settler colonial studies blog

But where is that settler colonialism? Emilie Cameron, ‘Where is Settler Colonialism?’ ACME, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This essay considers both the limits and necessity of mobilizing settler colonial frameworks in the contemporary moment. It traces the rise of Settler Colonial Studies as the dominant framework for making sense of colonial relations in Canada and considers the limits of this framework for understanding colonization in Inuit Nunangat, where the settler state’s interest in dispossession, extraction, and proletarianization have played out differently than in southern Canada. Guided by Aimé Césaire’s directive to ask, again and again, what colonization is, I consider why Settler Colonial Studies frameworks are so readily mobilized in the study of northern Canada but are hyperpoliticized when they are applied to Israel/Palestine, why Inuit theories of colonization barely figure in Qallunaaq research about the North, and what this means for theorizing colonialism in the current conjuncture.

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Recovering from settler colonialism use disorder: Sara Cannon, Braiding More Than Sweetgrass: A Proposed Support Group Model for (Non)Tribal Native Americans in Recovery’, PhD dissertation, Eastern Kentucky University, 2026

27Apr26

Abstract: Native Americans (also referred to as American Indian/Alaska Natives or Indigenous persons) have too often been neglected in mental health interventions. This is a disservice, as they are disproportionately affected by challenges such as alcohol use disorder (AUD) and substance use disorder (SUD). Interventions directly speaking to AI/AN culture are rare to non-existent (at least in a published form), with the exception of White Bison’s Wellbriety (White Bison, 2002, 2024). It is not all together uncommon for individuals with Native roots to seek to (re)learn these traditions while in recovery from alcoholism and addiction. The aim of this project is three-fold: to deepen understanding of how expressing one’s Native American cultural identity may affect one’s quality of AUD/SUD recovery; to provide a culturally informed, outpatient treatment proposed support group model that addresses this disparity in intervention options for AI/AN individuals and communities; and to seek input, approval, and guidance from (non)tribal AI/AN community members to ensure cultural sensitivity. To achieve this aim, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design was implemented.

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Settlers on the moon: Laura Goldblatt, ‘”We On the Moon Now”: The Space Race and Legacies of Settler Colonialism’, Amerikastudien / American Studies, 71, 1, 2026, pp. 25-42

27Apr26

Abstract: This article seeks to reorient the space race and especially the 1969 Apollo 11 mission within Civil Rights, Black, and Native American Movements’ resistance to an oppressive U.S. state. In contextualizing the space race as part of a Cold War contest between the United States and the ongoing threat of the Soviet Union, I draw heavily on studies of space exploration that turn outwards to analyze space flight primarily within the history of technological innovation and international diplomacy, noting, too, the cross-pollination between actual space exploration and science fiction. Yet rather than using this literature to provide further insight into the space race’s role in global politics, in this essay, I turn inwards to consider how Native and Black artists and activists firmly tethered the Moon flight to the earthly realm in order to satirize the Apollo mission. Their aesthetic strategies highlight a structure of feeling in which lived affects like ridicule or disappointment compete with officially encouraged sublimity. In doing so, I argue that Native and Black artists and authors—namely Howlin’ Wolf, Faith Ringgold, and Simon J. Ortiz—took up the very formal features of the performance of the Apollo 11 mission to reject the government’s celestial and inspirational framing of space flight by focusing instead upon the everyday to diagnose space exploration as an escapist fantasy that can only compulsively repeat the injustices they face on earth. Through my attention to non-hegemonic audiences and strategies I hope to make two interventions. First, I situate the Apollo mission as an aesthetic event, if also a geopolitical one, following the literary critic Hortense Spillers. Second, this framing allows me to show how Black and Native authors and artists like those I consider seized on space flight as a performance, using its specific formal features not to dismiss that performance, but rather to render it absurd.

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Settlers are classed: Chris M. Hansen, ‘Marxing the Westward March: A Case Study on a Marxist Approach to Family History and Great Plains Migration’, Literature & Aesthetics, 36, 1, 2026, pp. 36-50

25Apr26

Abstract: This article provides a new look at conducting family history research from the perspective of historical materialism (Marxism). Instead of typical family histories isolating and atomizing the individual and family oral accounts which center the “great man” of the past, this work provides an analysis firmly rooted in class conflict and how individuals directly receive their conditions as mediated by the past. This specifically takes family history in the American western migration as a way to reconceptualize conducting this type of historical research, and using family stories, legends, and oral traditions as a window into the class ideologies present both in the present and the past moderating how they were shaped and transmitted, and what stories were regarded as important (especially in erasing the memory of indigenous peoples who had lived in the originally settled areas).

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The negativity of settler colonialism: Shahira A. Hathout, ‘Critical negativity in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22), settler colonialism, and the death of myth’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25Apr26

Abstract: This paper draws on the critical negativity presented by Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant. Despite their differences, both accounts agree on three points: First, they respectively reject the fixation of an original meaning or original identity, moving towards a more indeterminate open-ended rethinking of loss, trauma, and the fragmented subject. Like Glissant’s ‘womb abyss’, Kristeva’s ‘black sun’ is another abyss, through which fragmentation, trauma, meaning, and the possibility for differential collectivity emerge. Secondly, both accounts expose the violence inscribed into settler colonialism to unsettle master narratives and myths of civilization. Thirdly, Kristeva and Glissant acknowledge the capacity of art and poetics to operate as sites of intertextuality and negativity where myths of civilization that sustain the violence of settler colonialism could possibly activate its own collapse. Within this framework, I explore Hans Holbein’s painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, alongside images of the dead bodies of Palestinian children, starved by Israel’s genocide in Palestine, not as aesthetics of suffering that reproduce the sites of subjection but as aesthetics of negativity and accountability to show how myths of spiritual and cultural superiority that sustain settler colonialism collapse at the site and sight of settler colonial violence.

