Abstract: Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis, initially derived from studies of African American women and their newborns, posited that their physical health outcomes were worsened by accumulated stress produced by long-term experiences of pervasive intersectional oppression. African American women experienced sociopolitical and economic oppression produced by the synergistic interactions of structural anti-Black racism and patriarchy. The weathering hypothesis can be extrapolated beyond African American women, and beyond physical health, as an analytic framework to understand how other less-studied intersectional groups may experience poorer mental health outcomes due to the intersections of multiple axes of oppression. The present work argues that Indigiqueer people, who exist at the intersection of Indigenous and queer identities, may similarly be weathered by their experiences of combined oppression arising from systemic forces of settler colonialism and queerphobia. After introducing the weathering hypothesis, its neuroendocrine mechanisms, and its original application to African American women, we then separately detail the ways that Indigenous and queer people in Canada experience oppression, linking the forms of oppression experienced by both populations to their respective mental health. In consideration of this discussion of the impacts of and queerphobia, we reapply Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis to understand the mental health disparities experienced by Indigiqueer people and defend this recontextualization of the weathering hypothesis. In closing, we celebrate Indigiqueer vitality and issue a call to action for Canadian healthcare systems to apply a holistic intersectional lens towards viewing Indigiqueer people and their lived experiences to make meaningful progress towards Indigiqueer mental health equity.

Abstract: Native American imagery and symbols—as logos, mascots, and nicknames—have been commonplace in American sports since the early-twentieth century. This review presents scholarship on this practice at the intersection between the sociology of sports, race/ethnicity, higher education, politics, and social movements, as well as other relevant social sciences. Scholarship has emphasized this imagery’s social origins, public opinion, social psychology, and socio-political trends in the conflict over and often elimination of such symbols. As a disproportionately American practice, Indigenous imagery in sports is linked to the history of settler-colonialism, racialization, and corporate capitalism, and is found throughout all levels of sports (high schools, colleges and universities, and professional). After the US West’s frontier closure, and during the height of Jim Crow and racial lynchings, many educational institutions adopted Indigenous imagery—motivated by a masculinity crisis and American myth-making as a settler-colonialist society. Sociological scholarship has used many methodological approaches, but has emphasized public opinion of the practice, using surveys to predict support for symbols, comparing racial differences, and criticizing how some surveys purportedly offer “support” to the practice via unreliable, non-representative survey techniques. Social psychological studies has explored both the motivations for support and the consequences for the practice, giving particular attention to the impact on Indigenous people (especially Indigenous youth’s self-esteem), in contrast to evidence of improved white self-efficacy. The long-standing conflicts generated by the practice date back to the 1960s with the National Congress of American Indians and 1970s’ “red power” movements, specifically the American Indian Movement. These conflicts have pitted institutional actors (e.g., school administrators and team owners) and sports fans against movements for Indigenous autonomy and anti-racism. Conflicts have involved widespread resistance from sports fans and alumni, against various waves of racial justice mobilizations. Decolonization efforts have aimed to achieve Indigenous self-determination, the right to evade psychological disparagement in the face of both physical and cultural genocide, and to instead be empowered by ownership of their own cultural identity. While most universities and some professional sports teams have ended this practice, many have not—especially at the primary and secondary education levels. Thus, this research continues to occur within an active period of changing practices, and aims to respond to both evolving conditions and new scholarly questions.

Excerpt: A portrait of heavy metal music in North America is incomplete without considering its political and anticolonial appeal in Indigenous communities. Across Canada and the United States, there are active metal music scenes where Indigenous creators are voicing their resistance to settlercolonialism [sic].

Abstract: Over the past century, debates have raged about the validity of United States corporate personhood and the scope of a person-corporation’s rights. While important, these discussions have also erased marginalized peoples’ use of corporate personhood as a strategy for securing the rights denied them by governments. This is the case with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), who incorporated in 1847 to ensure their own rights and protections at a time when their political sovereignty and human rights were being systematically violated. Although legal recognition of corporate personhood began in 1818, the granting of previously human-only rights to person-corporations has accelerated via recent court cases. In this article, I briefly examine how, over time, the US has conferred personhood on corporations. I then deconstruct what this personhood can tell us about the beliefs and practices regarding the meaning of being a person in the United States. Through this, I demonstrate that the act of conferring personhood—the accountability of who is counted as a person and by whom—manifests the underlying ontologies and purposes of what it is to be a person, whether it is through US incorporation laws or in the EBCI’s sovereignty protections.

