Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist 9780520972674

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Red Scare

american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

Red Scare The State’s Indigenous Terrorist Joanne Barker

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Joanne Barker Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barker, Joanne, 1962– author. Title: Red Scare : the state’s indigenous terrorist / Joanne Barker. Other titles: American studies now ; 14. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Series: American studies now: critical histories of the present ; 14 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2021016869 (print) | lccn 2021016870 (ebook) | isbn 9780520303171 (hardback) | isbn 9780520303188 (paperback) | isbn 9780520972674 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Indians of North America—Social conditions. | Social justice—North America—21st century. | Social movements—North America—21st century. Classification: lcc e98.s67 b37 2021 (print) | lcc e98. s67 (ebook) | ddc 970.004/97—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016869 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021016870 Manufactured in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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contents

Overview vii Prologue ix Scared Red 1 The Murderable Indian: Terror as State (In)Security 26 The Kinless Indian: Terror as Social (In)Stability 70 Radical Alterities from Huckleberry Roots 110 Acknowledgments 125 Appendix I: A Chronology 127 Appendix II: Cherokee Treaties and Membership/Census Rolls 131 Notes 139 Glossary 171 Selected Bibliography 175

ov ervi ew

scared red Indigenous people are identified and made identifiable by the state as terrorists in order to advance imperialist objectives. Racism • Imperialism • Anti-pipeline Activism • The Red Scare • Indigeneity • Terrorism • Futurism

the murderable indian: terror as state (in)security The Murderable Indian, perhaps the first and last authentic Indian, is the terrorist we are all too familiar with. As an affect of racist fears and concerns for personal safety, economic stability, and national security, the Murderable Indian serves to license the state’s counterterrorist, military, police, and vigilante responses to contain, punish, and deter. Fear Affect • Redskins • Oil Industry/Energy Policy • Surveillance/ Policing • Dillon S. Myer • Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien • COINTELPRO • Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples • Standing Rock and NoDAPL • Unist’ot’en Camp • Sexual Violence

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the kinless indian: terror as social (in)stability The Kinless Indian enables false and fraudulent claims to Indian ancestry and identity, claims that seem to absolve the notion that one might have any benefit from or complicity with the dispossession of and violence against Indigenous people. It suggests that, all along, one has in fact if in secret been Indigenous. Simultaneously, the Kinless Indian provides the rationale to the state to aggressively challenge the rights of Indigenous people to sovereignty and self-determination. Fraud

• Cherokee Cases • Donald J. Trump/Elizabeth Warren • Métis Cases • Joseph Boyden

radical alterities from huckleberry roots The Murderable Indian and Kinless Indian are effective because they provide for such a discursive and ideological realignment of Indigenous opposition into the service of state imperialism. Indigenous opposition calls not merely for the abolition of the state but a committed production of Indigenous governance systems based on values of relationality and responsibility. The Murderable/Kinless Indian • Abolition Rematriation • Sky Woman

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prologu e

When Indigenous activists showed up at Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2011 to oppose treaty rights violations, it was not the first time they had done so. Nor, in 2016, was it the first time they told their stories to the Canadian Parliament about missing and murdered women and police violence. Indigenous activists in the United States did not show up for the first time in 2016 at Standing Rock to oppose oil extraction. They did not appear for the first time in 2015 before the U.S Congress to urge legislation addressing violence against women. Indigenous peoples have been protesting the imperial forces of invasion, occupation, land theft, extraction, exploitation, and sexual violence for centuries. And so, too, have they been represented by state and corporate officials (who are sometimes one and the same) as terrorists  out to destroy national security and social stability. Ever since the United States became a nation in 1787, and Canada in 1867, Indigenous peoples exercising their sovereignty and selfdetermination have been depicted as terrorists. As Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Asha Bandele, and Angela Y. Davis have argued, ix

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Prologue

when the state or a powerful corporation identifies an individual as a terrorist, they can act with impunity against even your most basic human rights.1 You can be harassed and imprisoned without charge; police can beat and kill you in the streets; private security can use tear gas and attack dogs on you; you can be raped and murdered and discarded in a ditch. When a state or corporation identifies a group or a people as terrorists, they can be willfully defrauded of their territories and resources. What makes it all the more terrifying is that the invading, occupying foreign government or corporation is not acting on its own to criminalize you. They have the broad support and participation of the public. Across social media and news outlets, “Indigenous terrorism” has been used to justify the use of harsh counterterrorist measures to monitor, police, and punish Indigenous people. They have been used to minimize and even excuse sexual violence against Indigenous women. They have been used to legitimize land theft and resource extraction and to suppress Indigenous opposition to those efforts. The basic argument of this book is that Indigenous peoples are identified and made identifiable as terrorists in the service of state imperialism. I draw from Indigenous critical race, feminist, and anti-imperialist scholars and activists to consider how and to what ends Indigenous people are represented as terrorists by the state, often with the full support of the public. I organize these representations by two figures, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian. Representations of Indigenous people as murderable or as fraudulent threats to the state’s security and social stability demands and rationalizes counterterrorist measures that advance racist ideologies of Indigeneity that directly serve imperialist goals. I conclude with a reflection on the abolition of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination as an

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otherwise, as an exercised and lived land-based governance and culture that is a viable alternative to state imperialism and neoliberalism. But first, I want to acknowledge the multiple Indigenous individuals and communities of comrades—scholarly, activist, artist, sometimes all in one—that have helped me work through the issues addressed in this book. When I have shared my research with them, no one ever asked me to discuss Indigenous terrorism against the state or its citizens. Rather, I have been asked, repeatedly, whether I was going to start with smallpox blankets or address sexual violence. At Occupy Oakland organizing in 2011, at Idle No More solidarity actions in Oakland in 2012, at Black Lives Matter demonstrations since 2013, in a delegation to Palestine in 2014, at Standing Rock in 2016, in multiple discussions through the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust with which I serve—no one has ever presumed that Indigenous people were the terrorists. Instead, people have asked how I was going to treat the history and current condition of state terrorism against Indigenous people. I have been struck over and over by the specific questions about smallpox blankets and sexual violence and how these seem to represent so powerfully Indigenous experiences of state terrorism as well as the broad public demand for and cooperation with state violence against Indigenous people. In 1763, several coalitions of tribes within the Great Lakes region came together to fight Britain’s assumption of authority following its victory over France in the French-Indian War. One coalition was made up of tribes within the Ohio Valley, including the Lenape, Shawnee, Wyandot, and Mingo nations. These tribes had long been engaged in conflicts with Britain, France, and the Six Nations Confederacy (Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida,

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Cayuga, Tuscarora) for control of the territories now defined as New York and Pennsylvania. In June of that year, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, the British officer in charge of Fort Pitt (later Pittsburg, Pennsylvania), reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet, stationed in Philadelphia, that the tribal siege of the area was taking its toll. Bouquet then conveyed the news of the siege, as well as an account of a local smallpox outbreak, to General Jeffery Amherst, the British commander-in-chief in New York. Amherst replied to Bouquet: “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” On the same day, William Trent, a trader and land speculator, wrote in his diary that Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee, Lenape diplomats, had met, unsuccessfully, with Fort Pitt officials to urge them to quit the garrison. “The parleys came to a close, and the Indians asked for ‘a little Provisions and Liquor, to carry us Home.’ The British obliged. ‘Out of our regard to them . . . we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.’” Fort Pitt account books include the entry: “To Sundries got to Replace in kind those which were taken from people in the Hospital to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians Vizt: 2 Blankets . . . 1 Silk Handkerchef . . . ” Subsequent fort records document the “general & raging” spread of smallpox among Indigenous people throughout the Ohio Valley.2 Many historians and biologists have attributed the origins of the British use of biological warfare against Indigenous people to Amherst, though in fact the Ohio Valley smallpox epidemic of 1763–1764 may well have had multiple sources of infection. Epidemics were also exacerbated by the devastating impacts of the fur trade, deforestation, and environmental contamination on Indigenous economies.3 Between 1492 or 1526 (“first contact”) and 1890

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(the “end of the Indian Wars”), some 90 percent of Indigenous populations in North America perished. Roughly 60 percent of these may have died as a result of epidemic diseases, including smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis. The other 40 percent died in warfare. For Indigenous people, smallpox and other epidemics led to the devastating loss of ancestors, other-than-human kin, cultural knowledge, language, and lands. The perception that this was a strategy of warfare, state-sanctioned and funded through the military and trade, is not without foundation. It happened in simultaneously coordinated and isolated ways that were ideologically linked through a racism aimed at the genocide of Indigenous peoples. There is ample historical documentation of the torture and rape of Indigenous people—heterosexually and nonheterosexually identified, adults, youths, and children—by mercenaries, slavers, soldiers, missionaries, traders, farmers, and ranchers. As many scholars have argued, this sexual violence against Indigenous people is a central feature of an imperial formation and colonial practice.4 Christopher Columbus and his crews enslaved, beat, and raped Indigenous people. Hernán Cortés and his troops gang-raped, mutilated, and tortured Indigenous people, and trained packs of dogs to kill and sexually penetrate deviants (seen as pagans). This included men, women, and non-gender-conforming individuals. John Smith raped Indigenous women; many contend this included Pocahontas, if not by him then by the men in his company with his approval. Ranchers and traders captured and enslaved Indigenous people, not only for domestic and field work but also for sex. Soldiers gang-raped Indigenous people before and after battles to shame them and their communities. Missionaries across the religious spectrum, within and outside of boarding schools, sexually abused Indigenous people.

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In other words, sexual violence was used strategically to create and perpetuate trauma and social instability within Indigenous communities, and it was always sanctioned by the state, whether or not directly. It included the corporate-endorsed practice of men marrying into Indigenous communities as a means of expanding trade relations and then allowing the men to abandon their Indigenous wives and children when their contracts expired. So normalized was sexual violence in Oklahoma that ranchers conspired to marry and then murder Osage Nation women in order to inherit their lands, rich with minerals. It was a violence that folded easily into forced sterilization programs and the denial of Indigenous women’s reproductive rights. Sexual violence wrought profound histories of shame and trauma, resulting in substance abuse, unemployment, and criminalization and rendering sexual pleasure and eroticism a difficult topic at best. Such violence has occurred in both coordinated and isolated acts—ideologically connected—aimed at the subordination of Indigenous peoples to the state’s imperialist interests. For many Indigenous people whose territories are occupied by the U.S. and Canada, smallpox blankets and sexual violence represent the histories and cultures of state violence as well as the public demand for genocide, land theft, and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples to imperialist interests. These histories and cultures are lived, felt, grieved, and raged over, for the violence and public entanglement remain ongoing. I am deeply grateful to colleagues and comrades who have helped me grapple with terrorism’s ongoing work in the state’s oppression of Indigenous peoples. While all errors in this book’s argument and writing are my own, I am indebted to those with whom I think and struggle for Indigenous liberation.

Scared Red

The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region have many stories about Thunderbirds, deemed among the most powerful of beings. Able to bring about renewal and destruction, Thunderbirds have a unique and protective relationship with humans. The Anishinaabe also have many stories about the Great Lakes, which are understood to be the center of Turtle Island, the source of all life. One story tells of a future when a great black snake will threaten to swallow the land and all the waters.1 This cautionary prophecy is similar to other Indigenous teachings. The Lakota, for example, tell of a black snake that, moving underground, will destroy the earth.2 These are not fated predictions, however. The prophesied future can be changed. The future is about the choices we make now. So many Indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada have pitted themselves against imperialist ideologies and extractive capitalism, most powerfully embodied by the oil and gas industry and the neoliberal valuations of water, land, and life that that industry represents.3 This struggle has involved 1

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both local and international actions against the expansion of pipelines within and across the United States and Canada—the Dakota Access pipeline (North Dakota to Illinois), TransCanada’s Keystone XL (Alberta to Texas), TransCanada’s Energy East (Alberta to New Brunswick), Enbridge’s Northern Gateway (Alberta to British Columbia), Enbridge’s Line 3 (Alberta to Wisconsin), Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain (Alberta to British Columbia), Energy Transfer Partner’s Bayou Bridge in Louisiana, and others. It has involved bringing attention to the industry’s collusive role in governments, the courts, and global relations, its facilitation of climate disaster, and its complicity in gender-based and sexual violence. In speaking out, Indigenous peoples have insisted on the viability of their land-based governance and culture as an otherwise. Imperialism and capitalism are not inevitable, nor are they progressive. Indigenous territorialbased practices of shared governance, cooperative economies, reciprocity among humans and other-than-human beings, and genuine equity between genders and sexualities (in)form a viable social alterity. The U.S. and Canada, in full collusion with oil and gas executives and private or paramilitary security firms, have responded to Indigenous opposition by deploying harsh counterterrorist measures to suppress and criminalize Indigenous protest and disrupt, undo, and disparage Indigenous lifeways. These measures have included smear campaigns and harassment, surveillance and entrapment, and arrest, charge, and incarceration. Particularly disturbing in all this is the broad public support and even demand that these tactics have occasioned. As Jack D. Forbes says of the 1850s genocide campaign against Native Americans in California and Nevada, “The sequence of events [is] all the more distressing since it serves to indict not a group

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of cruel leaders, or a few squads of rough soldiers, but, in effect, an entire people; for the conquest of the Indigenous Californian was above all else a popular, mass enterprise.” 4 In October 2017, Elizabeth LaPensée released a 2-D sidescrolling game on Windows entitled Thunderbird Strike, which was followed shortly thereafter by an iOS version.5 The game’s development was supported by small grants from Michigan and Minnesota, including money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, which provides support to projects that preserve state history and cultural heritage. The game included a link to a website with educational materials on Great Lakes Indigenous cultures and teachings. It also included information on the damages oil pipelines have wrought on Indigenous lands in the United States and Canada and on Indigenous efforts to protect these lands and waters from further destruction. The three levels of Thunderbird Strike depict, respectively, the Alberta tar sands, the prairies of Saskatchewan, and the Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lake Huron and Lake Michigan— all three areas that are implicated in pipeline projects.6 Players assume thunderbird avatars who gather lightning power from clouds to restore fallen caribou and buffalo and strike against pipeline equipment. Game reviewer Dia Lacina writes, “It’s the first time a game has ever asked me to take on an oil pipeline, specifically the Enbridge 5 pipeline [which flows under the Straits of Mackinac]—all without killing a single person. And video games have asked me to kill a lot of people.”7 Upon release of Thunderbird Strike, several government officials and oil industry lobbyists accused LaPensée of advancing terrorism.8 Senator David Osmek (R-MN) described the game as “an eco-terrorist version of Angry Birds.”9 Toby Mack, president

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of the lobby group Energy Builder/Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance, called it a “taxpayer-funded political campaign . . . designed to encourage eco-terrorism or other bad behavior.” He further noted: “We don’t think there’s any place for this kind of material being out there. . . . The consequences of somebody committing an act such as you can on the video game is [sic] just horrific.”10 Bob Gunther (R-MN) called LaPensée’s use of the legacy grant “an abuse” of the program: “Common sense would tell you our arts dollars should be spent on programs that serve some purpose to the State of Minnesota, not on an out-ofstate video game that blows up oil pipelines.”11 Mack agreed, saying, “We call on Michigan State University to pull the plug immediately on this taxpayer-funded political campaign and reject any so-called educational program designed to encourage ecoterrorism or other bad behavior.”12 LaPensée was subjected not only to government scrutiny and corporate criticism, threats of funding recall, and questions about her scholarship, but also to online harassment, including death threats, which were justified by the charge that she and the game were advancing or condoning terrorism.13 They were consistent with nationwide and international efforts to demoralize, silence, criminalize, and punish all kinds of Indigenous opposition to state imperialism. They were meant as a warning to others. State and corporate use of terrorism to justify suppression of and violence against opposition is nothing new. But specific to this historical moment is its use within a particularly configured imperial formation protected by a massive global surveillance and military industrial apparatus. Neither are counterterrorism measures new, but how they are so readily administered and financed is about the unique resources and technologies of war

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and surveillance currently available to the state. The racist ideologies and practices that inform terrorism’s articulation rely on actively assembled anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, Islamophobic, anti-Asian, and anti-queer and transphobic notions of identity, culture, and difference that legitimate state imperialism through violence and censorship. In this book, I argue that the state identifies Indigenous peoples as terrorists in the service of its own imperialist goals. My concern with these identificatory practices is not to analyze the psychology of the oppressor, center military and police violence, replicate the problematics of the oppression-resistance analytic, or romanticize Indigenous opposition. My concern is with how state-defined representations of Indigenous people in the United States and Canada—which I organize by the figures of the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian—presumes what Billy-Ray Belcourt and Neferti Tadiar address as lives not worthy of life, as lives forever defined by the fate of death, injury, and grief.14 I try to show how the representations reenact the social relations and material conditions of invasion, occupation, exploitation, and appropriation. They do so because imperialism’s capitalism can only expand itself in perpetuity by reproducing social relations of gross inequality between the state and Indigenous peoples.15 By comparing the United States and Canada, I try to show how terrorism as a representational technology has proven to be an especially effective means for states to deflect any real accountability for genocide, physical and sexual violence, unconstitutional invasion and occupation of Indigenous territory, wanton extraction and contamination of water and minerals, and exploitation of Indigenous labor and culture. Drawing on Indigenous critical race, feminist, and antiimperialist studies scholars like Manu Karuka, Jennifer Nez

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Denetdale, Vine Deloria Jr., and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, this book pays attention to the articulation of relationships between the United States, Canada, and Indigenous people within state discourses of terrorism.16 In so doing I hope to show how Indigeneity has been made indistinguishable from terrorism, to lay out the different modes by which Indigenous peoples are identified and identifiable as terrorists, and to explore how that subjectivity works to further imperialist goals. I conclude with a reflection on the abolition of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination as an otherwise. Not as a future imagined, but as an exercised and lived land-based governance and culture that is a viable alternative to state imperialism and neoliberalism. But first: the Red Scare.

the red scare A Red Scare is a state’s racist and xenophobic campaign of fear. It is focused on an alleged threat—of communism, socialism, anarchism, atheism, often all lumped together—to the state’s security and social stability.17 The term is used most often to refer to two historical periods defined by the two world wars. In that context, the Red Scare was used to justify the expansion of surveillance, policing, and punishment of those who challenged state policy and to advance global economic interests through military intervention. The first Red Scare occurred immediately following World War I (1914–1918). The Russian Revolution (1917), led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, resulted in the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, the creation of a provisional government, and the formal establishment of the Communist Party. A civil war ensued, often referred to as the Red Terror, in which tens of

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thousands were killed. Ultimately claiming victory over Russian monarchists, the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1922, the world’s first communist state.18 This elicited deep concern in Western Europe and northern North America over the potential of workers to unite and overthrow an established government. Publicly, the idea that democracy, capitalism, and Christianity could be improved upon or superseded was seen as at once ludicrous and heretical. But states acted quickly to rationalize and expand executive and federal authority, bolster surveillance and interrogation resources, and criminalize and deport immigrants. In the United States such efforts included the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade sharing national defense information with foreign enemies, interference with the draft, and speech involving the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government, its flag, or its armed forces or that portrayed the government or its institutions with contempt.19 In Canada these efforts included the War Measures Act of 1914, which conferred broad authority on Parliament to amend previous acts by legislation and gave the executive unlimited powers in the name of state security. The act provided for the declaration of war. It also allowed for the suspension of civil liberties, giving police broad authority “to arrest and interrogate suspects and to seize documents without going through the regular channels.”20 The second Red Scare is associated with World War II (1939– 1945) and its aftermath but really began earlier, during the Great Depression, which stretched roughly from the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 to the advent of the war. This worldwide economic recession was characterized by staggering poverty, unemployment, and housing and food insecurity. It called into question

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the viability of capitalism and the promise that hard work alone would bring wealth and happiness. Many in the U.S. and Canada believed that leftist adherents of labor and civil rights movements were turning to or could be turned to communism as an answer to their economic troubles. In the United States, this concern seemed validated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a series of social programs, public works projects, and financial reforms implemented between 1933 and 1939. Conservatives characterized the New Deal as a gateway to communism that would bring about the undoing of U.S. government and society.21 “There are today many Communists in America,” Attorney General J. Howard McGrath said, “and each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”22 If successful, it was believed, they would fundamentally “change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life.”23 In response, extreme surveillance and policing measures were gradually put into place and normalized by public sanction. President Harry S. Truman (served 1945–1953) mandated that all federal employees be reviewed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government. J. Edgar Hoover, first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (served 1935– 1972), and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (served 1947–1957) equated any kind of protest or organizing with communist subversion and led efforts to surveil and blacklist all supposed communists. Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected president in 1953, mandated the immediate suspension without pay, and later automatic dismissal, for federal employees who displayed “any behavior, activities, or associations which tend to show that the individual is not reliable or trustworthy.”24 Since no provisions were made for hearings, agencies assumed full discretion, often summarily firing individuals who pled the fifth. International travel was

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denied to individuals who criticized U.S. foreign policy and entry visas were denied to individuals with potential communist affiliation. Thirty-nine states followed the federal lead, prohibiting “subversive activities,” criminalizing advocacy of “violent governmental change,” and penalizing membership in the Communist Party.25 In Canada between 1945 and 1957, several royal commissions were established to reform Canadian security and intelligence.26 Charged with investigating foreign intelligence networks operating in Canada, these commissions were given “broad powers to summon, hold, and question individuals without charging them and to punish them if they were uncooperative.”27 In 1946, Prime Minister Mackenzie King created the Security Panel, “an interdepartmental body to oversee and coordinate internal security issues and to determine the loyalty of government workers. It included representatives from the Privy Council Office, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], and the departments of External Affairs and National Defense, with the occasional participation of representatives from other departments.”28 The panel oversaw the screening of thousands of civil servants each year: “They caught up hundreds of unsuspecting Canadians who for some past action, membership, or ‘moral lapse’ were judged to be unreliable and, as potential risks, were either denied jobs or quietly given less sensitive jobs within the government.”29 The Red Scare made legible the deep collusions between state governments and the industries of defense, energy, and technology. Suppressing dissent was not about protecting democracy against communism; it was about being able to advance capitalistdriven invasions and occupations of territories, “domestic” and foreign, to acquire lands, natural resources, and the labor necessary to feed imperialist ambitions.30 These ambitions were

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unintentionally marked in Eisenhower’s January 1961 Farewell  Address to the Nation, a cautionary tale of the “militaryindustrial complex” that deflected his own role in advancing not only the complex itself but the formations of wealth and debt that it concretized.31 Within the Red Scare, war, poverty, unemployment, and social precarity were not understood as resulting from capitalism’s gross failures or imperialism’s deep wrongs; instead, they were the consequence of grave, covert threats on the part of communist spies, sympathizers, foreigners, and immigrants who had to be punished and purged. The notion of a communist menace lasted long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. By then, the evils of communism had become associated with the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, Third World Liberation, labor unions, the women’s movement, queer movements, and many other left-wing organizations. They were ascribed to anticolonial efforts in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Kenya, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere, and were blamed for the strife in the Middle East over oil. The alleged influence of communism and its danger to democracy around the world was used to cover a myriad of situations into which the U.S. and Canada insinuated themselves—often together—as advocates of democratic freedom while covertly establishing and protecting the infrastructure of military invasion, occupation, intelligence, policing, and resource extraction. Meanwhile, all this time, the Red Man and communism and socialism were made indistinct from one another in state discourses of terrorism. As Indigenous groups like the American Indian Movement and National Indian Brotherhood, or those engaged in treaty rights struggles, from Neah Bay, Washington, to the Restigouche River in New Brunswick, addressed the prin-

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ciples of “communal land-holding” or community-based governance, associations between the Indigenous and the communist became normalized. Indigenous people were either the original communists, outright collaborators, or the unwitting dupes of infiltrators welcoming communists into their communities. In any case, the threat to U.S. and Canadian society was considered real and required preemptive intervention. The representation of Indigenous peoples as a threat of this kind, to the state’s very national security, rendered them wholly murderable, relegating them to a life filtered by death’s affect.

the indigeneity of state terrorist discourses It is important to pause here and consider the legal etymologies of Indigeneity and terrorism. On their own, these terms are complicated enough. What does it mean when they are fused together? According to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues of the United Nations, a clear, internationally agreed upon definition of Indigeneity is grossly lacking. The Forum maintains that this lack is due to the global diversity of Indigenous peoples. But is it not more likely that leaving the Indigenous relatively undefined in fact serves state interests, allowing for greater control over those who are, or are not, recognized as Indigenous within a state’s claimed territories. Rather than providing a concrete definition, the Forum argues that international understanding of Indigeneity coheres around seven key points: •

Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member

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Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or presettler societies Strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources

•

Distinct social, economic or political systems

•

Distinct language, culture and beliefs

•

Form non-dominant groups of a society

•

Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities32

When an individual or community is recognized as Indigenous according to these terms, a whole host of rights to governance, territorial control, natural resource access and use, and cultural autonomy are likewise recognized. But since a cohesive definition of Indigeneity has not been adopted within the international community, the question of recognition—determining who is and is not Indigenous within a claimed territory—is deferred to state authority. As was evident during the forty years it took the Forum to oversee the approval process within the General Assembly on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, state governments have disputed such definitions in order to dispute Indigenous claims to lands, waters, and other resources. Worldwide, these disputes have been felt in real ways by Indigenous groups engaged in historic struggle for the recognition of their basic human rights, beginning with the right to life and extending to rights to self-governance, territorial integrity, and control of natural resources, as provided through treaties and constitutions. In the United States, Indigeneity is defined almost solely in relation to the term tribe, extending even to Alaska Natives and

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Native Hawaiians for purposes of defining their legal status and rights as Indigenous peoples: “Indian tribe” or “tribe” means any Indian tribe, band, group, pueblo, or community for which, or for the members of which, the United States holds lands in trust; “Indian” means (A) any person who is a member of any Indian tribe, is eligible to become a member of any Indian tribe, or is an owner (as of October 27, 2004) of a trust or restricted interest in land; (B) any person meeting the definition of Indian under the Indian Reorganization Act and the regulations promulgated thereunder.33

As of January 2021, 574 entities within the United States are recognized as “tribes,” including roughly 235 Alaska Native villages and several Native Hawaiian organizations.34 Recognition status is the prerequisite for government relations, territorial jurisdiction, and federal and state funding and services often reserved by treaty. Such status decides a group’s right to consult on matters relating to federal statutes such as the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. In Canada, the Indigenous are defined in the Constitution Act of 1982 (Section 35) as “the aboriginal peoples of Canada,” with Indians, Inuit, and Métis specifically named. The act further acknowledges “existing aboriginal and treaty rights.”35 Indian includes groups and individuals accorded status and treaty rights; Inuit refers to the Indigenous peoples of northern Canada, many of whom reside in the territory of Nunavut, established in 1999; and Métis includes those with ties to the historic homeland of the Métis Nation. As of 2021, 619 entities are recognized as having Indigenous status in Canada. Indigenous peoples’ self-definitions vary, but international law makes a distinction between sovereign, collective peoples

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(plural) and people (individuals).36 The difference is drawn from the language of the United Nations Charter, which provides that one purpose of the United Nations is the development of “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace.”37 Peoples, also referred to as non-state political entities or groups, are understood to possess inherent rights to self-determination that are held collectively; these rights include governance, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy. Peoples’ rights are differentiated from the kinds of civil rights possessed by individuals under state constitutions, such as freedom of speech or due process. The distinction between peoples’ collectivity and people’s individuality is germane to understanding Indigenous refusals of their racialized statuses as minorities under the jurisdiction of states and their collective assertions of the rights to governance and to territories normally associated with states. It is also important to note that in both the United States and Canada, when an Indigenous person from elsewhere enters the state’s territory, they are no longer identified as Indigenous with regard to either legal status or their rights to access designated federal programs, services, and funds. This matters in complicated ways beyond the scope of this book. But the erasure of Indigeneity from Indigenous Africans, Central and South Americans, and people from the rest of the world when they are in the U.S. and Canada is another means by which the state claims its jurisdictional authority to identify who is or is not Indigenous.38 Tellingly, international law also provides no agreed-upon definition of terrorism.39 In the United States and Canada, however, the use of the words terrorism and terrorist to label a broad and

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dissimilar swath of individuals and of group or state actions and movements would suggest that such a definition exists. Since the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union and its allies have never escaped the “terrorist” label. When, during the Vietnam War, Soviet advisors provided training and support to the Viet Cong who were fighting the French and Americans, the Viet Cong were described as terrorists. When the PLO in Palestine and Castro in Cuba received military support from the Soviets, both were described as terrorists. When the USSR allied with Nicaragua in the 1980s, the U.S. identified it as terrorist and funded the Contras. The label has also been applied to a wide array, and not necessarily commensurate range, of communist- or socialist-leaning revolutionary movements and anticolonial oppositions, both armed and pacifist. These have included the Viet Minh, who fought against the Japanese and then against the French (1941–1951); the National Liberation Front in Algeria, who fought against the French (1954–1962); and the EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) in Cyprus, who fought against the British (1955–1959). Other groups in this category include fighters in the Cuban revolution, Maoists, Students for a Democratic Society (the Weather Underground Organization), and the Black Panther Party. The world wars provided the context in which oil gained ascendance as a strategic global resource. In response, the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western powers worked to secure their investments and access to oil. In 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela responded by creating the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to coordinate production, prices, and rights of access. As additional countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Central America joined through the 1970s, OPEC solidified its position.40

