settler colonial studies blog

Taxing settlers: Lila Teeters Knolle, ‘Indians Now Taxed: Citizenship and Taxation in Settler-Colonial South Dakota Available to Purchase’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 44, 4, 2025, pp. 44-72

07Jul25

Abstract: In 1915, the United States sued the treasurer and sheriff of Dewey County, South Dakota, on behalf of six Lakota men at Cheyenne River Reservation. The suit alleged that Dewey County officials had improperly taxed the Lakota men before illegally seizing property for back payment. The case, US v. John Pearson (1916), became a turning point in Indigenous taxation case law. Analyzing the events leading up to the case, this article shows how the relationship between good citizenship and taxation was deeply contested in Dewey County. The primacy of fiscal citizenship was a product of Indigenous dispossession, internal migration, and foreign immigration, which shaped not only South Dakota but also the nation writ large. Local governments and migrants coveted Indigenous lands and the potential tax revenue from Native American citizens, creating a national push to expedite the conferral of citizenship to Indigenous individuals. The events preceding US v. Pearson illustrate how United States officials used citizenship and taxation as settler-colonial tools and tell a story about how an Indigenous community fought back.

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Aggrieved settlers: F. Evan Nooe, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South, University of Alabama Press, 2023

07Jul25

Description: A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity. In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a “long continued course of aggression and sufferings” between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, “aggression” and “sufferings” are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.

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The ascendancy of settlers: Jack P. Greene, ‘Perpetuating Settler Ascendancy: Empire and Nation Building in the British Empire and the United States’, Journal of Early American History, 15, 1-2, 2025, pp. 69-79

04Jul25

Abstract: This essay may be considered as an epilogue to a larger project with the working title of “Settler Ascendancies: Voice and Authority in the Construction, Operation, Extension, and Separation of the British American Empire before 1776.” Building on my earlier books and essays emphasizing the agency of settlers in the construction and rationalizing the many societies and polities founded in the English or, after 1707, British American Empire before 1776, it assesses how the secession of thirteen colonies from the British Empire between 1776 and 1783 affected traditional British practices, patterns, conventions, and objectives of imperial expansion and governance within both the diminished empire and the tenuous national union in North America.

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The insecurity of settlers: Carla Botha, Structures of Accumulation and Security: Understanding Contemporary Farm Attacks Through Autoethnographic Reflections and Historical Inquiry of the Cape Colony’, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2024

04Jul25

Abstract: This dissertation examines the complex relationship between settler accumulation and security within instances of violence on farms in the Cape Colony, employing a dual methodology of microhistory and autoethnographic inquiry. This study seeks deeper insights into the enduring patterns that characterise settler colonies, particularly in relation to the perception of persecution of the settler group. Through the lens of autoethnography, personal reflections are interwoven with microhistories of the early settler colonial period, revealing the structures that underpin settler security dynamics. By shedding light on historical precedents, the research aims to unravel the contemporary phenomenon of farm attacks. This interdisciplinary approach navigates through time and personal narratives to illuminate the settler colonial structure and its historic, as well as contemporary implications.

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Liminal urbanisation against interior settler colonialism: Goran Ivo Marinovic, ‘Liminal urbanisation: Undoing interior settler colonialism through the disruption of urban homogeneity’, Research in Globalization, 11, 2025, #100296

04Jul25

Abstract: In Mediterranean cities, settler colonial urbanisation operates through spatial homogenisation that transforms difference into otherness. Since 1979, in Budva, Montenegro, low-income working-class and forced migrants have confronted settler colonial urban practices—a system wherein established residents leverage local identity and political power to exclude newcomers. Interior settler colonialism constitutes a mode of domination characterised by the aspiration of an established collective to expel immigrants from the city. Rather than merely enduring displacement, these communities transform their marginalisation into resistance through what I term “liminal urbanisation.” Through inhabiting interstitial spaces, physically marginal neighbourhoods challenge the Manichean divisions between “legitimate” residents and “others.” These traced spatial, cultural, and social heterogeneities transcend the dualistic worldview of Manichean urbanisation—a political construct wherein privileged citizens, defined by local identity, economic stability, and political empowerment, assert their authority to govern urban territories at the expense of marginalised groups. Drawing upon multi-sited ethnography, which encompasses qualitative observation in immigrant settlements, neighbourhood mapping, household interviews, archival analysis of planning documents and policy frameworks, and mapping of spatial transformations, I trace how immigrants strategically contested their socio-political invisibility. The concluding analysis contributes to urban theory by demonstrating how liminal urbanisation reveals pathways for decolonising Mediterranean cities through participatory planning, cultural integration initiatives, and structural reforms that recognise immigrants as legitimate city-makers rather than temporary labourers.

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The violent settler: Edward Watts, Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville, Oxford University Press, 2025

04Jul25

Description: Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville studies the literary and cultural tradition of the “Indian Hater” in American writing from the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. In dozens of short stories, novels, poems, plays, and historical publications, Indian Haters were white settlers on the western frontier who vowed to kill all “Indians” to avenge the deaths of family members at the hands of a few. As they engage their episodes in racial violence, they attain transcendent racial powers based in traditions of historical white barbarism and the powers of the legendary berserker, the crazed Nordic super-warrior. Indian Haters’ obsession with genocidal retribution reflected and participated in important conversations in the new nation about race, violence, nation, and masculinity, as well as about the role of the emergent mass print culture in the distribution of propaganda, disinformation, and misrepresentation. At the same time, many authors used Indian Haters to represent the moral failure of the new nation, profoundly critiquing its ambitions and assumptions. Using theories and methods drawn from studies of settler colonialism, nationalism, media, sociology, trauma, and literary history, Edward Watts excavates dozens of long-lost Indian Hater accounts, as well as better-known ones from Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Hall, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville, to tell the story of a story, and how that story exposes the complex machinations of the role of print culture’s interactions with the violence of settler colonialism.