Description: Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized. Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikīkī attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John “Doc” Ball, Preston “Pete” Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison while also delving into California’s control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry. Compelling and innovative, Waikīkī Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.

Abstract: This study explores the nature of the Fedarb sheet of the Treaty of Waitangi. The author argues that it conflicts with the conventional argument for the necessity of Treaty principles. She argues that the Treaty principles are a device of settler/invader colonialism. The study is a type of Kaupapa Māori writing inquiry. In the case of the Fedarb sheet, if there was no English treaty sheet provided, then most traditional Treaty scholarship arguments become invalid.Rather than interpret Te Tiriti in light of the English Treaty, we must recognize that all the Fedarb signatories provided to the government was the ability to regulate land-use.Mataatua waka should not have been made a part of the settler colonial construction that was the results of settlers’ inaccurate interpretations of the document..All this highlights the need to view the various sheets of The Treaty of Waitangi and/or Te Tiriti o Waitangi as not a single monolithic and homogenous document, but differentiated international treaties between sovereign hapū and the Crown of England. Each sheet should be seen as separate and different on a regional and whakapapa basis, in its own context.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence. Settler colonialism was not having a good press in late 2024 – genocide rarely looks promising or inclusive (unless you are a sociopath, and many have articulated their sociopathy in 2024). This is when the Nobel Prize Committee came to the rescue, rescuing a 2001 article to award a group of economic historians for their work on explaining the reasons for the settler polities’ record of sustained economic growth.[1] These economists were asking: how is it that these former colonies are wealthy, while most other postcolonies are doing so poorly? Fair question. Could it be that if the colonisers reside in the metropole profits accrue in the metropole, whereas if they reside in the settler colony profits build up in the settler colony? Could it be about where precisely the loot of a callous system of expropriation and dispossession is accumulated?

Not so, according to Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors, and according to the members of the Nobel Prize Committee, who assumed that colonialism was neither bad nor good, but observed that ‘different colonial strategies have led to different institutional patterns that have persisted over time’.[2] ‘Extractive’ states or colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America were bad; ‘inclusivity’ in North American and Australasian settler colonial institutions was good. It is not whether the loot is shipped away or accumulated on site, these economists argued; it is settler colonialism in the ‘Neo-Europes’ that is characterised by ‘inclusive institutions’, while other forms of colonialism are defined by ‘exclusive institutions’.[3]

Acemoglu et al consider several variables but focus on institutions. What institutions exactly? Secure private property rights, security for foreign investments, and a ‘low risk of expropriation’ – the institutions they talk about are those that protect and enforce private property.[4] But not everybody’s property, of course, which is remarkable, as talking about ‘security’ of property and ‘settler colonies’ in the same sentence can only happen if one entirely neglects that the security of Indigenous property was systematically denied (this is not a minor detail, as the settlers’ protection from the risk of expropriation was entirely predicated on Indigenous dispossession).

How could these authors entirely disregard the Indigenous peoples of the countries they focus on? Similarly, how could the Nobel Prize Committee disregard these economists’ disregard of Indigenous peoples? Alas, disregard begets foreclosure; and the awarded authors and the Committee are contemporary epitomes of a very long-lasting tradition. Settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination is after all premised on disavowing the very presence of Indigenous collectives and polities, and in 2024 neither set of laureate scholars departed from this pattern of perception. The members of the Committee said that they now understood ‘differences in prosperity between nations’; but the whole episode may rather have shed light on a consistent pattern of misperception.

Acemoglu and his collaborators are adamant that it is not geography that ensures long term economic development, not the availability of resources, and not a privileged location (again, could it be a relation of domination?), and they state the obvious: that the settler colonies did better than the other ones:

Our argument rests on the following premises: (1) Europeans adopted very different colonization strategies, with different associated institutions. In one extreme, as in the case of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, they went and settled in the colonies and set up institutions that enforced the rule of law and encouraged investment. In the other extreme, as in the Congo or the Gold Coast, they set up extractive states with the intention of transferring resources rapidly to the metropole. These institutions were detrimental to investment and economic progress. (2) The colonization strategy was in part determined by the feasibility of European settlement. In places where Europeans faced very high mortality rates, they could not go and settle, and they were more likely to set up extractive states. (3) Finally, we argue that these early institutions persisted to the present. Determinants of whether Europeans could go and settle in the colonies, therefore, have an important effect on institutions today.[5]

Acemoglu and colleagues received the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on economic history, but they failed to consider history or the economy, and completely and possibly deliberately misrecognise the ‘determinants’ shaping the ‘strategies’. GG well played, but it was never a fair game.

They neglect economics because the settler colonies cannot be appraised as isolates. Over the long term, settler colonial expansion in some locales was predicated on other forms of colonial expansion in other ones. Considering one set of colonies and the other one without appraising their co-constitutive development and interaction is methodologically unsound and misleading. There would have been no settler colonies without the extractive ones providing markets, or a geopolitical context where the permanent emigration of Europeans would be even conceivable. Acemoglu and coauthors also neglect economics because extraction and appropriation were invariably the primary reason for establishing settlements. They fail to mention the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, or to note that expropriated land was an endowment that the settler polities deliberately utilised to promote development, sustain immigration, fund their institutions (including their universities), and further marginalise Indigenous collectives. The settlers got the land, while in the other colonies it was colonists keen on returning to the metropole and non-resident shareholders who got to own and exploit resources. The institutions themselves were not different at all; all colonialisms, including extractive colonialism, developed institutions that protected all colonisers from the ‘risk of expropriation’. Not observing flows of capital from one location to another is unbecoming for economic historians.

But Acemoglu et al neglect history too, as they assume that settlement was always one of the available ‘strategies’, and that extraction was the default recourse only once the feasibility of ‘European settlement’ had been disproved. It was the other way around! As far as the metropolitan colonists were concerned, the settler colonies were established only wherever the preferable option of establishing extractive colonies was unavailable. The English and the French were latecomers, and found themselves cut off from the most profitable colonies by Iberian ascendancy. They settled for settlements because they could not extract elsewhere, as they would have preferred. If anything, the settlements they initially established were aimed at extracting some loot from someone else’s extraction. There never was a real choice between ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions, the colonising powers opted for settlements because they faced constraints that could not be overcome.

These scholars also neglect history because they do not see Indigenous resistance as a determinant (as well, as noted, as Indigenous systems of property). The purpose of their work is to demonstrate a direct correlation between initial settler mortality and the feasibility of establishing colonial settlements with early representative institutions. But their historical data on the comparative morbidity of colonists and settlers is largely unusable because they do not compare apples with apples (sailors and soldiers would die at a higher rate than farmers wherever they are), and their assumptions about ‘institutions’ are unsupported by sufficiently inclusive data (I am using this adjective deliberately, as I expand below). The British colonies in the West Indies, for example, had very early representative institutions, and they were very respectful of property rights, especially in enslaved persons. And the strategy was to build settlements, and the colonists faced very high mortality rates. Mortality and institutions mixed differently there, and these colonies were not marginal, and only in the nineteenth century their relevance subsided. Neglecting history is routine for economic historians.

It is likely that the settler colonies and the settler societies that superseded them diverged from other colonies and the postcolonial successor states for reason that Acemoglu and colleagues did not reflect on. The extractive colonial economies are born in the context of their immediate subsumption in international circuits of unequal trade; loot and tribute aside, even if loot and tribute are significant, they offer commodities that are monopolised by metropolitan concerns, and they purchase articles of trade that are monopolised by metropolitan concerns. The demand is to produce what the metropole wants and to buy only what the metropole allows. Once their economies take shape, once their entire productive capacity is concentrated in a limited number of staples, it is extremely difficult to revert to an autonomous pattern. And by then the wealth of the country has generally been literally shipped away. Is this systematic siphoning not a form of expropriation?

