Researchers @ RICH, Radboud University, and the Decolonial/Postcolonial Working Group @ IAS, University of Warwick, present a special guest talk by Dian Million, (Tanana), Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair, Department of American Indian Studies, University of Washington

The history of the violence done to Indigenous and Black lives, our generations and our kinships, human and non human make for a grim story. Yet, any recounting of the litany of these atrocities would only divert us from considering the core of life affirming struggles that we have conducted in this never-ending war, one that appears to deepen now. In this generation, we explore the idea of what Indigenous means to a contemporary abolition movement. Indigeneity is a global practice in living, that liberal humanism/racial capitalism has tried to eradicate from the earth for over 500 years. We come to the work that Ruth Gilmore proposes, to "change one thing: everything" from our difference and our similarities. Indigeneity poses a different kind of struggle. How might we make a multiplicity of places that answer our desires and demands to remake systems of U.S. and Canadian settler colonialism and racial capitalist carceral systems of "unfreedom"? How might we stop the violence against our peoples, gendered, sexualized, and individualized that make impossible collective forms of care, that make impossible our ways of life.

Dian Million’s talk is part of a short online lecture series called Voices on Indigenous Dispossession and Reclamations. This series of events is organised by Dr Doro Wiese, supported by the European Union and the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, and in cooperation with Dr. Laura De Vos and Dr. Mathilde Roza, Radboud University, as well as the Decolonial/Postcolonial Working Group at the University of Warwick. This series hopes to demonstrate that it is paramount to examine Indigenous dispossession and to make it a central category when analysing the political economy of settler-colonial societies. It searches for and establishes alternative ways of organising life and living well, especially for and by Indigenous intellectuals.

Image credit: Dian Million, photographed by Emile Petrie, 2018

"Be like the wind--or better, like water" Dr. Dian Million @ IAS Warwick