settler colonial studies blog

Unracial settler colonialism in Aotearoa: Luka Budak, Marijana Borić, ‘Scientific, linguistic and migration research: Croatian Dalmatian communities in New Zealand’, Časopis Hrvatskih studija, 20-21, 1, 2025

27Nov25

Abstract: Croatian immigration to New Zealand dates back to the 1850s. Today, there are well over 100,000 New Zealanders of Croatian descent. The earliest Croatian settlers were almost exclusively from Dalmatia. Over 90% of them came from Makarska and the surrounding area (Podgora, Drašnice, Drvenik, Zaostrog, Živogošće), then from the islands of Korčula, Hvar, Brač and the Pelješac peninsula. After World War II, immigrants also came from other parts of Croatia for economic reasons. In the last ten to twenty years, more than 10,000 highly educated Croats have immigrated to New Zealand. Croatians are the second largest immigrant group in New Zealand after the Irish. Generally speaking, Croats in New Zealand are successful and respectable, and a fairly large number of them play an important role in the economic life of New Zealand. In February/March 2023, in the initial phase of research into Croatian/Dalmatian communities in New Zealand, Dr. (Hon. Causa) Luka Budak, Dr. Marijana Borić and Dr. Josip Lasić began to unlock layers of rich cultural heritage through field research, recording the speeches and migration stories of members of local Croatian/Dalmatian communities on the North Island, through lectures and meetings in their societies/clubs, their museums and libraries, and in addition collecting material and creating numerous contacts and collaborations that will enable further research into Croatian heritage and the contribution of Croats to the development of New Zealand’s multicultural society, and the systematic monitoring of their trace preserved not only in archives, museums and libraries, but also in the places where their daily lives took place: from gum-digging fields and churches to final resting places in cemeteries. The research study showed that in each of the visited cities in New Zealand, the Croatian community was and remains closely connected, preserving language and tradition, creating its own collections and funds filled with memories, with the aim of preserving identity, tangible and intangible heritage. By preserving their community and Croatian heritage, to which they added the contributions they made in their new homeland, they simultaneously successfully integrated into New Zealand multicultural society while preserving their Croatian identity.

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Racial settler colonialism in Aotearoa: Heather Gao, ‘Chinese racialisation and colonial complicity: connecting capitalism, white supremacy and settler colonisation in Aotearoa’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

27Nov25

Abstract: Building on theorisations examining the colonial positionalities of Asian diasporic communities in settler societies such as Canada, Hawai’i and the U.S., this article investigates the role of Chinese racialisation and discursive positioning vis-à-vis Pākehā and Māori in bolstering, obscuring or otherwise entrenching White supremacy, settler colonisation, and capitalism in Aotearoa. Specifically, I offer a critical analysis of historical texts, building upon and expanding existing narratives within secondary sources through the theoretical framework of colonial racial capitalism. I argue that Chinese racialisation and discursive positioning in Aotearoa has and continues to be shaped by the material interests of ‘New Zealand’ as a settler-colonial project founded upon the subjugation of Māori land and life, and reliant on the alienation of racialised tauiwi from the national identity and body politic. At once a Yellow Peril, model minority and essentialised Other, Chinese immigrants have been differentially racialised and positioned in society in order to produce and reproduce the conditions necessary for the preservation of colonial racial capitalism. Our racialisation as Chinese people can then be understood as inseparable from the settler-colonial project, and so to resist against White supremacy thus also requires that we resist against the violences of capitalism and (settler) colonisation.

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Prosthetic settler colonialism: Caroline Lieffers, ‘Disability, Spirituality, and Settler Colonialism: The Story of Joseph La Flesche’s Artificial Leg’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 99, 3, 2025, pp. 457-487

24Nov25

Abstract: This article is a microhistorical examination of a settler medical technology in an Indigenous community: Umonhon leader Joseph La Flesche’s artificial leg, which he wore from the early 1860s until his death in 1888. This case study illustrates how La Flesche’s disability and prosthesis were deeply entangled with Euro-American challenges to Umonhon ways of life, including relational care, land use, and spiritual practices. Although the artificial limb, from a Euro-American perspective, was a medical technology to resolve disability, from the perspective of some Umonhon the limb represented unwanted changes to their land and culture, changes that also compromised crucial community rituals and engendered new forms of “spiritual disablement.” The medical technology’s significance cannot be removed from the larger context of settler colonialism and its ableist assessment of Indigenous bodyminds, lands, beliefs, and ways of life.

