Editor's note

Settler colonialism shapes and reshapes people's everyday lives on multiple fronts. It impacts the ways people act, think, and experience their lives. It very much penetrates the intimate realm and it sets parameters for the embodied, sensory experiences, and to the material realities, while being in turn impacted and shaped by these all. Settler colonialism is felt, it is lived. It involves pain, terror, and trauma, but also empowerment, healing, and friendship.

In our current issue Joanne Wilmott, Jen Hamer, Damien W. Riggs and Shoshana Rosenberg examine healing and intergenerational trauma by looking at two Aboriginal healing camps held in South Australia in 2021 and 2022. Combining First Nations and western healing practices, these camps focused on supporting members of the Stolen Generations. Next Anthea Compton, Alison Vivian, Theresa Petray, Matthew Walsh and Steve Hemming investigate the relationships between a complex and tense settler-colonial legal-political system, native title, and Indigenous nation (re)building processes in Australia. They look how Indigenous peoples can use settler-colonial policy for their own collective ends in highly contested environments. Elizabeth Venczel also touches on the lived and felt tensions of settler colonialism when exploring the carceral regimes and the differences and similarities between the use of prisons as a tool in settler colonial expansion in Australia, Canada, and Palestine. While carceral systems remain an important tool for settlers in their efforts to control the everyday lives of Indigenous peoples and steal land and resources, so does legislation concerning intimate relations, as shown by Rawia Aburabia. She explores criminal prohibition against bigamy during the British colonial rule of Palestine, drawing particular attention to the exemptions it afforded to Muslims.

The settler colonial experience is also about securing futures and dealing with troubling heritages. Moving the discussion to human acclimatation in an Arctic environment, Dmitry V. Arzyutov showcases how the Soviet Union sought to develop a settler colonial science project aimed at asserting control over the territory and its resources while creating a new setter population, Homo Polaris, in Siberia and the North. Caio Simões de Araújo looks at certain colonial monuments that have remained largely uncontested, meaning those of Bartolomeu Dias in Southern Africa and their significance in the settler colonization experiences and the building of settler friendships in the area.

This issue also has a new feature, the Book Forum. Initiated and organized by Antoinette Burton, this inaugural forum discusses Alaina E. Roberts’ book I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Joining the discussion with Burton and Roberts are T.J. Tallie, Jenny Davis, and Hilary Green. They point at the entangled histories at the intersections of Black and Indigenous lives in the framework of US settler colonialism, at the intimate histories of the everyday, family, and kin complicating the stories of settler colonization while looking for understandings beyond racial binaries.