Abstract: The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s […]

Abstract: This paper examines the writings of George Brown, a leading expansionist and liberal thinker in the British settler state of Canada. Studying George Brown’s thinking as a non-canonical colonial statesman and thinker who helped appropriate Indigenous lands exposes the specific liberal ideas that authorized the enlarging of British settler states. Specifically, inquiring into Brown’s […]

Abstract: Renewed interest in empire and colonialism has transformed our understanding of transnational networks and processes of exchange, entanglement, and globalisation. However, colonial entanglement still conceals some significant players in globalising cultures. The Protestant women’s foreign missionary movement pioneered transnational activism by interweaving women’s empowerment in “foreign” and “home” environments into a single mission. Essential […]

Abstract: While women in United States agriculture are increasingly asserting control over land and assuming identities as primary producers, they continue to face significant challenges in being “read” as legitimate producers and in accessing the material resources (land, labor, capital) to do the work of farming. Although scholarship documents how women are generating new strategies to gain […]

Abstract: The 1790 pantomime The Provocation!’s intervention into the Nootka Crisis may signal that what was to crystalize by 1871, when BC entered Canadian Confederation as a settler colony, was already taking shape: the confluence of the development of a series of extractive industries, the establishment of settler colonies, and persistent imperial ambivalence about the territory […]

Abstract: As education-migration (edugration) blurs the line between international student and immigrant recruitment in some jurisdictions, higher education admission is becoming linked to settler nation-building projects. Using critical discourse analysis, this article examines the Canadian higher education sector’s response to COVID-19 through pre-budget submissions to the House of Commons of Canada Standing Committee on Finance […]

Abstract: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a profound meditation on the paradoxical phenomenon of political founding worthy of Machiavelli (The Machiavelli of The Discourses, that is). In it, Ford tells the story of a democratic political community that comes into being thanks to the heroic intervention of an outsider, Ransom Stoddard, who happens to […]

Abstract: The 2021 Unity Intifada represented a vital moment in the history of Palestinian resistance. The unification of Palestinian struggle inherent to the uprising can be read as an expression of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing on the critical thought of Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples struggling against settler colonialism, I argue for a theorization of […]

Excerpt: What is the story of race and settler colonialism in the legal landscape of present-day Canada? How do we tell these legal histories of settler-state racial violence in the context of the ongoing realities of Indigenous dispossession, anti-Black racism, and the experiences of civil death by migrants and displaced people? What does it mean […]

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Christianity, extractivism, and Amer-European settler colonialism. It argues that Amer-European Christianity is an extractivist religion, with beliefs and practices that are deeply intertwined with an extractivist relationship to the natural world and Indigenous peoples. In conversation with the work of Willie Jennings and exploring the impact of the […]