Abstract: Unique among marginalized groups, American Indians are both citizens of the United States and citizens of sovereign tribal nations, as recognized (but not granted) by federal Indian law. However, even as tribal nations exert increasing economic and political power, criminal legal outcomes for tribal members—who interface with an array of tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement and justice systems—remain detrimental or are worsened. These outcomes also include increased contact with state courts and the delegitimization of tribal courts, which uniquely implicate the civil justice context. We use the settler colonial framework to investigate how tools of state criminal law, such as heavy policing and disparate punishment, may impact the civil justice needs of Indigenous people, and more broadly, the very sovereignty these policies aim to protect. Drawing on interviews and observations in tribal and county-level courts, we examine the experiences of American Indians and other stakeholders in Indian country. We identify how enforcement practices, surveillance of space, and the complexities of layered policing within a “jurisdictional maze” contribute to the deterioration of tribal sovereignty. We contextualize our findings by considering the historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors that influence the experiences of American Indians in the criminal justice system, and by examining the civil justice implications.

Abstract: This chapter explores the relationship between indigenous peoples and their historical and cultural connections to the past. It critically examines the concept of “indigenous nostalgia”, demonstrating how indigenous groups are often seen as communities where nostalgia is expected to be found. Established concepts like “imperial nostalgia” focus on indigenous peoples as objects of remembrance by settlers who express nostalgia for an idealized, but supposedly vanishing indigenous population. To describe how indigenous communities themselves relate to the past, however, “nostalgia” is rarely used. The negative connotations of the term, characterized as romantic and emotionalized longing for an irretrievable past, threaten to delegitimize the aspirations of indigenous activism and conflict with indigenous temporalities. One response is to use alternative terms like “memory”, “heritage”, and “tradition” which not only avoid the sentimentality of nostalgia but are also more in tune with the insistence that the past persists as an integral part of the present. Efforts to reconceptualize the idea of nostalgia from the perspective of indigenous peoples are another response. Here, the past and expressions of “healing nostalgia” serve as a set of cultural resources that continue to inform the present and help to develop a positive vision for the future.

Abstract: Apocalypse is a persistent form of rhetoric that appears in moments of collective upheaval, a genre that sets up certain courses of action while discouraging others. As rhetoric scholars have recognized, premillennial Christian discourses influence our understanding of apocalypse as the prophetic foretelling of a “world-ending” event—to which the proper response is agreement with prophesy (and perhaps atonement). This chapter reads the 2009 telefilm Eruption to better understand how such forms shore up settler-colonial (and white masculine) power at moments in which it is most threatened. We underscore the necessity of challenging settler apocalyptic frames as we navigate life in the sixth mass extinction.

Abstract: How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological Association conference. At that time, scholarly considerations about Asian land and resource extraction emphasised capitalism, development, and governmentality, with scant consideration of settler colonialism, even though the last remains a vital framework for understanding the structural nature of imperial projects (Wolfe 2006). Even the literature that adopted this frame drew its analysis primarily from Euro-American–centred examples, implicitly suggesting that settler colonialism is an innately Western phenomenon (Pels 1997). Yet, capitalist developments with imperial consequences continue to impact Asia at varying scales (Tsing 2005). Such contemporary developments, alongside long Asian imperial histories, including those of China, Japan, and India, complicate this assumption. This provokes questions such as: How does settler domination work when those involved in it are neither white nor from the West? How can we critically engage with this while not Orientalising this history as a cultural peculiarity or delinking it from the deep influence of Western empires?

Description: This edited collection presents perspectives from a range of disciplines on the challenges of dismantling coloniality in settler societies. Showcasing a variety of pedagogies and case studies, the book offers approaches to the praxis of decolonisation in diverse settings including tertiary education, activism, arts curatorial practice, the media, trans-Indigeneity, and psychosocial therapy. Chapters centre on the personal, relational, and political work needed to support decolonisation in settler societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Drawing from experiences in the field, contributors argue that to decolonise research and build authentic relationships with Indigenous communities, settler researchers must learn from Indigenous worldviews without appropriating them, disrupt colonial epistemologies, and reconcile their place in colonialism. Indigenising is discussed as a counterpart to the decolonisation process, involving restoring and centring the Indigenous voice within Indigenised socio-cultural, economic, legal, and political structures and institutions, including the return of land. The book is a rich resource for researchers seeking to understand and support decolonisation in settler societies, and will appeal to non-Indigenous scholars, students, and those involved in decolonisation work in community and institutional settings.