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Leveraging the settler ecostory: Caitlin Morton, Settler Colonialism and the Australian Environment: A Sociolegal Discourse Analysis of Decolonising Narratives Mobilised by First Nations Peoples in Modern Australian Environmental Conflicts, PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: This thesis uses a historical discourse analysis of sociolegal narratives mobilised by First Nations peoples in environmental conflicts in modern Australia to develop three case studies on (1) the Wild Rivers Act 2005, (2) the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (3) the McArthur River mine. Each case triggered social, legal, and political action by affected Traditional Owners who mobilised narratives that contributed to decolonisation by critiquing and replacing colonial assumptions about the environment and environmental governance. The sources evidencing these decolonising narratives are diverse, reflecting the diverse forms of legal, social, and political participation within First Nations peoples’ resistance to ongoing settler colonialism and its effects on their lands and waters. It is this fact that necessitates the analysis of a broad scope of sources such as petitions; open letters; protest narratives; and legal documents such as court transcripts, submissions, and reports, with O’Brien (2018) providing important precedents for decolonising projects based on the extensive historical study of petitions and related documents. By exploring the sociolegal achievements and narrations of First Nations peoples (individually and collectively) asserting rights to their lands and waters, this research adopts a decolonising approach adept at critiquing and replacing colonial normativity (Mignolo, 2009, 2021). This approach allows the research to answer questions on how decolonisation is framed by First Nations peoples within public debates about the environment, and the implications for understanding environmental politics and policy in Australia and other settler colonial contexts. The results, which are particularised to each case, support the overall argument that the mobilisations and narrations of First Nations peoples defending their lands and waters are decolonising because they critique and replace colonial environmental norms in public fora.

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The death of settler colonialism: Rye Purvis, ‘A conceptual review of a land-informed Native American Death Pedagogy: Overcoming settler colonialism and the Western Death System’, Death Studies, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: Land is central to and holds agency in death and dying belief and knowledge systems within Native American communities in North America. these land-informed belief and knowledge systems serve as the foundation for a Native American Death pedagogy. possibilities and futurities of Native American Death pedagogy has been negatively impacted by historical and ongoing effects of settler colonialism. As settler colonialism functions to eliminate Native American lifeways, it simultaneously makes space to replace with Western socio-political systems and frameworks. for death and dying practices, these Western socio-political systems and frameworks can be referred to as a Western Death System—an expansion of Robert Kastenbaum’s theory of the Death System. through experiential knowledge and a conceptual review, this article will address the significance of land in Native American Death pedagogy and the challenges from the Western Death System.

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Once they were migrants (then they were settlers): Fotios Papadopoulos, From migrants to settlers: the history of Greek communities in colonial Zimbabwe and Tanganyika, 1890s-1960, PhD dissertation, EUI, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: This doctoral thesis examines the position of Greek migrants in the colonial societies of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on their transformation from migrants to settlers. Through the cases of colonial Zimbabwe and Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1950s, it explores how Greeks, as marginal Europeans without a colonial background, were positioned both materially and culturally within these societies. Although generally classified as Europeans in the 20th century, Greeks lacked direct colonial rule background, having themselves been subjects of British and Italian rule in the Ionian Islands, Cyprus, and the Dodecanese. The study argues that Greek migrants’ racial and settler status was fluid, shaped by their economic activities, class, and interactions with European settlers, indigenous communities, and other immigrant groups, such as Indians. In the early period (1890s– 1920s), most Greeks worked as laborers, small shopkeepers, or traders with indigenous populations, often occupying peripheral roles in colonial society. However, from the late 1920s to the 1960s, their status shifted: in Southern Rhodesia, Greeks entered politics and even held mayoral positions in major cities, while in Tanganyika, they acquired extensive agricultural estates—land ownership on a scale rarely seen in their homeland. This dissertation examines the conditions that allowed only certain social classes to access the privileges of settler colonialism and how individuals from a non-imperial background—lacking capital, foreign language skills, and religious or ethnic alignment with ruling elites—were able to integrate into, and sometimes thrive within, colonial structures. Ultimately, it challenges approaches to settler colonialism as an exclusive domain of imperial powers, demonstrating how ‘smaller’ European migrant communities strategically navigated, participated and even influenced colonial systems.

