The Empire's Terrorist: Indigeneity and the State

• In Event: Temporalities of Catastrophe

Abstract

The demands of Indigenous people for social justice and treaty rights represented by the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada and the Native Lives Matter and No DAPL movements in the United States are not new. Indigenous legal status and rights to sovereignty and self-determination, affirmed by international and constitutional law, have been core to Indigenous social justice and treaty struggles for centuries. But what is particular to the current juncture of these movements against sexual, police, and environmental violences are both the intersectional solidarities and political futurisms defining them and the collusive government and corporate use of counterterrorism measures against them. The measures are rationalized on the grounds of the imminent threat to state security that Indigenous movements pose, rationalizations producing and produced through the figure of the murderable Indian.

The murderable Indian is the Indian who can and should be murdered. She embodies the activist protesting extractive industries, police violence, and rape culture, threatening the state's economic security and public safety while pretending her own vulnerabilities. She advances an affect of terror that demands proportionately repressive, carcerally-centric state interventions and protections. The murderable Indian is co articulated with Blacks, Mexicans, Arabs and others so identified to rationalize all manner of invasion and occupation, genocide, mass incarceration, securitization, and counterterrorism. This Indian and her others not only justify but demand state intervention, minimizing sexual violence and environment destruction on behalf of a fragile state.

After a brief historical contextualization of the murderable Indian, this paper examines US and Canadian responses to Idle No More and No DAPL and links those responses to counterterrorism measures that seek to discipline and control anti-capitalist environmental justice movements and maintain misogynist ideologies and practices.

Author

• Joanne Barker, San Francisco State University