settler colonial studies blog

Indigenst research against settler colonialism: Bindi Bennett, Kelly Menzel (eds), Indigenous Research Knowledges and Their Place in the Academy, Springer, 2025

28Jul25

Description: This book privileges Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing in research and serves as a voice in taking on some of the more marginal topics within methodologies. It is significant in that it is written by indigenous scholars themselves. The contributors shed light, for example, on Queer BlaQ bodies and place Indigenous women as central in reimagining fair academic practice; others return to their foundational texts to reflect on the growth of Indigenous Standpoint Theory. This book sees Indigenous Peoples as holding greater significance within research objectives and institutional practices and reimagines a research world embracing storytelling as foundational to academia. It is intended for students and early researchers, particularly Indigenous researchers, whilst also serving as an invaluable textbook for non-Indigenous people as it aids in explaining and outlining Indigenous research and is a valuable tool in the classroom and with research students. It demonstrates that Indigenous research approaches can sit beside and be equal to Western research, especially when engaging with the ethics process and for PhD students. This book is invaluable for non-Indigenous allies and researchers globally to further explain and outline Aboriginal (Australian) Indigenous research.

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Even the Roman Empire! Jeremy Armstrong, Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome’s Empire, Oxford University Press, 2025

28Jul25

Description: A fresh narrative history of the rise of Rome’s empire in Italy, that exposes the monumental expansion of the Roman familial, social, political, and militaristic way of living across Italy. Before the Romans could become masters of the Mediterranean, they had to first conquer the people of their own peninsula. This book explores the origins of Roman imperialism and the creation of Rome’s early Italian empire, bringing new light and interpretations to this important but problematic period in Roman history. It explains how and why the Romans were able to expand their influence within Italy, often through the use of armed conflict, laying the foundations for their great imperial project. This book critically reexamines and reframes the traditional literary narrative within an archaeologically informed, archaic Italian context. Jeremy Armstrong presents a new interpretation of the early Roman army, highlighting the fluid and family-driven character which is increasingly visible in the evidence. Drawing on recent developments within the field of early Roman studies, Children of Mars argues that the emergence of Rome’s empire in Italy should not be seen as the spread of a distinct “Roman” people across Italian land, but rather the expansion of a social, political, and military network amongst the Italian people. Armstrong suggests that Rome’s early empire was a fundamentally human and relational one. While this reinterpretation of early Roman imperialism is no less violent than the traditional model, it alters its core dynamic and nature, and thus shifts the entire trajectory of Rome’s Republican history.

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The Return to the Land (RTTL) Movement: Settlers!

28Jul25

Your curated rabbit hole on the RTTL:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5419057-whites-only-community-return-to-the-land-missouri-arkansas/amp/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp-video/mmvo243787333559

https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/return-to-the-land-whites-only-b2795418.html#

https://news.sky.com/story/inside-the-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas-the-group-building-a-fortress-for-the-white-race-13399875

The Times of Israel recognises a settlement when they see one:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/return-to-the-land-white-supremacists-building-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas/amp/

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Settler colonialism resonates: Bill Rolston, ‘Ireland and Palestine: the roots of resonance’, Race & Class, 2025

26Jul25

Abstract: This article argues that, despite major differences across time and space, there are similarities between the colonial experience of the Irish in the midseventeenth century and the present-day colonial experience of Palestinians. This is illustrated by a detailed comparison of attacks by the Irish against English and Scottish settlers in 1641 and the Palestinian attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. In both cases, the indisputable violence of the attacks was exaggerated, thereby carrying out a crucial ideological role in underpinning the brutality of the state response. The collective memory of the Irish in relation to their own colonial experience allows for an easy identification of similar colonial experience elsewhere. The suffering of the people of Gaza resonates with people in Ireland in ways that it would not were the Irish not catching echoes of their own past in the contemporary experience of the Palestinians. That is the basis of the strength of pro-Palestinian actions in Ireland. Dismissed by some as evidence of antisemitism, these actions are instead instances of intense international solidarity.

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The rhetoric of settler colonialism: Joshua Smith, ‘Transforming Relationships: Land, Colonialism, and Rhetorical Sedimentation’, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 28, 2, 2025, pp. 158-180

26Jul25

Abstract: This article uses the competing visions of land of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to show the rhetorical operation of the human relationship with land. Telling two stories of the same land’s entanglement with diverging modes of relationship, it explains the concept of rhetorical sedimentation. Rhetorical sedimentation describes how certain rhetorics and discourses bury others, much as new dirt becomes stratified on top of old. With the aid of this geological metaphor, this article demonstrates the intersection of land relations with broader matters of cultural politics. Lee, it argues, follows the goals of settler colonialism and attempts to bury Indigenous peoples’ land relations with the Bears Ears National Monument. Through rhetorics of land relations, Lee claims the settler Utahn as “indigenous” and portrays federal ownership of public lands as a new form of colonialism. This article also argues that the coalition’s advocacy for Bears Ears serves to center its tribes’ land relations in public discourse about federal lands. Through such rhetorical work, the discursive terrain of Bears Ears and federal public lands gains new rhetorical strata. Attending to rhetorics of land relations, this article contends, affords rhetoric studies opportunities to resist complicity in colonial power.

