Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal offers a discussion of settler-colonial biopolitics as it targets Indigenous life across a range of transnationally related, yet distinct, sites of colonial settlement. Moving across these sites, it examines how settler colonial regimes at different locations and at different positions within an economically hierarchized globality employ forms of biopolitics in historically specific ways to their own ends. At the same time, this special issue explores Indigenous life in its manifold manifestations as a site of resurgence, decolonial resistance, and enduring continuity that exceeds any attempt at biopolitical control. The contributions to this special issue thus engage scholarly conversations in critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies that connect a biopolitical logic of racialization, regularization, and naturalization to a geopolitical logic of dispossession and removal as inherent to the eliminatory logics of settler colonialism.