Indigenous Erasure Research Articles

Miscegenation and militarization: undoing racial colonial citizenship for the next century

ABSTRACT This essay considers the Immigration Act of 1924, otherwise known as the Johnson-Reed Act (JRA), within historical and contemporary contexts of anti-miscegenation and Indigenous erasure that are undercurrents of citizenship and immigration processes. By using a framework of settler colonialism carried out by the U.S. nation-state, we explore connections among racialized peoples in U.S. American empire and the push for racial purity through systems of blood quantum and anti-miscegenation laws. With attention to how colonialism from the continental USA flows to locales such as Guåhan/Guam, a place enacting sovereignty despite occupation and colonial possession, we consider how immigration and citizenship are wielded as tools of U.S. American militarization. Ultimately, we argue that critiquing miscegenation and militarism is necessary to overcome racial and colonial violences of empire.

The violence of curriculum: Dismantling systemic racism, colonisation and indigenous erasure within medical education.

Epistemic violence is enacted in medical curricula in mundane ways all the time, negatively impacting learners, teachers and patients. In this article, we address three forms of such violence: White supremacy, indigenous erasure and heteronormativity. In this article, we examine the knowledge systems of medicine as a global phenomenon, impacted by Western and European ideologies of race and colonisation, both produced by them, helping to reproduce them through authoritative and hegemonic ideologies. We seek not only to problematise but also to propose alternative teaching approaches rooted in the Global South and in Indigenous ways of knowing. Taking inspiration from Paulo Freire, we advocate for the development of critical consciousness through the integration of critical pedagogies of love, emancipation and shared humanity. Drawing on Irihapeti Ramsden, we advocate for cultural safety, which emphasises power relations and historical trauma in the clinical encounter and calls for a rights-based approach in medical education. Deliberately holding space for our own vulnerabilities and that of our students requires what Megan Boler calls a pedagogy of discomfort. Our perspectives converge on the importance of critical consciousness development for culturally safe practice in medical education, acknowledging the need to emphasise a curriculum of shared humanity, introducing the concept of Ubuntu from Southern Africa. Ubuntu can be encapsulated in the phrase 'I am because we are', and it promotes a collective approach to medical education in which there is active solidarity between the profession and the diverse populations which it serves.

Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear

ABSTRACT Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial logic, itself replete with gendered exclusion and speciesism. In this article, we combine intersectional theoretical frameworks with settler colonial and Indigenous studies to carry out a systematic content analysis of 201 unique campaign documents. We demonstrate how the campaign’s production of the careful citizen – one rooted in mid-to-upper class, settler masculinity – hinges on interlocking narratives of Indigenous erasure, low-class criminality, and the helpless victimhood of women and more-than-human species.

Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Love Letters to Chicanx and Latinx Studies

ABSTRACT Migration and global displacement of populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have increased US Latinxs intergroup diversity, propelling fields like Chicanx Studies and Latinx Studies (CSLS) to question the taken-for-granted homogeneity of Latinidad and Chicanismo. Inter-group oppression within these imagined collectives has also shed light on overlapping colonial systems, specifically launching critiques of Latinidad that include the historical centering of cisheteronormativity within Chicanismo, AfroLatinxs, AsianLatinxs, and Indigenous erasure, as well as anti-Blackness and anti-Indio sentiments. Such critiques are pushing CSLS into a moment of reckoning. This article provides a “loving critique” of CSLS with an emphasis in education where innovative analytics like Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) are pressing these fields into unpacking and reorienting in ways that challenge the very narratives and discourses that in previous generations were empowering. A “loving critique” of CSLS is taken up by asking, what does CSLS need to re/think given the current diversity of “Latinx” communities? What can CSLS learn from CLI and CSP without appropriating or romanticizing them? How can CSLS not just survive but thrive and endure by engaging and learning from the opportunity that change brings?

Haunted Monasteries: Troubling Indigenous Erasure in Early Colonial Mexican Architecture

This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico’s earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost’s appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples.

Red Codes and Removal: Racial Exclusion and Indigenous Persistence in the Midwest

Abstract: The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Myaamia families who stayed behind used fee simple family reserves as a tool to combat ethnic cleansing. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession. Red Codes, akin to the more well-known Black Codes, reveal how state and local authorities designed laws to advance white supremacy. The appropriation and performance of Indigeneity grew out of the race-based legal regimes that defined the nineteenth-century Midwest.

