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Humoring settlers: Kirsten Sandrock, ‘Scottishness, Humour, and the Aesthetics Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 47, 1, 2022

22Oct25

Excerpt: Today, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) is no longer viewed without controversy as “the ‘father of American humour’” (Cogswell). Whereas earlier scholarship praises the author’s “compassionate humour” and reads Sam Slick’s witticisms as part of the “free exchange of ideas between men and women” (Harding 224), recent approaches to The Clockmaker have flagged the political nature of Slick’s humour. Ruth Panofsky (“Breaking”) and George Elliot Clarke (“Must”; “White”) have demonstrated how Slick’s jokes target female characters and Black characters especially often. As Panofsky claims, “Women and Blacks represent two disenfranchised groups whose vulnerable positions in an all-white patriarchy make them easy targets for his often-times vicious humour” (“Breaking” 42). For Clarke, Slick’s gibes align with the “English-Canadian conservatism” of Haliburton, who was “bourgeois in his blood, Tory to the bone, and Gothic in spirit” (“Must” 4). Following up on these inquiries into the ideological nature of Slick’s jokes, this article suggests that The Clockmaker’s humour is part of a nineteenth-century settler colonial tradition that creates an illusion of a harmonious British Atlantic Canada. While laughter has been recognized as a veritable tradition in postcolonial and transcultural literatures (Balce; Dunphy and Emig; Reichl and Stein), the following discussion links the forms and functions of humour in Haliburton’s works to discussions of settler colonial aesthetics (Bryant; Gould; Rudy; Veracini; Wolfe). Haliburton’s humour idealizes settler colonial relations in Atlantic Canada and turns conflict into comedy. This pertains to differences not only between British and non-British characters but also within the English-speaking community. Settlers from different parts of the British Isles are satirized, though with the overall function of imagining them as a diverse, agreeable body of like-minded settler colonists. Discourses of Scottishness in The Clockmaker and its sequels illustrate this naturalizing and idealizing function of humour in settler colonial fiction.


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Structure: Jeremia Pelgrom, Clemens Six (eds), Settler Colonialism as a Structure? Structural Logics, Long-Term Patterns, and Critical Reflections, University of Groningen, 2025,

22Oct25

Description: Since Patrick Wolfe’s groundbreaking work on settler colonialism’s logic of elimination, the field has rapidly expanded, sparking debate about its origins, characteristics, and global impact. This volume advances the discussion by offering a long-term, comparative analysis of settler colonialism as a structural phenomenon. Drawing on diverse case studies – from ancient Mediterranean societies to contemporary visions of settling Mars – contributors critically examine key questions: What defines settler colonialism? How does access to land shape its dynamics? What socio-political and cultural forces underpin settler expansion? By broadening the geographic and temporal scope beyond familiar contexts, this book challenges established paradigms and invites fresh perspectives on a complex and multi-layered concept. Ideal for scholars and students in history, political science, Indigenous studies, and global studies, this volume encourages ongoing dialogue and provides new tools for understanding settler colonialism’s enduring influence on past and present global relations.


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Veganvashing settler colonialism: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, ‘In Israel’s Warped Logic, Veganism and Genocide Go Hand in Hand’, CounterPunch, 12/09/25

22Oct25

Excerpt: People around the world are waking up to the outlandish tenor of Israeli propaganda. It’sderanged to legitimize occupation and genocide on the grounds of self-defense. Or to cast refugees burned alive and forcibly starved to death as imperiling Western civilization. Or to frame the colonial entity’s armed forces – which gleefully brag about murdering children and destroying homes, and post trophy photos clad in the lingerie of women they murdered – as “the world’s most moral army.” Yet the discursive acrobatics do not end there. A lesser-known element of Israel’s disinformation campaign is its self-proclaimed status as the leading nation in animal rights. A richbodyof scholarship addresses the paradoxical relationship of veganism and animal liberation to colonialismin so-called Israel. On the one hand, the settler colony dehumanizes Palestinians, mobilizing the species divide to legitimizetheir erasure. On the other, it boasts of providing plant-based meals and synthetic combat wear to vegan soldiers. This framing perverts vegan ethics, which repudiate killing, confinement and the use of force against living beings. As Ahmad Safi, co-founder of the Palestinian Animal League, challenges, “What good is it if an Israeli soldier is vegan and wears leather-free boots if his gun is aimed at Palestinians?” This reality-distortion is known as veganwashing. 


