ABSTRACT
This introduction briefl y outlines the terrain of “indigeneity in the courtroom” and locates how indigenous difference is produced in North American courts.1 The central question of this book is when and how does indigeneity in its various iterations-cultural, social, political, economic, even genetic-matter in a legal sense? When does it not? Indigeneity here references not the specifi c ontologies and epistemologies of peoples living throughout Native North America, but rather the political, economic and legal articulations of indigenous difference (and the discursive and material effects of these articulations) in postcolonial settler nations.2
