It’s the political economy of settler colonialism, s: Phil Henderson, Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Political Economies of Ongoing Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 266-272 | settler colonial studies blog

It’s the political economy of settler colonialism, s: Phil Henderson, Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Political Economies of Ongoing Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 266-272

04May26

Excerpt: Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty (2023), Rebecca Hall’s Refracted Economies (2022), and Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North (2023), all offer distinct and compelling investigations of political economy. Each considers in some detail how Indigenous Peoples respond to, engage with, or plan around the ways in which the market—be it in the form of coal power plants, diamond mines, or big retailers—conditions the scope of possibility for exercising autonomous political authority. In the case of Carbon Sovereignty and Refracted Economies, both books share an approach that foregrounds careful yet unsparing ethnography of the profound social and political complexities driving Indigenous decision-making regarding resource extraction. Plundering the North, by contrast, delves into the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and it’s successor, the North West Company (NWC), in order to show the deliberate role played by both firms in perpetuating food crises in the North in order to secure new rounds of state-backed profitability models that made the hunger of Indigenous northerners a bankable commodity for southern capital.

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