Settler Toxicity: Contaminated Restitutions and the Contagion of Hope

ABSTRACT This article introduces settler toxicity: the symbolic charge that lodges itself in Indigenous cultural‐material worlds through their passage through settler institutions, producing real harm through institutional and epistemic vectors rather than particle matter. Drawing on participatory workshops with Palestinians engaging with objects from one depopulated village, it documents three components through which settler toxicity operates—polluted provenance, contamination by association and toxic epistemologies—and examines what communities do when restitution frameworks prove inadequate. Settler toxicity persists even under conditions designed to resist it: good intentions do not detoxify. Yet toxicity does not foreclose action. We document how belongings turn into instruments of solidarity and sovereign assertion. Restitution is not a dispute over possession but a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty, self‐determination and the right of return. Just restitutions require contaminated alliances: relations of co‐resistance that acknowledge settler scholars cannot stand outside the toxic structures they seek to contest.