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As demonstrated by Edward Said, Darryl Li, and many others, Orientalist and Islamophobic racisms existed long before oil’s pivotal role in global politics.41 But discourses of terrorism, uniquely (in)formed by the Red Scare, provided for a powerful articulation of these racisms. Asians, Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and Central and South Americans were rendered a cogent, identifiable harm to the international community. In the United States and Canada, officials asserted exceptionalist claims of responsibility and ability to protect all of humanity from this harm. Behind the veil of such altruism, terrorism masked the ways in which the U.S., Canada, and other Western states were actively funding and arming competing groups in the oil-rich regions in order to maintain control of the market.42 Given the proliferation and significance of terrorism, the lack of an agreed-upon definition of terrorism in international law is all the more conspicuous. Following the New York and Washington attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and the European Union led passionate, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to create an explicit definition. The lack of consensus conferred the definition back to state authority. After all, if no international definition is in place, states may define terrorism as they wish, often without any international accountability. This is not to suggest that international law is necessarily effective at holding states accountable, or that the existence of a consensual definition would produce said accountability. But as we have seen, especially following 9-11, there has been an explosion, largely without public debate, of state legislation concerning terrorism, including enhanced executive and surveillance powers, incarceration practices, immigration controls, and trade

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sanctions—all without any real international answerability but with serious international consequences.43 In the United States, the Patriot Act of October 2001 distinguishes two types of terrorism: international and domestic. International terrorism is defined as activities that “(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life” in violation of federal and state law; “(B) appear to be intended—(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States” and “appear intended to intimidate or coerce” (emphasis added). Domestic terrorism is defined similarly, with only section C changed, to specify that such acts “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” 44 In Canada, the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 inserted a definition of “terrorist activity” into its criminal code, calling it “an act or omission, in or outside Canada, that is committed (A) in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause, and (B) in whole or in part with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act, whether the public or the person, government or organization is inside or outside Canada” (emphasis added). “Terrorist activity” also includes any “act or omission that intentionally (A) causes death or serious bodily harm to a person by the use of violence, (B) endangers a person’s life, (C) causes a serious risk to the health or safety of the public

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or any segment of the publics, (D) causes substantial property damage, whether to public or private property, . . . or (E) causes serious interference with or serious disruption of an essential service, facility or system, whether public or private.” 45 In the United States and Canada, terrorism includes not only acts but intents to act that violate federal and/or state/provincial laws and threaten or are perceived to threaten “human life,” the state, or the state’s citizens, both within and without the state’s territorial and jurisdictional borders. The state, in effect, claims the power to suspend time and place in order to identify, punish, and prevent terrorism. The more serious the threat, the more emboldened the state is to protect itself and its citizens. Since 9-11, the United States and Canada have used the language of terrorism to license presidential and prime ministerial war powers and to finance ever-expanding military, police, intelligence, and energy resources. Terrorism is the language invoked when severe counterterrorist measures are deemed necessary, when energy extraction and infrastructure are bolstered in ways that defy international human rights standards and constitutional protections—in response to not just actions but also intents, preemptively, domestically as well as internationally, now and into the foreseeable future. Despite the seemingly broad applicability of the language of terrorism, not everyone is created equal under its provisions. In no instance has the United States or Canada ever identified its own actions or intents as terrorism. Even when officials and governing bodies like the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament have issued acknowledgments of and apologies for invasion and annexation, child kidnapping and sexual abuse, and other violent actions toward Indigenous peoples that have violated international

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human rights and constitutional law—enacting and causing genocide, land theft, gender violence, and environmental destruction and contamination—the state has cast its actions as isolated, unfortunate digressions from an otherwise growing embodiment of democratic ideals on the way to reconciliation. For instance, in 1993 the United States issued what is known as the Apology Resolution to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. The resolution “acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.” 46 In addition, it included acknowledgment of the unconstitutional usurpation of Hawaiian land ownership through military occupation and annexation, devastation of the Hawaiian way of life, and the undermining of Hawaiian cultural self-determination—all this despite a treaty relationship between the United States and the Kingdom of Hawai‘i at the time of the overthrow. The apology ended by looking forward to a reconciliation between the United States and the Native Hawaiian people. In 2007—the same year it voted against the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—Canada offered an apology for the sexual and physical abuses and deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools. It acknowledged the removal of Indigenous children from their homes and communities and subsequent isolation in an effort to forcibly assimilate them. It acknowledged that many of the children died at the schools or never returned to their homes. “The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian Residential

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Schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language. . . . The legacy of Indian Residential Schools has contributed to social problems that continue to exist in many communities today.” Finally, Parliament passed the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to further “healing, reconciliation and resolution.” 47 In neither apology, whether for the overthrow of Hawai‘i or residential school violences, were the implied and direct actions of the state identified as terrorism or its representatives described as terrorists. This is despite the acknowledgment of statesanctioned invasion and abuse as actions that would otherwise be considered violations of international human rights and constitutional law. Instead, U.S. and Canadian apologies to Indigenous peoples made a quick turn to reconciliation as an affirmation of the state’s professed democratic and liberal ideals, its previous behavior notwithstanding. Until recently, moreover, it was extremely rare for white heteronormative men or white identity–based groups to be identified and treated as terrorists, or to be perceived as forming or participating in terrorist networks. Instead white supremacy is normalized, and on the rare occasion when a white man is labeled a terrorist, he tends to be cast as a lone wolf, mentally challenged, or the victim of bullying and social rejection. This has not been the case for Muslims, Arabs, or Sikhs, especially since 9-11. As early as the 1970s, Muslims, Arabs, and indeed the entire Middle East were increasingly identified and targeted as terrorists. 9-11 reinforced these identifications, justifying the U.S. and Canadian military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the demonization of Pakistan and Syria, and of stateless

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Sikhism. Yet as reported by multiple sources, since 9-11 nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics, and other non-Muslim extremists than by Muslims.48 Only upon the occasion of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and the January 2021 riot at the Capitol in Washington DC have organized attacks by white identity–based groups seemed to be conceded as “domestic terrorism.” 49 And yet Indigenous people, Blacks, trans, women, and others targeted by these attacks have consistently and loudly condemned such violence, as well as associated police abetment, as a form of terrorism with a long history. In so doing, they point not to the exceptionalism of white identity–based terrorism but to its institutionalization and normalization.

the social alterity of the future imperfect Indigenous peoples who maintain governance and territorialbased lifeways are perceived as threats to the state’s security and social stability. Indigenous rights and cultural practices challenge the state’s authority and those whose interests the state serves (as if it is even possible to separate the state from the corporation any longer). As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, Indigenous people come “face-to-face” with state “authority, surveillance and violence” because Indigenous territorial, water, and natural resource rights and practices place Indigenous bodies in between the state and its sources of capital.50 This is what has happened at every pipeline protest in the United States and Canada: state officials, oil industry executives, and private security contractors have charged Indigenous

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protesters with terrorism. This took on special meaning at Standing Rock after Black Lives Matter and Palestinian delegates joined the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (NoDAPL), citing links between their struggles for social justice and against U.S. and Canadian imperialism. By then counterterrorism efforts were in full deployment, with the camps being represented as terrorist enclaves shoring up violent opposition against the energy-asnational-security infrastructure of the United States and Canada. NoDAPL participants countered by representing themselves as water protectors. This was not a war of words, as social and news media often portrayed it. It was a struggle over the state’s modes of objectification, which sought to transform Indigenous people into the particular kinds of subjects—terrorists—over which it had absolute authority, not just “here and now” but across state borders and in perpetuity.51 This required not merely a “casting out” into rightlessness of Indigenous people, as Sherene H. Razack argues in relation to Muslims,52 but a particular kind of inclusion—one demanding that Indigenous peoples reject their sovereignty and self-determination and subject themselves entirely to the legal terms, material conditions, and political interests of the United States and Canada. In short, they were required to let go of their Indigeneity even as that Indigeneity was used to represent the state’s embodiment of the values of a multicultural democratic society. Against the state’s demands, water protectors, invoking the Lakota phrase mni wincone (water is life), insisted on the vitality and viability of Indigenous governance, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy. Citing teachings often coded as the “seventh generation,” they named the continued relevance of Indigenous cultural practices to a territory and kin (both human and other-

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than-human beings) and history (past, present, and future) for which Indigenous peoples are responsible. They rejected the state’s authority and promises of full citizenship in favor of Indigenous governance. The state countered by holding the future up as an everpresent possibility of promise or doom. If, it argued, the state’s power is protected and expanded, a future of heady promise awaits, bringing status measured by wealth and reputation to its citizens. If, however, the state’s power is challenged, the future will be one of disastrous instability, poverty, and loss. In this telling, the state becomes necessary now and for all time, not so much to provide a sense of well-being and security as to assure a future free from dread. Grounded in relationship and responsibility to human and other-than-human beings, territories, and waters, water protectors challenge the state’s future by shifting governance away from it and to Indigenous peoples and their cultural teachings and practices. By marking a relevant set of laws and values not belonging to the state, by representing the viability of another space of governance based on teachings valuing reciprocity and interdependence, water protectors unseated the state’s authority. The degree to which they succeeded was and continues to be laid bare by the state’s immediate use of invasive and punishing measures of counterterrorism. Against the presumed permanence of the state, Indigenous movements have emphasized the present-future tense of a lived social alterity. In other words, the existence that Indigenous peoples claim as possible is not about the future at all; it is about life now. It is an insistence that things do not have to be the way they are, that another way is not only possible but already being lived out through other understandings of land and water, kin

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relationships, and territorial-based practices. It is a perspective that (in)forms the Indigenous feminism on which the movements were built and from which their history is envisioned. It is the very viability of this alternative to state control that the state responded and continues to respond to with such violent, suppressive force. In the next two chapters, I map out two types of Indigenous terrorism as invented by the United States and Canada to protect their imperialist agendas: the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian. For this, I draw in part on the work of Jack D. Forbes, who addresses the problematics of reifying state boundaries in Indigenous studies.53 Historically, of course, Indigenous peoples in what are now referred to as the United States and Canada were not politically or culturally defined by those geopolitical entities. As Forbes suggests, however, it is important to neither essentialize state borders nor underestimate their importance when considering the legal terms and social conditions of Indigenous life. By paying attention to Indigenous political and cultural histories and relations across state borders, I try to respect their complexities while at the same time decentering the state. In “The Murderable Indian: Terror as State (In)Security,” I examine the Indian who, perceived and represented as a threat to national security, is responded to with the full spectrum of the state’s counterterrorist resources, including corporate security contractors, invasive surveillance, detention and interrogation, incarceration, and police violence. I argue that the Murderable Indian, (in)formed by the affectivity of terror, is seen as requiring proportionately more repressive, disciplinary, prison-centric state interventions in order to reestablish public safety and national security. In important ways the Murderable Indian is coarticulated with Blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, and others to rational-

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ize all manner of practices: invasion and occupation, genocide, mass incarceration, securitization, and counterterrorism. In “The Kinless Indian: Terror as Social (In)Stability,” I examine the politics of those who claim Indian identity but are without any lineal or community-based relationships to Indigenous people(s). These individuals, and perhaps more so the fraud they embody, are used by the state to challenge Indigenous governance and territorial rights. They are represented as terrorists in state discourses when they are figured as threatening the social integrity of the state. The state’s Indian is embedded in cultural-as-biological notions of racial authenticity that sustain the legal legitimacy of Indigenous rights. The wellentrenched historical grooves of the racisms that inform the Kinless Indian are those into which state discourses and ideologies of terrorism fall easily to justify the use of extreme counterterrorist measures to protect the state’s imperialist interests. In the final chapter, “Radical Alterities from Huckleberry Roots,” I conclude by suggesting that the future is not something we are waiting for, but rather is already embodied in our relationships with one another. These relationships anticipate the abolition of state imperialism and the real alternative of Indigenous governance.

The Murderable Indian Terror as State (In)Security

The Murderable Indian, perhaps the first and last authentic Indian, is the terrorist we are all too familiar with. Affected through racist fears and concerns over personal safety, economic stability, and national security, it serves to license the state’s counterterrorist, military, police, and vigilante responses to contain, punish, and deter. The Indian in buckskin wielding a hatchet while raiding innocent towns; the Indian in a jeans jacket defiantly waving a rifle overhead; the Indian standing in the path of oil trucks—the Murderable Indian is the penultimate terrorist that good citizens invoke to demand, justify, and retroactively legalize the most brutal of state violences. I want to begin by considering the familiarity of this particular Indian in political terms. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion, we see that the affect of terror is intimately tied up with what we think we already know about the object by which we feel terrorized.1 What we take for granted (claim to know) about that object is not necessarily based on prior personal experience but rather on accumulated perceptions 26

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shared within a state’s economy of regulation and policing and substantiated by an imagined community of good citizens. The question is not what the Indian has done to terrorize (as if the Indian has done anything at all), but how the accumulated affect of terror has socialized non-Indians, particularly as they gather together as good citizens, to anticipate harm from Indians and demand a state that can offer protection against them. In other words, within processes of associated meaning, the Indian is foundationally not merely a non-citizen but an anticitizen, one who has been cobbled together most recently from the racist and sexist perceptions of threatening behavior against the state long associated with the Red Scare. So historically entrenched are these perceptions that even modest assertions of Indigenous treaty rights, territorial claims, and demands for environmental protections are perceived as a threat against state sovereignty and citizen safety. This affect of terror produces, and in turn is produced within, a community of good citizens who share and so corroborate concerns about security and safety, who are presumed to stand together to demand the particular kind of state that can protect them from harm. The kind of Indigenous produced by citizens united is the Indigenous who is not absent or erased but is made particularly present—at the ready—to be killed. The public protected depends not on a dead Indian, a corpse whose image can readily represent the state’s criminal barbarity and so their own (for having produced such a state), but on an Indian who is murderable— permanently in the state’s line of sight, the citizen’s gun locked and loaded. One of the most immediate and implicated of murderable Indians is the Redskin, the original Red Man or Red Terror. The

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Redskin has an old history of irrational and unprovoked violence against guiltless whites and of lustful brutality toward innocent white women. Often gendered as a hypermasculinist warrior, this Indian has dominated colonial and U.S./Canadian writings for centuries as the barbaric savage who wantonly rapes, tortures, and kills whites without cause or purpose, even in reports involving invasions and attacks on Indians themselves. For instance, a 1745 account in the Boston Evening-Post reported: “The Enemies had 2 kill’d and as many wounded in the Engagement, which being over, the Indians cut open Capt. Donahew’s Breast, and suck’d his Blood, and hack’d and mangled his Body in a most inhuman and barbarous Manner, and then ate a great part of the flesh. They also suck’d the Blood and mangled the Bodies of the other Slain.”2 The context for this “engagement,” implying an armed confrontation between soldiers and Indians, is the colonial wars that characterized the Boston region, in which the Indian is typically figured as violently, cannibalistically savage. Forever lurking in the dark cover of a forested wilderness, and later creeping through prairie grassland, ready to eat or mangle the flesh of innocent whites, the Redskin is produced within a community of unprotected citizens (even when these are colonial soldiers or living in territories not under a state’s control) who endorse a sovereign ready to send in (more of) his armies and/or condone the protective acts of armed vigilantes. So visceral is the threat that, from Jamestown on, states unable to fund or train a mass deployment of soldiers to deal with it paid its citizens per Redskin or scalp to protect themselves. In 1703, for instance, the Massachusetts Bay Colony offered a lot of money, between 250 and 300 pounds, for Indian scalps. In 1756 the Pennsylvania governor, declaring war against the Lenape, offered “130 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Male

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Indian Enemy above the Age of Twelve Years” and “50 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Indian Woman.”3 Following California statehood in 1850, the state’s first governor inaugurated an extermination policy that over time paid between 25 cents and 5 dollars per scalp. At least 4,500 Indigenous people were murdered between 1848 and 1880, the equivalent of 150 people every year, the state issuing close to $1.5 million in payments for their scalps.4 As Jack D. Forbes observes, this campaign of genocide was carried out not by the military or police, but by a willing, participating public.5 The payments for Redskins advertised on fliers and in newspapers held Indigenous people in a state of murderability. They fused the image of Indigenous terrorism to that of a vulnerable citizenry needing to be protected. This rationalized not only the business of scalping but also colonial and then state laws that criminalized Indians gathering in large groups or traveling outside reservation boundaries, to prevent them from committing terrorist acts against good citizens. But not all murderable Indians are the same. As federal, territorial, and state governments condoned military massacres of Indian people and reimbursed their citizens for murdering them, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs initiated an assimilation program meant to save Indigenous youth from the near-certain extinction of Indigenous people that its very departments were carrying out and funding. In 1875, Brigadier General Richard H. Pratt used a curriculum that included Bible lessons and guard drills to reeducate Indigenous prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida. He represented his alleged success in civilizing the prisoners through education in before-and-after photographs, presented as dramatic images of much-altered hair and clothes. He also had the

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men perform their archery skills for visitors. Both were used as devices to raise money. In 1879, Pratt translated this approach into the curriculum of the first off-reservation boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, subsequently modeled by sixty schools around the United States.6 Pratt was known for asserting that one must “kill the Indian to save the man.” The notion of extracting Indigeneity from the Indigenous person treated Indigeneity as if it were an undesirable contaminant that could be isolated and removed from an otherwise healthy body, which could then be assimilated into civil society. In the discourses of the Vanishing Indian then dominant in U.S. policy and philanthropy, the murderable Indian was at once pitied, envied, and feared. It remained a target, its inherent nature seen as the terrorist who could at any moment “go back to the blanket” and wantonly kill and rape. However, the murderable Indian was also deemed salvageable. Indeed, for the state and citizen who took on the task of assimilation—even as they carried out the genocide and violent dispossession of Indigenous people—the murderable Indian transformed them into democratically generous benefactors. In this chapter, I examine the Murderable Indian’s deployment by the state, the oil and gas industry, and particular sectors of the public to contain Indigenous opposition. My concern is not to center military and police violence, replicate the problematics of the oppression-resistance analytic, or romanticize Indigenous opposition. Rather, I take an Indigenous feminist approach, looking at how territorial-based practices of relationship and responsibility (in)form Indigenous embodiment of a social alterity that invariably pits them against an imperial, capitalist state and its interests. I begin with oil.

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capital oil Before gasoline-powered modes of transportation, oil was used for multiple purposes, including mummy conservation, sculptural adornment through oil-based paints, and as body paint for decorative and ceremonial purposes. Medicinal uses included treatment of rheumatism, scabies, wounds, ulcers, and ringworm. It was used as a preservative coating for meats, as a lubricant on chariot axles, and as mortar in asphalt. It was a source of heat and light.7 It was its use in waterproofing irrigation canals and ships, and as lubrication for machinery, that defined its importance in international trade and war, entangling the industries of oil, agriculture, and manufacturing.8 In the United States and Canada, the first successful oil wells were sunk in the 1850s at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, and Oil Springs, Ontario. Although the U.S. Civil War completely disrupted the U.S. economy, including oil extraction and transportation, it was also a fully mechanized conflict, demanding an infrastructure that included railways, armament factories, artillery equipment, and armored warships.9 Oil was central to the functioning of the mechanics of war. After the Civil War, John D. Rockefeller invested heavily in this infrastructure, particularly railroads, oil wells, pipelines, and oceangoing freighters. In 1870 he established Standard Oil Company, whose corrupt practices and illegal operations— including the bullying and acquisition of competitors, the squelching of labor organizing, the fraudulent appropriation of lands, and unregulated extraction—quickly gave it a monopoly in North America. Standard Oil controlled oil prices, production, and transportation to almost nine-tenths of the total world market.10

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The wider sale and use of oil’s residue, sulfuric acid, in fertilizer, and of grease in manufacturing; the improved refinement of oil and its residues; and the invention (1886) and mass production (1901) of gasoline-powered automobiles and airplanes (1903, 1937) propelled oil’s significance in politics and economics.11 Through World Wars I and II, wealth in the U.S. and Canada was anchored by oil and the investment banks and financial systems through which oil was financed. This is powerfully represented by the fact that Rockefeller’s brother, William, served on the board of directors of National City Bank in New York, which loaned $20 million to the United States after the stock market crash of 1929, thus stabilizing the economy.12 Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (created in 1913) and the Bank of Canada (chartered in 1934) remained dominated by these oilcontrolled investment banks.13 The world wars sealed the use of petroleum, normalizing it in government perceptions of the inseparability of national security and economic stability.14 Since World War II, Naomi Klein writes, “The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world.”15 In 2012, according to the Daily Energy Report, “oil accounted for almost 80% of total DoD [Department of Defense] energy consumption, followed by electricity, natural gas and coal. . . . There are only 35 countries in the world consuming more oil than DoD.”16 The significance of energy to the global empire that is the United States means the energy industry secures unprecedented and often illegal land and resource access within the U.S. and U.S.-occupied territories in the Pacific and Caribbean. So hardened are the links between statehood, energy, and the military that national security has become interchangeable with energy security—consider, for example, the Energy Security Act of 1980, the Energy and Environmental

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Security Initiative at the University of Colorado Law School launched in 2003, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the U.S. Energy Security Council, et cetera. Since World War II, the United States has had the highestfunded military in the world. In July 2019, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the United States had allocated $121.1 billion more on its military than 144 other countries combined, outspending the next seven largest military budgets combined by $40.1 billion.17 Including the costs of running eight hundred military bases in eighty different countries, half of the Pentagon’s budget goes to private military contractors and new equipment.18 Within the U.S. departments of defense and security, energy is the single greatest expenditure. In contrast, Canada’s military budget ranks fourteenth in the world, though in 2017 the government announced that it would be increasing its military spending by 73 percent over the next twenty years.19 Many have reported that this promise was made under pressure from the United States, but it seems also to be a response to the expectations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that its twenty-nine member states spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on the military.20 Indigenous peoples are hailed into this imperial formation to participate as “good citizens” for whom the U.S. and Canada have provided lands, resources, aid, and protection. The frequent story told in/by the United States is that “reservations contain almost 30% of the nation’s coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50% of potential uranium reserves, and 20% of known oil and gas reserves. The Department of the Interior estimates that 15 million acres of potential energy and mineral resources are undeveloped on Indian lands while only 2.1 million acres of Indian land are

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being tapped for their energy resources.”21 The fact that Indigenous governments on reservations do not pay taxes is often held up as evidence that the state’s benevolence ought to result in unfettered access to Indigenous lands and resources. This perception folds easily into those of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who asserted that First Nations did not have the power to stop pipeline expansion through their territories: “No, they don’t have a veto.” They were welcome to participate in Canadian democracy, he said, but ultimately they were expected to submit to the state’s economic/security interests: “We’re a country of rule of law. We’re a country where we have processes for consultations. We have regular elections. We have ways of protesting to make your feelings heard, and that is all par for the course and that will happen.”22 However, “Ottawa doesn’t recognize the unconditional right of First Nations to unilaterally block projects.”23 Time and again, in the United States and Canada, as Indigenous people have challenged expectations of entitled access to their lands and resources, often on grounds of international and constitutional law, the historical affective association of Indigeneity with terrorism has informed public demand for, and state rationalizations of, their violent repression, invasive surveillance, and punishment of Indigenous people. During and after World War II, the economic interests being disguised in discourses of national and even global security have become especially transparent.

the red scare redux In August 1941, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met in Newfoundland and

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subsequently issued a joint statement, known as “The Atlantic Charter,” outlining their respective objectives. Given ongoing German invasions in Europe and threats to Egypt, as well as growing concerns about Japan, Roosevelt and Churchill intended to identify “certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future of the world.”24 This future, to begin on conclusion of war, would include no territorial aggrandizement; restoration of self-government to those deprived of it; reduction of trade restrictions; global cooperation to secure better economic and social conditions for all; freedom from fear and want; freedom of the seas; abandonment of the use of military force; and the disarmament of “aggressor nations,” including the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. The charter served as the basis for the Declaration by United Nations in 1942 and the United Nations Charter of 1946, both of which anchored the authority of the United States and the United Kingdom in global politics. Also in August 1941, the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance was established. It provided for cooperation in the collection and sharing of signals intelligence among the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.25 The FVEY was aimed at keeping an eye on the Soviet Union and East Bloc, including a group of states in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia perceived to be under the Soviet Union’s communist or socialist influence or control. It was the international intelligence framework through which the Cold War was waged. Cold War discourse was powerfully framed through the racist ideology of the Red Scare or Red Menace. Communism, socialism, and anarchy were popularly taken to represent state-controlled economics, the end of personal freedoms, and

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everything not only opposite of but against democracy. When not already perceived as communist or socialist, Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada were deemed particularly vulnerable to these ideological influences and/or to infiltration and manipulation by soldiers or foreign agents seeking shelter. Such representations imagined Indians as especially uneducated, unemployable, and socially backward, tied to outdated social norms and cultural practices that led to poverty, substance abuse, family dysfunction, and crime and rendered them vulnerable to political manipulation. To address the problem, the U.S. and Canada, though taking allegedly different approaches, advanced a racist ideology of Indian inferiority. In the United States, Roosevelt promised a reformist overhaul of federal Indian policy. He appointed several public advocates of Indian rights to government office, including Harold L. Ickes as secretary of the DOI (1933–1946); John Collier, a sociologist and founder of the American Indian Defense Association, as commissioner of Indian Affairs (1933–1945); and Felix Cohen, an attorney and member of the Socialist Party, who worked in the DOI Solicitors Office (1933–1947). Cohen was one of the main architects of the original version of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which affirmed tribal governance, land rights, and cultural autonomy. Cohen also helped establish the Indian Claims Commission (ICC), which operated from 1946 to 1978, to redress U.S. violations of Indian treaty rights. The IRA and the ICC were sharply vilified by conservatives as advancing communist or socialist ideals that threatened national security. Several in the Senate and House publicly accused Collier and Cohen of being communists wielding dangerous influence over vulnerable tribes. They were successful in securing significant revision to the intents and provisions of the

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IRA and the ICC, including gutting affirmations of tribal cultural self-determination, particularly tribal law and religious freedom. The changes also restricted the ICC to making financial settlement of treaty violations instead of addressing tribal demands for land return.26 Presidents Harry S. Truman (1945–1953), a Democrat, and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961), a Republican, sought to overhaul federal Indian policy to realign it with state security interests. Both adopted policies calling for the dissolution of tribal self-determination and the integration of Indians into U.S. society as the best means of resolving the “Indian problem.” This approach was reinforced by the appointment of Dillon S. Myer as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) (1950–1953). Myer, who held an M.A. in education from Columbia University, taught agronomy at the University of Kentucky before moving into government. From 1934 to 1942 he worked at various posts within the Department of Agriculture. His political views about the dangers of communism and socialism, including the particular threat posed by the Soviet Union, Asia, and Latin America, then led to successive appointments as director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) (1942–1946), commissioner of the Federal Public Housing Authority and Administration (1946–1948), president of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs (1948–1950), and finally BIA commissioner. He oversaw the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as well as a flawed attempt at racial integration in public housing. As president of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, he directed a federal agency that coordinated “commercial and cultural relations between the American Republics” and affiliation to the Council of National Defense. Institute archives include reports on economic and infrastructure programs, transportation (rail,

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freight, air), media information campaigns (film, radio, print), with details on specific projects in Mexico and several countries in South and Central America.27 He then turned his efforts toward tribes. Upon taking over at the BIA, Myer replaced most BIA staff with his staff from the War Relocation Authority.28 This included the WRA solicitor Edwin E. Ferguson, who assumed a newly created position as chief counsel, and Lewis A. Sigler as associate chief counsel. He created an associate commissioner position for agricultural scientist and economist H. Rex Lee, a WRA “relocation expert” (later appointed governor of American Samoa) and brought in Erwin J. Ute, former WRA chief of operations, and WRA publicist Morrill Tozier.29 Without any background in Indian law or history, Myer and his staff, characterizing reservation Indians as “wily” “troublemakers” who needed to become “free, unrestricted Americans,”30 proudly declared their sole purpose to be getting the BIA “out of the business” as quickly as possible.31 They demonized Indian allies, including Collier and Cohen, for foisting communist values on tribal people and, slamming their views as anti-American, operated multiple smear campaigns intended to drive them out of government office.32 One of those targeted was Alida C. Bowler, the first woman appointed as a BIA superintendent, at the Carson Agency in Stewart, Nevada. Bowler attempted to address squatting on tribal reservations, confronting the individuals and banks that illegally held mortgages on the lands. They in turn appealed to Senator Patrick A. McCarren, who pushed passage of a bill that would have given the lands to the squatters. He argued before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs “the principled position” that “fair play, justice, and equality were all on the side of the ‘honest, God-fearing citizens’ who had made the land theirs by converting it from a ‘wilder-

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ness waste.’” Pyramid Lake Indians, by contrast, were not even agriculturalists at all, “but fishermen, and ‘nomadic’ ones at that: ‘They are a rambling tribe. . . . What they never had they never lost.’”33 Bowler was described by her detractors as an “amalgam of the evils of Marx and Hitler,” part of a broader communistsocialist infiltration of federal agencies aimed at steering federal Indian policy even further left.34 McCarren’s bill was defeated, and the tribe secured legal counsel that set about protecting their land and water rights from any such future efforts.35 The voracious legal fight continued through Myer’s first year on the job. Taking heed of the power of the law, Myer and his staff focused on nullifying the rights of tribes to secure independent legal counsel, requiring that all such counsel be approved by the BIA.36 He likewise mobilized the surveillance and policing practices used by the WRA at the internment camps to squelch tribal political dissent, including the denial of due process, the interception of mail, the monitoring of telephone conversations, and the use of informants.37 To quiet his critics, including Collier and Cohen, he worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), accusing his critics of fomenting political dissent and communist ideology within tribes.38 Defying the need for tribal consultation or transparency, Myer lobbied a series of policies and congressional bills that essentially characterized tribes as “segregated groups” and Indians as dependent and socially inferior, tied to their lands and to one another in ways that prevented their integration and civilization.39 To solve this “Indian problem,” Myer proposed the termination of tribal segregation, the fostering out of tribal children, and the continuation of boarding schools.40 Collier, Cohen, and others fought back. As a result, Eisenhower did not reappoint Myer as commissioner in 1953. But,

