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Stealing mothers: Kathleen S. Kenny et al, ‘The association of child removal by child protective services and mortality among First Nations and non-First Nations mothers in Canada: a retrospective cohort study’, The Lancet Public Health, 20/01/26

26Jan26

Abstract: Background: Links between maternal exposure to child removal by child protective services and increased mortality have been identified in the general population. However, this association has not been examined in First Nations mothers, who are disproportionately intervened upon by this system. Our study aimed to quantify the relationship between child removal and mortality in First Nations and non-First Nations mothers. Methods: In this retrospective analysis, we used whole population, matched, and sibling cohorts to compare mortality in First Nations and non-First Nations mothers with and without a child removed by child protective services between April 1, 1998, and March 31, 2022, in Manitoba, Canada. First Nations mothers were identified through the First Nations Research File; non-registered or self-identified First Nations mothers, along with Inuit, Métis, and non-Indigenous mothers, were categorised as non-First Nations mothers. We excluded mothers not residing in Manitoba for 2 years before the birth or first removal date of their oldest child. In the whole population cohort, we compared First Nations mothers with a child removed, First Nation mothers without a child removed, non-First Nations mothers with a child removed, and non-First Nations mothers without a child removed. For the matched cohort, First Nations and non-First Nations mothers with a child removed were matched 1:2 with mothers without a child removed based on First Nations status, urbanicity, and maternal age at first birth. For the sibling cohort, we compared First Nations mothers who had a child removed with a sister (with the same biological mother) who did not have a child removed. We extracted individual-level data from Manitoba’s Population Research Data Repository for each contact a person had with health care and social services. We estimated absolute rates and rate ratios of all-cause, unavoidable, and avoidable mortality. Findings: The whole-population cohort included 16 211 First Nations mothers and 77 841 non-First Nations mothers. The prevalence of child removal was 27·3% (4429/16 211) for First Nations mothers versus 4·3% (3353/77 841) for non-First Nations mothers. Compared with unexposed non-First Nations mothers, adjusted mortality rates due to all causes in mothers with a child removed was highest for First Nations mothers (64 deaths per 10 000 person-years [95% CI 57–72]; rate difference 51·65 per 10 000 person-years [95% CI 49·15–54·14]; rate ratio 5·20 [95% CI 3·98–6·78]) followed by non-First Nations mothers (48 deaths per 10 000 person-years [40–56]; 35·28 per 10 000 person-years [32·81–37·74]; 3·87 [2·90–5·15]). Associations persisted in the matched and sibling cohorts. Avoidable causes accounted for the majority of all deaths, and in the sibling cohort in First Nations mothers, child removal was only associated with avoidable mortality. Interpretation: Child removal was associated with preventable deaths in mothers, with the highest risk of death observed in First Nations mothers. Our findings call for recognition of the potential extent of health harm to mothers attributable to child removal and should accelerate action for First Nations-led interventions to support and preserve families.


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The pulverisation of Indigenous property: Jessica A. Shoemaker, ‘Fractionation by Design: Remedy Without Repair in Indigenous-Owned Trust Allotments’, Tulsa Law Review, 61, 1, 2025, pp. 63-90

26Jan26

Abstract: This essay returns to the persistent problem of fractionation—or extreme coownership—within Indigenous-owned trust allotments and argues that fractionation is a structural feature of the specialized federal trust property regime that applies uniquely in Indian country, not an administrative glitch. The Department of the Interior recently completed a ten-year land buyback program funded by its settlement of the Cobell breach-of-trust class action lawsuit. This effort aimed to consolidate fractional co-ownership interests back into tribal control. The Department recently released its final report from the buyback program, and this offers a natural reflection point. After a decade of effort and nearly $1.9 billion in investment, the buyback program transferred roughly one million undivided interests back to tribal ownership. Yet, the structural property dynamics that produced fractionation to begin with still persist, and—after all this investment—fractionation is predicted to rebound to pre-program levels again in only fifteen years. Drawing on a century-long case study of a single allotment on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation (Tract 1305) and decades of research and attention to this problem, this essay shows how piecemeal remedies—like repeated rounds of probate reforms, purchase programs, and land-management process improvements—can stabilize symptoms temporarily but do not repair the deeper property system mechanics that produce these results. Fractionation drains scarce federal resources, fragments tribal territorial authority, and entrenches a federalized land regime at odds with Indigenous governance. The essay calls for repair rather than more doctrinal tinkering: land-based reconciliation led by tribal governments, funded and supported by the federal government, and deeply rooted in Indigenous self-determination and land ethics. Fractionation and associated reservation land and governance challenges are products of the federally created trust property system. This system has become so normalized that it can be mistaken for a natural constraint. But this is a system of the federal government’s own making—and one that can be remade in partnership with, and following the lead of, tribal governments.


