Abstract: Recent work in black and indigenous studies has made claims to exceptionalism that leave the two fields at an impasse. This article argues that since the nineteenth century, US colonial projects have relied upon a simultaneous logic of anti-blackness and settlement. It further argues that social movements have been able to capitalize on radical […]

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that […]

Abstract: Indigenous resistance in the 19th century was recast as criminal activities, enabling the US and Canada to avert attention from their own illegality. The imposition of colonial law, facilitated by casting Indigenous men and women as savage peoples in need of civilization and constructing Indigenous lands as lawless spaces absent legal order, made it […]

Abstract: Colonial unknowing endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and colonization, occluding the mutable historicity of colonial structures and attributing finality to conquest and dispossession. Colonial unknowing establishes what can count as evidence, proof, or possibility—aiming to secure the terms of reason and reasonableness—as much as it works to dissociate and ignore. This […]

Abstract: Drawing on the traditions and perspectives of ethnic studies, history and anthropology, I examine historical roots of U.S. settler colonialism and how they shape contemporary tribal issues in the U.S. Driven by the forces of territoriality and occupation, colonial strategies and derivative mechanisms have fostered misconceptions about the unique socio-political status of tribal nations […]

Abstract: This perspective article describes the problem of Canadian indigenous suicide from a non-Canadian viewpoint. In particular, the article compares both similarities and differences in suicide prevention between Māori in New Zealand and indigenous peoples in Canada. It emphasises that the problem of indigenous suicide is not being indigenous but coping with losses secondary to […]

Abstract: Scholarly debate persists about the role of disease in the European colonization of the Americas. Were human pathogens the shock troops of conquest or a by-product of colonial incursions? Biological warfare or an accident of ecology? Historians and other scholars have recently raised the stakes on this 500-year-old debate by questioning the received narrative […]

Excerpt: In an 1844 article in the London-based Fraser’s Magazine, Morgan Rattler opens his account “Of the Red Indian” with a story of an Irish landlord attending the Greenwich fair to see “a wild man!” This “wild man” seems to be a Native from North America: he appears with “face covered with a profusion of […]

Abstract: During the 2013 American Indigenous Research Association (AIRA) conference, it was noted that graduate students using Indigenous research methodologies make unique contributions to academia and have unique needs. In response, Student Storytellers Indigenizing the Academy (SSITA) was formed, a worldwide support network of graduate students using an online forum. A SSITA working group launched […]

Excerpt: Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia (2008) is the most expensive and one of the highest grossing films in Australian history (Connell 2008). While cinema has long been recognised for its role in constructing and mediating national identities, Australia was also an exercise in branding and promoting the nation. The film is an example of how […]