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believing as Myer did that the unique legal status and rights of Indian people under the law had to be eliminated, Eisenhower appointees including Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay, Commissioner Glenn L. Emmons, and Assistant Commissioner H. Rex Lee worked to bring the termination policy that Myer had written to fruition. The result was House Concurrent Resolution 108 of 1953.41 Between 1954 and 1962, fourteen “termination acts” followed that ended the legal status and rights of 111 tribes, suspending all federal programs, liquidating their financial assets, and privatizing their lands and resources.42 While it was argued that termination was necessary to resolve social problems such as poverty and unemployment, the tribes targeted were almost always those with sound economic self-sufficiency tied most directly to natural resources. Concurrently, Public Law 280 of 1954 unilaterally transferred federal criminal jurisdiction over Indian-Indian felonies on treaty lands, as established by the Major Crimes Act of 1887, to six states who had lobbied for or welcomed its provisions: Wisconsin, Minnesota (except the Red Lake Nation), Nebraska, California, Oregon (except Warm Spring Reservation), and Alaska.43 PL 280 allowed states to assume jurisdictional authority over tribal lands and suspended federal programs and dollars for tribal justice–related programs in those states. This undermined the legal standing of tribes as sovereigns with a unique relationship to the federal government as recognized by treaty, Supreme Court, and congressional law, as well as violating the specific provisions of those statutes. The Senate then passed the Indian Relocation Act in 1956 under the auspices of providing relocation funds and job training to Indians leaving reservations behind. In Canada, prime ministers R. B. Bennet (Conservative Party, 1930–1935), William Lyon Mackenzie King (Liberal, 1935–1948),

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Louis Saint Laurent (Liberal, 1948–1957), and John Diefenbaker (Progressive Conservative, 1957–1963) adopted overtly conservative directives aimed at the dissolution of Indigenous selfdetermination, land rights, and natural resource management as a way of staving off “socialist” threats. In 1951, Parliament amended the Indian Act presumably to remove its discriminatory provisions; in so doing, however, it ignored gender discrimination embedded within band membership patrilineal requirements, formalized the loss of status for women who married non-status men, and imposed some provisional laws on reserve lands. In response to severe economic disparity on the reserves, the amendment also bolstered funding for reserve housing, education, and health care. But while it established a number of social support programs aimed at alleviating economic inequalities among Indigenous people, it made those programs contingent on compliance with Canadian law. For instance, it used a federal Mother’s Allowance program to compel Indian parents to keep their children in Canadian schools. In the context of residential school histories, Indian people considered this condition of financial support deeply problematic. Despite all of these legal and social “remedies” for Indian poverty, they failed to produce any kind of viable economies on the reserves. Poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing, lack of food and access to clean water, and the like continued to characterize reserve life. This embarrassed Canada’s leadership. Instead of discussing possible solutions with Indigenous communities, Canada doubled-down on its efforts. In 1969, newly elected prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien issued a Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy announcing their intent to create a “just society” by altogether dissolving Indigenous rights under the Indian

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Act and treaties, on the grounds that the policies were racially discriminatory and only perpetuated Indigenous poverty. U.S. and Canadian efforts at Indian policy in the Cold War era defied the United Nations’ promise of deescalation, demilitarization, and disarmament to recenter state military, intelligence, and police forces against all kinds of groups racialized as terrorists, now and into the future. Anti-Indigenous policies in the aftermath of World War II thus became connected to the aggressive counterintelligence measures used against not only the American Indian Movement (AIM) but also the Black Panther Party, the Third World Liberation movement, labor unions, students, the women’s movement, queer movements, and many left organizations. Simultaneously, similar measures were engaged in anticolonial movements that the U.S. and Canada insinuated themselves into in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1955–1975), and South and Central America (including “regime changes”). Consistently, states deployed the discourse of the Red Scare to rationalize the deployment of now vast military, intelligence, and police forces to stop the global spread of communism with its supposed threat to Western democracy and civilization. By the 1970s, the U.S. and Canada had recast military invasion and occupation as “police actions,” even as they deployed militaries on foreign soil and increased military spending by over 200 percent.44

counterintelligence As Radley Balko and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz suggest, there has never been a real difference between the military and the police when it comes to the experiences of Indigenous peoples

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and communities of color vis-à-vis state violence.45 The lines separating military and police, from jurisdiction (foreign v. domestic) to oversight to state funding to operations, are all but irrelevant. It is no surprise, then, that military actions in Korea, Vietnam, and Latin America paralleled military actions at home, in terms both of conduct (surveillance, detention, etc.) and of the ideologies used to justify them. As communists faded from view as the chief threat to state security and social stability, largely because of international and domestic criticisms of the Vietnam War and “regime change” efforts in Latin America, the state turned its propaganda machine toward Indigenous peoples, Blacks, immigrants, and the left. The turn drew from the familiar association of such groups with discourses of terrorism and the supposed threat these people posed to not only state security but the personal safety of good citizens. In the case of Indigenous peoples, the turn relied on racist stereotypes of Indian backwardness, inferiority, laziness, ingratitude, savagery, and violence. “These people” needed to be contained because of their propensity not only to take advantage of the system, betraying its generous benevolence, but also to become irrationally violent against good, innocent citizens. In the United States, Indigenous opposition to state imperialism resulted in the founding of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944, the Pacific Northwest “fish-ins” beginning in 1964, American Indian Movement organizing beginning in 1968, the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969–1971, the creation of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) in 1974, the founding of Aboriginal Lands of Hawaiian Ancestry in 1969/1972, Alaska Native opposition to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972, and multiple other political actions. In Canada, the

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opposition led to the founding of the National Indian Council in 1961, the National Indian Brotherhood in 1968 (later reformed as the Assembly of First Nations), the Native Women’s Association of Canada and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) in 1974, and the Métis National Council in 1983; fishing and hunting rights struggles; and the Oka Crisis of 1990. Virtually every one of these actions and organizations was defined in relation to treaty, extraconstitutional, and international rights. They pushed for the United States and Canada to recognize existing treaties and reinstate treaty negotiations with Indigenous nations as a recognition of the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples to sovereignty and self-determination under international and constitutional law, rejecting outright the assimilationist goals of termination and “just societies.” The U.S. and Canada did not respond well. From 1956 to 1971, for instance, the FBI operated the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” any group or individual that they deemed subversive, almost always identified as anyone critical of U.S. foreign policy and military action. COINTELPRO operations included the financing, arming, and direction of the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs) at Pine Ridge Reservation, which used intimidation and gun violence against traditionalists opposing tribal leadership, including AIM members during the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973.46 During the 1970s, in the name of “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order,” COINTELPRO (consistent with CIA operations in Latin America) falsified reports to smear leadership and used psychological warfare, wrongful imprisonment, and assassina-

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tion, including the killing of anywhere between 45 and 70 individuals, many affiliated with AIM, to harass movement leaders.47 These tactics complemented the FBI’s use of arrest and prosecution of AIM leadership as a means of criminalizing and nullifying their work. The existence of COINTELPRO suggested serious concern on the part of the United States (and Canada) about the constitutional and international viability of Indigenous rights claims against them, a concern that only intensified as groups like the IITC and WCIP secured non-governmental organization (NGO) and consultative status with the United Nations. This work folded into the founding of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP) in 1982 and the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 1993. Through these groups Indigenous peoples began vetting drafts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP), which would go before the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007. The nonbinding declaration was adopted by a majority vote on September 13, 2007: 144 states approved, 34 were absent, 11 abstained (with 2 subsequently approving), and 4—the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—voted against. The no votes were explained as owing to unresolvable concerns about the scope of the rights acknowledged by the declaration. When all four states ultimately modified their votes to endorse the DRIP—Australia in 2009 and the United States, Canada, and New Zealand in 2010—it was only after securing what they saw as necessary reassurances from other United Nations member states that the declaration could not result in Indigenous legal action or redress, domestically or internationally.

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Classified documents reveal that the 2007 no votes were vetted ahead of time by FVEY diplomats and their regional counterparts. This included intelligence gathering on how various U.N. member states were intending to vote. Email communications between U.S. diplomats and U.N. leadership show them strategizing to ensure that U.S. interests were fully addressed at the General Assembly. For example, in an email dated February 2, 2007, with the subject “Negotiations Slowly Coming to Life,” U.S. acting permanent representative to the United Nations Alejandro Daniel Wolff writes to U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon: “From a U.S. perspective, the Africans, share a number of U.S. concerns, and may be useful advocating U.S. positions of importance.” 48 Similar communications appeared in 2009–2010 as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand prepared to reverse their votes. By that time, the communications exhibited some hubris in observing that the DRIP had no legal consequence and the reversals were purely for show. As one in a series of communications between U.S. diplomats in Australia and Ban Ki-moon regarding Australia’s pending reversal in 2009 put it: Most of the rights outlined in the Declaration are already recognized and protected in Australia through domestic laws or support for other international conventions and treaties. In fact, the Declaration does not suggest any ‘new’ or ‘special’ rights for Indigenous people. . . . Article 46 of the Declaration states: “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” This means that the rights in the Declaration cannot be interpreted in any way that threatens national unity, encourages Indigenous separatism or create laws that conflict with Australian law.49

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The legal force of the declaration was thus virtually nullified under the guise of protecting “national unity.” The classified documents show clearly that the no votes were based on concerns about Indigenous peoples’ refusal to participate in imperialist, neoliberal projects—most centrally, allowing unlimited access to their lands and wanton resource extraction. The already-existing fusion of state and energy security and its international implications for politico-economic power quickly represents Indigenous opposition as terrorism and so legitimates harsh measures on the part of the state—even agencies directing Indigenous relations—to suppress and discredit such opposition. In Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State, Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan demonstrate deep cooperation, even collaboration, among state intelligence agencies, federal and local police, the oil and gas industry, private security contractors, and government agencies charged with administering Indigenous affairs.50 Canada’s office of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, in fact, has provided the names and other relevant information about Indigenous activists to government officials, law enforcement agencies, industry executives, and private security firms. All of these various groups exchange intelligence with one another— mining social media, emails, and public event records—to coordinate police, military, and private response to Indigenous protests. For instance, Stratfor, headquartered in Texas (and which boasts to be the “world’s leading geopolitical intelligence platform”), “provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the

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U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.”51 Email communications made available by Wikileaks reveal Stratfor’s close attention to Indigenous activists’ protests against the energy industry, such as tracking the names of First Nations groups and individuals in Canada actively opposing tar sands development and pipelines, referring to them as “a bunch of hippies.”52 In a series of emails from June 2011, Stratfor staff were paying close attention to “a trip for First Nations and environmental funders who want to learn how the B.C. coast and communities could be impacted by the proposed Enbridge pipeline and the tankers that will transport the oil to Asian markets.”53 Stratfor felt that the trip was an indulgence of “special interests” and wondered what kind of PR campaign/response the companies were planning to counter the First Nations’ misinformation that would inevitably follow.54 U.S. diplomats have been likewise in close conversation about Indigenous antienergy activities along pipeline routes in Alberta and in the arctic region.55 In 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) issued a report on Indigenous activists.56 According to Crosby and Monaghan, the report resulted from an “extensive, quasicriminal investigation,” Project Sitka, launched in response to a resurgence of Indigenous activism against multiple oil and gas projects in Canada. The report focused on Idle No More, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), and activists focused on land claims settlements and natural resource issues. It identified 313 individuals in all, and 89 in particular, as engaged in potentially criminal behavior, including the “threat level” of each one. Those deemed of special concern were those involved in anti–pipeline, shale gas, and mining actions, who were labeled “extremists” threatening the state’s “critical infrastructure.”57

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The cooperation of state, energy industry, police, and private security pretends a commitment to national security to mask the capitalist aims of unfettered extraction and wealth. While the leadership of some First Nations and American Indian/ Alaska Native groups, such as the Blood Tribe (Blackfoot/Kainai) Reserve in southern Alberta and the Fort Berthold Indian (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation) Reservation of North Dakota, have signed agreements with oil and gas companies for revenue shares in exchange for land access, many Indigenous peoples have actively opposed extraction projects and, more importantly, the principles and values of imperialism, neoliberalism, and corporate capitalism that the projects represent.

the identity extremist The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas. And as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple. Our young people have a right to know who they are. They have a right to language, to culture, to tradition. The way they learn these things is through connection to our lands and our history. If we allow an oil company to dig through and destroy our histories, our ancestors, our hearts and souls as a people, is that not genocide? LaDonna Brave Bull Allard (Standing Rock Sioux)58

Indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada have long been pitting themselves against imperialist ideologies and extractive capitalist practices, most powerfully embodied by the oil and gas industry. The No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) camps at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota from April 2016 to March 2017 were one such

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example of Indigenous opposition to capitalist-imperialist valuations of the land and water, and to the policing required to enforce those valuations. For many, the camps were an opportunity not merely to protest, but to re-create a space governed by Indigenous principles of relationality and responsibility represented by mni wincone (water is life). Energy Transfer Partners LP (ETP) is an oil and gas pipeline transport company organized in Delaware and headquartered in Dallas, Texas. In December 2014, ETP applied for the permits to construct the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The plan, which had been vetted internally for at least six months, proposed a route 1,172 miles long, from North Dakota to Iowa, and promised to carry 570,000 barrels of oil per day. Its total projected cost was $3.78 billion. The original route would have laid the pipe close to North Dakota’s capital of Bismarck, but after consultation with the state an amended proposal was put forward, by which the pipeline would cross the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.59 The proposal came at a time when the northern plains oil and gas boom of 2008, which had been particularly rich for North Dakota, was undergoing a steady decline, with oil prices down more than 70 percent. The 80,000-plus workers who had migrated into the state to take advantage of the boom had likewise seen a dramatic decrease in job opportunities and pay. Meanwhile, violent crimes including rape increased between 44 and 70 percent.60 On December 9, 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a draft of its plan to approve the pipeline and opened it up to public comment for the requisite thirty days. It would later rule, on April 22, 2016, that no historic or culturally relevant sites

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would be impacted by the pipeline. Meanwhile, between January 25 and March 11, 2016, four state boards approved the pipeline’s construction. On March 11, the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the Army Corps directing it to perform a fuller environmental assessment of the project. On April 1, two hundred Indigenous people rode on horseback from the camp to the barricade to protest the pipeline. Around this time, several protest camps were established along the proposed route near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, including Oceti Sakowin and Treaty Camp (on federal land) and Sacred Stone Camp (on private land). On April 29, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe petitioned the Army Corps for a more thorough environmental impact study of the site, stating that the tribe had not been adequately consulted before the plans were approved at the state level. On July 25, the Army Corps approved the easement and water crossings to allow the project to move forward, including crossings under the Missouri River, Lake Sakakawea, and Lake Oahe. The pipeline, it ruled, would have “no significant impact” on historic or cultural sites. On August 4, the tribe filed suit against the Army Corps to stop construction due to its impact on sacred sites, including burial grounds.61 On August 15, Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of ETP, filed a countersuit against the leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, alleging that protesters near Lake Oahe and the Missouri River had “halted construction activities” scheduled to begin five days earlier.62 On August 24, a federal judge heard arguments from the tribe that they were not allowed to voice their concerns and provide comments about the project’s impact. Because portions of the pipeline were to go beneath Lake Oahe, they stated, environmental quality was at risk, as well as cultural use of the water.

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On September 3, DAPL security used guard dogs and mace against protesters who had marched from the main camp at Oceti Sakowin after bulldozers began prepping for the pipeline on neighboring private lands. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe issued a statement saying that ETP had demolished an area that contained “significant Native artifacts and sacred sites” when crews bulldozed a two-mile-long stretch north of the reservation. On September 6, U.S. District judge James Boasberg temporarily halted construction on the portion of the DAPL that crossed under the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, pending a decision on the tribe’s lawsuit against the Army Corps.63 On September 8, North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple activated the National Guard to assist Morton County sheriff’s deputies with the protesters. On September 9, Boasberg denied Standing Rock’s request to stop construction.64 On the same day, however, the Justice Department, Department of the Army, and Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a statement that construction on Army Corps–controlled lands near the Missouri River and Lake Oahe should not proceed until further evaluation and consultation with the tribe could be conducted. The statement asked DAPL to honor the request.65 DAPL refused. On October 9, a federal court denied the tribe’s appeal of the ruling against their injunction and ordered that DAPL had the right to continue construction on private land. On October 12, twenty-seven people were arrested for protesting. On October 27, 140 were arrested. Some had allegedly lit hay bales and construction equipment on fire. On November 14, even as DAPL claimed it had finished sections of the pipeline, DOI and the Army Corps announced that they would delay a final decision on permitting until further

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consultation with tribes. On November 18, three days after nationwide protests, ETP said it would not reroute the pipeline. On November 21, Morton County and DAPL security used water cannons, tear gas, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, and LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) sonic weapons on protesters. As a result, one woman lost sight in one eye, one woman lost use of an arm, and numerous protesters suffered hypothermia, breathing difficulties, physical injury, and hearing damage. On November 25, the Army Corps ordered protesters to vacate the camp site by December 5. On December 3, two thousand members of Veterans Stand for Standing Rock arrived at the camp to help protect the protesters from the police and DAPL security. On December 4, the Army Corps denied DAPL the easement allowing the pipeline to cross Lake Oahe, effectively halting work on the pipeline. On January 18, 2017, the Army Corps published a notice in the Federal Register saying that it was preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the pipeline easement under Lake Oahe and would receive public comments until February 20.66 Six days later, however, Trump signed an executive memorandum instructing the Army Corps to expedite the review and approval process.67 On February 7, the Army Corps granted DAPL the easement. In a memo, it stated that it had terminated the public comment period and was rescinding its notice of intent to prepare an EIS.68 DAPL proceeded to complete the pipeline, which began carrying oil on June 1. On June 15, Judge Boasberg issued a 91-page decision, finding that the Army Corps “did not adequately consider” key aspects of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in granting the Lake Oahe easement to DAPL.69 He directed the Corps to conduct a fuller environmental impact study:

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Although the Corps substantially complied with NEPA in many areas, the Court agrees that it did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline’s effects are likely to be highly controversial. To remedy those violations, the Corps will have to reconsider those sections of its environmental analysis upon remand by the Court. Whether Dakota Access must cease pipeline operations during that remand presents a separate question of the appropriate remedy, which will be the subject of further briefing.70

From the start of the NoDAPL protests, participants were labeled as terrorists by state officials and oil professionals. Police and private security responded with severe counterterrorist measures. On October 27, 2016, during one of many physical confrontations, there were about 126 people arrested and charged with felonies. Brandy Toelupe, an attorney with the Water Protector Legal Collective (WPLC), described the conditions they encountered: “The Water Protectors were held for 48 hours or more, forced to remove outer layers of clothing, crowded into freezing chain-link cages, and denied food, water and bathrooms for long periods. . . . They were strip searched and taken to jails all over North Dakota.”71 Tara Houska, national campaign director for Honor the Earth, was “‘arrested for criminal trespass as I was leaving a peaceful demonstration and getting into my car on a public road.’ She says police handcuffed her with zip ties and held her in a dog kennel for six hours without charging her with a crime. ‘After that, I was strip-searched and then thrown into jail and, finally, late, late that evening, was charged with a crime.’ ”72 According to WPLC, of those arrested, five faced federal charges pursuant to the October 27 incident, and all five were

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convicted:73 Red Fawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for Civil Disorder and Possession of a Firearm and Ammunition by a Convicted Felon; Michael Little Feather Giron was sentenced to 36 months in prison for Civil Disorder; Michael Rattler Markus was sentenced to 36 months in prison for Civil Disorder pursuant to the terms of his non-cooperating plea agreement: Dion Ortiz was sentenced to a 16-month prison term for Civil Disorder; James Angry Bird White was sentenced pursuant to the terms of his non-cooperating plea agreement to time served, two years of supervised release, and $100 special assessment for the charge of Civil Disorder. Over the duration of the NoDAPL protests, 837 individuals faced North Dakota criminal charges. Of them, 392 were dismissed, 42 were acquitted at trial, 188 had pretrial diversion, 148 reached a plea agreement, and 26 were convicted at trial. The criminalization and punishment of NoDAPL protesters is hardly the exception. Such treatment has occurred throughout Indigenous-led pipeline protests over TransCanada’s Keystone XL (Alberta to Texas), TransCanada’s Energy East (Alberta to New Brunswick), Enbridge’s Northern Gateway (Alberta to British Columbia), Enbridge’s Line 3 (Alberta to Wisconsin), Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain (Alberta to British Columbia), Energy Transfer Partner’s Bayou Bridge in Louisiana, and many others. These protests represent Indigenous opposition to imperialist valuations and neoliberal differentiations of the land, of water, and of life. The severity of the counterterrorist measures used reflected the energy companies’ perceived need for unfettered accumulation. This is consistent with a long history of political suppression and policing of Indigenous communities in the United States and

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Canada, including those communities engaged, whether directly or indirectly, in active opposition to state economic interests. In a report titled “Native Lives Matter,” the Lakota People’s Law Project reports: “In total, the number of Native Americans per capita confined in state and federal prisons [in the U.S.] is approximately 38 percent above the national average. The rate of confinement in local jails has been estimated to be nearly four times the national average.”74 Native men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men, and Native women at six times the rate of white women.75 In its 2016–2017 annual report, Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator states that while the overall federal prison population increased by less than 5%, the Indigenous prison population increased by 39%. percent. For the last three decades, there has been an increase every single year in the federal incarceration rate for Indigenous people. Today, while Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the Canadian population, as a group they comprise 26.4% of the total federal inmate population. 37.6% of the federal women inmate population is Indigenous.76

As reported by Vicki Chartrand for The Conversation, “Not only are Indigenous people more likely to be imprisoned, but they are also more often subjected to some of the most restrictive levels of punishment, including segregation, forced interventions, higher security classifications, involuntary transfers, physical restraints and self-harm.”77 Luana Ross’s work has taught us to think carefully about the racist criminalization of Indigenous antipipeline activists, which is aimed at undermining Indigenous sovereignty in order to advance imperialist economic interests.78 These interests are captured powerfully by the transnational pipeline, posited as a

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symbol of energy-security-as-national-security, of the oil and gas industry and its constitutive role in state governments, of a predominantly heteronormative male labor force, and of the presumption of unfettered corporate rights to natural resources, including water and minerals. Characterizing Indigenous opposition to these doctrines, and to the racialized and misogynist ideologies that fuel them, as terrorism has proven an effective means of political suppression and censorship, leading to the passage of emboldened state policies and industry practices. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks antiprotest bills since the 2016 presidential election, seventeen states have enacted bills to restrict public protest, nineteen states have bills pending, and thirty-six states have bills proposed.79 This is particularly disturbing given Executive Order 13809, known as the “Presidential Executive Order on Restoring State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement’s Access to Life-Saving Equipment and Resources,” enacted on August 28, 2017, providing riot gear and other surplus military equipment to state and local police. In 2017, Oklahoma passed legislation imposing fines and/or prison time for trespassing in areas containing critical infrastructure facilities. Subsequently, the American Legislative Exchange Council developed a model Critical Infrastructure Protection Law based on Oklahoma’s legislation, which it urged other states to follow. Sixteen states followed suit. In Texas, for instance, the law makes “impairing or interrupting” pipeline construction a felony, punishable by up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine. If an activist is alleged to have “intent to damage or destroy” a pipeline facility, they could face a third-degree felony charge, on par

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with attempted murder, and up to ten years in prison. Any organization found to be so culpable could face a $500,000 fine.80 In 2017, more than eighty congressional representatives sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) requesting that it classify antipipeline efforts as “domestic terrorism.”81 This was consistent with a report released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, in May 2017 on “suspected environmental rights extremists,” which labeled antipipeline actions as “criminal and violent acts” against the nation’s economic infrastructure and national security.82 (Black Lives Matter protesters were similarly labeled as “identity extremists” out to disrupt the social order and kill police.)83 The language of the congressional letter is almost identical to that of reports from private security contractors to oil and gas industry officials. TigerSwan, “an international security and global stability firm,” was hired by ETP to secure DAPL against Indigenous protests.84 According to The Intercept, which secured leaked documents of TigerSwan’s report to ETP, the firm collaborated with the Morton County Sheriff’s Department (Morton County abuts the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation) and law enforcement from North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, and Texas, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On behalf of ETP, TigerSwan pressured police to use aggressive actions against protesters and met with campus officials of the University of Illinois and Lincoln Land College to dissuade student organizing and involvement. It conducted invasive surveillance, gathering intelligence about events, groups, and individuals from social media and phone records, as well as aerial surveillance and radio eavesdropping.85 “Throughout the leaked documents, Tiger-

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Swan makes reference to its intelligence-gathering teams, which infiltrated protest camps and activist groups in various states. TigerSwan agents using false names and identities regularly sought to obtain the trust of protesters, which they used to gather information they reported back to their employer.” The agents describe using “ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rights between peaceful and violent elements,” in their efforts to delegitimize the movement. Other tactics included a massive social media campaign of misinformation, including false rumors about protesters storing arms and explosive devices at the camps. They also targeted Palestinian activists in the camp with questions about their ties to radical Islamic groups.86 Throughout their reports, TigerSwan describes the NoDAPL movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compares the protesters to “jihadist fighters.” According to The Intercept, One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse . . . While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora . . . aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.” 87

As The Intercept observes, TigerSwan’s descriptions of the NoDAPL movement as “unpredictable” and “menacing” were clearly self-serving, meant to secure its employment in perpetuity. But the descriptions also represent a broader articulatory process of social formation, in which a threat that is real, imposing, and imminent is required to rationalize imperialism. The threat does not lurk in a dark forest or slither through prairie

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grasslands; rather, it maintains an eerie and very real present potential to cannibalize and rape. The threat also, not insignificantly, legitimates the violently oppressive and repressive state. For in the absence of such a threat, the state is a sham, a mockery of democracy, its violence nothing but fascism. In this sense, the slippage between the Islamic jihadist insurgent and the NoDAPL protester is not disguised, but rather draws on what is presumed to be transparent and obvious—that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists par excellence—to assert what is underestimated—that Indians are terrorists—to call for what is necessary: they all must be stopped. Fatally, permanently stopped. Especially when they gather together, as when Palestinians and Black Lives Matter activists show up at Standing Rock or Indigenous people join Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) protests. The end game is that there must be a state that can murder, a citizen who is armed. For what is required of the Murderable Indian—the Indigenous terrorist—is not merely an Indian who can serve as a permanent target, but a state that is able and authorized to kill.

the aboriginal extremist The key message is to respect the hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs on their unceded territory. The title of those lands is 100 per cent held by the hereditary chiefs, and that needs to be respected. The other thing is that the land defenders are doing this because of climate change and global warming. We can see it in the weather, we can see it in the emergency flooding and fires that we’re going through. We go right from flooding to fires in our territory. Last year a lot of this was burnt up, a lot of our communities that were affected are still struggling. Our animals were affected, our plants,

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our medicines, our water. We can’t continue on. The scientists are showing their information. Our Indigenous knowledge keepers and our land defenders are also saying why we can’t continue on this path and that we all need to wake up and say we do need to change, we need to work toward better renewable resources and better ways of energy, and better ways of an economy than basing it on dirty oil and gas. Judy Wilson (Wet’suwet’en)88 They are erasing our history. . . . They’re erasing that part of our history that we know in this generation that may not be taught to the next generation. Then it’s lost. . . . The thing is that I’m living this whole process [and] the process is broken. Mike Ridsdale (Wet’suwet’en)89

In the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations, after previous legal attempts failed, finally secured recognition of the validity of oral testimony as evidence of historic territorial rights; the ruling also rendered a clear definition of “aboriginal title,” which was later affirmed in Tsilhgot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014). In recognition of Section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982, Delgamuukw and Tsilhgot’in established that provinces could not unilaterally claim a right to engage in clearcut logging on lands protected by aboriginal title. It affirmed that Indigenous nations had jurisdiction over their lands and the right to consult, or not, on projects involving their lands and resources—that is, those within reserve and historic boundaries. The rights included economic benefits. Provinces could not infringe upon these rights and were required to engage in meaningful consultation with Indigenous nations. The Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations have been and remain actively opposed to extractive efforts throughout their territories

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in northwestern British Columbia, particularly of oil and gas. The lands of the Unist’ot’en, a clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, are specifically implicated in a number of proposed oil and gas projects, including: 1. Coastal Gaslink—TransCanada: A 670-kilometer gas pipeline that would run from Dawson Creek to Kitimat, British Columbia. It is part of a $40 billion project by LNG Canada. LNG Canada is a fracked gas processing facility run by five companies, of which Royal Dutch Shell is a 40 percent owner. The provincial government announced tax breaks for this project. 2. Pacific Trails Pipeline—Chevron: A 480-kilometer gas pipeline that would run from Summit Lake to Kitimat, B.C., for export of gas to Asian markets. 3. Northern Gateway Pipeline—Enbridge: A 1,177-kilometer twin-pipelines project that would run from Alberta to Kitimat, B.C. One pipe would carry tar sands oil, the other would carry condensate, a form of gas used to dilute the molasses-like bitumen to allow it to flow through pipelines. Enbridge owns 50 percent of the project; the other half includes French, Chinese, and Canadian companies.90

Under the guidance of clan elders, a number of Unist’ot’en established a camp to protest the pipeline projects. According to their website, on January 1, 2007, the Wet’suwet’en people announced their intent to oppose all oil and gas pipeline projects through their lands. Their stated purpose is the protection of “the traditional hunting, trapping, and fishing territories” of their people, “to ensure that the natural beauty and bounty of the earth will be enjoyed for generations to come.”91 On January 1, 2008, they further announced their unanimous decision to opt out of the British Columbia Treaty Process on the grounds that they already possessed historic jurisdiction within their territories. On April 1, 2009, the Wet’suwet’en established a checkpoint at the Wedzin

