settler colonial studies blog

Healing against settler colonialism: Devin G. Atallah, Yasser M. Abu-Jamei, ‘Rethinking Trauma Against a Genocidal World: Palestinian Healing Is a Sound of Our Victory’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: In this essay, two Palestinian healers, mental health workers, and fathers offer reflections on trauma, healing, and love in the face of Israeli genocide and settler-colonial violence across Palestine. Recognizing that the trauma and healing processes will extend much further than any moment of ceasefire, the authors, one of whom survived the genocide in Gaza, offer insights into trauma and healing as integral parts of their own personal and professional experiences. In doing so, they reimagine the trauma that Indigenous communities face as a result of settler colonialism not as a “mental illness,” but as being connected to the silence and inability of the world to stop genocide in ways that protect collective Palestinian liberation. They conclude that Palestinian trauma is an intergenerational message to a genocidal world, requiring courageous listening in the face of the ongoing Nakba. Palestinian healing, they offer, is a sound of Palestinian victory.

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Collecting specimen, displaying settlers: Conall Petroc Treen, ‘Specimens of settler colonialism: collecting and displaying natural history at the University of St Andrews, 1838-1917’, PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: This thesis investigates the history of the natural science collection of the University of St Andrews to examine the relationship between natural history and empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the foundation of the collection, during the years of the Literary and Philosophical Society of St Andrews (1838-1917), this thesis analyses the acquisition and movement of human and non-human remains from colonial Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to the imperial rhetoric of display and education in Scotland. Natural science collections can provide insights into how the natural world was interwoven with imperial ideologies and the settler-colonial processes of violence, displacement, dispossession, and assimilation that irreparably harmed Indigenous communities. In recovering the histories of extant and non-extant objects, this examination highlights the contributions and experiences of naturalists, settlers, and Indigenous peoples in the history of science. By centring Indigenous agency, survival, and autonomy within moments of cross-cultural exchange, this thesis argues that collections have the potential to reconstruct invisible Indigenous histories that continue to be absent from museum displays. Employing a critical lens to the methodological approach of ‘object biographies’, this study illustrates the advantages and limitations of recovering Indigenous and colonial histories through objects and archival sources. Divided into two, the first part of this thesis examines the practices of naturalists in nineteenth-century colonial Australia, charting their reliance upon systems of power, colonial infrastructures, and the labour and knowledge of Aboriginal Australian peoples. The second part of this thesis explores the ‘afterlives’ of objects, both human and non-human remains, once they entered the museums at St Andrews, examining their changing roles in displays, scientific theories, and university education. This thesis provokes future discussions about the imperial and colonial legacies within university collections and offers new approaches for museum professionals and historians to examine natural science collections.

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Borrowing settlers: Christian Pinnen, Charles Weeks, Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land, University Press of Mississippi, 2023

05Apr25

Description: Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land offers the first composite of histories from the entire colonial period in the land now called Mississippi. Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks reveal stories spanning over three hundred years and featuring a diverse array of individuals and peoples from America, Europe, and Africa. The authors focus on the encounters among these peoples, good and bad, and the lasting impacts on the region. The eighteenth century receives much-deserved attention from Pinnen and Weeks as they focus on the trials and tribulations of Mississippi as a colony, especially along the Gulf Coast and in the Natchez country. The authors tell the story of a land borrowed from its original inhabitants and never returned. They make clear how a remarkable diversity characterized the state throughout its early history. Early encounters and initial contacts involved primarily Native Americans and Spaniards in the first half of the sixteenth century following the expeditions of Columbus and others to the large region of the Gulf of Mexico. More sustained interaction began with the arrival of the French to the region and the establishment of a French post on Biloxi Bay at the end of the seventeenth century. Such exchanges continued through the eighteenth century with the British, and then again the Spanish until the creation of the territory of Mississippi in 1798 and then two states, Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. Though readers may know the bare bones of this history, the dates, and names, this is the first book to reveal the complexity of the story in full, to dig deep into a varied and complicated tale.

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Toxic settlers: Matthew C. Ward, Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

05Apr25

Description: For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.
Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.

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Settler colonial multiculturalism: Daniel R. Meister'”One of the Cultural Minorities”? Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of Official Multiculturalism’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 1, 2025

05Apr25

Abstract: Examining advocacy for multiculturalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges the idea that Indigenous peoples were not part of the discussions that led to the policy of multiculturalism. Instead, it demonstrates that their activism directly led to some inclusion in the early years of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and that ethnic minorities took some tentative steps towards building political alliances with them. However, the possibility of a less colonial, more inclusive “syncretic multiculturalism” was dashed by the White Paper’s assault on Indigenous identities, which diverted Indigenous leaders’ engagement with multicultural activists, and by the passive revolutionary outcome of a policy of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework,” which originally excluded, but then was quickly extended to include, Indigenous peoples.

