settler colonial studies blog

The active archive: Rose Miron, Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2024

06Jan26

Description: Who has the right to represent Native history? The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history. Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee. As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Always beware of the green settler: Grey Weinstein, Angel White, ‘Green Technologies, White Colonies: Zionism and the Colonial Uses of “Indigeneity” and “Environmentalism”’, Critical Zionism Studies, 2, 1, 2025

06Jan26

Abstract: This paper explores two competing liberal Zionist discourses which attempt to justify the Zionist project by invoking a unique relationship between settlers and the land. First, we examine how despite its enactment of environmental harm and ecological apartheid, contemporary Zionist discourse frames the Israeli state as a global leader in environmentalism, positing the Zionist settler as a civilizing force over a “savage” landscape. Second, we analyze a competing Zionist discourse that frames Zionism as an Indigenous land sovereignty movement. Taken together, we demonstrate how adherents of liberal Zionism simultaneously view themselves as Indigenous stewards of the land, and as settlers whose technological superiority to the Indigenous “other” justifies their control of the land. To understand these ecological discourses, we analyze liberal Zionist writing and place it in conversation with Indigenous scholars’ understanding of Indigeneity as founded on resistance to colonialism. Contextualizing the narrative of the Israeli state as a pillar of environmentalism within a broader history of colonial environmentalism, we demonstrate how this narrative is both factually inaccurate as well as a continuation of the colonial aims that founded the environmentalist movement. Despite their blatant and inherent contradictions, these two strands of liberal Zionist discourse operate together to disguise the colonial nature of the Zionist project while continuing to perpetuate that very colonialism. We identify three central mechanisms that liberal Zionism uses to accomplish this: 1) it posits a post-politics framework that naturalizes the Israeli state’s colonial expansion; 2) it imposes a white supremacist view of natural and racial purity onto Palestine’s ecology; and 3) it re-embraces the terra nullius view of Palestinians as invisible. These mechanisms demonstrate the centrality of racism to liberal Zionist discourse and spotlight the structural flaws in liberal and leftist conceptualizations of Indigeneity and the environment. We conclude by calling on environmentalists and anti-Zionist critics to engage with how liberal Zionism continually weaponizes appeals to sustainability and decolonization in service of white supremacy.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The climate crisis and the crisis of settler colonialism (with a chapter on the ‘History of Settler Colonialism’): Sarah Haley Knowles, Diminished Prosperity: How a Warming Planet Impedes Healthy Families, Communities, and Economies, Palgrave, 2025

06Jan26

Description: This book explores the relationship between climate change, reproductive justice, and the prosperity of families, communities, and economies. Bringing together critical analyses of historical white feminism, classical economics, and corporate success models, it argues that the consequences of climate change render traditional approaches to prosperity ineffective and irrelevant in modern times. Climate change does not impact us all equally, and the impacts of extreme weather and climate events are influenced by societal structures. Socioeconomic power, cultural norms, and traditional roles make some people more vulnerable to climate change than others. In exploring the correlations between climate change, increased cost of living, and decreased birth rates, this study paves the way for a new prosperity model based on a four-part test to promote, protect, and advance the health and long-term viability of families, communities, economies, and ecosystems through sustainable and responsible economic principles, means, and indicators of success. Alongside these findings, the book shines a light on the hypocrisy of the modern feminist movement that sacrifices the prosperity of low-income women of color in order to leverage the modern corporate success model for the prosperity of the white elite, which is ultimately what is most responsible for climate change. It will be of interest to researchers in gender studies, feminist theory, environmental sociology, sustainability studies, and social policy.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

An olive grove is not a pine forest: Christopher C. Jadallah, ‘What could be more innocent than planting trees? Thinking with Palestine in land education’, Curriculum Inquiry, 2026

06Jan26

Abstract: Land education, as both theory and pedagogy, works to unsettle the colonial dynamics that continue to pervade both land relations and learning environments. In this article, I turn to the geographies of Palestine to engage in a critical reading of two prominent landscape types in the region—pine forests and olive groves—with the goal of unearthing, and thus confronting, the ways in which settler colonial inheritances manifest across ecologies. From this reading, I call attention to a related phenomenon: how curricular encounters—in this case, activities such as planting pine trees—can serve to reify and reinscribe settler colonial dynamics, despite often being portrayed with a certain innocence. In contrast, curricular encounters grounded in Palestinian lifeways, land relations, and sumud, or steadfastness, present an alternative to settler environmentalism and create openings for education to contribute to decolonial futures. Through these analyses, I reveal how Palestine teaches us to focus not only on place-based ecologies as sites for curricular intervention; it also teaches us to situate such interventions in transnational analyses that build global solidarities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenising Argentina’s settler history: Robert Christensen, ‘Ethnohistory and Indigenous People on Argentina’s Southern Frontier: Pampas-Patagonia, 1810-1885’, History Compass, 2025

05Jan26

Abstract: The growth of the field of ethnohistory on Argentina’s southern frontier has revolutionized Argentine historiography, challenging historians to rethink time-worn subjects as they considered Indigenous peoples’ experiences. This article contends that historians should prioritize decolonizing the field through putting Indigenous peoples’ experiences and ways of thinking at the center of their analyses rather than the government and settler frameworks that are most available in source material. Expanding the range of geographic and temporal frameworks that are deployed in historical studies will also help refocus attention on the events that were most important for these people. “Indigenizing” the study of Argentina’s Indigenous people is a worthy goal and a necessary step toward understanding the Indigenous world of tierra adentro on its own terms.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Žižek’s settler colonialism: Jamil Khader, ‘Universalizing Capital, Foreclosing Necro-Imperialism: Žižek’s Liberal-Zionist Response to the Gaza Genocide’, Middle East Critique, 2026