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Kwa entrance to Unist’ot’en Territory. On April 5, 2010, they constructed a cabin, and Freda Huson, of the Dark House Clan, and Smogelgem (Warner Naziel), hereditary chief of the Laksamshu Clan, moved onto the land. Beginning on July 1, 2013, they constructed a traditional Pithouse; on August 1, 2014, a bunkhouse for visitors; and on June 1, 2015, a Healing House. On September 3, 2015, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs from all five of the Nation’s clans visited the camp and affirmed their opposition to all pipeline projects. Construction continued throughout 2016, and on June 18 the first Youth Mural Camp was held as a cultural art project.92 Over this time, the Unist’ot’en Camp had become the permanent home of many people: “We’re planning on living out the rest of our lives there,” Smogelgem said. “We live off the land. We do a lot of trapping and hunting and fishing up there. We collect our medicines. We pick all the berries. We sustain ourselves primarily off of our territory, and that’s the way our ancestors were.”93 Meanwhile, TransCanada, Chevron, and Enbridge proceeded with pipeline construction efforts in British Columbia, falsely claiming that they had the support of First Nations people along the proposed route. They retained private security firms to track Indigenous people’s antipipeline activities. Workers with Coastal GasLink repeatedly attempted to access Unist’ot’en Territory but were turned away at the Camp’s checkpoint. The Unist’ot’en began filming the encounters for evidence. “We’ve always been peaceful and we’ve always been respectful,” Huson said. “It was their workers who haven’t been respectful . . . who go back and claim we threatened them.” 94 In November 2018, Coastal GasLink Pipeline Ltd. filed an injunction with the Supreme Court of British Columbia against the Unist’ot’en Camp. It specifically named Huson and Naziel, as well as “Jane Doe,” “John Doe,” and “persons unknown,” as

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threats and claimed that without “unimpeded access” their project could not proceed.95 Two months later, after using extensive surveillance and establishing a “media exclusion zone,” an RCMP tactical unit assaulted the camp, dismantling the checkpoint and arresting fourteen people. Reporters for the Guardian describe how the raid was coordinated between RCMP, TransCanada, and Coastal GasLink: Notes from a strategy session . . . show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), argued that “lethal overwatch is req’d”—a term for deploying an officer who is prepared to use lethal force. The RCMP commanders also instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” ahead of the operation to remove a roadblock which had been erected by Wet’suwet’en people to control access to their territories and stop construction of the proposed 670km (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL). In a separate document, an RCMP officer states that arrests would be necessary for “sterilizing [the] site”.96

Potential strategies also included the arrest of children and grandparents and child apprehension by social services. Huson said that the raid was “consistent with a long history of colonial violence. ‘In our experience, since first contact, RCMP have been created by the federal government to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands.” Molly Wickham (Sleydo’), agreed: “What I’ve witnessed over the last year is not only violent oppression by RCMP and the state on 7 January, but the continuing occupation of our territories and surveillance of our people and camp by the CIRG [Community-Industry Response Group, a subdivision of the RCMP].” 97 Justin Brake, reporting for APTN National News, secured documents from the Government Operations Centre, an office of

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the Department of Public Safety that compiles information from other departments, including police and intelligence agencies, to identify potential threats to the “national interest.” One report focused on the Unist’ot’en Camp. Identifying the camp’s “blockade” as “the ideological and physical focal point of Aboriginal resistance to resource extraction projects,” the report expressed concern that injunctions would lead to the use of police force and violent resistance, and that “other groups may use this violence as a trigger to protest against other federal initiatives.” It maintained, however, “that these types of events are not highly functional due to a lack of the organization’s ability to garner the support of large groups. There is no indication that ongoing protests and blockades have been endorsed by local band councils or First Nation chiefs.” The report concluded that the Wet’suwet’en were a risk to Canada’s “national interest” and stated that one of its hereditary chiefs was an “aboriginal extremist.” The Wet’suwet’en “suspect Canada and the RCMP will try to portray them as potentially violent and as criminals if police are compelled by the provincial supreme court to remove the Unist’ot’en from their land.” 98 As in TigerSwan’s descriptions of the NoDAPL movement, the language of “national interest” and “aboriginal extremism” represent the Wet’suwet’en and their Indigenous allies as an imminent threat to state security, requiring an immediate and violent response. The “extremist” is not merely a target but a rationalization of a state that is ready and willing to pull the trigger.

the life less Many Indigenous people throughout the world have linked statesanctioned extractive violence against the land to gender-based

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and sexual violence. In 2012, the United Nations Human Rights Council, in coordination with the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, reported that extractive industries “operate with impunity” in Indigenous territories. This impunity has had a “detrimental impact on indigenous women and girls, which manifests itself in sexual assault, sex trafficking, prostitution, bonded labour, the exploitation of overseas contract workers, the internal displacement of women and environmental violence . . . [and] unique ecological, economic and spiritual impacts on indigenous women in their role as traditional caretakers of the environment.” It has also had a detrimental impact on Indigenous governance, cultures, and economies: “Globally, a fundamental concern of Indigenous peoples regarding extractive industry development, in addition to that of the dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, has been the ensuing unsustainable development and environmental degradation. Such patterns contrast with Indigenous peoples’ traditional models of development and are rooted in a lack of recognition of Indigenous peoples’ international human rights.”99 Justin Nobel, writing for the DeSmog Blog in July 2020, reported that the Three Percenters, a far-right militant group (so called after their erroneous belief that it only took 3 percent of colonists actively fighting to overthrow the British in the American Revolutionary War), “have established a prominent presence at a Bakken oil and gas facility [in North Dakota] regarded as critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security,” as well as in oilfields in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska. Militia-related patches, flags, and artwork have popped up across the Bakken oil patch, and a thriving gun culture among its workers

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has led to a Mad Max-mentality of chaos plaguing residents of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. While federal security agencies and their partners have prioritized focus on the energy industry and produced a raft of reports in the past two decades on other risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure, such as cyber security, natural disasters, and environmental activism, right-wing militia groups appear to be escaping close scrutiny.100

While state officials, energy executives, and the American Legislative Exchange Council have been working to pass antiprotest bills, and Trump tweeted support for violence against protesters and deployed Department of Homeland Security and security contractors to antistate violence, these entities and the FBI have all but ignored white identity–based militias. Militia members, in turn, have been openly wearing far-right and militia patches at work. Hoping to incite conflict, they have engaged in armed protests and hate speech, wearing colonial tricorner hats adorned with bullets and Hawaiian shirts, described by the Anti-Defamation League as a coded reference to a coming civil war.101 Predictably, the repopulation of the oilfield regions by the far right has resulted in a new wave of violence against Indigenous women. The Sovereign Bodies Institute’s database of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women has so far recorded almost 500 cases in the Dakotas, with 125 women having disappeared from the Bakken area alone.102 Writing for the Red, Green, and Blue blog, Climate Denier Roundup argues: the fact that a racist militia has essentially infiltrated the Bakken oil fields where legal technicalities mean the disappearance of Indigenous women goes unpunished (if they’re even investigated in the first place) shows how the intersections between the deadly consequences of our nation’s deeply entrenched misogyny, the

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colonizing and erasure of Indigenous peoples, and our dependence on fossil fuels are as entangled and polluting as the pipelines crisscrossing the country.103

In 2015 and 2017, the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons issued a statement titled “The Link between Extractive Industries and Sex Trafficking.” Quoting the U.N. Development Program, the statement notes that the nonrenewable removal of raw materials from the earth has “triggered violent conflicts, degraded the environment, worsened gender and other inequalities, displaced communities, and undermined democratic governance.” The “man camps” that extraction industries establish “necessarily lead to a large influx of workers and other individuals, some of whom create a demand for commercial sex.”104 In 2019, the Canadian National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls echoed these concerns, noting the ways the “man camps” and traffickers take advantage of ill-defined jurisdictions to rape, murder, and traffic Indigenous women and girls. According to the commission’s final report, “This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”105 These reports point to the ways in which the state accommodates corporate criminality and sexual and gender-based violence in the service of capitalism.106 Billy-Ray Belcourt addresses what it means for Indigenous people to be fated to an “exhausted existence . . . under the sign of misery,” expected to “become numb to the injustice of being made into an always-already object of injury.”107 So scripted, Indigenous people are made ready to be

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murdered, raped, wounded—to expect, in essence, a lack not merely of human rights but of humanity. Similarly, Neferti Tadiar examines what it means to live within the antagonistic relations between “the war to be human and becoming human in a time of war.”108 Under global regimes of capitalism, she argues, the relentless valuation of life and humanity in the calibration of life’s warrant evaluates opposition as a dangerous reclamation of an otherwise—dangerous because capitalism is utterly incapable of coexistence. Indigenous women’s opposition to capitalist valuations, and to violences against the land and against their lives, refuses a subjectivity that has been halted, finished, in rape at death’s door. Red, a color that in Indigenous teachings variously represents blood, ancestors, and bravery, is worn at gatherings to call upon the ancestors or, as body and face paint, in deviance. It is the color of the MMIW movement. Hand prints across the face drip red in rejection of capitalism’s inevitability and the fate of violence.

The Kinless Indian Terror as Social (In)Stability

Michael Taussig argues that the colonizer brutally terrorizes Indigenous communities and, when the initial shock of their acts of genocide, torture, and enslavement has settled, seeks out the Indigenous shaman for either physical or spiritual healing.1 The participation in the ritual of healing—medicinal and ceremonial—allows the colonizer to claim redemption despite the fact that the colonizer is actively engaged in violence against Indigenous people. This in turn enables the colonizer to revise their history, rendering their terrorism of Indigenous communities a modest digression from an otherwise proud tale of sanctified transcendence. And so comparably goes the work of the Kinless Indian in the current war on terror. The Kinless Indian is the Indian without any but an invented relationship to Indigenous people, often cultivated through family or local folklore. This Indian allows the imperialist not merely to follow or be cured by an Indigenous shaman but to claim an Indigeneity all its own. The imperialist is thus not only 70

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saved but absolved of responsibility for any benefit from or complicity with state violence against Indigenous people by suggesting that, all along, they were in fact, if in secret, the Indigenous. Unlike the more direct work of the Murderable Indian, the Kinless Indian slips between its absolution and the state’s rationale for oppression. While it absolves the individual of responsibility, it provides a rationale to the state to challenge Indigenous peoples’ rights to sovereignty and self-determination. The Kinless Indian, who secures socioeconomic reputation and status through their fraud, makes a mockery of the state’s democratic commitments to fairness and equality, undermining the state’s ability to secure a stable society. The Kinless Indian is not the terrorist we are familiar with. It is not the Murderable Indian, directly represented as a grave threat to the state’s security and public safety. Rather, it is the social terrorist who, through lies and deceit, undermines the integrity of the state’s claims regarding its democratic ideals. While seemingly contradictory, the Kinless Indian consistently upholds the racist and sexist ideologies of identity that articulate an imperial formation by associating social stability with capitalism’s promise of economic liberty and opportunity, wealth and status. The Kinless Indian threatens the integrity of a system that works because it is fair: frauds take advantage. To think through this, I examine the Kinless Indian within two contexts: the Cherokee and the Métis.

the cherokee Circe Sturm examines the politics of “racial shifting” marked by the unusual rise in American Indian/Alaska Native (in particular Cherokee) self-identifications in the U.S. Census between 1960 and

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2000. During this period, American Indian/Alaska Native selfidentifications increased by 340 percent, with a 647 percent increase for multiracial identifications. Cherokee self-identifications alone increased by more than 1,000 percent during the same period.2 Concurrently, hundreds of organizations that claim Cherokee identity were formed—forty-three in Georgia (three of which are recognized by the state); twenty-three in Florida; sixteen to twenty in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee; and as many as thirteen in California, Texas, and Ohio. Altogether, thirty-six states have at least one such organization.3 The unexpected increase in self-identification, predominantly by white people, is rationalized on the grounds of undocumented family stories, spiritual feelings, and DNA test results. Sturm argues that these personal reasons mask the attempt of mainly white-identified individuals and groups to shift not merely their racial identity but their immediate and implied benefit from or complicity in histories of colonial violence. The repudiation and rejection of whiteness thus serves as a “remedy” for the “ills of the modern, neoliberal age.” 4 Indian identity allows whites in particular to avoid taking any substantive responsibility for, or changing anything about, current social relations or material conditions directly informed by histories of imperialist ideologies and practices. In fact, many Indigenous scholars, including Louis Owens and Rebecca Nagle, argue that it is U.S. imperialism that has produced the conditions in which cultural appropriation is made possible.5 By the late 1700s, Theda Perdue argues that much had already changed for the Cherokee owing to invasion, war, occupation, missionization, trade, slavery, and epidemics.6 As of 1805, the Nation

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had been engaged in near-constant wars with either the colonies or the Muscogee tribe and already had ceded nearly half its territory to Britain and subsequently the United States. Between 1777 and 1786, the newly formed U.S. Congress ratified eight treaties with the Cherokee Nation (see appendix II), and in 1784 the Cherokee also formed a trade alliance with New Spain and the Muscogee. These treaties established the terms of Cherokee land cessions to the United States in Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia as well as the terms of peace, alliance, and trade with the United States, Spain, and the Muscogee. Between 1787, when ratification of the U.S. Constitution centralized federal authority in tribal relations and over treaty negotiations, and 1871, when treaty-making with tribes was suspended, the Congress ratified an additional twenty-two treaties with the Cherokee Nation (see appendixes I and II). These treaties established the terms of additional Cherokee land cessions to the United States, with financial annuities, goods, and services provided in compensation. Meanwhile, the U.S., as well as the states of Georgia and Alabama, set about removing all eastern Indigenous nations to Indian Territory (an area originally conceived of as lands west of the Mississippi River), a goal that seemed especially plausible after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. But tribes were resistant to relocation, and frequently employed armed opposition. To further complicate matters, as early as 1808 small groups of Cherokee had begun emigrating from their territories west of the Mississippi River to ceded Osage Nation lands. Others migrated to Arkansas Territory (after 1817) and Indian Territory (after 1828). To secure lands for these Cherokee migrants, the Nation ceded an additional one-third of its treatied lands in the east. In an

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attempt to secure treaty rights to their remaining territories in the Southeast, the Cherokee ratified a constitution in 1827. Dissatisfied with the government’s slow progress in removing tribes, and emboldened by Andrew Jackson’s election as U.S. president in 1828, Georgia passed a series of laws in 1830 that undermined tribal governance and treaty rights while allowing its citizens to destroy Cherokee property (including farms, businesses, and newspapers). Rampant violence against Cherokee people was simply ignored. Under these conditions, the Cherokee Nation submitted two U.S. Supreme Court complaints, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), contesting Georgia’s laws and seeking affirmation of treaty rights. Much to the chagrin of both Jackson and Georgia, the Supreme Court affirmed Cherokee treaty rights, finding Georgia’s laws to be unconstitutional. Jackson defied the decision, however, and refused to support Cherokee sovereignty. The Treaty of New Echota, illegally negotiated between the U.S. government and Cherokee citizens not on the Nation’s Council, was ratified by the Senate in 1835, with removal enforced in 1838. Despite fierce opposition by the majority of Cherokee, the Nation was forced to relinquish its remaining lands east of the Mississippi River. Cherokee people were methodically rounded up, their farms and goods burned behind them, and detained in camps before being transported to Indian Territory. As many as four thousand Cherokee, or about 25 percent of the population, died en route from hunger, exposure, and disease. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, like several tribes in the southeast, included groups that held African slaves. The Nation’s treaty of 1866 with the United States required the tribe to end

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slavery and enfranchise Freedmen. This provision was repeated for all tribes that had slaves or in which groups of citizens aligned with the Confederacy during the Civil War.7 Also addressed were illegal settlement on treatied lands, crime against tribal members, and the need for social services. The Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights on tribal territories within the United States, allowing for the subdivision of tribal communal landholdings into allotments for enrolled tribal members. Although the Cherokee were exempted from allotment without renegotiation of the terms of the 1835 and 1866 treaties, in 1900 the Nation—despite fierce opposition among the majority of Cherokee—reached an agreement to undergo allotment. Oklahoma statehood followed in 1907. Not only did allotment allow for individual parcels to be issued to enrolled tribal members, but it also opened surplus lands for purchase by nontribal people. Through this process, tribal lands nationwide were reduced by about 70 percent. Meanwhile, almost 60 percent of those land titles that were issued to tribal members were lost through foreclosure and fraud by 1934.8 As a result, allotment effectively dissolved any remaining vestiges of Cherokee territorial rights. While the Cherokee would be granted the right to administer federal programs and services within a “jurisdictional service area” of fourteen counties in northeastern Oklahoma, they otherwise received no territorial rights to those lands to which they had been removed in 1838. Julie L. Reed has analyzed the complex matrilineal kin system of the Cherokee Nation that informed its development of social welfare programs between 1800 and 1907 to counter the extreme poverty wrought by U.S. removal and allotment policies.9 That system, she writes, “included kinship obligations and gadugi—

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coordinated work for the social good,” and “communal land holding” required that people help one another, with a focus on those most in need. Many Cherokee people rejected the individualism and property constructs of the United States, which they saw as based on greed and exploitation. The Nation responded by developing programs to address social issues, but they also had to contend with the rapid proliferation of claims to Cherokee identity outside of the Nation’s jurisdiction. As documented by Angie Debo, these claims emerged from the opening up of Cherokee lands for public sale and development during allotment.10 People throughout the United States attempted to buy tribal membership in order to secure access to tribal lands and resources. The claims were further facilitated through a complicated history of land fraud that informed not only the 1831 and 1832 Supreme Court decisions mentioned above but the repeated acts of Congress and state court rulings that retroactively legalized land theft from Indigenous nations and their citizens.11 From 1817 to 1914, the Cherokee Nation’s Council maintained thorough census rolls (see appendix II). They did so both to monitor the health and well-being of their citizens and to protect the tribe’s financial assets and territorial rights.12 It was also, Reed suggests, an attempt to ensure, in the face of systematic undermining, the tribe’s ability to provide basic social services to its people in accord with values based in matrilineal descent, egalitarian relations, kinship obligations, and communal landholding practices.13 According to David Cornsilk, a Cherokee genealogist, Cherokees are among the best documented people in the world. We probably come in 3rd after royalty and Mormons. . . . Our blood quantums range from 4/4 to 1/8192. All are embraced as equal[;]

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though not 100% Indian, they are 100% Cherokee. What all real Cherokees have in common is proof of ancestry[,] whether they can enroll or not. . . . Most people are not aware that there are 30 rolls made of Cherokees between 1817 and 1914. There are thousands of linear feet of records created by colonials, missionaries, U.S. officials, schools, travelers and newspapers that trace our ancestries to the mid-1700s. Much of this paper trail was created by the tribe itself.14

In an attempt to deal with fraud during allotment, the Cherokee established relatively strict criteria for membership that required individuals to identify descent from someone on the membership roll that closed in 1906. As Sturm and Cornsilk have noted, however, the membership rolls reflected the racism of some Cherokee toward those of African descent; as a result, Cherokee lineality, codified on the rolls as “Indian blood,” was not recorded for Africans, even though an overwhelming majority of Africans were also of Cherokee descent. Technically, then, whereas their membership was recognized by enrollment, their citizenship status and rights within the Nation were not.15 Since the allotment period the tribe removed blood quantum criteria for membership and reaffirmed lineality to the 1906 roll.16 Cornsilk explains the important distinction between membership or enrollment status and lineality: When I say someone has no Cherokee ancestry, it’s not just that they or their ancestors are not enrolled. It’s much more complex than that. In my past job as a Cherokee genealogist, I would look at the rolls and documents of course. But I also examine the wider extended family to see if there is any kinship to Cherokees on the roll during the ancestral time frame and in the tribe now. When Cherokees left the tribe or chose not to enroll, that was a decision at a specific moment in time. They would be on previous rolls. And most importantly, other members of the extended family, aunts,

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uncles, siblings, parents, grandparents and cousins would be among the tribal members and on the various rolls and records.17

The complicated provenance of the rolls, not to mention the political turmoil surrounding the treaty negotiations, forced removals, and overall land loss that led to the rolls’ production, ties them to the social forces of U.S. imperialism. People who falsely claim identity or association with the Cherokee, particularly but not only for social status or material gain, are seen as condoning and being complicit with those forces. The lies of identity and affiliation are the scaffolding on which white heteronormative property rights are established, legitimated, and protected by federal and state law. That scaffolding is threatened by fraudulent claims to Indigenous identity, not because it is concerned with Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination but because it is concerned with protecting white property rights and maintaining the lies of the state as an evolved democracy. The Forty-Fifth Indian [Speaking to radio host Don Imus] I would perhaps become an Indian myself. I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations. . . . [Speaking to Rep. George Miller (D-CA) during a congressional hearing] Because I’ll tell you what. If you look, if you look at some of the reservations that you’ve approved, that you, sir, in your great wisdom have approved, I will tell you right now—they don’t look like Indians to me. . . . Now, maybe we say politically correct or not politically correct, they don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians. Donald J. Trump18

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Throughout the 2008 subprime crisis, and later during his presidency, Trump referred to then–Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.” A reference to Warren’s claim of Cherokee, or less regularly Delaware, descent, it was meant as an insult, intended to undermine her credibility when she was part of a wide effort to hold government, Wall Street, and the rich accountable for collusion and fraud.19 Her reform efforts, in concert with widespread public demand, resulted in the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010. The act authorized creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), originally proposed by Warren in 2007. President Barack Obama appointed Warren as assistant to the president and special advisor to the secretary of the Treasury; she was passed over as CFPB director because of fierce GOP and bank opposition, which Trump was a part of. Instead, she focused her energies on securing one of Massachusetts’s two Senate seats in 2012. Trump’s derision of Warren as Pocahontas took hold during his presidential campaign, as part of his overall anti-nonwhite platform. His supporters produced signage referring to Warren as “Fauxcahontas” and “Chief Speaking Bull,” and the insults spread through social media in memes: Warren’s face cut-andpasted into photographs of Indian chiefs, Warren as a cartoon caricature in headdress and buckskin. The situation was embellished by conservative media, with allegations that Warren had identified herself as an Indian on school admission/financial aid documents and job applications for purely financial reasons.20 During Warren’s 2012 Senate run, her opponent, incumbent Republican senator Scott Brown, seized on the media reports to challenge Warren’s credibility, calling for her to provide evidence

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of her claims of Cherokee descent. “When she was growing up in Oklahoma,” Warren responded, “her family always told her she’s part Cherokee. ‘I am very proud of my heritage . . . These are my family stories. This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.’”21 She was quoted often as telling a story about her Aunt Bea, “who was given to complaining that Warren’s maternal grandfather who ‘had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do’ had not passed them on to her.”22 During this time, a delegation of four women from the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, Twila Barnes, Ellen Goss, Ali Sacks, and Sky Davis, traveled to Massachusetts to share with Warren their concerns about her claims.23 (Despite suggestions by the Warren campaign that they were funded by the GOP or the Brown campaign, they had conducted a fundraising drive on Facebook and paid out of pocket for the travel.) After being refused a meeting with Warren, Barnes, a genealogist who maintains a blog about Cherokee genealogy and history, told Indian Country Today: We are smart Native women who did this on our own, and we are plenty smart enough to figure out that Warren has been less than truthful and now doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to give us Native women that credit, yet she calls herself a Native woman. That’s just wrong. . . . We simply wanted this to be an educational visit for Warren and for everyone. . . . Many non-Cherokee people don’t understand how many people falsely claim to be Cherokee. We wanted to share with people that we’re not just something from history, we are here, and we want to confront people like Warren in a civil way. . . . Elizabeth Warren calls herself a Native American and calls herself a Cherokee, but she doesn’t really seem to care about us.24

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Warren’s refusal to meet with the women was perceived as disrespectful, a refusal to be accountable to the relationships and responsibilities that define Cherokee identity and culture. After Warren’s election to the Senate, attention regarding her identity quieted—until Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015. Warren was sharply critical of the candidate. In a May 2016 speech at the Center for Popular Democracy, she accused Trump of caring only about himself, of “kissing the fannies” of Wall Street bankers, dodging taxes, and disparaging hardworking people.25 Trump and his supporters retorted by calling Warren Pocahontas and other epithets, disparaging her intelligence, and accusing her of being a liar, a hypocrite, and a fraud. “Her whole life was based on a fraud,” Trump said.26 We call her Pocahontas for a reason . . . She said she’s 5 percent Native American. She was unable to prove it. She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her own career . . . Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work for her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud . . . She made up her heritage, which I think is racist. I think she’s racist, actually because what she did was very racist . . . She’s got less Native American blood in her than I have, OK . . . Believe me . . . She goes, “Well look at my cheekbones.”27

To be clear, Trump’s assertions about Warren were never meant to be factual. They were intended to serve as political messaging and gather support, in line with his other racially charged hate speech and his pointedly Islamophobic, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant platform. And it worked. The rhetoric about Warren emboldened supporters across class and party affiliations. At a rally in Montana in July 2016, he taunted her further, promising to make a $1 million donation to Warren’s “favorite

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charity” if she conducted a DNA test that “shows” she is “an Indian.”28 Leading up to the 2018 midterm election, Warren announced that she would take a serious look at a potential presidential bid in 2020.29 Throughout the year, she took several steps to “put to rest” the question of her identity. The first was in February 2018 when she addressed the Executive Council Winter Session of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington DC. She stated that she was not an enrolled member or citizen of a tribe and had never claimed to be, but that she was a descendant: “I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.”30 While she addressed the Congress, including over 500 tribal delegates, there were no reports that she met with Cherokee or Delaware representatives in attendance. Later that year, Warren submitted a DNA sample to Carlos Bustamante, a professor of biomedical data science, genetics, and biology at Stanford University, for analysis. In October, she posted to her official page a summary of the results, a link to Bustamante’s report, and a two-minute video about her family, all under the heading “Deep Dive: The Story of an American Family.”31 (I will return to this heading in a bit.) The report, written in the third person and surrounded by photos and stories about the family’s immigration to Indian Territory and Warren’s growing up in eastern Oklahoma, concludes that there is “ ‘strong evidence’ that Elizabeth’s DNA sample ‘contains Native American ancestry.’ Specifically, Dr. Bustamante concludes with 99% confidence that Elizabeth’s DNA sample contains five genetic segments, spanning 12,300,000 DNA bases, which are ‘Native American in origin.’ ”32 Details about

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how Bustamante compared the results are also provided. The analysis “concludes that such an ancestor can be found ‘likely in the range of 6–10 generations ago.’ ” Framing the results, Warren repeats her understanding of the distinction between her lineage and enrollment. In bold-faced type, the report states: “Elizabeth’s family was never enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship. She never used her family tree to get a break or get ahead. She never used it to advance her career. But her parents were real people.” Warren reiterates this in the video: “I am not enrolled in a tribe, and only tribes determine tribal citizenship; I understand and respect that distinction, but my family history is my family history.” The web page’s footers provide an option for posting the information to multiple social media sites, to “spread the truth” about her family and her descent claims. Chuck Hoskin Jr., secretary of state of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, issued a statement on behalf of the Nation in response to Warren. It began, “A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship.” As evident in the context of people of African descent being granted membership in the Cherokee Nation, Hoskin explained that “sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.” He criticized Warren’s presumption that DNA could indicate cultural affiliation. “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her

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continued claims of tribal heritage.”33 Similarly, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians said in a statement that although it appreciated “Warren’s enthusiasm for Native America, her DNA test alone cannot satisfy the membership requirements for our tribe.”34 The Delaware Tribe of Indians stated very simply: “The Delaware Tribe of Indians’ position on Senator Warren’s claim of being part Delaware is that she does not meet the criteria for membership in our Tribe and therefore is not an enrolled member.”35 The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Delaware Tribe of Indians are located within the territories to which Warren’s family immigrated. As the report on her website explained, “Her grandfather was a carpenter, doing repairs and building homes and the occasional one-room schoolhouse in Indian Territory. Her grandmother lived in Oklahoma before it became a state in the late 1800s, married young, and had ten children.” Oklahoma became a state in 1907. Does she mean that her family lived in Indian Territory “in the late 1800s”? Under what conditions did they move to Indian Territory? What was their involvement in the politics of allotment and statehood that defined Indian Territory during this period? What ties did they in fact have to the Cherokee and Delaware with whom they claimed affiliation, who remember this period as one of great land loss, inter- and intratribal conflict, economic disparity, crime, and despair?36 If Warren’s Cherokee ancestor lived 6–10 generations ago, as Bustamante reports, and we accept the biography on her website, her ancestry occurred at least a few generations before her family arrived in Indian Territory. This begs the question of why it is the Cherokee and Delaware people from whom the

