History, time and the indigenist critique

During the early surge of globalization and geopolitical reconfiguration that followed the end of Empire, the specificities of settler colonialism emerged as requiring a different interpretive paradigm to the one used to explain other forms of colonialism. New developments in the writing of history allowed for an exciting, transnational reading that connected the past and present of settler societies, unique to the circumstances of those societies. This explanation I set out below, but it is worth adding to it a suggestion that the global indigenous movement after the 1970s and the new discourses of redress and retribution it inspired spurred on this new historical imagination about the on going subjugation and marginalization of indigenous communities. Today it has become clear in settler societies that the past and the present are entwined in a complex knot, which was first tied at the moment of conquest and has held firm ever since.