Settler Love Is Breaking My Heart: Sex, Kin, and Country
2025-01-15 12:15 - 13:30 UTC | MN
Settler sexuality, family, and “love” are key to sustaining settler property relations in the US and Canada. In this in-process book chapter (a shorter version was previously published in a 2024 edited volume), I draw on the work of historians, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have investigated the history of state- sanctioned marriage and monogamy in the US, Hawai’i, Canada, and Europe. I also build on popular and academic polyamory literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies and critical race theory. In addition, (auto)ethnographic examination of eco-erotic, polyamorous, and other more-than-monogamous relating inform alternative concepts of anticolonial relating after the unsettling of settler sex and family. Finally, I center the role of country—both music and place—to think through and beyond unsustainable settler- colonial practices of making relations with human loves and more-than-human loves. Decolonization is more sustainable with music.
UC Santa Cruz
Humanities 1, Room 210

Panel Discussion : Digital Public Scholarship – Benefits and Pitfalls
2025-01-28 14:30 - 16:00 | MN
Speakers: Dr. Philip Chase, County College of Morris; Dr. Dorothy Kim, Brandeis University; Dr. Kim TallBear, University of Alberta; Dr. Vanessa Warne, University of Manitoba; Dr. Erin Keating, University of Manitoba (moderator)
Tuesday, January 28
2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Online via Zoom
Contact for registration: umih@umanitoba.ca
Sponsors: University of Manitoba Strategic Initiatives Fund and UMIH

Holding Our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self-Indigenization
2026-03-18 08:00 - 2026-03-19 17:00 | McNamara Alumni Center, 200 SE Oak St, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, United States
A Hybrid Symposium
Wed, Mar 18 – Thu, Mar 19, 2026 | All day
This two-day, hybrid symposium will convene leading experts, community members, and “first responders” to the global issue of self-Indigenization, particularly in the form of “Indigenous ethnic fraud,” or “pretendianism,” as it is referred to in North America.
The symposium will be held in Minneapolis, on the traditional homelands of the Dakota people, who were imprisoned and eventually exiled in 1863 to aid settler appropriation of “Minnesota,” a word also taken from the Dakota. On top of seizing land, US citizens have for centuries “played Indian” via sports mascots and appropriating Native nation names and iconography in scouting and in industries including the military. In the twenty-first century, we see ballooning numbers of US citizens make mythological claims to belong to Native lineages and nations. Some capitalize on those claims to appropriate Indigenous resources and opportunities, and to seize governance of institutions. We see an obviously violent example of self-Indigenization in the Department of “Homeland Security” whose agents seize governance of these lands, terrorize, imprison, and threaten to exile. As multiple forms of self-Indigenization converge, not all are grasped as violent, yet they combine to further colonial extraction.
Extractive self-Indigenization, including Indigenous ethnic fraud, not only targets American Indians, but also First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada; and global Indigenous communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and elsewhere. This symposium will bring participants together to engage in critical discussions, learn from one another, and discuss actionable strategies to disrupt this global problem.