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Decolonising Palestine: Riccardo Bocco, Ibrahim Saïd (eds), De/Colonising/Palestine, Graduate Institute Publications, 2025

03Jul25

Abstract: This edited volume seeks to contribute to the broader project of decolonisation by bringing
together diverse perspectives for a critical examination of the Palestine Question. It aims to challenge dominant narratives, highlight the resilience and agency of Palestinians, and explore new pathways toward justice and liberation amid ongoing occupation and colonialism. The volume is structured into five sections, each providing a distinct lens on the question of Palestine. Topics covered include the question of refugees, the diaspora, the predicament of the Palestinian Authority, hydropolitics, and the settler colonial modes of Israeli control. Additionally, the book delves into Palestinian cultural resistance and the evolution of international coalitions, highlighting a shift in solidarity – from performative to transformative – towards decolonisation and liberation and the associated challenges.

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Corporate and settler dispossession: Matthew Scobie, Andre Poyser, Georgia Hampton, ‘Tangata Whenua, People Born of the Land: From Corporate Dispossession and Repossession to Severance and Reconnection’, Journal of Business Ethics, 2025

03Jul25

Abstract: This paper explores Indigenous resistance to corporate dispossession in both a historical and contemporary context. Using two case studies of corporate dispossession of Ngāi Tahu land and resources in Aotearoa New Zealand, we advance understanding of dispossession and resistance through Indigenous critique. Although over 170 years apart, these cases are linked together by a singular Indigenous experience and demonstrate the recursive (self-referential and self-reinforcing) logic of both dispossession and Indigenous resistance. We utilise the concepts of ‘severance’ as a more locally appropriate term for dispossession, and ‘reconnection’ as a more locally appropriate term for repossession. These concepts also have broader use for exploring the relationship between capitalism and its outside. Indigenous critique offers valuable insights beyond particular Indigenous contexts, and Indigenous struggles provide an alternative power base to defend shared rights and reconnect these shared rights with shared responsibilities. Indigenous critique thus offers a glimpse of possible futures.

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The writing on the settler wall: Hadil Haroun Louz, ‘”We protest on walls”: Palestinian political agency in Berlin’s struggle against German state repression’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2025

02Jul25

Abstract: Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines Palestinian political graffiti in Berlin as a visible form of resistance against state repression. It conceptualises this repression as a transnational extension of settler-colonial mechanisms – understood as settler coloniality, following AnnaEsther Younes – and deeply entangled with Germany’s antiPalestinian racism and institutionalised memory politics. This framework legitimises surveillance, censorship, racialized policing, and the deployment of high-tech state power against Palestinian activists. Amid this repressive landscape, political graffiti functions as a counter-public, confronting dominant narratives, resisting structural silencing, and reimagining Berlin’s urban surfaces as spaces of response. These visual interventions are not merely symbolic; they provoke ideological opponents, nurture political consciousness, and resist historical erasure. Much of this graffiti is created by recently arrived Palestinian refugees, particularly those affiliated with Samidoun, the now-banned Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. The suppression of political graffiti and the framing of Palestinian activism as ‘new antisemitism’ serve to uphold a colonial hierarchy that systematically delegitimizes Palestinian resistance. While acknowledging the limitations of graffiti as a tool for political change – its vulnerability to erasure, alteration, and smudging – this paper emphasises its role in asserting agency, sustaining transnational anti-colonial solidarity, and exposing the contours of anti-Palestinian racism in Germany.

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Sámi’s predicament: Panu Puhakka, Everyone is for Sámi, yet no one agrees, MA dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2025

02Jul25

Abstract: This thesis asks what kinds of themes and ignorances arise in the Finnish Parliament, when Members of the Finnish Parliament (MPs) legislate on Sámi, and what kind of implications Parliamentary discussions have, regarding Finnish policy toward Sámi, and the relations between the Finnish state and Sámi. Sámi, the only recognized Indigenous people in the European Union live across Northern Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the Kola Peninsula, in their traditional homeland Sápmi, and have been, throughout the history, the subjects of various assimilationist and colonial policies and efforts. To examine the situation, this thesis draws from settler colonial theory as well as theories of knowledge and ignorance. Publicly available parliamentary data two Records of Parliamentary Plenary sessions, PTK 127/2022 and PTK 128/2022, and six written questions, publicly available through the website of the Finnish Parliament, are examined through thematic analysis, as this was deemed the most effective way to examine the contributions Finnish MPs have made between 2014 and 2022, considering that ignorance has not been studied in this context in Finland. The analysis finds six themes regarding ignorances and their implications for the Sámi and the Finnish society as a whole. This thesis finds that both ignorances and colonialisms in the contributions made by MPs are rooted in the view that Indigenous rights are a zero-sum game. Furthermore, the MPs in question have an implicit worry regarding the land use in Sápmi with the emergence of Sámi rights. Finally, the implications of the findings to Sámi, wider society, and further research are discussed.

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