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The hunger of settler colonialism: Erica Gonzalez, An examination of the impact of settler colonialism on Blackfoot food security and sovereignty: A landscape and policy approach,, MA dissertation, University of Lethbridge, 2025

26Jan26

Abstract: The thesis examines how the destabilization of food security and the diminishment of food sovereignty occurred for the Blackfoot Peoples in Treaty 7 (the Blackfoot Treaty) territory between 1877 and 1913. Using an ethnographic archival approach, I analyze documents from Library and Archives Canada and the Galt Museum. The study focuses on three areas: the criminalization of the Sundance as a disruption to food sovereignty, the use of rations to destabilize food security, and the imposition of agriculture, ranching, and industries as tools of assimilation as an impact on food security and sovereignty. The archival documents indicate that the destabilization of Blackfoot food security and the decline of food sovereignty were influenced by colonial land and assimilation policies. These policies disrupted ceremonies and restricted mobility under the guise of promoting self-sufficiency and civilization. While the impacts of policies varied across reserves, the policies consistently disrupted land-use practices. In short, the thesis demonstrates that food was central to colonial governance, used to dismantle Blackfoot destabilization of food security and the diminishment of food sovereignty by attempting to replace them with settler economies.


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Transitioning: Suzanne Chew, Tracey Galloway, ‘Settler colonialism lock-in: Transitions and the prefiguring of settler futurities’, Energy Research & Social Science, 132, 2026, #104515

26Jan26

Abstract: Transitions research commonly assumes the dominant Western paradigm of modern ontology and its ideological colonial and capitalist relations. Yet these assumptions, left uninterrogated, endanger the emancipatory and liberatory potential heralded by new energy futures within just transitions, eliding decolonial futurities that honour tenets of Indigenous resurgence as well as truth and reconciliation. In colonized places where the invaders never left, these onto-ideological assumptions risk perpetuating settler colonialism and its manifest harms, reproducing the status quo of social inequity and hegemonic power relations. Learning from the concepts by Seto et al. (2016) of ‘carbon lock-in’ and Byrd’s (2011) ‘transit of empire’, we aim to further illuminate such risks by characterizing this path dependency as settler colonialism lock-in. Here, settler colonialism lock-in refers to the entrenchment of an enmeshed modern ontology, contemporary capitalism, and colonialism within the institutional, political, social, and infrastructural (legal, financial, physical) fabric of transitions, by default prefiguring and prioritizing settler futurities. Centering equity and justice necessitates reflection upon the crux of the question: whose priorities, and whose futurities, do transitions centre? Through such reflection, we call upon researchers and practitioners working on transitions to consider different worlds and learn from Indigenous thought, and in resisting neoliberal worlds, to reimagine who can and should profit from transitions. The idea of settler colonialism lock-in aims to provoke thought and reflection in discerning such path dependency to avoid these slippery paths, towards building just transitions.


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Parking settler colonialism: Sarah Montoya, ‘Moving Toward Accountability: Challenging Settler Narratives through Interpretive Shifts and Tribal Engagement at Anza National Historic Trail’, Parks Stewardship Forum, 42, 1, 2026, pp. 101-110

19Jan26

Abstract: This article summarizes the work I undertook from 2023–2025 as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail (Anza NHT). It identifies long-standing gaps in Indigenous representation and participation on the trail and reviews the perpetuation of settler-colonial narratives that minimize the violence of settler invasion and marginalize the contributions of Native peoples in interpretive materials. These critiques are set alongside the significant interpretive and relational shifts initiated by Anza NHT staff following the adoption of revised themes and interpretive approaches in the 2023 Foundation Document. The report details the creation of internal onboarding materials designed to reorient the staff’s understanding of the impact of Indigenous dispossession, settler occupation, and the legal and structural violence that shaped the United States federal government and the National Park Service. The report also outlines the development of external Tribal outreach materials that build on this understanding of settler violence and articulate the trail’s commitments to accountability that exceeded the minimum federal requirement within an inherently asymmetrical system. The work concludes by summarizing updates to interpretive materials and highlighting new projects and partnerships along the trail, including the development of the Anza 250 commemorative logo, a revised Anza NHT brochure, and enhanced support for Tribes and Native-led organizations made possible through the Mellon partnership’s funding.