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Serial settlers: Rachel Vivian Helmer, Demythologizing the Mennonite Peacemaker Myth Among Serial Settler Mennonites, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2025

22Oct25

Abstract: This thesis examines how the “peacemaker myth”, which claims that Mennonite settlers brought spiritual and material prosperity to Indigenous communities, remains a form of settler colonial denial in Paraguay today. While Mennonite settlers continue to claim that they peacefully coexist with Enlhet and Enxet peoples, their actions result in displacement, subjugation, and environmental destruction. Mennonites left Canada in the 1920s to resist forced assimilation, yet began imposing their own cultural and religious values upon Indigenous communities in Paraguay as soon as they arrived. The hypocrisy of the Mennonites who left Canada, preserving their autonomy while using their powers to deny the same to Indigenous peoples in Paraguay, is an exercise in settler-colonial impunity: importing lessons of domination learned in one settler setting into another subsequent settler setting. Highlighting Indigenous protests, this thesis argues that such resistance dismantles the peacemaker myth by revealing the ongoing effects of Mennonite-led environmental destruction, economic dependency, and cultural erasure in Paraguay. By situating Mennonite expansion within the broader discursive framework of the Doctrine of Discovery (see Miller 2019), I trace a pattern of Mennonite “moves to innocence” (Mawhinney 1998) that shapes Indigenous-settler relations in Latin America to this day.


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The Indigenous Third Nation and its constituent power: Nick Estes, ‘Awakening the Red Giant: American Indian Anti-Imperialism and the First Decade of the International Indian Treaty Council’, Wicazo Sa Review, 40, 1-2, 2025, pp. 32-61

20Oct25

Abstract: The founding of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974 marked a pivotal shift in the politics of the American Indian Movement. AIM activist John Thomas calls this transformation part of the prophecy of the sleeping Red Giant, which once awakened, would spread Red Power activism across North America and eventually the world. Originally a local activist organization founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968, focusing on combatting police violence and discrimination against urban Natives, AIM saw itself increasingly as a national liberation movement as it also turned toward internationalism. In its first decade of existence, the Treaty Council sought to make connections with the world’s national liberation movements, resulting in AIM and Treaty Council activists sending delegations to socialist and Third World nations, thus helping shape an explicit rhetoric and practice of American Indian anti-imperialism. It was the Treaty Council’s relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization, however, that helped it theorize an explicit theory of anti-imperialist struggle against settler colonialism. This article draws on oral history interviews with AIM and Treaty Council activists as well as several archival collections of AIM and Treaty Council publications.


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When destroying patrimony is settler heritage: Stephanie A. Bohon, Shaylee Hodges, ‘Digging into Indigenous History’, Contexts, 24, 3, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: Nantucket construction uncovered human remains right where the map said they’d be. In this feature, we learn how racial ignorance has allowed developers, collectors, politicians, and scientists to ignore, desecrate, and erase sacred Indigenous burial sites.


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Indigenous theory in outer space: Blaire Morseau, Les W. Field, ‘Anarchist Futures: Indigenous Influences in the Speculative World-Making of Ursula K. Le Guin’, Wicazo Sa Review, 40, 1-2, 2025, pp. 105-127

20Oct25

Abstract: By focusing on the interventions Le Guin makes in the discipline of anthropology, theorists have missed a critical connection to radical and utopia studies—the diverse ways that anarchist thought can be and is being grounded in Indigenous radical theory. In this article, we argue that Le Guin was influenced by Native North American philosophy and political action, tracing the links between these influences and anarchism more generally. We also point out that the tradition of anarchism and critical theory, broadly speaking, that has developed in settler-colonial nations is greatly enriched by, indeed requires, Indigenous scholarship to imagine and construct truly liberated futures. In addition to critical Indigenous theory, Native-authored speculative world-making offers a poignant vantage point from which to actualize these anarchist futures in ways that do not assume the permanence of or reify settler colonialism.


