Excerpt: In the past several years, settler colonial theory has taken over my field, Native American studies. Comparative indigenous histories focused especially on British-descended “settler colonies”—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States—have proliferated. And settler colonial theory is now dogma. At my last two conference presentations, a fellow panelist was astonished that I didn’t […]

Abstract: In key texts of Australian history, indigenous culture was seen as a device for delineating the boundaries of populations in such a way as to see it depicted as no longer focusing on race or physical difference. Focusing on several key moments in twentieth-century Australian indigenous policy when interventions in indigenous populations were first […]

Abstract: Fiscal relations between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada are a matter of life and death. By bringing to light techniques of economic rationality and governance of Indigenous peoples, this paper demonstrates a vital, yet overlooked trajectory in an ongoing colonial war. I examine specifically how Canada investigated and intentionally distorted Attawapiskat Chief […]

Abstract: Different groups from both sides of the Atlantic have since the 1930s come together to commemorate histories of Swedish settling in America. They have celebrated the founding of the New Sweden colony in the Delaware Valley (1638–1655), and the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Swedish pioneers in the Mississippi Valley. Border-Crossing Commemorations investigates this continuing practice […]

Abstract: This essay considers the significance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben in order to do so. UNDRIP provides means for developing a comparative framework for conceptualizing the situation of Indigenous peoples globally, focusing on the ways they defy settler-state norms and expectations […]

Abstract: The article examines the use of the name ‘Geronimo’ as the codename that the US Defense Department gave to Osama Bin Laden in their successful mission to assassinate him. In engaging this critique of “Codename Geronimo,” the article offers a way to imagine decolonization and unsettlement through a wider critique of American statism, upon […]

Excerpt: In his 2010 article “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy,” Edward Watts argues that by using settler theory to study early American literature, scholars in the field can move away from the binary of empire and resistance, toward a better understanding of the multiple experimental and alternative nationalisms of the early Republic. This timely […]

Abstract: Historians examining relations between Indian women and non-Indian men on the California frontier have focused on the gold rush era and later. These interactions were often violent and degrading to native women and a source of disease, despair, and population decline in Indian communities. Less attention has been paid the pre–gold rush period, in […]

Abstract: This article examines the Palestinians’ psychological and cultural response to the loss of Palestine and their plan of recovering it. By examining Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of how people cope with loss, especially Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, the author explores the Zionist and Israeli demand that the Palestinians accept their loss, mourn Palestine […]

Excerpt: Today, the enduring violence of Oslo and settler colonialism is best reflected in the growing material and symbolic fragmentation of the Palestinian body politic: that is the Diaspora, the Palestinian ‘citizens’ of Israel, and the residents of the occupied territories.