Abstract: The microelement composition of lunar soil was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, and its potential hazard to health of future Moon settlers was analyzed. Regoliths from four lunar regions were tested for chemical composition, and element contents were compared with terrestrial soil clarkes. The regolith samples examined in the study were collected in mare regions in the missions of Luna 16, Luna 24, Apollo 11, and Apollo 12. The concentrations of the microelements Cr, Ni, Co, Be, Sc, Y, Au, and Ag and the majority of lanthanides were found to be much higher than in terrestrial soils. A direct contact with high concentrations of these elements is likely to endanger health of settlers on the Moon.

Abstract: This chapter examines the intersections and distinctions between the fields of critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies regarding the study of Shakespeare’s works. In recent decades critics have become increasingly aware of the issue of race within Shakespeare studies and have also explored the place of colonialism within the same context, but what has come to be known as critical Indigenous studies has only recently become part of the broader discourse in early modern literary studies. ‘Race’ in the early modern era depended largely on descent and culture (i.e. language and religion), whereas ‘Indigeneity’, as we use the term now, did not exist. Its closest intellectual cognate would have been ‘native inhabitant’. With the rise of early modern imperialism came the establishment of settler colonialism, and I argue that a racialized notion of monstrosity was deployed to abrogate Indigenous sovereignty and dispossess them of their territories. Caliban, like other Indigenous figures, must first be rendered monstrous in order to legitimize European conquest and rule.

Abstract: This thesis investigates the role of police and prisons in the reproduction of a violent, settler- colonial state order. The scope of police being examined pertains to all police forces in Canada, including city police and the RCMP. It asserts that proposals for reform in response to issues of police violence against Indigenous peoples and communities of color along racialized and gendered lines have been only at the micro-level and technical. I argue that we must broaden our approach to a macro-level to engage in a systemic analysis that views policing in the context of the state’s racial, settler-colonial project and to this end I investigate how institutions of policing and prisons reproduce a white, settler-colonial order. With the production of this white, settler- colonial order, populations within it also come under the maintenance of the state via both policing and prisons. By recognizing the existence of racism as structures, such as the police and prisons, we can begin to utilize an abolitionist approach to justice which sees to their dismantlement and a transformative future. My thesis concludes that while it is theoretically possible to curb police violence through reform, doing so runs counter to its very raison d’etre.

Description: Critical Perspectives on White Supremacy and Racism in Canadian Education shows how K-12 schooling continues to produce and maintain white supremacist and colonial logics and questions the alternate future of schooling in Canada. It argues that white supremacy and race in schooling are present in colonial-centered approaches to teacher education, formal and informal exclusion through curriculum development, and persistent failed commitments to racial justice and decolonization. These themes guide the organization of this collection, which is further underpinned by theoretical perspectives, including critical race theory, anti-Blackness theory, abolition, and anticolonial theory. Contributions are drawn from classroom teachers, community educators, and pre-service teacher educators and are powerfully informed by first-hand accounts as well as stories of teachers and teacher candidates. Combining theory with practice, this edited volume will be important reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in social justice education, multicultural education, and Indigenous studies. It will also be beneficial reading for antiracist and Indigenous education researchers, as well as policymakers and practitioners within critical education.

Description: Analyzes favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte. Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures. Drawing on the knowledge produced by Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers, Poets argues for an interdisciplinary framework that prioritizes the voices and experiences of these communities. Addressing increasingly salient calls for decolonization, Poets ponders the paradoxical role of rights, citizenship, and the state in the fight for freedom and justice. Unsettling Brazil urges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the nation’s history and stands in solidarity with those fighting to reclaim their heritage, identity, and land.

Abstract: Jodi A. Byrd and Joseph M. Pierce discuss the Supreme Court decisions Dobbs v. Jackson and Haaland v. Brackeen, which upheld the legality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act. In this wide-ranging conversation, the authors reflect on “what Indigenous studies and queer studies can bring together,” considering Indigenous dispossession, kinship, settler colonialism, sovereignty, and reciprocity, among many other subjects.

