Commentary: “Settler-colonialism reveals the brutal face of imperialism in some of its most vicious forms.  This carefully researched and penetrating study focuses on one of its ugliest manifestations, the forcible transferring of indigenous children, and makes a strong case for Canadian complicity in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ – with implications that reach to the Anglosphere […]

Abstract: In transnational settler colonial contexts, the photograph has been a tool of suppression, playing a key role in the categorisation of race and difference, as well as furthering the logic of elimination through gestures towards whiteness, authenticity and vanishing races. For Indigenous peoples living in early-invaded, densely settled areas, such as the participants in this […]

Abstract: The specter of settler colonialism fills every sliver of the United States. This article studies the current moment of settler colonialism in the Karuk homeland on the Klamath River in Northwest California. Part of this moment has been the emergence of Unsettling Klamath River, a group of settlers engaging in the work of “unsettling.” Analysis […]

Access the Handbook here.

Excerpt: Biologists shaped European colonization and European colonization shaped the future of biology. Colonization created racialized concepts of who is “native” to America and who is not, an “us versus them” mentality predicated on white supremacy. Identifying plants pre-1492 as “native” and post-1492 as “non-native” establishes a false narrative that American natural history began with the […]

Abstract: In this paper, I explain Black feminist identity politics as a practice that is ‘on the way’ to settler decolonization in a US context for the fact that it makes demands that we attend to our “originating” stories and, in doing so, 1) generate potential for difficult coalitions for decolonization in settler colonial USA and […]

Excerpt: At the University of Victoria, where I teach, as at many other Canadian universities, we use a range of territorial acknowledgements. Many academic departments, faculties and individuals have developed their own acknowledgements, and you’ll hear some variants at official university events. The university’s 2017–22 Indigenous Academic Plan, for example, includes the following: We acknowledge and […]

Abstract: Close reading Irrational Games’s 2013 BioShock Infinite to consider how notions of the wild circulate at the site of the both absent and present Indian, this essay argues that the ontological turn in technology studies is predicated on the juridical, racial, gendered, and colonial violences enacted in the spaces between the civil and the savage, […]

Abstract: Narratives of settler belonging rely, in part, on the appropriation of indigeneity. Today in the United States, non-Natives regularly coopt perceived markers of Indianness, such as dream catchers or a mystical connection to nature. Some claim distant indigenous ancestry, most often through the mythic Cherokee-princess-grandmother trope.1 They also supplant indigenous identity through place-making: destroying or […]

Description: Across the globe, there are numerous examples of treaties, compacts, or other negotiated agreements that mediate relationships between Indigenous peoples and states or settler communities. Perhaps the best known of these, New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi is a living, and historically rich, illustration of this types of negotiated agreement, and both the symmetries and asymmetries […]