Abstract: This chapter explores how the Coen brothers reconfigure the Western in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, laying bare its white settler fantasies to reveal how toxic beliefs often shape foundational myths of regional and national identity. Many of the sequences refuse to deliver action in ways we expect in the genre. Plots, for instance, often […]

Abstract: This chapter argues that the television series Yellowstone rewrites the history of white settlement and white relations with Native nations in Montana, revising a cultural idea of the “Frontier” that promotes a notion of “rugged individualism,” a ranching-style monopoly capitalism, and an ethically empty “environmental” ethos. It is a narrative adaptation of a story of the […]

Abstract: This article examines how Māori indigeneity is ethically reconfigured in diaspora when Māori live on Aboriginal land in so-called Australia. Drawing on tikanga-based obligations of manuhiritanga, it argues that Māori are tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand but become implicated in settler/invader relations in Australia unless they practice humility, restraint, and accountability to local […]

Abstract: This chapter briefly compares the nature of ranching and pastoralism. It then follows the diffusion of cattle ranching to the Americas, Oceania, and southern Africa. And it explores how ranching helped propel settler colonialism. However, rather than viewing cattle as the “shock troops” of European settlement, it describes ranching as the handmaiden of state-led […]

Abstract: This article examines why Indigenous land titling, widely promoted as an enabling condition for climate action, advances without closing persistent gaps in territorial recognition. It conceptualizes this paradox as a climate titling institutional trap, in which reforms progress through adaptive practices yet remain embedded in territorial governance configurations that constrain their transformative potential. Drawing on […]

Abstract: Over the past decade, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has become a flashpoint in Australia’s ongoing History Wars. By challenging colonial myths that depicted Aboriginal peoples as ‘mere hunter-gatherers’ and demonstrating the complexity of pre-colonial practices of cultivation and land management, Pascoe directly unsettled the legal fiction of terra nullius and, with it, the legitimacy of the settler-colonial nation-state. […]

Abstract: A widely shared assumption is that truth-telling about colonial violence can facilitate reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples. This paper addresses the psychological disposition of the settlers of Australia as it was manifested in recent public contestations, including in the lead-up to the Voice referendum of October 2023, when the proposal of amending the […]

Description: This collection brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and experts from Australia and beyond to examine the persistent settler-colonial patterns of denial, ignorance and antipathy that continue to constrain the possibilities of truth and justice in settler-colonial societies. Written from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives, the chapters identify and analyse the social, cultural and […]

Abstract: The Living Prairie Museum (LPM) initially called the St. James Prairie Park, or the St. James-Assiniboia Living Prairie Museum is a tall grass prairie conservation area and park in Winnipeg established in 1976. It was set aside by municipal leaders to preserve an area that is home to a diverse range of prairie grasses […]

Abstract: Following the 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa and amidst calls to «decolonize academia», decolonial theory has become increasingly read and cited in many academic disciplines. But as I seek to demonstrate in this essay, decolonial theory as elaborated by the leading exponent of it, Walter D. Mignolo, is beset with internal contradictions and […]