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The fence as a settler episteme: Lisa L. Stenmark, ‘Fences on the Epistemological Prairie: A Settler Colonial Approach to “Religion and Science”’, Religions, 15, 1, 2025, #3

27Dec24

Abstract: Building on the idea of religion and science as conceptual maps of intellectual territory, I use a settler colonial analysis as a framework for thinking about decolonizing religion and science in a way that moves away from abstraction and towards action; addressing not just the ideas, but the tools of control—the fences—that impose ideas on the territory itself. Comparing the Wyoming prairie with the epistemological prairie, I describe the maps, fences and other tools and technologies of settler colonialism used to appropriate Indigenous Land and knowledge, eventually turning it into private property. It is in this last step—the creation of private property—that fences are most important, because they are tools of ownership that do not merely restrict access to parts of the prairie (land and knowledge), but restrict movement on the prairie itself. I describe patents and intellectual property as examples of fences on the epistemological prairie. Because they are legally and historically connected to technologies of settler colonial appropriation of land—including terra nullius and land patents—they are an excellent example of the connection between land and epistemological territory, and show what epistemological decolonization can look like in practice.


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Indigenous expression in settler texts: Johannah M. Bird, Discursive Ecology: Tracing Indigenous Expression in Settler Prairie Archives, PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: Within the broader project of studying early Indigenous literatures in Canada, this dissertation attends to Anishinaabe and Nêhiyaw discourse in government reports, missionary letters and diaries, newspapers, and other forms written between 1815 and 1874 to trace the range of ways Indigenous people responded to changing exigencies in their environments from mihkwâkamîw-sîpiy, miskwaagaamiwi-ziibi (Red River) to kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River). Informed by work in Indigenous literary studies that understands Indigenous literatures as interrelational, including with land and the broader physical world, and diverse in form and media, I approach discourse as a network of relations that also mediates those relationships, reading my archive as part of discursive environments within the broader shifting, contested discursive ecology of the nineteenth-century prairies when settler colonial discourse worked to establish itself. This approach enables me to read with a networked form of attention, taking my texts as contested, polysemous, polyvocal sites in which I account both for settler colonial constructions of “Indians,” which increasingly constrained Indigenous life, and for the ways Indigenous people asserted themselves, their thought, and sovereignty. I argue we can re-trace Indigenous expressions in colonial archive and settler texts, complicating them in ways that exceed their frames and revealing the multiple entries of assertion and creativity expressed in a range of Indigenous concepts, rhetorics, imagery, and forms. Indigenous discourse exerts a destabilizing energy in settler colonial archives, showing how colonial attempts at narrative and conceptual circumscription of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, knowledge, etc. inadvertently preserved, and thereby conceded, Indigenous autonomy, knowledge, and authority.


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The settler religion of Indian religion: Kenneth J. Richards, The Settler Doctrine: Indians, Religion, and the Land, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: In this dissertation, I propose the Settler Doctrine to position federal Indian law as profoundly determined by and organized around the legal, historical, and mythical entanglements between land, religion, and indigeneity. Neither land, religion, nor indigeneity are given natural categories. They emerged as anthropological concepts, pop culture fantasies, colonial myths, racist categories, and legal terms from a history of power relations, discursive expressions, lived experiences, and practical negotiations. In federal Indian law, I argue that their genealogies emerged and evolved in codeterminative and deeply entangled relationships. This means that the application of federal Indian law and the interpretation or construction of federal Indian policy depends upon these categories’ maintenance and developmental characteristics. In delving deeper into case histories and materials in federal Indian law, I was surprised to learn that “religion” was consistently deployed as an important, if not deciding characteristic, in the judicial opinions supporting a majority of Indian cases that, on the surface, had nothing to do with religion. These cases range from water allocations to fishing rights and property law or into the very bedrock of US federal recognition and protection of tribal sovereignty. Everywhere I looked, I found Indian religion. If not overtly addressed in judicial opinions, courts implicitly relied upon Indian religion through court citations, references, and precedence. In the process of my research, while pulling on the threads of religion, I found statements about land. This connection should not be a surprise. Federal Indian law, after all, is essentially about the land and the result of over five hundred years of colonial endeavors to dispossess Indian peoples of it. In addition, for native peoples in the US, there is a considerable amount of native voices and scholarship stating that whatever Indian religion may be, it is almost certainly tied to the land and quite often to particular places for specific native peoples. When the thread is pulled in the other direction, beginning from legal questions of land, I quickly found court concerns over religion. This dissertation is an analysis of the settler-colonial entanglement between land, religion, and the Indian in federal Indian law.


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Settler stories now: Daniel Scholte, Settler News Media Understandings of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline: Discourses of Territorial Sovereignty, Legality, and Justice, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: This thesis uses the concept of the settler imaginary to conduct a critical discourse analysis of
113 news articles covering the Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict. Specifically, I engage with 3 research
questions: 1) What are the narratives that frame Wet’suwet’en dispossession as legal or “just”? 2)
How does mainstream media express understandings of territory and resource rights in the
context of Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty? 3) How do these understandings relate to, or
reflect, notions of settler reason? Mainstream media performs a discursive function in responding
to Wet’suwet’en assertions of sovereignty, discursively moving claims into the jurisdiction of
Canadian law. News articles create a discursive distance between the present dynamics of the
Wet’suwet’en-CGL conflict and historic and ongoing settler colonialism. I argue news articles
reflect a normative framework of rationality, one that justifies infringement of Wet’suwet’en title
for the needs of extraction.


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With a chapter by James Miller and Natalie J. K. Baloy on ‘Settler Colonial Critique and Indigenous Urbanisation’: Kundani Makakavhule, Karina Landman (eds), Decolonising the Built Environment Process, Product, and Pedagogy, Routledge, 2025

24Dec24

Access the chapter here.


