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The Indigenous Third Nation and its constituent power: Nick Estes, ‘Awakening the Red Giant: American Indian Anti-Imperialism and the First Decade of the International Indian Treaty Council’, Wicazo Sa Review, 40, 1-2, 2025, pp. 32-61

20Oct25

Abstract: The founding of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974 marked a pivotal shift in the politics of the American Indian Movement. AIM activist John Thomas calls this transformation part of the prophecy of the sleeping Red Giant, which once awakened, would spread Red Power activism across North America and eventually the world. Originally a local activist organization founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968, focusing on combatting police violence and discrimination against urban Natives, AIM saw itself increasingly as a national liberation movement as it also turned toward internationalism. In its first decade of existence, the Treaty Council sought to make connections with the world’s national liberation movements, resulting in AIM and Treaty Council activists sending delegations to socialist and Third World nations, thus helping shape an explicit rhetoric and practice of American Indian anti-imperialism. It was the Treaty Council’s relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization, however, that helped it theorize an explicit theory of anti-imperialist struggle against settler colonialism. This article draws on oral history interviews with AIM and Treaty Council activists as well as several archival collections of AIM and Treaty Council publications.


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When destroying patrimony is settler heritage: Stephanie A. Bohon, Shaylee Hodges, ‘Digging into Indigenous History’, Contexts, 24, 3, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: Nantucket construction uncovered human remains right where the map said they’d be. In this feature, we learn how racial ignorance has allowed developers, collectors, politicians, and scientists to ignore, desecrate, and erase sacred Indigenous burial sites.


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Indigenous theory in outer space: Blaire Morseau, Les W. Field, ‘Anarchist Futures: Indigenous Influences in the Speculative World-Making of Ursula K. Le Guin’, Wicazo Sa Review, 40, 1-2, 2025, pp. 105-127

20Oct25

Abstract: By focusing on the interventions Le Guin makes in the discipline of anthropology, theorists have missed a critical connection to radical and utopia studies—the diverse ways that anarchist thought can be and is being grounded in Indigenous radical theory. In this article, we argue that Le Guin was influenced by Native North American philosophy and political action, tracing the links between these influences and anarchism more generally. We also point out that the tradition of anarchism and critical theory, broadly speaking, that has developed in settler-colonial nations is greatly enriched by, indeed requires, Indigenous scholarship to imagine and construct truly liberated futures. In addition to critical Indigenous theory, Native-authored speculative world-making offers a poignant vantage point from which to actualize these anarchist futures in ways that do not assume the permanence of or reify settler colonialism.


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Mars will be settler colonial (unless…): Maya Cruz, ‘(Machine) Learning How to See Like a Rover: Feminist Objectivity and the Demonic Ground of Martian Sand’, Catalyst, 11, 2, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: Mars has long been a space onto which fantasies of colonization have been projected in both popular and scientific imaginaries. Amidst these colonizing visions, can there be a feminist science of Mars? In this paper, I examine an emerging technology being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed to increase the capacity for future rovers to conduct autonomous scientific research on Mars using machine learning and computer vision, called the Soil Property and Object Classifier (SPOC), as a case study in crafting feminist objectivity. I bring together feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies approaches to the study of science and technology to analyze the ways in which SPOC evidences how contemporary techniques used to engineer autonomous scientific discovery on Mars through machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision reproduce and redescribe the logics, imaginaries, and power relations of US settler colonialism in new technological terms. Ultimately, my work aims to gesture towards the possibilities that emerge for crafting a feminist objectivity of Mars when we situate scientific knowledge through the racialized conditions of its production.


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Land hungry! Alice Louise Gorton, Earth Hunger: Agriculture, Settler Colonialism, and the Rise of the Global Grain Trade, 1846-1914, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: This dissertation argues that Britain’s shift to free trade in 1846 moved British settler colonialism in Canada and Australia away from older trade and land monopolies and toward an imperial-agrarian system that sought to transform Indigenous lands into breadbaskets for the newly industrializing metropole. Liberal theories articulated in the 1840s created the ideological basis for new colonial legislation in the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the routine enclosure of land for settlers. Contrary to the utopian visions of interdependence and trade harmony painted by free traders in the 1840s, free trade policies led to an increase in British territorial conquest in the settler colonies. As foreign grain imports put pressure on the domestic agricultural sector in the 1870s, many began to view settler colonization as a release valve that could alleviate domestic population and food pressures. The 1870s were pivotal. As the imperial-agrarian system expanded to feed a growing industrial population in Britain, Indigenous communities in areas slated for grain production entered the agricultural economy and developed new political claims around land, even as colonial expansion undermined access to resources. Indeed, efforts to secure private property rights for farmers in new regions undermined the existing food supply, which led to subsistence crises, displacement, and land loss among Indigenous communities across Canada and Australia. While new legal agreements emerged to reserve land for Indigenous peoples in the empire, the cyclical dynamic of agricultural development and improvement also foreshadowed the erosion of those agreements. The establishment of the grain economy set in motion a process of continual exploitation and expropriation, as colonists sought new arable lands—new extractive or commodity frontiers—to preserve or expand their margins. As settlers ran into both economic and ecological limits, such as exhausted soil and rising land prices, they sought to appropriate more Native land, establishing farmsteads in territories they had once considered marginal or that had been legally reserved for Indigenous communities. The grain economy in both places experienced significant growth in the 1890s and 1910s. These decades also saw intensified efforts to subdivide and allot reserve lands for sale to agricultural settlers. Examining the closure of Poonindie in South Australia and the surrender of the Siksika reserve in Alberta, my argument shows how land allotment was closely tied to the grain trade. This dissertation uses the thread of the grain trade to bind together national histories within a British imperial system linked by trade. The story of the grain trade between 1846 and 1914, with its extensive land use, sprawling capital-intensive infrastructure, and integral position in the global and increasingly globalized food economy, gives us a more holistic picture of a period for which scholars have tended to write distinct histories of the British empire and its settler dominions in Canada and Australia. The project demonstrates that grain became the crop most closely associated with settler colonies, as the production of cash crops by family farmers simultaneously addressed both the population and agricultural crises in Britain. Grain was the flipside of the industrial economy, the crop that underwrote Britain’s economic growth and upheld its imperial system.


