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Knowledge is sovereignty: Liam Midzain-Gobin, Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025

11Oct25

Description: Knowledge production in the Anglosphere depends on the erasure of non-Western ways of knowing – especially ways of knowing oneself, the lands and waters, and the relationships between these entities. In settler colonial states those in power seldom question this erasure, despite the ongoing presence and power of Indigenous nations. In this groundbreaking work, Liam Midzain-Gobin illuminates how the logic of improvement animates this epistemological ignorance, both historically and currently. By creating a new world based on settler views, the settler state augments its own power. This way of thinking drives government actions and even influences how settlers and the state imagine what is possible. Examining knowledge production through governance processes, Settler Colonial Sovereignty studies three policy areas: First Nations reserve policy, land and resource monitoring frameworks, and the Indigenous Peoples Survey. Throughout, Midzain-Gobin shows how state sovereignty is never stable but continually being reaffirmed. Inspired by the interaction of Indigenous knowledge with cosmological assumptions to provide different understandings of our place in the world, Settler Colonial Sovereignty imagines how we might move past improvement as a basis for Indigenous-settler relations.


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The colonised settler: Laurent Poliquin, ‘Educating the Colonized Colonizer: Rethinking Francophone Schooling in Canada’, British Journal of Teacher Education and Pedagogy, 2025

08Oct25

Abstract: This article offers a critical reassessment of francophone education in Canada through postcolonial and settler colonial theory. Francophone communities have long framed themselves as colonized minorities resisting linguistic and cultural assimilation. However, this identity often obscures their simultaneous participation in settler colonial structures, particularly regarding Indigenous lands and histories. Adopting a comparative, critical narrative methodology, the article analyzes curriculum frameworks from multiple Canadian provinces, historical documents such as the Parent Commission (1963–1966), and key texts on decolonization and Indigenous–settler relations. Literary and philosophical perspectives complement this analysis by exploring the affective and ethical dimensions of truth-telling in education. Findings reveal that while francophone education emphasizes cultural survival, it often marginalizes Indigenous perspectives or includes them in superficial ways. Curricula across Canada show persistent tensions between gestures of inclusion and deeper structural silences. Institutional and employment precarity among francophone teachers further complicates the adoption of critical pedagogies, especially when they challenge dominant national narratives. The article proposes a pedagogical ethics of truth built around three dimensions: epistemic accountability, affective engagement, and transformative praxis. It calls for curricula co-created with Indigenous partners, validation of emotional responses to injustice, and learning practices grounded in dialogue and land based inquiry. Ultimately, the article challenges the limits of multicultural inclusion and the myth of francophone innocence. Truth telling in education, it argues, must move beyond symbolic gestures to become a foundational commitment—one that embraces discomfort and reimagines historical responsibility as an ongoing and relational process.


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Slovak settlers! Zuzana Palovic , Gabriela Bereghazyova (eds), Slovak Settlers, Global Slovakia, 2025

08Oct25

Description: Countless Slovaks left Slovakia because life there got too hard. A harsh climate, a lack of freedom, pandemics, crop shortages, and an everyday struggle to earn a living were a daily reality. ​ For hundreds of thousands, the only way out was to leave behind their beloved forests, rivers, and mountains. Carried by their hopes and dreams, they ventured across Europe and the Atlantic to lay their roots down in the New World. Slovak Settlers presents 44 authentic stories that piece together the fascinating, powerful, and touching Odyssey of Slovaks who left their homeland in search of a new life in faraway North America. Their destinies reveal a timeless story of shared dreams and hope that should never be forgotten. Although the history of Slovakia is a history of migration, we know so little about the Slovak men and women who dared to cross the ocean in search of a better life and even less about what happened to them after. Their stories help to recover ties severed by decades and even a century of separation.


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Touching wood: Jim Clifford, Sam Huckerby, ‘Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817-61’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.