Excerpts: While investigations of the effects of colonization on Indigenous peoples at first contact in what is now known as the United States are numerous, most are focused on European white men as primary actors. With only a few exceptions, scholars have mostly ignored the unique roles of European white women. Most existing investigations exhibit anti‑Indigenous assumptions, adhere to the global north’s oppressive norms of research, or are passively voiced and apologist in tone, excusing white women from accountability as they center white people’s accounts instead of Native perspectives. None of them address the complicity of white women in what I and others argue was the attempted genocide of Native Americans.

This chapter starts from the position that feminists hoping to mount a meaningful challenge to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy must acknowledge the role feminism plays in legitimating the ongoing project of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism refers to the persistent structures of domination through which a group of invasive colonizers come to stay, claiming Indigenous lands as their own by displacing, eradicating, or subjugating Indigenous populations and asserting supreme and exclusive authority over the territory. It is important to note that settler colonialism is not a singular event that took place in the distant past, but rather a process that is continually perpetuated through the narratives and the political and legal institutions imposed by the colonizers. The goal of this chapter is to frame and generate meaningful dialogue about the complicity of feminism in upholding settler colonialism, and the possibilities for a just path forward.

Abstract: In 1898 Georges Proust, his wife Berthe and their three sons, arrived in Noumea from Bordeaux, France. They were among the free settlers who became known as ‘colons Feillet’. They took up a concession to grow coffee in the Amoa Valley along with others who arrived in 1898. Life as a colonist was difficult, arising from social isolation, environmental conditions, and lack of agricultural experience. After two years the Proust family left New Caledonia for Australia. In the new century they became part of the French community in Sydney, where Georges worked for ‘Le Courrier Australien’. In this article I describe the family’s experiences based on the account written by Alfred Proust in 1978. Their experience as settler-colonists in turn-of-the-century New Caledonia provides insights into the history of this failed experiment.

Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (London: Head of Zeus, 2024).
Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2020).
Jonny Steinberg, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (London: William Collins, 2023).

Excerpt: In her book The Colonizing Self, Israeli political theorist Hagar Kotef recalls overhearing a conversation at a café in a bourgeois left-leaning neighbourhood of northern Tel Aviv in 2012. The Israeli army had been engaged in a war on Gaza at the time that killed over 150 Palestinians and displaced hundreds of families. She describes two people sitting at separate tables who end up sharing a newspaper and a conversation. At some point they conclude, in her paraphrase, that ‘if the world blames us for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza we might as well commit genocide and get it all over with’ (182). Kotef notes that they did not seem to know one another until their chance encounter in the café, as if to underscore the banality of Israeli genocidal intent vis-à-vis Palestinians such that it could furnish the shared ground for imagined community between strangers.

Abstract: What were the pedagogical forces that were operating in the construction of my racialized subject positions with the context of the Australian white settler state? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question by deploying critical race-decolonizing theories to trace a genealogy of forces that were operative in the constitution of my subjectivity. In the first instance, I proceed to unravel a genealogy that preceded my family’s migration to the Australian colony. I work to reconstruct this genealogy to materialize the prior forces of settler colonialism and race that already inscribed me as a subject and which were instrumental as push factors in my family’s migration. I then proceed to unpack the racialized pedagogy of the white settler state that I was compelled to experience as a non-Anglo diasporic-settler child. My personal account is located in the practice of critical race theorists, who use storytelling and counter-storytelling through personal stories as a critical method to recount experiences with racism. By examining two school textbooks that were part of my miseducation, I trace how these texts pedagogically laboured to inculcate a range of hegemonic values that normalized the racialized version of the settler state.

Abstract: This discussion article argues that contestations about antisemitism in current German public discourse and an uncompromising and institutionally mandated support for Israel, even in the face of plausibly genocidal actions, are related to and enabled by an unreconstructed embrace of a settler colonialist ethos. In this context, an unwillingness to come to terms with a history of colonial violence is only one component among multiple determining factors. And yet the question of settler colonialism, while not immediately recognisable, should be recovered and foregrounded to explain the operation of what is here defined as an anti-antisemitic complex, where institutions, the media, and the law combine to enforce a ban on discussions of Israeli history and policies towards Palestinians.