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Poetic fragmentation against settler mythscapes: Doro Wiese, ‘Unsettling Coloniality: Opaque White Space in the Cut-Up Poetry of Jordan Abel’s (Nisga’a) Un/Inhabited’, English Studies, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited—a cut-up poetry collection from 91 Western novels in the public domain—disrupts, fragments and resists colonial narratives of Indigenous vanishing through the agency of its white space. Through a process of appropriation that erases, fragments and disrupts ongoing settler-colonial ideas, Un/inhabited critiques colonial practices of land-seizure and its representations, while its white space becomes a metaphor for Indigenous ways of relating to the land that make themselves felt without being articulated, resisting legibility. In this essay, it will be shown how Abel’s aesthetic procedures interrogate and dismantle the settler-colonial mythscape of the American West, shaped in the USA by popular culture and the idea of a Manifest Destiny and in Canada by legal discourses. Attention is paid to the affective presence of the white space, and Indigenous and decolonial interpretative methods that respect and relate to its opaqueness are sought and discussed.


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Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Writing in to The Bulletin in 1892, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson participated in what Manu Samriti Chander has called a “poetry war” and “literary debate” about the Australian bushlands (74).(1) The men were well-known contributors to the newspaper, including for Lawson’s “A Song of the Republic” (1887) and Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” (1890). Ostensibly, the poetic debate is over the nature of the bushlands, the “region of farms, forests, mines, and provincial towns and villages that supports Australia’s primary and export industries” (Lawrence 212). The apparent disagreement rests on the harshness of bush life. In a poem initially titled “Borderland,” in the July 9 Bulletin, Lawson writes of the “burning wastes of barren soil and sand / With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!” (21). Two weeks later, Paterson’s poetic response sings of the land’s “moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall / And the men who know the bush-land—they are loyal through it all” (15). On August 6, in a poem titled “In Answer to ‘Banjo,’ and otherwise,” later retitled “The City Bushman,” Lawson emphasizes the inhumanity of a barren landscape, even as he admits a yearning to affiliate himself with the mythic bush, “to feel once more a little like a native of the land” (5). Paterson, by contrast, highlights the humanity of those who live and work in the bush, their camaraderie, traditions, and capacity to endure. Despite their disagreement, the men share a distinctive vocabulary that casts the bush as a masculine, distinctly Australian space. Both strive to associate the bush with a new, emergent national identity within and against other versions of bush ecology. Whether or not they wrote for money or increased readership, Paterson and Lawson also wrote into being a “demonstrably non-British iconography at a time when Australian nationalism was burgeoning” (Lawrence 212). Australian literature of the 1890s, in the decade leading up to Federation (January 1, 1901), or the joining of the separate states, is almost exclusively read in this way: male, anti-authoritarian, and allied to an uncanny bush landscape that refused understanding by outsiders. As Susan Lawrence has argued, Paterson and Lawson, alongside other writers and visual artists, were “responding to, even rebelling against, a colonial, British past,” and so “seeking distinctive and unique attributes from which to form a new identity” (221). Their works asserted what Jason Rudy has described as “an almost ontological relationship between Australia’s distinct landscape and emerging nationalist sentiment,” between the stark, phantasmagoric imagery of the bush and masculinist independence from domestic life (174). To the extent that Paterson’s and Lawson’s poems repeatedly invoke ecological motifs—topological formations, species’ names, weather patterns—they do so to emphasize the absolute singularity of the bush landscape: an ecology without peer, impervious to comprehension by a non-initiate, an outsider, or, pointedly, someone British. My aim in this essay is to offer a counterpoint, to analyze how two women writers of the “Federation decade” complicate late nineteenth-century formulations of a masculine bush ecology, and to argue that women’s writing of the 1890s offers an alternative view of human-ecological bonds. Louisa Anne Meredith’s 1891 Last Series. Bush Friends in Tasmania, an illustrated guide to local species, and Ethel Pedley’s 1899 children’s novel Dot and the Kangaroo use representations of the native landscape to challenge conventional readings of Australian identity formation. I put them in dialogue because they use two distinct genres often associated with nineteenth-century women’s science writing—the botanical guide and the children’s text—and because they are both invested in a specific ecological pedagogy. Unlike earlier ecological and naturalist texts, including Meredith’s own mid-century volumes, these 1890s works refute logics that either completely align the settler colony with Britain or segregate emergent colonial knowledge from existing British “leadership in these observational sciences” (A. Johnston 216). Rather, Meredith and Pedley’s 1890s texts model modes of ecological thinking that emphasize interconnection and entanglement. In what follows, after a brief introduction to both authors and texts, I will highlight three components of Meredith’s and Pedley’s engagement with Australian ecology: species naming conventions, visual illustrations, and patterns of economic exchange. The first two hinge on paratextual elements and the volumes’ print format, linking ecological content to multi-scalar form and invoking broader, more expansive readings of bush ecosystems. References to economic exchange exist explicitly on the level of content and, implicitly, in the global circulation of both authors and texts. Together, the three components offer a reading of 1890s Australian ecology that foregrounds interconnectedness rather than isolationism: a feminized alternative to the masculine logic of settler nationalism.


