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Indigenous Wards, settler wardens: Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

23Dec25

Description: Wardship and the Welfare State examines the ideological dimensions and practical intersections of public policy and Native American citizenship, Indian wardship, and social welfare rights after World War II. By examining Native wardship’s intersections with three pieces of mid-twentieth-century welfare legislation—the 1935 Social Security Act, the 1942 Servicemen’s Dependents Allowance Act, and the 1944 GI Bill—Mary Klann traces the development of a new conception of first-class citizenship. Wardship and the Welfare State explores how policymakers and legislators have defined first-class citizenship against its apparent opposite, the much older and fraught idea of Indian wardship. Wards were considered dependent, while first-class citizens were considered independent. Wards were thought to receive gratuitous aid from the government, while first-class citizens were considered responsible. Critics of the federal welfare state’s expansion in the 1930s through 1960s feared that as more Americans received government aid, they too could become dependent wards, victims of the poverty they saw on reservations. Because critics believed wardship prevented Native men and women from fulfilling expectations of work, family, and political membership, they advocated terminating Natives’ trust relationships with the federal government. As these critics mistakenly equated wardship with welfare, state officials also prevented Native people from accessing needed welfare benefits. But to Native peoples wardship was not welfare and welfare was not wardship. Native nations and pan-Native organizations insisted on Natives’ government-to-government relationships with the United States and maintained their rights to welfare benefits. In so doing, they rejected stereotyped portrayals of Natives’ perpetual poverty and dependency and asserted and defined tribal sovereignty. By illuminating how assumptions about “gratuitous” government benefits limit citizenship, Wardship and the Welfare State connects Native people to larger histories of race, inequality, gender, and welfare in the twentieth-century United States.


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Intersectional AI? Rebecca Bennett, Shakara Liddelow-Hunt, Brianne Hastie, Em Readman, ‘AI and Settler-colonial Cis-hetero Hegemony: AI Responses to the Purpose of “life” at the Indigenous-queer Intersection’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper reveals the discursive mechanisms through which generative AI reinforces societal hegemony and denies scope for Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS). We interrogate the implicit positionality of text-based generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) through responses to a single ontological question: What is life’s purpose? The first answer to this question was then modified by three respective prompts: ‘Indigenise response’; ‘queer response’; ‘Indigenise and queer response’. The baseline (normative) response focused on global impact, personal joy, continuous growth, inspiring others, and creating a legacy; an ‘Indigenous’ modifier focused on nature, connection, community, ancestors, and sharing knowledge; a ‘queer’ modifier returned a politicised purpose of radical kindness, LGBTQ+ rights, and inclusivity, and the ‘Indigenous-queer’ modifier returned a randomised mash-up of the previous responses, loosely focused on cultural strength and queer liberation. Comparative critical discourse analysis of the findings, from our Indigenous, queer, and Indigenous-queer author positionalities, found that Indigenised life purpose was positioned outside of settler colonialism, denying the situatedness of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing within coloniality and the related IDS priority issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Conversely, queered life purpose was radical and resistive, an inherently political way of being with no scope for existing outside of politics. The intersectional response was not cohesive, but it did both contain political and apolitical elements. This analysis exposes the limits of LLMs such as ChatGPT for IDS priorities such as community speaking for community and control of our own narratives and ontologies. It debunks notions of AI neutrality by highlighting settler colonial, cis-hetero-normative, and otherising responses within in seemingly ‘apolitical’ tech. GPT thus provides a contemporaneous example of the hegemonic systems the IDS movement is challenging. Further, intersectionality is revealed as a potential hegemonic disrupter through the system’s inability to control a narrative that includes multiple identities.


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Indigenous AI? Tamika Worrell, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Indigenous AI Futures: Uncle Chatty Gee, Aunty Lexi, and Algorithmic Settler Colonialism’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This article explores the complex relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Indigenous peoples, framing AI as an extension of colonial systems that continue to extract, distort, and commodify Indigenous knowledges, lands, and bodies. We introduce Uncle Chatty Gee and Aunty Lexi as playful yet critical personifications of ChatGPT and Perplexity AI to explore how Indigenous communities engage with and interrogate AI technologies. This framing situates AI within Indigenous relational frameworks, making it culturally legible while inviting scrutiny. Our paper argues that generative AI perpetuates algorithmic settler colonialism through digital and algorithmic systems, reinforcing biases and erasing Indigenous knowledge. We highlight the risks and harms posed by AI to Indigenous communities, including data extraction without consent, distortion of digital narratives, and environmental impacts on Country. We also discuss Indigenous resistance to algorithmic settler colonialism through data sovereignty movements and Indigenous-led AI governance models. As Indigenous scholars, we emphasise the urgent need for Indigenous peoples to not only critique but also shape the future of AI in ways that centre relationality, sovereignty, and Indigenous aspirations, ensuring active participation in the AI landscape to uphold cultural integrity and digital justice.


