settler colonial studies blog

Water itself against settler colonialism: Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, ‘The Poetics and Ontologies of Fresh Water in Settler Contexts’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2025

21Mar25

Excerpt: In mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Pākehā (settler) poet J. R. Hervey encounters a “squat citadel spraying power”—a hydroelectric dam—and finds that it has turned the river into “dumb, disciplined waters” (43). A decade later, the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi) draws on his experiences as a worker on hydroelectric dam projects to also describe their environmental impact as a forcible act of silencing: “Nowhere is there greater fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue” (“Sea” 30). At first glance, the similarity between Hervey and Tuwhare’s portrayals of rivers rendered “dumb” simply attests to the far-flung extent of the modernist belief that hydroelectric infrastructure contributed to civilization’s necessary work of pacifying unruly nature. As Patrick McCully puts it in his history of large dams, aptly titled Silenced Rivers (1996), such infrastructure has come to “symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality” (237). Framed by this binary opposition, literature seems to offer a powerful vehicle through which rivers might speak against the extractivist forces that would seek to silence them. Thus, Paul Kingsnorth aligns his recent poetic response to the “wild and blue, raging and unchanneled” rivers of Patagonia, Songs from the Blue River (2018), with theologian Thomas Berry’s insight that the “modern project” is predicated upon silencing these bodies of water: “We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation” (qtd. in Kingsnorth). Yet such straightforward assertions are complicated by the earlier examples of Hervey and Tuwhare, whose distinct cultural perspectives prompt questions both about the source of a river’s speech and the ability to understand what it might have to say. The matter of riverine voice has surfaced into western consciousness in recent years as a result of various legislative attempts to recognize prior and ongoing Indigenous understandings of rivers as living, ancestral, metaphysical entities.

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Nursing after settler colonialism: Gina Jang, ‘A Journey Toward Self-Reconciliation via Indigenous Wisdom Unraveling Identity: A Contemporary Issue in Nursing’, Nurse Education Today, 150, 2025, #106680

21Mar25

Abstract: The author delves into the intricate layers of identity and responsibility as experienced by an Asian immigrant in Canada. The author grapples with the complexities of being simultaneously an outsider and a participant in settler colonial dynamics. The narrative traces the author’s evolving comprehension of her settler identity.

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Settler colonial and sexist: Muhammad Rehan Sabir, Maryam Asim, Muhammad Rehan, Muqaddas Saif, ‘Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave: An Artistic Reclamation of Native American Women’s Identity and Cultural Sovereignty’, International Conference on Next-Generation Innovations and Sustainability, 2025

21Mar25

Abstract: Native American women seem to struggle for emancipation from two kinds of status quo. One aspect focuses on breaking free from the colonial idea of the nation-state, while the other highlights resistance against heteropatriarchy that was planted into Native American tribes. This article applies theoretical lens of Andrea Smith on Joy Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave to highlight the involvement of settler colonialism in the obstruction of Native American consciousness. This paper investigates the resistive campaign of native women against intersectional politics of tribal men and colonial powers. Smith’s idea of spiritual activism unfolds the difference of white feminism and colored feminism to uncover the systematic violence against native women. This paper also explores how Joy Harjo, through memory, metaphor, storytelling, and spiritual activism, critiques the dual oppression of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy to reclaim indigenous identity and cultural sovereignty. This research is an exploration of native women’s adversity of keeping tribal nationalism over sexism as their survival strategy in an imperial nation state by using Joy Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave as a specimen.

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The settler’s game? Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, Braden Te Hiwi, Beyond the Rink: Behind the Images of Residential School Hockey, University of Manitoba Press, 2025

20Mar25

Description: In 1951, after winning the Thunder Bay district championship, the Sioux Lookout Black Hawks hockey team from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School embarked on a whirlwind promotional tour through Ottawa and Toronto. They were accompanied by a professional photographer from the National Film Board who documented the experience. The tour was intended to demonstrate the success of the residential school system and introduce the Black Hawks to “civilizing” activities and the “benefits” of assimilating into Canadian society. For some of the boys, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of hockey; for others, it was an escape from the brutal living conditions and abuse at the residential school. In Beyond the Rink, Alexandra Giancarlo, Janice Forsyth, and Braden Te Hiwi collaborate with three surviving team members—Kelly Bull, Chris Cromarty, and David Wesley—to share the complex legacy behind the 1951 tour photos. This book reveals the complicated role of sports in residential school histories, commemorating the team’s stellar hockey record and athletic prowess while exposing important truths about “Canada’s Game” and how it shaped ideas about the nation. By considering their past, these Survivors imagine a better way forward not just for themselves, their families, and their communities, but for Canada as a whole.

