Notes

1. I included an earlier version of this anecdote in my dissertation, but omitted the detail about Kashmir, which speaks to a kind of willful unknowing on my part of the significance of the layered and overlapping colonial contexts at play here.

2. Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 53–76.

3. For example, see the work of scholars such as the anthropologist Ather Zia. With Javaid Iqbal Bhat, Zia notes that “Kashmiris continue to demand that sovereignty be added as an option to reflect their desire for nationhood, a struggle they insist is older than India or Pakistan,” in “Introduction,” A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir, ed. Ather Zia and Javaid Iqbal Bhat (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 10.

4. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).

5. Queer scholars have developed modified formulations of hope vis-à-vis their critiques and complications of Lee Edelman’s and Leo Bersani’s respective embraces of negativity and antifuturity. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004);Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). For the late José Esteban Muñoz, that promise was located in the not-yet-hereness of queer cultures; as he famously wrote in Cruising Utopia, “Queerness is not yet here. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with possibility” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [New York: New York University Press, 2009, 1]). Sara Ahmed has likewise suggested that unhappiness of queer or feminist subjects, or of the melancholic migrant, may be a productive affect insofar as it enables the critique and transformation of the social conditions that produce unhappiness (Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010]). For additional critiques, see Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

6. For other ways of theorizing worldmaking see Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1978); Mark Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019); Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).

7. Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, “Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue,” Women & Performance 19, no. 2 (2009): 281.

8. Dian Million, “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives, and Our Search for Home,” American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2011): 315.

9. Cutcha Risling Baldy, “Z Nation was the first post-apocalyptic zombie tv show to feature Native Americans and it was bad . . . bad . . . really bad . . . I’m sure there was something redeeming . . . Eddie Spears is cute,” Sometimes Writer-Blogger Cutcha Risling Baldy, November 18, 2015, http://www.cutcharislingbaldy.com/blog/z-nation-was-the-first-post-apocalyptic-zombie-tv-show-to-feature-native-americans-and-it-was-bad-bad-really-bad-im-sure-there-was-something-redeeming-eddie-spears-is-cute. Should be Risling Baldy cites Deborah Miranda’s memoir, in which Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) describes the California mission system as “the end of the world.” See chapter 1 of Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday, 2013).

10. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 43, emphasis mine.

11. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon [Jas Morgan], “What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?” Canadian Art, May 23, 2018, https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics/.

12. Jas Morgan in Belcourt and Nixon [Morgan], “What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?”

13. Belcourt, in Belcourt and Nixon [Morgan].

14. It is worth noting that as the founder of the artist/activist collective R.I.S.E: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, DinéYahzi′ collaborated with queer Asian multimedia artist Jess X. Snow on Solastalgia, a “queer eco-feminist poetry tour” that took place in 2016–2017, culminating in a zine. DinéYahzi′ and Snow define solastalgia as “the pain experienced when the place where one resides or one loves is under immediate assault.” The framing of the tour and zine through solastalgia elicits interconnectivity and relation, as both Snow and DinéYahzi′ meditate on the pain of colonization, displacement, and ecocide. Snow’s poetry features in the first half of the zine; DinéYahzi′’s in the second. Preceding these two sections are two introductory poems, one by Snow, and one by DinéYahzi′, which set the stage for the zine as they reflect on themes such as collective pain, privilege, solidarity, and resistance. The organization of the zine thus invites readers to appreciate both sets of writing in terms of solastalgia.

15. While Toronto might technically be considered ceded land, the scope and validity of treaties signed between settler and Native nations—such as Treaty 13, signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, or the Williams treaty, signed between settlers and multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands—have been contested and subject to debate. See, for example, this summary of negotiations around the Williams Treaty: https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1542370282768/1542370308434#:~:text=1923%3A%20Williams%20Treaties%20signed%20to,seeking%20justice%20and%20fair%20compensation. The details of Treaty 13 are here: https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1370372152585/1581293792285#ucls13.

16. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57.

17. Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 5.

18. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547–66; Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65; Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

19. Use of the acronym BIPOC to denote “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” (rather than “bisexual people of color”) first appears around 2013 in posts on Twitter (now X) by Toronto-based user accounts. The Marvellous Grounds archive project captures the Toronto-specific relational ethos I speak of: see Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018) and the accompanying website, http://marvellousgrounds.com.

20. See chapter 4 of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

21. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “Comparison and Coalition in the Age of Black Lives Matter,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 2 (2017): 275.

22. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017); bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing, 1984), 124–33; Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 264–74; Maria Lugones, “Hard-to-Handle Anger,” in Overcoming Racism & Sexism, ed. Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 203–18. See also Grace Kyungwon Hong, Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), for her useful reading of Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of difference and incommensurability. For a recent reflection on Indigenous feminist rage, see Sarah Deer, Jodi A. Byrd, Durba Mitra, and Sarah Haley, “Rage, Indigenous Feminisms, and the Politics of Survival,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 4 (2021): 1057–71.

23. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 356–57.

24. Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 115–18.

25. The late historian Patrick Wolfe’s succinct observation that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event,” provided a rubric for how to understand this longue durée. Wolfe argued that the framework of colonial invasion was insufficient for understanding ongoing attempts to eliminate Indigeneity (whether through physical genocide or cultural genocide, aka assimilation) in order to appropriate and lay claim to Native land as settler land. By naming colonialism as a structure, Wolfe highlighted how bureaucratic mechanisms of law and governance cemented settler-colonial power, while disappearing (or, attempting to disappear) Indigenous nations. Unfortunately, as Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein point out in their introduction to a 2016 special issue of Theory & Event, “On Colonial Unknowing,” Wolfe’s work has frequently circulated in ways that posit a too-reductive binary between structure and event. Consequently, they note, scholars take up Wolfe and then frame settler colonialism as a modular form of colonialism, rather than a historically situated formation that is entangled with slavery, imperialism, and other forms of structural violence. Moreover, as Tiffany Lethabo King argues in The Black Shoals, privileging settler-colonial structure over event crowds out attention to the violence of conquest lived and survived by Indigenous and Black peoples. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019).

26. Joanne Barker, originally posted on her blog, Tequila Sovereign; republished by Devon G. Pena on his blog, mexmigration: History and Politics of Mexican Immigration, http://mexmigration.blogspot.com/2014/01/decolonize-this-joanne-barkers-critical.html.

27. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387.

28. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (2016), https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/.

29. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13.

30. Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Malinda Smith, “Introduction: States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century,” in States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Malinda Smith (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010), 2.

31. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

32. For Cho, diaspora is “a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession. Diaspora is not divorced from the histories of colonialism and imperialism, nor is it unmarked by race and the processes of racialization. It is not defined by these histories and social practices, but these histories and practices form a crucial part of the condition of diaspora’s emergence.” Lily Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2007): 14.

33. Sharon Fernandez, “More Than Just an Arts Festival: Communities, Resistance, and the Story of Desh Pardesh,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 1 (2006): para. 1.

34. Punam Khosla, “Desh Pradesh: South Asian Culture in the Diaspora: Opening Address,” Rungh Magazine 1, no. 1–2 (1991): 5.

35. Fernandez, “More Than Just an Arts Festival,” para. 2.

36. For example, see Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Quynh Nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Americas (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2019); Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Erin Suzuki, Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021); Nishant Upadhyay, Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024).

37. See Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021).

38. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Other authors who have theorized settler subjectivity include Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020); Scott Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Sherene Razack, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

39. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxiv, 53.

40. Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): para. 1, emphasis mine.

41. Hagar Kotef, “Violent Attachments,” Political Theory 48, no. 1 (2020): 19–20.

42. Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 13.

43. For example, in Native American and Indigenous studies, see works such as Joanne Barker’s Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), and Byrd’s Transit of Empire; in Black studies, King’s The Black Shoals and Kyle T. Mays’s City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022); in Asian American studies, see Day’s Alien Capital and Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). For an overview of critical ethnic studies, see Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective, “Introduction: A Sightline,” in Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, ed. Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), and John D. Marquez and Junaid Rana, “On Our Genesis and Future,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–8.

44. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, eds., “Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000); Fujikane and Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism.

45. For an account of Trask’s MELUS address and responses to it, see Cynthia Franklin, “Introduction,” in Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Pacific, Selected Essays, ed. Cynthia Franklin, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), xvii.

46. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–24.

47. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120–43.

48. For instance, Black studies scholars such as Jared Sexton have pointed out that to conflate anti-Black racism with other forms of racism and discrimination is to effectively flatten out history, ignoring the ways that transatlantic slavery—along with attempted Native genocide and land seizure—have profoundly changed the course of the world as we know it. Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–5 (2016): 583–97. To render slavery as essentially equivalent to other forms of migration is thus to ignore what Saidiya Hartman has called the “afterlife of slavery.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6. Also see Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2008–9): 120–38.

49. Dean Saranillio, “Haunani-Kay Trask and Settler Colonial and Relational Critique: Alternatives to Binary Analyses of Power,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 4, no. 2 (2018): 38.

50. Malissa Phung, “Indigenous and Asian Relation Making,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 1 (2019): 22.

