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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Lucinda Rasmussen Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist. By Joanne Barker, University of California Press, 2021. Joanne Barker’s Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist explores the destructive ways imperial nations reify harmful stereotypes of Indigeneity: as the author puts it, the settler state maintains its power by ensuring that “Indigenous peoples are [both] identified and made identifiable as terrorists” (x). By shaping such outcomes, the settler state ensures that many of its mainstream non-Indigenous citizens continue to normalize “racist ideologies,” making it easy to justify ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, including the appropriation of their lands for commercial purposes (x). The reification of practices that cause Indigeneity to be read as a threat are what enables settler nations to maintain power, as well as to postpone steps toward meaningful social change that would help to bring about reconciliation. Red Scare is comprised of four chapters including an introduction titled “Scared Red,” in which the author introduces the etymology of the book’s titular phrase. The text also includes a brief prologue, a glossary, endnotes and appendices. The opening chapter is followed by two substantive ones that break down the tropes that Barker identifies as foundational to the claim that through imperialism there occurs an equating of Indigeneity with terrorism: one is subtitled “The Murderable Indian: Terror as State (In)Security,” and the other “The Kinless Indian: Terror as Social (In)Stability.” These chapters, which make up the bulk of this slim volume, are followed by a final chapter titled “Radical Alterities from Huckleberry Roots.” Here the author follows through on the promise not to center imperialist institutions and their violence, but instead to locate solutions to these longstanding problems in Indigenous feminism. Barker supports her argument that Indigeneity is “made indistinguishable from terrorism” with many contemporary examples drawn from what is now Canada and the United States. There is serious discussion of the oil industry, beginning with how corporations and the government worked to frame Elizabeth LaPensée as a threat to national security, after she used a small grant to create a virtual game in which players could restore aspects of the natural environment while removing pipeline projects (3–4). The game, which LaPensée named Thunderbird Strikes, contained links to Indigenous teachings, as well to information about the harm being done to Indigenous lands by the oil industry. Even though the game clearly served a pedagogical function, and it did not portray the death of any humans, members of the government and oil industry leaders did serious harm to LaPensée’s reputation with accusations that she condoned and even perpetuated terrorism. After a compelling introduction, Barker convincingly continues to deconstruct the hegemonic work being done to silence Indigenous peoples who advocate for social change. In “The Murderable Indian,” Barker suggests that mainstream citizens have been socialized by media, history and popular culture to normalize the iconic image of violent Indigeneity—“the Indian in buckskin wielding a hatchet…; the Indian in a jeans jacket defiantly raising a rifle overhead; the Indian standing in the path of oil trucks” (26). Imperial forces can locate, within such a portrayal, the justification for “surveillance, incarceration, and violence,” including the murder of any Indigenous person who can be perceived as resisting its rules and thereby posing a threat (111). This chapter is both distressing and insightful when it notes the connection between corporate preservation of the oil and gas industries, with a widespread indifference to police violence against Indigenous peoples, as well judicial indifference to violence against Indigenous women and girls. Barker’s third chapter, “The Kinless Indian,” explores the topic from a new angle. In this section, Barker defines the “Kinless Indian” as the “social terrorist who, through lies and deceit, undermines the integrity of the state’s claims regarding its democratic ideals” (71). What Barker proceeds to do is to explain what happens when people without the necessary “lineal or community-based relationships” claim to have an Indigenous identity (25). Two high-profile cases are discussed. First, Barker outlines the controversy surrounding Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Cherokee descent. Second, author Joseph...