Attempted Indigenous Erasure and Frontier Gothic in Arrival (2016)

In the process of adapting a written narrative for the silver screen, there is much that can be lost (or gained) in translation. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaption of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is no exception. Often analyzed as a work of science fiction, this article argues that understanding Arrival as a work of the frontier gothic renders the attempted erasure of Indigenous presence in the film visible. The frontier gothic elements of Arrival, most prominently the transformation of Chiang’s protagonist, Louise, into a frontier hero(ine), and the looming Montana setting, both evoke and attempt to erase the Indigenous presence in this “frontier”. As a frontier hero, Louise ultimately supersedes the aliens of Arrival, absorbing and appropriating their knowledge and language to save the world (and the superiority of the United States).

On Noongar Boodjah: George Vancouver’s Colonial Fictions

This essay reads Captain George Vancouver’s account of his 1791 landing on the southwestern coast of what is now known as Australia through the theorizations and analyses of Indigenous theorists and scholars to expose the colonial fictions that undergird his actions and rhetoric. I then focus on the rhetoric and critical posturing of the settler colonial academy, especially within white-dominated fields like eighteenth-century studies, to consider how its work participates in the processes of Indigenous erasure and points to the need for self-reflexive and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous communities and their knowledges.

Racialized Overlaps & Indigenous Eclipses on O'odham Land: U.S. Settler Militarism & Policing of the U.S.-Mexico Settler Colonial/Imperial Border

Abstract By centering Indigeneity, specifically O'odham presence, sovereignty, and land at the site of the U.S.–Mexico border, I argue that the U.S.–Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. immigration law are ongoing, settler colonial, and imperial formations of U.S. empire. Further, this paper investigates the settler process of racialization, specifically the construction of "illegal alien," and how, at the border, this racial category is imposed onto, and erases, Indigeneity. I argue that while racialization at the border focuses on criminalizing illegal crossings, it also eliminates Indigenous ontologies of migrants and immigrants, and eclipse land-based Indigenous presence and sovereignty. Through content and discourse analysis, and archival research, I critically read O'odham Indigenous critique of the border and immigration policies against U.S. government documents to show that the settler racialization process of undocumented border crossings is foundationally one of Indigenous erasure and genocide. The aim of this paper is to broaden the scope of critique via an analytic of Indigeneity in the realms of the academy, advocacy work, organizing, activism as related to the U.S.–Mexico border and U.S. immigration.

Alienated Species and Unsettled Ecologies: Locating “Redneck” Conservation in the Racial Discourse of “Asian” Carp Invasion

Abstract: Science studies scholars identify parallels between anti-immigrant and anti-invasive species rhetoric but have yet to consider how this linked racial discourse of invasion functions as part of a settler colonial project or what alternative forms of conservation arise through this confluence. Looking at this confluence through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigenous studies scholarship demonstrates how a form of environmental practice that I term “redneck” conservation reveals the racial and colonial logics of dominant invasive species discourses and practices. I propose the term alienated species to highlight these interconnections. Further, through a case study of “Asian” carp that explores social media, news media, and popular culture alongside Indigenous approaches, I argue that self-identified “redneck” settlers operationalize this discourse—alongside militaristic, masculinist embodiment—to position the “alien” as a foil against which they define whiteness and nativity while perpetuating Indigenous erasure. In this way, erasures of indigeneity and attacks against Asianness jointly produce the white male settled subject. In contrast, Indigenous communities engage a range of alternative responses to the carp and other alienated species within both formal land management strategies and everyday practices, such as harvesting. These responses reveal an Indigenous ethic of belonging that animates different ways of living on and providing care for the land, including the humans forced to live together.

“The First White Mother in America” Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, Popular History, Firsting, and White Feminism

This article takes Ásmundur Sveinsson’s statue "The First White Mother in America" as a starting point. With reference to this work, its several later casts, and three illustrative examples from recent popular history writing, the article demonstrates how popular representations of the statue's subject, Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, frequently reinforce traditions rooted in racially exclusive historical standards and Indigenous erasure. While Guðríðr’s story offers a valuable counterpoint to male-dominated and often hyper-violent images of “Viking” history, writers and other popular history purveyors depicting her story also run the risk of simultaneously reinforcing settler-colonial and white supremacist ideals regardless of their individual motives.

Indigenous Fire Futures

Abstract Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural controlled burning, fire stewardship, and sovereignty. These initiatives emphasize reciprocal human-fire relations and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihoods. Concurrently, Indigenous fire sovereignty is threatened by knowledge appropriation and superficial collaborations. In this article, we review contemporary research on Indigenous burning in order to highlight the strategies that Indigenous communities and scholars employ to subvert colonial power relations within wildfire management and actualize regenerative Indigenous futures.

