Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Kara Roanhorse (bio) Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker University of California Press, 2021 US empire defines terrorism as the "unlawful" use of violence, fear, and intimidation, particularly against civilians, in the pursuit of ideological or political aims. The term primarily refers to intentional violence and is used most often in the context of war; however, terror and terrorism in relation to Indigenous people are reproduced differently under the US/Canadian settler empire. What does it mean to call Indigenous people terrorists on their own land? This is a question Lenape feminist Joanne Barker addresses in Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, noting, "Indigenous People are identified and made identifiable by the state as terrorists in order to advance imperialist objectives" (p. vii). Two defining concepts she uses, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, are meant to be identifiers for how Indianness is "terrorism" and therefore justifies the genocide and Indigenous removal from their lands. The Indigenous feminist framework which Barker takes up disentangles settler policies, signifiers, and language used for antiterrorist laws and sentiments. Terror and the fear-driving discourses of settler empire reinforce a designation for settler justifications and weaponizing for harsher sentencing of the state's exploitation, policing, and violence under the systems of colonialism and capitalism. In the US and Canadian contexts, terrorism and terrorists are defined exclusively within settler political order. Thus, the "red scare" embodies the full spectrum of settler racism and xenophobic fear that justifies war-making against Indigenous people. The racism and fear further perpetuates into a belief that security and social stability [End Page 124] requires the extermination or genocide of Indigenous people. This is how they handle the so-called Indian problem. The business of utilizing fear in the name of order against Indigenous people is the basis of settler freedom: figures of terrorism created by state and capitalist industries authoritatively deem Indigenous movements as the ultimate threat to society. Barker is clear about the realities of contemporary Indigenous struggles like "NoDAPL" (No Dakota Access Pipeline), Wet'suwet'en land defenders, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) movement. It is clear how violations of land and territory, the sexual and environmental violence are each intertwined with police violence, prompting many radicals to envision solidarity building as central to the state's historical and political contextualizing of "terrorism" under the US empire's neoliberal state. As Barker illustrates, companies of resource-centered extraction of gas and oil raise questions of identity by intentionally disavowing and challenging Indigenous territorial rights, sovereignty, and self-determination. The militarizing of police and increasing harm to the environment alongside the ongoing MMIW epidemic is why Indigenous feminists' critiques of the state and violence must be concise. Barker's succinct analysis of the political weaponization of identity fraud makes visible the ever-present conflicted and contradictory work of racist ideologies of cultural authenticity and rationalizations of state violence and suppression placed on Indigenous people. Figures of terrorism are made and remade by the United States and Canada to create order whereby Indigenous sovereignty and their movements threaten national security and social stability. Such threats are linked to all manner of protecting settler economic infrastructure and growth at any cost. Barker first introduces the figure of the "Murderable Indian" as "the first and last authentic Indian," crystalizing how Native people are subjected to a certain kind of criminalization, not just incarceration but of constant surveillance and other types of police violence from the state; they are "an affect of racist fears" and concerns for the settler public and thus require a national security response. The Murderable Indian serves to "license the state's counterterrorist, military, police, and vigilante responses to contain, punish, and deter" (p. vii). Barker asserts this Indian as one that is familiar because they are deemed too much of a threat, whereby the state responds to their terrorism with full force. The Murderable Indian faces the state's counterterrorist measures (including corporate security contractors, invasive surveillance, detention, interrogation, and incarceration), drawing from examples of police violence experienced by water protectors, land defenders, and the work...