Abolishing Settler Imperialism: Review of Red Scare

Abstract

Abolishing Settler Imperialism:Review of Red Scare Juliana Hu Pegues (bio) Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 Joanne Barker's Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist is a significant and necessary examination of state power's consolidation through the criminalization and surveillance of Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the historical and contemporary contexts in the United States and Canada, Barker argues that Indigenous peoples are both represented as terrorists and made representable as terrorists in order to establish, organize, and maintain state imperialism. Barker looks specifically to two figures, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, who act in tandem to fortify the authority of the state to regulate identity, punish opposition, and condition the possibilities for life itself. Red Scare offers an important analysis of state power through an intersectional Indigenous studies, which is in conversation with feminist studies, carceral studies, critical ethnic studies, and anti-imperialist scholarship. Readers familiar with Lenape scholar Joanne Barker's work will recognize her incisive critique of colonialism and capitalism grounded in an Indigenous feminist framework. While her previous book Native Acts focused on Indigenous peoples' subjectivity within state formations of recognition and membership, in Red Scare she hones in specifically on how, and to what ends, state and corporate actors (often working together) deploy discourses of national security and public safety in order to enact materially and epistemically violent reprisals against Indigenous activists and Indigenous peoples' self-determination. Since the 1998 publication of Luana Ross's (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) foundational book, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, very few scholars have focused keen attention on the criminalization of Indigeneity and [End Page 221] Indigenous peoples. Such analyses are critical, given disparities within the system of mass incarceration and the alarming yet underreported instances of police violence experienced by American Indian, Alaska Native, Hawaiian, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit persons and communities. Barker joins scholar-activists in Indigenous studies, such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Alderville First Nation), Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in centering the criminalization of Indigenous peoples as both sign and instantiation of colonialism's longue durée in the United States and Canada. Red Scare, moreover, locates the state's current strategies of counterterrorism, particularly in response to the pipeline opposition of Indigenous water protectors, as a continuation of ongoing imperial processes of anti-Indigenous invasion, occupation, extraction, and sexual violence. Throughout the book, the concept of Red Scare functions as both an organizing analytic and a reading practice for studying state formation through this polysemantic phrase that invokes the fearmongering fueled by the discursive and affective imagery of, alternately, the red communist and the racialization of the Native Red Man/Woman. Though an inventive play on words, Barker moves past analogizing the multivalent meanings of the term to offer a historical reiteration of anti-Indigenous criminalization located in the shift from government scapegoating and the (extra)legal disciplining of communists, socialists, and anarchists during World Wars I and II, to a post–Cold War refashioning of subversive threat attached to a new cohort of racialized radicals, namely Indigenous, Black, Muslim, or queer. From the late 1960s forward, Indigenous activists in particular were considered communist sympathizers, or unknowing patsies for communist organizers, because of what was viewed as the inherently socialistic and anti-capitalist nature of Indigenous communities. In relation to state imperialist practices, Barker goes even further to explicate an additional Red Scare genealogy through the lens of extractive capitalism. In a section under the heading "Capital Oil," Barker brilliantly traces the development of oil economy and infrastructure alongside the ascendancy of American military hegemony, resulting in the equating of energy security with national security. Not only does this securitized economy depend disproportionately on energy and mineral extrication from Indigenous territories, but it underscores the reasons underlying the creation of the Indigenous terrorist, whose protection of the environment undermines national inviolability and public freedom. These are not incidental constructions. Barker excels in [End Page 222] drawing these types of unexpected and nuanced linkages that, once understood, are the only way one can view them. Joanne Barker most...