Building Silver Bridges: Paranormal Apparitions, Settler Heritage, and Indigenous Erasure in the Ohio River Valley

"Paranormal heritage" is contested and should be understood as bridging conceptual divides within dark heritage studies and settler colonial studies. Through historic/fictitious narratives, regional legends, and fortean research this article examines paranormal heritage in the Ohio River Valley, connected to the cryptozoological figure of Mothman, as a continued weaving of settler heritage. Using decolonial and Indigenous theory, it argues that through weaving certain paranormal heritages Indigenous stories and landscapes are usurped, and Indigenous Peoples and Title are erased to ‘indigenize’ settler populations. Paranormal settler heritages require attention for their role in the logic of elimination and settler moves to innocence.

"It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages": The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769–1803

Abstract: The enslavement of Indigenous peoples by Europeans was not a small and isolated practice in the lands that now comprise the United States. Contests for land and labor were not mutually exclusive, and enslaved Native people labored in mines, domestic households, and plantations across North America. In the vast Louisiana Colony, French records frequently enumerated enslaved Indigenous people, but their presence is conspicuously absent from Spanish period records. Scholars have previously assumed that the practice of Indian slavery had simply been outlawed and any remaining Indian slaves were emancipated under the Leyes y Ordenanzas Nuevamente de las Indias after Don Alejandro O'Reilly raised the Spanish flag over New Orleans in August 1769. However, the very first case brought before the Louisiana State Supreme Court disproves that assumption. During the period of its supposed illegality, Indigenous enslavement persisted through a discursive practice of Indigenous erasure; changing notions of race and legal personhood hid enslaved Native Americans within a socioracial order that negated their existence. These machinations allowed "Indianness" to be controlled and exploited, and Native people continued to be trafficked and enslaved across the Gulf South into the antebellum period. Their stories must become part of the broader history of American slavery.

An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann

Reviewed by: An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann Darryl G. Barthé An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. By Andrew N. Wegmann. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 238. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6078-2; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6076-8.) Andrew N. Wegmann is a talented researcher who has ventured bravely into the murkiest of historical contexts with his monograph An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. Histories of race and nation are, presently, among the most treacherous of scholarly discourses, and the author should first be commended for wading into those waters in the first place. Some of his observations are contentious, and it is certain that future scholars will take him to task for an incomplete contextualization of Gulf Coast Creolité and for Indigenous erasure. However, Wegmann has elected to have a hard conversation at a time when many prefer to avoid hard conversations, and that deserves recognition. The book itself is well written. Wegmann accomplishes a skillful navigation of the legal discourses surrounding race across two centuries and three colonial regimes. This is no small feat in itself. At its best, An American Color demonstrates the dialectical progression of racist thought and legislation in Louisiana, showing the consistencies (and/or lack thereof) from one regime to the next. Scholars have long recognized that racial lines in Louisiana were often blurrier and more negotiable before 1803 than in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, under the American regime. That fact can often give the impression that Latin Louisiana was, somehow, more enlightened or tolerant when it came to issues of race and caste. Wegmann does not fall into this trap, however, and rightly observes that every colonial regime in Louisiana—French, Spanish, and American—has been predicated on white supremacy. Yet, in his attempt to emphasize the commonality and experiential continuity between the communities of free people of color in Francophone and Creolophone New Orleans and communities of free African Americans in Anglophone colonial spaces in the United States, one cannot help but feel at times that the author overstates his case. Wegmann attempts to place “New Orleans and its foreign, bizarre, frightening ‘mulattoes and quadroons’ into the narrative of American racial identity and relations during the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 7). This, however, is an effort that defies nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole people’s own self-identification as neither “American” nor “foreign” to the land where they lived. An American Color does not engage the subject of Louisiana Creole Afro-Indigeneity at all. By the end of his work, Wegmann announces with authority that Creoles in New Orleans were “American. It just took them a while to admit it” (p. 145). This observation, however, is not consistent with New Orleans Creoles’ own [End Page 349] views of themselves during the nineteenth century (or during the first half of the twentieth century, according to primary source accounts left by A. P. Tureaud, Marcus Christian, and Gilbert Martin, among others). In the end, readers are left to wonder at the distance between Wegmann’s perception of nineteenth- century New Orleans Creoles and nineteenth-century New Orleans Creoles’ perception of themselves. One does not have to agree with Wegmann’s conclusions—and often I do not—in order to recognize the skillfulness of his labor. Future scholars of Creole Louisiana will, no doubt, derive some benefit from his efforts. At the same time, I could not read An American Color without being reminded that in Louisiana, French is not taught as a heritage language but as a “foreign” language to people with names like “Boudreaux” and “Poché,” “Broussard” and “Barthé,” even when those people are, as I am, only a generation removed from native Francophones and Creolophones. This is Americanization contemporarily manifested, and, to be certain, Wegmann’s is an American’s history of Creole New Orleans, constructed from the outside looking in, with all that that entails. Darryl G. Barthé Dartmouth University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association...

