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The sexual politics of settler colonial genocide: Ana Laura Velasco Ugalde, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Genocide in KanataGénero, sexualidad y genocidio en Kanata’, CONfines, 17, 32, 2021, pp. 93-112

01Sep22

Abstract: The main argument of this article is that the attacks on the gender and sexuality structures of Indigenous populations can be a form of settler colonial genocide. By highlighting gender’s cultural embeddedness, historicity, and relation to colonization, I provide evidence of the potential of challenging the assumptions around the term. By destabilizing gender and sexuality hierarchies, I argue that the current dominant ideas surrounding genocide fail to recognize the experience of Indigenous peoples in colonial Canada. To make this case, the article relies on the evidence gathered in the report of the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.


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The Homesteading Hero Myth: Jessy Lee Saas, The Myth of the Homesteader: Challenging Saskatchewan Settler Narratives, 1880-1910, MA dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2022

30Aug22

Abstract: At the beginning of Saskatchewan’s homesteading period, from 1880 to 1910, the
Homesteading Hero Myth – a narrative that celebrates the courageous white farmer who entered
an unknown landscape and faced numerous hardships, only to succeed in breaking the land and
creating home – took shape. The Homesteading Hero Myth presents agricultural development of
Saskatchewan land as an epic quest and casts settlers as the winsome protagonists who prevail
despite the challenges they face. This same Myth downplays or ignores the roles of Indigenous
peoples who are represented neither as main nor as supporting characters: when they are given a
role to play at all, it is minor, on the sidelines, typecast, or silent. Yet, despite the Homesteading
Hero Myth relying on the idea of the Canadian prairies being an “open” landscape ripe for the
settlers’ taking, the settlers who came did not actually see the land as empty. Settlers recognized
evidence that Indigenous peoples had recently occupied the territory they now claimed, and in
many cases recognized Indigenous peoples as neighbours. Settler family narratives about the
homesteading period provide an alternate account in which incoming settlers recognized and
understood that they were arriving on Indigenous lands. Ultimately, this thesis argues that
homesteader hero narratives need to be “unsettled” and reframed into the uncomfortable reality
that they are really stories about imperial dispossession, suppression, and oppression of
Indigenous peoples.


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Manuel Lujan Cruz, ‘Weaving against settler media: ‘I Fanhigaiyan: weaving an alternative journalism praxis from CHamoru decolonization media activism’, AlterNative, 2022

30Aug22

Abstract: In this article, I theorize an Indigenous media framework drawn from conversations with journalists and Indigenous activists in Guåhan (Guam). I refer to this framework as I Fanhigaiyan, a Fino’CHamoru (CHamoru language) term which can mean a thing which weaves or a place for weaving. This term captures the essence of CHamoru (the Indigenous people of the Marianas) media activism as a grounded and resurgent practice which establishes and maintains networks of reciprocity in Guåhan and in translocal spaces for Indigenous sovereignty and demilitarization. While in critical studies it is a given that news media serve an ideological function of state power, few researchers have examined the settler ideological power of media in American territories such as Guåhan. This article draws attention to the role of mainstream news media in concealing and reproducing settler logics of territoriality and elimination, and the mediated CHamoru resistance to American settler governance and discourse.


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Native TikTok against the logic of elimination: Jenna M. Williams, Reconstituting Indigenous Identity on #NativeTikTok: Navigating narratives of erasure mediated by the ‘For You’ algorithm, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2022

30Aug22

Abstract: TikTok, an app which allows users to create, share, and consume short-video content, is largely considered to be a “cultural aspect” of the ongoing 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. With its skyrocketing popularity, TikTok is quickly surpassing other forms of social media to become the dominant digital platform for those under 30. Accordingly, physical and online communities have followed this digital shift. By understanding settler colonialism’s ‘logics of elimination,’ this research explores how Indigenous TikTok users in the United States have created a space, Native TikTok, to combat systemic contemporary and historical erasure of their people and identities. I argue that Native TikTok functions as a subaltern counterpublic in which Native users resist ‘master narratives’ by circulating counternarratives. Ultimately, I ask how Native identity is understood and enacted through TikTok’s mediative algorithm and examine how the resemiotization of viral memes acts a method for negotiating identity. This paper utilizes Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) for a multilayered analytical structure and emphasizes the way Native TikTok users perceive, articulate, and define the technocultural space they inhabit.


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The settler colonial city as Indigenous place: Michael Simpson, David W. Hugill, ‘The settler colonial city in three movements’, Progress in Human Geography, 2022.

30Aug22

Abstract: This paper traces the trajectory of scholarship on the settler colonial city and argues that this literature could pay closer attention to the dynamic circulations, movements, and mobilities that constitute and sustain urban space. It foregrounds the ways that the movement of commodities, capital, and people must be assiduously managed in order to preserve settler colonial relations in the city and beyond. Building on existing work, it argues that “settler colonial urbanism” operates as a regime of spatial management which is connected to other sites of racial capitalist extraction and accumulation across global space.


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Have the Indigenous peoples of the world nothing to lose but their (block)chains? Ashley Cordes, ‘Storying Indigenous cryptocurrency: reckoning with the ghosts of US settler colonialism in the cultural economy’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022

27Aug22

Abstract: Since 2008, cryptocurrencies, or digital peer-to-peer currencies/assets, have amassed interest and proven unique in their ability to circumvent traditional financial institutions (disintermediation). The system can supersede the nation-state, while also garnering the attention of nation-states and marginalized groups. Indigenous individuals and Nations are among those interested in cryptocurrency, experimenting with it to express resistance to economic imposition beginning in the colonial era. Utilizing an Indigenous storytelling method, this article unveils the technological life and afterlife of an altcoin, MazaCoin, as a ghost of empire, insofar as it links the technological present of financial capital and the past (and ongoing present) of US settler colonialism. Throughout its various complicated reanimations, it expresses a relentless remembering of settler colonial injustices, performing productive haunting work within the twenty-first century cryptocurrency ecosystem. This article offers a reminder that there is much to learn about Indigenous alternative currencies in the cultural economy as the strings of racism, settler colonialism, poverty, financialization, and empire continue to tangle.


