settler colonial studies blog

The flight of settlers: Holly Randell-Moon, ‘Aero-regionalism: Branding, mobility, and settler cultural heritage in regional airlines in Australia’, in Bart Paul Vanspauwen, Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros (eds), Postcolonial Aeromobilities: Branding, Cultural Governance, and Tourism Imageries, Routledge, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: This chapter analyses how regional air travel in Australia shapes infrastructural imaginaries through the case study of Regional Express (Rex) airlines. The analysis examines how Rex’s branding strategy aligns air connectivity with rural Australian values and settler colonial history despite its financial ties to the Asia-Pacific region. The carrier’s marketing narrative connects contemporary aeromobility to an Anglo-centric pioneering past marked by mining and technical innovations that “opened up” Australia’s inland regions. The study reveals how regional airports and air routes are presented as catalysts for economic growth, linking infrastructure investment to future development. Through Rex’s aero-regional branding and cultural heritage messaging, investment in future connectivity becomes intrinsically tied to settler colonial narratives of development and progress. This dynamic demonstrates how contemporary regional air infrastructure perpetuates and reinforces traditional pioneering narratives of settler colonial Australia while promising economic advancement through aerial connectivity.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Burning settler colonialism down: Marcus Baynes-Rock, ‘Cultural Burning as Resistance to Colonisation’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: In the context of a changing climate and an increasing threat of wildfires, interest in First Nations cultural burning has intensified. One response to this has been an increase in private and government funded burning programs involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors. These collaborations can be fraught in that modes of land tenure, government regulations, and state and capitalist structures are at odds with First Nations modes of engagement with Country. Here, I argue that tensions within these collaborations reflect a deeper structural conflict zone in which cultural burning resists colonisation. This resistance stems from an Indigenous relational ontology that prioritises relations and engagement with the land as the basis for prescriptions pertaining to action in socio-cultural landscapes. It is in this conceptual and practical realm that cultural burning resists a triumvirate of colonial forces: modernity, state, and capitalism. The conflict lies in the way of engaging with land, in that Indigenous ontologies see land as part of a cosmological totality, while colonial ontologies conceive of and act towards land as a resource. I argue that this conflict represents not just a threat to cultural burning, but to capitalism itself as the land rapidly diminishes the conditions needed for capitalism’s existence.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The tenure of settlers: Casey L. Price, Given to This Land: Mapping Settler Colonialism in Kituwah, 1682-1810, PhD dissertation, University of Tennessee, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps of the Cherokee homelands in the Southern Appalachian Mountains spanning present-day Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northwest South Carolina, and Northwestern Georgia documented and facilitated European settler colonialism’s accretion in the region. I argue that from the 1750s until the early nineteenth century, ecological destruction resulting from the invasion of settler populations from British colonies and eventually the U.S., who established plantation-style agriculture, drove changes in the Cherokee’s agricultural practices, social connections, and cultural identity directly tied to an incremental land loss of nearly all of their vital spaces. The deracination of Cherokees from their agriscapes and cultural anchors proved significantly more transformative than more overt forms of European conquest in the Cherokee homelands. My project helps define settler colonialism by demonstrating it is a collective substantiation of land tenure by individual colonizers entrenching on Indigenous lands. My dissertation uses maps as primary source material to detail the entrenchment of European settler colonialism in the Cherokee homelands during the eighteenth century. Early modern European maps were meant for European audiences, but they were more than European productions. Diverse groups of people contributed to colonial cartography. Indigenous communities provided Euro-American informants with geographic knowledge regarding regional hydrography and topography. European mapmakers repurposed Indigenous geographic knowledge of the land to market land speculators’ claims. Indigenous nomenclature for areas with good fishing waters and rich hunting grounds became Baroque royal fantasies, such as Jamestown and Charleston, to attract European buyers. Maps empowered land brokers and enticed settlers to occupy interior territories permanently. Collectively, these groups’ activities would diminish the land’s viability for Cherokee agrarian practices. Maps demonstrate that Cherokees developed multiple strategies for combating colonial entrenchment. As a series of larger-scale maps of the Keowee frontier region reveal, Cherokee women became a source for preserving Cherokee land tenure amongst the destructive environment of colonial agriculture. Cherokees employed their hand-drawn 1785 [Cherokee Map of their Territory] to assert their territorial sovereignty. However, by the final decades of the eighteenth century, every territorial facet of the Cherokee homelands became an untenable amalgamation. Maps from the early nineteenth century that confidently display solidified state boundaries and neat integration of Cherokee towns into the Euro-American landscape belie the enduring battle within.