settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is depressing: D. C. Wendt, M. Garneau, H. Fraser-Purdy, N. Augustine, C. Gilpin, S. H. Stewart, C. J. Mushquash, J. A. Burack, ‘Depression and Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada: Prevalence, risk/protective factors, interventions’, in T. M. Olino, J. W. Pettit, R. C. Boyd, B. C. Chu, E. P. Hayden, D. A. Pizzagalli (eds), APA handbook of depression: Minoritized populations, lifespan development, assessment, and treatment, American Psychological Association, 2026, pp. 57-76

18Nov25

Abstract: This chapter focuses on depression in the context of Indigenous Peoples of North America (Turtle Island). While this population includes less than 5% of the United States (U.S.) and Canada, the implications of this chapter are outsized relative to the population size. Mental health problems, including depression, faced by Indigenous Peoples are inseparable from settler–colonialism. This chapter tries to understand relevant psychological and clinical approaches while simultaneously holding cultural and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples at the forefront. Indigenous coauthors help facilitate this cultural relevance. First, the chapter provides a brief overview of the Indigenous context in the U.S. and Canada to better conceptualize depression in this population. Next, it summarizes the literature on depression phenomenology and prevalence in Indigenous communities, addressing key risk and protective factors. Finally, the chapter summarizes the literature on best intervention practices, including assessment, mental health promotion, prevention, psychotherapy, and cultural interventions.

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Forced settlers? Christina R. Clark-Kazak (ed.), Forced Migration in/to Canada: From Colonization to Refugee Resettlement, Mc-Gill Queen’s University Press, 2024

16Nov25

Description: Forced migration shaped the creation of Canada as a settler state and is a defining feature of our contemporary national and global contexts. Many people in Canada have direct or indirect experiences of refugee resettlement and protection, trafficking, and environmental displacement. Offering a comprehensive resource in the growing field of migration studies, Forced Migration in/to Canada is a critical primer from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Researchers, practitioners, and knowledge keepers draw on documentary evidence and analysis to foreground lived experiences of displacement and migration policies at the municipal, provincial, territorial, and federal levels. From the earliest instances of Indigenous displacement and settler colonialism, through Black enslavement, to statelessness, trafficking, and climate migration in today’s world, contributors show how migration, as a human phenomenon, is differentially shaped by intersecting identities and structures. Particularly novel are the specific insights into disability, race, class, social age, and gender identity. Situating Canada within broader international trends, norms, and structures – both today and historically – Forced Migration in/to Canada provides the tools we need to evaluate information we encounter in the news and from government officials, colleagues, and non-governmental organizations. It also proposes new areas for enquiry, discussion, research, advocacy, and action.

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Settler realism: Mark Fiege, Leisl Carr Childers, Michael J. Lansing (eds), Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West, Bison Books, 2024

16Nov25

Description: Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in light of contemporary issues and crises. Along with Stegner’s achievements, the contributors show how his failures offer equally crucial ways to assess the past, present, and future of the region. Drawing from history, literature, philosophy, law, geography, and park management, the contributors consider Stegner’s racial liberalism and regional vision, his gendered view of the world, his understandings of conservation and the environment, his personal experience of economic collapse and poverty, his yearning for community, and his abiding attachment to the West. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country is an even-handed reclamation of Stegner’s enduring relevance to anyone concerned about the American West’s uncertain future.

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Settler horror: Aleryk Fricker, ‘The great Australian silencing of the lambs’, Agora, 2025

16Nov25

Excerpt: A simple advertisement for lamb perpetuates colonial mythologies, but critical engagement can help students to engage with historical truth-telling.

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Settler gothic: Cynthia Sugars, ‘”Destination Indigenous”: Wilderness Tourism, White Guilt, and Indigenous Ghosts in Algernon Blackwood’s Canadian Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 27, 3, 2025

16Nov25

Abstract: Blackwood’s Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood’s stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood’s Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer’s imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.

