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Environmentalist settler colonialism? J. M. Bacon, Kirsten Vinyeta, Graham Ward, Ella Widmann, ‘Mapping the web of solidarity: a social network analysis of shifting Tribal engagement among the Big 10 environmental organizations in the United States’, Environmental Sociology, 2025

21Jul25

Abstract: In the last decade, Big 10 environmental movement organization (EMO) rhetoric in the U.S. has noticeably shifted to include topics pertaining to social justice. For Indigenous studies scholars, Indigenous peoples, and Tribal governments and organizations, this raises questions about how Big 10 organizations grapple with Tribal sovereignty and with ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. As organizations largely led by non-Natives, EMO failures to acknowledge Tribal sovereignty reflect settler colonial legacies of Indigenous erasure. Nevertheless, EMOs have made progress toward improving relationships with Tribes in recent years. Our research employs social network analysis and qualitative methods to explore the collaborations the ‘Big 10’ have built since 2010. Our findings affirm the importance of two large-scale, land-based conflicts – the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Bears Ears National Monument – as catalysts for strengthened ties between EMOs and Tribes. As EMOs interacted closely with Tribal partners, their rhetorical frames shifted from environmental and cultural frames to political frames centering Tribal treaty rights and sovereignty. We also found EMO involvement in direct action supporting Indigenous peoples fluctuated throughout the dataset depending on the presence or absence of high-profile environmental conflicts affecting Indigenous peoples.


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Anti-Indigenous racism is different: Darell Howard, Adele N. Norris, Juan M. Tauri, ‘Rewriting a violent settler-colonial history: why anti-Māori racism must be distinguished from other forms of racism in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2025

21Jul25

Abstract: Driven by a United Nations 2017 recommendation to assess New Zealand’s progress to eliminate racial discrimination and the 2019 terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques, the Ministry of Justice along with National Iwi (Indigenous) Chairs forum (NICF) launched the National Action Plan Against Racism (NAPAR) Joint Steering Committee in April 2022. In April 2024, the NICF walked away from NAPAR. Their departure occurred after the newly entered right-wing government advised the official document to limit its focus on colonial racism, institutional racism and specific references to anti-Māori/Indigenous racism. This paper interrogates the embedded egalitarian myth and extensive legislation imposed overtime to distinguish racism, as a broad category, from strategic assaults on Māori/Indigenous sovereignty. We conclude by contextualizing current attempts to diminish focus on the historical specificity of anti-Māori racial oppression demonstrate deliberate state efforts to target Māori upon which Pākehā/white sovereignty is asserted and maintained.


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Acceptance and reparations: Andreea Ioana Zota, Ismehen Melouka, Jo-Anne Wemmers, ‘Settler-colonialism, social acceptance, and support for reparations in Canada’, International Review of Victimology, 2025

21Jul25

Abstract: In contexts of collective victimization such as settler colonialism in Canada, recognizing both
historical and ongoing victimization, as well as supporting reparations measures, is crucial for healing
the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and for propelling reconciliation
efforts forward. While most non-Indigenous Canadians recognize the historical victimization of
Indigenous peoples, fewer acknowledge ongoing victimization of Indigenous communities and
support measures promoting their right to self-determination. The recognition of ongoing
inequality can evoke feelings of guilt and pose a threat to the privileges of the advantaged groups,
which may lead to minimizing and disregarding experiences of victimization of the disadvantaged
group. While recognition of ongoing victimization can be uncomfortable, it is not impossible.
According to the needs-based model, members of the advantaged group may be more willing
to acknowledge the ongoing structural victimization and consider relinquishing their privileges if
they receive social acceptance from members of the disadvantaged group. Using data (n=313)
collected from an original survey, this paper examines if social acceptance by Indigenous peoples
influences: (a) acknowledgment of ongoing victimization, (b) support for justice measures, and (c)
recognition of Indigenous autonomy among non-Indigenous Canadians. The findings suggest that
there is a positive relationship between social acceptance and both recognition of victimization
and support for justice measures. However, no significant association was found between social
acceptance and support for autonomy. These findings partially support the needs-based model,
suggesting that social acceptance plays a limited role in promoting reconciliation.


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Black settlers? Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, Riverhead Books, 2025

21Jul25

Description: The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States. In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people — and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him. As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people were on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears. McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land. In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didn’t, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black people’s attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.


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Settler ruination: Hatib A. Kadir, Anna Tsing, ‘Possession/Dispossession: Making Property at the Edge of the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2025

18Jul25

Abstract: Property (in its currently most powerful form) is made through the violence of dispossession. Property-making requires the transformation of landscape; prior residents, both human and nonhuman, are no longer welcome. This process is particularly clear in ‘frontiers’, that is, places where property is in formation through the displacement of Indigenous peoples and ecologies. This article takes up wetland drainage and mining for concrete aggregate as exemplars of this kind of property formation. In Sorong, a frontier city at the western edge of Indonesian Papua, transforming the landscape builds property for settler occupation. Indigenous land rights are channeled into alliances between settlers and Indigenous clan leaders to hasten the transformation of land for settler economies. ‘Intimate violence’ shapes relations not only with settlers but also among and within Indigenous clans. At the ‘edge of the Anthropocene’, we argue, landscape transformation reshapes both ecologies and human subjectivities, creating property as ecological ruin.