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The other settlers: Javier E. Sánchez, ‘“To Hold for Themselves, Their Children, and Their Heirs”: The Saga of Mexicano Settlement in the Lower Estancia Valley, 1800-1925’, PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: This dissertation focuses on the mexicano settlement experience in central New Mexico’s lower
Estancia Valley, where local settlers co-opted the settlement strategies and traditions of three successive political regimes and experienced a net gain in land ownership over the course of the Long 19th Century. It invokes four major themes: settlement, culture, economics, and parentela (kinship). Regarding settlement, it explores the mechanics of mexicano frontier settlement traditions and illuminates how deeply rooted concepts such as presura, an ancient method of settling embattled frontier zones through seizure, occupancy, and utilization by the settlers themselves, are reflected in settlement patterns in the lower valley through the early twentieth century. Secondly, it elaborates on the cultural aspects of mexicano frontier society and explores the meaning of warfare with indigenous people and the effects of the incorporation of local semi-nomadic Indian populations into frontier communities, as well as that of the incorporation of those communities into larger indigenous cultural spaces. It explores the multifaceted ways in which mexicano settlers used violence to protect their interests. Thirdly, it explores the complexity of local market economies and shows how small to medium family-based agricultural and mercantile enterprises were practical in their endeavors, maximizing settlers’ economic reach in boom times, while consolidating and holding onto their goods, lands, and herds during downturns. Finally, this dissertation centers on the role of parentela, or kinship, in mexicano frontier society and highlight its influence in economic relations and social organization. It elevates stories that link the experiences of criados, peones, and bandits with those of rancheros, politicians, farmers, and small merchants, including women, bi-ethnic people, and immigrants from Mexico. It closes with the observation that far from being pushed off their land, as many mexicano settlers were in the 19th century; those in the lower valley eventually amassed over one-hundred thousand acres of land for themselves. By using this four-part framework to examine the saga of mexicano settlers in the lower Estancia Valley, I develop a model to synthesize a narrative regarding the larger history of mexicano frontier settlement across the Southwest Borderlands that explains mexicano land retention and expansion.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Furnishing progressive settlers: Natasha Wilcockson, ‘Morris & Co., Settler Nation-Building, and the “Imperial Anthropocene”: The Floral Furnishings of Torrens Park, South Australia, 1880-1900’, Art History, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Faced with the impacts of climate change and colonialism, historians have been quick to celebrate Victorian Arts and Crafts designer William Morris as an important early green voice. Morris produced hand-crafted furnishings inspired by the British countryside to induce respect for nature and resist the nefarious consequences of capitalism. Yet celebratory histories of this enterprise overlook the ramifications of Morris’s nature-oriented designs when they were exported into entirely contrasting environmental contexts, such as colonial South Australia. This essay explores the significance of Morris’s interiors in the homes of the influential Barr Smith family in Adelaide. It investigates the relationship between Morris’s furnishings, the process of settler nation building, and the repression of Aboriginal peoples and lands: lines of enquiry that reveal some of the contradictions within the designer’s principles, in theory and in practice.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous online sovereignty against settler colonialism: Siobhan Senier, ‘What Indigenous Literature Can Bring to Electronic Archives’, b2o: boundary 2 online, 2025

21Jun25

