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Five globes shaped like human faces, connected by threads.

It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous”

Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who came first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the idea escape its colonial past?
by Manvir Singh via The New Yorker on February 20, 2023
In plane sight: Loadmasters look over Tumon Bay, Guam, during Exercise Cope North.

Guam: Resisting Empire at the “Tip of the Spear”

The Pentagon is increasing its forces on the US territory, but Indigenous residents are fighting back.
by Chris Gelardi via The Nation on November 2, 2021
Hundreds of stampeders’ tents on the Tr’ochëk site and the west bank of the Klondike River (1898).

Historical Mining and Contemporary Conflict: Lessons from the Klondike

The local indigenous population was most affected by environmental change resulting from mining in the Klondike.
by Heather Green via NiCHE on May 2, 2018
A group of Philippine “Head-Hunters” on display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

These Horrifying ‘Human Zoos’ Delighted American Audiences at the Turn of the 20th Century

‘Specimens’ were acquired from Africa, Asia, and the Americas by deceptive human traffickers.
by Shoshi Parks via Timeline on March 20, 2018
Drawing of a Caribbean sugar plantation.

Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas

A tribal collaborative project that seeks to understand settler colonialism and its legacies through the lens of Indigenous enslavement and unfreedom.
by Linford Fisher via Indigenous Slavery on October 6, 2017

What Became of the Taíno?

The Indians who greeted Columbus were believed to have died out. But a search for their descendants yielded surprising results.
by Robert M. Poole via Smithsonian on October 1, 2011

1491

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe.
by Charles C. Mann via The Atlantic on March 1, 2002
Christopher Columbus

On the Mysteries, Real and Imagined, Surrounding Christopher Columbus

Columbus lives on as a political and cultural symbol—hero, villain, myth—revealing how belief, not fact, shapes history.
by Matthew Restall via Literary Hub on October 13, 2025

Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity

A Q&A with the author of "America, América: “A New History of the New World.”
by Greg Grandin, Alexander Aviña via Public Books on September 9, 2025
American Progress by John Gast, 1872, oil on canvas.

Who’s Afraid of “Settler Colonialism”?

If we dismiss concepts because of particular examples of misuse, we encourage the repression of discomforting histories and ideas.
by Aziz Rana via Dissent on September 8, 2025
Scene of prehistoric game hunters.

Prehistory’s Original Sin

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.
by Connor Grubaugh via The Hedgehog Review on May 6, 2025
A line of workmen drilling.

A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.
by Marisol LeBrón via Public Books on December 17, 2024
A group of indigenous Pacific Islanders forced to work on a sugar plantation, with a white overseer in the background.

How ‘Blackbirders’ Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders Into Slavery After the Civil War

The decline of Southern industries paved the way for plantations in Fiji and Australia, where victims of “blackbirding” endured horrific working conditions.
by Shoshi Parks via Smithsonian on December 5, 2024
The cover of "Martian Time-Slip," featuring a man tending to a farm on Mars.

“Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine

A critique of colonialism from Martian science fiction.
by Jonathan Lethem via The Paris Review on November 14, 2024
Table of illustrations of various diverse human faces from "Ethnographic Tableau."

Baffled by Human Diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.
by Jacob Zellmer via Aeon on July 8, 2024
Palestinians inspect the ruins of a building destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, October 8, 2023.

The Desire to Annihilate Gaza Wasn’t Born on 10/7 — It’s Part of a Long Tradition

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.
by Adam Yaghi via Religion Dispatches on June 17, 2024
A drawing of a hedgehog in Buffon's Natural History.

Waking From the Dream of Total Knowledge

Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.
by Daniel Kraft via The Hedgehog Review on April 15, 2024
Alexandria Park School in Sydney, Australia, is built on Aboriginal land.

Overlooking the Past

Land acknowledgments amount to the hollow incantations of hollow people.
by David Eisenberg via Law & Liberty on April 15, 2024
Liberian workers at the Firestone Plantation carrying buckets of latex in buckets on their shoulders.

The Human Price of American Rubber

Segregated lives of pride and peril on Firestone's Liberian plantations.
by Gregg Mitman via The Disappearing Spoon on December 7, 2023
Corn in a basket.
partner

Translating Corn

To most of the world, “corn” is “maize,” a word that comes from the Taíno mahizwas. Not for British colonists in North America, though.
by Matthew Wills, Betty Fussell via JSTOR Daily on November 22, 2023
Scaffolding around the statue of President Theodore Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History as it is prepared for removal on December 2, 2021 in New York City

A New York Museum's House of Bones

The American Museum of Natural History holds 12,000 bodies — but they don’t want you to know whose.
by Erin L. Thompson via Hyperallergic on October 15, 2023
Engraving of Christopher Columbus and a friar on their knees in prayer on the shore of the New World

The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think

To fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493.
by Robert P. Jones via TIME on August 31, 2023
An illustration imagining Maura, an indigenous Filipino woman.

Searching for Maura

A Filipino woman died after coming to the U.S. to be put on display at the 1904 World's Fair. A Smithsonian anthropologist likely took part of her brain.
by Nicole Dungca, Claire Healy, Ren Galeno via Washington Post on August 16, 2023
Front entrance of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Mütter and More

Why we need to be critical of medical museums as spaces for disability histories.
by Aparna Nair via Disability Visibility Project on July 29, 2023
Boys at Kamloops Indian Residential School, probably before the 1920s.

We Must Not Forget What Happened to the World’s Indigenous Children

Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard.
by Steve Minton via Aeon on July 21, 2023
A young girl in profile with syringes looming behind and a reddish, gritty spiral behind

New Docs Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners

While we may never know the full truth, we owe it to those harmed and killed to illuminate their stories.
by Orisanmi Burton via Truthout on June 22, 2023
Indigenous people brought to Spain by Hernán Cortés play the game patolli.

The Indigenous Americans Who Visited Europe

A new book reverses the narrative of the Age of Discovery, which has long evoked the ambitions of Europeans looking to the Americas rather than vice versa.
by Karin Wulf via Smithsonian on January 26, 2023
Image of a plant within a circular graph.

America’s Lost Crops Rewrite the History of Farming

Our food system could have been so different.
by Sarah Laskow via The Atlantic on October 1, 2022
Painting of Patent Office in 1855

A Sea of “Savage Islands”: How Antebellum Americans at Home Imagined the Pacific World

When most U.S. nationals in the early republic thought of the Pacific Ocean, they conjured lands instead.
by Michael A. Verney via The Panorama on June 13, 2022
Illustration of Spanish slaves unloading ice.

Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors

Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
by Geraldo Cadava via Public Books on April 13, 2022
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