Katie Walkiewicz on Indigenous and Black Freedom

In episode 151 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Indigenous studies and literature professor Katie Walkiewicz about states’ rights and the role this concept has played in US settler colonialism, enslavement, and dispossession as well as in radical projects seeking to create alternative political structures.

Katie Walkiewicz is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the associate director of the Indigenous Futures Institute.

They chat about Katie’s new book Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. The book shows how federalism and states’ rights were used to imagine US states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.

They also explore how states rights have been mobilized in two landmark Supreme Court cases, the 2020 case McGirt v. Oklahoma and a case we are expecting a verdict on any day now—Haaland v. Brackeen—which is expected to have an enormous impact on Indigenous sovereignty.

In addition to tracing the violent imposition of states’ rights as tools for anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness, they also investigate how Black communities and Indigenous nations have sought to reimagine what a state could be, including through statehood campaigns for Black- and Native-run states.

Finally, they close out our conversation with a vision for a world of Indigenous and Black freedom, one beyond the bounds of both the nation and the state.

Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/151-katie-walkiewicz