05Jan26

Abstract: This article offers an ideological critique of Slavoj Žižek’s recent interventions on the Gaza genocide, beginning with his October 2023 Project Syndicate article. It argues that by appropriating the post-Oslo liberal-Zionist position he once criticized, Žižek forecloses the real antagonism – necro-imperialist Zionist settler colonialism – and recodes it as a tragedy of mutual victimhood within the universal logic of global capitalism. At the same time, he re-integrates this antagonism into his symbolic universe through mythic, geographical, and ethical disavowal strategies. Consequently, Žižek reframes the Gaza genocide and Israeli war crimes as an ethical impasse grounded in David Ben-Gurion’s notion of an unbridgeable ‘abyss’ between Zionist and Palestinian claims to Palestine. This culminates in a ‘pragmatist realist’ politics of hope that imagines solidarity between 1948 Palestinians and Israeli Jews through their ‘weird similarities’, without confronting how Zionist colonialism structurally precludes working-class solidarity. The article concludes by asking whether Žižek’s Hegelian notion of the universal singular can still generate new conditions of intelligibility for Palestinian liberation in the necro-imperial world.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settler local state and its representation: Karen Bird, Abbey Forbes, Gloria Liu, Maïa Rousseau, ‘Talk matters: local council debates over electoral reform for Indigenous representation in Canada and New Zealand’, Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, 30, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: This study looks at recent city council debates over introducing Indigenous seats in Canadian and New Zealand municipalities, asking whether debate is respectful and focused on relevant issues, and agreements are decisive and consequential. Despite very different national contexts and local government systems, overall we find similar arguments across the two countries. And while deliberation is generally civil and principled among councils as a whole, individual councillors who voted against Indigenous representation tended to argue in ways that are potentially polarising. We relate our observations to wider arguments about the exclusion of urban Indigenous peoples from local policymaking and the importance of making rational inputs available for citizens’ judgement and decision.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settler state and the settler people: Richard Howson, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou, ‘Gramsci and “The Voice”: Closing the Gap Between “The Social” and “The Political” in Australia’s failed 2023 Referendum on Indigenous representation’, International Gramsci Journal, 6, 2, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: On 14 October 2023, Australians voted down a referendum proposal that would have acknowledged the place of Indigenous Peoples as First Peoples in the Australian Constitution, and which would have provided Indigenous Peoples with a “Voice” to the Australian Parliament. While some commentators chose to label the defeat as proof of Australia’s inherent racism, in this article we argue the failure of the referendum on the Voice was ultimately a lost opportunity for the Australian government which organised the vote but then refused to provide the moral and intellectual leadership to educate the public as to exactly why the Voice was required. As such it failed to demonstrate the leadership required of an stato integrale (integral state), in particular its educative functions. In this article we first outline the origins and evolution of the Voice referendum proposal before then explaining our methodology, method and positionality in writing about this topic. Thirdly, we subject the central texts of the referendum to a Gramscian analysis before finally we detail the referendum result and position the vote within Australia’s changing demographic structure. Throughout the article, we argue a Gramscian analysis of the Voice referendum demonstrates the reality of a gap between what we describe as the social (the people) and the political (the state), one that is more complex than accusations of racism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonial violence is gendered: Emily Grafton, Amber Fletcher, ‘Settler Colonial Saskatchewan and Gender based Violence Against Indigenous Women’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 12, 2, 2025

04Jan26

Abstract: Women and gender nonconforming people living in Saskatchewan, Canada, face staggeringly high rates of gender-based violence (GBV). These rates are disproportionately experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit or gender-queer individuals, and can be attributed to both historical and ongoing settler colonial practices. This article provides a structural analysis linking GBV against women and gender nonconforming people to the province’s settler colonial politics. Drawing together theoretical and empirical sources, we provide a conceptual synthesis that connects macro-level political and sociocultural ideologies to past and present colonial events. We analyze relevant legislation, policy, provincial budgets, peer-reviewed scholarship, industry-related reports, and media documents. As such, this article argues that GBV perpetrated against Indigenous women is central to settler colonial violence, enabling the settler state to foster settler colonial expansion and Indigenous dispossession, which are power imbalances in urgent need of redistribution. These settler colonial mechanics are readily observable in Saskatchewan, a province at the forefront of settler colonial development in Canada, partly through these disproportionate GBV rates.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settler colonial future is bleak: Stefanus Galang Ardana, ‘Whose Apocalypse? Unfuturability and the Politics of Settler-Colonial Futurity in Western Apocalyptic Narratives’, Retorik, 13, 2, 2025

03Jan26

Abstract: This paper argues that reading Western settler-colonial apocalyptic narratives—including films, video games, and novels such as The Road, the Fallout series, Children of Men, and Interstellar—through the lens of unfuturability reveals their underlying political function. I distinguish between “apocalypse-as-genre,” the spectacular collapse imagined in these works, and “apocalypse-as-structure,” the slow violence already endured in places such as Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. The analysis identifies three recurring settler-colonial tropes that work to secure the future as a racially exclusive domain: the reimagining of land as an emptied frontier, the rebirth of the hunter-hero through righteous violence, and the salvation of the future through a settler adoption fantasy. These tropes function as a form of “white property” by controlling who inherits futurity. In response, unfuturability is proposed as both an analytic and an ethic: a political refusal of the colonial future that opens space for plural, relational worlds already being built through Indigenous land stewardship, Black mutual aid, and decolonial archival practice. By using unfuturability to name and critique these narrative patterns, this paper offers a framework for reading apocalyptic culture beyond the horizons secured by settler futurity.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute