Theorizing Native Studies

Description

This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as attempts to identify the larger institutional and political structures that enable racism, inequities, and the displacement of indigenous peoples. They emphasize the need for Native people to be recognized as legitimate theorists and for the theoretical work happening outside the academy, in Native activist groups and communities, to be acknowledged. Many of the essays demonstrate how Native studies can productively engage with others seeking to dismantle and decolonize the settler state, including scholars putting theory to use in critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how theory can serve as a decolonizing practice. Contributors. Christopher Bracken, Glen Coulthard, Mishuana Goeman, Dian Million, Scott Morgensen, Robert Nichols, Vera Palmer, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Andrea Smith, Teresia Teaiwa Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith 1 1. There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life / Dian Million 31 2. The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won't Deny / Teresia Teaiwa 43 3. From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh / Glen Coulthard 56 4. Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-Colonial Contexts / Robert Nichols 99 5. "In This Separation": The Noncorrespondence of Joseph Johnson / Christopher Bracken 122 6. Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty / Mark Rifkin 149 7. Indigenous Transnationalism and the AIDS Pandemic: Challenging Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance / Scott Lauria Morgensen 188 8. Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity / Andrea Smith 207 9. Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie / Mishuana R. Goeman 235 10. The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative / Vera B. Palmer 266 Bibliography 297 Contributors 321 Index 323