The Emergence of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race and Culture in Native North America

Abstract

In this essay, I review four recent publications on American Indian life in the United States, past and present, through the lens of indigeneity. While indigenous activism has been a central focus of recent work in anthropology and American Indian studies, Indigeneity is still emergent as a conceptual tool for historical and ethnographic work. This essay traces conceptual issues associated with more general discourses of indigeneity through the reviewed works in order to examine the relationship between the politics of indigeneity and the racialized structures of settler colonialism that still confront American Indian peoples in the United States.