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The walking settlers: Brian Grant, ‘Walking Toward Relationality: An Autoethnographic Inquiry of Inner Work for Personal and Systemic Change’, Journal of Awareness-Based System Change, 5, 1, 2025, pp. 98-128

07Jun25

Abstract: In this essay, I share an autoethnographic walking experience that is part of my inner work as an early-career sustainability scholar seeking to relate differently with land, people, and knowledge. This research began after I learned about the Exodus: the 1875 forced removal of Yavapai (Yavapé) and Apache (Dilzhę́’é) peoples from their ancestral lands in today’s Arizona, USA—the region where I, a white settler, was born and raised—which provoked in me intense shame. To unpack my relationships with settler colonialism and begin a process of becoming naturalized to place, I walked a section of the Arizona Trail that is part of the Exodus route. Employing a critical, relational walking methodology, as well as arts-based methods, I propose an autoethnography to illustrate six personal (un)learnings that aim to be insightful for the emerging relational paradigm in sustainability science. This includes drawing attention to the ways in which settler colonialism, intertwined with religions and science, may unconsciously orient relationships to land (ontology), people (axiology), and knowledge (epistemology) that are anti-relational. My walking experience underscores the importance of relational ethics as embedded in Indigenous relationality, which taught me that learning to relate differently with land in a more-than-human sense necessitates healing relationships with the First Peoples. This situates the turn toward relationality as far more than an intellectual endeavor that includes embodied experience, embracing difficult emotions, and acknowledging inner work as important for systems change.


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Settlers from one island: Susan Kingsley Kent, British Settler Colonialism since 1530: Indigenous Peoples in an Imperial World, Bloomsbury, 2025

07Jun25

Description: This book provides an account of British setter colonialism across the globe from 1530 to the present day. Centering the impact of settler colonies on indigenous peoples whose land was taken and populations were disrupted, it traces resistance, revolution, migration, assimilation and elimination in North America, Latin America, South Africa, Kenya, Ireland, the Middle East and Australia. Exploring the concept of settler colonialism, understanding how it differs from other aspects of imperialism and highlighting the importance of centering indigenous peoples in the study of empire, this book clarifies key theories, terms and debates within the field. Each chapter addresses issues of race, gender and the environment through a specific case study along with comparative ‘counterpoint’ examples of other settler colonies. It explores how indigenous peoples tried to preserve, recreate and reassert their cultures and values, and highlights the ongoing impact of settler colonialism and the domination of indigenous peoples and culture that continues to this day. With maps, images, primary documents and suggested further reading British Settler Colonialism provides an introduction to empire and colonialism with a focus on indigenous peoples, cultures and histories.


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Imagined settler community (micro): Dan Colson, ‘”A Peaceful Place”: Midwestern Colonialism in Ozark (Netflix, 2017–2022)’, Middle West Review, 11, 2, 2025, pp. 533-536

03Jun25

Abstract: Since the time of legal slavery, Missouri has been a site of conflict and geographic uncertainty. The Missouri Compromise (1820) designated Missouri as a slave state, thus aligning it with the American South. During the Civil War, though, Missourians fought on both sides, suggesting a space fully attached to neither the North nor the South. Now, Missouri is most often grouped into the Middle West. Ozark—a Netflix series that ran from 2017 to 2022—refigures this conflict by juxtaposing a White nuclear family with a distorted colonial space: the Ozarks, which are ripe with certain types of resources. This space contains the raw materials that make colonization profitable, from heroin-producing poppies to a dual population (local and tourist) that can sustain criminal activity. But, if the Ozarks stand as a pseudo-colonial space, who is the colonizer and who/what is being colonized? And what does the show say about the nature of midwestern spaces and people?


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Imagined settler community (macro): Jarosław Szczepański, ‘The anglosphere as non-contiguous region: Remarks on CANZUK’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2025

03Jun25

Abstract: The Anglosphere has been analysed perspectives of political science and IR. It is possible to adopt the perspective of humanistic regional studies, which will allow us to present a new way of explaining the phenomenon of the so-called kin nations among the CANZUK group countries. The article presents a way of starting from the non-national imagined community of Anglosphere, which is presented as an imagined place – accordingly to humanistic regional studies. On this basis, the characteristics of the non-contiguous region are indicated, primarily associated with the settler colonial past. The proposed new approach, in comparison with previous studies, indicates a possible deepening of the explanations of political events and processes already made and indicates new important factors allowing for a better understanding of the phenomenon of the Anglosphere.


