settler colonial studies blog

The settler tree and the Indigenous forest: Lars Östlund, Macarena Fernández Génova, Miguel Cáceres, Elle Eriksson, ‘Timber colonialism in the periphery: Timber frontiers and indigenous peoples land use in northern Scandinavia and southern Patagonia in the late 19th and early 20th century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 89, 2025, pp. 213-225

08Aug25

Abstract: During the nineteenth century an intense exploitation of natural resources such as wood and timber in what was considered “marginal” or remote regions started, and was driven by an ever-increasing demand in industrialized regions. One common denominator for the timber exploitation that opened the global expansion of capitalism beyond the borders of Europe was the brutal intrusions into Indigenous territories. The overall aim of this study is to analyse two timber frontier movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: one in northern Sweden and one in southern Chile, intruding into previously un-logged old-growth forests on ancestral Indigenous territories. The large-scale commercial logging began around the mid-nineteenth century in both regions. It was driven by external demand and financed by national and/or international capital. New logging entrepreneurs moved into the territories and established sawmills, brought in workers to run the sawmills, cut trees in the forest and transported the timber to the sawmills. In northern Sweden the logging industry was the main economic activity, while in southern Patagonia the logging of timber was one of several forms of natural resource exploitations complemented by mining, rangeland sheep herding and trade through the region. In both regions, the logging frontier was often intertwined with agricultural expansion promoted by the state and global capitalism. In both studied regions the colonial legacy of the nineteenth century timber frontiers has left a heavy burden on the forest landscapes, on the rights of the Indigenous peoples whose lands were exploited and on the present legal situation. Challenges for the future are to re-establish recognition of Indigenous heritage and land tenure rights in both regions, according to international conventions, as well as restoring ecological qualities to the associated forest ecosystems for the sustainability of Indigenous practices.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The beads of settler colonialism: Eric Daniel Johnson, Zoë Antoinette Eddy, ‘Beads of Settler Bafflement and Indigenous Futurity: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda’, American Anthropologist, 2025

08Aug25

Abstract: Beads are a medium through which settlers and Indigenous peoples of North America shape the future. Here, we apply the analytic of futurity to examine two case studies of bead making and bead working across archaeology and cultural anthropology. Johnson examines The Mint at Pascack, a fictionalized account of the Campbell Wampum Factory. The Campbell Factory was a Euro-American-owned workshop in New Jersey that produced shell beads for export to Indigenous consumers throughout the 19th century. The Mint shows how settler futurity replaces histories of Indigenous dispossession and appropriation with futures of civilizational supremacy and Native elimination. Eddy considers the Native Baby Yoda phenomenon and adjacent uses of Disney to show how Indigenous beaders use popular media to claim space in new art movements. Beaders engage with long-term intergenerational futures while also contesting settler futurity through rupture, play, and reinvention. We argue that both Indigenous and settler futurities are made and contested through a creative combination of storytelling and transformations of material culture centered on youth. Where settler and Indigenous futurities collide, we observe the affect of settler bafflement, or the confused, sometimes humorous experience of being forced to recognize Indigeneity in ways that interrupt settler expectations and temporalities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On settler colonialism from Afterlives: Ishfaq Ullah, Zahid Kamal, Haris Bari, ‘Settler Colonialism the Gradual Elimination of the Natives: Assimilation, Cultural Destruction, Dislocation of Land, Forced Relocation Represented by Gurnah in the Novel Afterlives’, Qualitative Research Journal for Social Studies, 2, 2, 2025, pp. 1016-1023

08Aug25

Abstract: The present research paper focuses on the ways in which the portrayal of settler colonization through the subtle and devastating means is discussed in the novel Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah (2020). The focus is on the numerous strategies employed by settler colonial states in an attempt to dominate indigenous populations, such as displacement, cultural genocide, and dispossession, and assimilation. This article takes a closer look at how such gradual, yet violent acts dissemble the indigenous people, in this case, the process of destroying the culture and severing them off their ancestral lands is done systematically using the novel as a sample. The example of the long-term impact of such colonial activities on the existence of people and the historical memory of the collective as a whole is movingly offered by the story of Afterlives. This paper aims to give insight into the symbolic effects of settler colonizing, by analyzing their life and the socio-political context of the characters.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous Chicago: Free and open to all: Sep 12, 2024–Jan 04, 2025 At the Newberry – Trienens Galleries

08Aug25

Chicago has always been a Native place.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler Arendt: Dana Francisco Miranda, ‘Wretched Spaces: Manichean Divisions in the Arendtian Republic’, in Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neil Roberts (eds), Creolizing Hannah Arendt, Bloomsbury, 2025

08Aug25

Access the chapter here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenising archeology? Craig N. Cipolla, ‘Archaeology’s epistemological breadth: Collaborative-Indigenous and ontological turns in historical perspective’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 79, 2025, #101715

