ABSTRACT
Native feminist theories centrally address two intertwined ideas that are significant but often overlooked in feminist discourses: the United States and many other Western countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, are settler colonial nation-states, and settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. This chapter highlights central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women's studies. With these challenges, it offers suggestions for meaningful engagement, arguing overall that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative. Unmasking the forces that have hidden Indigenous women and Native feminist theories within gender and women’s studies therefore requires critical reflection and a commitment toward structural change. Native feminist theories also radically reshape notions of Indigenous sovereignty, at times seriously threatening the investment that Indigenous peoples themselves have made in the nation-state and heteropatriarchy and its manifestations.
