Agents of Empire: Contemporary policing and the legacies of settler colonial disposession

• In Event: 21009 - Policing & Surveillance

Abstract

Settler colonialism is an ongoing cause of violence against Indigenous people who live within the territory of the United States. In this paper, we link long histories of the displacement, dispossession, assimilation, and destruction of Native nations and their peoples to the ongoing activities of contemporary state agencies. We argue that contemporary institutions of social control can be understood as agents of empire. That is, the street-level practice of the day-to-day social control of Indigenous people is continuous with the ongoing colonization of the United States. We present a quantitative analysis of the geographic correlations of multiple forms of settler state violence against indigenous people, and evaluate how the geographic distribution of this violence is linked to historical and contemporary actions of the settler state to seize Native lands and reduce the power of Native nations. We show that police violence against Native people, the removal of Native children from their families, and the incarceration of Native people are spatially linked. We further show that the geographic distribution of these forms of state violence is a function of historical federal Indian policy and contemporary legal institutions limiting tribal sovereignty. In so doing, we argue that US government efforts to regulate the lives of Native people coercively is best understood not through micro-level behavioral theories, but rather through comparative historical processes that situate day-to-day interactions within the ongoing process of settler colonization.

Authors

• Theresa Rocha Beardall, University of Washington

• Frank Edwards, Rutgers University-Newark