51. See Trask, “Settlers of Color”; Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism”; Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement; Yu-Ting Huang, “Writing Settlement: Locating Asian-Indigenous Relations in the Pacific,” Verge 4, no. 2 (2018): 25–36; Byrd, Transit of Empire; Day, Alien Capital.

52. Scholars across Black and Native studies in particular have engaged in difficult and generative conversations to tease out the co-constitutive nature of anti-Blackness and settler-colonial violence. For example, see Jackson’s Creole Indigeneity; King, The Black Shoals; Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery”; T. J. Tallie, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

53. Byrd, The Transit of Empire.

54. Jodi Byrd, “Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance,” Critical Ethnic Studies 5, no. 1–2 (2019): 210.

55. Tiffany Lethabo King, “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Discourses of Black Conquest,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016); Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery”; Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

56. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).

57. For example, see the 2016 special issue of Theory & Event edited by Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” as well as their introduction to it; Barker’s Tequila Sovereign blog posts; and the 2019 special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies, “Solidarities of Nonalignment,” edited by Michael Viola, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Iyko Day. See also Shaista Patel’s essay, “The ‘Indian Queen’ of the Four Continents: Tracing the ‘Undifferentiated Indian’ through Europe’s Encounters with Muslims, Anti-Blackness, and Conquest of the ‘New World,’” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 414–36.

58. Day, Alien Capital; Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement; Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism; Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Le, Unsettled Solidarities; Suzuki, Ocean Passages; Upadhyay, Indians on Indian Lands. In addition to these monographs, please see the works of authors such as Yu-Ting Huang and Shaista Patel: Patel, “The ‘Indian Queen’ of the Four Continents”; Huang, “Writing Settlement.”

59. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992); Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

60. For example, Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10.

61. Curtis Marez, University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

62. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

63. Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 13.

64. Gunning describes the cinema of attraction more “as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism. In other words, I believe that the relation to the spectator set up by the films of both Lumière and Méliès (and many other filmmakers before 1906) had a common basis, and one that differs from the primary spectator relations set up by narrative film after 1906. . . . I believe that this conception dominates cinema until about 1906–1907. Although different from the fascination in storytelling exploited by the cinema from the time of Griffith, it is not necessarily opposed to it. In fact the cinema of attraction[s] does not disappear with the dominance of narrative.” Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 382.

65. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Janne Lahti, “Introduction: Reel Settler Colonialism: Gazing, Reception, and Production of Global Settler Cinemas,” in Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, ed. Janne Lahti and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (New York: Routledge), 5.

66. Black Camera, a journal of Black film studies, is one of the few publications that might fall under this category. In terms of faculty lines, it is only relatively recently that film and media studies departments at universities such as UC Berkeley (2020), the University of Toronto (2019), and the University of Washington (2020) have hired for race-focused positions.

67. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight; Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); Dustin Tahmahkera, Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Denise Khor, Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2003); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).

68. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 1.

69. On representations of Blackness, see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bloomsbury, 1973); Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Daniel Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). On representations of Latinx/Chicanx people, see Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Frank Javier Garcia Berumen, The Chicano/Hispanic Image in American Film (New York: Vantage, 1994); Allen L. Woll, The Latin Image in American Film (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1980). On representations of Arabs and Muslims, see Tim Jon Semmerling, “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch, 2001). On representations of Native Americans, see Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005); Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L. P. Silet, The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980); Jacqueline Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). On representations of Asian Americans, see Gina Marchetti, The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in American Motion Pictures (New York: Amo, 1978).

70. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,” Screen 24, no. 2 (1983): 3.

71. Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Daniel Bernardi, ed., Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge; 2008); Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 2–11; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.

72. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44–65.

73. Bernardi, The Birth of Whiteness; Bernardi, Classic Hollywood; Bernardi, The Persistence of Whiteness.

74. For example, see Desai, Beyond Bollywood; Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993); Peter X. Feng, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Raheja, Reservation Reelism.

75. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 714.

76. See Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, “‘To Get Here?’ The Onscreen/Offscreen Relations of Biopower and Vulnerability in Frozen River,” Critical Ethnic Studies 4, no. 2 (2018): 118–40.

77. Hugh Hart, “Here’s the Camera: Go!” UCLA Magazine, June 14, 2022, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/la-rebellion-multicultural-filmmakers. For more on the multiraciality of the LA Rebellion, see Josslyn Luckett’s work; e.g. Josslyn Luckett, “Searching for Betty Chen: Rediscovering the Asian American Filmmakers of UCLA in the Seventies,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2020): 34–40.