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Mars will be settler colonial (unless…): Maya Cruz, ‘(Machine) Learning How to See Like a Rover: Feminist Objectivity and the Demonic Ground of Martian Sand’, Catalyst, 11, 2, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: Mars has long been a space onto which fantasies of colonization have been projected in both popular and scientific imaginaries. Amidst these colonizing visions, can there be a feminist science of Mars? In this paper, I examine an emerging technology being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed to increase the capacity for future rovers to conduct autonomous scientific research on Mars using machine learning and computer vision, called the Soil Property and Object Classifier (SPOC), as a case study in crafting feminist objectivity. I bring together feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies approaches to the study of science and technology to analyze the ways in which SPOC evidences how contemporary techniques used to engineer autonomous scientific discovery on Mars through machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision reproduce and redescribe the logics, imaginaries, and power relations of US settler colonialism in new technological terms. Ultimately, my work aims to gesture towards the possibilities that emerge for crafting a feminist objectivity of Mars when we situate scientific knowledge through the racialized conditions of its production.


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Land hungry! Alice Louise Gorton, Earth Hunger: Agriculture, Settler Colonialism, and the Rise of the Global Grain Trade, 1846-1914, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: This dissertation argues that Britain’s shift to free trade in 1846 moved British settler colonialism in Canada and Australia away from older trade and land monopolies and toward an imperial-agrarian system that sought to transform Indigenous lands into breadbaskets for the newly industrializing metropole. Liberal theories articulated in the 1840s created the ideological basis for new colonial legislation in the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the routine enclosure of land for settlers. Contrary to the utopian visions of interdependence and trade harmony painted by free traders in the 1840s, free trade policies led to an increase in British territorial conquest in the settler colonies. As foreign grain imports put pressure on the domestic agricultural sector in the 1870s, many began to view settler colonization as a release valve that could alleviate domestic population and food pressures. The 1870s were pivotal. As the imperial-agrarian system expanded to feed a growing industrial population in Britain, Indigenous communities in areas slated for grain production entered the agricultural economy and developed new political claims around land, even as colonial expansion undermined access to resources. Indeed, efforts to secure private property rights for farmers in new regions undermined the existing food supply, which led to subsistence crises, displacement, and land loss among Indigenous communities across Canada and Australia. While new legal agreements emerged to reserve land for Indigenous peoples in the empire, the cyclical dynamic of agricultural development and improvement also foreshadowed the erosion of those agreements. The establishment of the grain economy set in motion a process of continual exploitation and expropriation, as colonists sought new arable lands—new extractive or commodity frontiers—to preserve or expand their margins. As settlers ran into both economic and ecological limits, such as exhausted soil and rising land prices, they sought to appropriate more Native land, establishing farmsteads in territories they had once considered marginal or that had been legally reserved for Indigenous communities. The grain economy in both places experienced significant growth in the 1890s and 1910s. These decades also saw intensified efforts to subdivide and allot reserve lands for sale to agricultural settlers. Examining the closure of Poonindie in South Australia and the surrender of the Siksika reserve in Alberta, my argument shows how land allotment was closely tied to the grain trade. This dissertation uses the thread of the grain trade to bind together national histories within a British imperial system linked by trade. The story of the grain trade between 1846 and 1914, with its extensive land use, sprawling capital-intensive infrastructure, and integral position in the global and increasingly globalized food economy, gives us a more holistic picture of a period for which scholars have tended to write distinct histories of the British empire and its settler dominions in Canada and Australia. The project demonstrates that grain became the crop most closely associated with settler colonies, as the production of cash crops by family farmers simultaneously addressed both the population and agricultural crises in Britain. Grain was the flipside of the industrial economy, the crop that underwrote Britain’s economic growth and upheld its imperial system.


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Settler redface: Bethany Hughes, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, NYU Press, 2024

20Oct25

Description: Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.


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