Interstellar Stories & Cosmic Encounters of Indigenous Youth: In the Space Between Stars and Sovereignty

• In Event: To Heal and Care Amidst State Violence: Theorizing Kinship from Alternate Spaces

Abstract

This paper examines how Indigenous youth theorize and enact kinship through spatial and temporal (spatiotemporal) frameworks that resist the neoliberal co-optation of trauma and healing within settler colonial paradigms. Public health, trauma studies, and humanitarian discourses often render Indigenous suffering legible only when framed through settler logics of pathology, individualization, and governance. This work refuses such containment, instead centering the radical relationality of Indigenous youth as a practice of sovereignty and care beyond the therapeutic state. Drawing from Dian Million’s critique of neoliberal humanitarianism, Audra Simpson’s politics of refusal, Laura Harjo's concept of kin-space-time, Jasbir Puar's theorizing of debility, and Black and Indigenous feminist scholarship, this paper interrogates how Indigenous youth disrupt settler-sanctioned models of resilience that depoliticize trauma, disability, and relational responsibilities. Through community-building, mutual aid, and youth-led organizing, Indigenous youth challenge state narratives of healing that function to pacify resistance while reaffirming racial capitalism and settler occupation. One example focuses on Palestinian resistance to ongoing genocide, juxtaposed with President Biden’s apology for U.S. government atrocities in boarding schools, exposing the contradictions of state-sanctioned redress. Engaging with abolitionist disability justice and Indigenous critiques of neoliberalism, this paper asks: How do Indigenous youth navigate and redefine care beyond state-sanctioned paradigms? How do they cultivate kinship across digital, land-based, and movement spaces that refuse settler containment? By theorizing healing not as individual recovery but as a collective practice of refusal and sovereignty, this work asserts that care is not a settler commodity, but a relational commitment tied to survival, futurity, and the (re)mapping of Indigenous worlds. Ultimately, this paper explores what becomes possible when Indigenous youth reject legibility to the state, medicine, and the academy, and instead imagine alternative ways of being with each other beyond the colonial grammars of suffering, ableism, and exclusion.

Author

• Kara Grace Roanhorse, University of New Mexico-Main Campus