Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (review)

THUS FAR, ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF SCHOLARS have developed projects under the explicit rubric of a "critical" Indigenous studies. Most often, they have been inspired by Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's seminal critique of Western modes of inquiry, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999, 2nd ed. 2012), or Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson's incisive investigations of the entanglements of Indigenous sovereignty and settler "whiteness," including the collections she edited, Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (2004) and Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (2008), and, more recently, her own series of related essays, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015). Following the lead of Smith and Moreton-Robinson, much of the Indigenous studies scholarship marked as "critical" falls within or intersects social science disciplines and interrogates dominant laws, policies, court decisions, and other state systems of power that regulate or attempt to regulate Indigenous lives, lands, and identities; much of this scholarship also interrogates dominant social and critical theories. An early example that builds from Moreton-Robinson's work is Canadian Metis scholar Chris Andersen's "Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density" (Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 [2009]), which argues that "a sophisticated Indigenous studies discipline must focus on Indigenous communities as a critique of colonial society" (94). Moreton-Robinson's latest edited collection, Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, which developed from the Indigenous Studies Research Network symposium she convened in Australia in 2012, continues to describe critical Indigenous studies as an "emerging discipline," and the essays this volume brings together, written by Indigenous studies scholars based in the continental United States, Hawai'i, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia, continue the work of marking out how a "critical" Indigenous studies differs from Indigenous studies as it is typically practiced and how such studies might develop in new directions in the future.

Moreton-Robinson's efficient and excellent introduction, "Locations of Engagement in the First World," provides historical, intellectual, institutional, and theoretical contexts for the kinds of questions and provocations she and the other authors will raise across the collection. It also provides working definitions for the volume's key term. Early in the introduction, Moreton-Robinson establishes that "critical Indigenous studies" does not describe a limited set of analytical methods or critical theories but rather an expansive set of scholarly projects that both include and exceed the production of analysis and theory: "Critical Indigenous studies is a knowledge/power domain whereby scholars operationalize Indigenous knowledges to develop theories, build academic infrastructure, and inform our cultural and ethical practices" (5). Nine essays follow the introduction, written by twelve Indigenous scholars and arranged into three interrelated sections: "Institutionalizing a Critical Place" (with essays by Daniel Heath Justice, Jean O'Brien and Robert Warrior, and Chris Andersen), "Expanding Epistemological Boundaries" (with essays by Kim TallBear, Brendan Hokowhitu, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson), and "Locales of Critical Inquiry and Practice" (with essays by Vicente Diaz; Larissa Behrendt; and Hokulani Aikau, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, and Noenoe Silva).

Standouts among these strong essays include Justice's "A Better World Becoming: Placing Critical Indigenous Studies," which opens the collection by recentering the role of place in Indigenous studies projects that move across, beyond, and through specific Indigenous nations or regions, including but not limited to the scholar's own; Hokowhitu's "Monster: Post-Indigenous Studies," which argues for moving Indigenous studies away from its dominant logic of resistance to—and thus its relentless (re)centering of—the structures of colonization and the discourses of the Western academy; Moreton-Robinson's "Race and Cultural Entrapment: Critical Indigenous Studies in the Twenty-First Century," which offers a sharply focused analysis of the persistence of racialized discourses in the structuring of the conditions of Indigenous possibility; Diaz's "In the Wake of Mata'pang's Canoe: The Cultural and Political Possibilities of Indigenous Discursive Flourish," which demonstrates the politics and analytic possibilities of Indigenous polysemic play—that is...