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Care against settler colonialism: Nina De Bettin Padolin, ‘Care as Resistance: Indigenous Feminist and Queer Survivance in The Marrow Thieves’, Postcolonial Text, 20, 3-4, 2025

24Dec25

Excerpt: “And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all. Anything. Everything.” In this way, Cherie Dimaline (Métis Nation of Ontario) ends the 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves. This article argues that the novel reimagines resistance to settler colonialism through an Indigenous feminist and queer ethic of intergenerational care. Dimaline centers Elders and queer kinship as the primary agents of survivance (Vizenor), showing how practices of teaching, tending, ceremony, and story constitute counter-violence. Methodologically, I draw on Indigenous feminist theory and resurgence (Simpson), refusal (Audra Simpson), and decolonial critique (Mignolo and Walsh) to read the novel’s aesthetic, narrative, and epistemic interventions. I show how The Marrow Thieves relocates sovereignty from the state to landbased kin-structures. I examine how chosen, non-biological family reorders value beyond heteropatriarchal nuclear logics and how Minerva’s and Miig’s teachings help their kin and ultimately the nation to actively practice resurgence. Finally, I argue that the text revises colonial temporality by insisting that time is non-linear, meaning that ancestors, present kin, and future beings co-occur. The sections that follow map (1) colonial extractivism; (2) care as counter-violence; (3) queer/Elder kinship as epistemic sovereignty; (4) story and language as insurgent and resurgent; and (5) Indigenous Futurisms.


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Settler bodies: Lisa Guenther, ‘Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 255-268

23Dec25

Abstract: Historian Patrick Wolfe argues that colonial invasion “is a structure, not an event.” The violence of colonialism is not confined to an isolated moment with a definite beginning and end; it is an ongoing process that organizes the political, economic, social, and interpersonal life of both settlers and Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects critically on the way colonial structures are lived and experienced—or ignored and disavowed—at the level of the settler body schema. Are there specific forms of perception, cognition, and action that colonialism engenders and reproduces in those who benefit from colonial power? And if so, how do we disrupt and transform these structures, such that they no longer appear as simple pathways to objective knowledge but as contingent schemas that have sedimented over time and remain open to revision, perhaps even to abolition? I engage with these questions through a reading of Susanna Moodie’s 1852 colonial narrative, Roughing it in the Bush, and Margaret Atwood’s 1970 poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 course notes, The Sensible World and the World of Expression.


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Settler subjects: Mérédith Laferté-Coutu, ‘A Generative Phenomenology of Settler Homeworlds in Canada and the United States’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 269-288

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper is about the relationship between intergenerational and subjective dimensions of settler colonial power. I mobilize both generative phenomenology and settler studies to analyze how settler affects toward land have maintained logics of dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. in past decades. I do so through Eva Mackey’s ethnographic study of settler feelings of surprise and anxiety in the context of 1990s land disputes in Southern Ontario and Upstate New York. Through a critical uptake of the phenomenological distinction between homeworld and alienworld, I propose the notion of settler homeworlds, where senses of home are generated not in co-relation to the “alien,” but through the intent to replace entire peoples on foreign land and erase that ongoing history of elimination. My approach challenges the absence of the land in the general structure of lifeworlds and offers an account of the term “settler subjectivity.”


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Yeah nah (still a settler colony): James D. Sidaway, ‘Locating Israel as “settler colony”‘, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This commentary engages with Mikko Joronen’s ‘Polluting Appropriations: Malevolent Weathering of Settler Colonisation in Palestine’ through two tracks. Firstly, I delve into the lineage of the term ‘settler colony’ as a designation of Israel, considering some of its political framings and impacts. Secondly, I consider wider literature on environmental transformations and impacts of settler colonialism. Both tracks yield questions on Israel’s commonalities with other military-colonizing powers.


