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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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Settler colonial dementia: Megan Eustace, Campbell Le Heron, Jeanette King, Katrina McGarr, Catherine Theys, ‘A Systematic Review of Communication-Focused Dementia Interventions for Indigenous Communities’, Dementia, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: Dementia is a significant challenge for many Indigenous peoples who face inequities in risk factors, prevalence, progression rates, and access to quality healthcare. Culturally relevant interventions are needed across the care pathway, however, little evidence exists to guide culturally relevant communication support. This systematic review aims to understand dementia communication interventions developed for Indigenous populations and explore factors relating to their effectiveness. A systematic search of databases, repositories, and search engines was conducted. We took a comprehensive approach to communication, considering the communication skills and abilities of people with dementia, their communication partners, healthcare providers, and community-level information sharing. Studies were required to evaluate an intervention targeting communicative skills, communicative ability, or health communication and include a cultural focus on one or more Indigenous communities. Quality was appraised using an adapted Well Living House Quality Appraisal Tool. Six studies met inclusion criteria, with most studies (n = 5) conducted from 2019 onwards. No studies evaluated an intervention targeting communicative skills and abilities for people with dementia, their communication partners, or healthcare providers. All included studies evaluated a health communication intervention. Interventions utilised various resources, including storybooks, videos, flipcharts, posters, handouts, worksheets, fact sheets, and training modules, tailored towards Indigenous communities across Canada, the United States, and Australia. Content about dementia and dementia management varied across interventions. Analysis identified key benefits of the interventions and three factors influencing their effectiveness: (1) representation of Indigenous people, cultures, and languages in resources, (2) methods and settings for knowledge sharing, and (3) communication, connection, and collaboration. While content within resources and methods for information sharing should be tailored to local communities, common elements may support health communication developments across Indigenous contexts. Further research is needed to develop interventions specifically targeting communication skills and conduct methodologically strong evaluations.


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Are Catholic settlers different settlers? Sadra Emami, ‘Breaking the Mold: Irish Catholic Migration and Upper Canadian Identity between 1845 and 1867’, Webster Review of International History, 5, 1, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: This study explores the impact of Irish Catholic migration to Upper Canada between 1845 and 1867, focusing on how these migrants challenged the colony’s existing Protestant and loyalist identity. While Irish immigration to British North America was already established in the early 19th century, the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) triggered an unprecedented wave of migration. This influx of Irish Catholics, who settled primarily in urban centers like Toronto, disrupted British colonial expectations that immigrants would assimilate into an agrarian, Protestant, and monarchist society. Unlike their Protestant counterparts, Irish Catholics struggled to integrate into the rural economy and instead established distinct communities centred around Catholic institutions, religious schools, and fraternal organizations. Their preference for urban labour over agricultural settlement and their alignment with Irish nationalist causes created tensions with the British colonial government and the Protestant majority. This article argues that Irish Catholics in Upper Canada, far from being passive settlers, actively shaped the cultural and political landscape through religious, social, and political resistance. By examining demographic shifts, institutional development, and sectarian conflict including events like the Guy Fawkes Day episode of 1864.


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The ‘post’ that never was: Moggallan Bharti, ‘Understanding the Postcolonial: Native versus Settlers and Brahmin versus Dalit’, in Sejuti Das Gupta, Shouvik Chakraborty, Taposik Banerjee (eds), Contradictions of Democracy, Development and Inequality, Routledge, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: This chapter reviews postcolonial theory from the standpoint of the politics of social justice of two marginalised groups from different geographical settings, namely dalits in India and the indigenous people of Andean Latin America. It is argued that postcolonialism and the Subaltern Studies School—while developing a critique of colonialism and claiming to initiate a reading of history from below—overlooked this referred perspective of history of the below. For instance, dalits in India do not share the critique of postcolonial scholarships and have advanced their own nuanced understanding of colonial history. This chapter foregrounds the grip of caste in understanding colonial history—something which remains absent in postcolonial scholarship—and offers a renewed understanding of the political world view of the marginalised that has remained unattended in the vast literature of decolonisation studies.


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