Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Melanie K. Yazzie Joanne Barker. Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 192 pp. Hardcover, $85.00. Joanne Barker’s Red Scare offers an introduction into “how Indigeneity has been made indistinguishable from terrorism” (110) within discourses of US and Canadian imperialism. Barker uses an Indigenous feminist methodology to sketch Indigenous–state relationality across multiple [End Page 186] historical periods, with particular emphasis on how state definitions of terrorism shape this relationality to conform with its imperial interests. While not technically a history of these relations, Red Scare includes a variety of historical examples to demonstrate how US state power has consistently linked indigeneity to terrorism. Examples in the book range from Dillon S. Myer’s tenure as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1950 to 1953, to the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Oceti Sakowin–led encampments along the Cannonball River in Standing Rock Sioux treaty lands in 2016 and 2017, to Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee and Delaware descent, which became a matter of national controversy in 2016 when then-president Donald J. Trump mocked Warren’s claims in a move to politically discredit her. Throughout the course of the book, Barker underscores how Indigenous people are rendered as subhuman within state discourses of terrorism, or as “lives not worthy of life, as lives forever defined by the fate of death, injury, and grief ” (5). The author posits two archetypes of this subhuman or forestalled subjectivity: the murderable Indian and the kinless Indian, which chapters 2 and 3 address in turn. Drawing from the historical examples I mention above, Barker argues that both archetypes are a fiction and a creation of US imperialism, which must constantly position Indigenous people, culture, and nationhood as without humanity—and thus violable—to justify its own superiority. The two archetypes are animated through the discourse of terrorism. Barker argues that the very transition of Indigenous people into subjects of the state happens through their categorization as terrorists who threaten the state: whereas the murderable Indian threatens national security, the kinless Indian threatens social stability. These threats make Indigenous people useful in the sense that the state can recreate and expand its power through endless moves to curb the threat of anyone who can be deemed “Indian.” Given its Foucauldian interest in subject formation and power, Red Scare is essentially a book about how the United States and Canada interpolate Indigenous people into their practices of state power. The book helps us understand how the murderable and kinless Indian bolsters state power; they are semiotic containers injected with meaning by the state to serve its own interests, namely, the securing of resources for its capitalist, imperialist, and colonial goals. The discourse of terrorism is immensely useful and productive for securing such goals because it [End Page 187] justifies violence against Indigenous people, whose ongoing connections to land and claims to sovereignty are seen as dangerous impediments to these goals, and therefore in need of punishment, disparagement, degradation, and destruction. But Barker points out in the fourth and final chapter that many Indigenous people refuse this deadly subjectification by the state. For Barker, such refusal is the space where alternative political and social orders of Indigenous life continue to exist outside of, and despite, state violence. Barker calls these spaces the “Indigenous embodiment of a social alterity” (30), premised on land-based practices of relationship and responsibility. Again, using an Indigenous feminist methodology centered on relationality—this time to sketch the relationality of Indigenous alterities—Barker outlines the “many ways by which Indigenous peoples oppose and dissociate imperial relations” (114). Rematriation and rootedness are two types of alterities that Barker chooses to highlight. Rematriation is the return of land to Indigenous governance, and rootedness emerges from kin-based land stewardship that emphasizes noncompetitive, reciprocal interdependencies between all forms of life. While the United States and Canada have been hard at work using the discourse of counterterrorism to crush these alterities, Barker suggests that Indigenous movements are already proving that “the future is not something we are waiting for, but...