ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the fundamentals of how state-controlled population statistics operated, and continue to operate, as a key tool of colonization. This understanding is central to our key tasks of (1) challenging the status quo of Indigenous statistics within our nation-states and (2) reimagining Indigenous statistics as tools that serve First Peoples. The first part of the chapter challenges Western positioning of population statistics as numerical facts, demonstrating their long association with the rationale and maintenance of eugenics and hierarchies of power, across the Western world, but particularly in colonized settler states. The chapter then explores the politically and racially infused characteristics of Indigenous population statistics by asking and answering the interlinked questions: What do Indigenous statistics mean? and How are Indigenous statistics understood? Finally, the chapter asks, what should Indigenous statistics mean and how should they be understood by the Indigenous Peoples to whom they pertain?