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Indigenous properties and settler anthropologists: David S. Trigger, ‘Land claim legacies, native title, and the rigours of Indigenous politics’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2025

20Mar25

Abstract: My studies in the Northern Territory/Queensland border region of Australia’s Gulf Country indicate continuing tense negotiations among Waanyi/Garawa people concerning the inclusion/exclusion of particular persons as traditional owners and recipients of benefits from various economic ventures. Despite commonly expressed Indigenous views that stress the importance of sustaining continuity of traditional ‘law’, this points to the importance of addressing change, as assuming that the model of traditional ownership articulated in a land claim 40 years ago will not undergo modification would be naïve. Subsequent generations have come to define connections to Country more flexibly than the earlier documented system of inheritance through patrilines and mother’s patrilines. Native title, land claims, and mining negotiations on the Queensland side of the border have influenced this outcome. I address risks of legal rigidification of customary law driven by the practical availability of the original Northern Territory land rights research. That earlier completed work has become a focus for appeals to cultural authenticity and strategic traditionalism among Indigenous protagonists fuelled in part by competition for money and related resources. While research such as mine from the 1980s remains essential in decision-making, it needs to be updated and approached with a methodology open to the significance of cultural change. This difficult area of anthropological work deserves more analytical attention, recognition, and support.

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Subversive Indigenous authenticity: Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Authenticity and decolonization: On the subversive authenticity of Indigenous resurgence’, Anthropological Theory, 2025

18Mar25

Abstract: Authenticity is often regarded as an impediment to decolonization, particularly in contexts involving Indigenous people. Some frame authenticity as a colonialist construct, perpetuated by Indigenous people and others to contest or enforce power relations. Others dismiss authenticity altogether as an illusory, essentialist and divisive concept. Yet others marshal ‘hybridity’ and ‘Indigenous modernity’ as conceptual alternatives. While these lenses generate useful perspectives, I argue that their shared rejection of authenticity overlooks the diverse ways in which many Indigenous people make sense of it. To account for authenticity’s intricate vernacular usage and functionality in contexts of Indigenous resurgence, I propose an additional framework that differentiates authenticity from accuracy and verisimilitude. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2022 among urban-based and newly identifying Indigenous people in Cape Town, South Africa, whose authenticity rarely goes unquestioned. When expressing their views on authenticity, many ‘Khoisan revivalists’ assert their agency by subverting widely held expectations. Their ‘subversive authenticity’ intermittently ignores, rejects and reinforces dominant understandings of Indigenous authenticity in a seemingly disinterested manner. As its boundaries are thus made porous, authenticity emerges as a potential source of empowerment and conduit for decolonization. However, since authenticity’s boundaries frequently remain contested, subversive authenticity is not meant to supplant critical approaches but to increase the analytical purchase of anthropologists’ theoretical arsenal.

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Settler colonialism from the margins: Lucy Taylor, Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia: Settler Colonialism from the Margins, University of Wales Press, 2025

17Mar25

Description: This book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. Inspired by decolonial thinking, this book challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony, and in particular disrupts the myth of Welsh–Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing less familiar accounts in the record. A newly-developed framework applies three logics – possession, racialization/barbarisation, and assimilation – to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales’s complex position as both colonised and coloniser. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.

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The extractions of settler colonialism: Claire Blencowe, Spirits of extraction: Christianity, settler colonialism and the geology of race, Manchester University Press, 2025

17Mar25

Description: Spirits of extraction revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to ‘civilise savages’, were crucial to the movement’s foundation in eighteenth-century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the nineteenth century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, the book theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.

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Settlers monopolise violence: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘On the monopoly of violence: Ideal types of settler colonial violence and the habitus of sumud’, Current Sociology, 2025

17Mar25

Abstract: Political sociologists have articulated state-making as the concentration of power and violence within state apparatuses. However, classical theories have often overlooked the distinctive characteristics of settler colonial nation-state formation, whose raison d’état is the preservation of settler sovereignty and supremacy, accumulated largely through practices of dispossession, appropriation, subjugation, and elimination, and whose power is dispersed at times to settler-citizens. Examining the case of Israel, and identifying divergent ideal types of settler colonial violence, the article pinpoints the unique features that define Israel as a settler colonial state. Moreover, it explores how the monopoly on violence is variably applied depending on contingent dynamics, and dialectical interactions with the indigenous and their habitus of sumud (steadfastness). The analysis delves into the themes of state violence and the state of exception, examining the case of the ‘Dignity Intifada’ in May 2021, alongside the genocidal war since October 7, 2023. By comprehending the material and symbolic processes shaping the persistence of settler colonialism in its different formations, the article contributes to a nuanced understanding how ‘war-by-other-means’ and indigenous resistance both endure.

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Settler capitalism, today: Hugh Burnam, ‘Postdigital Settler Capitalism’, in P. Jandrić (ed.), Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education, Springer 2024

17Mar25

Abstract: Embedded as a societal structure, settler colonialism has only intensified in our postdigital age. Under a free-market capitalist economy, digital consumerism undermines Indigenous rights when tech companies have interest in large-scale extraction of raw materials like lithium, gold, and copper on Indigenous lands. While private tech companies extract natural resources from Indigenous lands, this increases socio-cultural conflict, causes harm to the environment, exploits workers, and dispossesses Indigenous Peoples of their rights and their lifeways on their sacred lands. Private interests in the mass production of digital technology, under a settler capitalist system, continues to threaten the welfare of people and lands locally and globally.

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