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Warren family claims descent. Why not claim ancestry from tribes in the territories from which the family migrated? These are questions to and about Warren that have been asked by Cherokee genealogists for years. In her blog, Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter, Twila Barnes provides the results of her own research into Warren’s ancestry, and specifically into her claims of matrilineal Cherokee descent.37 Referencing over 150 public documents and Cherokee records, Barnes shows that Warren’s mother was born in Oklahoma City in 1912. Her maternal grandparents were born in Illinois (1872) and Missouri (1875); they married in Arkansas (1893) and died in Oklahoma City (in 1956 and 1969, respectively). In other words, her grandparents moved from Illinois and Missouri to Indian Territory, in what would become the state of Oklahoma, sometime before their marriage. This time period would have coincided with the forcible removal of the Delaware Tribe onto Cherokee lands in 1867, the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 (opening unassigned lands in Indian Territory to white settlers), the agreement by the Cherokee Nation to allot in 1896, the closing of its rolls in 1906, and Oklahoma statehood in 1907. The Warren family, nuclear and extended, are not included as Cherokee or Delaware on any of the public or tribal records produced during this time. Barnes also turns to the records of Warren’s maternal greatgrandparents. Between 1837 and 1924, they resided in Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma. This period and these places are marked by the forced removal of the Cherokee from their traditional territories in the southeast to Indian Territory in 1838 and by the forcible removal of the Delaware from Missouri Territory, Kansas Territory, and onto Cherokee lands in Indian Territory. After removal both the Cherokee and Delaware were

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subjected to allotment and statehood under severe conditions of economic disparity, exploitation, and violent crime. The Warren extended family are not included as Cherokee or Delaware on any of the public or tribal records produced during these times. This is also true of her great-great-grandparents, who, records show, resided in New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Indiana, and Arkansas. These multiple territories implicate dozens of tribes other than the Cherokee and Delaware. As Cornsilk and Barnes argue, the presence or absence of the Warren family in tribal records is important but not the only point. What also matters is that the family—now or going back several generations—are not claimed by the Cherokee or Delaware as kin: no living Cherokee or Delaware person claims the Warren as family.38 And yet at some point along the way, the family developed stories that they were Cherokee or Delaware and held to those stories as more important than tribal reckonings of identity and belonging.

the métis The Métis people occupied territories now located within the borders of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and parts of Ontario, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, and the northern United States. Debates over the unique social complexities and political economy of the fur trade out of which the Métis emerged as a people have often uncritically translated the term “Métis” as meaning only that they are racially mixed. As Chris Andersen argues, this translation has been both popular and institutional.39 People perceive the Métis not as a distinct sovereign with rights to self-determination but as a racial minority with rights akin to other minorities. The courts, in turn,

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have mitigated disputes that the Métis are merely a racially mixed group of people making illegitimate claims to treaty rights like hunting and fishing. As Andersen asks, Why are Métis mixed but not so the Ojibway or Cree living adjacently, involved in the same historical political economy, and living under the same auspices of the same kinship networks? It is. . . puzzling that the hybridity of Métis in particular is seen as noteworthy, given that all contemporary Indigenous cultures, communities, and nations in Canada are the consequence of a blending of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures and societies and even a blending among different Indigenous cultures. Certainly those “First Nations” living adjacent to Métis communities were no less susceptible to the intermixing that resulted from, for example, the political economy of the fur trade.40

The core problem is with the racial logics that inform how mix is deployed within processes of imperial formation to rationalize Indigenous oppression. I begin in the late 1700s, when the Métis people were an established, self-determining political entity actively engaged in negotiating the terms of their governance and territorial integrity against the advances of England’s Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and Montréal’s North West Company. The HBC, chartered by the British Crown in 1670, functioned as a colonial state—with a government and a military—in the North American territories that Britain invaded and occupied, and which later became part of Canada and the United States. Initially, the Crown’s charter granted the HBC title to the entire Hudson Bay watershed, known as Rupert’s Land (roughly 15 percent of North America’s acreage). The Crown had not, however, secured that land by treaty with the resident Indigenous peoples, rendering the title illegal under English law.41 Nevertheless, from

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these lands the HBC asserted decisive control over the North American fur trade, thus implicating all those Indigenous peoples in whose territories it traded, including the Cree, Anishinaabe, Lakota, Blackfoot, and Métis. In 1779, France’s Montréal colony established the North West Company. By then, Rupert’s Land was entangled in all kinds of trade and land disputes between the HBC and the Métis and other Indigenous peoples. In 1812, the HBC issued a land grant of about 116,000 acres in the Red River Valley, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers (more or less present-day Winnipeg), to Lord Thomas Douglas, earl of Selkirk, the goal being to establish a colony that would reinforce the company’s influence vis-à-vis the North West Company. The Red River Valley was a central hub of Métis territory. In 1814, in an effort to support the colony, Selkirk and the colony’s governor, Miles MacDonnell, issued the Pemmican Proclamation banning the Métis from exporting food out of the area. The Métis, under the leadership of Cuthbert Grant, disregarded the order. Conflicts escalated, culminating in the Battle of Seven Oaks on June 19, 1816. The Métis were victorious and many colonists were killed, while those who survived withdrew. Meanwhile, the Métis continued to refuse cooperation with the HBC. So effective was their resistance that the HBC’s influence in the region was compromised. It attempted to adjust by expanding its trade farther west, which eventually broke its monopoly. In 1821, with the entire fur trade at stake, the British Crown forced the HBC and North West to merge, a move that helped stave off total collapse of the HBC. In 1867, the British Parliament passed the British North American Act creating Canada as a self-governing federation made up

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of the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec. Nineteen additional acts were passed through 1975 under the same name to further define Canada’s government, including its federal structure, the House of Commons, the Senate, the justice system, and taxation, and establishing the mechanisms for incorporating new provinces. In 1869, the HBC sold Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the British Crown, which incorporated them as part of Canada. These lands included most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southern Nunavut, and northern parts of Ontario and Quebec, as well as areas that would later become parts of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The sale, again, was illegal under English law, as not all of the lands in question had been secured by treaties with Indigenous peoples. Subsequently, regional governor William McDougall ordered surveys to be carried out of Métis lands in the Red River Valley, ostensibly as the first step toward expanding settlements. Recalling the definition of “aboriginal title” in the U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), which provided that Indians could occupy but did not own the lands on which they lived,42 the assessors assured the Métis that they would be allowed to continue to occupy their lands, but provided no assurances that they would ever be granted title to those lands. The Métis were enraged. Led by Louis Riel, the Métis initiated a successful year-long armed conflict (1869–1870) against the Red River settlement. In 1870, the Manitoba Act was passed, establishing the province of Manitoba. It affirmed Métis properties and reserved 607,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of land for the Métis. But the provisions were never carried out. The lands were never assigned, and the Métis became so severely discriminated against,

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disenfranchised, and criminalized that many moved further into Saskatchewan and Alberta territories. There, they established a provisional government and aligned with a confederacy of other Indigenous groups, including the Cree, Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan, and Salteaux, who were facing their own consequences of colonization. In 1876, Canada passed the Indian Act under Section 91 of the Constitution Act, which provided Canada exclusive authority to govern “Indians and Lands Reserved for Indians” within its territories. It promised to affirm Indigenous rights as codified by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, principally in relationship to governance and territorial integrity, while anticipating that Indians would be assimilated and integrated into Canada. The act defined Indian status patrilineally, established electoral band governments, and outlined reserve policies for housing, education, health care, and other social services. Since 1876, the act has been amended over twenty times. Indians with status under the act are granted rights to participate and vote in band government, live on the reserves, and receive funds and programs earmarked for Indians. The act, however, excluded the Métis and the Inuit from “Indian status” and so from any institutionalized provision for governance or territorial integrity. Métis and Inuit rights would, consequently, have to be addressed separately.43 For the Métis, these rights were supposed to be recognized by the Manitoba Act of 1870 as well as an 1875 adhesion to Treaty 3 of 1873, which provided lands for Métis families connected to the Anishinaabe Mikiseesis Rainy Lake Band. The failure of Canada to respect Métis land rights by legislation and treaty resulted in the North-West Rebellion of 1885 in which, under the initial leadership of Louis Riel, the Métis and their allies fought back against settlements along the Canadian Pacific Railway. After

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five months of intense fighting, the rebels were defeated, prosecuted, and Riel was hanged. Thereafter, Métis land rights would remain tenuous until the 1980s. For instance, in 1896 the Métis were provided with modest acreage by the Catholic Church in St. Paul, Alberta—but only until the lands were sold in 1910. In 1938, Alberta passed the Métis Population Betterment Act, which established twelve temporary Métis settlements. Upon dissolution of these temporary settlements, Métis land rights were all but vacated and would languish until 1990. In 1982, Canada’s Constitution Act was passed. Section 35 provides that (1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed. (2) In this Act, “aboriginal peoples of Canada” includes the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples of Canada. (3) For greater certainty, in subsection (1) “treaty rights” includes rights that now exist by way of land claims agreements or may be so acquired. (4) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, the aboriginal and treaty rights referred to in subsection (1) are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.44

Métis Section 35 rights were first legally challenged by the province of Ontario in R. v. Powley. The case involved Steve and Roddy Powley, “members of a Métis community near Sault Ste. Marie,” who in 1993 were charged for “unlawfully hunting a moose without a hunting license” and “knowingly possessing game hunted in contravention” of Ontario’s Game and Fish Act. The father and son pleaded not guilty on the grounds that as members of a Métis community they possessed “an aboriginal right to hunt for food that is infringed without justification by the Ontario hunting legislation.” The Ontario Court of Justice,

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the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and the Ontario Court of Appeals all agreed and dismissed the charges. The Ontario attorney general, however, appealed the decisions to the Supreme Court of Canada. In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittals and dismissed the appeals, ruling: The term “Métis” in s. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 does not encompass all individuals with mixed Indian and European heritage; rather, it refers to distinctive peoples who, in addition to their mixed ancestry, developed their own customs, and recognizable group identity separate from their Indian or Inuit and European forebears. A Métis community is a group of Métis with a distinctive collective identity, living together in the same geographical area and sharing a common way of life. The purpose of s. 35 is to protect practices that were historically important features of these distinctive communities and that persist in the present day as integral elements of their Métis culture.

Importantly, while the Court recognized the distinct nature of Métis ancestry, customs, and identity, it suppressed Métis selfdetermination, instead elevating its own authority to determine— assert knowledge of—Métis cultural authenticity and legal legitimacy. Self-identification, ancestral connection, and community acceptance are factors which define Métis identity for the purpose of claiming Métis rights under s. 35. Absent formal identification, courts will have to ascertain Métis identity on a case-by-case basis taking into account the value of community self-definition, the need for the process of identification to be objectively verifiable and the purpose of the constitutional guarantee.45

Even as the Court acknowledged a distinction between Métis and other people of mixed descent, it declared a “need for the process of identification to be objectively verifiable.” Instead of

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relying on Métis governance to determine group affiliation and thus rights claims, the Court turned to the “historical record”— and its own interpretation of it—for evidentiary verification. The Court’s knowledge, and hence authority, was thus upheld, in a disavowal of Métis experiences of the ongoing social forces of Canadian colonialism. In other words, the narrative advanced by the Court is one that easily falls into the historical grooves carved out by the racial logics of cultural authenticity. This narrative pretends that the Métis, suspended from the realities and consequences of ongoing Canadian colonization, embody the values of historical continuity and cultural cohesiveness, despite Canadian genocide and land dispossession. These qualities are treated as objectively observable, measurable, and what’s more, documentable and thus documented. Métis legal legitimacy, and Section 35 rights in particular, are made dependent on the conformity of the Métis to the Court’s interpretation of the “historical record” regarding their identity and culture: The historical record fully supports the trial judge’s finding that the period just prior to 1850 is the appropriate date for finding effective European control in the Sault Ste. Marie area. The evidence also supports his finding that hunting for food was integral to the Métis way of life at Sault Ste. Marie in the period just prior to 1850. This practice has been continuous to the present.46

Métis people seeking to exercise their rights under Section 35 have to show not only that individuals are accepted members of the modern Métis community, but also that the practice in question—in the Powley case, hunting in a specific region— relates to a documented historic practice of a rights-bearing Métis community prior to European political and legal control.

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The entire narrative thus advances the absurd notion of Indigenous identities and cultures suspended from the temporal and spatial realities of Canadian colonialism. It likewise affirms Canada’s recognition of Métis rights as an instance of Canadian multiculturalism. When the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its decision in the Powley case in 2003, recognizing and affirming Métis legal status and rights under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, it solidified the Métis National Council (MNC). The MNC, formed in 1983, one year after the act passed, included the Métis Nation British Columbia, the Métis Nation of Alberta, the Métis Nation Saskatchewan, the Manitoba Métis Federation, and the Métis Nation of Ontario, and was recognized by Canada as representing the Métis people. In 1997, the MNC was granted NGO Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.47 Since the MNC was established, over twenty other Métis organizations have formed. These include the British Columbia Métis Federation, the Canadian Métis Council–Intertribal in New Brunswick, the Ontario Métis Aboriginal Association, the Woodland Métis, and the Nation Métis Québec. These organizations are not recognized by Canada’s courts or legislature as establishing Section 35 rights for their members. In 1989, Alberta passed the Alberta-Métis Settlements Accord to provide a modest financial compensation to the Métis of $310 million for stolen lands as well as 1,250,000 acres “to secure a Métis land base for future generations, local autonomy, and economic self-sufficiency.”48 The accord also established the Métis Settlements General Council, bringing together five representatives from each of the eight Métis settlements in Alberta, to exercise governance over the lands, including the co-management of

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natural resources. In 2004, the Métis Settlements General Council and the Métis Nation of Alberta reached agreements with the province of Alberta recognizing Métis hunting and fishing rights.49 In two transactions in 2014 and 2018, the community of Fort McKay purchased its lands, a total of 492 acres (about 200 hectares), from Alberta for $1.6 million.50 Problematically, Fort MacKay then proceeded to lease lands to oil companies.51 In 1997, the Manitoba Métis Federation launched an effort to obtain lands promised by the Manitoba Act of 1870 but never granted. In 2006, the Federation filed a legal complaint. In 2013, the Supreme Court acknowledged the Federation as representing the Manitoba Métis in its claim against the Crown as well as Manitoba’s breach of the 1870 act. It required Manitoba to negotiate a land claims settlement with the Métis. In 2016, the Federation negotiated the Manitoba Métis Federation–Canada Framework Agreement on Advancing Reconciliation, and in 2018 a joint action plan was announced. The plan promises a federal investment in the social and economic development of the Manitoba Métis, with an initial payment of $154.3 million. It also agrees that both parties will work toward a self-government agreement that allows the Federation to transition from a corporate to a self-governing structure.52 Canada’s regulation of Métis legal status and rights has forced Métis people to misshape themselves into Canada’s definitions and provisions of Indigenous rights in order to secure their governance, lands, resources, and cultural autonomy. This process effectively erases Canada’s histories of imperialism and colonialism in favor of a narrative that posits Canada as a liberal, multicultural democracy. That land settlements have been the mechanism through which Canada’s regulation of Métis legal

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status and rights has been mediated is important. As Alyosha Goldstein argues, financial settlements absolve the state from further legal liability.53 The goal of the reconciliation and compensation afforded by settlement is to align Métis with Canada’s interests. These interests are invested in protecting white heteronormative property rights over and against Métis governance and territorial rights. The fact that there has been such a surge in self-identification as Métis during a historical period marked by Métis land claims settlements is not the great mystery it might seem. In a society predicated on its self-presentation as a great liberal, multicultural, democratic state, a narrative that seeks to disguise crass capitalist ambitions, the Métis have to be scripted into stories that make it possible for anyone to claim to be Métis. Only when everyone can be Métis can the state insist on the need for regulatory powers to return society to the order and justice the state’s recognition embodies. Everybody’s Métis Joseph Boyden was born in northern Ontario in 1966, the ninth of eleven children of Blanche Gosling and Raymond Boyden. He studied at York University in Toronto and the University of New Orleans, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in 1995. He has taught creative writing at Northern College (1995–1997), the University of New Orleans (1998–2010), and the University of British Columbia (2013–2015). He is the author of four award-winning novels—Three Day Road (2005), Through Black Spruce (2008), The Orenda (2013), and Wenjack (2016)—as well as a ballet and several nonfiction works, all of which address aboriginal issues. He has received five honorary degrees and was appointed as a

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member of the Order of Canada in 2014 for his contributions to Canadian heritage. Throughout his career, Boyden has claimed Indigenous ancestry, primarily Métis but also Mi’kmaq, Ojibwa, and Nipmuc. The claims have varied, sometimes also including his Scottish and Irish background, and never identifying exactly where his Indigenous ancestry derives from. Many within the Indigenous communities with which he has declared affiliation have asked questions. These questions were amplified on December 22, 2016, when Robert Jago, a guest host of the shared Twitter account @IndigenousXca, posted a series of tweets about Boyden’s identity. Two days later, Jago published an opinion piece on CanadaLand explaining that he wanted “to bring out into the open what a lot of us Natives have been saying about Joseph Boyden privately, that we question his Native identity. What led many of us to think this is that the way in which Boyden has described his indigenous background is confused.”54 Jago tweeted, “Is Joseph Boyden actually Native, or is he playing Indian like his uncle Earl reportedly did? Think of all the Native writing awards he won. . . . Some are cash awards, for Natives only. . . . And how many Native writers, thinkers, Residential School survivors have gone unheard because he’s colonized their public space?”55 In the midst of this, on December 23, Jorge Barrera, reporting for APTN National News, published the results of his own research into Boyden’s ancestry.56 He begins by citing a 1956 Maclean’s article by Dorothy Sangster about Boyden’s uncle, “Tex” Erl Boyden, who went by the alias “Injun Joe.” Sangster begins: The tourists at Algonquin Park think they’re meeting a real live redskin in a tribal tepee. Indian schmindian! He’s Tex Boyden, who reads the New Yorker, sips Martinis and makes his living selling beads to the white natives.

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When Erl Boyden was five years old, his Uncle Richard took him to a wild-west show in Ottawa and introduced him to Buffalo Bill. Excited by tom-toms and war cries and trailing war bonnets, little Erl fell in love with Indians on the spot. He took to cutting out pictures of Indians, improvising Indian costumes, collecting Indian souvenirs. His bedroom in the old Boyden home on Mackenzie Avenue, in the shadow of the Parliament Buildings, became a litter of bows and arrows and buckskins. His most treasured possession was a five-foot cotton tepee his aunt Bertha O’Donaghue sent him from New York. The Last of the Mohicans was his favorite book and he and his two brothers saved their nickels to see Broncho Billy Anderson on Saturday afternoons at the neighborhood movie house, and Custer’s Last Stand, a stage show that came to Ottawa’s Grand Opera House in 1907. School bored young Erl—his thoughts were elsewhere. He saw himself as a white boy who by his knowledge of hunting and outdoor lore is adopted by an Indian chief and given a place of honor in the tribe. Boyden is sixty years old now, but he’s still playing Indian. All summer long you can find him sitting beside the highway at Dwight, a small resort town 160 miles north of Toronto on the road to Algonquin Park, under a sign that says, “Ugh! Indian Souvenirs!” Tourists know him as Injun Joe. The toy tepee has changed into a real tepee. The buckskins and tomahawks are spread out on counters for sale. The child is a man who refuses to put away childish things. “Haven’t you guessed? I’m a case of arrested development, Peter Pan in a war bonnet,” he says. Erl König Boyden—he was named after his mother’s favorite Schubert song—has been soldier, sailor, artist, stage designer and Jack-of-all-trades, but says the proudest day of his life was the day he met Buffalo Bill.57

Sangster goes on to describe Injun Joe in Algonquin Park, which sits north of the Great Lakes and west of Ottawa in Ontario. Injun Joe, a popular attraction, “makes enough money in the

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four summer months to travel for the rest of the year. From June to September cars line up at Injun Joe’s door, full of tourists eager to buy his stuff and beg his picture, for curiously the boy who dreamed of becoming an Indian has grown up to look like one.” Sangster, seemingly at pains to figure out Injun Joe’s popularity, does so through the folklore surrounding Algonquin Park. Tourists, she explains, think of it as an amusement park, complete with hot dogs, scenic railway, and possibly a small skirmish between rival Indian tribes in full war regalia. When they discover that Algonquin is not and has never claimed to be anything but a magnificent primitive forest and game reserve they can’t help being disappointed. They hurry past the beautiful lakes, stare apathetically at a few deer nibbling soda biscuits at headquarters, and settle down in a fine public campsite for a spot of fishing.

The disappointed tourists, Sangster muses, turn their attention and funds to Injun Joe’s wares, which include “pennants and postcards, deerskin purses and moosehide moccasins, beaded belts, porcupine quill table mats, carved wooden animals, clay peace pipes, birchbark canoes, sweetgrass baskets, hand-carved leather saddles, feathered dance bustles, corn-husk dolls, and small Indian drums, decorated with painted thunderbirds.” The goods are made by Boyden, private entrepreneurs, and “Canadian Indians under the supervision of the Indian Affairs Branch.” Boyden, however, “is discouraged by both the quantity and the quality of native Indian handiwork, which he attributes to indifference on the part of the Indian and exploitation on the part of the white man.” Sangster’s long descriptions of Injun Joe’s products, the tourists who buy from him, and his trade with Indians are accented

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by the fact that Boyden readily admits that he is not of Indian descent: “Erl König Boyden may look like an Indian, think like an Indian and spend most of his year among Indians, but so far as he knows he hasn’t a drop of Indian blood. His father was a wellto-do Ottawa merchant (in household furniture) who traced his family to Thomas O’Boyden of Yorkshire. His mother was Irish.” But Joseph Boyden has claimed otherwise. His 2005 novel Three Day Road is about a Cree veteran of World War I and the attempts of his aunt to restore him to health. In an autobiographical reader’s guide, Joseph Boyden explains the novel’s inspiration: In the summer of 1945, Erl, my dad’s older brother, was living a traditional lifestyle in a teepee near Algonquin Park, selling crafts to tourists. Uncle Erl had experienced World War I and was too old for this second great war, but I doubt he would have wanted to participate anyway. He enjoyed life in the woods of northern Ontario in summer and the life of a world wanderer in winter . . . My father was blond and blue eyed. Erl was brown and high-cheek boned and had a hooked nose. [Their younger brother] Robert looked something in the middle. My father chose one route. He became a doctor and a war hero and brought his family to the city. Erl took the other route. He lived in the bush and made his own clothing out of hide and traveled the world with only a few coins in his pocket, somewhere along the way picking up what now sounds like the horribly racist moniker “Injun Joe.” There are still postcards of him in full Indian regalia floating around Algonquin Park trading posts. Robert chose a quiet life somewhere between the two . . . I returned with my wife to Ontario and took a job as professor of aboriginal programs on James Bay in the far north. Here I was introduced to the Mushkegowuk Cree, northern cousins of the Ojibwa. Stationed in Moosonee, I worked for two years up and

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down the reserves of the west coast of the bay—Moose Factory, Fort Albany, Kashechewan, and Attawapiskat—teaching communications, my wanderlust satisfied by moose and caribou hunts and snowmobile treks into the frozen wilderness of Hudson Bay. Over the last ten years this gateway to the last great wilderness has become my muse and obsession, refusing to loosen its grip on me even now that I am back in New Orleans teaching in the same MFA program that birthed me. I visit what have become old friends on James Bay a number of times a year. It seems I’m a bit of a split personality, a combination of my father and my uncle Erl. I have my father’s responsibility and my uncle’s belief that the world is to be traveled. I split my life between the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf of the Arctic. I write and I teach writing. My heart is part Irish, part Ojibwa. I’m a Canadian in America. I’m grounded by history, and I am inspired by legend. I’m part my father, part my uncle. I am a father to my son, Jacob, and I am a writer.58

Barrera observes that the available information about Erl Boyden does not corroborate Joseph Boyden’s claims about his uncle or family. As both Jago and Barrera note, this lack of corroboration is complicated by the inconsistency in how Boyden has identified over time. As they summarize: On his Speaker’s Bureau Profile, where you can hire Boyden to give his signature speech titled “The Aboriginal Experience,” Boyden is described as Métis, an identity he also claimed when he won the 2005 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award and its $5000 prize.59 In 2005, in an interview with the New Scotsman, Boyden said his father was part Mi’kmaq.60 In 2005, in an interview with Quill and Quire, Boyden is described as having Mi’kmaq somewhere down his father’s lineage, along with Métis ancestry.61

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In 2008, Boyden identifies his ancestry in three different ways: In the Globe and Mail, he is said to have Mi’kmaq and Ojibwa ancestry through his father’s and mother’s families. In the Star, he is referred to as a Woodland Métis with Irish, Scottish, and Ojibwa ancestry. In a promotional blurb for the Winnipeg Writer’s Festival, Boyden is described as having “Irish, Scottish, and Métis roots.” 62 In 2009, Boyden says in an interview with Toronto Life: “My family is Métis. I’m a mixed blood of Irish, Scottish and Ojibwa . . . My experience with First Nations communities across Canada is that they’ve always been extremely welcoming, especially when the band is not my own . . . the Cree up in James Bay, the Ojibway in different communities than mine.” 63 In 2014, in an interview with The Walrus, Boyden claims his father’s ancestry included the Nipmuc. In an interview with CBC’s Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild, Boyden claimed he discovered this heritage by reviewing Nipmuc membership rolls.64 In 2015, at Carleton University’s Voicing Aboriginal Stories conference, Boyden was described as Ojibwa.65 To CBC Aboriginal, Boyden presented himself as Anishinaabe and Nipmuc.66

Barrera’s research into Boyden’s claims about Nipmuc heritage and the membership rolls could not be substantiated; “it is difficult to determine where Boyden’s father’s side links into his claimed Indigenous heritage over roughly the last 170 years,” he concluded. Barrera was also unable to corroborate Boyden’s claim to Ojibway ancestry through his mother. All available genealogical records point only to the Scottish and Irish. “APTN also contacted Boyden’s sister, Mary Boyden, who works as the Aboriginal liaison for mining firm Goldcorp and is part of the Eight Fire Solutions consulting firm, but she refused to provide

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comment and sent a terse email suggesting a story into her family’s background would ‘descend into a progression of lateral violence and gossip.’ ” 67 When Barrera requested an interview, Boyden responded with the following statement: My family and I are keepers of a number of oral histories passed down to us from previous generations that speak both to our European and to our Indigenous roots. I, along with other siblings, have also participated in many ceremonies performed by traditional elders and healers across the country. My family is Mukwa Dodem, Bear Clan. I myself have been given two traditional names in ceremony, one of them by my beloved elder and teacher Basil Johnston, a man who taught me much of my own history, and pride for and love of who I am.68

Two days later, Boyden contacted APTN and provided a second statement that omitted Basil Johnston’s name, “in order to follow proper protocol.” Johnston, who passed away in 2015, was a beloved Anishinaabe author, linguist, and teacher from the Wasauksing First Nation. Johnston’s family sent APTN a statement saying Boyden did spend “private” time with Johnston four months before his death. “Our father admired Joseph Boyden as a writer and as an individual. Our father also encouraged those who were Indigenous to be proud Anishinabe [sic] and to be proud of their culture,” the statement read. “Basil Johnston’s family does not have any information about Mr. Boyden’s Indigenous heritage to comment further.” 69 The day after Barrera’s report was published, Robert Jago published another opinion piece in CanadaLand, explaining why he felt he needed to address Boyden’s identity. In part, his response was prompted by rage over the tweets of public figures, including Margaret Atwood, who had commented on identity frauds in

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such a way that demonstrated a complete disregard for First Nation people’s concerns. He also objected to the way Boyden continued to assume authority to speak on behalf of Indigenous people despite the fact that he was not who he claimed to be.70 In an article titled “Communing with the Dead,” Adam Gaudry draws a parallel between the identity fraud experienced by the Cherokee Nation and that experienced by the Métis Nation. He situates this parallel within the importance of kinship: As Cherokee scholar Eva Marie Garroutte argues, Indigenous kinship is “an ongoing practice or skill, an active relationship that must be maintained and that is not invariably tied to one’s genealogical connections.” Thus wahkohtowin and kinship obligations involve not merely a “relationship to ancestry” but also a “responsibility to reciprocity” that involves reciprocal relationships with living communities that can demonstrate historical-contemporary continuity and are regularly practiced in a contemporary setting.71

Métis kinship, like Cherokee, is not about a far distant line of descent. It is a lived experience of relationship and responsibility to kin, including other-than-human beings, the land, and waters. The idea that an individual can claim heritage—by family legend, documentary evidence, or genetic testing—and entirely skirt accountability to the community from which they claim descent is absurd. It is even considered hostile to the way Métis reckon kinship as a practice of their governance and cultural history. As Gaudry explains, this idea privileges Canadian notions of individual freedom and liberty over and against Métis selfdetermination: “Self-identified Métis do not situate their Métis identity—and the authority to speak about being Métis—in the lived practice of Métis communities that have persisted for generations throughout Western Canada but in written genealogical reports that link them to long-dead Indigenous relatives who

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may not have even understood themselves to be Métis.” This reflects “the belief that contemporary Indigenous communities either don’t exist or are less capable of providing commentary about their own existence than authoritative outsiders, including those interested in reviving a lost identity.”72 As the self-identified undermine Indigenous self-determination, they also serve to provide the rationale for state and public concern. In the space where anyone can claim to be Métis because everyone already is, the state must protect its integrity. It must regulate against the fraud to ensure its democratic ideals are not weakened: good, hard-working citizens demand it. They have, after all, earned their rights through hard work. Frauds have not.