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Not necessarily vulnerable: Jade Jenkinson, ‘Contemporary Crises, Historical Antecedents: Refusing Vulnerability in Indigenous Speculative Fictions’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) Empire of Wild (2019) and Jessica Johns’s (Cree) Bad Cree (2023) refuse to frame the violent events at their centre as isolated or incidental. Instead, authors situate crises within the long historical continuum of settler-colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities in Canada. Catriona Mackenzie et al.’s expansive intersectional taxonomy of vulnerability defines its pathogenic variant as emerging from entrenched ‘sociopolitical oppression or injustice.’ Pathogenic vulnerability demonstrates how specific groups can experience conditions that render them more vulnerable to violence. In this article, I argue Dimaline and Johns utilise speculative tropes to interrogate widespread decontextualised state narratives of individual vulnerability. Violent events are alternatively narrated as products of their specific context – the conditions of pathogenic vulnerability conferred upon Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations. A central protagonist’s individual search for truth foregrounds narrative engagement with contemporary issues facing communities – Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2s) statistics, land grabs, state sponsored industrialism and environmental and psychological devastation within post- extraction communities. Yet authors resist reasserting victim paradigms or employing a reconciliatory politics. Speculative tropes instead encourage what Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) calls storywork. Such tropes, which denaturalise violent encounters, encourage lateral thinking via nested narratives/metanarratives and embed both traditional monsters and alternative worlds, instigate storywork through inciting deeper reader engagement while foregrounding Indigenous agency, knowledge and resistance.

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Growing settlers thinking about settler colonialism: Robert Petrone, ‘”I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help”: An examination of how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about settler colonialism’, Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 54, 2025, pp. 73-85

21Nov25

Abstract: This essay offers an examination of various ways Angeline Boulley’s best-selling, award-winning Indigenous Young Adult novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter attends to and educates about settler colonialism. At the core of this analysis is the guiding question: In what ways does Firekeeper’s Daughter illuminate the ongoing social structure of settler colonialism within the context of what is currently known as “The United States”? Specifically, this analysis focuses on the topics of Native identity, including colonial mechanism of blood quantum; and the ways institutions such as the FBI operate from values and epistemologies of compartmentalization and deficit notions of Native Peoples. Across this analysis, the overarching goal is to demonstrate how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about how settler colonialism as structural, contemporary, and ongoing—baked into current social systems.

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Settlers out of time and out of place: Linda Andersson Burnett, ‘The “Savage” Within: The Sámi People and the Archaeology of Whiteness’, Isis, 116, 4, 2025, pp. 766-777

21Nov25

Abstract: In this article, I will examine how the Swedish zoologist and archaeologist Sven Nilsson (1787–1883) constructed what I refer to here as the archaeology of whiteness. Whiteness denotes here a racialized and colonial epistemic venture that positioned Europeans at an “evolutionary advantage” over Indigenous and colonized peoples. Specifically, I will analyze how Nilsson’s writing denied the Sámi people, Indigenous to Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, any sense of temporal “coevalness” with Europeans and how they were marked as racially and temporally different from other European inhabitants. I will conclude by addressing the colonial and political implications of this denial of Sámi historical motion, particularly in the context of how narratives of Sámi “savagery” and their supposed extinction were entangled with the increased extraction of natural resources from Sámi territories in Sweden and settler colonialism.

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Settler dishumanitarianism: Ron J. Smith, ‘A failure of humanitarianism: the West, Settler Colonialism, and the Manufactured crisis in Gaza’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

21Nov25

Abstract: Gaza has been subject to numerous manufactured humanitarian crises since 2006, a year after the Israeli withdrawal of civilian settlers across the strip. Many of these crises are supported by the refusal of the West to recognise the sovereignty of the Palestinian people and their basic human rights. The starvation and total collapse of the health of Gazan people is not simply a matter of neglect, but rather an active process of dispossession that began with the numerous proposals for the splitting of historical Palestine, and the advent of the Palestinian refugee problem with the establishment of the state of Israel. This paper considers the history of the West’s contentious relationship with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from its conception to the present day. This history includes long-term shortfalls in promised financial support to UNRWA across the Middle East and existential crises for the agency due to funding withheld based on flimsy accusations. The paper will examine demands to end the agency in favour of others even further removed from the goal of refugee return and resettlement.

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