06Aug25

Abstract: This paper considers two Indigenous-oriented approaches in contemporary archaeology that seek to increase archaeology’s epistemological breadth: collaborative Indigenous archaeology and the ontological turn. One more practical, the other more theoretical, these approaches are rarely considered together. Each seeks to build new connections between archaeology and Indigenous peoples, politics, and/or perspectives. These connections increase focus on Indigenous knowledges while identifying—and correcting for—the arbitrary modernist values that undergird the discipline. Although they prioritize similar goals, these approaches take very different paths. By placing them into historical context and highlighting connections to previous anthropological and archaeological engagements with difference or “alterity,” this paper emphasizes important similarities and differences between these approaches. Drawing historical parallels with relativist and feminist turns, this comparison shows important distinctions between how new practitioners and new theories help to expand archaeology’s epistemological breadth.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Targeting children: Brittany Babij, Existence as Resistance: Examining Israeli Efforts to Eliminate the Native Palestinian Child Through a Discussion on Settler Colonialism, Securitization, and Genocide, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2025

05Aug25

Abstract: By exploring the three themes of settler colonialism, securitization, and genocide, I analyze the ongoing Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza through a multidisciplinary theoretical lens whereby I essentially argue that the genocide Israel is perpetuating was always intentional in that it stems from the logic of elimination which is inherent within the settler colonial nature of its state formation (and even earlier, with the emergence of Zionism in the late 19th century). I further argue that Israel seeks, in particular, to target the native Palestinian child through a sublogic of limiting future possibilities, or in other words, the elimination of futurity. According to this logic, existence is resistance for the Indigenous in Indigenous lands, whereby survival serves as the ultimate testament to resilience in the face of settler colonial violence and erasure.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The architecture of settler colonialism: Stephen Travers, Home on Native Land: Decolonizing Architectural Education Through Indigenous Collaboration, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2025

05Aug25

Abstract: My thesis examines identity and architecture through my lens as an aspiring Canadian architect who uncovers my ancestral history of colonization as original settlers in Gespe’gewa’gi in 1785. After discovering my family’s role in colonizing the coast of Mawipoqtapei, I question my own future practice as an architect in the continued colonization of Native Land. I also critique architecture’s failure to honour Indigenous sovereignty through meaningful collaboration in the design process. Through Critical Regionalism, Indigenous knowledge systems, and case studies of architects engaging with colonial histories, I search for a path toward decolonization in architecture. By challenging research practices and settler-controlled design processes, this thesis argues that reconciliation in architecture requires fundamental restructuring to ensure that Indigenous voices lead the transformation of the built environment.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler or nonsettler? Randa Abdel-Fattah, ‘Muslim Solidarity with Palestine whilst Living on Stolen Land: The politics of Ramadan in Australia’, ReOrient, 9, 2, 2025

04Aug25

Abstract: This paper contextualises Muslim celebrations within a neoliberal understanding of politics and the consequent erasure of Indigenous identity. It traces the overlap of spectacles of Israeli brutality against Palestinians during Ramadan with official Ramadan and Eid celebrations in Australia when the Islamic concept of “ummah” is invoked to mobilise Muslim solidarity with Palestine. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, and drawing on Critical Indigenous studies, Settler Colonial Studies, and Critical Muslim Studies, I analyse the discursive repertoires mobilised by Muslim “representatives” in their Ramadan/Eid engagements with the Australian settler-colonial state. I outline how respectability politics and liberal multicultural agendas pursued by Muslim community leadership legitimate and reproduce settler-colonial relations of power and demonstrate how this undermines a praxis of ummah as potential clarion call to decolonial, anti-imperial struggle both here on stolen land and in solidarity with Palestinians.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The meaning of settler colonialism: Annalee Ring, ‘A critical semiology of settler colonial meaning-making: de-naturalizing and re-politicizing contradictory and intertwined mythologies’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

04Aug25

Abstract: This paper highlights contributions of Indigenous and decolonial scholars to semiology, focusing on how settler colonialism generates systems of meaning that support its establishment, maintenance, and reproduction as well as how intertwined myths contribute to sustain settler colonialism on Turtle Island. These scholars argue that settler colonialism’s longevity requires the naturalization and internalization of intertwined mythologies. These settler colonial mythologies justify violence against Indigenous people and the expropriation and exploitation of Indigenous land, resulting in ongoing social and environmental injustices. Further, settler colonial myths operate collectively even though they seem contradictory or circular. The Myth of the Ecological Savage and the Myth of the Ecological Saint reduce millions of diverse peoples into two stereotypes that promote settler colonial interests. Both myths support the Myth of Wilderness, an inaccurate description of land as untouched before European arrival. This myth was employed to justify genocidal and assimilationist practices beneficial to settler colonial interests. This myth also erases the relationships that Indigenous peoples had with land, justifying land theft. These myths also support the Myth of Wasteland, which claims that Indigenous peoples are wasting the land’s potential, further justifying land theft and exploitation. The Myth of Biological Race and the Myth of the Vanishing Indigene both assume what they supposedly find, and they both obscure the material and health-based consequences of settler colonialism, following a pattern of blaming the oppressed for their oppression. This myth diverts attention and removes responsibility from settler colonial production of racial health disparities, attributing these disparities to Indigenous genetics. These intertwined mythologies obscure Indigenous multiplicity and difference and establish and maintain settler colonialism by naturalizing and these myths and internalizing them into habits of perception. Studying these myths collectively illuminates what I call a settler colonial grammar, or the structural and systemic relationships between multiple myths and how they operate in conjunction. Thus, this paper argues that settler colonial systems of meaning should be de-naturalized and re-politicized as their continuation and materialization is lethal. Furthermore, the paper suggests that practices of radical resistance and refusal, as defined by Indigenous scholars, which can offer strategies for disrupting settler meanings and their correlated material institutions.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute