settler colonial studies blog

Settler hegemonies: Aidan Huang, ‘Gender(ed) Imaginations, Hegemony, and Counter-hegemony in Guatemala’, Trail Six, 19, 2025, pp. 31-41

23Mar25

Abstract: Guatemala’s socio-political landscape is well known as one marked by enduring conflict and state repression, often traced to settler colonialism and US imperialism. Compared to the attention on overt, physical violence, however, the role of ideological and cultural strategies in enabling this violence is less extensively discussed. In this paper, I draw upon Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to analyse how colonial-capitalist relationships of power in Guatemala operate not only through physical and political force, but are also underpinned by ideological and cultural domination. I argue that the cultural hegemony of Spanish colonisers and the settler colonial state have been and are reinforced by certain patriarchal ideas of gender, which are used to establish control over people in Guatemala, especially Indigenous Mayans. To illustrate this, I use examples from both colonial and post-independence periods, as well as my own experiences during a university study program. However, cultural hegemony in Guatemala remains incomplete, as counter-hegemonic imaginations and expressions of gender–rooted in Mayan cultures and resistance–challenge dominant gender roles and notions of identity, illustrating the ongoing contestation of power.

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Refugee settlerhood: Ambihai Akilan, ‘Between Borders and Histories: Refugee Settlerhood, Forced Migration, and Decolonized Belonging’, Trail Six, 19, 2025, pp. 77-84

23Mar25

Abstract: This paper explores the complexities of refugee settlerhood, examining the intersection of forced migration, settler colonialism, and the implications for Indigenous communities. Through the lens of personal experiences as a Tamil-Canadian, the tension between being both a product of colonization and a participant in the settler colonial project comes into focus, highlighting the differential experiences of migration that shape varying degrees of complicity. Using the insights of scholars like Xavier (2022), Wiegel et al. (2019), and Ellerman & O’Heran (2021), the paper critiques the commodification of citizenship and belonging in settler states and examines how refugees and migrants, despite fleeing violence and persecution, contribute to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The paper argues that understanding settler complicity requires a shift away from binary notions of guilt and innocence, advocating instead for a framework of decolonized belonging. In this framework, belonging is redefined through Indigenous sovereignty, relational accountability, and active engagement in dismantling settler colonial structures. Ultimately, confronting colonial legacies and working toward transformative justice for Indigenous communities necessitates a collective responsibility, with refugee settlers playing a critical role in this process.

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You shall (not) have the (Indigenous) body (habeas corpus): Matthew Villeneuve, ‘Habeas Corpus and American Indian Boarding Schools: Indigenous Self-Determination in Body and Mind, 1880-1900’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2025

22Mar25

Abstract: This article examines the history of Native people’s use of habeas corpus to resist family separation employed in the United States’ system of Indian boarding schools. It highlights three cases brought by Native petitioners from Alaska, New Mexico, and Iowa between 1885 and 1900. These cases show how Native parents, husbands, and cousins challenged the federal agents responsible for boarding schools by appealing to federal courts for intervention on behalf of their kin confined in such schools. Moving beyond legal interpretations, however, this article further argues that Native people used these petitions to assert their capacity to make their own decisions about the proper education of their young people and to convey Indigenous values of teaching and learning. Consequently, these cases illustrate an important but understudied means by which Native people used the legal tools available to them to assert self-determination in education. These habeas corpus cases are therefore a crucial part of boarding school history, American Indian and Indigenous history, and the history of U.S. education.

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Water itself against settler colonialism: Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, ‘The Poetics and Ontologies of Fresh Water in Settler Contexts’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2025

21Mar25

Excerpt: In mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Pākehā (settler) poet J. R. Hervey encounters a “squat citadel spraying power”—a hydroelectric dam—and finds that it has turned the river into “dumb, disciplined waters” (43). A decade later, the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi) draws on his experiences as a worker on hydroelectric dam projects to also describe their environmental impact as a forcible act of silencing: “Nowhere is there greater fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue” (“Sea” 30). At first glance, the similarity between Hervey and Tuwhare’s portrayals of rivers rendered “dumb” simply attests to the far-flung extent of the modernist belief that hydroelectric infrastructure contributed to civilization’s necessary work of pacifying unruly nature. As Patrick McCully puts it in his history of large dams, aptly titled Silenced Rivers (1996), such infrastructure has come to “symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality” (237). Framed by this binary opposition, literature seems to offer a powerful vehicle through which rivers might speak against the extractivist forces that would seek to silence them. Thus, Paul Kingsnorth aligns his recent poetic response to the “wild and blue, raging and unchanneled” rivers of Patagonia, Songs from the Blue River (2018), with theologian Thomas Berry’s insight that the “modern project” is predicated upon silencing these bodies of water: “We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation” (qtd. in Kingsnorth). Yet such straightforward assertions are complicated by the earlier examples of Hervey and Tuwhare, whose distinct cultural perspectives prompt questions both about the source of a river’s speech and the ability to understand what it might have to say. The matter of riverine voice has surfaced into western consciousness in recent years as a result of various legislative attempts to recognize prior and ongoing Indigenous understandings of rivers as living, ancestral, metaphysical entities.

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Nursing after settler colonialism: Gina Jang, ‘A Journey Toward Self-Reconciliation via Indigenous Wisdom Unraveling Identity: A Contemporary Issue in Nursing’, Nurse Education Today, 150, 2025, #106680

21Mar25

Abstract: The author delves into the intricate layers of identity and responsibility as experienced by an Asian immigrant in Canada. The author grapples with the complexities of being simultaneously an outsider and a participant in settler colonial dynamics. The narrative traces the author’s evolving comprehension of her settler identity.