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Settler colonial AI (introducing a special issue): Jessica Russ-Smith, Holly Randell-Moon, ‘AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Knowing, Engaging, and Learning in New Data Contexts’, Somatechnics, 15, 3, 2025

23Dec25

Excerpt: The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated debate and discussion about knowledge practices in social, political, and institutional spaces. Although the development of new data systems raises important ethical and professional practice issues, these developments also take place in a digital context informed by older colonial knowledges and systems. Technologies such as AI prompt renewed considerations and examinations of the sustainability and importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, as data governance remains an ongoing priority for First Nations communities (Tapu and Fa’agau 2022; Whaanga and Mato 2021). Whilst a substantial body of research, policy and law development has focussed on developing ethical standards for AI use (Kakar 2021), this work has largely excluded First Nations communities. To achieve ethical AI use, if even possible, First Nations communities, knowledges and Data Sovereignty are essential to resist producing and reproducing colonial data norms. This special issue focuses on AI, Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the impact of technology on data decision-making in knowledge, engagement, and learning contexts. Furthermore, this issue explores and examines these intersections from the perspectives of diverse sovereign First Nations peoples, cosmologies and ways of Knowing, Being and Doing.


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Settler colonial AI: Ihab Maharmeh, ‘AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of how Israel employs artificial intelligence (AI) technologies under the pretext of counterterrorism to intensify the Zionist settler-colonial project and capitalist accumulation in Palestine. It focuses particularly on how AI has become integral to Israel’s settler-colonial regime, serving ideological, geopolitical, and commercial objectives while presenting these aims as neutral, technical procedures embedded within its counterterrorism strategy. This paper builds on scholarship that shows how settler colonies have historically used stigmatisation, classification, and the delegitimisation of Indigenous resistance as terrorism to eliminate Indigenous peoples before raising questions about how, more recently, AI has intensified this colonial logic. By focusing on Israel’s use of AI, this paper offers an analysis of how AI is intensifying genocide, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ voices. It also demonstrates how Israel’s use of AI supports capitalist accumulation, as security technologies tested on Palestinians under the pretext of counterterrorism are commercialised and exported to global markets.


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Unmissable settler patriarchy: Lindsay Martel Montgomery, Heather Pezzarossi, Jennifer P. Byram, ‘Archiving Futurity Within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Crisis’, American Anthropologist, 2025

20Dec25

Abstract: In this article, we examine how settler colonization and gendered violence against Indigenous women are remembered and recorded in two archival registers: 18th-century records from the Massachusetts Archives Collection (MAC) and a 21st-century corpus of posts using the hashtag MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) on X (formerly Twitter). These archives are shaped by distinct temporal logics and contain multiple projections of settler and Indigenous futurity. The MAC is dominated by the colonial logic of recursive dispossession; a temporal perspective of declension that acknowledges Indigenous lands only after they are taken, and Indigenous people only after they are “disappeared.” A close reading of these documentary sources also reveals how Indigenous peoples worked within this system to maintain social relationships and connections to place. We contrast settler visions of futurity with contemporary social media articulations of vibrant and emancipatory Indigenous futures grounded in hope and presence. Through this comparative discussion, we demonstrate how different documentary modalities encode time, define events, and shape informational flows in ways that enable and constrain Indigenous futurity.


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Settler Oktoberfest! Audrey Ricke, Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity, University of Alabama Press, 2023

20Dec25

Description: Oktoberfest in Brazil: Domestic Tourism, Sensescapes, and German Brazilian Identity is one of the first ethnographies to analyze the tourism industry based on German cultural heritage in southern Brazil. Southern Brazil’s booming domestic tourism industry draws more than 500,000 people to events such as the Oktoberfest in Blumenau. Ricke investigates domestic tourism as sensescapes, focusing on the multiple and layered meanings associated with tourism’s sensory experiences and interactions. The author also introduces the “economy of aesthetics” as a new framework to capture how the sensescapes associated with domestic tourism are intertwined in the negotiation of ethnic, national, and transnational identities. These sensescapes also intersect with discourses on class and race, which are examined as well. Oktoberfest in Brazil leads readers on a tour through German Brazilian home gardens, folk dance performances, and the largest Oktoberfest in Brazil. These sensory-rich spaces of interaction provide access to different perspectives and types of identity negotiation at multiple levels from the local to the transnational. Ricke illustrates how the emotions and sensory experiences of these sensescapes associated with German cultural heritage function as a means for German Brazilians to negotiate senses of belonging as Brazilians as well as their ethnic and transnational identities. This book also provides historical and contemporary insights into the politics of citizenship associated with cultural heritage. As politics become more polarized, the need to analyze different ways of communicating through sensory experiences increases. The unique contribution of the economy of aesthetics framework is its ability to capture the influential power of sensory experience in the negotiation of identity and senses of belonging and citizenship more broadly. It provides new insights into how and why some sensory experiences within domestic tourism foster belonging and identity while other experiences reinforce social distinctions and national divisions.


