Abstract: In the quarter-century since it began its work, the South African TRC has been endlessly debated. At the same time, a field of study emerged centred on settler colonialism, and settler colonial analyses have become established in transitional justice. South Africa’s TRC, however, has escaped examination through the lens of settler colonialism. Typically, settler […]

Abstract: This article documents how the Indian Act, the historic legal regime structuring settler colonialism in Canada, is being displaced by new statutory law, as nearly fifty federal statutes passed by successive governments between 2005 and 2020 rewrite First Nations land, taxation, resource, and governance regimes. I focus attention on these new laws, asking how […]

Abstract: This essay relies on the insight that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure geared toward the elimination of Indigenous presence to argue that ideologies that legitimate and naturalize settler occupation are equally ongoing. More specifically, the ideologies that justify settler colonialism in major states like Australia, Canada, and the United States, are like Flying […]

Abstract: In this paper I explore the strange figure of the levitator within Kim Scott’s (1999) Miles Franklin Prize winning novel Benang: From the Heart. Through different genres of art and creative practice, mysticism, religion, science-fiction, magic, and even civil disobedience, the levitator is a poorly acknowledged mobile subject who seems to refuse scholarly enquiry. Levitation is more […]

Abstract: Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, […]

Abstract: The summer of 2020 was one of unprecedented mass protest and a growing critical awareness around the racist operation of criminal justice systems in North America. Consequently, criminal justice systems have been placed squarely at the forefront of struggles for racial equality and social change. While activists, critical researchers, and legal experts have argued […]

Abstract: Preppers represent a sub-culture of Americans who prepare for the collapse of society, or “the end of the world as we know it,” via emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency. Securing access to land and the rights to access natural resources are the tenets of self-sufficiency. Preppers associate access to land, water, resources, and distance from […]

Abstract: This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that […]

Abstract: In The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, author David McCullough tells a story of the white heroes who settled the Ohio Territory. McCullough describes a story of intrepid pioneers with noble intentions who endeavored to advance the American Dream. His work, however, ignores decades of historical scholarship […]

Abstract: Native American peoples’ health is impacted by structural legacies of settler colonialism, including land dispossession, racism, and poverty. Responding with care to individuals and communities experiencing past and present traumatic stress from genocide and deeply entrenched structural violence means navigating ongoing grief, restoring self-community and human-ecological relationships, and generating cultural vibrancy.