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The sovereignty of Indigenous care: Theresa Ysabel Rocha Beardall, ‘Indigenous Abolition and the Third Space of Indian Child Welfare’, Genealogy, 9, 2, 2025, #59

03Jun25

Abstract: This article introduces the Third Space of Indian child welfare to theorize how Indigenous nations simultaneously engage and disrupt settler legal systems while building sovereign, care-based alternatives. Drawing from legal analysis, Indigenous political thought, and sociohistorical synthesis, I trace the historical continuity from boarding schools to today’s foster care removals, showing how child welfare operates as a colonial apparatus of family separation. In response, Native nations enact governance through three interrelated strategies: strategic legal engagement, kinship-based care, and tribally controlled family collectives. Building on Bruyneel’s theory of third space sovereignty, Simpson’s nested sovereignty, and Lightfoot’s global Indigenous rights framework, I conceptualize the Third Space as a dynamic field of Indigenous governance that transcends binary settler logics. These practices constitute sovereign abolitionist praxis. They reclaim kinship, resist carceral systems, and build collective futures beyond settler rule. Thus, rather than treating the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as a federal safeguard, I argue that tribes have repurposed ICWA as a legal and political vehicle for relational governance. This reframing challenges dominant crisis-based narratives and positions Indigenous child welfare as the center of a “global Indigenous politics of care” with implications for theories of sovereignty, family, and abolitionist futures across disciplines, geographies, and social groups. The article concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of the Third Space for other Indigenous and minoritized communities navigating state control and asserting self-determined care.


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Extinction and settler Rebellion: Kyle R. Matthews, Sophie Bond, Karen Nairn, ‘Diffusion as a colonizing process and the challenges of decolonizing Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand’, Social Movement Studies, 2025

03Jun25

Abstract: The Extinction Rebellion (XR) model, including three demands and a disruptive theory of change, were transferred from the imperial center of the United Kingdom to Aotearoa. Initially activists assumed that the model required no significant modification to be applied in this new context and built local groups and conducted protests in ways that were like XR in the UK. Yet by late 2019, in response to the critiques of a caucus of Māori and their allies, Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand (XRANZ) began to adapt the XR model with the aim of decolonizing it. They did this by adding a fourth demand, translating the demands and principles into Māori, and focusing XRANZ’s activism on a critique of the relationships between colonization and the climate crisis. Through this work there were significant challenges and pushback from some XRANZ members, and outcomes were partial at best. We make four interrelated arguments about these acts of adaptation: that processes of knowledge transfer from one context to another can be colonizing; that confronting the ways that colonial knowledge is entangled with climate activism requires significant work; that XRANZ’s is instructive for XR chapters in other settler-colonial contexts; and that transnational knowledge diffusion needs to be considered through a decolonial lens.


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Settler rights vs Indigenous relations: Laura Barraclough, ‘From rights to relations with the rural: Lessons from Indigenous studies’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

01Jun25

Abstract: This commentary responds to Van Sant and Fairbairn’s invitation to consider the meanings, potentials, and pitfalls of land access struggles in settler colonial contexts. Drawing on teachings from the field of critical Indigenous studies, I suggest that the developing idea of a right to the rural may be incommensurable with movements for Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization. I chart three sources of potential incommensurability between these projects: the colonial blind spots of Lefebvre’s rights to the city, which risk being imported into a right to the rural; the limits of rights for Indigenous peoples living under settler colonialism; and the coloniality of urban and rural scalar divisions. I propose we move away from a nascent right to the rural in favor of an Indigenous-led commitment to nurturing and sustaining relations with the rural. A focus on relations, rather than rights alone, has potential to build more meaningful solidarities between settler movements for rural social justice and Indigenous nations and to heal relations between people, more-than-humans, and the Land.


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There is no such thing as a free land: Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, Viking, 2023

01Jun25

Description: Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.


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The national settler Midwest: Peter S. Onuf, ‘Rethinking The Midwest and the Nation’, Middle West Review, 11, 2, 2025, pp. 577-582

01Jun25

Excerpt: Celebration of the Ordinance—the original organic law of the states that would be carved out of the new nation’s northern borderlands—was overshadowed by simultaneous celebration of the drafting of the federal Constitution. Historically, local patriots took pride in the coincidence of national and regional beginnings. In the free land north and west of the Ohio River, they claimed, old sectional distinctions dissolved, and the national promise was fulfilled. The Northwest Territory and its successor states constituted a region that transcended regionalism, drawing streams of immigrants from—and through—all parts of the union. The Civil War seemed to confirm this identification or conflation of region and nation, and historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” (1893) marked its apotheosis: America’s distinctively democratic character was forged on its first great settlement frontier, the land of the free—and not in the Southern “slave power’s” empire of slavery.


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The open road of settler colonialism: Nak-chung Paik, ‘Settler Colonialism and the “Open Road”: Apropos of Studies in Classic American Literature’, Journal of English Studies in Korea, 47, 2024, pp. 5-25

01Jun25

Excerpt: But let me first indicate that my discussion rests on the premise that, despite
the talk of the demons of the place and ghost of dead Indians, the book presents
a cogent historical narrative tracing the history of the United States since the
colonial days. For all its idiosyncratic language, Lawrence’s approach seems
essentially in line with that of ‘historical materialism’, namely, attending to the
actual motives and their material consequences rather than the historical actors’
own perceptions and ideals. Thus he begins the book by challenging the myth
of Puritan settlers first coming to New England in search of freedom of
worship …


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