settler colonial studies blog

Defending Indigenous sovereignty requires flexibility: Patience Collier, Papatɨmnanáx̱a Tíinma Ku Tiichám / The People and the Land Tell Each Other’s History: Strengthening Tribal Sovereignty on the Western Columbia Plateau, 1854-1940, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2025

13Aug25

Abstract: This dissertation uses primary source documents, linguistic analysis, and secondary sources to closely examine tribal leadership in the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Confederated Bands and Tribes of the Yakama Indian Reservation from 1854 to 1940. I aim to examine sovereignty in the terms and with the goals that tribal leaders in 1854-1855 used, and carry that definition forward through leadership and activism on both reservations. Plateau tribal leaders, I argue, defined sovereignty as a web of reciprocal relationships between people and land, in which people had rights – but so did land, and so did the other-than-human relatives who also resided on the Plateau. Although the context on and around the Plateau changed politically from 1855 to 1940, Plateau tribes adapted their strategies to that context without changing their core goals. The first decades of American settler-colonialism on the Columbia Plateau, from the 1840s to the 1880s, were catastrophically violent. Leaders of the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Yakama bands adopted multiple strategies, sometimes at odds with one another, to survive. Between the 1870s and 1910s, however, it is clear that band leaders worked together to protect each other, their land, and their people from American violence. Over the early 20th century, more grassroots activism becomes clear, particularly in labor, religion, and education. The determination of Plateau leaders and people to maintain their sovereign relationships shaped their political context at least as much as Federal Indian policy did, by the middle of the 20th century.

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The end of the struggle is not an electoral system: Margaret Yun-Pu Tu (Nikal Kabala’an), ‘A System Not of Our Making: Electoral and Institutional Constraints on Indigenous Self-Determination in Taiwan’, Taiwan Politics, 2025

13Aug25

Abstract: This research note examines the Indigenous legislative electoral system in Taiwan, discussing how the separation into “Mountains” and “Plains” reflects a legacy of colonial classification and continues to marginalize Indigenous voices in contemporary politics. It then argues that low voter turnout and limited legislative impact are not merely behavioral issues but outcomes of deeper structural constraints. This note situates electoral underrepresentation within broader conversations about Indigenous sovereignty, survival, and self-determination, and questions whether reforms within a state-centric framework are sufficient to address systemic exclusion. In doing so, this note contributes to ongoing debates about democratic participation, settler colonialism, and the future of Indigenous politics in Taiwan.

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Criminalising is a settler colonial strategy: Marya Al-Hindi, ‘Border Creation and the Hangover of Empire: The Genocide of Palestine and the Historical Construction of the Palestinian Threat’, in Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, David S Fonseca, Valeria Vegh Weis, Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South, Palgrave, 2025

13Aug25

Abstract: This chapter addresses the way in which impunity granted to Israel to enforce its illegal expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been made possible due to permissiveness around the dehumanisation of Arabs. International acquiescence about the genocide of Palestine has been intimately tied to border making and imperial interests in the region. The first section will explore the continuities in British criminalisation of Arabs in the twentieth century and how this shifted to conceptions of Palestinian terrorism in Israeli security discourse. The normalisation of punitive measures towards Arabs under colonialism demonstrates that the genocide in Gaza is a calculated, long-term strategy to erase the Indigenous people of Palestine. The second section moves on to demonstrate how the segregation of Gazans behind a fortified border coincides with this racialisation of Palestinians as terrorists. It shows how settler colonialism, which is founded on the elimination of the Indigenous population, has endured through Israeli actions in Gaza and is reinforced by narratives of Palestinian criminality. The acquiescence to Israel’s actions has demonstrated the inequality of life under international law and the permissiveness about genocide, in the service of “security narratives” in Israeli expansionist policy. Ignoring the continuities in settler colonialism and its violent border-making processes normalises violence against Indigenous populations as seen in the ongoing genocide in Palestine today.

