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Training settlers: Alessandra La Rocca Link, The Iron Horse in Indian Country: Native Americans and Railroads in the US West, Oxford University Press, 2025

03Mar25

Description: In 1872, artist John Gast rendered one of the more famous depictions of nineteenth-century Western settlement, a painting titled American Progress. Gast’s painting celebrated the US colonization of the West as the culmination of industrial progress by foregrounding two relatively new technologies: the telegraph and the railroad. For Gast, as for so many other Americans, the Iron Horse seemed destined to serve as the literal engine by which the industrial acumen and God-given civilization of the expanding nation would conquer western lands and peoples. On Gast’s canvas, American Indians shuffled toward the painting’s edge. Faced with the locomotive’s irrepressible force, Gast assumed that native peoples, incapable of adapting to modernity, would have no choice but to fade away. The Iron Horse in Indian Country shows how indigenous Americans across the trans-Mississippi West actively engaged with western railroads, not simply as passive bystanders to and victims of railroad expansion and dispossession as they have traditionally been cast. Foregrounding the hidden histories of native entanglements with the Iron Horse between the 1850s and 1930s, Alessandra La Rocca Link reveals how they played central roles as guides, passengers, entrepreneurs, wage-earners, and tribal citizens. Many Indians became wage earners (and, in some cases, wage payers) at a historic moment when the federal government sought to sequester natives on isolated reservations and limit their labors to agriculture. Indigenous political envoys made authorized and unauthorized visits to Washington, DC for negotiations among native leaders, railroad corporations, and the federal government, the beginnings of tribal and intertribal activism that would accelerate in the early twentieth century. The railroad provided Indigenous communities with a tool that they often put in the service of sustaining their cultural and material lives in the face of colonization. Indeed, the end of formal treaty relations with Native Americans in 1871 resulted from growing concerns about private negotiations taking place between corporations and tribal governments that directed the course of settlement in the region. Additionally, railroads facilitated a growing intertribal, Indian identity, as Native Americans used proliferating western railroad networks to visit one another, thus forging and renewing cultural, political, and social ties. Such ties were critical to the survival of Indigenous communities facing demographic decline over the course of the nineteenth century. Just as the West shrank with the arrival of the horse on the Plains, so too would it shrink as steam-powered locomotives brought far-flung locales into the traveling range of many Lakotas, Navajos, Cherokees, and others. Presenting a story that goes beyond the narrative of dispossession of Native land and resources, The Iron Horse in Indian Country demonstrates how the locomotive-powered settlement of the West was constantly contested, thwarted, and negotiated by the original inhabitants of the region who appropriated and repurposed this technology to transform it into a literal and figurative vehicle of survival.


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Terra Nullius is manufactured: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘The Afterlives of Terra Nullius: Unmarked Graves, Indigenous “Discoveries”, and Colonial After-Thoughts’, Performance Philosophy Journal, 9, 2, 2024, pp. 241-249

01Mar25

Abstract: The 2021 discovery of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia revealed the brutal genocide at the heart of Canadian colonial rule. Canadian governments and the Catholic Church had sought to leave this issue buried, literally and figuratively, by asserting a modern form of terra nullius in positing that these and other residential schools were ‘empty lands’ in the sense that they did not contain the remains of Indigenous children, even as Indigenous nations knew the truth. This essay argues that these gruesome discoveries are evidence of the after-lives of terra nullius of modern settler colonialism, where Indigenous peoples’ deaths are a colonial after-thought in settler society, which leads to settler denials and avoidance of responsibility for the damage done. This colonial after-thought can be traced right on up to Pope Francis’ apology for the Church’s role in the schools. In resistance to the settler effort to produce Indigenous peoples as ontological absences, as colonial after-thoughts, nations such as the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc demonstrate the power of Indigenous resurgence through their persistence in nation and movement building.


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Territory – the settlers want it: Salena Fay Tramel, ‘Territory grabbing: agrarian perspectives on the unmaking and reclaiming of Palestinian sovereignty’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2025

01Mar25

Abstract: Genocide in Gaza has refocused global attention on the question of Palestine, which has received weak treatment in critical agrarian studies – a field uniquely positioned to address it. This contribution offers a lens of territory grabbing to the land grab debate to explain the dismantling of territorial relations. Palestine makes for a powerful case on territory grabbing, where violent Israeli land seizures include both spectacular forms of violence and slower methods of ratcheting up control. This article also explores how Palestinian social movements are engaging with and shaping the food sovereignty movement and its broader convergences to defend territory.


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Combined and uneven parallel genocides: Raz Segal, ‘Israeli Settler Colonial Genocide’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

28Feb25

Abstract: The article examines the combined violence of settler colonialism in Israel and the US in two parts. The first part discusses the Jewish supremacism at the heart of Israeli settler colonialism, focusing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza since October 2023. It traces how genocidal rhetoric by state leaders, articulated in the language of Jewish supremacy, shaped the dynamics of violence on the ground, as documented by Israeli soldiers and officers in Gaza who described their own crimes in videos they recorded and uploaded to social media. The second part of the article addresses US settler colonialism as a key element in explaining the unconditional support that the US extends to Israel. This support now includes an unprecedented assault on documented reality and evidence. Senior administrators on university campuses in the US also partake in this Orwellian attack, though growing numbers of faculty and students continue to resist and insist on truth and justice – in Israel and in the US.