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The land eaters: Mansel G. Blackford, Land Hunger: Ohio and the Western Frontiers, Ohio University Press, 2025

18Jan26

Description: In Land Hunger, Mansel G. Blackford explores the central role of land use in the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro Americans as the new nation expanded westward from Ohio to the Oregon Country. Blackford emphasizes how people adapted to new and changed environments and focuses on key themes related to environmental and frontier studies: the land-use interactions between Native Americans and outsiders, the influence of government policies, and the impact of earlier concepts about the ownership and use of land and water that continue to affect us today in the face of climate change. The first part of the book delves into Euro American and African American settlement in the Ohio Country during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Driven by “Ohio fever” and influenced by a blend of pragmatic, romantic, and capitalistic ideals, tens of thousands crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle and farm in an unfamiliar land. It was in Ohio and the Midwest that many Americans developed their views on land and the environment, and where the new federal government devised methods for surveying and selling claimed lands. Subsequent chapters analyze how Ohioans and others attempted to apply Midwest-born ideas and practices in the Oregon Country and the Great Plains—regions with significantly different environments—with limited success. Land Hunger defines “frontiers” as zones of interaction between distinct groups of people, offering a broad interpretation of these contested spaces. The book explores how frontiers were depicted in fiction, where their portrayal helped establish their meaning and significance to incoming Americans. Blackford examines diaries, letters, and reminiscences, as well as a broad range of scholarly studies in this historical synthesis.


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The wreck of settler colonialism: Coll Thrush, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific, University of Washington Press, 2025

18Jan26

Description: The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers. Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.


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Emasculating settler colonialism: Sam McKegney, Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story, University of Regina Press, 2021

18Jan26

Description: Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song—one that celebrates rather than pathologizes; one that seeks diversity and strength; one that overturns heteropatriarchy without centering settler colonialism? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities even be creative, inclusive, erotic? Carrying the Burden of Peaceanswers affirmatively. Countering the perception that “masculinity” has been so contaminated as to be irredeemable, the book explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism. Sam McKegney’s argument is simple: if we understand that masculinity pertains to maleness, and that there are those within Indigenous families, communities and nations who identify as male, then the concession that masculinity concerns only negative characteristics bears stark consequences. It would mean that the resources available to affirm those subjectivities will be constrained, and perhaps even contaminated by shame. Indigenous masculinities are more than what settler colonialism has told us. To deny the beauty, vulnerability, and grace that can be expressed and experienced as masculinity is to concede to settler colonialism’s limiting vision of the world; it is to eschew the creativity that is among our greatest strengths. Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominative Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.


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Indigenous sovereignty just down the road: Kiara Vellios, Andréanne Doyon, ‘Examining Indigenous resurgence in urban parks through Vancouver’s Stanley Park’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article explores the collaborative work of the Stanley Park Intergovernmental Committee and Working Group, established by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation in partnership with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It examines how principles of coexistence planning, grounded in Indigenous resurgence and the disruption of settler normativity, can guide the reclamation of urban parklands in support of Indigenous self-determination, cultural identity, rights, and sovereignty. These planning principles, along with a pivotal shift in local governance toward truth-telling and grounded normativity, demonstrate how Indigenous resurgence fosters cultural visibility and socio-spatial inclusion of Indigenous Peoples within urban spaces.


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Occupied labour between the rvier and the sea: Ihab Maharme, ‘The Politics of labour: everyday practices of Palestinian workers in the settler economy’, Journal of Political Power, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article examines the daily practices of Palestinian workers within the settler economy as forms of resistance that penetrate and undermine settler-colonial domination. While existing scholarship emphasises systematic Israeli violations against Palestinian labour, it often neglects the power of workers to develop everyday resistance practices. By centring labour as a site of daily struggle and drawing on nine semi-structured interviews with Palestinian workers in the settler economy, the article offers new insights into lived experience under settler colonialism and argues that workers’ everyday practices penetrate settler sovereignty, producing an intertwined form of sovereignty that challenges colonial domination over the land.


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