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Fe(de)ral settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Settler Federalism and the Conditions of Indigenous Autonomy: A Comparative Study’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2025

30Dec25

Abstract: This article examines how different federal configurations can shape Indigenous autonomy across three cases: The United States, Canada, and Australia. While federations might seem better equipped than unitary states to share sovereignty with Indigenous peoples, they often entrench settler authority by internalizing Indigenous affairs, thereby limiting Indigenous self-government. Through a comparative historical analysis, this study shows that Indigenous autonomy is enhanced when settler governments externalize Indigenous affairs—treating them as nation-to-nation relationships through treaties or constitutional agreements. The article identifies two mechanisms that support such externalization: aligning Indigenous affairs with settler powers over foreign relations and separating them from settler control over land and resources. Drawing on constitutional and jurisdictional history, the study offers a novel framework for understanding how federal systems can either constrain or support Indigenous self-determination in the US, Canada, and Australia, highlighting the promise of treaty federalism as a path toward greater Indigenous jurisdiction and autonomy.


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Violence, slow and fast: Elena Ruíz, Structural Violence: The Makings of Settler Colonial Impunity, Oxford University Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens—including those associated with sexual violence—for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive.


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Schooling settler colonialism: Meredith McCoy, On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: On Our Own Terms contextualizes recent federal education legislation against the backdrop of two hundred years of education funding and policy to explore two critical themes: the racial and settler colonial dynamics that have shaped Indian education and an equally long and persistent tradition of Indigenous peoples engaging schools, funding, and policy on their own terms. Focusing primarily on the years 1819 to 2018, Meredith L. McCoy provides an interdisciplinary, methodologically expansive look into the ways federal Indian education policy has all too often been a tool for structural violence against Native peoples. Of particular note is a historical budget analysis that lays bare inconsistencies in federal support for Indian education and the ways funds become a tool for redefining educational priorities. McCoy shows some of the diverse strategies families, educators, and other community members have used to creatively navigate schooling on their own terms. These stories of strategic engagement with schools, funding, and policy embody what Gerald Vizenor has termed survivance, an insistence of Indigenous presence, trickster humor, and ironic engagement with settler structures. By gathering these stories together into an archive of survivance stories in education, McCoy invites readers to consider ongoing patterns of Indigenous resistance and the possibilities for bending federal systems toward community well-being.


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Outing settler colonialism: Caitlin Keliiaa, Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program, University of Washington Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. Outing removed Native people from their communities and transferred them to white homes, farms, and businesses to work as menial laborers. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Despite oppressive living and working conditions, they strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency. In this groundbreaking work, historian Caitlin Keliiaa examines Native women’s lived experiences of federal policy and connects outing to the region’s longer history of coerced Native labor. Refusing Settler Domesticity explores the unexpected story of Native women in the Bay Area, decades before Indian Relocation, illuminating the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today. This book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.


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Sovereignty is a powerful story: Angela K. Parker, Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: “The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States,” Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the construction of the Garrison Dam as part of the New Deal–era Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program meant the flooding of a third of their land, including their most fertile agricultural acreage, the loss of their homes, and wrenching relocation. In Damming the Reservation, Angela K. Parker, an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, offers a deeply researched, unflinching history of the tribes’ fight to preserve and rebuild their culture, shared history, common stories, sense of place, and sovereignty. With the richly informed and deeply personal perspective of a historian and descendant of those who survived these events, Parker tracks the riverine communities from 1920 to 1960, in the years before, during, and after the Army Corps of Engineers did its devastating work. By studying the inextricable link between on-the-ground conditions and national policy, she builds a cohesive narrative for twentieth-century Native American history that hinges on the assertion of Indigenous sovereignties. These battles over land, water, and resources that constitute the “territory” required to maintain a working sovereign body are at the very heart of the Native American past, present, and future. The author shows how Indigenous resistance to the Garrison Dam created a new generation of activists, including Tillie Walker, the focus of the book’s epilogue. Damming the Reservation documents what can happen when a settler colonial nation tramples tribal rights while exerting control over rural hinterlands: in this case, the reservation community developed a praxis of self-determination and tribal sovereignty that trickled up to the national level so that tribal meanings came to saturate federal Indian policy. This is a history whose lessons echo through today’s most pressing environmental justice crises.


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Alternative settlers (again, on gastro-settler colonialism): Angie Sassano, ‘Between gourds and saltbush: the politics of race, coloniality, and recognition in Australia’s alternative food movements’, Agriculture and Human Values, 43, 2026, #14

29Dec25

Abstract: Although there has been much attention paid to the racial dynamics of food movements across North America, there has been little attention paid to race and colonialism in Australia’s alternative food movements. I focus on the conflation of race and Indigeneity through cosmopolitan and multicultural food practices of recognition that comes to limit more radical possibilities for Indigenous sovereignties. Therefore, this paper asks how whiteness structures everyday alternative food relations and mediates efforts to disrupt settler logics. I draw on fieldwork conducted at urban market gardens in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, to explore how settler food actors come to understand whiteness and (de)colonization in food practices, and how such dynamics are both disrupted and (often unintentionally) reinscribed through liberal paradigms of recognition. The paper frames whiteness as a colonial construct which facilitates the political conditions of alternative food practices to organize and govern whose (and how) knowledges and practices are made to matter. I argue that while well-intentioned, participants recognize that such efforts of inclusion and recognition are bound by broader settler governmentalities which risk potentially undermining creative forms of resistance.