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‘Colonized’ settler colonialism: Franka Vaughan, Sarah Maddison, ‘Thinking through the history of Liberia’s formation with settler colonial theory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

05Apr25

Abstract: The formation of Liberia in the nineteenth century as a resettlement for freed and formerly enslaved Black Americans represents an intriguing puzzle in the articulation of the distinction between postcolonialism and settler colonialism. The small West African country is sometimes lumped together with the now postcolonial African countries that underwent structural decolonisation in the twentieth century. In many narratives, Liberia is even heralded as one of two African countries whose formation as a modern state is not defined by colonialism. By contrast, we reject both narratives through a re-theorisation of Liberia’s history as a settler society established by freed and formerly enslaved Black Americans who, we argue, acted as settler colonists even though they had themselves once been enslaved as Black people in the United States. This article argues that analysing Liberia’s formation through the lens of settler colonial theory sheds new light on the structures of inequality that continue to shape the lives of Liberians today. Understanding Liberia as a unique settler colonial project pushes the boundaries of settler colonial theory and provides the framework with a more transnational and transcultural lens.

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Settlers and their foreclosures: Dan Tout, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Foreclosure: Why Australian modernisms are implausible’, Thesis Eleven, 2025

04Apr25

Abstract: This article appraises debates about modernism in 1930s and 1940s Australia in relation to the cultural and political traditions of settler colonialism. We theorise settler modernist and anti-modernist engagements as conditioned by a succession of negations constituting ‘Australia’ as what we have previously termed ‘the negative Commonwealth’. Both rejections and affirmations of European modernist traditions considered the imminent arrival in Australia of the ‘dangers’ of modernity. One response was the attempt to keep modernity and its contradictions ‘out’, and to maintain the supposed advantages of being an island continent. When isolation could no longer be maintained, attempts were made to leap over the implications of imminent reconnection by asserting that Australia was always already modern. Here, we survey settler cultural expressions and their embrace or rejection of ‘Old World’ traditions. Beyond complex engagements with these traditions, Australian modernist and anti-modernist experiments similarly struggled to establish their own indigenising settler nationalist traditions.

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Petitioning beyond the settlers: Miranda Johnson, ‘Subjects of Difference: Māori Petitions and the LateNineteenth Century Colonial State’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

04Apr25

Abstract: For nearly two hundred years since the annexation of New Zealand to the British empire, Māori have written thousands of petitions criticising the colonial and later national government. There has been surprisingly little analysis of this extensive archive of Indigenous petitioning in New Zealand. A close examination of petitions changes how historians understand relations between power and resistance in the colonial state and wider empire. This article focuses on one set of petitions written by prominent individuals and landholding groups in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that these examples of petitioning show how effectively and strategically Māori countered the narratives and assumptions of the colonial state in regard to central matters of concern to their communities: recent violent conflict and the confiscation and sale of land. In so doing, Māori petitioners laid the groundwork for later activism and their petitions have been revisited in more recent decades when the nationstate has sought to reckon with the colonial past. Rather than being assimilated into the late nineteenth-century colonial state, petitions demonstrate that Māori understood that they were different from settlers. Petitions show that Māori difference was shaped not only by how the state treated Indigenous subjects but also by how Indigenous peoples remembered what had happened differently.

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Kids to settlers: Katja Uusihakala, Imperial Investments: Legacies of Displacement in British Child Migration to Southern Rhodesia, Palgrave, 2025

04Apr25

Description: This book examines the legacy of a British child migration scheme that relocated British children to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, with the aim of populating the colony with “fresh white stock”. The selected children were resettled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school established in a disused RAF airbase outside the town of Bulawayo. This social engineering project sought to “rescue” children from what were predicted as undesirable futures in Britain and offer them a “better life” with prospects of social advancement. Yet, beyond individual salvation, the scheme emigrated the children with the intention that they would help sustain the racially segregated colonial order. Building on long-term ethnographic research with former Rhodesian child migrants, now living in the UK, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, this book delves into the children’s unique experiences of migration, displacement, and resettlement. By highlighting these enduring emotional, social, and political repercussions, the author critically addresses how colonial histories matter in the present. Through the lens of former child migrants – whose kin relations were ruptured, who were disciplined into silence and suppression, and who have seen scant public recognition of their past – this book sheds light on the formation of memory through its gaps and silences. It contributes to our understanding of memory in relation to forced migration and displaced communities.

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Settler colonialism as seen by children: Catherine Gay, ‘Children as parties of encounter on Australian frontiers: girls in colonial Victoria, 1835-1856’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

03Apr25

Abstract: Indigenous-settler relations on antipodean frontiers have been well analysed by numerous scholars, yet the actors and agents are usually framed as adult and often male. Focusing on the Australian colony of Victoria from its invasion in 1835 to the mid-1850s, I position young people as parties of encounter in this contact zone. I focus on three case studies of settler girls with vastly different upbringings who interacted with First Nations communities near their homes. Using contemporary writings, memoir and art, I demonstrate that the complex cross-cultural encounters and relationships formed between Indigenous peoples and settler children could at once reinforce and unsettle settler colonial imperatives. I show that positioning girls as interlocutors and contributors within a settler colonial context illustrates how colonial violence was embedded in domestic domains. However, the connections between Aboriginal peoples and these settler girls could unsettle and resist the negation and elimination of Indigenous sovereignty. By centring settler children’s experiences within the processes of dispossession which characterised the invasion of the Australian continent, this article unsettles understandings of the settler colonial frontier and expands conceptions of who could be an actor in this context.

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