It has been twenty years since the 2000 publication of Haunani Kay Trask’s essay, “Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony” in Amerasia Journal. Recognizing this, in an upcoming Amerasia special issue, scholars, activists, and community organizers will reflect on shifting conversations and debates in the field of Asian settler colonialism. Their collective articles, forums, creative pieces, and reflection essays re-orient and ground scholarship about Asian settler colonialism in Indigenous land and water based-struggles. In this way, they open more capacious engagements of decolonization- ones that are rooted in alternative futurities for Asian and Indigenous communities beyond different settler colonial states.
This roundtable brings together the forum contributors to the special issue. Grounded in their ties to Guåhan, Okinawa, Guåhan, and Turtle Island, Ryan Buyco, Eleanor Craig, Himanee Gupta-Carlson, Tamara Ho, Josephine Faith Ong, and Areerat Worangwongwasu unsettle the binary that is often attributed to Asian American and Indigenous experiences in Turtle Island and the Pacific, re-orient Asian settler colonial scholarship towards decolonial praxis, and raise robust questions about the functioning of Asian nation-state as settler states that participate in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Asia