Abstract: By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish and the television show Longmire, this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in […]

Abstract: This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share […]

Abstract: This paper situates Indigenous social reproduction as a duality; as both a site of primitive accumulation and as a critical, resurgent, land-based practice. Drawing on three distinct cases from British Columbia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Bua, Fiji, we illustrate how accounting techniques can be a key mechanism with which Indigenous modes of life […]

Abstract: Between 1880 and 1914, charitable emigration societies run by middle-class reformers worked to recruit and relocate London’s working-class men to work in western Canada. These societies were motivated by fears about unemployment and the moral degradation of men in the city and sought to reunite working men with the land. For the men involved, […]

Abstract: Indigenous movements against settler sovereignty are often characterized as “civil disobedience.” This characterization is problematic as it domesticates Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of settler states. Taking up this problematic, this essay shows that the logic and rhetoric in Hobbes’ Leviathan is one that either dissolves collective political resistance into individual self-defense, or delegitimizes it by […]

Abstract: In this dissertation, I challenge the pervasive notion of South Dakota as a settler fantasy space by considering several of its twentieth and twenty-first century literary offerings through the lens of Settler Colonial Studies. Settler colonial ideology has long dominated historical, sociopolitical, and literary narratives in South Dakota, affecting state policy, Lakota and Dakota […]

Abstract: Over the last two decades, Canadian political and social thought has experienced a “treaty turn” that calls for non-Indigenous Canadians to remember a forgotten “settler treaty tradition.” In this diagnostic essay, I draw out both a conceptual limitation of this turn in its obfuscation of the critical moment in Indigenous treaty visions, and a political limitation of overlooking […]

Abstract: In 2018-2019, 35.5% of people with a Dangerous Offender designation were Indigenous (Public Safety Canada, 2020, p. 117). While the disproportionate number of Indigenous people with the designation corresponds to the broader trend of overincarceration of Indigenous people in Canada, very little research has addressed the use of the designation on Indigenous people. This […]

Abstract: This article examines how settlers in New Zealand and California responded to seismic instability throughout the late nineteenth century. By interpreting a series of moments during which the foundations of settlement were shaken by earthquakes I argue that the economic temporality of colonial boom and bust inflected contemporary understandings of natural disaster. In earthquake […]

Abstract: Grounded in space yet facilitated by mobility, settler colonialism has adopted distinct architectural devices. Tents, prefabricated shelters, mobile homes, shipping containers, and other portable structures, have created the scaffoldings of new colonial settlements, allowing for rapid territorial expansion. These mobile spatial objects have also served as instruments of expulsion and expropriation, facilitating the creation […]