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Taxing settlers: Jeffrey L. McNairn, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty through Taxation: Direct Taxes, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Did local taxes levied by the Upper Canadian parliament from 1793 apply to Indigenous communities in the colony? Only in 1850 did colonial legislation give an answer by exempting Indigenous peoples from taxes on real and personal property and from statute labour, provided they resided on “Indian” lands. Yet Indigenous leaders had always denied that the colony’s jurisdiction extended to their communities, which they conceived of as political societies governed by their own customary law. A de facto tax exemption had emerged as a result of their refusal of perfect settler sovereignty, but settler resentment grew in the 1820s and 1830s, often focused on local roads. Prior to 1850, colonial law on the question of tax liability was unsettled. Successive attorneys general offered different answers, and the de facto tax exemption was most often associated with the nature of Indigenous land tenure rather than any recognition of their constitutional status. The 1850 act emerged from two contradictory forces: a renewed empire-wide emphasis on humanitarian “protection” of Indigenous peoples as a strategy of colonial governance and Haudenosaunee demands for protection as a strategy to preserve their collective self-government in the face of increasingly aggressive attempts to tax them. Direct taxes were a technology of colonial rule, marking identities and measuring settler sovereignty and the status of Indigenous peoples and land.


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The settler colonial continuum: Paige Raibmon, ‘Violence That Dispossesses: Continuity on the Settler Colonial Timeline’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: This article considers what role and responsibility historians may have when faced with settler society’s tendency to be freshly shocked each time it learns (again) about a colonial horror from its past that was, in fact, already long well known by many. Following an introduction, my argument unfolds in five sections. First, I engage a mostly Indigenous scholarship to suggest replotting British Columbia’s timeline as a continuum, or continuous process, of ongoing violence that illuminates connections across myriad forms of violence. Second, I reflect on an earlier, mostly non-Indigenous historiography about physical force and violence in British Columbia. Third, with this scholarship as context, I use an experimental format to present a catalogue of dispossession drawn from transcripts of the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia (1913–1916). These accounts demonstrate that settlers relied on physical violence during the foundational pre-emption and Crown granting processes to an extent that warrants greater attention. Fourth, I suggest that some important implications follow from this for understandings of British Columbia’s past and present. Fifth, I argue that taking the long view of settler-on-Indigenous violence as a continuum helps clarify connections among forms of violence, particularly in relation to the materiality of forced physical dispossession, and, in so doing, moves us closer to telling histories that are not just for the winners.


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Settlers, not migrants: Anne Gustavsson, Jenny Ingridsdotter, ‘Swedish Migration to Northern Argentina: The Conditions and Possibilities of Settlement in the Early Twentieth Century’, Scandinavian Studies, 97, 4, 2025, pp. 1-25

07Oct25

Abstract: We examine how the settlement of Europeans in the Americas was shaped by colonial processes. We specifically discuss the role of Swedish migrants in relation to processes of settlement in the border regions between Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia during the beginning of the twentieth century. We focus on migrants who settled in different parts of northern Argentina, becoming small-scale farmers or cattle ranchers. Based on an analysis of migration narratives and archival work, we compare settler strategies and socioeconomic positions and discuss how the migrants were affected by structural factors, such as state policies on immigration and land tenure, as well as contrasting models for agriculture and livestock production. We find that although conditioned by these factors, their settlement differed in terms of premigration networks, community building, type of mobility, and settlement depictions. We argue that in our cases, migrants became settlers, however the complicity with colonizing agents is dissimilar.


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Settler violence is gendered: Syndel Thomas Kozar, ‘Erased by Policy: Gendered Policy Violence in The Indian Act and the Dispossession of Indigenous Women and Their Descendants’, Living Histories: A Past Studies Journal, 2025

07Oct25

Excerpt: Canada’s most enduring violence against Indigenous women and their descendants is currently written into Canada’s federal legislation: policies that have long targeted Indigenous women and their descendants with discrimination and erasure. My engagement with this work is rooted in personal experience, and I begin with a brief positionality statement to explain how my own status journey led me to critically examine the Indian Act’s ongoing impacts. From its enactment, the Indian Act has directly targeted Indigenous women and their children with discriminatory, assimilating policies. Despite these policies being acknowledged as discriminatory against Indigenous women and their descendants, Canada has not effectively addressed the systemic inequities to remedy the issue. Parliament first introduced Bill C-31 to rectify the sexual discrimination within the Indian Act, only to create more inequity. After backlash, Canada enacted Bill C-3, which, while granting status to many, continued to enable many of the previous prejudiced policies. Bill S-3 looked promising to remedy the core issues of the sexually discriminatory assimilation policies within the Indian Act, only to be passed without the crucial amendment. The Government of Canada is now enacting a collaborative process to look for further remedies for the inequitable policies, despite already having an effective solution to the remaining inequities with the disregarded amendment of Bill S-3.1 As a result, Indigenous women and their descendants are left to deal with the far-reaching consequences of these policies, including the socioeconomic marginalization and the heightened vulnerability they face in connection with the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit individuals. With the current supports like Jordan’s Principle overburdened, Indigenous women and their descendants are left with little to support them in the aftermath of this political violence.2 The Indian Act’s gender-discriminatory policies continue to marginalize Indigenous women and their descendants. These harms are upheld by insufficient legislative reforms and Canada’s failure to implement meaningful change, resulting in lasting systemic inequities, reduced access to essential supports, and increased vulnerability across generations.


