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For students of settler colonialism in the modern era, Africa and America represent two polar opposites. Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed. Mamdani discusses American discourse on the making of America from an African vantage point. Adapted from the source document.

Studying Native American reservations, and their historical formation, I find that their forced integration of autonomous polities into a system of shared governance had large negative long-run consequences, even though the affected people were ethnically and linguistically homogenous. Reservations that combined multiple sub-tribal bands when they were formed are 30% poorer today, even when conditioning on prereservation political traditions. The results hold with tribe fixed effects, identifying only off within-tribe variation across reservations. I also provide estimates from an instrumental variable strategy based on historical mining rushes that led to exogenously more centralized reservations. Data on the timing of economic divergence and on contemporary political conflict suggest that the primary mechanism runs from persistent social divisions through the quality of local governance to the local economic environment.

Ethnic quotas are often expected to induce distribution of material benefits to members of disadvantaged groups. Yet, the presence of an ethnic quota does not imply that political mobilization takes place along ethnic lines: Cross-cutting affiliations within multi-ethnic party organizations may lessen the tendency of politicians to target benefits to particular ethnic groups. In this article, we evaluate the impact of quotas for the presidencies of village councils in India, a subject of considerable recent research. Drawing on fine-grained information from surveys of voters, council members, presidents, and bureaucrats and using a natural experiment to isolate the effects of quotas in the states of Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Bihar, we find weak distributive effects of quotas for marginalized castes and tribes, but suggestive evidence of the importance of partisanship. We then use survey experiments to compare the influence of party and caste on voting preferences and expectations of benefit receipt. Our results suggest that especially when politicians have dynamic political incentives to allocate benefits along party lines, cross-cutting partisan ties can blunt the distributive impact of ethnic quotas.

Do electoral quotas for women alter women's chances of winning elections after they are withdrawn? I answer this question by examining an unusual natural experiment in India in which randomly chosen seats in local legislatures are set aside for women for one election at a time. Using data from Mumbai, I find that the probability of a woman winning office conditional on the constituency being reserved for women in the previous election is approximately five times the probability of a woman winning office if the constituency had not been reserved for women. I also explore tentative evidence on the mechanisms by which reservations affect women's ability to win elections. The data suggest that reservations work in part by introducing into politics women who are able to win elections after reservations are withdrawn and by allowing parties to learn that women can win elections.

Since the 1990s, Treaty Land Entitlement (TLE) and Specific Claims settlements have significantly expanded First Nations reserves in Saskatchewan, Canada. Yet, the ecological impacts remain understudied, with limited systematic land-use data. This study employs geospatial analysis of open-source historical records, land cover data, and land capability assessments to evaluate reserve changes in southern Saskatchewan—a heavily agricultural region with dense First Nations populations. Between 1992 and 2024, reserve areas nearly doubled from 4,173.3 to 8,233.9 km 2 , substantially increasing Indigenous land holdings. Land cover analysis reveals that reserves retained disproportionately more forests and wetlands than surrounding areas, functioning as vital biodiversity refuges and carbon sinks in a predominantly agricultural landscape. However, soil assessments indicate most reserve lands are marginal for high-yield crop production, reflecting historical inequities in allocation, and highlight systemic disparities in land quality. While expansion supports diverse land uses and priorities, limited indicated that most agricultural capability restricts economic opportunities in farming while minimizing potential environmental degradation, to the few areas of high-quality land available. Reserves’ ecological value—particularly their role in preserving native habitats—contrasts with their constrained agricultural potential, underscoring the need for policies that address both sustainable management and alternative economic development. This study provides empirical evidence for Indigenous land rights discussions, illustrating how reserve lands simultaneously offer ecological benefits and face socioeconomic challenges and opportunities. Future research should prioritize community-led strategies to enhance sustainable development, ensuring land-use planning aligns with First Nations’ goals and self-determination efforts.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), passed by the US Congress in 1988, was a watershed in the history of policymaking directed toward reservation-resident American Indians. IGRA set the stage for tribal government-owned gaming facilities. It also shaped how this new industry would develop and how tribal governments would invest gaming revenues. Since then, Indian gaming has approached commercial, state-licensed gaming in total revenues. Gaming operations have had a far-reaching and transformative effect on American Indian reservations and their economies. Specifically, Indian gaming has allowed marked improvements in several important dimensions of reservation life. For the first time, some tribal governments have moved to fiscal independence. Native nations have invested gaming revenues in their economies and societies, often with dramatic effect.

Objectives. Understanding the similarities and differences between substance use rates for American Indian (Al) young people and young people nationally can better inform prevention and treatment efforts. We compared substance use rates for a large sample of Al students living on or near reservations for the years 2009-2012 with national prevalence rates from Monitoring the Future (MTF). Methods. We identified and sampled schools on or near Al reservations by region; 1,399 students in sampled schools were administered the American Drug and Alcohol Survey. We computed lifetime, annual, and last-month prevalence measures by grade and compared them with MTF results for the same time period. Results.Prevalence rates for Al students were significantly higher than national rates for nearly all substances, especially for 8th graders. Rates of marijuana use were very high, with lifetime use higher than 50% for all grade groups. Other findings of interest included higher binge drinking rates and OxyContin® use for Al students. Conclusions. The results from this study demonstrate that adolescent substance use is still a major problem among reservation-based Al adolescent students, especially 8th graders, where prevalence rates were sometimes dramatically higher than MTF rates. Given the high rates of substance userelated problems on reservations, such as academic failure, delinquency, violent criminal behavior, suicidality, and alcohol-related mortality, the costs to members of this population and to society will continue to be much too high until a comprehensive understanding of the root causes of substance use are established.

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the \"precontact baseline,\" they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

A basic premise of representative democracy is that all those subject to policy should have a voice in its making. However, policies enacted by electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. This paper exploits the institutional features of political reservation, as practiced in Indian states, to examine the role of mandated political representation in providing disadvantaged groups influence over policy-making. I find that political reservation has increased transfers to groups which benefit from the mandate. This finding also suggests that complete policy commitment may be absent in democracies, as is found in this case.

Geographic research on environmental justice and risk is moving beyond its conventional focus on proximity and spatial distribution, increasingly recognizing multiple spatialities entailed in other dimensions of environmental justice-including recognition and participation-and in risk itself. Critical scholarship on environmental justice, however, has insufficiently considered the process of risk assessment, and research on the construction of risk has not fully engaged with the implications of environmental justice. Through analysis of human health risk assessment at the St. Regis Superfund site, on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, this article investigates intersections between spatialities of risk and spatialities of environmental justice as participation and recognition. I argue that the historical production of the reservation as place, territory, and scale lies at the origin not only of distributive injustices but also of injustices of misrecognition and marginalized participation in the assessment and management of risk. On the other hand, I contend that changing scalar and network spatial relations enabled the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe to strengthen the risk assessment by taking the significance of the reservation into account, as a place and territory associated with rights to tribal traditional lifeways. Nonetheless, the circulation of dominant assumptions about race and property continues to structure the \"playing field\" of risk assessment as uneven, and scholarship and policy on environmental justice and risk need to attend to this asymmetry.