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The settler colonial conformity of non-conformism: Read Wheeler, The Albertlanders: The Making and Remaking of a New Zealand Provincial Immigration Scheme, PhD dissertation, Massey University, 2024

14Nov25

Abstract: This thesis examines immigrants who joined the Albertland Special Settlement Scheme, which was established in 1861 by the Auckland Provincial Government to bring a group of Christian non-conformists from Britain to the Kaipara. The scheme was one of several special settlements which provided the opportunity for religious or ethnic settlements to be established in New Zealand. They were an attempt by the provincial governments to boost migration to the colony and to settle outlying areas. Some of these have been previously studied, such as the Scottish settlement at Waipū and the Bohemian settlement at Pūhoi. These studies have focused on the correspondence and journals of the migrants to build a sense of these settlements and how their traditions changed or were abandoned. Other community research involved large demographic studies with observation focused on the development of the townships rather than the lives of those who stayed there. This study also focuses on the lives and experiences of the migrants, but it augments archival records with new digitally available resources, such as genealogical websites, to explore the long histories of these immigrants’ lives from their place of origin, until 1962, when descendants of the settlers assembled to celebrate a century since their arrival. The advent of the internet and the widespread digitisation of archives and secondary sources has provided unprecedented access to new primary sources and better ways of accessing and managing existing sources. This thesis draws on these new methodologies. The Albertland settlement has been assessed by general histories and dedicated works as a failure. This thesis argues while the northern Kaipara did not attract or retain the vast majority of the Albertland migrants, those who did settle were able to recreate something of the non-conformist communities they hoped for, despite the limitations of geography, poor agricultural potential and isolation. This was a major achievement. A good proportion of migrants who never even went to Albertland, or who stayed but briefly, also did well in the new colony through business ventures and community standing. The thesis explores several phases of the scheme’s history. The first stage, the making of the Albertland scheme, occurred though the joining of like-minded individuals prior to departure. In the second phase, the migrants faced the challenges of the voyage out and the dramatic difference between what was expected and the isolated, surveyed and difficult country they found on their arrival. Many chose not to go on. The hope of establishing a nonconformist community, the joining together of those with different religious beliefs, was shattered by the dispersal and fracturing of the scheme into separate communities, isolated from each other. Those remaining in or shifting to Auckland often did very well. Three thousand prospective settlers registered for the Albertland scheme, just over 2,500 of these voyaged to New Zealand. The Albertlanders came from more diverse backgrounds than previously thought and yet they began forming communal bonds as soon as their voyages to New Zealand began. However, from this group only 300 journeyed to the settlement and after five years only 150 remained. This represents only five percent of the prospective settlers. Nonetheless, strong non-conformist foundations were maintained, and community feeling was strengthened, not weakened, through responses to challenges such as land speculation, crime, and civil administration. Around 2,000 of the settlers remained in Auckland and influenced the development of the city and some even the colony. However, while separated from their compatriots on the Kaipara they were still referred to as the Auckland Albertlanders. Those who stayed on the Kaipara and those who remained in Auckland reunified the scheme in nostalgia, forging in memory the cohesion and stability that saw the settlers and their descendants maintain a common identity through anniversary celebrations and remembrances. Success had different meanings throughout Albertland’s history. For the founders of the scheme, success was the establishment of a large, independent, non-conformist settlement with a centralised leadership. For the original settlers, success meant remaining on the land and establishing a functional community. Those who left Albertland for elsewhere or had remained in Auckland found success meant establishing businesses and engraining themselves into the already established communities they moved to. The descendants of the Albertlanders found success in regaining a connection and reclaiming the vision of the founders, tempered through the hardship of those who settled on the land. Ignoring the extent to which the community had been dispersed across the Kaipara, and throughout the country.