No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. As of now, the corpus of works by early Soviet Marxist historians still represents the most massive and sustained effort to challenge imperial narratives of Russian history from within the Russian academic community. Resonating with current conversations about Russian imperialism and colonialism, this intellectual tradition represents a major contribution to the postcolonial turn in studies of Russian history.

Indigenous Erasure and Resistance in the Caribbean

Indigeneity has, for the most part, been absent in literature on the Caribbean, even in de-colonial writing. Writing on the Caribbean has often portrayed Indigenous people as extinct and thus as irrelevant to contemporary life in the Caribbean. Yet Indigenous peoples have played and continue to play a central role in Caribbean politics.
 This essay discusses how and why Indigenous people have been erased from discourse on the contemporary Caribbean. I argue that Indigenous erasure is a longstanding colonial tactic that is still used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the case of the Maya peoples’ struggle for land in Belize, I describe some of the ways that Indigenous people continue to resist colonial and capitalist violence. Having identified and historicized the myth of Indigenous erasure in the Caribbean, I begin to sketch possibilities for shifting the discourse on the Caribbean such that it highlights rather than ignores the historical and ongoing contributions of Indigenous communities to the Caribbean. I suggest that diaspora and entanglement are two concepts that may be helpful for clarifying the Caribbean’s complex colonial histories in a way that underscores the importance of Indigenous peoples to the Caribbean.

The Vanishing Scholar: Indigenous Erasure in Funding Data

Nonreporting of funding data and exclusion of communities from research harm Indigenous Peoples and contribute to their invisibility in science and society. We can and must do better.

Moving Beyond Obfuscating Racial Microaggression Discourse

In this article, we argue that the concept of racial microaggression is a white supremacy construct that is an ideological and discursive anti‐Black practice. We discuss how microaggressions’ reduction of historical and hegemonic white supremacy to everyday relations that are merely performative, not integral to sustaining such larger forces, is an analytical shortcoming. We contend that without the adequate heft of historical white supremacy as a part of capitalist and colonial expansion, genocide, and Indigenous erasure, microaggression scholars will remain enthralled with the idea that individual behavior changes can eradicate anti‐Black violence.

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country.

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country Brianna Theobald (bio) Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives.1 It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women.2 It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction. This is the vantage point from which I have been assessing the consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and from which I approach this forum. A Native-centered historical analysis underscores the limitations of a narrow scholarly or political focus on the now overturned Roe v. Wade and the question of abortion’s legality, a point long emphasized by Indigenous women, women of color, and working-class [End Page 39] women. As Indigenous Women Rising founder Rae Lorenzo (Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana) recently argued, “Roe v. Wade has never been a reality for Native people.”3 Nor, one might add, has Roe ever been enough to meet Native people’s needs, as they have faced countless other obstacles in the pursuit of abortion access, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy. And yet, as Native attorneys and reproductive activists powerfully argued in an amicus brief submitted for the defendants in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe portends particularly harmful consequences for Native peoples.4 While in tension, these realities—that Roe was illusory in the lives of many Native people and that its repeal carries particular burdens and dangers—reflect the duality of federal control and neglect that the sociologist Barbara Gurr has identified in the provision of “imperialist medicine.”5 They speak to the need for robust reproductive justice agendas that attend to settler colonialism in the past and present and imagine vibrant Indigenous futures.6 Native reproductive agendas have long been informed by the exigencies of Native women’s struggle to have children and Native families’ struggle to raise them in safe, healthy, and culturally centered environments without undue external intervention.7 For centuries, Native peoples have endured the efforts of policy makers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and missionaries to assimilate them into U.S. society, a thankfully unsuccessful yet nonetheless destructive attempt to eliminate Native cultures and dissolve tribal nations. The education of Native children was a cornerstone of federal assimilation efforts. Well into the twentieth century, authorities removed Native children from their homes and communities to carry out this education, an intentional effort to destabilize children’s ties to their families and homelands. Authorities justified these actions [End Page 40] in part on allegations of Native maternal apathy or incapacity.8 Such stereotypes existed alongside and buttressed self-serving tropes regarding Indigenous promiscuity and domestic deficiency, even as colonization rendered Native women vulnerable to sexual violence.9 Colonial surveil-lance of and intervention in Indigenous home and family life rested on racist assumptions about the need for “moral uplift” of individuals and communities. Health and healing, too, were sites of assimilationist intervention in Indian Country. The reservation system that federal officials embraced following the Civil War produced a cascade of public health disasters. Native nations faced land dispossession, a forced sedentary lifestyle, malnutrition due to government neglect, and economic underdevelopment. These conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, and infant mortality and maternal morbidity rates reached alarming heights in many locations. The federal government further hindered communities...