“Smuggled Stories in the Settler-State”: Book Review on Shannon Speed’s Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State

Abstract

Shannon Speed’s (Chickasaw) Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State is a heartbreaking ethnography about the ‘smuggled’ stories of migrant Indigenous women from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras who are detained after crossing the border into the United States. Speed, a professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology and director of the American Indian Studies Center at University of California–Los Angles, looks at the forms of interpersonal and state violence that render women vulnerable (vulneradas) and shows how they are inseparable from settler-colonialism and neoliberalism. Speed’s ethnography is laid out in a quasi-chronological manner in which each chapter reflects a step in the migration journey from the circumstances in one’s home-country to the journey and crossing itself to the challenges encountered in the United States, describing both the detainment centre itself as well as post-detention. As such, the reader is able to follow along these women’s journeys from beginning to present.