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Ruthless settler colonialism: Rebecca Lindsay, Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia, Society of Biblical Literature, 2026

08Jul26

Description: Rebecca Lindsay reads the book of Ruth from her location in Australia, paying attention to the impacts of colonization on biblical interpretation. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, including decolonial studies, this volume places the book of Ruth in conversation with texts from Australia and stories from Linday’s own experience, revealing common themes of home, land, memory, and identity. Engagement with Indigenous voices and settler colonial studies leads to an honest grappling with the challenges of decolonizing biblical interpretation. Scholars and students of both biblical studies and Australian studies will discover how to adopt the embodied reading postures of feet on the ground, being in relationship, ceding control, and attending to justice. Lindsay’s embodied interpretive approach offers an alternative to the colonial legacies of biblical hermeneutics as it is practiced today.


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Crimea as a settler colony: Mariia Shynkarenko, Identity as Weapon: Crimean Tatars and their Quest for Indigenous Self-determination, University of Toronto Press, 2026

08Jul26

Description: Identity as Weapon presents a study of Crimean Tatar resistance to Russian settler colonialism through the strategic deployment of identity. Since the first Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783, Crimean Tatars have been the victims of the classic tools of settler colonial violence: land dispossession, racialization, deportation, and assimilation. In her investigation of Crimean Tatar political activism, researcher Mariia Shynkarenko shows the continuity of Crimean Tatar claims to self-determination. During the early years of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatar activists embraced the language of “backwardness” to access political resources available to them through Soviet korenizatsiia (indigenization) policies. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Crimean Tatars have alternately invoked European, Indigenous, Ukrainian, and Muslim identities. These identities – sometimes state sponsored, but often not – have been powerful weapons of the Crimean Tatar struggle for self-determination. Shynkarenko critically applies lessons from Indigenous studies to explain why Indigeneity has become an important category for Crimean Tatar politics, while challenging presumptions about the nature of Indigenous identity and politics that have been drawn predominantly from examples in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.


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Settlers Magdalenism (i.e., rescuing ‘fallen’ women for the purpose of settlement): Marine Berthiot ‘Decolonising the Character of the Magdalene in White Settler Colonies’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2026

08Jul26

Abstract: Magdalenism is often associated with Ireland; however, it was in fact practised in more than 60 western and westernised countries from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. This structure, which is known for oppressing, repressing, and censoring femininity, women’s rights over their own bodies, and women’s access to the public sphere, also participated in the Baby Scoop Era (1940s–1980s), separating more than 1 million unwed mothers from their babies in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Visual narratives by Magdalene survivors themselves are the focus of this article, which examines the cultural and historical specificities of Magdalene trauma as experienced in Canada and Australia. A decolonial, transnational, and feminist approach to trauma-reading will be applied on two shorts: Zuma, a filmed performance by Sharon Alward (non-Indigenous Canadian) (2011), as well as the visual poem, Magdalen Diaries (2011) by Rachael Romero (non-Indigenous Australian) (2011). This article examines how both women artists stage Magdalene trauma on the screen to decolonise the character of the Magdalene in their respective white settler colonies, focusing on clothes/costumes, narratorial perspectives, and institutional silence.


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Post-settler disorder and colonial contact fatigue: Jenny Morgan, ‘Naming the Fatigue, Rekindling the Fire: Gitxsan Matriarchs’ Fight Against Colonial Disorder’, Fourth World Journal, 26, 1

08Jul26

Abstract: This article introduces two conceptual frameworks—Post-Settler Disorder (PSD) and Colonial Contact Fatigue (CCF)—to describe the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples in Canada. Written from the perspective of a Gitxsan woman, the paper draws on Indigenous epistemologies, storytelling, and feminist scholarship grounded in lived experience. PSD functions as a satirical analytical lens exposing settler denial, historical amnesia, and narratives of innocence that sustain colonial systems. CCF names the cumulative spiritual, emotional, and physical exhaustion experienced through continuous contact with colonial institutions. The article highlights the role of Indigenous women, humor, and matrilineal knowledge as sources of resilience, resistance, and pathways toward healing.


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Transubstantiation (migrants into settlers): Lisa Ruth Brunner, Antje Ellermann, ‘Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides’, Citizenship Studies, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: This article examines Canadian citizenship guides as state pedagogies that socialize immigrants into a white settler colonial common sense of land, sovereignty, and belonging. Through a critical content analysis of seven federal guides published since 1947 and the 2020 Canadian Orientation Abroad (COA) guide for refugees, as well as interviews with civil servants and personnel involved in their production, we trace how these texts narrate Indigenous – settler relations across four themes: colonialism, treaties, land, and reconciliation. In the federal guides, settler colonialism is not named, the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted, reserves are referenced in decontextualized ways, and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm and preserve settler innocence. Treaties are absent until 1995 and framed as land-for-benefits transactions that naturalize settler title. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture. Reconciliation is largely absent from citizenship pedagogy, appearing mostly in the non-binding COA guide where it is translated into low-stakes actions of respect, learning, and consumption rather than material obligations such as land restitution or Indigenous jurisdiction. These persistent framings reveal the durability of colonial citizenship and the limits of state-led reconciliation within citizenship pedagogy.


