Abstract: This article examines the role of letters to the editor in British newspapers as a medium for settlers in self-governing British colonies to perform imperial citizenship during the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a dataset of 125 letters from 1860–1900, it highlights how settlers used the participatory nature of the British press to navigate the economic, military, and political structures that remained under British influence after colonial self-governance. By leveraging British public opinion through these letters, settlers sought to address obstacles such as local governmental inefficiencies, unfavorable portrayals in the British press, and challenges from imperial policies and corporate power. The article problematizes historiographical distinctions between political and cultural imperial citizenship. It reveals the persistence of British influence in settler colonies through the guise of public opinion. It emphasizes the constraints imposed by class and editorial gatekeeping on who was afforded the opportunity to perform imperial citizenship through the participatory press. And it argues that letters to the editor were not only tools of individual agency but also windows into the complex and interwoven cacophony of lived experiences of empire within the late nineteenth-century settler colonies.


Abstract: Settler colonialism is based in the separation of peoples from Lands and from one another, producing ongoing harm to human and more-than-human communities as evidenced in climate collapse, racialized violence, war, and widening social inequities. These conditions are sustained by ideologies of human supremacy—specifically white, male, Christian human supremacy—that deny personhood to most humans and to all more-than-humans, while enabling the attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples and the nation-state enforcement of anti-Black and anti-Brown racism. Situated on the Lands of the Coast Salish Peoples in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, this multiparadigmatic innovation dissertation develops a Land-centered framework for supporting settler teachers in transforming toward relational worldviews that re-situate humans as part of Land. Grounded in decolonial Land-and-water education (Bruce et al., 2023; Calderón, 2014; Calderón et al., 2021; Lees et al., 2023; Lees & Nelly, 2024; Tuck et al., 2014), this framework is designed to unsettle settler epistemologies while centering Land. Organized through a seasonal, circular structure, the framework engages three primary interrelated spheres: turning to Indigenous leadership, Land as first teacher, and unsettling the settler. These spheres inform the disruption of settler colonial values and the reclamation of Land-based values, resulting in four seasonal themes: unsettling/(re)stor(y)ing; trauma-informed ceremony; embodying lifeways; and service/activism. The framework emerged through its enactment as research methodology and is presented as praxis for bringing settlers into relational iv accountability (Wilson, 2008) with Lands and their peoples in service of their liberation, including Indigenous resurgence, Indigenous futurities, and the rematriation of Indigenous Lands to their peoples.





Abstract: Ho-Chunk leader Hąpoguwįga (Glory of the Morning) led her village in Wisconsin during a pivotal era of Ho-Chunk history. However, narratives crafted by settlers decenter her legacy, working to legitimize settler colonial occupation and identity. These narratives participate in and inspire settler affect—physical and emotional attachment to place identities—and further settler myths of Indigenous consent regarding land occupation. Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768, illustrates the formation of Eurocentric nation-building narratives that dismiss Native American governance and relationships to land. Within the text, Carver describes Hąpoguwįga as the “queen” of her village yet diminishes her role as a sovereign leader. This colonial imaginary strengthens settler attachment to place and erases Ho-Chunk presence. The twentieth-century play Glory of the Morning(1914) by William Ellery Leonard, serves a similar function by focusing on her consensual relationship with a French trader to reinforce a myth of settler belonging. This play describes Hąpoguwįga as her husband’s “sq**w,” erasing her role as a Ho-Chunk leader and autonomous woman. As a historical figure, Hąpoguwįga embodies Ho-Chunk presence amidst settler encroachment. In contrast, Carver’s travel writing and Leonard’s play reveal how settler affect shapes her presence in settler memory to sustain the myth of Indigenous consent to land occupation.




Abstract: In this critical introduction, co-editors Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, and Julia Hurst set out the provocation and framing for Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? The collection emerges in the aftermath of the defeat of the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples as Australia’s First Peoples, situating this defeat in the broader context of persistent patterns of settler refusal to hear and act upon truths long articulated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Rather than a deficit of knowledge, let alone information, the editors identify a pervasive infrastructure of refusal—denial, ignorance, and antipathy—that sustains settler legitimacy while constraining the possibilities of justice. Situating Australian experience within comparative and transnational contexts, the volume interrogates how refusal operates institutionally and affectively, and how it is reproduced through pedagogy, culture, and politics. At the same time, contributors foreground Indigenous-led truth-telling and sovereignty, affirming their independent power as practices of healing, resurgence, and mobilisation. Rejecting reconciliationist closures, the introduction advances a historiographical agonism that retains tension and contestation as necessary to resisting settler moves to innocence. In mapping both impediments and points of vulnerability, this collection reframes the burden of response: truth-telling is not a project First Nations must render more palatable to a settler polity structured by refusal, but rather a challenge settlers and their institutions must confront if just relations are to be realised.