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The horror of settler colonialism and its antidote: Tracy A. Stephens, ‘Kinship as a Counter to the Settler Gaze in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians’, Journal of Modern Literature, 48, 3, 2025, pp. 20-38

18Jul25

Abstract: Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 horror novel The Only Good Indians follows the haunting and murder of four Blackfeet men by a vengeful monster called Elk Head Woman, who manipulates the settler gaze to make the men look to outsiders as the source of the violence, much as violence within real-life Indigenous communities is often illegible to those outside them. In borrowing and adapting the deer woman trope, the novel furthers Jones’s longstanding challenge to settler notions of Indigenous authenticity by both textually and metatextually countering the myth that Indigenous people have an innate connection to their culture. Instead, it offers a vision of kinship among characters with diverse ways of being “good Indians” as an alternative to essentialism that allows Indigenous people and artists, including writers of horror fiction, to escape the constraints of the settler gaze.


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Pulling the wool over settler eyes (wool is settler colonial, cotton is colonial): Yahya Birt, ‘Bradford’s Wool as a Settler Colonial Commodity’, Somali Village, 2025

18Jul25

Excerpt: In the early 19th century, Bradford emerged as a powerhouse of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, becoming the nation’s leader in mechanised wool spinning. Wool was the town’s lifeblood; by 1881, a third of Bradford’s working men and two-thirds of its working women were employed in the trade. While Manchester was known as “King Cotton”, Bradford earned the moniker “Worstedopolis”. Unlike cotton, which is widely associated with the slave plantations of the Americas, wool still carries a romanticised image as a traditional, local product tied to Britain’s pastoral heritage. Wool is even tied up with the myth of Bradford’s foundation, as a “broad ford” where medieval sheep drovers on their way to York settled when they found the soft waters of the stream, Bradford Beck, ideal for preparing the fleece for sale. However, during the 19th century, wool was transformed into a colonial commodity. The mechanisation of wool combing in Yorkshire helped drive the global expansion of sheep farming, fuelling settler colonialism across the world. From the Scottish Highlands to the plains of Western America, and from Australia to South Africa, wool production required vast tracts of land – land that was often violently seized from its original inhabitants.


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Settler colonialism is genocidal: Maureen S. Hiebert, ‘University Teaching of Indigenous Genocides in North America: A Pedagogical Perspective on Teaching “Our Own Case”’, Genocide Studies International, 16, 1, 2025

18Jul25

Abstract: I explore the specific challenges of teaching genocides committed in the United States and Canada against Indigenous peoples through various methods and the very logic of settler colonialism. The positionality of settler professors and students means that this subject stands in sharp contrast to other commonly taught cases of genocide which are “far away” physically, psychologically, and often temporally. Teaching Indigenous genocide in North America involves the fraught experience of educating students about the intentional elimination of Indigenous communities by us on a homeland claimed by Indigenous peoples and settler states and societies. These efforts are further challenged by scholars and activists who reject the study of Indigenous genocide in both countries as “woke” campus culture intended to undermine Western values and civilization. Incorporating Indigenous genocides into genocide studies courses can be facilitated by making explicit our own positionality as settler instructors, avoiding cultural appropriation and making Indigenous students feel they must salve our conscience, careful case selection, and respectful collaboration with local Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers built on the sensitive cultivation of community relationships.


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Settler colonialism is gendered: Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, ‘(Re)Making Native Space: Locating Gendered Geographies of Law, Territoriality, and Dispossession in the Colonial Archive’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

18Jul25

Abstract: Revisiting Cole Harris’s Making Native Space, this article responds to Harris’s assertion that settler attitudes toward Indigenous people were not gendered but that, rather, it was the civilization–savagery paradigm that conditioned Indigenous dispossession. Revisiting the same colonial archive of British Columbia through the dual lenses of legal geography and Indigenous feminism, the article examines available evidence about Indigenous women’s role in land governance in British Columbia. Although fragmented and partial, due to the historical and colonial devaluation of Indigenous women’s knowledge, evidence is available on the specific forms of land governance throughout northern, interior, and coastal regions of British Columbia, forming what might be considered property relations in colonial terms. Through a rereading of the archive with knowledge of Indigenous gender and legal relations, it is argued that settlers were able to suppress the legal nature of women’s land governance practices through colonial understandings of Indigenous women as racial and gendered subjects who were already always deterritorialized, incapable of forming territorial expressions of authority. The suppression of Indigenous women’s authority is continued in settler colonial paradigms that separate traditional ecological knowledge from realms of law or governance and that deny gender as a structural component of settler colonialism. Key Words: colonial archives, deterritorialization, gendered dispossession, Indigenous legal geography, settler colonialism.


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Arresting (settler colonialism): Don Weatherburn , Michael Doyle , Teagan Weatherall , Joanna Wang, ‘Colonization and Its Legacy: The Correlates of Indigenous Arrest’, The British Journal of Criminology, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: The Indigenous peoples of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all over-represented in their prison systems. Yet despite a shared history of colonization and dispossession, most Indigenous peoples have little if any contact with the criminal justice system. In this article we put forward and test a model of Australian Aboriginal arrest which seeks to explain why some Aboriginal people come into frequent contact with the criminal justice system, but the majority do not. We examine the influence of substance use, social environment, human, financial and social capital, exposure to arrest and experience of racism. The base risk of Aboriginal arrest in the past 5 years is 14.9 per cent; however, the risk of arrest for those who have experienced racist treatment over the past 12 months is much higher for those dealing with drug and alcohol problems or psychological stress, who were removed from their family as a child, or who have experienced racist treatment.


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