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Settler redface: Bethany Hughes, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, NYU Press, 2024

20Oct25

Description: Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.


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Visual settlers (and Taylor Swift): Erin Morton, ‘Seeing Like a Settler: Taylor Swift’s folklore and the White Visualization of Settler Colonialism’, RACAR: revue d’art canadienne, 50, 1, 2025, pp. 30-47

18Oct25

Abstract: À partir de l’album folklore de Taylor Swift (2020) considéré comme trame pour concevoir le colonialisme de peuplement en Amérique du Nord, cet article examine la signification, pour la discipline de l’histoire de l’art au Canada, de « voir comme un colon ». En explorant les connivences qui sous-tendent les fantasmes et la féminité idéalisée des pionnières blanches à travers des tropes familiers, tels que le retour à l’enfance et à la nature, je me sers de folklore pour m’interroger sur les objets de confort de l’évasion coloniale qui se sont à mon sens cristallisés dans l’isolement de la pandémie de COVID-19. Je compare les imaginaires coloniaux de folklore à ceux du photographe canadien écossais du XIXe siècle, William Notman, pour montrer que ni les fantasmes coloniaux de Swift ni les miens ne sont nouveaux, mais qu’ils s’inscrivent plutôt dans un schéma de longue haleine qui consiste à se voir comme un colon pour éviter les désagréments des complicités coloniales. En fin de compte, je me sers de cette recherche pour rejeter les fantasmes apparemment inoffensifs des femmes blanches colonisatrices comme des sources de confort non violentes auxquelles nous pouvons facilement revenir dans les moments de (relative) difficulté.


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The racial-settler-capitalist regime: Debbie Bargallie, Alana Lentin, Kieron Turner, ‘Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2025

18Oct25

Abstract: In 2023, 60.6 per cent of Australian voters defeated the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. The disinformation campaign against the “Voice” deployed longstanding myths about Indigenous people claiming rights and benefits above the settler population. Countering this, Voice proponents sought to instil calm by insisting that Indigenous people would not be able to demand restitution of land. This masked the fact that Australian colonialism is founded upon Indigenous dispossession, and a history of Indigenous slavery and ongoing labour exploitation almost entirely obliterated from public discourse. Building on Debbie Bargallie’s research on racism against Indigenous workers, our paper uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine how the negation of Indigenous labour exploitation past and present is maintained by a racial regime. The regime posits Indigenous recognition and reconciliation as routes out of disadvantage, thus obscuring the history and present of Australian racial capitalism.


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On settler colonial Zionism: Syed Rizwan Haider Bukhari, ‘Settler Colonialism and Resistance Historical Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, International Social Research Nexus, 1, 3, 2025

18Oct25

Abstract: The paper is the historical trace of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, within the larger contexts of the colonization, settler projects, and world geopolitics. Starting with the emergence of political Zionism in late 19th century Europe, the paper reviews how antisemitism, imperialism, and frequent betrayals by world powers all came together to form a century of dispossession, violence and rebellion. The article studies critical turning points using a historical-analytical methodology, including the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, the Nakba of 1948, the six-day war, the Oslo Accords, and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza (2023-2025). Rooted in settler-colonial and postcolonial theory, the discussion proves the way Zionism was both a national move-ment and a European colonial project. The conclusions outline that the Gaza crisis that has taken place today is not the singular battle, but rather the result of a 100 years-long process of displacement and subjugation. The paper ends by restating the moral, political, and scholarly urgency of re-forming Palestine as an incomplete project of decolonization of the world.


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House, the settler: Michele Lancione, ‘The Colonies of Home’, in Elaine Stratford, Katie Walsh (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Home, Routledge, 2026

18Oct25

Access the chapter here.


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