Abstract: Despite Robert M. Campbell’s assertion that “an examination of contemporary postal matters would reveal much about the Canadian state” (Campbell, 1994, p. 6), the interest in postal history from social scientists has been short-lived. In Canada, this loss of interest coincided with the efforts to privatize Canada Post through the late 1980s–1990s (e.g., Campbell, 1994). This work is an attempt to reignite political analysis of Canada’s postal system. Unlike previous analyses, however, we are most keenly interested in thinking with Indigenous and settler-colonial studies theorists about the role of postal services in the territorial project of settler-colonialism in Canada. We contend that the overarching omission of Canadian postal services from much of Canada’s political history results in the exclusion of two key roles played by the post office in Canadian state formation: the first, that postal networks were essential to the proliferation of communications across the ‘hinterlands’ of the expanding nation-state and colonial interests. The second, and perhaps less widely studied, role of postal services in Canada’s political history is that of territorialization and the production of distinctly Canadian space. We note that Canadian territorialization is specifically reinforced by the distinctly settler-colonial structures of Canadian colonization, which require an even more obvious physical demarcation of colonized territory and a colonial presence that extends beyond state administrators to encompass the public life of settlers more generally—and that the infrastructure of postal services provided a state mechanism through which to materialize territorial expansion and settler nationalism.

Abstract: Following the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, this article examines the manifesto written by the perpetrator, Patrick Crusius. I use critical discourse analysis to reveal some of the racial contours of white nationalist protestation, which I connect to the erasure of indigeneity by settler colonialism. I also use a moral, economic framework to discuss Crusius and other white nationalists’ deployment of affective structures to justify their violent actions. This unconventional nature of the mass shooting, which resulted in the killing of 23 primarily Mexican and Mexican American individuals, was based on rather ordinary arguments about white erasure, the fear of invasion, and anger over economic and environmental concerns. This was overall a cocktail of reasons and sentiments that Crusius used to justify lethal violence against brown bodies associated with indigeneity.

Abstract: What justifies plenary powers over Native nations, U.S. territories, and overseas colonies? One answer is the text of the Constitution: the Indian Commerce Clause or the Territorial Clause. Another answer is sovereignty under international law. In this Article, I argue that these legalistic explanations overlook a third answer: that political and judicial actors justified plenary powers based on the colonial notion that these so-called dependent peoples were incapable of self-government. Members of Congress, presidents, federal judges, and territorial governors reconciled republicanism and colonialism in the American empire by constituting Native nations, the territories, and the overseas colonies as dependent peoples. This Article unmasks how the legal framework of colonialism rested on their infantilization, the temporal character of colonial rule, and the pretense that it was for their benefit. Federal rule was justified because they were “wards of the nation,” “in a state of infancy,” or in “political childhood,” waiting to learn how to govern themselves. The Article examines the judicial decisions, political speeches, and academic publications that infantilized these dependent peoples and how tribal and territorial sovereignty was contingent upon an expansive concept of dependency. The Article is a cautionary tale about redemption through constitutionalism, either judicial constitutionalism (ending plenary powers) or legislative constitutionalism (repurposing plenary powers). Overruling any of the individual cases that legitimized these plenary powers—including United States v. Kagama or the Insular Cases—will not undo colonial dependence or American imperialism. Instead, it will only conceal how the Constitution and the Supreme Court have long been complicit in empire. Constitutional redemption for the benefit of Indigenous peoples and colonized peoples ignores how central dependence and colonialism are to U.S. constitutionalism. Rather than ending or repurposing plenary powers, this Article concludes that only through democratic politics, social movements, and anticolonial solidarities can we undo the dependencies left by colonial rule. The emancipation of dependent peoples will only be possible if democratic decolonization takes precedence over constitutional interpretation.

Excerpt: For those Low-German speaking Mennonites who sought to live apart from the world and historically resisted conscription, national schooling, and political par-ticipation, David S. Koffman’s “audacious” question was frequent and fraught across centuries of diasporic mobility. In the 1870s, facing compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, Mennonite delegations traveled to the United States and the Dominion of Canada with that question on their lips. Their investigations on both sides of the 49th parallel did not produce a consensus. For the majority, opportunities in the Mennonite Commonwealth they had established over the preceding century in imperial Russia outweighed concerns about encroaching Russification. Life there, particularly with the option of alternative service, offered a better home and would until the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War prompted a new round of emigration in the 1920s.