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Settler colonialism, one microaggression at a time: R. Bubar, T. Kelly, C. Souza, L. Lovato-Romero, K. Bundy-Fazioli, ‘K. (2022). ‘Disrupting Settler Colonial Microaggressions: Implications for Social Work’, International Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics, 19, 2, 2022, pp. 47-77

27Aug22

Abstract: The Council on Social Work Education made significant changes in 2022 to integrate anti-racist practices in social work education. However, this change in the social work education accreditation standards still neglects the persistent harms of settler colonialism. The unintended consequence of neglecting settler colonialism is ongoing violence of gendered, heteronormative, and colonial power relations (Arvin et al., 2013) against Indigenous women and 2SQ people. This Indigenous research project seeks to call attention to harm that is perpetuated when the social work profession does not acknowledge settler colonial logics. A reimagining of the discipline’s values is needed by re-centering Indigenous knowledge to create more ethical spaces for future generations that align with anti-oppressive social work practice (Clarke, 2016; Lee & Ferrer, 2014). The research applies the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011; Anderson et al., 2018) to microaggressions to mark how the discipline’s logics of conquest and settler complicity sustain field and classroom experiences that wittingly or unwittingly condone violence against Indigenous people. This qualitative study on microaggressions centers Kovach’s (2010) conversational method, Archibald (2008) and Clarke’s (2016) storywork and talking circles with Native women. Native participants in this research included college students, practitioners, and parents, all of whom work as professionals in higher education, social work, K-12 school environments or tribal-related affairs. Two major findings emerged in the data, killing Indigenous futures, and witnessing other Native Women and 2SQ people’s storywork as resistance. These findings are discussed as a pathway to pursue liberatory framings for future generations.


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Is attacking identity politics settler colonial? Talia Devi Holy, Transcending identity in settler colonial states: considerations for decolonial solidarity, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2022

27Aug22

Abstract: In recent years, discourses in academic and activist circles increasingly emphasize the potential failures of identity politics, highlighting the tendency of political movements based in identity to prevent unity or become co-opted by elites. Because of this, many activist groups are reformulating or transcending the role of identity in their political movements. However, critics of identity politics often fail to account for the fact that the erasure of Indigenous people’s identities is a deliberate tool of settler colonialism; challenging the role of identity in political movements thus risks furthering settler colonial processes. As such, this thesis engages with the question of how non-Indigenous people can reformulate the role of identity in their political movements without undermining a politics of solidarity with Indigenous nations and their resurgence movements. I begin by laying out the distinction between recursive and destructive power, which critically informs political movements’ differing approaches to identity. By analyzing power as predominantly recursive, or creating the subjects it intends to marginalize, many theorists of identity politics ignore the ways in which power must critically destroy or disappear Indigenous identity in order to establish settler state sovereignty. Thus, moves to reformulate non-Indigenous identity in non-Indigenous political movements should not implicate the role of identity in Indigenous political movements, given that Indigenous political – movements respond to destructive, rather than recursive, power. Further, understanding the functioning of recursive and destructive power reveals the potentially intertwined nature of resistance to these differing forms of power. With this in mind, I look to the #NoDAPL protests to argue that non-Indigenous people can reformulate the role of identity in their political movements by engaging with identity subject to destructive power. Through exploring the recursive construction of the terrorist, the role of anti-capitalism, and the existence of identity beyond destructive power at Standing Rock, it is apparent that identity can be reformulated in ways that fundamentally challenges the functioning of settler states, creating a broad-based politics of solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous political movements.


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Settler colonial credit and the question of US capitalism (when land – and slaves – can be used to satisfy debts the future is somewhere else): Claire Priest, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America, Princeton University Press, 2021

26Aug22

Description: Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic. In this major new history of early America, Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament departed from the customary ways that English law protected land and inheritance, enacting laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their assets to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America. Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, one where credit markets and liquidity were prioritized from the outset, where property rights and slaves became commodities for creditors’ claims, and where legal institutions played a critical role in the Stamp Act crisis and other political episodes of the founding period.


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The affect of settler colonialism: Katherine Natanel, ‘Affect, excess & settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

25Aug22

Abstract: What happens when we pay attention to the sensations of our research? Based on an image and encounter during fieldwork in West Jerusalem, this article traces how a feeling of discomfort both confirms and challenges what we (think we) know about settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. Rather than dismissing the moments when narratives, objects and exchanges generate unease, I suggest that exploring this ‘data’ attunes us to how settlers navigate the complex and contradictory conditions of coloniality – how they create resources for living. Structuralist accounts of settler colonialism are not fully capable of engaging this texture, even as they might invoke or attempt to harness emotion through mechanisms including the logic of elimination, settler indigenisation and heteropatriarchy. While thinking with this existing theory, I ask scholars and activists to consider what exceeds our dominant frames, following how affects spill over, attach and circulate among settler subjects in ways that have material consequences. This uneasy approach entails letting things play out, accepting our own implication in power and taking theorisation seriously as an ethical practice. At the same time, it is profoundly future-facing, enabling us to better identify what must be done as we work toward decolonial futures.


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