Abstract: The project to find the role that German Studies can play in building transdisciplinary relationships with Indigenous Studies begins from the deleterious presumption that colonization in North America is a thing of the past and that the work of decolonization can therefore commence in an already-decolonized space. Imagining a different German Studies at this intersection is an inevitably future-oriented task that necessitates a problematization not just of the colonial past and still-ongoing settler colonial present but also of futurity itself. Informed in large part by Critical Indigenous Theory, this article intervenes on German Studies as a discipline that, in line with the settler colonial state, either relegates invasion, occupation, and settlement to the past or reconciles itself with continued invasion, occupation, and settlement through practices of inclusion. This article therefore calls for an expansion of the inquiry of German Studies’ investments in settler colonialism.