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The end of the Indigenous struggle is not an institution: Cheng Xu, ‘Autonomy, interrupted: constitutional weakening of indigenous activism from civil war to civil society’, World Development, 196, 2025, #107157

13Aug25

Abstract: This study examines why democratization efforts in the Global South often fail to deliver meaningful self-determination for indigenous peoples. Focusing on the Cordillera region in the Philippines, where indigenous communities waged a successful insurgency against the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s, I investigate why the post-conflict transition, despite constitutional and legal reforms, failed to realize the movement’s central demands. For development practitioners and scholars, this case offers critical insights into how even democratic institutional and legal frameworks may entrench, rather than resolve, historical injustices against indigenous communities. The central question explored is how do postwar constitutional frameworks shape the capacity of indigenous movements to secure autonomy? Why do legal reforms sometimes weaken, rather than empower, these movements? Using qualitative fieldwork and over 50 interviews with activists, civil society leaders, and government officials, I reveal some of the unintended consequences of the 1986 peace agreement between the indigenous rebellion and the Philippine state. I find that while the postwar democratic transition created new legal pathways for advocacy, it simultaneously entrenched neocolonial mechanisms, such as the Regalian Doctrine, that preserved state control over ancestral domains and shifted bargaining disadvantages onto the indigenous opposition. These findings challenge dominant assumptions that democratization and legal recognition automatically empower marginalized groups. Instead, I show how postwar frameworks can fragment movements, co-opt moderate factions, and repress dissenting ones, thereby reinforcing state dominance. This study reveals how states are better positioned during critical periods of democratization and can use peace negotiations to institutionalize control without meaningful concessions. Broadly, this research demonstrates how democratic constitutional orders can legitimize the deferral, and erosion, of indigenous self-determination in the Global South.

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The migration of nonsettlers entrenches settler colonialism: Cynthia Spring, Nisha Toomey, Andrea Noack, Leah F. Vosko, ‘Understanding Temporary Labour Migration through a Settler Colonial Lens: A Critical Analysis of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy’, Studies in Social Justice, 19, 2, 2025

13Aug25

Abstract: The relationship between differential inclusion of workers migrating for employment internationally and the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous people and lands is a growing area of study within critical migration studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to how (im)migration policies that foster migrant worker precariousness also extend settler colonial practices. Scholars situated in the transdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies have long theorized nation-state building as exclusionary to Black and Indigenous life, and reliant on limited mobilities and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples. Bridging this scholarship with critical migration studies, in this article we explore how policies regulating international migration for employment to Canada on temporary bases reflect and sustain the settler-colonial context in which they operate. We outline three logics of settler colonialism that underpin policies governing temporary migration for employment to Canada: (1) the racialized hierarchization of life and knowledge; (2) the reliance on technologies of governing, which foster unequal administrative burdens; and (3) the disruption of people’s relationships to land and livelihoods. Analyzing Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and International Education Strategy, we illustrate how migration policies reinforce and replicate settler colonial practices.

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The roots of settler colonialism: Pinar Dinc, Necmettin Türk, ‘Roots of destruction: exploring the genocide-ecocide nexus through the destruction of olive trees in occupied Palestine and Rojava’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2025

11Aug25

Abstract: Ecological degradation not only affects local and global environments but also threatens the cultural survival of affected societies, exemplifying the phenomenon known as the genocide–ecocide nexus. This article presents the first comparative case study of olive tree destruction in occupied Palestine and Afrin canton of Rojava, highlighting how ecocide serves as a deliberate strategy of cultural and physical extermination in these regions, home to two of the world’s largest stateless groups. Juxtaposing these cases reveals that environmental destruction and genocidal practices are connected and function as tools of systemic oppression. The study also bridges critical genocide studies and the genocide–ecocide nexus with field political ecology and critical perspectives on environmental security, offering insights into links between conflict/violence and the environment. Our empirical analysis has three parts. First, we examine common mechanisms of olive tree destruction and appropriation in Palestine and Afrin – damaging, uprooting, poisoning, cutting, burning, stealing, and looting—by Israel and Turkey. Second, we explore resistance strategies by Palestinians and Kurds in response to ecological violence. We conclude by discussing similarities and differences between the two cases and problematising the international legal and political systems that fail to address the destruction inflicted on stateless and marginalised groups.