Excerpt: Indigenous people are here—here in digital space just as ineluctably as they are in all the other “unexpected places” where historian Philip Deloria (2004) suggests we go looking for them. Indigenous people are on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; they are gaming and writing code, podcasting and creating apps; they are building tribal websites that disseminate immediately useful information to community members while asserting their sovereignty. And they are increasingly present in electronic archives. We are seeing the rise of Indigenous digital collections and exhibits at most of the major heritage institutions (e.g., the Smithsonian) as well as at a range of museums, universities and government offices. Such collections carry the promise of giving tribal communities more ready access to materials that, in some cases, have been lost to them for decades or even centuries. They can enable some practical, tribal-nation rebuilding efforts, such as language revitalization projects. From English to Algonquian, an exhibit curated by the American Antiquarian Society, is just one example of a digitally-mediated collaboration between tribal activists and an archiving institution that holds valuable historic Native-language materials.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The race against settler colonialism: Stine Mark Rasmussen: ‘We Run to Tell a Different Story’: Exercising with the Right to Movement Community in a Militarised, Settler-Colonial Context, MA dissertation, Tampere University, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: This thesis explores how the embodied everyday experience of living in a militarised, settler-colonial context can be understood through exercise practices, and how the effects of living in such a context may be navigated through exercise. It explores this objective through interviews with six Palestinians who exercise and participate in the Right to Movement community in Bethlehem, to understand their lived, everyday experiences. Using a Feminist Peace Research methodology and applying reflexive thematic analysis to the interview data, this research finds that exercising as an everyday practice gains value beyond the ordinary when carried out in this extraordinary setting. Furthermore, this thesis engages with decolonial feminist ideas to argue why lived, everyday experiences of war and violence matter and proposes ways to challenge and transform the existing Western-dominated systems and structures that sustain violence and suppression. The analysis concludes that exercising in this setting is a complex, multilayered, powerful practice of agency and control. Their experiences reveal that exercising operates between the everyday and the extraordinary, highlighting its flexibility and how its significance and symbolic value vary according to the socio-political and specific spatio-temporal settings in which it is practised. As the participants insist on preserving and caring for their bodies, as well as displaying Palestinian identity through their exercise practices, it is used as a creative mode of expression and transformation. Despite the occupation, exercising helps them achieve a sense of freedom, altering feelings of worry and anger into joy and empowerment. This demonstrates the powerful role of exercise as a means of taking control of one’s body and agency regarding how they encounter the militarised, settler-colonial context they live in. Furthermore, the Right to Movement community utilises exercise to take control of and change the narrative, to tell a different story. This thesis argues that we need such stories to understand war and violence as corporeal, lived experiences, and that these experiences should be at the centre of how we analyse, discuss, and formulate foreign policy on war and conflicts. However, this fundamental change requires not just a change of approach but a shift in paradigm and a radical change in how we understand our interconnectedness and responsibility toward one another. I argue that decolonial feminist ideas of collective responsibility, ethics of care, and solidarity are needed to make this shift and break the ongoing cycle of violence.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The wellness of settlers: Timothy Willem Jones, Nadia Rhook, ‘Returning to the sacred spring? Spa treatments, mineral springs and spirituality in settler Australia since 1852’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Spas and mineral springs constitute major sectors of the global wellness economy, which now exceeds the size of the global biomedical economy. The industry, media and its critics emphasise ‘wellness’ as both holistic health care and pampering self-care. Wellness culture has been critiqued as neoliberal exploitation, particularly of middle-class, white women. Its spiritual dimensions are often figured as window dressing, gestural, or more substantively as the spirituality of neoliberalism. The history of mineral springs and spa treatments in Australia tells a different story. Spas, water cures and mineral springs in Australia have not typically been an elite enterprise. They have been accessible across class divisions, focussed on meeting neglected health needs, and instrumental in the development of environmental protections. Spa culture in Australia has been relatively free of spiritual tokenism, instead emphasising its scientific rationales. When spirituality started to be associated with the conceptualisation and marketing of aquatic wellness in the 1990s, it was preoccupied with a nonreligious settler colonial spiritual condition, addressing settlers’ experiences of spiritual alienation in the colonised environment. We suggest that recent public engagements with spirituality in aquatic wellness practices have been enabled by the public acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty facilitated by the Mabo judgement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settler and the wolf: Kristina Beggen, Richard York, ‘Colonizing Canis lupus: Wolf