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Shopping settler colonialism: Steve Penfold, The Dominion of Shoppers: Canadian Consumption from Hudson’s Bay to eBay, University of Toronto Press, 2026

28Dec25

Description: The Dominion of Shoppers is a concise introduction to the long history of Canadian consumption. Building on the “four Ps” of consumer history – place, product, payment, and power – historian Steve Penfold traces the complex mix of business, economic, social, and cultural dynamics that shaped shopping and exchange from the bygone fur trade to contemporary online buying. Stretching from the 17th to the 21st century, The Dominion of Shoppers builds its narrative around several key moments in the history of the (now bankrupt) Hudson’s Bay Company, leading the reader through the exchanges of the fur trade, retail in settler colonialism, modern consumption, post-World War Two consumer boom, consumer nationalism, state regulation, and more recent technological and retail disruptions. Through the pages of this book, readers will visit fur trade posts, public markets, small rural shops, department stores, shopping malls, power centres, discount houses, and online markets. The Dominion of Shoppers is a valuable introduction to Canadian consumerism for historians, students, and anyone interested in Canada’s past and present.


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Alien monsters: Niamh Gallagher, ‘Indigenous monsters and the spectres of assimilation: Jon Bell’s The Moogai (2024) as Aboriginal Gothic’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2025

28Dec25

Abstract: John Bell’s recent feature film The Moogai (2024) marks the entry of Aboriginal Gothic and Horror into twenty-first century mainstream Australian and international cinema. Working alongside and beyond current frameworks of Aboriginal Gothic, monster studies, and haunting, I argue that the monsters and spectres within the film can be understood as emerging from different world-systems, troubling Western conceptions of monsters and ghosts as purely metaphorical sources of fear. I also argue for an archipelagic understanding of Aboriginal Gothic texts, in which texts engage in an expansive and dynamic set of articulations which foreground the localised nature of Aboriginal relationships to place and space. Monsters borne from Country, and Ancestral ghosts, are connective and reparative, as they signal practices of care and mutual responsibility embedded in systems of Kinship, Dreaming, Lore and Law. The past and ongoing violent impingements of the colonial nation, particularly the Stolen Generations and hyperincarceration of Aboriginal people within the prison system, haunt Aboriginal life through the imminent threat of disappearance, and gaping absences of those disappeared. Within the film, Bell explores the interface of these two worlds, creating a titular monster which is both deeply tied to Bundjalung Country, and respondent to the horrors of colonialism.


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Ritual settler colonialism: Joshua Zentner-Barrett, ‘With Orca, Goose, and Bear: Expanding Canada’s Ritual Body’, Toronto Journal of Theology, 41, 2, 2025

28Dec25

Abstract: The publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015 was a significant moment in both the story of Canadian-Indigenous relations and church-Indigenous relations. Churches across Canada have been wrestling not only with their complicity in the operation of residential schools but with their wider role in European colonialism. Many of the churches have initiated significant strategies for learning and education, and have explored ritual responses to residential schools and colonialism, such as land acknowledgements, art installations, and the reading of parts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. This paper is not quite about these ritual practices. Instead, it takes a wider lens, asking about the context in which these practices take place: what does it mean to “do” liturgy—to practice Christian ritual, to ritualize—in Canada today? More broadly, however, it asks how settler colonialism—particular practices of violence and domination—impact ritualization in contexts across the world—and how this is all rooted in the land. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, it discusses the concepts of the body, ritualization, and contextualization in Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Second, it examines settler colonialism using my own context of Canada as a particular example. Third, it draws on Cláudio Carvalhaes’ concept of lex naturae to expand Bell’s concept of the “body”: all (liturgical) practice must be seen through the lens of creation. Through a brief case study, it then demonstrates one way in which a Christian community has attempted to bring the voice of the land into liturgical practice and thus expand the ritualization of “bodies” in Christian ritual. Because of the way that settler colonialism functions in its global contexts, ritualization should understand the “body” as including the land and the interrelationship of all created things.


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Against Mestizo settler colonialism: Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, ‘Against Mestizaje: Articulations Towards a Black/Indigenous Sense of Place in Mexico’, Antipode, 2025

26Dec25

Abstract: In this paper, I sit with the different modes of relation that Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous women have to community, to each other, and to land and sea. In particular, I demonstrate the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous women contend, refuse, and negotiate racialised identifiers on their own terms, extending beyond Mexico’s rubrics of inclusion and exclusion. I ask: How does one insist on existence, and do so on your and your community’s own terms? What does it mean to be inseparable from the land and water that your community inhabits? I weave together Black and Indigenous feminist thought, with an analysis of language use, to unsettle hegemonic mestizo understandings of place, racial and state formation in the land known as Mexico and beyond.


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