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Beware of sympathetic settlers: Erin Akerman, ‘At the Crossroads of Sympathy and Prophecy: Anna Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, and the Drummond Island Métis’, Canadian Literature, 250, 2025

11Oct25

Abstract: While discussing their community’s relocation, Drummond Island Métis interviewees Lewis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre describe how they witnessed British author Anna Jameson steal skulls from an Indigenous grave during her travels in 1837 (The Migration of Voyageurs from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene in 1828 1901). Their testimony provokes a reckoning for Jameson and her travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) due to her self-depiction as exceptionally sympathetic toward Indigenous peoples. Their evidence also unsettles earlier scholarship that valorizes Jameson’s sympathy and gestures toward the settler colonial stakes bound up in such readings. This paper re-evaluates Jameson’s travel narrative by demonstrating how her settler sympathy is intertwined with prophecies of “elimination” (Wolfe 2006, 388). It then shows how the narratives of Solomon, Sylvestre, and other members of the Drummond Island Métis community (ancestors of the present-day Georgian Bay Métis community) resist the constraints of such prophecy.


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Settler colonialism can be green (and nasty): Ghada Sasa, Resisting Green Colonialism: Palestinian and Islamic Strides Towards Justice and Sustainability, PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2025

11Oct25

Abstract: Since the 1980s, Western academia began to thoroughly contend with anticolonialism and environmentalism, progressively connecting the two movements. At their crossroads, I make four major contributions as a Palestinian activist-scholar. Firstly, I theorize settler colonialism as an operation that is inherently genocidal, outlining ways in which it destroys human and nonhuman lives in my homeland. Secondly, I designate the absorption of environmentalism by Israel for expansionist purposes as “green colonialism.” I provide several examples of this manoeuvre, perceiving it to be a Western environmental, Orientalist, and Zionist concoction. They include Israeli construction of forests as border walls, rezoning of Palestinian localities as “protected areas,” recruitment of settlers into hiking and planting as exercises of Indigenization, and rendering of Palestinians as ecological enemies. Thirdly, I animate the stories of several demolished Palestinian localities, which have been smothered by the Zionist entity, sourcing them from oral archives. Fourthly, Indigenous rebellion in human and nonhuman forms is spotlighted. I also channel Palestinian, scientific, anticolonial, and Islamic knowledge to foster “holistic decolonization.” This notion prioritizes human rights, while attending to the abolition of White supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. The introduction of this dissertation is split into two parts: the first examines the four major foundations of green colonialism in Palestine, (Zionism, Orientalism, settler colonialism, and Western environmentalism), while the second expounds my contributions to literature on the topic. The first chapter of this thesis sketches out the colonial architecture of the Israeli park system, the second chapter largely consists of a case study, (which investigates the imposition of USA Independence Park over the remnants of 8 Jerusalemite villages by Israel), and the third chapter provides a glimpse into the paradoxical fusion of Zionist environmentalism and militarism. This dissertation closes with a summary and points to global openings for Indigenous healing, restoration, and return.


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Settlers for sport: Robert Kossuth, Adam Mills, ‘Fraternal Societies, Settler Colonialism, and Combat Sports on Canada’s Prairie West’, Sport History Review, 2025

11Oct25

Abstract: In southern Alberta, Canada, during the early twentieth century, fraternal organizations such as the Oddfellows, Moose, Elks, and Eagles employed boxing and wrestling to advance their interests and assist in molding members to demonstrate the discipline and respectability expected of a member. These organizations not only appropriated symbols of the natural world—Elk, Eagle, and Moose—to stake a claim to the land and space that they occupied but also offered male settlers social support and economic benefits in the case of injury or death when such support was largely unavailable. Boys and young men represented ideal candidates for membership to continue and promote the brotherhoods’ shared beliefs and values, and boxing and wrestling were considered valuable activities for achieving these ends. As a result, boxing and wrestling benefitted fraternal societies, allowing them to attract new members while entrenching existing settler colonial relations on Canada’s prairie west.


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Settlers need land; it must be confiscated: Abd elkarim Harma, ‘The Colonial Administration’s Policy and the French Governors General in Land Confiscation and the Promotion of the Settler Movement and Its Impact on Algerians (1852-1870)’, El-Hakika (the Truth): Journal for Social and Human Sciences, 24, 3, 2025, pp. 206-224

11Oct25

Abstract: During the colonial period, Algeria underwent significant economic exploitation, primarily centered around land issues, which became the cornerstone of various colonial settlement and exploitation projects. This exploitation intensified from 1852 to 1870, as colonial authorities sought to acquire the largest possible landholdings to serve their economy and accommodate incoming European settlers. This research paper aims to highlight the key methods and means employed to achieve this, emphasizing their Impact on the Algerian people. To clarify these points, I employed a historical recovery methodology, utilizing descriptive, analytical, and statistical tools. One of the findings indicates that the colonizers were relatively successful in altering the economic structure and dismantling the social fabric in certain regions, primarily through changes in the social composition of specific tribes and communities.


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Knowledge is sovereignty: Liam Midzain-Gobin, Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025

11Oct25

Description: Knowledge production in the Anglosphere depends on the erasure of non-Western ways of knowing – especially ways of knowing oneself, the lands and waters, and the relationships between these entities. In settler colonial states those in power seldom question this erasure, despite the ongoing presence and power of Indigenous nations. In this groundbreaking work, Liam Midzain-Gobin illuminates how the logic of improvement animates this epistemological ignorance, both historically and currently. By creating a new world based on settler views, the settler state augments its own power. This way of thinking drives government actions and even influences how settlers and the state imagine what is possible. Examining knowledge production through governance processes, Settler Colonial Sovereignty studies three policy areas: First Nations reserve policy, land and resource monitoring frameworks, and the Indigenous Peoples Survey. Throughout, Midzain-Gobin shows how state sovereignty is never stable but continually being reaffirmed. Inspired by the interaction of Indigenous knowledge with cosmological assumptions to provide different understandings of our place in the world, Settler Colonial Sovereignty imagines how we might move past improvement as a basis for Indigenous-settler relations.


