Abstract: This research study is an investigation into how children in public elementary schools are educated through social studies curricula into ways of understanding themselves and their relationships to the nation-state, the land, and people with whom they share the land. The questions that have driven this research are these: 1) How do young students […]

Abstract: This article examines the language and strategies of Canadian land expansion through the founding of Manitoba in 1870. It analyses the discourse of key colonial authorities, which reveal that Canada mobilises the ideals of liberalism to promote the colonial policy of appropriating Indigenous lands. Because liberalism endures as the dominant paradigm that both structure […]

Excerpt: David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers, provides a sweeping narrative history of the Ohio Company and the men who settled what became Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Manasseh Cutler, his son, Ephraim, and other colleagues from Massachusetts, including Rufus Putnam and Joseph Barker, formed a company to speculate in […]

Abstract: This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent […]

Abstract: Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of […]

With a section on ‘Celebrity masculinities and settler colonialism‘.

Scholars committed to decolonial activism should discuss ways in which settlers can support Indigenous struggles and consider whether Indigenous examples could inspire and guide a commitment to decolonisation. Instead, I here feel compelled to write a post about being politically confronted by scholars committed to decolonial activism like me. Perhaps this is what blogs are […]

Description: The Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies is the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous scholarship. The book is ambitious in scope, ranging across disciplines and national boundaries, with particular reference to the lived conditions of Indigenous peoples in the first world. The contributors are all themselves Indigenous scholars who provide critical […]

Abstract: This article examines how the person-centered approach (PCA) became established in Aotearoa New Zealand, and draws parallels between how a Western psychology lands and settles and the process of colonization. Utilizing a critical methodology of both written records and oral history, the article documents the process of ‘first contact’ of Rogers’ ideas, followed by […]

Abstract: In this paper I reconsider debates in the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s about Aboriginal people and rights in land. I contend that Aboriginal rights of property in land were seldom the matter at stake in these debates. Further, I argue that a notion of duties rather than rights was invoked by […]