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Indigenous Wards, settler wardens: Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

23Dec25

Description: Wardship and the Welfare State examines the ideological dimensions and practical intersections of public policy and Native American citizenship, Indian wardship, and social welfare rights after World War II. By examining Native wardship’s intersections with three pieces of mid-twentieth-century welfare legislation—the 1935 Social Security Act, the 1942 Servicemen’s Dependents Allowance Act, and the 1944 GI Bill—Mary Klann traces the development of a new conception of first-class citizenship. Wardship and the Welfare State explores how policymakers and legislators have defined first-class citizenship against its apparent opposite, the much older and fraught idea of Indian wardship. Wards were considered dependent, while first-class citizens were considered independent. Wards were thought to receive gratuitous aid from the government, while first-class citizens were considered responsible. Critics of the federal welfare state’s expansion in the 1930s through 1960s feared that as more Americans received government aid, they too could become dependent wards, victims of the poverty they saw on reservations. Because critics believed wardship prevented Native men and women from fulfilling expectations of work, family, and political membership, they advocated terminating Natives’ trust relationships with the federal government. As these critics mistakenly equated wardship with welfare, state officials also prevented Native people from accessing needed welfare benefits. But to Native peoples wardship was not welfare and welfare was not wardship. Native nations and pan-Native organizations insisted on Natives’ government-to-government relationships with the United States and maintained their rights to welfare benefits. In so doing, they rejected stereotyped portrayals of Natives’ perpetual poverty and dependency and asserted and defined tribal sovereignty. By illuminating how assumptions about “gratuitous” government benefits limit citizenship, Wardship and the Welfare State connects Native people to larger histories of race, inequality, gender, and welfare in the twentieth-century United States.


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Intersectional AI? Rebecca Bennett, Shakara Liddelow-Hunt, Brianne Hastie, Em Readman, ‘AI and Settler-colonial Cis-hetero Hegemony: AI Responses to the Purpose of “life” at the Indigenous-queer Intersection’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper reveals the discursive mechanisms through which generative AI reinforces societal hegemony and denies scope for Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS). We interrogate the implicit positionality of text-based generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) through responses to a single ontological question: What is life’s purpose? The first answer to this question was then modified by three respective prompts: ‘Indigenise response’; ‘queer response’; ‘Indigenise and queer response’. The baseline (normative) response focused on global impact, personal joy, continuous growth, inspiring others, and creating a legacy; an ‘Indigenous’ modifier focused on nature, connection, community, ancestors, and sharing knowledge; a ‘queer’ modifier returned a politicised purpose of radical kindness, LGBTQ+ rights, and inclusivity, and the ‘Indigenous-queer’ modifier returned a randomised mash-up of the previous responses, loosely focused on cultural strength and queer liberation. Comparative critical discourse analysis of the findings, from our Indigenous, queer, and Indigenous-queer author positionalities, found that Indigenised life purpose was positioned outside of settler colonialism, denying the situatedness of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing within coloniality and the related IDS priority issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Conversely, queered life purpose was radical and resistive, an inherently political way of being with no scope for existing outside of politics. The intersectional response was not cohesive, but it did both contain political and apolitical elements. This analysis exposes the limits of LLMs such as ChatGPT for IDS priorities such as community speaking for community and control of our own narratives and ontologies. It debunks notions of AI neutrality by highlighting settler colonial, cis-hetero-normative, and otherising responses within in seemingly ‘apolitical’ tech. GPT thus provides a contemporaneous example of the hegemonic systems the IDS movement is challenging. Further, intersectionality is revealed as a potential hegemonic disrupter through the system’s inability to control a narrative that includes multiple identities.