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Settler patriarchy: Jordan Lea Johnson, ‘Angelina in the Archives: Tracing Heteropatriarchy and Settler Colonialism in Local Histories of the Pineywoods’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 46, 3, 2025, pp. 121-151

20Dec25

Abstract: This article draws on Native feminist theories and critical settler colonial studies to analyze the role of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in local histories of the East Texas Pineywoods, occupied Caddo lands. Taking up accounts from the early modern colonial period alongside more contemporary examples, I conduct a feminist genealogical analysis of a Caddo woman known to the settler archive as Angelina. Characterized as the “Pineywoods Pocahontas” within local history and lore of East Texas, Angelina is situated within a legacy of Native women imagined to be aligned with colonial interests through their romanticized attachments to white settler men. As with other famous Native women, settler stories comprehend Angelina according to heteropatriarchal norms of gender and sexuality, imagining her as submissive and accommodating while framing colonization within a teleological narrative of US history. In colonial journals and memoirs, as well as contemporary paintings, murals, and local histories, settler stories frame Angelina through the lens of heteropatriarchy and colonial modernity, confining Caddo peoples and societies to a prehistoric past while eliding Caddo sovereignty in the present and denying Caddo futures. I apply Native feminist theorizations of gender, sexuality, and colonialism to representations of Angelina to denaturalize the heteropatriarchal replacement narratives that continue to authorize settlers as the rightful inhabitants of Caddo homelands, framing local history narratives and settler storytelling practices as one way that settler colonialism is romanticized in the past, enacted in the present, and normalized in the future.


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Represented, but within settler colonialism: Loredana Giarrusso, ‘Contemporary Colonialism, Governmentality and the Pursuit of a Commonwealth Indigenous Body, 1973–2005’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2025

20Dec25

Abstract: This article examines Indigenous representative bodies in Australian politics from 1973 to 2005 with a particular focus on the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Council for Aboriginal Development and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The examples of these Indigenous representative bodies illustrate the pervasive settler colonialism that has underpinned the government’s approach in Indigenous affairs and highlights the problematic nature of relations between the national government and Indigenous peoples. This entrenched settler colonialism reinforces ongoing colonial structures, maintaining the legitimacy of national government at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ political autonomy. The article reflects on the 2023 constitutional referendum proposal of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as an outcome of the continued underlying settler colonial dynamics underpinning government interactions with Indigenous peoples conducted at the political level.


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German settlers without settler colonies (with illustrations): Rachel O’Sullivan, ‘Entangled Narratives of Colonialism: Promoting Overseas and Continental Expansion in Nazi Germany’, Copernico, 2025

19Dec25

Excerpt: Nazi Germany’s eastern expansion has meant the Nazi goal of Lebensraum (living space) is often solely associated with Eastern Europe. However, the justifications for claiming overseas colonies by colonial enthusiasts during the Third Reich were often strikingly similar to the narratives of those who supported eastern expansion. Although Nazi Germany is heavily associated with its eastern expansion during the Second World War, many groups did not abandon the fantasy of reestablishing a German empire in Africa, even after the National Socialists came to power with their clearly eastwardorientated ideology in 1933. In fact, from as early as 1934, Nazi state institutions, such as the “Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP” (NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy, KPA) under the leadership of war veteran Franz Ritter von Epp, officially planned for an eventual German return to Africa after the war. Meanwhile, colonial enthusiasts throughout Germany were eagerly producing material such as books and leaflets, attended specialized schools and organized events which promoted German overseas expansion. Such colonial enthusiasts were often members of the “Reichskolonialbund” (Reich Colonial League, RKB), also under the leadership of Epp, which was formed in 1933 when the “Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft” (German Colonial Society, founded in 1887) merged with other smaller organizations. While the KPA undertook all official planning for the future reclamation of the German colonies in Africa, the RKB raised awareness and educated the public on colonial matters.


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