American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal offers a discussion of settler-colonial biopolitics as it targets Indigenous life across a range of transnationally related, yet distinct, sites of colonial settlement. Moving across these sites, it examines how settler colonial regimes at different locations and at different positions within an economically hierarchized globality employ forms of biopolitics in historically specific ways to their own ends. At the same time, this special issue explores Indigenous life in its manifold manifestations as a site of resurgence, decolonial resistance, and enduring continuity that exceeds any attempt at biopolitical control. The contributions to this special issue thus engage scholarly conversations in critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies that connect a biopolitical logic of racialization, regularization, and naturalization to a geopolitical logic of dispossession and removal as inherent to the eliminatory logics of settler colonialism.

During the first century of Australia's colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims' best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia's Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia's biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott's Benang and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction.

This article explores the long arc of colonial terror in 1930s El Salvador through the establishing of Race Laws that both expelled and prohibited the migration of visibly African-descended peoples into the country whilst the state embarked on the systematic murdering of indigenous peoples as part of an anti-communist crusade. This essay investigates the effect of the Race Laws and 1932s La Matanza massacre of indigenous bodies through a settler colonial optic focused on the biopolitics of colonial terror as a mode of social control. The piece concludes with a reflection on the efficacy of settler colonialism as an analytic for reevaluating Central American history.

Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute author, lecturer, interpreter, and army scout, exploited the biopolitical fiction of ‘Indian authenticity’ to claim a political, activist space for herself and her agenda. Winnemucca's work has generated a great deal of controversy over the last century. The ‘authentic Indian’ stereotypes Winnemucca engages are so intrinsic to settler colonial biopower that dealing with either her lecture series or her autobiography within the traditional binary of assimilation/tradition has been counterproductive. I argue that her work constitutes a challenge to Indigenous authenticity as a strategy of settler biopolitics.

This article explores the imbrication of history, fiction, and biopolitics in a variety of specific confrontations between the Canadian state and the Anishnaabeg in Michel Noël's teen novel Nipishish (2004). Situated in Southwest Québec during the second half of the 20th century, the novel lends itself readily to a biopolitical reading which gleans from and expands on the theories of Foucault, Agamben, and Pratt. Focusing on deconstructing biopolitical strategies of the settler colonial state and agentive Native practices, the analysis underscores how Noël's depiction of Indigenous lifeways and resistance constitute an invaluable political message to Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth alike.

This response addresses aspects of biopolitical regulations by Canada, El Salvador, Australia, and the United States, as critically analyzed in the special issue. Each piece offers much to illuminate different modalities of regulating Indigenous lifeways and Indigenous peoples' resistance to them on myriad grounds, and this response engages three particular themes that emerge from these articles: (1) structural genocide in settler-colonial states' attempts at deracination; (2) Indigenous peoples' agency with regard to anti-normalization; and (3) decolonial resistance outside of imposed settler-colonial binaries. All three aspects challenge the “logic of elimination of the Native” that, as theorized by Patrick Wolfe, is endemic to settler colonialism. The piece also offers some thoughts on these same three key nodes in the case of Hawai‘i and the United States.

Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen nation) is an important voice in contemporary Native literature, and her memoirBad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won multiple awards. This conversation was held in June 2015 in Mainz, Germany, in the context of a symposium during which she gave a reading at a local bookstore. Covering a range of topics on her composition and thematic foci of her memoir and most recent poetry collection, Raised by Humans (2015), the conversation also includes a discussion of two poems in this collection that are reprinted following the interview, in addition to three recent poems of hers.