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With a chapter on Finnish settler colonialism: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘All I See Is White: The Colonial Problem in Finland’, in Josephine Hoegaerts, Tuire Liimatainen, Laura Hekanaho, Elizabeth Peterson (eds), Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality, 2022, pp. 291-314

05Sep22

Access the chapter here.



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The pollution of Indigenous waters: Nicole Van Lier, ‘Regulating Improvement: Industrial Water Pollution, White Settler Authority, and Capitalist Reproduction in the St. Clair–Detroit River Corridor, 1945–1972’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022

01Sep22

Abstract: This article explores the postwar racialization of socionatural metabolisms as Michigan consolidated its capacities to regulate water pollution in the St. Clair–Detroit River corridor. These unceded waters flow through the traditional territories of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, and Wyandot nations, as well as the heavily industrialized, urbanized, and racially segregated geographies of southeast Michigan. Drawing on archival records, I examine discursive constructions of White settler and Indigenous water metabolisms that coarticulated with Michigan’s growing concern that unchecked water pollution posed a metabolic barrier to industrial manufacturing. I situate these representations against the state’s emerging objective to reconcile two interconnected forms of waste: (1) the material degradation of water attributed to Michigan’s advanced capitalist economy, and (2) the wasted economic potential long used to denigrate Indigenous societies that “failed” to extract capitalist value from nature. This case study demonstrates how Michigan’s discursive approach to managing a potential crisis of capitalist reproduction also reconfigured the logic of improvement as the racial and economic basis for settler colonial authority over nature. “Improving” nature was not only about facilitating access to nature for capitalist production, but reproducing—indefinitely—the ecological conditions on which capitalist production relied. This article builds on two lines of inquiry in critical geographic scholarship exploring mutually constitutive relationships between race and socionatural metabolisms, and between settler colonialism and environmental degradation, to interrogate the postwar discourses flowing through water management in southeast Michigan, a region where water remains at the center of multiple racialized dispossessions and their ongoing contestation.


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Settler State and Indigenous Territory:Logan R. Flake, Oklahoman by blood: indigenous land tenure from Indian Territory to McGirt, MA dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2022

01Sep22

Abstract: After the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in 2020, Oklahoma’s statehood became the subject of intense legal scrutiny regarding the supposed “disestablishment” of American Indian reservations. The State’s position follows a playbook all too familiar to citizens of Indian Country, resurfacing antiquated beliefs about what it means to be a tribal citizen and misrepresenting the historical forces that animate Oklahoma’s statehood movements. Writing with historians, Indigenous people, and interdisciplinary scholarship, this thesis will incorporate the analytical tools of Critical Indigenous Studies alongside archival and empirical methodologies. This thesis contextualizes Oklahoma’s tribal-state governance dynamic as a contest for land, resources, and life made possible by the logic of settler colonialism and white nationalism instrumental in both contemporary and historic struggles for American Indian legal and political recognition. To do this, I look at the contested history of Indigenous land tenure in Oklahoma beginning with Charles Page and the establishment of Sand Springs in chapter two, followed by the enmeshment of blood politics and internalized colonialism in chapter three, and ending chapter four with an analysis of three distinct statehood movements preceding Oklahoma’s entrance to the United States.


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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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