78. For works outlining the difference between comparison and relationality, see Danika Medak-Saltzman and Antonio Tiongson Jr., “Racial Comparativism Reconsidered,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 1–7; and Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). Other examples of relational theorizing include Byrd, Transit of Empire; Day, Alien Capital; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; King, The Black Shoals.

79. For more on critical ethnic studies, see Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). Also see John D. Marquez and Junaid Rana, “On Our Genesis and Future,” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 1, no.1 (2015): 1–8. The Critical Ethnic Studies Association is currently inactive due to limited funds and resources.

80. Medak-Saltzman and Tiongson Jr., “Racial Comparativism Reconsidered.”

81. Khor’s recent Transpacific Convergences, for example, disrupts dominant modes of film historiography and assumptions about the centers and peripheries of filmmaking as she frames early Japanese film and its infrastructures in relation to forms of interracial encounter and intimacy, including African American filmmaking and Filipino spectatorship (Khor, Transpacific Convergences, 11).

82. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 19.

83. Wilderson, Red, White & Black.

84. Nick Mitchell, “The View from Nowhere: On Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism,” Spectre Journal (Fall 2020): 111. As of June 21, 2022, on Google Scholar, Red, White & Black has been cited 103 times in 2022; of these, only nineteen are citations from film and media studies, broadly construed.

85. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 5, 4.

86. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 3.

87. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 16. For the latter insight, Keeling draws on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

88. Keeling describes cinematic perception as “not confined to interactions with moving-image media such as film and television. Involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself, these perceptual and cognitive processes work to order, orchestrate, produce, and reproduce social reality and sociality. In other words, in addition to operating in and through the variety of technological apparatuses for the ‘mechanical reproduction’ or ‘electronic transmission’ of objects as images, cinematic processes govern (in the sense of exercising continuous sovereign authority over) the selection of which images can appear and of what is likely to be perceptible in their appearance. They designate a specific perceptual schema that is adequate to the task of perceiving those images and that corresponds to a ‘matter’ that is itself cinematic. Neither cinematic perceptual schemas nor cinematic matter precedes the other. Together they constitute the cinematic, an assemblage that might also be referred to as ‘twentieth-century reality’ because we neither posit nor access ‘reality’ except via these processes, which were perfected by film.” Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 11–12.

89. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 130–31, 137.

90. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 131.

91. Rita Wong, “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature,” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 158.

1. Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).

2. Hsinya Huang, “Tracking Memory: Encounters Between Chinese Railroad Workers and Native Americans,” in The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, ed. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019), 182. Chang, Fishkin, and Obenzinger write that there is further evidence that thousands of Chinese workers died under grueling circumstances and harsh weather. Gordon H. Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Hilton Obenzinger, “Introduction,” in The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, ed. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019), 14.

3. See Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

4. The film Minari similarly mines history and autobiography in order to stake a claim to live and belong (see also Steve Yuen’s GQ photo shoot following Minari). In Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Noon, while the cowboy is also a figure of desire, as a co-production between Hollywood and Hong Kong studios, the marketing and framing of Shanghai Noon focus primarily on the mash-up between the martial arts and western genres. In Shanghai Noon, it is genre that is the object of consumption, for transnational audiences.

5. Writer Clarence Mumford invented the character of Hopalong Cassidy, who appeared in a number of film and television shows beginning in 1935.

6. While Native people are not erased in Yau’s story, their incorporation within a multicultural Hawai‘i in which “Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Polynesian, and Samoan” are all substitutable for one another also performs an erasure of settler-colonial violence and Indigenous sovereignty that has been soundly critiqued. See John Yau, Hawaiian Cowboys (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1995), 100. For critiques of multicultural discourses of Hawai‘i, see Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–24; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 280–94; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Judy Rohrer, Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai‘i (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016).

7. Set in nineteenth-century California, How Much of These Hills Is Gold centers on two orphaned siblings, queer and nonbinary, struggling to survive racism and sexism of the harsh frontier. Though its epigraph, “This land is not your land,” might seem to be a critique of settler claims, the plot suggests that it is primarily a critique of Asian exclusion. C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020). Tom Lin’s The Thousand Crimes (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021), which is a revenge fantasy written from the perspective of an aggrieved Chinese worker, more closely parallels Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman in its attempts to stake a claim for an Asian American masculinity that is commensurate with white masculinity.

8. On playing Indian, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore 99, no. 1 (1988): 30–55.

9. See David A. Smith, Cowboy Presidents: The Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics Since 1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021).

10. Deena Rymhs, “‘It’s a Double-Beat Dance’: The ‘Indian Cowboy’ in Indigenous Literature, Art, and Film,” Intertexts 14, no. 2 (2010): 75–92.

11. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 188.

12. Jodi A. Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 209–10.

13. Beenash Jafri, “Desire, Settler Colonialism and the Racialized Cowboy,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 73–86.

14. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 11.

15. Rifkin, 37.

16. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 126, original emphasis.

17. The Native mimic has a different relationship to the figure of the cowboy that would more closely correspond to Bhabha’s formulation. See Deena Rymhs’s discussion of “Indian cowboys” in literature and visual art, for example. Rymhs, “‘It’s a Double-Beat Dance.’”

18. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–2.

19. Michael Yellow Bird, “Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism,” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (2004): 33.

20. Yellow Bird, 40–41.

21. Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 58.

22. Yau, Hawaiian Cowboys, 100. Similarly, Herb Jeffries began making Black-cast musical westerns in the late 1930s partly to provide relatable heroes for Black children; he recalls seeing a Black boy crying because his friends wouldn’t let him play cowboy. See Mary Dempsey, “The Bronze Buckaroo Rides Again,” American Visions 12, no. 4 (1997): 22–25.

23. The Canadian state consolidates much of this legal framework in the Indian Act.

24. On the vexed relations interplay between refugee and settler, see Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s work on what she calls the “refugee settler condition.” Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel-Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

25. Among the other Asian diasporic films that engage with the western in some way are Michael Kang’s short, Japanese Cowboy (2000), Nikhil Kamkolkar’s Indian Cowboy (2004), and Jackie Chan’s Hollywood co-production Shanghai Noon (2000). Aside from Wild West, Bains was the creator and writer of the television series Grease Monkeys (2003–2004), which ran for ten episodes and centers on “a dysfunctional Asian family in Manchester.” See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361187/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_4 for more on Grease Monkeys. For Wild West’s “Release Info” see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105820/releaseinfo?ref_=ttrel_ql_2.

26. Cowgirl is Lee’s first film. The second is a six-minute short called Chinese Food and Donuts (1999). Lee is currently a story analyst at Warner Brothers.

27. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 243.

28. Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Double Meaning of the American Dream,” The Atlantic, February 19, 2021, para. 13, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/minari-lee-isaac-chung-visual-melancholia-american-dream/618064/.

29. Anne Anlin Cheng, Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8.

30. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI (1927–1931), ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1927), 152–57.

31. Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosse and the Afterlives of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1858); Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 111; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 2004).

32. See Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1996).

33. By contrast, films such as Indian Cowboy or Shanghai Noon indulge the fantasy completely: the lost object is no longer lost. The protagonists become cowboys—in Shanghai Noon, through historical revision; in Indian Cowboy, through the metaphorical substitution of American westward expansion with (South Asian) Indian transnational mobility. On the latter, see Jafri, “Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy.”

34. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 136.

35. Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1974).

36. Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Can the Other of Native Studies Speak?,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Blog, February 1, 2016, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/can-the-other-of-native-studies-speak/.

37. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).

38. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). In particular, see Crimp’s introduction.

39. Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Blake Allmendinger, “The Queer Fronter,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 223–36.

40. Cowgirl is Lee’s first film; the second is a six-minute short called Chinese Food and Donuts (1999). Lee is currently a story analyst at Warner Brothers.

41. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.

42. Lee, personal conversation, December 21, 2021.

43. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 5.

44. For example, see Mire Koikari, “Love! Spam: Food, Military, and Empire in Post–World War II Okinawa,” in Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, ed. Nancy Stalker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 171–86.

45. Jodi Kim, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), 2.

46. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

47. Kevin Bruyneel, Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

48. In 2014, the West Virginia legislature declared “Take Me Home, Country Roads” one of the state’s official songs. The song also plays at the end of every football and basketball game at West Virginia University. See Chris Dorst, “W.Va Takes Home ‘Country Roads’,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, March 7, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140316212401/http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201403070150.

49. See Sarah Kessler and Karen Tongson, “Karaoke and Ventriloquism: Echoes and Divergences,” Sounding Out! A Sound Studies Online Journal, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/05/12/karaoke-and-ventriloquism-echoes-and-divergences/.

50. Kessler and Tongson.

51. The equation of “white foods” with blandness emerges from the racialization of whiteness as pure, normative, and unmarked. For example, see Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

52. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 6.

53. Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1998), 53. See also Laura Horak’s “Landscape, Vitality and Desire: Cross-Dressed Frontier Girls in Transitional-Era American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (2013): 74–98.

54. For example, Renée Tajima notes in her classic essay of Asian American women stereotypes that “there are two basic types: the Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian Beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu’s various female relations, prostitutes, devious madams).” Renée Tajima, “Lotus Blossom Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writing By and About Asian American Women, ed. Diane Yen-Mei Wong (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 309.

55. Fanon describes the everyday experience of being read not as human, but as a Black body; as an object of fascination and fetishization. In an oft-quoted passage, he recounts being pointed and gawked at by a child, who exclaims to his mother, “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” The child’s misrecognition of Fanon forces him to now rediscover himself as a subject overdetermined by race, unable to be seen outside of Blackness, including its historical associations and stereotypes. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 91.

56. Ernest Cashmore and Barry Troyna, Introduction to Race Relations (Bristol, Pa.: Falmer, 1990), 155.

57. Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and Southall Rights, Southall: The Birth of a Black Community (London: Institute of Race Relations and Southall Rights, 1981), 51.

58. Institute of Race Relations, “Remembering Blair Peach: 30 Years On,” April 23, 2009, https://irr.org.uk/article/remembering-blair-peach-30-years-on-2/.

59. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979); Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

60. See Rajiv Shankar, “Foreword: South Asian Identity in Asian America,” in A Part Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America, ed. Lavina Dhingra and Rajini Srikanth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), xii.

61. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

62. Muhammad Anwar, “Introduction I: The Context of Leadership: Migration, Settlement, and Racial Discrimination,” in Black and Ethnic Leaderships: The Cultural Dimensions of Political Action, ed. Pnina Webner and Muhammad Anwar (London: Routledge, 2009), 1.

63. Anwar, 7–8.

64. On South Asian and Afro-Caribbean solidarities, see Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and Southall Rights, Southhall. On race and nation in the UK, see Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.

65. Supporting such a reading, critic Robert Ebert noted in his review of the film, “Although some of the London critics immediately insisted on a comparison with Hanif (My Beautiful Laundrette) Kureshi, [Wild West writer Harwant] Bains will have none of it: His generation, he says, doesn’t identify with Britain or the Indian subcontinent, but are forming a new identity of their own.” Roger Ebert, “Wild West,” December 10, 1993, Rogerebert.com.

66. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 141. Bazin communicates his befuddlement when he goes on to exclaim in the same passage: “Its world-wide appeal is even more astonishing than its historical survival. What can there possibly be to interest Arabs, Hindus, Latins, Germans, or Anglo-Saxons, among whom the western has had an uninterrupted success, about evocations of the birth of the United States of America, the struggle between Buffalo Bill and the Indians, the laying down of the railroad, or the Civil War!”

67. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians,” Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (2003): para 28.

68. Deloria, Playing Indian, 3.

69. See Ruth Maxey, South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 63–65.

70. Cf. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126.

71. Zia-ul-Haq served as military general for the Pakistani army until 1977, when he declared martial law. He served as president until 1988, when he died in a plane crash.

72. The racial coding is clearly noted through the band’s name, “The Honky Tonks”: “honky” is vernacular for “white.”

73. The film’s nuanced portrayal of mobility and travel as both joyful and risky also places pressure on such renderings. For example, Zaf rides home into the sunset on his bicycle on a vast expanse of a road, in an early shot of the film that repeats a common opening shot in many western films. Zaf’s bicycle is flamboyantly decorated (complete with fringed leopard-print banana seat, and a furry tail), and his expression communicates satisfaction, confidence, and determination. While in many westerns, the camera focuses on the skill and physique of the cowboy on his horse, Wild West zooms in on the spectacle of Zaf, on his simple bicycle, decked out in a fringed buckskin jacket, pointed cowboy boots, and hat, with a guitar slung over his back. When Zaf enters the city streets again a few scenes later, he discovers that someone has stolen his bicycle. The contrast between the liberating bike ride across the empty road and the restriction on mobility resulting from the theft of his bicycle references the town/country dichotomy of the classic western.

74. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

75. Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), 91–92.

76. Roderick McGillis, He Was Some Kind of Man: Masculinities in the B Western (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 13.

77. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Moore, “Introduction: Trans, Trans-, or Transgender?,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–4 (2008): 11–22.

78. For more on masculinity and the western, see Janet Thumim, “‘Maybe He’s Tough but He Sure Ain’t No Carpenter’: Masculinity and In/competence in Unforgiven,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), 341.

79. On the construction of Indigenous men as hypermasculine, see Sam McKegney, Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), 1.

80. Lisa Tatonetti, Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 7 and 4. For a discussion of more expansive Indigenous traditions of masculinity, see Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).

