Micro-Erasures: How an "Evidence-Based" Violence Intervention with Indigenous Youth Advances Cultural Genocide

Abstract: In this case study of an evidence-based violence intervention with Indigenous youth in the southwestern United States, Cruz examines four different types of what he calls "micro-erasures": individual-level interactions that correct, pathologize, punish, or otherwise supplant Indigenous ways of being with the taken-for-granted norms of settler society. Using critical realist grounded-theory methods, he demonstrates how these micro-level practices advance the colonial crimes of cultural imperialism and cultural genocide in often subtle and unconscious ways. To rectify the harms caused by these practices, recommendations for both healing and liberation (beyond traditional Marxism) are discussed.