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Not even Kant would recommend hosting a settler: Harald Bauder, ‘Anti-colonialism and Kantian Hospitality: Towards an Urban Approach’, in Harald Bauder, Mary Boatemaa Setrana (eds), Urban Migrant Inclusion and Refugee Protection, Springer, 2025, pp. 3-16

11Aug25

Abstract: Immanuel Kant’s idea of hospitality has been highly influential in contemporary migration and refugee studies. In this chapter, I review his idea and the literature that has interpreted it and examine Kant’s motivations for defining the right to hospitality in a way that permits visitation but not long-term settlement. Despite accusations that racism and support for capitalist enterprise shaped Kant’s reasoning of hospitality, I contend that we should take Kant at face value when he wrote that limits to hospitality aim to protect non-European and Indigenous peoples from colonialisation. The state-centrism and Cartesian spatial logic that represent Kant’s idea of hospitality contradict the place-based logic of his anthropological and geographical scholarship. Kant’s attempt to prevent colonialisation thus follows a state-centric and Cartesian spatial logic that is inherently Eurocentric and that continues to permeate migration and refugee scholarship and international institutions such as the United Nations. Not only do the traditional knowledge and governance systems of colonised and Indigenous peoples tend to follow a place-based logic, but—I propose—urban approaches towards migrant inclusion and refugee protection also embrace this place-based logic. I discuss if urban hospitality can therefore offer a non-colonial perspective that escapes Kantian Eurocentrism.

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Settling the outer islands: Takahiro Yamamoto, Demarcating Japan: Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility, 1855–1884, Harvard University Ptress, 2023

11Aug25

Description: Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

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The settler tree and the Indigenous forest: Lars Östlund, Macarena Fernández Génova, Miguel Cáceres, Elle Eriksson, ‘Timber colonialism in the periphery: Timber frontiers and indigenous peoples land use in northern Scandinavia and southern Patagonia in the late 19th and early 20th century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 89, 2025, pp. 213-225

08Aug25

Abstract: During the nineteenth century an intense exploitation of natural resources such as wood and timber in what was considered “marginal” or remote regions started, and was driven by an ever-increasing demand in industrialized regions. One common denominator for the timber exploitation that opened the global expansion of capitalism beyond the borders of Europe was the brutal intrusions into Indigenous territories. The overall aim of this study is to analyse two timber frontier movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: one in northern Sweden and one in southern Chile, intruding into previously un-logged old-growth forests on ancestral Indigenous territories. The large-scale commercial logging began around the mid-nineteenth century in both regions. It was driven by external demand and financed by national and/or international capital. New logging entrepreneurs moved into the territories and established sawmills, brought in workers to run the sawmills, cut trees in the forest and transported the timber to the sawmills. In northern Sweden the logging industry was the main economic activity, while in southern Patagonia the logging of timber was one of several forms of natural resource exploitations complemented by mining, rangeland sheep herding and trade through the region. In both regions, the logging frontier was often intertwined with agricultural expansion promoted by the state and global capitalism. In both studied regions the colonial legacy of the nineteenth century timber frontiers has left a heavy burden on the forest landscapes, on the rights of the Indigenous peoples whose lands were exploited and on the present legal situation. Challenges for the future are to re-establish recognition of Indigenous heritage and land tenure rights in both regions, according to international conventions, as well as restoring ecological qualities to the associated forest ecosystems for the sustainability of Indigenous practices.

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The beads of settler colonialism: Eric Daniel Johnson, Zoë Antoinette Eddy, ‘Beads of Settler Bafflement and Indigenous Futurity: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda’, American Anthropologist, 2025

08Aug25

Abstract: Beads are a medium through which settlers and Indigenous peoples of North America shape the future. Here, we apply the analytic of futurity to examine two case studies of bead making and bead working across archaeology and cultural anthropology. Johnson examines The Mint at Pascack, a fictionalized account of the Campbell Wampum Factory. The Campbell Factory was a Euro-American-owned workshop in New Jersey that produced shell beads for export to Indigenous consumers throughout the 19th century. The Mint shows how settler futurity replaces histories of Indigenous dispossession and appropriation with futures of civilizational supremacy and Native elimination. Eddy considers the Native Baby Yoda phenomenon and adjacent uses of Disney to show how Indigenous beaders use popular media to claim space in new art movements. Beaders engage with long-term intergenerational futures while also contesting settler futurity through rupture, play, and reinvention. We argue that both Indigenous and settler futurities are made and contested through a creative combination of storytelling and transformations of material culture centered on youth. Where settler and Indigenous futurities collide, we observe the affect of settler bafflement, or the confused, sometimes humorous experience of being forced to recognize Indigeneity in ways that interrupt settler expectations and temporalities.

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