Theorizing Native Studies

Andrea Smith is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Native Americans and the Christian Right, published by Duke University Press, and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.Audra Simpson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, also published by Duke University Press.

“Theory might be read as ever-present according to this collection, but practice is clearly important too-Native practice in Native ways; Native activism, projects, scholarship. … In effect, the book allows theory and practice to lean against each other as steadfast partners in the Native matters that make Native studies important beyond the academy, double-underlining the Native-ness on which its chapters are grounded.” - Aroha Harris (Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History) "Given that academics continue to debate the efficacy of theory, Theorizing Native Studies supplies a necessary contribution to the field.... The editors have achieved their goal of compiling a collection that serves as an important contribution to theoretical studies in general, and Native Studies in particular." - Monica L. Butler (Journal of Anthropological Research) “Although each individual essay offers an important intervention on its own terms, as a collection, the volume is a vibrant snapshot of the field while also gesturing toward new horizons of theoretical possibility.” - Hokulani K. Aikau (Western Historical Quarterly) “The collected essays provide a helpful overview of the work of a new generation of activist Native academics and artists, many of them participants both in local community or transnational organizing and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association founded in 2011. … [A] groundbreaking contribution to the burgeoning writing in theorized politics and Native Studies activist scholarship that will have broad ramifications across many fields and movements for many years to come.” - Joe Parker (Women's Studies) "This book should be required reading for all students contemplating advanced scholarship in the field of Indigenous studies. It is a much needed corrective to decades of misplaced hostility directed towards theory in general, and Indigenous theory in particular. I recommend it highly." - Heather Devine (Canadian Journal of Native Studies)

• Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith 1 1. There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life / Dian Million 31 2. The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won't Deny / Teresia Teaiwa 43 3. From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh / Glen Coulthard 56 4. Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-Colonial Contexts / Robert Nichols 99 5. "In This Separation": The Noncorrespondence of Joseph Johnson / Christopher Bracken 122 6. Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty / Mark Rifkin 149 7. Indigenous Transnationalism and the AIDS Pandemic: Challenging Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance / Scott Lauria Morgensen 188 8. Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity / Andrea Smith 207 9. Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie / Mishuana R. Goeman 235 10. The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative / Vera B. Palmer 266 Bibliography 297 Contributors 321 Index 323