Description: This book draws on over twenty years’ investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in […]

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the meaning and function of ‘masculinity’ among Algonquin peoples in contemporary and historical contexts in lands claimed by Canada. As an Algonquin scholar, I examine historical sources alongside interviews with other Algonquin people to consider the relationship between ‘roles,’ as discussed by the interview participants, and the erroneous identity politics and status/non-status […]

Abstract: Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction. But little attention has been given to the ways in which Herbert’s complex, multifarious and heteroglossic novel exceeds and challenges the very possibility of coherent national space and […]

Abstract: National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralians’ (‘half-castes’) were for Herbert a redemptive motif that could assuage the ‘awful loneliness of the colonial born’ by which he hinted at the land claim of settler-colonials as spurious. Herbert’s exposure of the spectrum of interracial sex—from companionate marriage to casual prostitution to […]

Abstract: This thesis examines the contemporary crisis of Indigenous children in child welfare services in Canada, taking as its case study the Province of Alberta. I take a historical approach to this analysis, and consider the contemporary institutions that govern and manage Indigenous bodies through welfare services and their continuity in relation to historical iterations of […]

Excerpt: ‘You were here long before any of us were here’, Mr. Trump said to the veterans, ages 90 and older, who wore their military uniforms for the occasion, juxtaposed with turquoise and silver, hallmarks of Navajo culture. ‘Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They […]

Abstract: The 1930s in Australia was a period marked by rising awareness of and attention to Australia’s ‘half-caste problem’. Released and promoted in tandem with the 1938 sesquicentenary of Australia’s settler colonisation, Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia appeared as a searing protest against the exclusion of so-called ‘half-castes’ from white Australia. The novel itself was published by […]

Excerpt: I am looking for words, protocols, and methods that might honor the inseparability of bodies and land, and at the same time grapple with the expansive chemical relations of settler colonialism that entangle life forms in each other’s accumulations, conditions, possibilities, and miseries.

Excerpt: Breathing in a settler atmosphere is taxing. Some of us can’t breathe. In the fall of 2016 many of us watched shaky Facebook video livestreams that resembled a warscape of heavy military equipment and smoke. Standing Rock and the Mni Sose (Missouri River) were choke points for water protectors asserting indigenous sovereignty, and sites for […]

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