81. Homi Bhabha, “Are You a Man or a Mouse?,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57–65.

82. Deloria, Playing Indian, 3.

1. Shraya mentions the distribution of author royalties in the author’s note at the end of the book. There she also writes: “as a non-black person of colour writing a book about racism, i felt it necessary to acknowledge anti-black racism. my hope is that this comes through in this book. i also felt it necessary to consider what it means to be given a platform to discuss racism while being a settler in canada, where indigenous people have faced and continue to face racial violence, and the dismissal of this violence.” Vivek Shraya, even this page is white (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016), 109.

2. Shraya, 17.

3. It was specifically radical feminist organizers in the 1960s and 1970s who developed the tactic of consciousness-raising. See the collection of writing on consciousness-raising as a movement method in Barbara Crow, ed., Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

4. Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Speculation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.

5. At times in this chapter, I refer to queer and trans as distinct formations; at other moments I collapse them under queer. My shifting usages of these terms is intentional, signaling their imbrications in one another, without fully collapsing their differences.

6. See Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware, Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018) and the accompanying website, http://marvellousgrounds.com.

7. E.g., see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).

8. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

9. Ferguson, 117.

10. Ferguson, 117, 118–19.

11. Mark Rifkin, “Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 149–87.

12. Jennifer Denetdale, “Securing Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 131–48.

13. Denetdale, 146.

14. Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).

15. Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016): para. 1.

16. Lisa Tatonetti, Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

17. Tatonetti, 133.

18. Simpson, “The State Is a Man,” para. 17.

19. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “The Place Where We All Live and Work Together: A Gendered Analysis of ‘Sovereignty,’” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 18.

20. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 117–18.

21. See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.

22. Maylei Blackwell in Maylei Blackwell, Laura Briggs, and Mignonette Chiu, “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36, no. 3 (2015): 4.

23. See Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” GLQ 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 41–68.

24. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 172.

25. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019). The Black-Native relations that King speaks of are also historically and contextually specific, and not easily translatable to other kinds of relations.

26. Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Columbus, Ohio: Two Dollar Radio Press, 2020); Chris Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke): Bringing ‘Sexy Back’ and Out of Native Studies’ Closet,” in Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature, ed. Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Lisa Tatonetti, The Queerness of Native American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Joshua Whitehead, full-metal indigequeer (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2017).

27. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon [Jas Morgan], “What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?” Canadian Art, May 23, 2018; Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

28. King, The Black Shoals, chapter 4.

29. Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 92.

30. See Tatonetti’s tracking of the Indigenous erotic of the work of these writers in Written by the Body (particularly chapters 2 and 5).

31. Tatonetti, 156.

32. Mishuana Goeman, “Ongoing Storms and Struggles: Gendered Violence and Resource Exploitation,” in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 100.

33. Goeman, 102. My emphasis.

34. Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literature Matters (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018), xix.

35. In Karen Fricker, “What Do You Do When the Love of Your Life Fails You? Vivek Shraya Turned It Into a Solo Show,” Toronto Star, February 18, 2020, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2020/02/18/what-do-you-do-when-the-love-of-your-life-fails-you-vivek-shraya-turned-it-into-a-solo-show.html.

36. Heath McCoy, “Author, Musician and Artist Vivek Shraya Joins English Department,” University of Calgary News, January 11, 2018, https://ucalgary.ca/news/author-musician-and-artist-vivek-shraya-joins-english-department.

37. To be clear: I am engaging in Shraya’s work here not as analogy for diaspora, but as exemplifying what is at stake in focusing on corporeality.

38. See https://vivekshraya.com/about/.

39. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67.

40. Eric Stanley, “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 29, no. 2 (2011): 10. Calvin Warren’s generative critique of Stanley further raises questions about the disproportionate violence enacted on trans of color bodies—and specifically, on Black trans bodies. See Calvin Warren, “Onticide: Afro-Pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence,” GLQ 23, no. 3 (2017): 391–418.

41. Nicole Morse, “The Transfeminine Futurity in Knowing Where to Look: Vivek Shraya on Selfies,” TSQ 6, no. 4 (2019): 661.

42. Nael Bhanji, “Necrointimacies: Affect and the Reverberations of Violent Intimacy,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 4 (2019): 118.

43. Morse, “The Transfeminine Futurity,” 666.

44. Shraya’s animated short Reviving The Roost (2019) is one of the few of her works that explicitly thinks about place, in this case, the former Edmonton gay nightclub The Roost. The film is a nostalgic reflection on the communality that thrived at The Roost because of its status as the gay bar in town. However, while it meditates on place, it thinks less about land.

