ABSTRACT
“Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity” and thus also to the form that economic development took in the wake of colonial expansions. Indigenous women theorists have engaged with the concept of settler colonialism but add much to its power of analysis by looking specifically at how the state and state institutions such as police, court systems, systems of local and regional government, and military and paramilitary groups are agents of multiple forms of ongoing and accumulated violences directed at Indigenous women. Chickasaw Indigenous feminist anthropologist Shannon Speed uses an analysis of settler power embedded in a settler-capitalist state to illustrate how “Indigenous women are rendered vulnerable to a range of perpetrators” connected to institutions directly and indirectly linked to the state. Radical relationality is described by Arturo Escobar as “the fact that all entities that make up the world are so deeply interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves.