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The colonised settler: Laurent Poliquin, ‘Educating the Colonized Colonizer: Rethinking Francophone Schooling in Canada’, British Journal of Teacher Education and Pedagogy, 2025

08Oct25

Abstract: This article offers a critical reassessment of francophone education in Canada through postcolonial and settler colonial theory. Francophone communities have long framed themselves as colonized minorities resisting linguistic and cultural assimilation. However, this identity often obscures their simultaneous participation in settler colonial structures, particularly regarding Indigenous lands and histories. Adopting a comparative, critical narrative methodology, the article analyzes curriculum frameworks from multiple Canadian provinces, historical documents such as the Parent Commission (1963–1966), and key texts on decolonization and Indigenous–settler relations. Literary and philosophical perspectives complement this analysis by exploring the affective and ethical dimensions of truth-telling in education. Findings reveal that while francophone education emphasizes cultural survival, it often marginalizes Indigenous perspectives or includes them in superficial ways. Curricula across Canada show persistent tensions between gestures of inclusion and deeper structural silences. Institutional and employment precarity among francophone teachers further complicates the adoption of critical pedagogies, especially when they challenge dominant national narratives. The article proposes a pedagogical ethics of truth built around three dimensions: epistemic accountability, affective engagement, and transformative praxis. It calls for curricula co-created with Indigenous partners, validation of emotional responses to injustice, and learning practices grounded in dialogue and land based inquiry. Ultimately, the article challenges the limits of multicultural inclusion and the myth of francophone innocence. Truth telling in education, it argues, must move beyond symbolic gestures to become a foundational commitment—one that embraces discomfort and reimagines historical responsibility as an ongoing and relational process.


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Slovak settlers! Zuzana Palovic , Gabriela Bereghazyova (eds), Slovak Settlers, Global Slovakia, 2025

08Oct25

Description: Countless Slovaks left Slovakia because life there got too hard. A harsh climate, a lack of freedom, pandemics, crop shortages, and an everyday struggle to earn a living were a daily reality. ​ For hundreds of thousands, the only way out was to leave behind their beloved forests, rivers, and mountains. Carried by their hopes and dreams, they ventured across Europe and the Atlantic to lay their roots down in the New World. Slovak Settlers presents 44 authentic stories that piece together the fascinating, powerful, and touching Odyssey of Slovaks who left their homeland in search of a new life in faraway North America. Their destinies reveal a timeless story of shared dreams and hope that should never be forgotten. Although the history of Slovakia is a history of migration, we know so little about the Slovak men and women who dared to cross the ocean in search of a better life and even less about what happened to them after. Their stories help to recover ties severed by decades and even a century of separation.


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Touching wood: Jim Clifford, Sam Huckerby, ‘Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817-61’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.


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Taxing settlers: Jeffrey L. McNairn, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty through Taxation: Direct Taxes, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Did local taxes levied by the Upper Canadian parliament from 1793 apply to Indigenous communities in the colony? Only in 1850 did colonial legislation give an answer by exempting Indigenous peoples from taxes on real and personal property and from statute labour, provided they resided on “Indian” lands. Yet Indigenous leaders had always denied that the colony’s jurisdiction extended to their communities, which they conceived of as political societies governed by their own customary law. A de facto tax exemption had emerged as a result of their refusal of perfect settler sovereignty, but settler resentment grew in the 1820s and 1830s, often focused on local roads. Prior to 1850, colonial law on the question of tax liability was unsettled. Successive attorneys general offered different answers, and the de facto tax exemption was most often associated with the nature of Indigenous land tenure rather than any recognition of their constitutional status. The 1850 act emerged from two contradictory forces: a renewed empire-wide emphasis on humanitarian “protection” of Indigenous peoples as a strategy of colonial governance and Haudenosaunee demands for protection as a strategy to preserve their collective self-government in the face of increasingly aggressive attempts to tax them. Direct taxes were a technology of colonial rule, marking identities and measuring settler sovereignty and the status of Indigenous peoples and land.


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The settler colonial continuum: Paige Raibmon, ‘Violence That Dispossesses: Continuity on the Settler Colonial Timeline’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: This article considers what role and responsibility historians may have when faced with settler society’s tendency to be freshly shocked each time it learns (again) about a colonial horror from its past that was, in fact, already long well known by many. Following an introduction, my argument unfolds in five sections. First, I engage a mostly Indigenous scholarship to suggest replotting British Columbia’s timeline as a continuum, or continuous process, of ongoing violence that illuminates connections across myriad forms of violence. Second, I reflect on an earlier, mostly non-Indigenous historiography about physical force and violence in British Columbia. Third, with this scholarship as context, I use an experimental format to present a catalogue of dispossession drawn from transcripts of the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia (1913–1916). These accounts demonstrate that settlers relied on physical violence during the foundational pre-emption and Crown granting processes to an extent that warrants greater attention. Fourth, I suggest that some important implications follow from this for understandings of British Columbia’s past and present. Fifth, I argue that taking the long view of settler-on-Indigenous violence as a continuum helps clarify connections among forms of violence, particularly in relation to the materiality of forced physical dispossession, and, in so doing, moves us closer to telling histories that are not just for the winners.


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