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Settler colonial and sexist: Muhammad Rehan Sabir, Maryam Asim, Muhammad Rehan, Muqaddas Saif, ‘Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave: An Artistic Reclamation of Native American Women’s Identity and Cultural Sovereignty’, International Conference on Next-Generation Innovations and Sustainability, 2025

21Mar25

Abstract: Native American women seem to struggle for emancipation from two kinds of status quo. One aspect focuses on breaking free from the colonial idea of the nation-state, while the other highlights resistance against heteropatriarchy that was planted into Native American tribes. This article applies theoretical lens of Andrea Smith on Joy Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave to highlight the involvement of settler colonialism in the obstruction of Native American consciousness. This paper investigates the resistive campaign of native women against intersectional politics of tribal men and colonial powers. Smith’s idea of spiritual activism unfolds the difference of white feminism and colored feminism to uncover the systematic violence against native women. This paper also explores how Joy Harjo, through memory, metaphor, storytelling, and spiritual activism, critiques the dual oppression of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy to reclaim indigenous identity and cultural sovereignty. This research is an exploration of native women’s adversity of keeping tribal nationalism over sexism as their survival strategy in an imperial nation state by using Joy Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave as a specimen.

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The settler’s game? Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, Braden Te Hiwi, Beyond the Rink: Behind the Images of Residential School Hockey, University of Manitoba Press, 2025

20Mar25

Description: In 1951, after winning the Thunder Bay district championship, the Sioux Lookout Black Hawks hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School embarked on a whirlwind promotional tour through Ottawa and Toronto. They were accompanied by a professional photographer from the National Film Board who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities and the “benefits” of assimilating into Canadian society. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey; for others, it was an escape from the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school. In Beyond the Rink, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members—Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley—to share the complex legacy behind the 1951 tour photos. This book reveals the complicated role of sports in residential school histories, commemorating the team’s stellar hockey record and athletic prowess while exposing important truths about “Canada’s Game” and how it shaped ideas about the nation. By considering their past, these Survivors imagine a better way forward not just for themselves, their families, and their communities, but for Canada as a whole.

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Indigenous properties and settler anthropologists: David S. Trigger, ‘Land claim legacies, native title, and the rigours of Indigenous politics’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2025

20Mar25

Abstract: My studies in the Northern Territory/Queensland border region of Australia’s Gulf Country indicate continuing tense negotiations among Waanyi/Garawa people concerning the inclusion/exclusion of particular persons as traditional owners and recipients of benefits from various economic ventures. Despite commonly expressed Indigenous views that stress the importance of sustaining continuity of traditional ‘law’, this points to the importance of addressing change, as assuming that the model of traditional ownership articulated in a land claim 40 years ago will not undergo modification would be naïve. Subsequent generations have come to define connections to Country more flexibly than the earlier documented system of inheritance through patrilines and mother’s patrilines. Native title, land claims, and mining negotiations on the Queensland side of the border have influenced this outcome. I address risks of legal rigidification of customary law driven by the practical availability of the original Northern Territory land rights research. That earlier completed work has become a focus for appeals to cultural authenticity and strategic traditionalism among Indigenous protagonists fuelled in part by competition for money and related resources. While research such as mine from the 1980s remains essential in decision-making, it needs to be updated and approached with a methodology open to the significance of cultural change. This difficult area of anthropological work deserves more analytical attention, recognition, and support.

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Subversive Indigenous authenticity: Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Authenticity and decolonization: On the subversive authenticity of Indigenous resurgence’, Anthropological Theory, 2025

18Mar25

Abstract: Authenticity is often regarded as an impediment to decolonization, particularly in contexts involving Indigenous people. Some frame authenticity as a colonialist construct, perpetuated by Indigenous people and others to contest or enforce power relations. Others dismiss authenticity altogether as an illusory, essentialist and divisive concept. Yet others marshal ‘hybridity’ and ‘Indigenous modernity’ as conceptual alternatives. While these lenses generate useful perspectives, I argue that their shared rejection of authenticity overlooks the diverse ways in which many Indigenous people make sense of it. To account for authenticity’s intricate vernacular usage and functionality in contexts of Indigenous resurgence, I propose an additional framework that differentiates authenticity from accuracy and verisimilitude. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2022 among urban-based and newly identifying Indigenous people in Cape Town, South Africa, whose authenticity rarely goes unquestioned. When expressing their views on authenticity, many ‘Khoisan revivalists’ assert their agency by subverting widely held expectations. Their ‘subversive authenticity’ intermittently ignores, rejects and reinforces dominant understandings of Indigenous authenticity in a seemingly disinterested manner. As its boundaries are thus made porous, authenticity emerges as a potential source of empowerment and conduit for decolonization. However, since authenticity’s boundaries frequently remain contested, subversive authenticity is not meant to supplant critical approaches but to increase the analytical purchase of anthropologists’ theoretical arsenal.

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Settler colonialism from the margins: Lucy Taylor, Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia: Settler Colonialism from the Margins, University of Wales Press, 2025

17Mar25

Description: This book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. Inspired by decolonial thinking, this book challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony, and in particular disrupts the myth of Welsh–Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing less familiar accounts in the record. A newly-developed framework applies three logics – possession, racialization/barbarisation, and assimilation – to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales’s complex position as both colonised and coloniser. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.

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