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The style of settler colonialism: Mark Taylor, ‘”Literature in the Bush”: Samuel Butler, Style, and Settler Colonialism’, New Literary History, 56, 1, 2025, pp. 159-183

26Jul25

Abstract: This essay considers the relationship between settler colonialism and style in the work of Samuel Butler. Butler became an important influence on Anglophone modernism primarily through his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903). I argue that this text’s innovations were rooted in Butler’s time as a sheep farmer in New Zealand from 1859–64. Placing Butler in a theoretical tradition that insists on style’s essential tie to authorial personhood, I show how Butler’s “plain style” prose encodes a new, radically minimal conception of what it means to be a person—one profoundly shaped by the tensions of the settler experience.

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Parking settlers: Laura McKinley, ‘Commemorating Contested National Park Landscapes: The Canada 150 Discovery Pass and White Scopic Disremembering’, in Lourdes López-Ropero, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds), Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes, Springer, 2025, pp. 55-72

26Jul25

Abstract: This chapter explores the intricate relationship between memory, space, and white settler colonialism within Canada’s National Parks, using the Canada 150 Discovery Pass—a state-led commemorative program for Canada’s sesquicentennial—as a case study. It argues that these national parks, celebrated as iconic Canadian landscapes, are pivotal to a white settler national identity that necessitates the disremembering of colonial violence and dispossession for their very existence. The Canada 150 Discovery Parks Pass encouraged Canadians to reflect on, project, and imagine what it means to be Canadian through the viewing and spatial transit of these places purported to represent the best of Canada and its citizen-subjects. However, these parks are also sites of forced removals of Indigenous nations, marked by the dispossessive violence of white settler colonialism, which relies on the attempted erasure and forgetting of Indigenous presence. This chapter contends that these parks, while celebrated as iconic Canadian landscapes, are crucial sites for the production and maintenance of a white settler national identity. Drawing on the work of Critical Race scholars and Indigenous artist Rebecca Belmore’s aesthetic intervention, Wave Sound, the chapter demonstrates how the pass consolidates a white possessive subjectivity that justifies ongoing colonial land appropriation and elides colonial history. In contrast, Belmore’s sculptural objects, installed in four National Parks, invited visitors to listen to the land rather than merely view and transit through it, thereby offering an opportunity to challenge official memory and foster alternative forms of remembering.

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Cruel nation: Julie Macken, Australia’s Schism in the Soul: Colonialism, Immigration Detention and a Nation’s Failure to Mourn, Springer, 2025

26Jul25

Description: How has it become possible for the Australian state to gain public acquiescence to develop one of world’s most punitive systems of processing asylum-seekers; one that not only contravenes Australia’s international humanitarian commitments, but that, in the words of activists, medical professionals, and the detainees themselves amounts to torture? In this highly readable account academic, journalist and advocate Dr Julie Macken takes a psychoanalytic approach to both the country and its public to uncover why. Dr Macken’s investigation begins by outlining how the nation’s failure to mourn its colonial past has led to a state of collective melancholia, with the result that denial and psychological splitting have prevented genuine reconciliation with First Nations peoples. The central part of the book offers a compelling account of the development of Australia’s current system of privatised immigration detention and the political, economic and media forces that have sustained it that will resonate globally. In conclusion the book posits that political action in these circumstances—however distressing and visceral—should be adopted as a mental health strategy for both the person and the nation.

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Gendered resistance against settler colonialism: Coralie Annick Monique Buquet, Unveiling Colonial Narratives and Amplifying Indigenous Voices: The Role of Kanak Women in Resisting Settler Colonialism in Kanaky/New Caledonia, MA dissertation, The Arctic University of Norway, 2025

26Jul25

Abstract: This thesis explores gender dynamics in Kanaky/New Caledonia, highlighting colonialism’s enduring impact on Kanak women’s lived experiences. In response to the gaps in research on how Indigenous women actively negotiate the tensions between custom, modernity and colonialism, this study examines their narratives and practices in cultural education and media activism. Mobilizing a theoretical approach rooted in decolonial epistemologies, intersectionality and Indigenous feminism, this research draws on a qualitative methodology combining in-depth interviews with Kanak women, archival analysis, and a critical examination of colonial political texts. The work demonstrates that the commitment of Kanak women contributes to the construction of a situated decolonial feminism, rooted in Indigenous knowledge and living cultural practices. The trajectories of these women reveal a resilient resistance to internal patriarchal structures and colonial systems, as well as a capacity to reconfigure traditions in favor of self-determination. By articulating memory, cultural identity and political action, they contribute to a feminine sovereignty in the making. This work enriches contemporary debates on decolonization by highlighting the central role of Indigenous women in the struggles for social justice and political emancipation in Kanaky/New Caledonia.

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Settler colonialism is a family tradition: Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, Hilary A. Rose, ‘Unsettling our family history: critical interventions in settler Canadian pasts’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

26Jul25

Abstract: This article explores seven generations of our family’s participation in settler colonialism at different times and in different places across Canada. The ancestors we focus on came to North America beginning in 1820, and serial waves of immigration from divergent branches of our family tree followed thereafter. For each generation, we investigate our ancestors’ arrival on Indigenous lands, the histories of Indigenous presence on and use of those lands, the processes by which our relatives got access to that land, the impacts our ancestors’ presence had on Indigenous Nations of those lands and the benefits our family experienced from Indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism. Informed by decolonial critiques and interdisciplinary scholarship on histories of family and colonialism, we piece together these narratives by drawing on archival and genealogical records, settler accounts, family stories and fieldwork. Using our family as a case study, we argue that adopting a critical approach to settler family histories helps challenge the myth of Canadian benevolence, solidifies our understanding of the foundational violence of settler colonialism, and exemplifies the truth–telling that needs to come with settler reconciliation to Indigenous Peoples – a vital first step towards being able to recognize, live within and uphold Indigenous sovereignty.

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