“the american family” In 2012 Sally Jacobs, writing for the Boston Globe, and Twila Barnes, in her blog Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter, commented on a 1906 incident discussed among Elizabeth Warren’s family and reported by the Muskogee Times Democrat.73 The incident concerned Louis Yaholar, a Muscogee Creek, and John H. Crawford, Warren’s grandfather—and, according to Warren, of Cherokee descent. It is worth quoting the two separate accounts of the incident as reported: An Indian named Louis Yaholar was seriously, if not fatally, wounded . . . It appears that the Indian had been in town and was returning home on horseback, when about a mile from town he overtook some boys on horseback and drawing his lariat rope struck one of them several times . . . One of the other boys had a wild horse which it was difficult for the lad to control and the

106 / The Kinless Indian Indian, crazy with drink, fell upon him, beating him with the rope. The father of the boy Crawford, seizing his rifle, ran to the rescue of the boy, and upon hearing the Indian, fired. The Indian put spurs to his horse and escaped, but the white man was a good shot and the bullet from his Winchester passed through the body of Yaholar.74 Louis Yaholar, a drunker Indian, was on his way home from Wetumka, when he overtook several white boys whom he commenced to belabor with his lariat. One of the boys was riding an unruly horse and he could not escape so was severely beaten by the drunker Indian. John H. Crawford, father of the boy, came upon the scene with a rifle and fired at Yaholar, the ball passing through him, inflicting a wound that may prove fatal.75

There did not appear to be any confusion in 1906 about who was and was not an Indian in this incident. There is no record of John H. Crawford being charged with murder, either in the Muskogee Times Democrat article or in any of Warren’s version of her family’s history. Had John H. Crawford been considered Cherokee at the time, his murder of a Muscogee Creek man in Indian Territory would have been responded to and remembered differently. In 1906, he would have been subjected to a tribal response under Cherokee or Creek constitutional or customary law and/or a federal charge under the provisions of the Major Crimes Act of 1885. None of this occurred. It is perhaps too easy to make mistakes when reading absences. But the lack of a recorded Cherokee or Muscogee response suggests that Crawford was not considered a member or relative, or that the respective tribe’s interrogation of a white man for a felony falling under federal jurisdiction would have had serious consequences in tribal-federal relations. The lack of a federal response suggests that Crawford’s actions were not

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considered criminal. White men could kill Indians with impunity, even in Indian country. That the murder seems to be no more than a curious bit of lore within Warren’s family is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. Crawford, who was never charged, is remembered not as the murderer of a Muscogee man but as a father protecting his son. Yaholar’s death is normalized, if not demanded, by his drunken attack on a group of young—read, innocent—boys. Nowhere in the story is Yaholar said to have family, nor does his being in Indian territory matter. It is as if Yaholar should have expected the killing, and his family their injury and loss. Without any respite from this geopolitics of death and harm, Indigenous subjectivity is flattened and stalled. There is no point to making a life if that life is already scripted into death’s cruel imminence. Even survival’s register in grief and anxiety is futile since survival suggests a life worth making. And if a life that can only be bearable is all that is left, what is the value of that life?76 If Indigeneity is where life goes to die, why not just stare down a pint or the barrel of a gun? Meanwhile, Warren’s claim of Cherokee and Delaware descent does a lot of work in resolving her family history of violence against Indians. It resolves the existential and familial crises of imperialism by transcendence while it degrades Indigenous culture and identity. It reconciles imperial dispossession and violence with ancestry. It makes Indigenous people vulnerable to state authority and to public disparagement and brutality. It affirms the state’s narrative of itself as a multicultural democracy while it negates Indigenous cultural self-determination. It

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scripts Indigeneity into fraudulence while affirming imperial narratives of civilization. This is why, or how, Warren claims Cherokee and Delaware descent and not descent from the myriad other tribes in whose territories she and her family have resided. The Cherokee and Delaware are, for her and her family who are from Oklahoma, not the point. They are simply out there, somewhere, being Cherokee and Delaware. But they are not a part of her family history. In any way that matters, they are irrelevant except as family mythos. The irrelevance is re-presented by the forced reliance on public and tribal records for those who have researched Warren’s claims. Warren and her family have no Cherokee or Delaware kin now who claim her. She is—they are—kinless. So genealogists turn to documentation to try to figure out the reasons for the claims. And they find none. Warren’s identity as Indian is only possible in erasure—the erasure of kin, the erasure of record; and into the erasure flows the assertion of a right to and the credibility of a family story that has identified them as Cherokee and Delaware. A right and credibility that dismisses Cherokee and Delaware self-determination—and those stories that define their respective protocols for determining relationship and responsibility—in favor of the individuality of the Warrens. This is all powerfully coded by the title of Warren’s page addressing her identity, “Deep Dive: The Story of an American Family.” It is not a page about Cherokee and Delaware kinship, responsibility, history, culture, or identity. Rather, it is a page celebrating multiculturalism as the thing that links all Americans together despite their differences, racial and otherwise—a multiculturalism through which any American can claim to be

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not merely an Indian but a descendant of the original Americans. In that way, Warren and Trump are one and the same: they are both invoking an Indian that does not belong to Indigenous people. The Kinless Indian thus completes the narrative, and so the final erasure of Indigenous people from the land: we are all Indians now. This is how we end up with a Christina Fallin. Daughter of then–Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin, Christina posted to Facebook and Instagram a portrait of herself in a headdress, allegedly to promote her band, Pink Pony or Chrome Pony. Backlash on social media was so huge that Fallin and the band issued a statement: Growing up in Oklahoma, we have come into contact with Native American Culture institutionally our whole lives—something we are eternally grateful for. With age, we feel a deeper and deeper connection to the Native American culture that has surrounded us. Though it may not have been our own, this aesthetic has affected us emotionally in a very real and very meaningful way. Please forgive us if we innocently adore ourselves in your beautiful things. We do so with the deepest respect. We hold a sincere reverence for and genuine spiritual connection to Native American values.77

Dismissing the way cultural appropriation erases imperial violence against Indigenous people, Fallin and others like her contribute to a dangerous rhetoric. Through it, Native people who refuse imperial valuations of Indigeneity, along with the state narratives and relations that they define, are rendered as grave threats to society no longer deserving of “special” rights or privileges. In short, they become terrorists who must be destroyed.

Radical Alterities from Huckleberry Roots Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: Stop participating in it. Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror 1 Being engaged in land as pedagogy as a life practice inevitably means coming face-to-face with settler colonial authority, surveillance and violence because, in practice, it places Indigenous bodies between settlers and their money. . . . Being a practitioner of land as pedagogy and learning in my community also means learning how to resist this imposition, it’s a process of learning how to be on the land anyway. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy”2

An Indigenous feminist methodology attends to the complexities of relationships between imperial states and Indigenous peoples. My goal here has been to consider how Indigeneity has been made indistinguishable from terrorism, to think through the different modes by which Indigenous peoples are identified and identifiable as terrorists, and to understand how that subjectivity 110

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works in furthering imperialist goals. The history thus created is one in which state discourses of terrorism pretend concern about national security and social stability while in fact rearticulating relations of power predicated on the oppression of Indigenous people. It is a history that demands an otherwise. One mode of the objectification of Indigenous subjectivity is the Murderable Indian, the subject who lacks worth except as a trigger of the state’s technologies of surveillance, incarceration, and violence. This subject cannot stop imperialist aims or practices, or viably challenge racist and capitalist ideologies, existing only as the one who can be, and often must be, murdered. The life of this subject is only valued insofar as it reproduces imperial relations and material conditions of oppression and suppression. The state is thoroughly absolved of responsibility “to protect and to serve” such an Indian, and the public alleviated of complicity. The Murderable Indian disappears into criminality and ever-impending death. A second mode of the objectification of Indigenous subjectivity in state discourses of terrorism is the Kinless Indian, the subject foreclosed within the state’s power to discipline and punish. This Indian is claimed by non-Indigenous, predominantly white, individuals and groups who benefit from and within the social and material conditions of imperialism. It allows them to pretend an identity and history that transcends accountability to the ongoing conditions of genocide and dispossession. It serves to discredit and disparage Indigeneity even as it claims Indigeneity as its own. Together, the Murderable/Kinless Indian disciplines Indigeneity into a positionality of death for the taking. It visualizes the need for the state’s counterterrorist measures while indulging

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the ideological residue of colonial nostalgia for the authenticyet-doomed Indian, relieving the state of any genuine accountability for its violence and land theft while romancing the Indian it is killing. One hardly notices the Kinless Indian’s fraud or degradation of Indigenous culture and identity because it offers such a powerful respite from the Murderable Indian’s death watch. Not only can the Indian survive, but the Indian survives within the state and among its citizens, who knew all along its true value. Indigenous opposition to imperialist valuations of life, land, and labor, and Indigenous refusals of cultural degradation by fraudulent appropriation, are met with the force of counterterrorism. As Michael Gouldhawke argues, these “tactics share the same goal: to eliminate the political alternative and resistance to Canada [the state] that Indigenous Peoples represent.”3 As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, Indigenous people who choose to live on the land anyway are met with either the indiscriminate violence of militarized suppression. Or, they are met with the commercialized fraud of appropriation and resentment.4 In my book Native Acts, I explored how Indigenous people learn to recognize themselves as subjects of the state and submit to the state’s operationalization of its power in the legal terms of recognition and membership.5 Herein I have attempted to understand the question of the state’s formation, of power. Terrorism provides one way of thinking through how power is formed, of the social relations of production and signification it articulates, and to what ideological and material ends. The legitimation of power is the normalization of violent force and the disciplinary work of cultural degradation. As Hannah Arendt argues, the force of power lies not in its abject displays of

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violence or grotesque spectacle of appropriation but in its everyday banality.6 The Murderable Indian and Kinless Indian are effective not because of their exhibition but because of their normality. By reordering Indigeneity into its attendant forms of normativity, or erasing Indigeneity into carcerality and graveyards and fraudulent yet socially beneficial appropriations, the Murderable and Kinless Indian undermine Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. They serve by producing a life without life, freedom, and hope, a life hardly worth fighting for at all. Terrorism provides a useful discourse to think with because it is so overdetermined. The inescapability of terrorism reflects its routine utility. It allows for the relief of having to think too hard about state violence and criminality. It forgives one from having to work to undo that violence or hold the state accountable. Its thoroughness renders change impossible. Nothing would be more sterile or unproductive than to take terrorism at its word. Doing so traps one in a story in which we are all experts or all doomed to resignation and acquiescence. Neither possibility demands that anything be different. In his essay “Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault argues that moving toward a new social configuration, a “new economy of power relations,” requires stories that do not repeat power’s inevitability. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.

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In other words, it is not merely enough to understand power; we must “investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations.”7 There are many ways by which Indigenous peoples oppose and dissociate imperial relations. Drawing from Indigenous feminism, I want to discuss two of those ways as potentially effecting a critical movement forward, by doing a different work with the story of terrorism than merely retelling the state’s permanence and the futility of everything we might do to change things. The first is rematriation and the second is rootedness, not always indistinguishable or so ordered.

rematriation In Black Marxism, Cedric J. Robinson argues that capitalism requires a perpetual accumulation of capital, which can only happen “by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups.” For capitalism to thrive, it must define and enforce an “unequal differentiation of human value” that relies heavily on racial logics.8 In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander demonstrates that capitalism depends on enslaved labor, linking plantation labor and prison labor to global capitalism.9 In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis argues that the ideological work of prisons is to relieve us of having to challenge the racism and sexism of capitalism.10 Social institutions such as prisons, the military, police, and security normalize by shrouding racist and sexist ideology as inevitable outcomes of the other’s criminality: the prisoner is to blame for the prison. Luana Ross, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, and Fran Sugar have shown that Indigenous criminality is a construction of

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imperialism that normalizes territorial invasion, illegal occupation, genocide, and the mass incarceration of Indigenous people as well as violences against Indigenous women and womenidentified individuals.11 This criminality has demanded the extension of the state into and over Indigenous governance, inviting disciplinary administrations into Indigenous lives.12 Imperialism, colonialism, corporations, the military, security, and prisons are so fused to one another as to be impossible to distinguish.13 It will never be enough to reform or defund the police, the military, or security without also addressing corporate collusion. It will never be enough to recognize or reconcile or apologize or compensate for the violence and fraud committed against Indigenous peoples without abolishing the system in which that violence and fraud operate. Imperialism and colonialism must be undone, not as threads that pull at the others but as a woven amalgam of ideologies and institutions that must be obliterated. In its emphasis on territorial-based principles of relationality and the ethics of social responsibility, Indigenous feminism calls for the abolition not merely of the institutions of slavery, prisons, militaries, or securities that advance imperialism, but of the entire system of capitalism and its corporations that need those institutions in order to survive. It offers the rematriation of the land and governance by Indigenous peoples as an otherwise. Rematriation is the only path to a genuine revolution of the imperial formation. And as the present is defined by mass violence, genocide, incarceration, and exploitation, this path cannot wait to be inaugurated by a future imagined. It cannot wait to be phased in, for polite comfort, or civility. It must allow for the discomfort, inconvenience, and discord of revolution. “It’s

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not practical” is the first and last stop on the way to the radical change that rematriation proposes. Rematriation is the return of land to Indigenous governance. Indigenous governance is about relationality and responsibility within and across species, territories, and waters. It is as diverse as those beings, that land, the rivers, lakes, and seas to which it is responsible. It upholds values of reciprocity, generosity, and cooperation. It reflects a genuine equity between genders and sexualities and across generations. It accounts for the most vulnerable and advances mutual aid and community care. It assumes that women and other-than-heterosexually-defined individuals center structures of governance and cultural practice. Indigenous governance would abolish state prisons, the military, and intelligence, not because there would be an absence of law but because the law would not be driven by capitalism. It would not be invested in protecting capitalist valuations of the land, property, and bodies. It would provide reparations and allow for migration. In Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper, a collective of scholars including Hayden King and Shiri Pasternak consider what land return might mean given imperialism’s effect of “dismantling the power of [Indigenous] women, evacuating ceremony meant to honour the animals we hunted, and [contributing to] the rise of homophobia and lateral violence.” The solution lies in a very different approach: Self-determination and land back will only be effective, fair, and sustainable if we reverse these trends. This is not [a] deterministic process of one before the other, but rather as a simultaneous reweaving ourselves back together. The infrastructure to “legally”

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steal our lands is important to understand, and so are the concrete and promising practices to re-assert jurisdiction, but without including a discussion on how the latter is being done in a good way, we’ll keep getting it twisted.14

In any discussion of the rematriation of land, we must critically analyze the heteronormative and exclusionary politics and values that many Indigenous communities have accommodated through gender-based discrimination and exclusion. This includes returning to cultural roots, ones that embrace the leadership of Indigenous women and non-heteronormative-identified people in governance and territorial-based practices based on shared authority, cooperative economies, and reciprocity with and among humans and other-than-human beings. As King and Pasternak argue, it necessitates an Indigenous-led consent practice involving environmental assessment and monitoring and established protocols and permitting.15 And it is not about starting from scratch. The work has always been done, is already happening, in those locations where the “antagonism of strategies” and territorial-based practices are already in the otherwise. The routes to rematriation do not have to be invented. This work does not require the future to inaugurate. But it must be done through both critical analysis and storytelling that refuses to replicate imperial relations and conditions. As many Indigenous officials and activists in the United States and Canada have argued, treaty negotiations must resume with Indigenous peoples to address their rights to governance and territorial integrity under international law. In the meantime, in Alameda County in the east Bay Area of California, the Segorea Te’ Land Trust (STLT) is an urban

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Indigenous women-led effort to facilitate the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Led by Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone) and Johnella LaRose (Shoshone Bannock/Carrizo), the STLT applies the tools of land trusts and conservation easements to enable local Indigenous peoples to steward tracts of their ancestral lands in a traditional manner. By facilitating the transfer of land, including access to sacred places, back to Indigenous peoples, the STLT allows for the repatriation of human remains unearthed in projects throughout the region and the re-creation of shellmounds where ancestors can be reinterred in a traditional manner. As Beth Rose Middleton describes in Trust in the Land, land trusts allow Indigenous people to “undo some of the damage” enacted through state imperialism and “get land back into tribal stewardship.”16 In a special “Land Back” issue of Briarpatch, Xicotencatl Maher Lopez (Two-Spirit Tlaxcaltec Nahua) addresses several efforts aimed at returning Indigenous peoples to their lands.17 Idle No More’s “One House Many Nations” is a campaign focused on “the housing needs of Indigenous peoples both on and off lands under Indigenous governance.” It pressures Parliament and Provisional governments to “live up to their Treaty, moral, and legal responsibilities” to, among other demands, provide adequate housing on reserves: “We are starting a pilot project with the goal of creating a small sustainable village. Sustainable forms of energy such as solar and wind are extremely expensive to access and install especially in non-urban settings.”18 The Trans Mountain Pipeline project, owned by Canada, extends from Edmonton, Alberta, to Burnaby, British Columbia—approximately 1,150 km or 710 miles. Tiny House

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Warriors, an initiative of the Secwepemc Nation located in British Columbia, have constructed ten homes along the pipeline route in that province.19 The homes serve as village sites from which the warriors will assert Secwepemc law and jurisdiction over the land and block access to the pipeline. As with the Unist’ot’en Camp, they have been criminalized, arrested, and punished for their efforts. The anti-imperialist struggles of Indigenous peoples to reclaim governance and territory is not dissimilar to the struggles of Africans, Arabs, immigrants, and others comparatively oppressed by imperialism’s racism and capitalism. Following Foucault,20 let us look at what these struggles, including the fight for Indigenous sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, anti-Islamophobia, anti-transphobia, and the fight for immigrant rights, have in common: 1. They assert the right for things to be different. They reject the narrative archetypes of social evolution, capitalism, and racial difference that articulate imperial formations and their death, degradation, and misery. There is no fate. 2. They identify issues of violence, oppression, and exploitation as urgent, immediate, and visceral. The struggle is not merely about institutional reforms but their collective and individual rights to lives worth living. 3. They demand solutions be implemented now and not deferred to some future date. People cannot wait for the violence and hate to stop; deferral is a form of violence.

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4. They claim knowledge, competence, and qualification in identifying social problems and effecting substantive change. They acknowledge that knowledge is bound up with defining imperial relations of power. How knowledge circulates within those relations and operates within those relationships is important. They believe that what they know, their skills and experiences, provides an otherwise. What is common among these strategies is that they challenge not merely institutions but power itself. And each rejects the inevitability of that power in favor of an otherwise. Inherent within that rejection is the question of power’s modality. In this book, I have tried to show that power is not illusive or sneaky or even mysterious; rather, it is an identificatory practice that seeks to render individuals and groups as subjects. The terrorist is the subject of the imperialist, made to reflect the righteous authority of the state. Imperialism articulates the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, marking them as its own, imposing its laws on them, and coercing others to recognize them as such. Refusing that subjectivity is a refusal of the state’s authority.

(re)turning to huckleberry roots In Swampy Cree the word for land—“aski”—is inanimate. As Alex’s father Stan explained to her, land, alone, cannot perpetuate itself; it takes rain, air, sun, and more. Thus, it is the land’s spiritual connections that animate it. There is a spirit not in the soil, but in the whole system. “Land Back” is the demand to rightfully return colonized land—like that in so-called Canada—to Indigenous Peoples. But when we say “Land Back” we aren’t asking for just the ground, or for a piece of

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paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth. We want the system that is land to be alive so that it can perpetuate itself, and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That’s what we want back: our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected. Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai, “Land Back Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts”21

I have recounted the Lenape creation story of Sky Woman before. Sky Man lived in a lodge in the middle of the people’s village. For reasons no one quite understood, he got to brooding. One day, a man of the village suggested that perhaps Sky Man wanted the rather large tree in front of his lodge to be pulled up and moved away. It was, after all, one of the things he had complained about the most. So the people, desperate to help Sky Man and figuring it was as good a way as any, pulled up the tree. In doing so, they created a large hole where the ground fell through. Sky Man approached the hole and leaned far over to look through it. Abruptly he called his wife to join him. “Come on, Sky Woman, come see what everybody is looking at!” Sky Woman, though uneasy, was curious. “You really must take a look. Don’t be afraid. I’m standing right here.” Sky Woman walked over to the hole and leaned far over to look through it. Suddenly, Sky Man reached over and pushed her through the hole. As Sky Woman fell, she grabbed at the roots of a huckleberry bush, taking roots and dirt and seeds with her. She fell far, far down through the hole, down toward the great waters below. She was falling when the Fire Serpent met up with her. “I am sorry Sky Man tried to kill you. It is me that he is jealous of.” Water beings below, watching, decided to hold council. “Who will look out for Sky Woman?” they asked. Turtle spoke up and said she would break Sky Woman’s fall. So when the woman reached the waters, Turtle raised her back and caught her. Sky Woman was grateful to Turtle and wept as she offered all that she had. She placed the huckleberry roots and dirt and seeds on

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Turtle’s back and danced in gratitude. From her dancing, the dirt expanded and the roots took hold and the seeds began to grow, until the whole earth was formed.

Sky Woman’s huckleberry roots were planted in a dance of gratitude, clustered in dirt and seed, to create the world on the back of Turtle in community with Water Beings. Those roots grew to form the ground on which Lenape governance and culture was based, defining an ontology of care in the conduct of relationships and responsibilities toward the land, the water, and other-than-human beings. Later, other kinds of worlds were created. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation. . . . Plants mirror changes in culture and ownership of land.”22 For Kimmerer, restoration of the plants buried, altered, or lost by those forces requires a loosening and opening of the space needed for their return. After centuries of toxic dumping, restoration most certainly now also requires decontamination. We are at a point when the earth is holding humans accountable. The relentlessly destructive forces of imperialism have wrought such harm on the planet that attention to the issues is no longer about choice but about necessity. For the earth to survive, imperialism and capitalism, and the entire edifice of terrorism built to protect them, must be undone. In Grounded Authority, Shiri Pasternak argues that territorialbased practice distinguishes Indigenous jurisdiction from state sovereignty. Whereas authority of the state is located in and by capitalism and property rights, Indigenous jurisdiction is defined in kin-based practices of stewardship of the land.23 Yet

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as Glen Coulthard notes, these forces are incompatible:24 the entire structure of state recognition policy is predicated upon scripting Indigenous peoples and their lands into capitalist relations and material conditions. To fight back, he maintains, Indigenous nations must “refuse to be co-opted by scraps of recognition, opportunistic apologies, and the cheap gift of political and economic inclusion. For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.”25 The social alterity of Indigenous governance and cultures have always defined Indigenous opposition to pipelines, repudiation of state violence, and rejections of cultural appropriation. Indigenous refusals to be “co-opted” and gifted and recognized into an imperial formation have been met by the United States and Canada with the full force of their counterterrorist resources. These states have produced the punitive conditions in which frauds degrade Indigenous cultures and murderers act with impunity. Roots, huckleberry and otherwise, are interdependent. Diverse forms of life exchange water, minerals, chemicals, and information through them. As a result of this exchange, roots are able to modify their growth, respond to one another’s needs, and anchor themselves against external stresses. In their relationships to one another, they assume responsibilities for one another. They modify, adjust, and support, with older ones taking special care of and mentoring younger ones. They do not compete over resources or space. The vibrant relationships of root systems require engaged communication and caring attentiveness, the exchange of information, dedicated listening and seeing. This vibrancy defines a host of responsibilities characterized by intergenerationality,

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humility, deference, care, generosity, and reciprocity. There is no place for individual competitiveness in the health and vitality of the whole. Although single groups and individuals may live and grow, over time they will lose vibrancy. Diversity is required. Groups and individuals need others not like themselves. In this sense, diversity and interdependence are co-constitutive. In 1985, in a speech at the United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, visual artist and activist Lilla Watson said, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Watson, a Murri from Queensland, Australia, has said since and repeatedly that she was “not comfortable being credited for [saying] something that had been born of a collective process,” and preferred instead that the words and their meaning be credited to “Aboriginal activist groups, Queensland, 1970s.” She thus held herself—and the practice of citing her—accountable to the community to which she belonged. That ethic is further reflected in her—in her community’s—perspective that genuine decolonization will happen only as our various social movements address shared conditions of oppression. Our liberation is bound up together.

ack nowledgm ents

Books, like forests, have life-cycles all their own. They grow over years and years of germination, maturity, death, and decomposition. Climate and weather, nutrition and crowding, disease and wildfire impact their vitality but also create the conditions for growth and regeneration. Several people tended to this book’s life cycles. They helped me think and feel through it as a process, not merely as a product with a deadline. To my dearest ones, Don’t Rhine, Melissa Nelson, Catriona Rueda Esquibel, Luz Calvo, Keta Miranda, Tami Albin, and Sherri Tucker, I offer my deepest thanks for and to you. To my bestie collaborators, Jodi Byrd, Juliana Hu Pegues, Mishuana Goeman, Audra Simpson, Jennifer Denetdale, and Alyosha Goldstein, I am forever grateful. To Donna Haraway, Angela Davis, and Gina Dent, I remain indebted and humbled. My community at San Francisco State University provides me with a solid base from which to work. Thank you, in particular, to Falu Bakrania, Katynka Martinez, Abul Pitre, Mai Nhung Le, Russell Jeung, Grace Yoo, Amy Sueyoshi, Rob Collins, John-Carlos Perea, and Eddie Madril. My community in Oakland and with Segorea Te’—Corrina Gould, Johnella Rose, Darcie Houck, and Beth Rose Middleton—grounds me.

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/ Acknowledgments

Chapters of this project began as conversations—at a writing workshop in France, during a symposium in Lebanon, in an academic delegation to Palestine, and at the annual meetings of the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. My work was tended to by many colleagues who offered important questions and comments, including Rob Nichols, Neferti Tadiar, K-Sue Park, Maryam Kashani, Junaid Runa, Rasmyah Hammoudeh, Cavlan Erengezgin, Jaime Veve, Rabab Abdulhadi, Kevin Bruyneel, Circe Sturm, Heidi Stark, and Jill Doerfler. Thank you for helping me think better. Wanishi.

a ppendi x i A Chronology

1763 1775–78 1778 1788 1812–15 1823 1830 1831 1832 1846–48 1848 1861–65 1867 1871 1871 1871

1873 1874 1875 1876

The British Royal Proclamation (Canada) War for Independence (United States) Delaware Treaty (United States) Constitution ratified (United States) The War of 1812 Johnson v. McIntosh (United States) Indian Removal Act (United States) Cherokee v. Georgia (United States) Worcester v. Georgia (United States) War with Mexico (United States) U.S.-Mexico Treaty Civil War (United States) The British North America Act/the Constitution Act (Canada) Treaty 1: Anishinabe and Swampy Cree (Canada) Treaty 2: Anishinabe (Canada) Suspension of treaty-making by the Senate’s annual appropriations bill (subsequent agreements classified as compacts) (United States) Treaty 3: Saulteaux band of the Ojibwa (Canada) Treaty 4: Cree, Saulteaux band of the Ojibwa, and Assiniboine (Canada) Treaty 5: Ojibwa peoples and the Swampy Cree of Lake Winnipeg (Canada) The Indian Act (amended 1951 and 1985). (Canada)

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128 1876 1876 1876 1877 1879 1883 1883 1885 1885 1886 1887 1898 1898 1898 1899 1903 1905 1906 1908 1913 1914–18 1921 1924 1924 1934 1939–45 1944 1946–78 1948 1950–53 1953 1953 1954–75 1954 1960 1961

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Appendix I

Residential schools open (Canada) Treaty 6: Cree, Assiniboine, Ojibwa (Canada) Battle of Little Bighorn (United States) Treaty 7: Siksika (Blackfoot), Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan), Stoney-Nakoda, Tsuut’ina (Sarcee) (Canada) Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania (first such in United States) Ex Parte Crow Dog (United States) Court of Indian Offenses (United States) The Northwest Rebellion by the Métis people of Saskatchewan under Louis Riel (Canada) Major Crimes Act (United States) U.S. v. Kagama (United States) General Allotment Act (United States) Annexation of Hawaii (United States) Spanish-American War (United States) Treaty of Paris (United States) Treaty 8: First Nations of the Lesser Slave Lake area (Canada) Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (United States) Treaty 9: First Nations of the James Bay area (Canada) Treaty 10: First Nations of northern Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canada) Winters v. U.S. (United States) U.S. v. Sandoval (United States) World War I Treaty 11: Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut (Canada) Indian Citizenship Act (United States) Indian Health Division created (United States) Indian Reorganization Act (United States) World War II National Congress of American Indians (United States) Indian Claims Commission (United States) Trujillo v. Garley (United States) Korean War House Concurrent Resolution 108 (the Termination Act) (United States) Job Relocation Program (United States) Vietnam War Public Law 280 (United States) Natives granted right to vote in federal elections (Canada) National Indian Youth Council (United States)

Appendix I 1968 1968 1969 1970 1972 1973 1973 1973 1975 1975 1977 1978 1978 1978 1978 1978 1982 1982 1983 1984 1985 1987 1988 1988 1990–91 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1994 1997 2000 2005 2007 2007

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Indian Civil Rights Act (United States) American Indian Movement (United States) Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz (United States) Self-Determination Act (United States) Trail of Broken Treaties (United States) Calder v. AG (British Columbia) (Canada) Lovell v. AG (Canada) Occupation of Wounded Knee Memorial (United States) Quebec signs the James Bay agreement with Cree and Inuit (Canada) Pine Ridge shootout (United States) Senate Committee on Indian Affairs (United States) Indian Child Welfare Act (United States) American Indian Religious Freedom Act (United States) Santa Clara v. Martinez (United States) U.S. v. Wheeler (United States) Federal Acknowledgment Program (United States) Constitution Act, Section 35 (Canada) Indian Mineral Development Act (United States) Lovelace v. Canada (United Nations Human Rights Commission) (Canada) Inuvialuit Claims Settlement Act (Canada) Bill C-35 (Canada) California v. Cabazon (United States) Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Association (United States) Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (United States) Persian Gulf War Oka Crisis (Canada) Sparrow v. The Queen (Canada) Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (United States) Indian Arts and Crafts Act (United States) Indian Law Enforcement Act (United States) Executive Memorandum on Consultation (United States) Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (Canada) Nisaga’a Treaty (Canada) Kelowna Accord (Canada) Canada votes against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples United States votes against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

