Parking settler colonialism: Sarah Montoya, ‘Moving Toward Accountability: Challenging Settler Narratives through Interpretive Shifts and Tribal Engagement at Anza National Historic Trail’, Parks Stewardship Forum, 42, 1, 2026, pp. 101-110

19Jan26

Abstract: This article summarizes the work I undertook from 2023–2025 as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail (Anza NHT). It identifies long-standing gaps in Indigenous representation and participation on the trail and reviews the perpetuation of settler-colonial narratives that minimize the violence of settler invasion and marginalize the contributions of Native peoples in interpretive materials. These critiques are set alongside the significant interpretive and relational shifts initiated by Anza NHT staff following the adoption of revised themes and interpretive approaches in the 2023 Foundation Document. The report details the creation of internal onboarding materials designed to reorient the staff’s understanding of the impact of Indigenous dispossession, settler occupation, and the legal and structural violence that shaped the United States federal government and the National Park Service. The report also outlines the development of external Tribal outreach materials that build on this understanding of settler violence and articulate the trail’s commitments to accountability that exceeded the minimum federal requirement within an inherently asymmetrical system. The work concludes by summarizing updates to interpretive materials and highlighting new projects and partnerships along the trail, including the development of the Anza 250 commemorative logo, a revised Anza NHT brochure, and enhanced support for Tribes and Native-led organizations made possible through the Mellon partnership’s funding.


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The land eaters: Mansel G. Blackford, Land Hunger: Ohio and the Western Frontiers, Ohio University Press, 2025

18Jan26

Description: In Land Hunger, Mansel G. Blackford explores the central role of land use in the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro Americans as the new nation expanded westward from Ohio to the Oregon Country. Blackford emphasizes how people adapted to new and changed environments and focuses on key themes related to environmental and frontier studies: the land-use interactions between Native Americans and outsiders, the influence of government policies, and the impact of earlier concepts about the ownership and use of land and water that continue to affect us today in the face of climate change. The first part of the book delves into Euro American and African American settlement in the Ohio Country during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Driven by “Ohio fever” and influenced by a blend of pragmatic, romantic, and capitalistic ideals, tens of thousands crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle and farm in an unfamiliar land. It was in Ohio and the Midwest that many Americans developed their views on land and the environment, and where the new federal government devised methods for surveying and selling claimed lands. Subsequent chapters analyze how Ohioans and others attempted to apply Midwest-born ideas and practices in the Oregon Country and the Great Plains—regions with significantly different environments—with limited success. Land Hunger defines “frontiers” as zones of interaction between distinct groups of people, offering a broad interpretation of these contested spaces. The book explores how frontiers were depicted in fiction, where their portrayal helped establish their meaning and significance to incoming Americans. Blackford examines diaries, letters, and reminiscences, as well as a broad range of scholarly studies in this historical synthesis.


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The wreck of settler colonialism: Coll Thrush, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific, University of Washington Press, 2025

18Jan26

Description: The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers. Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.


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Emasculating settler colonialism: Sam McKegney, Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story, University of Regina Press, 2021

18Jan26

Description: Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song—one that celebrates rather than pathologizes; one that seeks diversity and strength; one that overturns heteropatriarchy without centering settler colonialism? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities even be creative, inclusive, erotic? Carrying the Burden of Peaceanswers affirmatively. Countering the perception that “masculinity” has been so contaminated as to be irredeemable, the book explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism. Sam McKegney’s argument is simple: if we understand that masculinity pertains to maleness, and that there are those within Indigenous families, communities and nations who identify as male, then the concession that masculinity concerns only negative characteristics bears stark consequences. It would mean that the resources available to affirm those subjectivities will be constrained, and perhaps even contaminated by shame. Indigenous masculinities are more than what settler colonialism has told us. To deny the beauty, vulnerability, and grace that can be expressed and experienced as masculinity is to concede to settler colonialism’s limiting vision of the world; it is to eschew the creativity that is among our greatest strengths. Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominative Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.


