settler colonial studies blog

Dairy settler colonialism: Lynley Tulloch, ‘The Price of Milk: Dairy Farming as Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Animal Studies Journal, 14, 1, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: This paper critically analyses the history and culture of dairy production in Aotearoa New Zealand through a historical-materialist approach. It is argued that the violence of settler colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand is pervasive and multifaceted. In historicizing the production and ideological maintenance of pastoralism and dairy farming in Aotearoa New Zealand, I argue that this has resulted in ongoing interspecies violence. A decolonial perspective is adopted, focusing on how pastoralism was the bedrock for animal agriculture and the alienation of Māori from their land and ways of being. The first part of this paper explores the development and growth of dairying in Aotearoa New Zealand, arguing that this was enabled in large part due to the confiscation of Māori land by the British colonial government. Following this, insights from postcolonial theory and critical animal studies are applied to examine the ongoing effects of capitalist colonisation and dairy expansion on the environment, the cows themselves, and Māori. Critical discourse analysis is then employed to explore dominant colonial ideologies of dairy farming that have persisted into the present day.

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The missions of settler colonialism: Joseph Vincent Payne, The Chumash War of 1824: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the California Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima, MA dissertation, California Polytechnic State University, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: In 1824, the Indigenous Chumash of Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima de Concepción went to war against the settler-colonial system that bonded them to the mission lands and forced labor regime demanded by the Spanish Franciscan missionaries and compelled by Mexican military force in Alta California. The conflict lasted months and included violent battles and skirmishes at all three missions, the militant occupation and reclamation of La Purísima, a mass exodus to the interior of the territory, and the subsequent counterrevolutionary collaboration of the Spanish missionaries and Mexican military to return many (but not all) of the Chumash to the missions. In this thesis, I argue that the actions of the Chumash throughout the conflict, available through multiple archival and oral history accounts, show a people engaged in a revolutionary war for autonomy against the settler-colonial mission system. The collective action of the Chumash in 1824 created a deep fissure in the California Mission system at a time of political tumult and radical redefinition during Alta California’s early Mexican period and helped feed the intertribal coalition of Indigenous resistance in the interior of the territory. The revolutionary Chumash contributed to the instability of the settler-colonial system and partly compelled the new Mexican government’s pragmatic decision to formally end the mission system through secularization less than ten years later. This thesis attempts to place the Chumash War of 1824 in this broader context of the Age of Revolutions, New Mission History, and the legacy of genocide of Indigenous Californians in the hopes of reexamining the California Missions in pedagogy and popular historical memory by illustrating the destructive role they played in the lives of Indigenous peoples, and the agency and autonomy that the Chumash asserted to remove themselves from the yolk of the settlercolonial California Mission system.

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Settler markers: Laura Pulido, Sophia Ford, Mason Leavitt, ‘Paving Over the Past: Oregon Historical Markers, White Innocence, and Manifest Destiny’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: In this article we examine how Oregon’s highway markers represent settler colonization and White supremacy. The data consist of 141 historical highway markers developed by the Oregon Travel Information Council (OTIC), a state-led tourism and transportation agency. We coded the data set based on the extent to which markers acknowledge White supremacy or settler colonization or represent multiculturalism. Although the markers employ multiple narratives, we found that the vast majority deny histories of White supremacy and colonization. We argue that one reason for this is because hegemonic cultural memory is invested in preserving White innocence, which is central to the legitimacy of the White nation. There are numerous ways that White innocence is produced, including centering Whiteness; obscuring Black, Indigenous, Mexican, and Asian American history; erasing settler violence; and celebrating and normalizing settler colonization. Within the data set, Manifest Destiny is the most fully articulated discourse of White innocence. Our findings illuminate how White supremacy and Manifest Destiny are foundational to Oregon and are expressed through state-sponsored White innocence to absolve racial violence and dispossession.

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Who is a settler? Samantha Lourdes Meza-Tejada, Social Work in the Settlement Sector and the Pursuit for Reconciliation: Reflections from Newcomer Latinos/as on Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation in Canada’, MA dissertation, University of Calgary, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: Formed on the practice of colonization, the creation of Canada is based on the immigration of French and English settler colonizers on stolen land. As time went on, immigration expanded to individuals of racialized backgrounds in search of starting a new life or seeking refuge in Canada. When we consider colonial legacies in immigration, and as we see modern-day immigration open to more non-European and racialized newcomers, how do we understand who is a settler or settler colonizer in the present time? This settler/non-settler debate carries particular importance when considering the Truth & Reconciliation (T&R) Calls to Action from the perspective of racialized newcomers to Canada, the settlement sector, and the social work profession’s interaction with racialized newcomers and immigrants. Using critical ethnography and exploring this topic through coloniality of power, postcolonial, and decolonial theories, this thesis shares details from a study completed with newcomer Latinos/as in Calgary, Alberta that explored their understanding and own positionality to settler colonialism, reconciliation, and being a racialized newcomer in Canada. Initial findings of this study present observations from Latin American cultural events, media, and reflections from individual interviews completed with Latino/a study participants as they explore their identity as newcomers in Canada and as individuals originating from a country and culture deeply rooted in colonization. This thesis concludes by offering recommendations on how these findings can be considered to promote a more relatable and intentional practice and engagement of reconciliation and achieving the T&R Calls to Action specifically for racialized newcomers, the settlement sector, and social work professionals who work with such populations.

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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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