The settlers’ ‘reanimation’ of Indigenous peoples: Kim TallBear, ‘Indigenous Genocide and Reanimation, Settler Apocalypse and Hope’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 93-111 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlers’ ‘reanimation’ of Indigenous peoples: Kim TallBear, ‘Indigenous Genocide and Reanimation, Settler Apocalypse and Hope’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 93-111

05Feb23

Excerpt: In addition to belonging to Dakota people who faced a genocidal settler assault that began in the mid-nineteenth century, I am a horror film aficionado with a macabre sense of humour. In this talk, I am informed by the concept of Indigenous elimination, most notably written about by the late Patrick Wolfe in the Journal of Genocide Research, but I combine it with the idea of “reanimation” of the dead (Gordon 1985; Wolfe 2006). A troubling image that guides my work is that of the settler who would banish most Indigenous people to the land of the dead, while retaining, freezing, reanimating, and controlling Indigenous flesh, blood, and bones, both literally as valuable bio-property and figuratively, as I have written about in my book Native American DNA and elsewhere (TallBear 2013; also see TallBear 2017). Adding to the ghoulishness of settler scientific and bureaucratic control, reanimation, and capitalization on our actual bio-matter, the settler sometimes drapes his (or often her) ontological skeleton in the vanished metaphorical Native’s skin in a final assumption of our “identities” as their own (Simpson 2022). How clever. Settler state citizens can retain the benefits of our disappearance but deny those benefits when they don “red skin.”

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