ABSTRACT
"Indian" is arguably the paradigmatic term for how the US conceptualizes Indigenous peoples and the resulting settler-Indigenous relations. The production of the "Indian" as a homogenous and largely apolitical category in the biopolitical discourse is strongly paralleled by firmly establishing the "Indian" as the embodiment of an ahistorical and uncivilized state of humanity in the settler imaginary. In biopolitical terms, "Indian" categorizes a racialized population in the political-judicial discourse of the US in the moment the US seeks to legitimize. The categorization of the diverse North American Indigenous peoples under the common moniker "Indian" significantly served the European settlers' interest in what Mark Rifkin has recently referred to as "turning peoples into populations". The missionization, functioning as a form of cultural genocide rooted in a deep-seated sense of European supremacy, had an actual genocidal effect.