For the settlers it is different. The settler economies are born in explosive ‘booms’ and only later are reconnected to international circuits of trade.[6] At first, self-consumption and an escape, then they reproduce at a fierce rate, supported by massive immigration; only later the settler societies recover from the busts that succeed the booms by relying on extractive industries. They are born autonomous, and it is this foundational independence that proves resilient – the institutions Acemoglu et al are talking about come later.

Finally, Acemoglu and collaborators neglect history because the feasibility of settlement was not determined primarily by the disease environment (as measured by settler mortality), but by the ability of accessing the interior of continents away from easier to get to seaboards, together with the ability of decisively defeating Indigenous resistors. They note that ‘the colonization strategy was influenced by the feasibility of settlements’, but do not consider that it was the ‘transport revolution’ of the early nineteenth century that allowed masses of settlers to access areas that had been unavailable until then, and that it was the ability to industrially mobilise military resources for sustained periods and project force inland that finally enabled settler colonial collectives to enforce a regime of ‘low risk of expropriation’.[7] There is a history to global settler colonialism, conditions changed over time, and Indigenous resistance and capabilities changed over time too. The temperate regions were colonised at a later stage because they were for a very long time the least appealing. Fierce and unsurrendered Indigenous polities constituted for centuries a significant threat of settler mortality, and this threat affected colonising strategies and settlement feasibility recommending circumspection (which determined the low mortality rate Acemoglu and collaborators rely on). A settler colonial genocidal determination increased over time, before generally receding in fits and starts during the twentieth century. Acemoglu et al have no time for this history and read it backwards.

They conclude: ‘settler mortality alone explains 27 percent of the differences in institutions we observe today’.[8] Using specific numbers may look impressive, but how is it that when modern medicine comprehensively transformed disease environments and enabled the deployment of settler colonial strategies in areas that had been previously spared the settler colonial onslaught the settlers generally failed (and yet they did try)?[9] Mortality and institutions were the same. And how can it be that it is an aggressively expropriating former semicolony that has become (again) the world’s second largest economy and global economic powerhouse?

Surely these are questions worth asking, but the most dismaying feature of Acemoglu et al’s contribution (and of the Nobel Prize Committee’s choice), however, is their use of ‘inclusive’ as an adjective describing the settler institutions. The settler societies may look inclusive now, but only after the accomplished elimination and violent marginalisation of the Indigenous polities and communities, a repression that is ongoing. Only after ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation these societies may appear inclusive. By this logic, former president of Uganda Idi Amin’s expulsion of Indian Ugandans looks quite inclusive too. Inclusive? Really?

These economists in 2001 and the distinguished members of Nobel Prize Committee in 2024 inhabited and inhabit a fantasy world where Europeans could do anything anywhere they went and could rationally adopt one strategy or another. It is a world where Indigenous people offered no substantive resistance, where their resistance is not even worth considering against other variables affecting the feasibility of settlement, and where the only limit to settlement was the accident of European exposure to tropical disease. They still see terra nullius wherever they look; they see a world where the ‘whole world was America’ or should have been, a world that would have been better and simpler if Europeans had established settler societies everywhere they went rather than ushering in wretched postcolonies. As if you could really conceive to have the ones without the others. But is a US-centric and implicitly racist exercise in wishful thinking even economic history, yet alone worth a prestigious prize?

[1] See Kate Meagher, ‘Does the Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Signal a Reversal of Fortunes for Settler Colonialism?’, LSE Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Series, 29/10/24; available at https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126368/1/internationaldevelopment_2024_10_29_does-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-2024-signal-a-reversal-of-fortunes-for-settler-colonialism.pdf

[2] Kalyeena Makortoff, Larry Elliott, ‘Trio of Professors Win Nobel Economics Prize for Work on Post-Colonial Wealth’, Guardian, 15/10/24; available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/14/three-us-based-professors-win-nobel-prize-in-economics-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-james-robinson See also Nobel Prize Press Release, ‘They have helped us understand differences in prosperity between nations’, 14/10/24; available at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/press-release/#:%E2%88%BC:text=This%20year%E2%80%99s%20laureates%20in%20the,or%20change%20for%20the%20better

[3] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation’, American Economic Review, 91, 5, 2001, pp. 1369-1401. The article is available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930?seq=1

[4] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1370.