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Performance against perfunctory: Sheetala Bhat, ‘Indigenous performances of love beyond settler recognition in Vigil and the unnatural and accidental women’, Australasian Drama Studies, 2024

23Dec24

Abstract: There has been a marked rise in the discourse of recognition in global state politics in the last four decades. In many ways, recognition has ‘become a key word of our time’. Indigenous scholars on Turtle Island note that the Canadian state has a history of using recognition as a strategy to appear to be ‘just’ and ‘humane’, while relinquishing commitments to upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard argues that, owing to the persistence of Indigenous-led movements, there has been an ‘unprecedented degree of recognition for Aboriginal “cultural” rights within the legal and political framework of the Canadian state’. However, this state recognition attempts to accommodate identity-based claims within settler state sovereignty and therefore continues to ‘reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’. This article examines how Indigenous women artists resist colonial state recognition through performance.


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Indigenous sovereign engagements: Aleksandr Korobeinikov, ‘Questioning Russian settler colonialism: resettlement strategies and indigenous agency in the post-imperial Sakha (Yakut) region’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: This article explores how indigenous Sakha intellectuals responded to Russian colonialism during a period of transformation in the Sakha (Yakut) region. It examines the impact of penal and resource colonialism in the late nineteenth century, the response of local intellectuals to potential settler colonialism in the early twentieth century, and their efforts to transition the Sakha population from nomadism to more sedentary or mixed lifestyles. Sakha intellectuals not only challenged Russian settler colonialism, but also appropriated its discourse, arguing for the designation of the Sakha as a sedentary community in the early Soviet period. They sought to counter imperialist representations of the Sakha as ‘backward’ while asserting indigenous agency in shaping regional development. By resisting and reframing colonial practices, these intellectuals became key actors in the socio-political transformation of Yakutia during the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. The article focuses on how sedentarization facilitated this transformation, revealing the complexity of colonial dynamics in early Soviet Yakutia.


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Resettler diasporas: Anna Flack, Jan Musekamp, Jannis Panagiotidis, Hans-Christian Petersen (eds), Russian Germans on Four Continents: Histories of a Global Diaspora, Nomos, 2024

22Dec24

Description: The history of Russian Germans (Russlanddeutsche) is one of intensive mobility across space and time. Today, the descendants of eighteenth-century German-speaking settlers in the Russian Empire live on four continents: Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In this volume, authors from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and sociolinguistics analyze key issues of the history and present of this globally connected diaspora group from an interdisciplinary angle. Contributions address the institutional regimes and networks that shaped—and continue to shape—the mobility of Russian Germans on a global scale, the impact of war and violence on the history of this group during the “Age of Extremes,” and the language shifts that accompanied their multiple global moves. Its interdisciplinary and geographic diversity makes this volume a unique contribution to research on migration, global diaspora, transnationalism, and practices of belonging. By analyzing the multiple pathways of migration, entanglement, and belonging of people designated as “Russian Germans” in past and present, its chapters provide fresh insight into the making and unmaking of a global diaspora.


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Indigenous placemaking now: Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, ‘Indigenous placemaking amidst settler colonial leisure: A tale of Hawaiʻi’s living parks’, Political Geography, 2024, #103226

22Dec24

Abstract: What does the production of public leisure space tell us about the 20th century mechanics of settler colonial dispossession? In the second half of the twentieth century, the nascent State of Hawaii expanded and developed its state parks system in an effort to enhance public leisure and natural resource conservation. In turn, several sites acquired for park facilities also catalyzed evictions and removals of the local and Indigenous people who lived there. This essay tracks the emergence of a compromise (attempted and in one case, successfully) to create a ‘living park’ in which residents would remain so that they might educate the public on traditional Native Hawaiian lifeways. This essay describes how midcentury park development did the work of Indigenous removal and erasure by neutralizing and democratizing park space: state-funded leisure space for all radically precluded Indigenous placemaking at a time when Kanaka Maoli communities felt the generational effects of American assimilation most acutely. Ultimately, this essay builds upon scholarly critiques leveraged against conservation politics in order to reveal the dispossessive logics bound up in the envisioning of settler colonial leisure space. Such an understanding offers fresh insight into the violences that occur when space is rendered ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’ and explores the decolonial possibilities embedded in Indigenous placemaking beyond leisure.


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Antisettler Comics? Sophie McCall, ‘Framing, Reframing, and Deframing: Disclosure in Indigenous Comics’, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 8, 3, 2024 pp. 337-357

22Dec24

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indigenous comic creators disrupt or reclaim the conventions of comics in four works: The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw), 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga by David Alexander Robertson (Cree), Deer Woman: A Vignette by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe, Métis), and Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls (Tahltan). These comics use innovative paneling to expose silence and denial in settler-colonial societies, to disrupt linear concepts of time, and to assert Indigenous presence expansively across settler-colonial borders. American comic book theorist Scott McCloud, author of several celebrated books on the “vocabulary of comics,” argues that comics create a “dance of the visible and invisible” in the production of “closure” across panels (McCloud 92). In the context of reading comics, McCloud defines closure as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole,” which he further glosses as the reader’s act of silently filling in the gaps between panels, allowing that reader to comprehend the action even between two seemingly unrelated panels. However, without critical self-awareness, a reader risks imposing closure in ways that maintain settler-colonial norms. The comic books that I discuss mobilize strategies of disclosure to contest a reader’s assumptions about the production of meaning across panels. I argue that disclosure interrupts readers’ unconscious mobilization of established narratives that invisibly guide interpretation, and turns the mirror back on the readers themselves. These comic books’ insurgent acts of disclosure challenge settler-colonial impositions of closure and powerfully activate narratives of Indigenous resistance, cultural continuance, empowerment, and resurgence.


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