Search Results (30)

The North American Great Lakes offer a dynamic case study of inundated cultural landscapes. These bodies of water and the life around them have never been static. While submerged lands offer avenues for archaeological research, it is essential to first understand that these cultural landscapes have also been flooded with invasive power dynamics through settler colonialism. For example, the land and water systems in Anishinaabe Akiing (the northern Great Lakes) have fundamentally shifted from flourishing life systems to poisoned areas and now struggle to deal with invasive species. When seeking to learn from or otherwise engage Indigenous knowledge, it is essential to work from a perspective that takes all these changes into consideration. There are Indigenous communities who are interested in these inundated landscapes, and in this research, but a pause, naandamo, is needed to ethically consider the ongoing process of settler colonialism and Indigenous perspectives. Here we address ethical considerations for researchers participating in, or interested in participating in, submerged site research. By incorporating settler colonialism as a methodology of understanding, we will provide an ethical starting place for working with Indigenous communities and inundated landscapes. Full article

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. Full article

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws. Full article

Since the onset of the Syrian conflict in 2011, millions of Syrians have sought refuge globally, with thousands resettling in the UK. Despite their displacement, Syrians have brought with them a rich array of inherited knowledge and traditions, collectively known as intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The construction of domestic spaces by these settlers and their struggle to feel at home have emerged as important topics in migration studies, particularly when housing issues are considered as a critical aspect of their transcultural social engagement and the evolving boundaries of their identity and belonging. However, the role of ICH, along with the related crafts and movable objects, in the home-making practices of forced migrants remains under-researched. This gap is especially significant given that the UK recently ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the safeguarding of ICH after a decade-long delay. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in the interviewees’ native Arabic within their home environments and supported by an observational study, this research explores how resettled Syrians in Liverpool integrate traditional ICH practices into their new homes, focusing on the dynamic relationship between the intangible and built heritage. By examining how intangible knowledge and movable objects interplay in creating a ‘Syrian home’, this study contributes to discussions on community engagement and the role of memory in conservation. The findings underscore the importance of ICH in maintaining cultural continuity and identity in the diaspora, providing insights into the inclusive heritage conservation practices in migrant contexts. This research highlights two key insights: first, the essential role that ICH, along with the associated crafts and movable objects, plays in constructing new homes in the diaspora, particularly in how these items serve as the carriers of cultural identity and continuity; and second, the symbolic significance of Syrian homes, especially their interior designs and decorations, as reflections of a blend of sociocultural practices that Syrians are committed to preserving. Full article

In 1978, the United States enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) “to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture.” The ICWA was codified to address centuries of genocidal government policies, boarding schools, and coercive adoptions that ruptured many Native families. Now one of the strongest pieces of legislation to protect Native communities, the ICWA was designed to ensure that Native foster children are placed with Native families. Implementing the ICWA has not been smooth, however, as many non-Native foster parents and state governments have challenged the ICWA. While the ICWA has survived these legal challenges, including the recent 2023 Haaland v. Brackeen Supreme Court case, the rise of non-Natives claiming Native heritage, also known as self-indigenizers or “pretendians,” represents a new threat to the ICWA. This Article presents a legal history and analysis of the ICWA to unpack the policy implications of pretendians in the U.S. legal context. This Article demonstrates how the rise of pretendians threatens to undermine the very purpose of the ICWA and thereby threaten the sovereignty of Native peoples. By legally sanctioning the adoption of Native children into non-Native pretendian homes, the ICWA can facilitate a new era of settlers raising Native children, rather than preventing this phenomenon as intended. In response, this Article offers concrete policy recommendations to bolster the ICWA against this threat. Full article

This essay is a chapter excerpted from my forthcoming book, Who Gets to be Indian: Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity The chapter shows the ways that Indianness, framed as Indian or Native American “identity”, is inseparable from state subjectivity based on the history of political relations between tribes and the United States. It argues that tribes’ political status and relationship to the state are central to how Native American identity is shaped, rejecting the understanding of Native identity as race-based. The term “Indigenous” is discussed as not being equivalent to “Native American” and is not a racial formation in international fora. Social changes during the twentieth century brought new ways to diffuse and co-opt Nativeness through disaggregating it from political status and reinforcing racialization with the rise in urban pan-Indianism and neo-tribalism. Distinguishing Nativeness as political status from racialization is critical given ongoing attacks on tribal sovereignty in Supreme Court challenges based on alleged violations to the equal protection principle. Native American “identity” is inextricable from tribal nationhood and state formation, and thus cannot simply be dismissed as a colonial construct. Full article

Substantial and necessary research examining the violence perpetrated against Native women continues to flourish, while violence and masculinity studies focused on Native men draws little attention. Meanwhile the murder rate of Native men is three times higher than Native women, twice as high as white men, and occurs at the hands of police more often than any other U.S. racialized group per capita. Colonization divided ‘Christians’ (white) and ‘heathens’ (Native), with settler whites identifying Native men as wild and threatening. I suggest the construct of settler colonialism and the ‘toxic gendering’ of Native masculinity continues today and impacts Native men internally (psychologically) and externally (rationally), contributing to violence perpetrated against and by them. This paper is an interpretive analysis of “Scary Brown Man” and Reservation Blues as examined through the intersection of the toxic gendering bias intrinsic to settler colonialism. Alexie’s novel offers a depiction of ‘typical’ reservation life and the conflicting struggle to maintain a healthy Native identity, while Ross’s article brings real-life situations into the conversation, encouraging the entry of intersectional discourse around Native masculinity into the arena of gender/bias research as applied to settler colonial studies while questioning the role of identity politics within disciplines. Full article

