Abstract: Close reading Irrational Games’s 2013 BioShock Infinite to consider how notions of the wild circulate at the site of the both absent and present Indian, this essay argues that the ontological turn in technology studies is predicated on the juridical, racial, gendered, and colonial violences enacted in the spaces between the civil and the savage, […]

Abstract: Narratives of settler belonging rely, in part, on the appropriation of indigeneity. Today in the United States, non-Natives regularly coopt perceived markers of Indianness, such as dream catchers or a mystical connection to nature. Some claim distant indigenous ancestry, most often through the mythic Cherokee-princess-grandmother trope.1 They also supplant indigenous identity through place-making: destroying or […]

Description: Across the globe, there are numerous examples of treaties, compacts, or other negotiated agreements that mediate relationships between Indigenous peoples and states or settler communities. Perhaps the best known of these, New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi is a living, and historically rich, illustration of this types of negotiated agreement, and both the symmetries and asymmetries […]

Abstract: In 1876, the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government agency responsible for the settlement of the northern island of Hokkaido, hired three Americans from Massachusetts Agricultural College: William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow. Their task was to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaido, Sapporo Agricultural College, that would spread American-style scientific agriculture among new […]

Abstract: This article explores the significance of the campfire to Australian settler culture in the nineteenth century. Considering the paradox that campfires could be both comforting and evoke terror, the piece considers how they provided a link between the northern and southern hemispheres. Drawing on a range of primary materials — many of which have been […]

Abstract: Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, Canadian universities and colleges have felt pressured to indigenize their institutions. What “indigenization” has looked like, however, has varied significantly. Based on the input from an anonymous online survey of 25 Indigenous academics and their allies, we assert that indigenization is […]

Description: This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and […]

Abstract: This essay offers an investigation of US settler colonialism and military empire, a conjunction theorized as settler modernity, in the post–World War II era. It argues that settler modernity is an ensemble of relations significantly structured and continually reproduced through manifold regimes, relations, and forms of debt, and in particular through debt imperialism. Debt imperialism […]

Abstract: This essay draws upon critical ethnic studies, Indigenous critical theory, and settler colonial studies to consider how biopolitics and biocapital have converged in North America through the racial regimes inaugurated by settler colonialism. It does so by close reading the popular science fiction television series Orphan Black to interrogate how late colonialism saturates cultural productions […]

Abstract: This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set […]