Excerpt: Several years ago Meridians joined many academic organizations and institutions in the United States by acknowledging that our Western Massachusetts–based offices are on Nonotuck land. In this we formed part of a wave of solidarity with Indigenous peoples that necessarily begins with recognition of how settler colonialism is deeply ingrained, embedded, and naturalized in every way, […]

Abstract: As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a longrunning conflict between a Eurocentric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of […]

Abstract: In April 2020, the British Columbia Utilities Commission released the Final Report of its Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry. The Inquiry was tasked with determining the regulatory environment for Indigenous utility providers across the Canadian province. We analyse the Inquiry as a colonial encounter between Indigenous nations and the settler state, arguing that technical bodies […]

Abstract: In discourse that normalizes and propagates Israeli settler colonial conquest and domination, analytical attention is given to the supposed nationalist nature of the Zionist project painting Zionism as a liberatory project for persecuted Jewish peoples in Europe and beyond. To counter this discourse and its erasure of the colonized, many critical scholars have emphasized […]

Excerpt: It is with these three dimensions of this question in mind that I want to frame this review essay. In evoking both the narrative and the normative, both books are deeply contextual and historically sophisticated works written with an eye toward the critical and normative stakes of the present. Furthermore, they reveal not only […]

Excerpt: Strung across the prairies of the United States, there are small towns whose claim to fame – and draw for visitors – is that they were once home to Laura Ingalls Wilder (1872–1957), author of the Little House series, which began publication in 1932. Wilder’s wandering family lived in homes and farms in Wisconsin, […]

Abstract: This essay examines Cather’s 1923 essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” and her 1918 novel My Ántonia to analyze her representation of the immigrant figure that simultaneously defines the region (Nebraska) and enriches the story of America. The essay contextualizes Cather’s writing within the statutes of nineteenth-century homesteading legislation, which allowed Nebraska to be […]

Abstract: The 1950s and 1960s policy of tribal termination is justly regarded as a genocidal federal effort to extinguish tribal sovereignty and identity. Some tribal leaders, however, like Guy Jennison, chief of the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma from 1930 to 1962, supported termination. Jennison’s advocacy for termination developed out of an Ottawa political tradition that […]

Abstract: During the first half of the nineteenth century, the 26th of January was celebrated as the founding anniversary of the colony of New South Wales, typically with a ‘public’ dinner. A political faction of locally born ‘natives’ and former convict ‘emancipists’ used this invented tradition to rally around arguments for democratic rights. Moving beyond […]

Description: Studying nature conservation in Palestine-Israel through the lens of settler colonialism. Settling Nature draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, […]