In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s–1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today’s robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics. Full article

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community. Full article

The study examines how members of the historically white possessive and supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States (mis)appropriated Māori genealogy, known as whakapapa. The Mormon use of whakapapa to promote Mormon cultural memory and narratives perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and white supremacy, as this paper shows. The research discusses Church racism against Native Americans and Pacific Peoples. This paper uses Anthropologist Thomas Murphy’s scholarship to demonstrate how problematic the Book of Mormon’s religio-colonial identity of Lamanites is for these groups. Application of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine and Hemopereki Simon’s adaptation to cover Church-Indigenous relations and the salvation contract is discussed. We explore collective and cultural memory, and discuss key Māori concepts like Mana, Taonga, Tapu, and Whakapapa. A brief review of LDS scholar Louis C. Midgley’s views on Church culture, including Herewini Jone’s whakapapa wānanga, is followed by a discussion of Māori cultural considerations and issues. The paper concludes that the alteration perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and Pacific peoples’ racialization and white supremacy. Genetic science and human migration studies contradict Mormon identity narratives and suggest the BOM is spiritual rather than historical. Finally, the paper suggests promoting intercultural engagement on Mormon (mis)appropriation of taonga Māori. Full article

Israeli settler colonialism, in time, became highly linked to the idea of a state, culminating in an institution that defends the past, present, and future practises maintaining the relations between the “native” and “settlers”. Settler colonial ideas and practises sustaining binary opposition between the “native” and the “settler” are reproduced not only by Israeli state broadcasters, but also by settler colonial social media. This article proposes media analysis that goes beyond the usual national and conflict narrative and links “settler colonial common sense” with social media impacts and state ideas/sovereign ideas of property that strive to eliminate native people or transfer them outside Israel’s perceived land ownership and sovereignty. This article also shows how Israeli settler colonial politics and narratives are supported by other settler colonial states (especially the United States). New media and settler common sense cannot be disassociated from the Israeli state and global politics, even though some settlers may have their own strategies regarding the relations with native Palestinians. The State of Israel, through massive surveillance technologies and support from other states that view militarisation and population management as crucial to maintaining its power, holds a great deal of influence over how it frames the “conflict” with Palestinians. We witness how both state violence and institutionalised Jewish privilege are recreated on the ground and globally through the new media. This issue is analysed through the “Roots” (a grassroots movement for understanding among Israelis and Palestinians) case study. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp—a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty. Full article

Plants have always been important for the Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Collectively, these peoples named and used hundreds of different native plant species, along with diverse animal species. When traders and settlers from Europe and other parts of the world arrived in the region, they brought many new species of plants with them. Some (e.g., turnips (Brassica rapa) and onions (Allium cepa)), were from Europe, and some (e.g., potatoes (Solanum tuberosum)) were from South America or elsewhere. Other plants, like dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, probably arrived unintentionally, as weeds. Examining the ways in which the Indigenous Peoples have incorporated these new species into their lexicons and lifestyles provides insight into processes of acquiring and embracing new products and expanding the cultural knowledge base for human societies in general. Full article

The problem of empire has been a key theme in Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT). However insightful, ILT’s engagement with the category of empire has generally presumed a particular colonial configuration in which Muslims are located on the receiving “end” of power, being occupied by an external, non-Muslim force. But what about the presence of Islam within settler colonies, in which voluntary Muslim migrants are structurally complicit in the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples? Focusing on the Canadian context, I ask: How can we decolonise Islam in the settler colony? That is, how can Muslims address their own complicity with the settler colonial project, standing in solidarity with native peoples and revisiting their own faith tradition in the light of that praxis? I argue that decolonising Islam entails three hermeneutical moves: (I) gaining a critical understanding of the socio-historical context, namely, the history of empire on the land; (II) deconstructing the boundaries between “migrant” and “settler”, which actually serves to vindicate the former group, releasing them of accountability and responsibility; and (III) engaging in bold theological reflection on the Islamic tradition. This final theological step, I maintain, is a two-fold dynamic: expounding Islam as both a radical subject that decolonises and a problematic object requiring decolonisation. Full article

While the history and technology of cinema are considered for the purpose of achieving decolonial ends, this paper suggests that ‘classic’ cinema may be considered a quintessentially settler colonial medium. However, the moving image is now delivered in new ways and through new devices, and streaming has transformed global patterns of cinema production and consumption. Thus, two developments are considered in relation to this transformation. On the one hand, there are signs that mainstream cinema may be genuinely addressing its implication with colonialism, and this paper focuses on a formal apology and on a big budget movie that adopted a radically innovative approach to representing Indigenous peoples: Prey (2022). On the other hand, streaming has made cinema portable and has made consumption in personally deliberated instalments possible. The ‘digital natives’ consume cinema in fragmented and noncollective patterns, and their activity is subjected to unprecedented modalities of surveillance and appropriation. This paper concludes that a form of digital colonialism supported by streaming operates in ways that are homologous with modes of settler colonial appropriation. Full article