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Ecopoetics in the settlerocene: Jessica Cory, ‘Another Anthropocene: Climate Change, the Anthropocene, and Coastal Indigenous Poetry’, American Literatures, 5, 2, 2025

05Oct25

Abstract: While scientists have sounded the alarm regarding anthropocentrically-fueled climate change for decades, global governmental and even smaller-scale responses to slow or halt this process have sometimes been sluggish or wholly ineffective. Yet Indigenous Peoples whose homes are on lands claimed by the United States, particularly coastal Peoples, have been engaging with climate change’s effects and working to mitigate them for decades, often using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Kyle Powys Whyte, Zoe Todd, Gregory Cajete, and other Indigenous scholars working in the environmental sciences, environmental humanities, and Indigenous studies more broadly have explored and documented how various Indigenous communities are refusing displacement from this latest crisis caused by colonization. Indigenous activists and scholars have long connected climate change and the Sixth Extinction with settler colonialism and colonization more broadly, noting that the systems responsible for the increased carbon output, namely capitalism, directly result from colonization. Todd and Heather Davis, for example, argue that the Anthropocene’s golden spike should begin with colonization in the 15th century, a suggestion taken up in varying degrees by non-Native scholars, such as Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, and Kathryn Yusoff. This essay examines the work of several Indigenous poets, particularly those belonging to coastal Peoples whose homelands are currently claimed by the US, such as Craig Santos Perez (CHamoru), dg nanouk okpik (Iñupiaq-Inuit), Houston Cypress (Miccosukee), and Thomas Parrie (Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb) in order to gain insight regarding how these regions and Peoples both frame climate change and respond to it through contemporary ecopoetry. 


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Geoengineering on Indigenous lands and waters: Sophie Crump, ‘A critical lens on geoengineering in Inuit Homelands’, Frontiers Policy Lab, 24/09/25

05Oct25

Excerpt: Inuit have an interconnected and inter-reliant relationship with the land, waters, and ice across their homelands which include Kalaallit Nunaat/ Greenland, Canada, Alaska (United States), and Chukotka (Russia). Drastic changes in the Arctic place Inuit on the frontlines of climate change. Thawing permafrost and eroding coastlines undermine built infrastructure and entire Inuit communities face relocation. Increasingly unpredictable freeze-melt patterns of sea ice threaten Inuit food security and sovereignty. Wildland and forest fires, as well as rain-on-snow events are reshaping the landscape and affecting the health of animals, the land, and consequently Inuit themselves. While the impacts of climate change are felt globally, the urgency to act and adapt is not new to Inuit, who have been raising the alarm about climate change for decades. The oceans, sea ice, and glaciers across Inuit homelands are sites of increasing interest for proposed climate intervention and geoengineering projects. These waters and ice are central to a healthy ecosystems, Inuit food sovereignty and traditional economies, and they support transportation and connectivity for Inuit, while also contributing to global weather and climate systems. In pursuit of solutions to climate change, some geoengineering experiments have already been funded and carried out in Inuit homelands, while others remain in scoping or conceptual stages. The Arctic Ice Project (formerly Ice911) faced strong vocal opposition from Alaska Native groups and environmental NGOs for solar radiation management (SRM) experiments conducted on a lake near Utqiaġvik, Alaska in 2017, and ceased operations in 2025. Although the Greenland Ice Sheet Conservation (GRISCO) project made some efforts to engage Inuit in Ilulissat, Greenland, a more formal approach is required to uphold the rights of Inuit. In 2025 researchers determined that this seabed curtain experiment was not feasible in Sermeq Kujalleq. The Real Ice Project has been conducting sea-ice thickening experiments since 2024 in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. This project has engaged directly with Inuit in the community and received support from the Ekaluktutiak Hunters and Trappers Organization, as required by Nunavut research permitting processes. Engagement with Inuit through brief advisory meetings, employment as field assistants, or open town halls does not, however, fully address the obligations of these projects to Inuit as rightsholders.


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