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Dancing against strangers: Joshua M. Hall, ‘Death-Defying Indigenous Dance: “Palest-Indian” Solidary Love’, Journal of Somaesthetics, forthcoming

28Feb25

Abstract: This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shadow of Israel’s retaliatory genocide, was catalyzed by a viral social media video with alternating clips of Palestinian and Native American people dancing in defiant resistance to ongoing white settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide, in loving embrace of their own Indigenous ways of being. After an introductory setting of the stage for this video, the first section rehearses the two historical chapters of dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Always Danced, emphasizing the paradoxical late nineteenth-century campaigns (1) criminalizing Indigenous American dances, and (2) appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. The second section then pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization. Finally, the concluding section spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as exemplars, captured in the Palestinian hip hop song’s neologism “Palest-Indians,” of loving Indigenous death-defying dance resistance.


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The ends of settler colonialism? Richard D. Wolff, ‘Settler Colonialism: “It Ends With Us” in Palestine and Israel’, CounterPunch, 31/01/25

28Feb25

Excerpt: My birth emerged from European capitalism’s fascistic catastrophe in the 1920s–1940s. That catastrophe also produced Israel’s experiment with settler colonialism in Palestine. This article refers to both these incidents to analyze the current Palestine-Israel catastrophe.


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The logic of settler colonialism (literally): Scott L. Pratt, ‘Logic and Colonization in North America’, The Pluralist, 20, 1, pp. 17-28

28Feb25

Excerpt: In 1672, The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof was published at the first North American press housed at Harvard College, where several of the printers were also members of local tribes. The book was written in English and Wôpanâak, the Native language spoken in the area of Boston and the Plymouth Colony, by the famed New England missionary John Eliot, with considerable assistance from Native interpreters including a number of Native preachers (mostly trained by Eliot). This volume represented one of the first uses of logic as an instrument of colonization in North America. Alongside disease and guns, logic served the larger mission of removing North American Indigenous people and replacing them with European people and culture—an effort that continues to the present day. Eliot’s primer is a key example because it illustrates both the means of conveying the dominant logic to a non-European world and the complexity of the borders where Indigenous and European worlds meet.


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A settler city by design: Rachel Gallagher, ‘Planning for dispossession: the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism in contemporary urban planning practices’, Cities, 160, 2025, #105793

26Feb25

Abstract: Drawing on a case study of Brisbane, Australia, this paper explores the parallels between the historical formation of settler-colonial cities and contemporary urban renewal schemes. Focusing on the development of a penal settlement (1825-) and largescale waterfront redevelopment (1988-), this study demonstrates how use of overt, top-down state power and a degree of authoritarianism is necessary to facilitate both forms of urban restructuring. Archival materials are used to track the transformation of the study areas at a street, lot and building scale, as well as the legislative framework and social and cultural context, to 2024. Findings develop an understanding of the legacy of colonial approaches to land management and property delineation, and how they continue to permeate throughout contemporary planning practices, including the ongoing effects of dispossession and historical revisionism. Like colonial land use planning, largescale urban renewal programs assume a blank slate exists for the transformations envisioned by decision makers, which can be at odds with the reality of peoples’ connection to the land, community identity, property rights and history.


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Settlers and their land rights: Francesca Merlan, ‘Anthropology and change over the ‘land rights era’: Towards treaties?’ Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2025

26Feb25

Abstract: Australia has made no treaties with its Indigenous peoples. Despite that, over the past five decades (the ‘land rights era’ of the title), Australia has granted proportionally more land area to Indigenous interests than have other, treaty-making Anglo settler colonies (Canada, the United States, New Zealand). Despite complexities of comparison by area, an order of difference is clearly discernible. After comparing these countries, this article examines legal and political changes involved in the transformation from no ‘Indigenous estate’ in Australia to a comparatively large one, and sketches the role anthropologists have played in land and native title claims which has enlarged the Indigenous estate. Subsequent articles in this issue treat the kinds of change that anthropologists, in their commitment to close ethnographic work, have been observing at this intersection of law and anthropology. This article concludes by considering directions in which land and native title claims seem to be moving.


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Panning slowly on settler colonial ruins: Freya Schiwy, ‘Moving Stillness: Cinema, Temporality, and Life in Settler Capitalist Ruins’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2025

25Feb25

Abstract: This article contemplates slow cinema’s potential to counter the intensity of mainstream eco-disaster cinema. Although the genre’s aesthetics are not inherently critical of the temporality of late capitalism, documentaries such as La isla y los hombres (The island and the men, Iñaki Moulian, 2017) can make apprehensible how the epistemological boundary between human and nonhuman life is both partially responsible for ecological catastrophe and linked to settler colonialism. What I call moving stillness invites viewers to sense Indigenous survivance with its multiple temporalities and ways of living on a diminished planet.


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