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Indigenous AI? Tamika Worrell, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Indigenous AI Futures: Uncle Chatty Gee, Aunty Lexi, and Algorithmic Settler Colonialism’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This article explores the complex relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Indigenous peoples, framing AI as an extension of colonial systems that continue to extract, distort, and commodify Indigenous knowledges, lands, and bodies. We introduce Uncle Chatty Gee and Aunty Lexi as playful yet critical personifications of ChatGPT and Perplexity AI to explore how Indigenous communities engage with and interrogate AI technologies. This framing situates AI within Indigenous relational frameworks, making it culturally legible while inviting scrutiny. Our paper argues that generative AI perpetuates algorithmic settler colonialism through digital and algorithmic systems, reinforcing biases and erasing Indigenous knowledge. We highlight the risks and harms posed by AI to Indigenous communities, including data extraction without consent, distortion of digital narratives, and environmental impacts on Country. We also discuss Indigenous resistance to algorithmic settler colonialism through data sovereignty movements and Indigenous-led AI governance models. As Indigenous scholars, we emphasise the urgent need for Indigenous peoples to not only critique but also shape the future of AI in ways that centre relationality, sovereignty, and Indigenous aspirations, ensuring active participation in the AI landscape to uphold cultural integrity and digital justice.


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Settler colonial AI (introducing a special issue): Jessica Russ-Smith, Holly Randell-Moon, ‘AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Knowing, Engaging, and Learning in New Data Contexts’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Excerpt: The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated debate and discussion about knowledge practices in social, political, and institutional spaces. Although the development of new data systems raises important ethical and professional practice issues, these developments also take place in a digital context informed by older colonial knowledges and systems. Technologies such as AI prompt renewed considerations and examinations of the sustainability and importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, as data governance remains an ongoing priority for First Nations communities (Tapu and Fa’agau 2022; Whaanga and Mato 2021). Whilst a substantial body of research, policy and law development has focussed on developing ethical standards for AI use (Kakar 2021), this work has largely excluded First Nations communities. To achieve ethical AI use, if even possible, First Nations communities, knowledges and Data Sovereignty are essential to resist producing and reproducing colonial data norms. This special issue focuses on AI, Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the impact of technology on data decision-making in knowledge, engagement, and learning contexts. Furthermore, this issue explores and examines these intersections from the perspectives of diverse sovereign First Nations peoples, cosmologies and ways of Knowing, Being and Doing.


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Settler colonial AI: Ihab Maharmeh, ‘AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of how Israel employs artificial intelligence (AI) technologies under the pretext of counterterrorism to intensify the Zionist settler-colonial project and capitalist accumulation in Palestine. It focuses particularly on how AI has become integral to Israel’s settler-colonial regime, serving ideological, geopolitical, and commercial objectives while presenting these aims as neutral, technical procedures embedded within its counterterrorism strategy. This paper builds on scholarship that shows how settler colonies have historically used stigmatisation, classification, and the delegitimisation of Indigenous resistance as terrorism to eliminate Indigenous peoples before raising questions about how, more recently, AI has intensified this colonial logic. By focusing on Israel’s use of AI, this paper offers an analysis of how AI is intensifying genocide, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ voices. It also demonstrates how Israel’s use of AI supports capitalist accumulation, as security technologies tested on Palestinians under the pretext of counterterrorism are commercialised and exported to global markets.


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Unmissable settler patriarchy: Lindsay Martel Montgomery, Heather Pezzarossi, Jennifer P. Byram, ‘Archiving Futurity Within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Crisis’, American Anthropologist, 2025

20Dec25

Abstract: In this article, we examine how settler colonization and gendered violence against Indigenous women are remembered and recorded in two archival registers: 18th-century records from the Massachusetts Archives Collection (MAC) and a 21st-century corpus of posts using the hashtag MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) on X (formerly Twitter). These archives are shaped by distinct temporal logics and contain multiple projections of settler and Indigenous futurity. The MAC is dominated by the colonial logic of recursive dispossession; a temporal perspective of declension that acknowledges Indigenous lands only after they are taken, and Indigenous people only after they are “disappeared.” A close reading of these documentary sources also reveals how Indigenous peoples worked within this system to maintain social relationships and connections to place. We contrast settler visions of futurity with contemporary social media articulations of vibrant and emancipatory Indigenous futures grounded in hope and presence. Through this comparative discussion, we demonstrate how different documentary modalities encode time, define events, and shape informational flows in ways that enable and constrain Indigenous futurity.


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