Quakers were one of the early settler colonist groups to invade northeastern North America. William Penn set out to develop a “Holy Experiment,” or utopian colony, in what is now Pennsylvania. Here, he thought, his settler colonists would live in harmony with the Indigenous Lenape and other settler colonists.

Centering on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, Finding Right Relations explores the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it. It provides historical examples such as the French and Indian War, the massacre of the Conestoga Indians, and the American Indian boarding schools to explore the power of colonialism to corrupt even those colonists with a belief system rooted in social justice.

While this truth rubs against Quaker identity as pacifists and socially conscious, justice-minded people, the authors address how facing these truths provide ways forward for achieving restitution for the harms of the past. This book offers a path to truth telling that is essential to the healing process.
 

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in homes: there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.

Critically examining beauty pageants, cinema, tourism propaganda, photography, murals, and more, Natasha Varner shows how postrevolutionary understandings of mexicanidad were fundamentally structured by legacies of colonialism, as well as shifting ideas about race, place, and gender. This interdisciplinary study smartly weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.

Sai Englert offers readers an accessible and global account of settler colonialism, taking in its history, some of its main characteristics, and its continued relevance today. 

From the Palestinian struggle against Israel occupation to the First Nations' mass opposition to pipeline construction in North America, indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the most important struggles of our age. Rich with their own unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, these different struggles are connected by the enemy they face: settler colonialism.

While settler-colonial regimes differ, Englert explains how they are all defined by a fundamental conflict between themselves and the indigenous people they aim to dispossess, exploit and/or eliminate. 

To understand settler colonialism as a distinct, structural, and contemporary process, is also to start engaging with a number of international social movements, political struggles, and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start asking how decolonization – as a material struggle for freedom – might be possible.

At a time when the Chinese are being labeled the “new colonialists,” this special issue of SAQ revisits the history of settler colonialism in such varied societies as the United States, South Africa, Eritrea, and Palestine/Israel. This issue examines similarities and differences among the diverse historical, geographical, and economic instances of settler colonialism, the practice of colonists moving permanently to a new settlement and, in some instances, growing to outnumber the indigenous inhabitants. Avoiding an oversimplified settler-native dichotomy, contributors engage current debates about the postcolonial to unsettle reductive chronologies of decolonization, addressing how formations of modern settler colonialism, both successful and failed projects (the Italians in Eritrea), compare with more general historical developments of colonial empire.

Essays consider how race, sexuality and gender, and ethnicity shape experiences of settler colonialism, how public and private space are administered, how citizenship laws establish boundaries of national inclusion and exclusion, how religious motives drive settler colonialism, and how settler colonial regimes appropriate and “cleanse” indigenous cultures and histories. One essay investigates the interwoven ideological rationales for cultural pluralism, Zionism, and opposition to empire in the United States prior to World War I, highlighting the seemingly paradoxical call for the support of a Zionist settlement of Israel on grounds that establishing a Jewish state through colonial appropriation paralleled American development. Another contributor argues that white settler colonialism in the United States is articulated within the present-day constellation of neoliberalism and post–civil rights “color-blind” discourse, focusing on the intersections of the U.S. vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York in 2005, and antisovereignty groups organizing against American Indian self-determination. Another offers the current situation in Darfur as a provocative rendering of postcolonial settler violence.

In Tropical Freedom Ikuko Asaka engages in a hemispheric examination of the intersection of emancipation and settler colonialism in North America. Asaka shows how from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction, emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, as black bodies were deemed to be more physiologically compatible with tropical climates. This logic conceived of freedom as a racially segregated condition based upon geography and climate. Regardless of whether freed people became tenant farmers in Sierra Leone or plantation laborers throughout the Caribbean, their relocation would provide whites with a monopoly over the benefits of settling indigenous land in temperate zones throughout North America. At the same time, black activists and intellectuals contested these geographic-based controls by developing alternative discourses on race and the environment. By tracing these negotiations of the transnational racialization of freedom, Asaka demonstrates the importance of considering settler colonialism and black freedom together while complicating the prevailing frames through which the intertwined histories of British and U.S. emancipation and colonialism have been understood.