Management as a Settler Colonial Project’, Rural Sociology, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: The hostility to wolves by segments of agribusiness and the general public in the United States is a puzzle, given that wolf predation is not responsible for a large number of cattle and sheep losses and has only a very modest economic effect on the livestock industry. Thus, the logic of profit-seeking in capitalism, although playing a role, is insufficient to explain the outsized and partisan opposition to wolf recovery. We argue that the logics of settler colonialism are a foundational force that shapes the politics and management of wolves in the United States. We explain how settler colonialism seeks to eliminate both Indigenous people and wolves to appropriate and reshape landscapes for settler use. Contemporary wolf policy and management at the state and federal levels continue to reflect settler colonial logics. Our general aim is to show how theories of settler colonialism complement other prominent sociological theories and enhance our understanding of the forces leading to ecological crises. We conclude by highlighting examples of more just approaches to wolf management that include Indigenous kinship and relational values.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonising Old Britain: Dimitri Mitrovic, Settler Colonization and Language Contact: How they Shaped Old English, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

21Jun25

Excerpt: The traditional story of the Adventus Saxonum, or the arrival of the Germanic-speaking populations in Britain, is one of invasion, genocidal violence and conquest. Following the withdrawal of the Roman troops in the fifth century, Germanic tribes washed up on the southern and eastern shores of the island and proceeded to plunder their way inland, forcing the native Britons to the northern and western frontiers, into areas which were to become Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and Southern Scotland. This characterization of the events is heavily influenced by De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a sermon written by the sixth-century British monk Gildas, who depicted the coming of the Germanic-speakers as a harrowing time in which any Britons who remained in the occupied regions were massacred or reduced to servitude. Archaeologists, however, came to doubt this view, partly as a result of an anti-migrationist trend in the field that sought to decouple material culture from tribal identities, and instead emphasized that artifacts could be spread through peaceful or semi-peaceful diffusion, rather than violent invasions and migrations. Through this lens, it was argued that a relatively small elite of male Germanic warriors had arrived in Britain, and their cultural and political dominance resulted in the bulk of the pre-existing population, which remained in place, adopting Anglo-Saxon culture until they began to conceive of themselves as English, rather than British. Though it originated in archaeological circles, this “elite dominance” model eventually came to be endorsed by historians such as Wood (2010). English historical linguists have tended to have difficulties accepting the viewpoint that the spread of Germanic languages in Britain was merely the result of an elite dominance scenario. Old English, which emerged by the seventh century from contact between the various Germanic dialects brought to Britain, contains very little obvious influence from the Celtic languages, and toponymic evidence suggests an almost total replacement of Celtic and Latin place names with Germanic ones during the transition between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Celticists, on the other hand, have seized upon the acculturation model, and have pushed back against the notion that Old English is devoid of Celtic influence. While the number of English words derived from British Celtic is widely accepted to be extremely small, it has been suggested that various English grammatical features bear the mark of a Celtic substrate, but only manifested themselves in writing once the Norman Conquest had extinguished the dominance of the West Saxon literary form, which had supposedly preserved a conservative and more purely Germanic structure than the Celtic-influenced dialects spoken by the commoners. This idea has become known as the “Celtic hypothesis.” In this paper, I will begin by deconstructing the Celtic hypothesis on linguistic grounds. I will then investigate the Adventus Saxonum utilizing archaeological, toponymic, and above all recently-published archaeogenetic data, in order to argue that the evidence in favor of a model of settler colonization via mass migration, rather than elite dominance, is insurmountable in the south and east of Britain. Following this, using theories of language contact and creolization, and analyzing analogous scenarios for which there is more historical evidence, I will explain why Celtic was unable to strongly affect early insular Germanic, despite the fact that some Britons did in fact live alongside the settlers and even started families with them. To conclude, I will examine the reasons for why the linguistic fates of Britain and Gaul differed from one another so drastically, despite the fact that both places experienced colonization by Latin-speakers and Germanic-speakers.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute