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.