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Settlers on the move: Jillian Louise Hahnlen Conroy, The Ober Homestead Site: A Study Investigating the Research Potential of Nineteenth Century Sites Located along the Wagon Roads of Southern California, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: The American west attracted Euro-American settlers in droves in the late nineteenth century. Settlers packed up their belongings, pets, and family members and traveled west in search of a life free of the financial and social constraints of common society. The Homestead Act urged immigrants and emigrants to claim tracts of indigenous lands, the only apparent cost being that they improve the land they claim. Many homestead settlements grew up around the wagon roads used to make the western journey, settling along these thoroughfares where water was available. Not all stops along these roads served the same function, however. Some might have been residential homes that made space for weary travelers, others might have been public houses or proper stage stops owned by the Army or mail route companies. Many stops likely served multiple purposes, as the needs of travelers and the growing communities became evident over time. How did the surrounding community, the former and current occupations of the settlers, and the landscape shape the function or functions of the homesteads? Through the in-depth analysis of a homestead property settled in nineteenth-century Poway, California, colloquially known as the Ober Homestead Site, the following study seeks to investigate how archaeology can be used to identify the function of mid- to late-nineteenth-century homestead sites located along the wagon roads to aid in painting a clearer picture of a community that might have been lost to the annals of time. By utilizing excavation data from fieldwork completed at the site in 1990 in conjunction with an in-depth artifact analysis of the artifacts recovered from that field effort and a thorough archival research study, the Ober Homestead study identified the location of an undocumented blacksmith shop that likely served the rural community and wagon road travelers. The study demonstrates that contextual analysis of historical archaeological sites, which requires the use of archival and archaeological data, can aid in determining the function of nineteenth century homestead sites beyond domestic, rural occupation. The study shows that an ancillary function of a homestead site will be informed by the needs of passing travelers, the community, the setting, and the occupations of homestead settlers. This is achieved with a thorough historical review of the region and site property, a literature review of three nineteenth century sites (a homestead, a stage station, and a blacksmith shop), the reconstruction and explanation of the work completed in 1990, and the completion of an in-depth analysis of artifacts recovered from the 1990 field effort.


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Settler colonialism’s viral load: Adam Kersch, ‘Inoculating whiteness: Vaccines, racial formation, and settler colonial immunity on Lingít Aaní’, Med Anthropol Q, 2026, #e70087

06Jul26

Abstract: In settler colonial contexts, health interventions are often sites for contesting authority, belonging, and protection. On Lingít Aaní, colonial responses to infectious disease illustrate how vaccination and public health practices produced racial hierarchies and secured white futurity by exposing Tlingit people to biomedical extraction, risk, and surveillance. I conceptualize this dynamic as inoculating whiteness, a situated analytic for understanding how immunological interventions shielded settler bodies from biological and political threat while exposing Indigenous bodies to experimentation, surveillance, and managed vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on colonial public health based in Sheet’ká, this article examines how inoculating whiteness operated during COVID-19 before tracing its genealogy through smallpox vaccination under Russian colonialism and BCG experimentation and tuberculosis sanatoria under U.S. governance. It argues public health has been instrumental to settler colonial governance and racialization and highlights Tlingit practices of collective care that articulate alternative frameworks for health and sovereignty.


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Conservation is settler pre(re)servation: Khadidja Bouchellia, Uprooting Indigenous Algeria: Green Colonialism and Ecocide under French Colonial Rule, PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: Colonial conservation did not emerge from a single place or moment in history, but through a convergence of imperial strategies to control and occupy land across colonies. Conservation discourse in the colonies conceals a system of exploitation that co-opts environmentalism in the service of empires. While green colonialism is often discussed in the context of capitalism and neo-colonialism, this study argues that its roots extend to early imperial and colonial conquests. Green colonialism, in this dissertation, refers to the seemingly benevolent environmental institutions and policies imposed by the French administration on colonized lands and populations in Algeria. Chapter one tracks how print and visual media cultivate the affective and epistemic conditions of land myths applied by French colonial discourse to Algeria. These myths include tropes of terra nullius, detachment, translatio imperii, “wastelands,” and “land decline.” Chapter two shows how those myths morph into colonial laws and institutions on Algerian soil, including forestry codes, conservation policing, acclimatization networks, botanic gardens, and agrarian projects. Chapter three turns to Indigenous literature, specifically the works of Algerian Kabyle author Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man’s Son (1950) and Land and Blood (1953), to challenge those myths and recenter Indigenous land relations, knowledge, and resistance. This dissertation establishes that green colonialism was integral to the French conquest of Algeria. It also places Algeria’s colonial environmental history within the broader histories of Indigenous dispossession and decolonial struggles. It challenges petromyopia in SWANA/MENA ecocriticism and environmental studies. This work argues that green colonialism developed alongside military occupation and, according to Damien Short’s genocide-ecocide nexus, constitutes ecocide. Because dominant colonial discourses have denied, minimized, or refused to acknowledge ecocide, this research argues the necessity of naming French colonial violence against human and other-than-human life as ecocide.


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