[5] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1395.

[6] New Zealand and Oxford historian James Belich has talked about ‘recolonisation’. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. I mention Belich’s work, but Shahram Azhar, who has also offered a recent critique of Acemoglu et al, refers to the pioneering work of Paul Baran, who emphasised colonialism’s unwavering rapacity and its consequences. See Shahram Azhar, ‘Daron Acemoğlu’s or Paul Baran’s prize? A critique of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics’, Human Geography, 2025; available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19427786241313267; Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1957.

[7] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1370.

[8] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1384.

[9] See, for example, Caroline Elkins, Susan Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, New York, Routledge, 2005.

Abstract: People disagree over transitional justice’s capacity to help decolonize settler states. This entry reviews four challenges to the decolonizing potential of transitional justice. Those challenges attack the lack of a clear transition, inadequacies of justice, the injurious exercise of political authority by settler populations, and the ongoing colonial imposition of the state as a political form. The entry concludes that if transitional justice is to serve decolonizing purposes in settler states, it may need to address Indigenous peoples’ self-government demands.

Excerpt: Boston, emerging from the radioactive mist. Broken towers and elevated highways—a world without the Big Dig—with scattered communities of survivors clinging on to relics of a long-lost past. Fallout 4—the sixth full game in the series—takes the player to 2287 AD, 210 years after a nuclear war in an alternative history timeline. It takes them to a Boston consumed with memories and rhetoric of the past—Minutemen in colonial-esque garb, mercenaries running around in 1970s and 80s white power militia cosplay, a neo-medieval fascist organization with Knights in science fiction armor. Radiation altered ghouls. Government virus shaped Super Mutants. All of the weird and wacky retro-futuristic tropes of the Fallout franchise, this time in a Boston still deeply shaped by its colonial history. What the game does NOT have, though, is Native Americans. None, anywhere. No references to them, no institutions, no members of a sovereign nation or tribal polity or outpost or anything. No museums. No statues. No evidence of their legacy, let alone their present. Not in Boston, not in Natick, not even on Mount Desert Island in the expansion Far Harbor. There’s no Peabody Museum at Harvard to hold artifacts, and no commemorative plaque on Matthews Hall to remember the “Indian College” of the 1640s, because there is no Harvard. No Museum of Fine Arts, so no exhibits of Native art and artifacts, North American or Mesoamerican or anywhere else. The Abbe Museum doesn’t exist in the remnants of Bar Harbor. Deer Island has no memorial to the murder of the “Praying Indians” forcibly interned there during King Philip’s War. No mural of John Elliot in the State House. Native Americans have, quite simply, been erased from post-apocalyptic New England, but also from the pre-apocalyptic East Coast. Fallout 3, set around Washington D.C., does the same thing. It is an East Coast without any Natives, without any memorials to a Native past or present, without an acknowledgement of the history of the America-that-was including indigenous groups and people. It is only in their most recent game, Fallout 76, that Bethesda acknowledges a Native presence in the landscape, and even then, only as archaeological sites—a window dressing as part of the attempt to make West Virginia into something Other.

Abstract: Emma Kowal’s 2023 monograph, Haunting Biology, takes up the dual task of documenting the
chequered history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asking what this
means for the contemporary field of Indigenous genomics. Teeming with ghosts—the spectres
of methodologies, human body parts, and racial theories—Kowal’s storied book links history
with contemporary genomics in a critical exploration of 21st- century Indigeneity. In this book
review forum, three scholars (David Trigger, Lynette Russell, and Warwick Anderson) engage
with Kowal’s work, after which Emma Kowal responds.