ABSTRACT
Though writ as a violation wherein one individual’s vulnerability is exploited by a nefarious other, the U.S. blueprint for trafficking began before the nation-state’s establishment with the forced/coerced movement of Native peoples for the purported protection of the burgeoning government. Such colonial spatial violence combined exploitative actions with dispossession in a terrorizing clearing of “excess” land for incoming settlers while encoding race into legal “sex trafficking” discourse. The resulting legacy of forced/voluntary “exploitation” distracts us from interrogating how the trafficking/exploitation model reproduces governmentality and inequality while it renders racialized peoples excess and beyond protection. This sociolegal analysis prioritizes Indigenous critique/perspective to examine continuing nation-state-constitutive settler violence through U.S. anti-trafficking sociocultural sentiment and legislation. Framing these “interventions” as responses to sexual exchanges that do not conform to settler sexual logics, this chapter considers how anti-trafficking discourse codes or marks “Indianness” and positions specific communities beyond “rightful citizen” status to reiterate the need for the nation-state through a spectacle of the consequences when such “protection” is withdrawn.