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Indigenous sovereignty just down the road: Kiara Vellios, Andréanne Doyon, ‘Examining Indigenous resurgence in urban parks through Vancouver’s Stanley Park’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article explores the collaborative work of the Stanley Park Intergovernmental Committee and Working Group, established by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation in partnership with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It examines how principles of coexistence planning, grounded in Indigenous resurgence and the disruption of settler normativity, can guide the reclamation of urban parklands in support of Indigenous self-determination, cultural identity, rights, and sovereignty. These planning principles, along with a pivotal shift in local governance toward truth-telling and grounded normativity, demonstrate how Indigenous resurgence fosters cultural visibility and socio-spatial inclusion of Indigenous Peoples within urban spaces.


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Occupied labour between the rvier and the sea: Ihab Maharme, ‘The Politics of labour: everyday practices of Palestinian workers in the settler economy’, Journal of Political Power, 2026

17Jan26

Abstract: This article examines the daily practices of Palestinian workers within the settler economy as forms of resistance that penetrate and undermine settler-colonial domination. While existing scholarship emphasises systematic Israeli violations against Palestinian labour, it often neglects the power of workers to develop everyday resistance practices. By centring labour as a site of daily struggle and drawing on nine semi-structured interviews with Palestinian workers in the settler economy, the article offers new insights into lived experience under settler colonialism and argues that workers’ everyday practices penetrate settler sovereignty, producing an intertwined form of sovereignty that challenges colonial domination over the land.


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The occupied water between the river and the sea: Elisa Adami, ‘Thinking with Water in Palestine’, UAL Research Online, 01/11/25

17Jan26

Excerpt: Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and the ongoing genocide, Israel has denied Palestinians access to basic life necessities: electricity, fuel, medical supplies, food, and, crucially, water. The currently unfolding human-made famine that the besieged population is subject to is compounded by a policy of deliberate deprivation of water. This is no accident of war but part of a systematic plan to eradicate any possibility of life in the Strip – for, as the protestors at Standing Rock reminded us, ‘Mní wičhóni’ or ‘Water is life’.


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Come and see settler colonialism: Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Duke University Press, 2023

16Jan26

Description: In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.


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Occupying time AND space: Natalia Gutkowski, Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine, Stanford University Press, 2024

14Jan26

Description: Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of mundane resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on indigenous time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in agrarian environments and develops a contemporary framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications. Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens’ agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the “year of release” for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens’ agriculture has become a site for the state to settle and mediate time conflicts to justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.


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Settler malaria: Amanda Cooke, Megan B. Brickley, ‘Ecologies of Risk: Malaria and Settler Landscape Transformation in 19th-Century Ontario’, American Journal of Human Biology, 38, 1, 2026, #e70181

14Jan26

Abstract: Objectives: This study examines how settler-driven environmental change shaped malaria transmission and mortality in 19th-century southern Ontario. It aimed to understand the biosocial and ecological conditions that sustained endemic malaria in a temperate, colonial context. Materials and Methods: We analyzed 2702 deaths attributed to probable malaria from 1831 to 1900 using civil, cemetery, parish, and municipal records. Each record was coded for age, sex, occupation, region, and season of death. To assess environmental influences, we incorporated monthly temperature and rainfall data from Toronto as a regional climate proxy. We examined demographic and spatial patterns at multiple scales, including towns, settlement type (urban/rural), and regional groupings, alongside temporal and seasonal variation. Statistical comparisons were used to explore associations, including nonlinear modeling of rainfall and malaria mortality. Results: Probable malaria mortality declined over time but persisted throughout the century. Children under 5 accounted for over half of recorded deaths, while adults in agricultural occupations were also disproportionately affected. Rural areas, particularly in western Ontario, experienced the highest mortality. Generalized additive model (GAM) results indicated a strong nonlinear association between rainfall and malaria deaths (p < 0.001), while temperature was not a significant predictor. Conclusions: Malaria’s persistence in 19th-century Ontario reflected a structural embedding of disease risk within settler-transformed landscapes. Deforestation, altered hydrology, and agricultural intensification created ecologies conducive to mosquito breeding. Vulnerability was not evenly distributed but shaped by age, labor, and proximity to altered environments. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental and historical data to reconstruct past disease ecologies and illustrate how evolutionary mismatch can drive vulnerability even in short-lived endemic contexts.


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