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Apology for residential schools (Canada) Canada signs the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Canada) United States signs the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

a ppendi x ii Cherokee Treaties and Membership/Census Rolls

Treaty of DeWitts’ Corner Cherokee–United States May 20, 1777 • Ceded lands of the Cherokee Lower Towns in South Carolina. Treaty of Fort Henry Cherokee–United States July 20, 1777 • Confirmed land cessions to the Watauga Association in Virginia and North Carolina. Treaty of Long-Island-on-the-Holston Cherokee–United States July 26, 1781 • Peace treaty between the Overhill Valley, Middle Towns, and the Overmountain settlers. Treaty of Augusta Cherokee–United States May 25, 1783 • Ceded lands in Georgia. Treaty of Long Swamp Creek Cherokee–United States May 30, 1783

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• Confirmed the northern boundary of the State of Georgia with the Cherokee; ceded additional lands to Georgia. Treaty of Pensacola Cherokee, Muscogee–New Spain May 30, 1784 • Trade and political alliance between New Spain, the Cherokee, and Muscogee. Treaty of Dumplin Creek Cherokee–United States June 10, 1785 • Ceded lands to the State of Franklin (Tennessee). Treaty of Hopewell Cherokee–United States November 28, 1785 • Changed Cherokee territorial boundaries. Treaty of Coyatee Cherokee–United States August 3, 1786 • Made with the State of Franklin at gunpoint. Ceded remaining lands north and east of the Little Tennessee River. Treaty of Holston Cherokee–United States July 2, 1791 • Established boundaries between the United States and the Cherokee. Guaranteed by the United States that the lands of the Cherokee have not been ceded to the United States. Treaty of Philadelphia Cherokee–United States February 17, 1792 • Supplemented the Holston treaty. Treaty of Walnut Hills Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Seminole–Spain April 10, 1792 • Tribes promised military protection by the Spanish governor in New Orleans. Treaty of Pensacola Cherokee–Spain September 26, 1792

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• Between the Chickamauga Cherokee (or Lower Cherokee) and Spanish West Florida for arms and supplies to wage war against the United States. Treaty of Philadelphia Cherokee–United States June 26, 1794 • Reaffirmed the provisions of the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell and the 1791 Treaty of Holston concerning land cessions. Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse Cherokee–United States November 8, 1794 • Peace treaty with the Lower Cherokee ending war. Treaty of Tellico Cherokee–United States October 2, 1798 • Treaty boundaries breached by settlers. Cherokee forced to cede lands as an “acknowledgment” of the protection of the United States, with the U.S. guaranteeing that the Cherokee Nation could keep the remainder of its lands “forever.” Treaty of Tellico Cherokee–United States October 24, 1804 • Ceded lands. Treaty of Tellico Cherokee–United States October 25, 1805 • Ceded lands, including lands that would accommodate a federal road through the Nation. Treaty of Tellico Cherokee–United States October 27, 1805 • Ceded land for the state assembly of Tennessee. Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States January 7, 1806 • Ceded lands. Treaty of Fort Jackson Cherokee–United States

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August 9, 1814 • Ended the Creek War in Alabama. Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States March 22, 1816 • Ceded remaining lands in South Carolina. Treaty of Chickasaw Council House Cherokee–United States September 14, 1816 • Ceded lands. Treaty of the Cherokee Agency Cherokee–United States July 8, 1817 • Ceded one-third of lands, removed to Arkansas River. Individual Cherokee east of the Mississippi could enroll to remove to Arkansas, or they could be issued 640 acres whose title would revert to the state upon their death or abandonment of the property. Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States February 27, 1819 • Reaffirmed the 1817 treaty and provided land reserves for certain Cherokee. Council Bluffs Treaty Cherokee–United States December 11, 1821 • Established a new boundary between the Cherokee and Creek nations. Treaty of San Antonio de Bexar (unratified) Cherokee–Spain November 8, 1822 • Granted land in the province of Tejas in Spanish Mexico upon which the Texas Cherokee band could live. Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States May 6, 1828 • Cherokee Nation West ceded its lands in Arkansas in exchange for lands in what became Indian Territory. The Emigration Rolls listed those Cherokee who emigrated to Arkansas (and later to Oklahoma). In 1828, the Cherokee ceded their

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lands in Arkansas in exchange for lands in Oklahoma. The Reservation Rolls listed those Cherokee desiring a 640-acre tract in the east (no record exists of the approximately 2,000 Cherokee who emigrated before 1817). These Cherokee would later form the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Treaty of New Echota Cherokee Treaty Party–United States December 29, 1835 • Surrendered lands of the Cherokee Nation East in return for $5 million to be disbursed on a per capita basis, an additional $500,000 for educational funds, title in perpetuity to an equal amount of land in Indian Territory to that given up, and full compensation for all property left behind in the east. The treaty was rejected by the Cherokee National Council but approved by the U.S. Senate. Henderson Rolls of 1835: Listed over 16,000 Cherokees living in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina who were to be removed to Oklahoma per the Treaty New Echota. Treaty of Bowles Village with the Republic of Texas Cherokee–United States February 23, 1836 • Granted nearly 1.6 million acres (6,500 km2) of east Texas land to the Texas Cherokees and twelve associated tribes. Treaty of Bird’s Fort with the Republic of Texas Cherokee–Republic of Texas September 29, 1843 • Ended hostilities among several Texas tribes, including the Texas Cherokees. (Amended 1844.) Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States August 6, 1846 • Ended the war between factions, attempted to unite the Old Settlers, the Treaty Party, and the Latecomers (or National Party). Mullay Roll of 1848: Listed 1,517 Cherokees living in North Carolina after the removal of 1838 (Eastern Band of Cherokee). Siler Roll of 1851: Listed 1,959 individuals by state and county in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Updated in 1854. These Cherokee were entitled to a per capita payment pursuant to an act of Congress in 1850 (Eastern Band of Cherokee).

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Old Settler Roll of 1851: A listing of Cherokee residing in Oklahoma when the main body of the Cherokee arrived in the winter of 1839. Lists individuals by district with associated children, unless the mother was an emigrant Cherokee, in which case the children were listed with their mother on the Drennen Roll of 1852. There were 44 family groups listed as non-residents. Chapman Roll of 1852: List of 2,134 individuals receiving payments based on Siler Roll of 1851 (Eastern Band of Cherokee). Drennen Roll of 1852: Census of “new” arrivals in Oklahoma. Federal Census of 1860: Census of Cherokee in Arkansas. Treaty of Fort Smith Cherokee–United States September 13, 1865 • Recognized the claims of the John Ross party as the legitimate Cherokee Nation vis-à-vis those of the Stand Watie party. Recognized a temporary cease-fire between the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Comanche, Creek, Osage, Quapaw, Seminole, Seneca, Shawnee, Wichita, and Wyandot, with the United States. Treaty of the Cherokee Nation Cherokee–United States July 19, 1866 • Annulled treaty with Confederate Cherokees; granted amnesty to Cherokees; established a U.S. district court in Indian Territory; prevented the U.S. from trading in the Cherokee Nation unless approved; prevented U.S. from taxing residents of the Nation; established that all Cherokee Freedmen living in the Nation “shall have all the rights of native Cherokees”; established right-of-way for rivers, railroads, and other transportation; allowed the U.S. to settle other Indian people in the Nation upon agreement; prevented members of the U.S. military from selling alcohol to Cherokees for nonmedicinal purposes; ceded Cherokee lands in Kansas; established boundaries and settlements for various individuals. Treaty of Washington Cherokee–United States 29 April 1868 • Supplemented the treaty of 1866 and also ceded the Cherokee Outlet in Indian Territory. Swetland Roll of 1869: Listed those Cherokee, and their decedents, who remained in North Carolina. Created pursuant to an act of Congress in 1868 authorizing removal payment (Eastern Band of Cherokee).

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Hester Roll of 1883: Listed 2,956 persons residing in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey, and California (including the Eastern Band of Cherokee). Federal Census of 1880: Included Cherokee and adopted whites, Shawnee, Delaware, orphans under sixteen years of age, those denied citizenship by Cherokee authorities, those whose claims to citizenship were pending, intruders, and whites living in the Cherokee Nation by permission. Payment Roll of 1896: Listed each payee’s 1851 roll number (based on the Old Settler Roll of 1851), name, age, sex, and post office address. Federal Census of 1900: Listed members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” and of whites and Blacks living in Indian Territory. Dawes Roll of 1906: Final roll for allotment. Churchill Roll of 1908: Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians rolls. Guion Miller Roll of 1909: Census of all Eastern Cherokee (not Old Settlers). Federal Census of 1920: Categorized people as Indian, Black, white, or other. Baker Roll of 1924: Roll of the Eastern Cherokee. The land was to be allotted and all were to become citizens.

notes

prologue 1. Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017); Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974). 2. Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History 86 (March 2000): 1552–1580 (quotations on 1554–1555). 3. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Colin G. Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1994); Philip Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67, no. 3 ( July 2000): 427–441; Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001); Paul Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015); Brian Balmer and John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “The British, United States and Canadian Biological Warfare Programs,” in Biological Threats in the 21st Century: The

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Notes to Pages xiii–3

Politics, People, Science, and Historical Roots, ed. Lentzos Filippa (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2016), 43–67. 4. On systematic sexual violence against Indigenous Americans, see, for example, Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Sarah Hunt, “Representing Colonial Violence: Trafficking, Sex Work, and the Violence of Law,” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice 37, no. 2 (2015): 25–39; and Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt, eds., Keetsahnak/Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2018).

scared red 1. See Melissa K. Nelson, ed., Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (Rochester, VT: Bear & Co., 2008); Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, eds., Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding The World Through Stories (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). 2. Dallas Goldtooth, “The Native American Prophecy of the Black Snake,” Bioneers, 2016, https://bioneers.org/the-native-american -prophecy-of-the-black-snake. 3. Thinking here of Cedric J. Robinson’s definition of racial capitalism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), esp. 76–85. Robinson argues that capitalism requires perpetual accretion of capital and value, which “can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups.” For capitalism to thrive, it exploits an “unequal differentiation of human value” (77). 4. Jack D. Forbes, Native Americans of California and Nevada (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph, 1993), 69. 5. CBC Radio, “Thunderbird Strike: Controversial Video Game Takes Aim at Oil Industry,” CBC Radio, November 4, 2017, www.cbc.ca /radio/unreserved/from-video-games-to-ya-novels-how-indigenous-

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art-is-evolving-1.4384041/thunderbird-strike-controversial-video-gametakes-aim-at-oil-industry-1.4384559. 6. Jacob Dubé, “Destroy Oil Pipelines as a Thunderbird in This New Video Game: Thunderbird Strike Is the Latest from Indigenous Developer Elizabeth LaPensée,” Motherboard, October 19, 2017, https:// motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59ymk5/thunderbird-strike-elizabethlapensee-video-game-imaginenative. 7. Dia Lacina, “Owning Our Resistances with Thunderbirds,” Medium, October 29, 2017 (no longer available online). 8. Julianne Geiger, “New Video Game Targets Oil Infrastructure,” Oil Price, October 20, 2017, https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News /World-News/Heres-Your-Chance-To-Blow-Up-An-Oil-Pipeline.html. 9. Quoted in Daniel Starkey, “No, This Video Game Is Not ‘Eco-terrorism,’” The Verge, November 1, 2017, www.theverge.com/2017 /11/1/16588166/game-ecoterrorism-politics-thunderbird. See also Kate Habrel, “Is Thunderbird Strike a Fun Learning Tool or an Ecoterrorist’s Version of Angry Birds?” Great Lakes Echo, February 14, 2018, http://greatlakesecho.org/2018/02/14/is-thunderbird-strike-a-fun-learning-tool-oran-ecoterrorists-version-of-angry-birds; Minnesota Senate Republican Caucus, “Sen. David Osmek: MN Taxpayers Should Not Be Funding Angry Birds for Eco-Terrorists,” MNSRC, October 26, 2017, www .mnsenaterepublicans.com/sen-david-osmek-mn-taxpayers-not-fundingangry-birds-eco-terrorists.. 10. Mack is quoted in Starkey, “No, This Video Game Is Not ‘Ecoterrorism’ ” and in Dan Kraker, “Video Game Prompts Charges of ‘Eco-terrorism’ from Oil Pipeline Advocates,” MPR News, October 26, 2017,www.mprnews.org/story/2017/10/26/video-game-enabling-fantasypipeline-attacks-draws-fire. 11. Tom Steward, “MN Taxpayers Fund Controversial AntiPipeline Video Game,” American Experiment (2017), www.american experiment.org/mn-taxpayers-fund-controversial-anti-pipeline-videogame. 12. Quoted in Caleb Parke, “Eco-terrorism? Anti-pipeline Video Game under Fire for Putting Lives at Risk, Says Group,” FoxNews, October 27, 2017, www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/26/eco-terrorism-anti

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Notes to Pages 4–7

-pipeline-video-game-under-fire-for-putting-lives-at-risk-group-says .html. See also John Flesher, “Video Game Enabling Fantasy Pipeline Attacks Draws Fire,” Mercury News, October 25, 2017, www.mercurynews .com/2017/10/25/video-game-enabling-fantasy-pipeline-attacks-drawsfire; Raphael Pires, “Video Game Depicting Pipeline Attacks Causes Concern,” KOMONews, October 26, 2017, http://komonews.com/news /nation-world/video-game-depicting-pipeline-attacks-causes-concern. 13. Starkey, “No, This Video Game Is Not ‘Eco-terrorism.’ ” 14. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2019); Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Meditations on Reserve Life, Biosociality, and the Taste of Non-sovereignty,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–15; and Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “LifeTimes of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31, no. 2 (2013): 19–48. 15. Robinson, Black Marxism, 76–85. 16. See, for example, Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Securing Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 131–148; Vine Deloria Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Recreation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011). 17. There are many histories of the Red Scare. I recommend beginning with Murray B. Levin, Political Hysteria in America: The Democractic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1971). 18. Lenin, drawing from the works of Karl Marx, characterized communism as a society run not by a ruling class entitled by inherited wealth and status but by a vanguard of intellectuals, soldiers, peasants, and workers. Lenin was resigned to the fact that to secure communism against a deeply entrenched bourgeoisie capitalism a kind of proletariat dictatorship was necessary: “And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of

Notes to Pages 7–8

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transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority” (Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution [1917; repr. New York: Haymarket Books, 2015], chap. 5). The reigns of Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the first rulers of the USSR, epitomized deep conflict between their expressed socialist ideals and their embrace of a hypercentralized government that controlled all property and means of production. 19. After World War I, the Espionage Act remained dormant until the Obama administration used it to charge whistleblowers. See Greg Myre, “Once Reserved for Spies, Espionage Act Now Used against Leakers,” NPR, June 26, 2017, www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/06 /28/534682231/once-reserved-for-spies-espionage-act-now-used-againstsuspected-leakers; Jameel Jaffer, “The Espionage Act and a Growing Threat to Press Freedom,” New Yorker, June 25, 2019, www.newyorker .com/news/news-desk/the-espionage-act-and-a-growing-threat-to-pressfreedom; Alex Emmons, “The Espionage Act Is Again Deployed against a Government Official Leaking to the Media,” The Intercept, October 9, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/10/09/the-espionageact-is-again-deployed-against-a-government-official-leaking-to-themedia. 20. David MacKenzie, Canada’s Red Scare, 1945–1957, Booklet No. 1 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2001), 6. See also Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918–1919—Canada’s First War on Terror (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011). 21. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 22. Remarks of the Honorable J. Howard McGrath, Attorney General of the United States, Delivered at the Advertising Club of New York “Celebrity Luncheon,” New York City, Wednesday, April 19, 1950, 1–12 (quote at 9), www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy /2011/09/12/04-19-1950.pdf. 23. Levin, Political Hysteria in America, 29. 24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Executive Order 10450, Security Requirements for Government Employment,1953, www.archives.gov /federal-register/codification/executive-order/10450.html.

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25. Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition— An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1996), 40. 26. Gary Marcuse and Reginald Whitaker, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 27. Marcuse and Whitaker, Cold War Canada; MacKenzie, Canada’s Red Scare, 1945–1957, 6. 28. MacKenzie, Canada’s Red Scare, 1945–1957, 8. 29. MacKenzie, Canada’s Red Scare, 1945–1957, 10. 30. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018). 31. President Dwight Eisenhower Farewell Address, January 17, 1961, www.c-span.org/video/?15026-1/president-dwight-eisenhowerfarewell-address: “A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.” 32. United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, “Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Voices: Fact Sheet,” n.d., www.un .org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf.

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33. 25 U.S. Code § 2201—Definitions, Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/25/2201. 34. “Indian Entities Recognized by and Eligible to Receive Services from the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Federal Register, January 29, 2021, www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/29/202101606/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-servicesfrom-the-united-states-bureau-of. 35. Canada, Constitution Act of 1982, Section 35: Rights of the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca /constitution_act_1982_section_35; Canada, Indian Act, Bill C-31, 1985, http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-5. 36. See David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); and S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 37. United Nations Charter, Chapter I: Purposes and Principles, Article 1, Paragraph 2, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter /full-text. 38. Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking the Native and Settler,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 ( June 2017): 267–276. 39. Ben Golder and George Williams, “What Is ‘Terrorism’? Problems of Legal Definition,” University of New South Wales Law Journal 27, no 2. (2004): 270–295. 40. Matthieu Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). 41. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Alex Lubin, NeverEnding War on Terror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 2013). 42. See, for example, Nicole Nguyen, Suspect Communities: AntiMuslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso

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Books, 2015); Sibylle Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Fighter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 43. Golder and Williams, “What Is ‘Terrorism’?” 44. 18 U.S. Code § 2331, Chapter 113B—Definitions, available at www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2331. The definitions continue: “(2) the term ‘national of the United States’ has the meaning given such term in section 101(a)(22) of the Immigration and Nationality Act; (3) the term ‘person’ means any individual or entity capable of holding a legal or beneficial interest in property; and (4) the term ‘act of war’ means any act occurring in the course of (A) declared war; (B) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or (C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin.” Added Pub. L. 102-572, Title X, § 1003(a)(3), Oct. 29, 1992, 106 Stat. 4521; amended Pub. L. 107-56, Title VIII, § 802(a), Oct. 26, 2001, 115 Stat. 376. 45. The Anti-Terrorism Act (2001), S.C. 2001, c. 21, http://laws-lois .justice.gc.ca/eng/annualstatutes/2001_41/page-1.html. See also Suresh v. Canada (2002), https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section83.01.html. 46. U.S. Public Law 103-150 (107 Stat. 1510) (1993), www.govinfo.gov /content/pkg/STATUTE-107/pdf/STATUTE-107-Pg1510.pdf. 47. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada Press Statement, “Prime Minister Harper Offers Full Apology on Behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools System,” June 11, 2008, www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1571589171655. 48. “ADL Report: White Supremacist Murders More Than Doubled in 2017,” Anti-Defamation League, January 17, 2018, www.adl.org /news/press-releases/adl-report-white-supremacist-murders-more -than-doubled-in-2017; Scott Shane, “Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. since 9/11,” New York Times, June 24, 2105, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us -challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html. 49. See Carlie Porterfield, “White Supremacist Terrorism ‘On the Rise and Spreading,’ ” Forbes, June 25, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites

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/carlieporterfield/2020/06/25/white-supremacist-terrorism-on-the-riseand-spreading; Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Will Give Terrorist Label to White Supremacist Group for First Time,“ New York Times, April 6, 2020, www/nytimes.com/2020 /04/06/us/politics/terrorist-label-white-supremacy-Russian-Imperial Movement.html; Scott Shane, “Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11, New York Times, June 24, 2105,www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challengesperceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html; Jacob Knutson, “Garland Asks Congress for $85 Million in Extra Funding to Fight Domestic Terrorism,” Axios, May 4, 2021, www.axios.com/merrick-garlanddoj-domestic-terrorism-02aa5942-dd07-40ab-825f-659b59782772.html; Reuters, “U.S. Spike in Domestic Terrorism ‘Keeps Me Up at Night,’ Attorney General Says,” Reuters, May 4, 2021, www.usnews.com/news /top-news/articles/2021-05-04/us-spike-in-domestic-terrorism-keepsme-up-at-night-attorney-general-says. 50. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 19. 51. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–795. 52. Sherene H. Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 53. Forbes, Native Americans of California and Nevada.

the murderable indian 1. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). See also Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2. Quoted in John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 33.

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3. Philip Martin, “Scalping: Fact and Fantasy,” in Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, ed. Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 1998), 58–59. 4. James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 176. See also Forbes, Native Americans of California and Nevada. 5. Forbes, Native Americans of California and Nevada, intro. 6. Zitkála-Ša, Old Indian Legends (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1902); Zitkála-Ša, American Indian Stories (Washington, DC: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921); Zitkála-Ša, Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). 7. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 13–15, 17. 8. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 15, 16. 9. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 22. 10. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 24–44; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 1–148. 11. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 38; Fiona Venn, The Oil Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2016). 12. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 73. 13. Auzanneau, Oil, Power, and War, 79. 14. Meenal Shrivastava and Lorna Stefanick, eds., Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada (Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press, 2015); Éric Pineault, “The Capitalist Pressure to Extract: The Ecological and Political Economy of Extreme Oil in Canada,” Studies in Political Economy 99, no. 2 (2018): 130–150; Donald Gutstein, The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks Are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2018). 15. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 113. 16. Sohbet Karbuz, “How Much Energy Does the U.S. Military Consume? An Update,” Daily Energy Report, August 5, 2013, http://karbuz .blogspot.com/2013/08/how-much-energy-does-us-military.html.

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17. Robert Artiga-Valencia, “The U.S. Spends More on Its Military Than 144 Countries Combined,” July 18, 2019, www.nationalpriorities.org /blog/2019/07/18/us-spends-more-its-military-176-countries-combined. 18. This includes “$7.5 billion for anti-ISIS operations . . . $6.7 billion for cyber defense, and $1.2 billion for counterterrorism drone flights” as well as allocations for “stealth fighter jets, nuclear submarines, and aircraft-carrier battle groups” (Fred Kaplan, “Obama’s Whopping New Military Budget,” Slate, February 9, 2016, https://slate .com/news-and-politics/2016/02/president-obamas-military-budgetis-still-one-of-the-biggest-ever.html). The dedication to excessively expensive equipment is not uncommon. Every year the U.S. spends so much on “improved” equipment that the Pentagon created the 1033 Program to make its “surplus” available to local police. “The 1033 program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in equipment since its inception in 1997. In 2013 alone it gave nearly half a billion dollars worth of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies” (Christopher Ingraham, “The Pentagon Gave Nearly Half a Million Dollars of Military Gear to Local Law Enforcement Last year,” Washington Post, August 14, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs /wonkblog/wp/2014/08/14/the-pentagon-gave-nearly-half-a-billiondollars-of-military-gear-to-local-law-enforcement-last-year). The “surplus” includes office supplies, generators, pickup trucks, armored tactical vehicles, military aircraft, high-powered weapons with sniper lenses, and grenade launchers; see Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2014). 19. David Pugliese, “Canada Ranked 14th in Military Spending Worldwide,” Ottawa Citizen, May 2, 2018, http://ottawacitizen.com /news/national/defence-watch/canada-ranked-14th-in-military-spendingworldwide; Reuters, “Canada to Boost Military Budget by 70% after Pressure from US to Spend More,” Guardian, June 7, 2017, www .theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/07/canada-increase-military-spendingnato. 20. Reuters, “Canada to Boost Military Budget.” See also the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2017, military expenditures, www.sipri.org/yearbook/2017/09.

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Notes to Pages 34–38

21. Shawn E. Regan and Terry L. Anderson, “Energy Wealth of Indian Nations,” LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources 3, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 196. 22. “Trudeau Says First Nations ‘Don’t Have a Veto’ over Energy Projects,” Financial Post, December 21, 2016, https://business.financial post.com/news/trudeau-says-first-nations-dont-have-a-veto-over-energyprojects. 23. “Trudeau: First Nations Have No Veto Power,” Indian Country Today, May 31, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/kindermorgan-woes-trudeau-first-nations-no-veto-power-tribal-opponentsdeclare-war. 24. “The Atlantic Charter,” August 14, 1941, www.nato.int/cps/en /natohq/official_texts_16912.htm. 25. For more on FVEY, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). The security agencies in question are the National Security Agency (U.S.), Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Australian Security Intelligence Service, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, and the Government Communications Headquarters (U.K.). 26. For fuller treatment of this period and the issues that define it, see Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 221–223; and Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 27. Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, eds., ¡Américas Unidas! Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, 1940–46 (Madrid and Orlando, FL: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012). The Central and South American projects were carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 28. Storrs, Second Red Scare and Unmaking of the New Deal Left, 224. 29. Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 168, 167.

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30. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 168, 170. 31. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 166. See also Dillon S. Myer, “Indian Administration: Problems and Goals,” Social Service Review 27, no. 2 (1953): 193–200; Susette Min, “Homeland Insecurities,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3, no. 3 (2017): 261–273. 32. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 170. 33. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 178–180. 34. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 181. 35. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 180–181. 36. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 188–213. 37. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 217. 38. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 221. 39. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 237. 40. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 242–243. 41. Donald L. Fixico, Bureau of Indian Affairs (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012), 142–144. 42. Pub. L. 83-280, August 15, 1953. See Carole E. Goldberg, “Public Law 280: The Limits of State Jurisdiction over Reservation Indians,” UCLA Law Review 22 (1974): 535; and Carole Goldberg-Ambrose with Timothy Carr Seward, Planting Tail Feathers: Tribal Survival and Public Law 280 (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, UCLA, 1997). 43. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, 247; Karen M. Tani, “States’ Rights, Welfare Rights, and the ‘Indian Problem’: Negotiating Citizenship and Sovereignty, 1935–1954,” Law and History Review 33, no. 1 (2015): 1–40. 44. Robert Higgs, U.S. Military Spending in the Cold War Era: Opportunity Costs, Foreign Crises, and Domestic Constraints (Washington, DC: CATO Institute 1988). 45. Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013); Roxanne DunbarOrtiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018). 46. Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Random House, 2012); Heather Pace Romanoswki, “The Real Terrorists: The FBI’s War against the American Indian Movement” (M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 2004).

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Notes to Pages 45–48

47. Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. See also the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (1976), S. Rep. No. 94 755. 48. [Alejandro Daniel] Wolff, “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Negotiations Slowly Coming to Life,” February 2, 2007, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07USUNNEWYORK93_a. html (punctuation as in original). 49. [Unidentified] Riche, “Australia’s Statement of Support on UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” April 3, 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09CANBERRA340_a.html. See also [Unidentified] Riche, “Australia Will Sign Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” March 26, 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables /09CANBERRA306_a.html 50. Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan, Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2018). 51. For more on Stratfor, see www.stratfor.com. 52. Stratfor emails can be found at https://wikileaks.org/gifiles /docs/38/386519_re-oil-sands-fn-ad-against-enbridge-pipeline-onexxon-valdez.html; . . . /docs/38/3808653_canada-china-energy-econgv-grassroots-gathering-to-resist.html; . . . docs/10/1099935_re-g3-b3gv-china-canada-energy-china-invests-in-canadian.html; . . . /docs/11 /1105419_re-g3-b3-gv-china-canada-energy-china-invests-in-canadian .html; and . . . /docs/39/396375_re-oil-sands-rbc-has-a-new-policy.html. 53. See https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/38/384020_re-phil-may2010-trip-to-bc-coast-.html. 54. See https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/38/386519_re-oil-sands -fn-ad-against-enbridge-pipeline-on-exxon-valdez.html; . . . docs/38 /3808653_canada-china-energy-econ-gv-grassroots-gathering-to-resist .html; . . . /docs/10/1099935_re-g3-b3-gv-china-canada-energy-chinainvests-in-canadian.html; . . . /docs/11/1105419_re-g3-b3-gv-china-canada -energy-china-invests-in-canadian.html; and . . . /docs/39/396375_reoil-sands-rbc-has-a-new-policy-.html.

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55. The report can be accessed at http://michaeltoledano.net/wpcontent/uploads/2016/11/CSIS_117-2016-47_Project-Sitka.pdf. 56. See https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05CALGARY656_a.html; . . . /cables/05OTTAWA3349_a.html; . . . /cables/05CALGARY631_a .html. 57. Crosby and Monaghan, Policing Indigenous Movements, 1–3. 58. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre,” Yes! Solutions Journalism, September 3, 2016, www.yesmagazine.org/peoplepower/why-the-founder-of-standing-rock-sioux-camp-cant-forget-thewhitestone-massacre-20160903. See Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019). 59. Amy Dalrymple, “Pipeline Route Plan First Called for Crossing North of Bismarck,” Bismarck Tribune, August 18, 2016, http:// bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/pipeline-route-plan-firstcalled-for-crossing-north-of-bismarck/article_64d053e4–8a1a-5198-a1dd498d386c933c.html. 60. See Ernest Scheyder, “In North Dakota’s Oil Patch, a Humbling Comedown,” Reuters, May 18, 2016, www.reuters.com/investigates /special-report/usa-northdakota-bust; Kathleen Finn, Erica Gajda, Thomas Perin, and Carla Fredericks, “Responsible Resource Development and Prevention of Sex Trafficking: Safeguarding Native Women and Children on the Fort Berthold Reservation,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 40.1 (2017), available at https://scholar.law .colorado.edu/articles/629; Carla F. Fredericks, Kate Finn, Erica Gajda, and Jesse Heibel, “Responsible Resource Development: A Strategic Plan to Consider Social and Cultural Impacts of Tribal Extractive Industry Development,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender online, Oct. 23, 2018. 61. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Dakota Access Pipeline Environmental Assessment Report, December 9, 2015, www.nwo.usace.army.mil/Missions /Civil-Works/Planning/Project-Reports/Article/633496/dakota-accesspipeline-environmental-assessment; North Dakota County Report, Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact, July 2016, www.documentcloud .org/documents/3460832-DAPL-EnviroAssessment-July252016.html.