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Homing in on settler colonialism: Federica Stagni, ‘Erasing the Past: Domicide and Settler Colonialism in Susiya and Sheikh Jarrah’, Middle East Critique, 2025

14Nov25

Abstract: This article explores the intersection of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and forced displacement through the lens of ‘domicide’ in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). It focuses on two case studies: Susiya, a rural village in the South Hebron Hills; and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The article argues that Israeli eviction and expulsion practices are not only rooted in a legal framework but also in a broader settler-colonial practice that involves both territorial and cultural dispossession/appropriation. These processes manifest in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in home demolitions, village destruction, settlement expansion, and forced evictions. Through fieldwork conducted over five periods from 2016 to 2024, including interviews with residents, activists, and organizations, as well as participant observation at protests and demonstrations, the study examines how these policies are shaped by capitalist interests, such as tourism-driven gentrification in Jerusalem and land commodification in the West Bank. In this way, settler colonialism is intertwined with neoliberal forces that further Palestinian dispossession. The article examines how Israel practices ‘domicide’—destroying both Palestinian homes and the historical memories they contain, which are central to Palestinian identity. The article situates these dynamics within the framework of ‘domicide’, highlighting the destruction not only of homes but also of historical memory linked to houses as an expression of Palestinian identity.

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Settler colonial peer review: Charlotte Ann Legg, Briony Neilson, ‘Settler Colonial Dynamics Across the Coral Sea: Australia and the Contours of French Settlement in New Caledonia’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2025

14Nov25

Abstract: In 1903, settlers in Nouméa celebrated the 50th anniversary of the French annexation of New Caledonia. They welcomed an Australian delegation – the first to represent the Commonwealth overseas since Australia’s federation in 1901, and the introduction of the racially exclusionary White Australia policy. This article traces the circulation of ideas about settler self-government across the Coral Sea in the wake of federation, examining the ways in which the political, economic, and racial aspirations of settlers in the French colony were shaped by their observation of developments in Australia. We argue that attempts to adapt Australian models to New Caledonian realities ultimately affirmed affinities between settlers across the Coral Sea, strengthening transimperial forms of whiteness.

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Settler transformations: Joseph Kaplan Weinger, ‘”One Is a Frontier”: Settler Migration as Transmogrification’, Sociological Forum, 2025

12Nov25

Abstract: This paper explores the trajectories and framing strategies of American Jewish migrants to Palestine–Israel. Drawing on original in-depth interviews with immigrants who migrated between 1976 and 2021, alongside interviews with and observations of an “aliyah” agency, it examines meaning-making around spatial relocation in relation to the perpetuation of institutionalized stratification and the violence of colonial settlement. Central to this analysis is the concept of transmogrification, which describes the profound affective transformations migrants undergo as they transition from diasporic subjects to settlers embedded in a project of demographic and territorial supremacy. Through an exploration of three key framing strategies persisting nationalization, majoritarian affiliation, and enduring frontierity—this paper investigates how immigrants navigate the material and symbolic landscapes of Israeli society and come to justify their roles within it. By focusing on the cognitive mechanism of framing, the research contributes to broader conversations about the reproduction of structural status positions, the politics of belonging, and the sui generis characteristics of contentious migration.

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Forced (nope: still forced): Ghassan Elkahlout, ‘Settler colonialism and the rhetoric of voluntary migration in Gaza’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

09Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza as a core mechanism within Israel’s settler-colonial strategy. Drawing on historical analysis, international legal instruments and original qualitative research, the study analyses how Israeli policies employ military force, structural deprivation, and legal manipulation to facilitate Palestinian expulsion, presented under the rhetoric of voluntary migration. By tracing the evolution of displacement from the early Zionist movement to the current genocide (This paper uses ‘genocide’ for the current Israeli assault on Gaza and ‘Naksa’ (Arabic for catastrophe/setback) for the six-day war in 1967, reflecting their systemic nature.) in Gaza, the article highlights the enduring logic of elimination embedded within settler-colonial practices aimed at erasing Palestinian presence while deflecting legal accountability. The study also engages comparative insights from other cases where displacement and demographic restructuring have been used to consolidate political control, including the experiences of Indigenous communities in North America, South Africa’s apartheid regime, and territorial fragmentation in Northern Ireland. In addition to archival and legal sources, the analysis incorporates first-hand testimonies drawn from 82 interviews with Palestinian families evacuated to Qatar since October 2023. These findings contest prevailing narratives of voluntary migration and underscore the urgency of addressing displacement as part of a broader system of structural violence and settler-colonial domination.

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