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The wreck of settler colonialism: Coll Thrush, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific, University of Washington Press, 2025

18Jan26

Description: The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers. Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.


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Emasculating settler colonialism: Sam McKegney, Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story, University of Regina Press, 2021

18Jan26

Description: Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song—one that celebrates rather than pathologizes; one that seeks diversity and strength; one that overturns heteropatriarchy without centering settler colonialism? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities even be creative, inclusive, erotic? Carrying the Burden of Peaceanswers affirmatively. Countering the perception that “masculinity” has been so contaminated as to be irredeemable, the book explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism. Sam McKegney’s argument is simple: if we understand that masculinity pertains to maleness, and that there are those within Indigenous families, communities and nations who identify as male, then the concession that masculinity concerns only negative characteristics bears stark consequences. It would mean that the resources available to affirm those subjectivities will be constrained, and perhaps even contaminated by shame. Indigenous masculinities are more than what settler colonialism has told us. To deny the beauty, vulnerability, and grace that can be expressed and experienced as masculinity is to concede to settler colonialism’s limiting vision of the world; it is to eschew the creativity that is among our greatest strengths. Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominative Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.


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Indigenous sovereignty just down the road: Kiara Vellios, Andréanne Doyon, ‘Examining Indigenous resurgence in urban parks through Vancouver’s Stanley Park’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article explores the collaborative work of the Stanley Park Intergovernmental Committee and Working Group, established by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation in partnership with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It examines how principles of coexistence planning, grounded in Indigenous resurgence and the disruption of settler normativity, can guide the reclamation of urban parklands in support of Indigenous self-determination, cultural identity, rights, and sovereignty. These planning principles, along with a pivotal shift in local governance toward truth-telling and grounded normativity, demonstrate how Indigenous resurgence fosters cultural visibility and socio-spatial inclusion of Indigenous Peoples within urban spaces.


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Occupied labour between the rvier and the sea: Ihab Maharme, ‘The Politics of labour: everyday practices of Palestinian workers in the settler economy’, Journal of Political Power, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article examines the daily practices of Palestinian workers within the settler economy as forms of resistance that penetrate and undermine settler-colonial domination. While existing scholarship emphasises systematic Israeli violations against Palestinian labour, it often neglects the power of workers to develop everyday resistance practices. By centring labour as a site of daily struggle and drawing on nine semi-structured interviews with Palestinian workers in the settler economy, the article offers new insights into lived experience under settler colonialism and argues that workers’ everyday practices penetrate settler sovereignty, producing an intertwined form of sovereignty that challenges colonial domination over the land.


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The occupied water between the river and the sea: Elisa Adami, ‘Thinking with Water in Palestine’, UAL Research Online, 01/11/25

17Jan26

Excerpt: Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and the ongoing genocide, Israel has denied Palestinians access to basic life necessities: electricity, fuel, medical supplies, food, and, crucially, water. The currently unfolding human-made famine that the besieged population is subject to is compounded by a policy of deliberate deprivation of water. This is no accident of war but part of a systematic plan to eradicate any possibility of life in the Strip – for, as the protestors at Standing Rock reminded us, ‘Mní wičhóni’ or ‘Water is life’.


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Come and see settler colonialism: Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Duke University Press, 2023

16Jan26

Description: In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.


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Occupying time AND space: Natalia Gutkowski, Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine, Stanford University Press, 2024

14Jan26

Description: Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of mundane resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on indigenous time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in agrarian environments and develops a contemporary framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications. Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens’ agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the “year of release” for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens’ agriculture has become a site for the state to settle and mediate time conflicts to justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.


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Settler malaria: Amanda Cooke, Megan B. Brickley, ‘Ecologies of Risk: Malaria and Settler Landscape Transformation in 19th-Century Ontario’, American Journal of Human Biology, 38, 1, 2026, #e70181

14Jan26

Abstract: Objectives: This study examines how settler-driven environmental change shaped malaria transmission and mortality in 19th-century southern Ontario. It aimed to understand the biosocial and ecological conditions that sustained endemic malaria in a temperate, colonial context. Materials and Methods: We analyzed 2702 deaths attributed to probable malaria from 1831 to 1900 using civil, cemetery, parish, and municipal records. Each record was coded for age, sex, occupation, region, and season of death. To assess environmental influences, we incorporated monthly temperature and rainfall data from Toronto as a regional climate proxy. We examined demographic and spatial patterns at multiple scales, including towns, settlement type (urban/rural), and regional groupings, alongside temporal and seasonal variation. Statistical comparisons were used to explore associations, including nonlinear modeling of rainfall and malaria mortality. Results: Probable malaria mortality declined over time but persisted throughout the century. Children under 5 accounted for over half of recorded deaths, while adults in agricultural occupations were also disproportionately affected. Rural areas, particularly in western Ontario, experienced the highest mortality. Generalized additive model (GAM) results indicated a strong nonlinear association between rainfall and malaria deaths (p < 0.001), while temperature was not a significant predictor. Conclusions: Malaria’s persistence in 19th-century Ontario reflected a structural embedding of disease risk within settler-transformed landscapes. Deforestation, altered hydrology, and agricultural intensification created ecologies conducive to mosquito breeding. Vulnerability was not evenly distributed but shaped by age, labor, and proximity to altered environments. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental and historical data to reconstruct past disease ecologies and illustrate how evolutionary mismatch can drive vulnerability even in short-lived endemic contexts.


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Settler colonialism is a current affair: Zachary Levenson, ‘Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism, Its Critics, and Its Critics’ Critics’, American Journal of Sociology, 2026

12Jan26

Excerpt: “Settler colonialism” has become the latest academic concept transformed by pundits into a bogeyman. Just since October 7, 2023, to cite a few examples, Time featured a cover story cautioning that application of the label to Israel “run[s] the risk of perpetuating antisemitism,” and the New York Times published multiple “explainers” of the term, describing it as only recently gaining in popularity. And in an op-ed for the Times, columnist Bret Stephens (2024) insists that the term focuses excessively on Israel. For him, deeming a country to be “settler colonial” means insisting that all “settlers” leave immediately, or else, buried in an aside, “Live under new rulers”.


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The race of Indigenous peoples: Sofia Locklear, ‘”People love playing the ‘what are you?’ game with me”: Street Racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native individuals’, Social Problems, 2026

12Jan26

Abstract: American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people are often excluded from the sociology of race within the United States. To expand research on racialization, this article examines how AIAN individuals experience and navigate racialization through the concept of “street race.” Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 47 AIAN individuals living in urban settings nationally, I find that respondents’ experience an erasure of their Indigenous identity and their assumed street race to be “Asian,” “Middle Eastern,” “Black,” “Latinx/Spanish-speaking,” and “White.” These results varied by geography across the United States and demonstrate that a legal AIAN identity does not always match with the day-to-day encounters of street race.


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