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Unfitting and therefore settlers: Susan Kollin, ‘Settler Ecologies and Western Adaptation: Unfitting Characters in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 203-218

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter explores how the Coen brothers reconfigure the Western in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, laying bare its white settler fantasies to reveal how toxic beliefs often shape foundational myths of regional and national identity. Many of the sequences refuse to deliver action in ways we expect in the genre. Plots, for instance, often appear unreal and cartoonish, highlighting a refusal on the part of the filmmakers to conform and adapt themselves to expectations of the Western. Satire and humor likewise redirect the narratives to reveal the underside of generic myths. Foregrounding various “unfitting” and “maladaptive” western characters whose misguided relationships with the more-than-human world and each other often end in tragedy and death, the Coens’ film illustrates how stories persist or perish, leading to the conclusion—from the point of view of ecoadaptation—that perhaps some stories need to go extinct.

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Adapting, but still settlers: Katie Kane, ‘”A Huge Mass in a Single Hand”: Yellowstone and the Selling of Montana’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 153-170

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter argues that the television series Yellowstone rewrites the history of white settlement and white relations with Native nations in Montana, revising a cultural idea of the “Frontier” that promotes a notion of “rugged individualism,” a ranching-style monopoly capitalism, and an ethically empty “environmental” ethos. It is a narrative adaptation of a story of the American West that positions the land as “beautiful” without considering its extreme environmental precarity and its long entanglement with extractive economies, including mining, logging, agriculture, and, most significantly, ranching. The series has had real-world impacts, affecting the state’s demography, housing market, and tourism. Even though the axiom of the series is “protect the land,” the proposed method of doing so reinforces white settler principles of class, status, and race.

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Indigenous diasporas are implicated: Hemopereki Simon, ‘”Cut your Hōhā nonsense out!” the “lady crown debacle(s)” as settler/invaderism from Māori in “so-called” Australia’, Journal for Cultural Research, 2026

24Apr26

Abstract: This article examines how Māori indigeneity is ethically reconfigured in diaspora when Māori live on Aboriginal land in so-called Australia. Drawing on tikanga-based obligations of manuhiritanga, it argues that Māori are tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand but become implicated in settler/invader relations in Australia unless they practice humility, restraint, and accountability to local Aboriginal authority. The central questions are: under what conditions do Indigenous migrants become entangled in settler/invader power on other Indigenous lands, and how are claims to indigeneity, mana whenua, or customary authority articulated and contested outside their originating jurisdictions? The analysis is grounded in the sovereign jurisdiction of Dharug Ngurra, treating Dharug Law/Lore as the enduring legal and ethical framework for Parramatta and the Dyarubbin. Using the 2019 Lady Crown/Ngāti Rangihou Corrangie case as a diagnostic ‘limit case,’ the article traces how whakapapa, missionary history, pseudo-law, and media amplification can be mobilised to manufacture trans-Indigenous sovereignty claims that bypass Aboriginal consent and governance. It concludes that such diasporic overreach risks reproducing settler/invader logics in Indigenous dress, and that Māori integrity in Australia requires acting as manuhiri under Aboriginal leadership.

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The handmaiden of settler history: Shawn Van Ausdal, ‘Cattle ranching: Handmaiden of settler colonialism’, in Mark Moritz, Igshaan Samuels, Nikolaus Schareika, Eva Schlecht (eds), Routledge Handbook of Pastoralism, Routledge, 2026

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter briefly compares the nature of ranching and pastoralism. It then follows the diffusion of cattle ranching to the Americas, Oceania, and southern Africa. And it explores how ranching helped propel settler colonialism. However, rather than viewing cattle as the “shock troops” of European settlement, it describes ranching as the handmaiden of state-led pacification. By altering land uses and landscapes, by promoting new sets of property rights and social relationships, by shifting diets and identities, and by occupying vast spaces, cattle ranching helped to produce new cartographies of colonial power.

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Indigenous title as a trap: Maritza Paredes, Danitza Gil, Anke Kaulard, ‘The Indigenous land titling trap: adaptive practices and the limits of climate governance’, World Development, 204, 2026, #107429

23Apr26

Abstract: This article examines why Indigenous land titling, widely promoted as an enabling condition for climate action, advances without closing persistent gaps in territorial recognition. It conceptualizes this paradox as a climate titling institutional trap, in which reforms progress through adaptive practices yet remain embedded in territorial governance configurations that constrain their transformative potential. Drawing on an extended case study of Kichwa communities in San Martín, Peru, based on multi-scalar ethnographic research, the paper shows how Indigenous leaders and bureaucrats deploy pragmatic strategies to navigate administrative bottlenecks and secure partial advances in titling. However, these gains unfold within historically layered regimes of agrarian, extractive, and conservation governance that overlap and converge in limiting Indigenous territorial rights. The interaction between adaptive practices and these layered institutional orders produces incremental change without altering underlying power relations. The article contributes to development debates by reframing institutional traps as dynamic outcomes of reform processes, highlighting the political-economic conditions shaping the limits of Indigenous inclusion in climate governance.

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