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Notes to Pages 51–53

62. The Dakota Access suit can be found at www.documentcloud .org/documents/3460834-170815-DakotaAccessLLC-Countersuit.html. 63. Merrit Kennedy, “Temporary Order Halts Construction on Part of North Dakota Pipeline,” NPR, September 7, 2016, www.npr.org /sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/07/492988500/judges-order-halts-constructionon-part-of-north-dakota-pipeline. 64. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, September 9, 2016, available at http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files /order-denying-PI.pdf. 65. U.S. Department of Justice, Joint Statement from the Department of Justice, the Department of the Army, and the Department of the Interior Regarding Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, September 9, 2016, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/joint-statementdepartment-justice-department-army-and-department-interior-regardingstanding. 66. Department of Army, Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement in Connection with Dakota Access LLC’s Request for an Easement to Cross Lake Oahe, North Dakota, Federal Registrer, January 18, 2017, www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01 /18/2017–00937/notice-of-intent-to-prepare-an-environmental-impactstatement-in-connection-with-dakota-access-llcs. 67. White House Office of the Press Secretary, Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army, January 24, 2017, available at https://legacy .npr.org/assets/news/2017/01/DakotaAccessConstruction.pdf. 68. Department of Army, Memorandum for Record, Subject: Compliance with Presidential Memorandum ( January 24, 2017), February 7, 2017, www.documentcloud.org/documents/3460889-Memo-Feb7-0 .html. 69. Rebecca Hersher, “Key Moments in the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight,” NPR, February 22, 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way /2017/02/22/514988040/key-moments-in-the-dakota-access-pipelinefight; Valerie Volcovici, “Federal Judge Orders More Environmental Analysis of Dakota Pipeline,” Reuters, June 14, 2017, www.reuters.com /article/us-northdakota-pipeline-dapl-idUSKBN19538I.

Notes to Pages 54–58

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70. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, et al., v. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, June 14, 2017, available at http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files /DAPL-order.pdf. 71. Quoted in Cat Whipple, “WPLC Fights for Water Protectors,” The Circle: Native American News and Arts, July 5, 2018, http:// thecirclenews.org/cover-story/wplc-fights-for-water-protectors. 72. Tara Houska, “Indigenous Activist Zip-Tied & Locked in Dog Kennel for 6 Hours for Protesting Dakota Access Pipeline,” Democracy Now!, November 16, 2016, www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/indigenous _activist_zip_tied_locked_in. 73. For detailed documentation of the incidents detailed in the following, see Water Protector Legal Defense, Arrests and Civil Cases, https://waterprotectorlegal.org. 74. Lakota People’s Law Project, Native Lives Matter, February 2015, https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/lakota-peoples-law/uploads/NativeLives-Matter-PDF.pdf, 7,1. 75. Lakota People’s Law Project, “Native Lives Matter,” www .lakotalaw.org/resources/native-lives-matter. 76. Office of the Correctional Investigator, Annual Report, 2016–2017, June 28, 2017, www.oci-bec.gc.ca/cnt/rpt/pdf/annrpt/annrpt20162017 -eng.pdf, 47. 77. Vicki Charlrand, “Broken System: Why Is a Quarter of Canada’s Prison Population Indigenous?” The Conversation, February 18, 2018, http://theconversation.com/broken-system-why-is-a-quarter-ofcanadas-prison-population-indigenous-91562. 78. Luana Ross, Inventing The Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012). 79. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, U.S. Protest Law Tracker, www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker. 80. The letter can be found at https://pipelinelaw.huntonwilliam sblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2017/11/Protecting-EnergyInfrastructure-letter-to-DOJ-10–23–17.pdf.

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81. Susie Cagle, “Protesters as Terrorists: Growing Number of States Turn Anti-pipeline Activism into a Crime,” Guardian, July 8, 2019, www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/wave-of-newlaws-aim-to-stifle-anti-pipeline-protests-activists-say. 82. Will Parish, “An Activist Stands Accused of Firing a Gun at Standing Rock. It Belonged to her Lover, an FBI Informant,” The Intercept (December 11, 2017), https://theintercept.com/2017/12/11/standingrock-dakota-access-pipeline-fbi-informant-red-fawn-fallis. 83. FBI Counterterrorism Division, “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers,” August 3, 2017, www.documentcloud.org/documents/4067711-BIE-Redacted.html. 84. Alleen Brown, Will Parish, and Alice Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to ‘Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies,’” The Intercept, May 27, 2017, https://theintercept .com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorismtactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies. See also “Intercept: Private Security Firm Used Counterterrorism Tactics against DAPL Water Protectors,” Democracy Now!, May 30, 2017, www .democracynow.org/2017/5/30/headlines/intercept_private_security_ firm_used_counterterrorism_tactics_against_dapl_water_protectors. 85. Brown, Parrish, and Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics.” 86. Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri, “Standing Rock Documents Expose Inner Workings of Surveillance Industrial Complex,” The Intercept, June 3, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/06 /03/standing-rock-documents-expose-inner-workings-of-surveillanceindustrial-complex/. 87. Brown, Parrish, and Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics.” 88. Zoë Ducklow, “Judy Wilson’s Message for Canadians: ‘The Land Defenders Are Doing This for Everybody,’ ” The Tyee, January 10, 2019, https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/01/10/Not-What-ReconciliationLooks-Like. 89. Amber Bracken, “ ‘They Are Erasing Our History’: Indigenous Sites Buried under Coastal GasLink Pipeline Infrastructure,” The Narwhal, January 14, 2020, https://thenarwhal.ca/they-are-erasing-

Notes to Pages 62–67

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our-history-indigenous-sites-buried-under-coastal-gaslink-pipelineinfrastructure. 90. Unist’ot’en Camp, No Pipelines Background of the Campaign, https://unistoten.camp/no-pipelines/background-of-the-campaign. 91. Unist’ot’en Camp, No Pipelines Background. 92. Unist’ot’en Camp, Timeline of the Campaign, https:// unistoten.camp/timeline/timeline-of-the-campaign. 93. Quoted in Justin Brake, “Government Document Calls Unist’ot’en Leader ‘Aboriginal Extremist,’” APTN News, December 3, 2018, https:// aptnnews.ca/2018/12/03/government-document-calls-unistoten-leaderaboriginal-extremist. 94. Brake, “Government Document Calls Unist’ot’en Leader ‘Aboriginal Extremist.’ ” 95. Brake, “Government Document Calls Unist’ot’en Leader ‘Aboriginal Extremist.’ ” 96. Jaskiran Dhillon and Will Parrish, “Canada Police Prepared to Shoot Indigenous Activists, Documents Show,” Guardian, December 20, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/canada-indigenousland-defenders-police-documents. 97. Dhillon and Parrish, “Canada Police Prepared to Shoot.” 98. Brake, “Government Document Calls Unist’ot’en Leader ‘Aboriginal Extremist.’ ” 99. United Nations Human Rights Council, Follow-up Report on Indigenous Peoples and the Right to Participate in Decision-Making, with a Focus on Extractive Industries, April 30, 2012, www.ohchr.org/Documents /Issues/IPeoples/EMRIP/Session5/A-HRC-EMRIP-2012–2_en.pdf. 100. Justin Nobel, “Whose Allegiance? Three Percenters Militia Working in Bakken Oil Patch Raises Concerns of Domestic Terrorism Risk,” DeSmog Blog, July 21, 2020, www.desmogblog.com/2020/07/21 /three-percenters-militia-bakken-oil-oneok-domestic-terrorism. 101. See Climate Denier Roundup, “Is a Far-Right Militia Taking over the Bakken Oil Fields?” Red, Green, and Blue, July 23, 2020, http:// redgreenandblue.org/2020/07/23/far-right-militia-taking-bakken-oilfields. 102. Sovereign Bodies Institute, www.sovereign-bodies.org/mmiw -database. Recent reports can be found at “REPORT: Missing

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Notes to Pages 68–70

Murdered and Indigenous People (MMIP) in States Impacted by the Keystone XL Pipeline via the Sovereign Bodies Institute,” ACLU South Dakota, February 26, 2021, www.aclusd.org/en/news/report-missingmurdered-and-indigenous-people-mmip-states-impacted-keystone-xlpipeline; and “Big Oil Is Fueling the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” Greenpeace, May 5, 2021, www.greenpeace.org /usa/justice-for-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-will-moveus-closer-to-climate-justice. 103. Climate Denier Roundup, “As Far-Right Militia Takes over the Bakken Oil Fields, Rates of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Skyrocket,” Red, Green, and Blue, July 24, 2020, http:// redgreenandblue.org/2020/07/24/far-right-militia-takes-bakken-oilfields-rates-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-skyrocket/. 104. U.S. Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, The Link between Extractive Industries and Sex Trafficking, June 2017, www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/272964.pdf. 105. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “Reclaiming Power and Place: Executive Summary of the Final Report,” 2019, www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads /2019/06/Executive_Summary.pdf. 106. For a comparative reference to state violence, see Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 107. Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Meditations on Reserve Life, Biosociality, and the Taste of Non-sovereignty,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 1, 2. 108. Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31, no. 2 (2013): 19.

the kinless indian 1. Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Notes to Pages 72–76

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2. Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), 5. 3. Sturm, Becoming Indian, 18. 4. Sturm, Becoming Indian, 85. 5. Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Rebecca Nagle, “Elizabeth Warren Has Spent Her Adult Life Repeating a Lie: I Want Her to Tell the Truth,” Huffington Post, August 23, 2019, www .huffpost.com/entry/elizabeth-warren-cherokee-apology_n_5d5ed7e6e4 b0dfcbd48a1b01. 6. Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700– 1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). Smallpox epidemics swept through the population in 1697, 1738, 1759, and 1780, with grave impacts. 7. See Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Circe Sturm, “Race, Sovereignty, and Civil Rights: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2014): 575–598; Jodi A. Byrd, “ ‘Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There’: American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen, and the Incommensurability of the Internal,” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011): 31–52. 8. Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law: With Reference Tables and Index (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). 9. Julie L. Reed, Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 10. Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 11. Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert Nichols, “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession,” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2018): 3–28; Robert

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Notes to Pages 76–79

Nichols, Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 12. Cherokee Heritage Documentation Center, https:// cherokeeregistry.com. 13. Reed, Serving the Nation. 14. David Cornsilk, “An Open Letter to Defenders of Andrea Smith: Clearing Up Misconceptions about Cherokee Identification,” Indian Country Today, July 11, 2015, updated September 12, 2018, https:// indiancountrytoday.com/archive/an-open-letter-to-defenders-of-andreasmith-clearing-up-misconceptions-about-cherokee-identification. 15. Sturm, Blood Politics. 16. Samuel Thomas Bledsoe, Indian Land Laws: Being a Treatise on Indian Land Titles in Oklahoma and under the General Allotment Act, Amendments and Legislation Supplemental Thereto, Including a Full Consideration of Conveyances of Lands of Minors, Descent, Dower, Curtesy, Taxation, Easements in, and Actions affecting Title to Allotted Indian Lands; Also a Compilation of Treaties, Agreements, and Statutes Applicable Thereto, Fully Annotated (Kansas City, MO: Vernon Law Book Company, 1913). 17. Cornsilk, “Open Letter to Defenders of Andrea Smith.” 18. Testimony quoted in Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Why Donald Trump Calls Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas,’ ” Washington Post, June 28, 2016,www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/28/whydonald-trump-calls-elizabeth-warren-pocahontas; Shawn Boburg, “Donald Trump’s Long History of Clashes with Native Americans,” Washington Post, July 25, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/national /donald-trumps-long-history-of-clashes-with-native-americans/2016 /07/25/80ea91ca-3d77–11e6–80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html; and Philip Bump, “How Donald Trump’s 1993 Comments about ‘Indians’ Previewed Much of His 2016 Campaign,” Washington Post, July 1, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/01/how-donaldtrumps-1993-comments-about-indians-previewed-much-of-his-2016campaign. 19. Lee, “Why Donald Trump calls Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas.’ ” See also Phil Mattingly and Ted Barrett, “Trump To Dems: ‘Pocahontas Is Now the Face of Your Party,’ ” CNN, February 11, 2017,

Notes to Pages 79–81

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www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/politics/donald-trump-elizabeth-warren-voterfraud. 20. She did not, however often reported, apply as an American Indian for admission or financial aid while an undergraduate at University of Houston or as a law student at Rutgers University. See Garance Franke-Ruta, “Is Elizabeth Warren Native American or What?” Atlantic, May 20, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive /2012/05/is-elizabeth-warren-native-american-or-what/257415; Lee, “Why Donald Trump calls Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas.’ ” 21. Curt Nickisch, “Voters Question Warren’s Embrace of Minority Heritage,” WBUR News, May 2, 2012, www.wbur.org/news/2012 /05/01/warren-native-american. 22. Quoted in Franke-Ruta, “Is Elizabeth Warren Native American or What?” 23. Suzan Shown Harjo, “What’s the Deal with Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee?” Indian Country Today, May 15, 2012, updated September 12, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday/archive/what-s-the-deal-with-elizabethwarren-cherokee; Editorial, “Elizabeth Warren’s Genealogical Challenge,” Indian Country Today, May 15, 2012, updated September 13, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday/archive/elizabeth-warrens-genealogicalchallenge. 24. Rob Capriccioso, “Cherokee Women Try to Meet with Elizabeth Warren; Campaign Offends Them,” Indian Country Today, June 21, 2012, updated September 13, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive /cherokee-women-try-to-meet-with-elizabeth-warren-campaign-offendsthem. 25. David Wright, “Warren Blasts Trump; He Calls Her ‘Pocahontas,’ ” CNN Politics, May 25, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/05/25/politics /elizabeth-warren-slams-donald-trump. 26. Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s Claim That Elizabeth Warren Made a ‘Quick Killing’ in Foreclosures,” Washington Post, June 6, 2016, www .washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/06/trumps-claimthat-elizabeth-warren-made-a-quick-killing-in-foreclosures. 27. Tom McKay, “Donald Trump Just Doubled Down on Elizabeth Warren,” Mic, June 27, 2016, www.mic.com/articles/147187/donald-

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Notes to Pages 82–84

trump-just-doubled-down-on-elizabeth-warren-we-call-her-pocahontasfor-a-reason. See also Sophie Tatum, “Trump: Elizabeth Warren Is ‘Very Racist,’ ” CNN Wire, June 12, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/06/11 /politics/donald-trump-calls-elizabeth-warren-racist/index.html; Alan Rappeport, “Navajo Leaders Reject Meeting with Trump in Campaign of ‘Pocahontas’ Taunts,” New York Times, June 18, 2016, www .nytimes.com/2016/06/18/us/politics/donald-trump-native-americans .html; Gabrielle Levy, “Trump Campaign Ups Attacks on Warren as ‘Pocahontas,’ ” US News, June 27, 2016, www.usnews.com/news/articles /2016–06–27/trump-campaign-ups-attacks-on-warren-as-pocahontas; and Mattingly and Barrett, “Trump to Dems.” 28. “Trump: I’ll Donate $1 Million to Native American Charity If I Can ‘Personally’ Test Warren’s DNA,” Daily Beast, October 16, 2018, www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ill-donate-dollar1-million-to-nativeamerican-charity-if-i-can-personally-test-warrens-dna. 29. Rebecca Nagle, “I Won’t Support an Elizabeth Warren Presidency while She Appropriates My Identity,” Huffington Post, October 3, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-elizabeth-warren-nativeamerican-identity_us_5bb4e922e4b0876eda9a72e1. 30. NCAI Press Release, “Senator Elizabeth Warren Addresses Native Heritage and Commits to Indian Country,” National Congress of American Indians, February 14, 2018, www.ncai.org/news/articles/2018 /02/14/senator-elizabeth-warren-addresses-native-heritage-and-commitsto-indian-country-at-the-national-congress-of-american-indians-2018winter-session. 31. All quotes in the following discussion are from these documents, which were located at https://elizabethwarren.com/fact-squad /story-of-an-american-family but are no longer available online. Many of the quotations can also be found in the news accounts of the time. 32. Quoted in “The Differences between Native Ancestry and Tribal Citizenship, Family Tree, n.d., www.familytree.com/blog/the -differences-between-native-ancestry-and-tribal-citizenship. Bustamante’s report is available at https://templatelab.com/bustamantereport-2018. 33. Will Chavez, “Cherokee Nation Reponds to Senator Warren’s DNATest,”www.cherokeephoenix.org/news/cherokee-nation-responds-

Notes to Pages 84–87

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to-senator-warrens-dna-test/article_d7a84410–2e21–5fcb-9734-e8219d8 c00ce.html. 34. David Choi and Ashley Collman, “ ‘Inappropriate and Wrong’: Cherokee Nation Official Throws Cold Water on Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test of Native American Heritage,” Business Insider, October 15, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-native-american-dna -test-response-tribal-heritage-2018-10. 35. Official Statement from the Delaware Tribe of Indians Re: Elizabeth Warren, October 18, 2018, http://delawaretribe.org/blog/2018 /10/18/official-statement-from-the-delaware-tribe-of-indians. 36. Theda Perdue, Nations Remembered: An Oral History of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1865–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980). 37. Twila Barnes, “Elizabeth Warren Information,” Thoughts from Polly’sGranddaughter,www.pollysgranddaughter.com/p/elizabeth-warreninformation.html. 38. The Eastern Band of Cherokee issued a different kind of statement about Warren than other federally recognized Cherokee nations. See Ashley Collman, “Eastern Band of Cherokee Chief Voices Support for Elizabeth Warren . . . ,” Business Insider, October 16, 2018, www .businessinsider.com/richard-sneed-cherokee-chief-voices-supportfor-elizabeth-warren-2018–10; Levi Rickert, “Eastern Band of Cherokee Chief: Sen. Warren Does Not Claim Tribal Citizenry, Only Tribal Ancestry,” Native News Online, October 18, 2018, https://nativenews online.net/currents/eastern-band-of-cherokee-chief-sen-warrendoes-not-claim-tribal-citizenry-only-tribal-ancestry (URL no longer active). 39. Chris Andersen, “Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2014). See also Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); and Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 40. Andersen, “Métis,” 56. 41. Nichols, “Theft Is Property!”

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42. See Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 43. Christopher Adams, Ian Peach, and Gregg Dahl, eds., Métis In Canada: History, Identity, Law, and Politics (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013). 44. The full text of the 1982 Constitution Act can be found at https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/const_index.html. 45. R. v. Powley [2003] 2 S.C.R. 207, 2003 SCC 43, https://scc-csc .lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/2076/index.do. 46. R. v. Powley [2003] 2 S.C.R. 207, 2003 SCC 43. 47. Another group that represents Métis interests is the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP). CAP’s nine regional affiliates represent all Aboriginal people who are not part of the reserve system, including the Métis and non-Status Indians. 48. Alberta-Métis Settlements Accord, https://open.alberta.ca /dataset/7995f7bb-6b5c-4ba1-81d8-9dd5e6581917/resource/ae03ca27-82b64eda-8ee9-b881a4ad3165/download/2171929-1989-alberta-metis-settlementsaccord.pdf. 49. “About Métis Settlements,” www.alberta.ca/about-metis-settle ments.aspx. 50. Raffy Boudjikanian, “Breaking New Ground: Métis in Alberta Buy Their Land from Province for 1st Time in Canada,” CBC News, March 28, 2018, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/metis-landpurchase-mckay-alberta-1.4596299. 51. “Carbon Bomb: Canada—The Tar Sands Sell-Out,” Guardian, May 28, 2015, www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015 /may/28/carbon-bomb-canada-tar-sands-fort-mckay-town-sold-itself; Chris Nelson, “Fort McKay Métis Nation Builds Booming Business in Oilsands Sector,” Calgary Herald, March 25, 2021, https://calgaryherald .com/news/local-news/fort-mckay-metis-nation-builds-booming-businessin-oilsands-sector. 52. “Understanding the Manitoba Métis Federation Land Claims,” n.d., www.mmf.mb.ca/land_claims_landing_page.php. 53. Alyosha Goldstein, “Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 118 (2014): 42–63.

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54. Robert Jago, “Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry,” CanadaLand, December 24, 2016, www.canadalandshow.com /question-joseph-boydens-indigenous-ancestry. 55. Quoted in Jorge Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity,” APTN News, December 23, 2016, https:// aptnnews.ca/2016/12/23/author-joseph-boydens-shape-shifting-indigenousidentity. 56. Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity.” 57. Dorothy Sangster, “The Double Life of Injun Joe,” Maclean’s, July 21, 1956, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1956/7/21/the-doublelife-of-injun-joe. Further quotes from the article are from this source. 58. Joseph Boyden, “Three Day Road Reading Guide,” www .penguinrandomhouse.com/books/295357/three-day-road-by-josephboyden/9780143037071/readers-guide. 59. Jago, “Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry.” 60. Editorial, “Heartfelt Northern Exposure,” The Scotsman, August 14, 2005, www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/heartfelt-northern-exposure-11402395 (URL no longer active). 61. Donna Baily Nurse, “Way of the Warrior: Joseph Boyden Brings New Voice to First World War Epic,” Quill and Quire, March 2005, https://quillandquire.com/authors/way-of-the-warrior. 62. James Adams, “A Publishing Success Turns into a ThreeBook Road,” Globe and Mail, September 27, 2008, www.theglobeandmail .com/arts/a-publishing-success-turns-into-a-three-book-road/article 1206381/; Vit Wagner, “Northern Roots Still Fuel Joseph Boyden’s Fiction,” Star, September 20, 2008, www.thestar.com/entertainment /books/2008/09/20/northern_roots_still_fuel_joseph_boydens_fiction .html; Press Release, Winnipeg International Writers Festival, 2018, https://thinairwinnipeg.ca/languages/en/writers/joseph-boyden. 63. Quoted in Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity.” 64. Charles Foran, “Revision Quest,” Walrus, October 6, 2018, https://thewalrus.ca/revision-quest/; CBC News, “Joseph Boyden Has Embraced the Visions in His Head,” CBC Radio, October 23, 2015, www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/tradition-authenticity-and-the-

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fight-for-indigenous-identity-1.3281731/joseph-boyden-has-embraced-thevoices-in-his-head-1.3282686 65. Jago, “Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry.” 66. Jago, “Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry.” 67. Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity.” 68. Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity.” 69. Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape Shifting Indigenous Identity.” 70. Jago, “Why I Question Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Ancestry.” 71. Adam Gaudry, “Communing with the Dead: The ‘New Métis,’ Métis Identity Appropriation, and the Displacement of Living Métis Culture,” American Indian Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2018): 168. (I had drafted this chapter before Gaudry published his article, but I am indebted to his work for helping me think through the connections.) For more on the Métis notion of kinship, see Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims on Indigenous Identity (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019); Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Métis Culture in NineteenthCentury Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); and Andersen, “Métis.” 72. Gaudry, “Communing with the Dead,” 163–164. 73. Sally Jacobs, “Elizabeth Warren’s Family Has Mixed Memories about Heritage,” Boston Globe, September 15, 2012, www.boston.com /news/politics/2012/09/15/elizabeth-warren-family-native-americanheritage; Twila Barnes, “Bam! Last Nail in the Coffin on That Old Story,” Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter, October 4, 2012, www .pollysgranddaughter.com/2012/10/bam-last-nail-in-coffin-on-that-old .html. The incident was reported in the Muskogee [Oklahoma] Times Democrat on August 13, 1906. 74. Muskogee Times Democrat, 1. 75. Muskogee Times Democrat, 4. 76. Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Meditations on Reserve Life, Biosociality, and the Taste of Non-sovereignty,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–15.

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77. Ryan Broderick, “The Daughter of Oklahoma’s Governor Caused an Uproar after She Posed in a Headdress for Her Indie Band,” BuzzFeed News, March 7, 2014, www.buzzfeednews.com/article /ryanhatesthis/daughter-of-governor-of-oklahoma-causes-an-uproarafter-she.

radical alerities from huckleberry roots 1. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, a film by John Junkerman ( Jacana Media, 2002); available at https://thoughtmaybe.com /power-and-terror. 2. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25. 3. Mike Gouldhawke, “Land as a Social Relationship,” in Briarpatch, the “Land Back” issue, ed. Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai, September/October 2020, https:// briarpatchmagazine.com/issues/view/september-october-2020. 4. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy.” 5. Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973). 7. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 780. 8. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 76–85. 9. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2020). 10. Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). 11. Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Heidi

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Notes to Pages 115–121

Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016); Fran Sugar,” Entrenched Social Catastrophe: Native Women in Prison,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 2/3 (1989): 87–89. 12. M. Gouldhawke, ”A Condensed History of Canada’s Colonial Cops: How the RCMP Has Secured the Imperialist Power of the North,” New Inquiry, March 10, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/acondensed-history-of-canadas-colonial-cops; Emily Riddle, Abolish the Police: The Financial Cost of Law Enforcement in Prairie Cities, Yellowhead Institute, June 27, 2020, https://yellowheadinstitute .org/2020/06/27/abolish-the-police-the-financial-cost-of-law-enforcementin-prairie-cities; Pam Palmater, “Shining Light on the Dark Places: Addressing Police Racism and Sexualized Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in the National Inquiry,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 28, no. 2 (2016): 253–284. 13. Vicki Chartrand, ”Unsettled Times: Indigenous Incarceration and the Links between Colonialism and the Penitentiary in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 61, no. 3 ( July 2019): 67–89; Sarah Hunt, “In Her Name—Relationships as Law,” TEDxVictoria, 2013, available at https://youtu.be/XmJZP2liqKI. 14. Hayden King and Shiri Pasternak, Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper, October 2019, p. 6, https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute .org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/red-paper-report-final.pdf. 15. King and Pasternak, Land Back, 48. 16. Beth Rose Middleton, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). 17. Longman, Riddle, Wilson, and Desai, eds., Briarpatch “Land Back” issue. 18. https://idlenomore.ca/one-house-many-nations. 19. www.tinyhousewarriors.com. 20. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 781. 21. Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai, “Land Back Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Letter from the Land Back Editorial Collective,” Briarpatch “Land Back” issue (see above, n. 3).

Notes to Pages 122–123

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22. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkwood, 2013), 261. 23. Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 6. 24. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Reflecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), esp. chap. 2. 25. Glen Coulthard, “For Our Nations to Live, Capitalism Must Die,” Unsetttling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice, November 5, 2013, https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/for-ournations-to-live-capitalism-must-die.

glossa ry

affect The word affect means to have an effect on. Many feminists use it to talk about the way certain actions or images presume or seek to create certain emotions in order to produce certain results, like representing someone as a terrorist in order to produce fear of them in order to justify police action. alterity/social alterity A state of being alternative, an other, different. Social alterity refers to social spaces of difference from the norm. These spaces include the geographical, the communal and interpersonal, and the imaginary. discourse A shared set of meanings, often meanings that are presumed or taken for granted within a given time and place. When Black queer feminist Audre Lorde said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” she was talking in part about the impossibility of using a discourse to undo itself. The discourse of woman or womanhood, of what is considered acceptable for a woman, cannot be used to undo itself. formation/social formation Those actions that seek to create, to make, to fashion, to shape. A social formation is the process of producing the terms and conditions of social relationships. It is the process of creating, not a structure already made.

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Glossary

ideology A bound set of ideas or beliefs. For philosopher and economist Karl Marx, ideology denotes the dominant ideas governing a society, ideas used to justify the power and privilege of the ruling class. For poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault, ideology is never as dominating as it might at first appear. This is because ideas, while presenting themselves as whole and authoritative, are in fact continuously contested, often through competing claims on what is true. imperialism The word imperial originates from those words meaning supreme power or rule; ism refers to a distinct doctrine or theory, especially an oppressive one. Imperialism is used to identify state policies or actions that seek to expand authority over other people and territory, often through military and economic intervention. neoliberalism The advocacy of free-market or laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending. Neoliberalists believe in sustained economic growth as a measure of human social progress and achievement. This philosophy is most often associated with a corporate ruling class pushing back against labor and other civil rights movements. self-determination The process by which a group decides its own form of governance or an individual controls their own life. Protected by various international accords and treaties, it is ascribed to states, non-state political entities, and individuals. It encompasses all basic human rights, defined by the United Nations as the “rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.” sovereignty Attorney S. James Anaya, the former United Nations special rapporteur on Indigenous peoples, described sovereignty as a state’s collective rights to governance, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy. He observed that non-state political entities,

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such as many Indigenous groups throughout the world, are recognized to possess the rights akin to those of states by international law. I use the term sovereignty when thinking about the rights held collectively by states and other-than-state groups. state In international law, the state is a politically organized body of people occupying a defined territory. The organization results in a centralized government and laws. It consists of a permanent population, defined borders, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. I opt for the term state instead of nation to be consistent with its use in international law.

selected bibliogr a phy

Anderson, Kim, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt, eds. Keetsahnak/Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2018. George, Lily, Adele N. Norris, Antje Deckert, and Juan Tauri, eds. Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous Women. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Lubin, Alex. Never-Ending War on Terror. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Mascarenhas, Michael, ed. Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020. Ross, Luana. Inventing The Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, Rinaldo Walcott, and Glen Coulthard. “Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange (Panel Discussion).” Studies in Social Justice 12, no. 1 (2018): 75–89. Speed, Shannon. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

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Selected Bibliography

Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik. “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land.” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016). Yellowhead Institute, Ryerson University. An Indigenous Abolitionist StudyGuide.https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/08/10/an-indigenousabolitionist-study-group-guide.

american studies now: critical histories of the present 1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson 2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige 3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam 4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira 5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby 6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby 7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris 8. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan 9. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, by Lázaro Lima 10. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, by L. H. Stallings 11. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, by Julie Sze 12. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century, by Naomi A. Paik 13. Neverending War on Terror, by Alex Lubin 14. Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist, by Joanne Barker

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