45. See https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/edmonton_archives/origins-of-naming-in-edmonton.

46. Shraya, even this page is white.

47. Tatonetti, Written by the Body, 150–53.

48. This quote comes from Wilson’s interview with Marie Laing (Kanyen’keh.:ka); it is cited in Tatonetti, 154.

49. Mishuana Goeman, “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 74.

50. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973/2000).

51. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31.

52. Quoted in Peter Knegt, “Legends of the Trans: Vivek Shraya Queers Brad Pitt (and His Hair) in Her Latest Project,” CBC, November 18, 2021, para. 12, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/legends-of-the-trans-vivek-shraya-queers-brad-pitt-and-his-hair-in-her-latest-project-1.6252798. My emphasis.

53. This recalls the paradox of American national identity discussed in chapter 1, wherein Americans are imagined to be simultaneously European and Indigenous. See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 3.

54. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

55. Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies,” TSQ 4, no. 2 (2017): 162.

56. Eva S. Hayward, “Don’t Exist,” TSQ 4, no. 2 (2017): 192–93.

57. See https://www.shanimootoo.com/.

58. For more on the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, see https://www.banffcentre.ca/history-banff-centre-arts-and-creativity.

59. See Monika Kin Gagnon and Richard Fung, 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (Montreal: Artextes Editions, 2002).

60. See https://www.shanimootoo.com/.

61. Richard Fung, “Bodies Out of Place: The Videotapes of Shani Mootoo,” Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 162.

62. Shani Mootoo, “Selected Paintings,” https://www.shanimootoo.com/visual-art.

63. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “‘A Shared Queerness’: Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Sexuality in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Meridians 7, no. 1 (2006): 74.

64. See Deborah Dundas and Sue Carter, “How a Move from Toronto to Prince Edward County Sparked Writer Shani Mootoo’s #MeToo Novel,” Toronto Star, March 4, 2020, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2020/03/04/how-a-move-from-toronto-to-prince-edward-county-sparked-writer-shani-mootoos-metoo-novel.html.

65. Fung, “Bodies Out of Place,” 162.

66. Marie Conboy, “Siksika Nation Reclaims Land at Castle Mountain, Wrongfully Taken in 1908,” Calgary Herald, June 7, 2022, https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/siksika-nation-reclaims-land-at-castle-mountain-wrongfully-taken-in-1908. For details on the settlement, see https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SI-2016-32/page-1.html.

67. See Kyo Maclear, “The Accidental Tourist,” in Private Investigators: Undercover in Public Space, ed. Kathryn Walter and Kyo Maclear (Banff: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1999), 9; Meg Stanley and Tina Loo, “Getting into Hot Water: Racism and Exclusion at Banff National Park,” NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, August 26, 2020, https://niche-canada.org/2020/08/26/getting-into-hot-water-racism-and-exclusion-at-banff-national-park. For a reading of the discourses of race, sexuality, and whiteness underpinning cultural constructions of Canadian national parks, see Margot Francis, “The Lesbian National Parks and Services: Reading Sex, Race, and the Nation in Artistic Performance,” Canadian Woman Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 131–36.

68. Chaguaramas is an area in the northwest peninsula of Trinidad. The peninsula was leased to the U.S. military from 1940 to 1963.

69. See the website of the Santa Rosa First Peoples community in Trinidad: https://web.archive.org/web/20190207102958/http://santarosafirstpeoples.org/.

70. Shona N. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

71. Jackson, 3–4.

72. Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night is set in a colonial Caribbean landscape modeled after Trinidad. The novel is attuned to the enmeshment of colonization, sex, gender, and violence, but it is primarily concerned with European colonization rather than lateral relations of violence. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996).

73. Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo, “Dear Shani, Hiya Richard: A Dialogue by/with Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo,” Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication 2, no. 1 (1995): n.p. http://www.e-felix.org/issue4/shani.html.

74. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity, 4.

75. Bruno Cornellier and Michael Griffiths, “Globalizing Unsettlement: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 306.

76. For more on Durga, see David R. Kinsely, The Goddesses Mirror: Visions of the Divine from East and West (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

77. Dandiya, which comes from Gujurati dance traditions and is popular at weddings, usually involves a group of dancers performing with sticks in a circle.

78. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), chapter 2.

79. Day, 86.

80. Enakshi Dua, “The Hindu Woman’s Question,” Canadian Woman Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 110.

81. Hong, “A Shared Queerness,” 89.

82. Sonja Thomas writes: “In 1452 a papal bull was issued by Pope Nicholas V. It gave the Portuguese permission ‘to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans and to take all their possessions and their property.’ In 1493 the bull was strengthened when Pope Alexander VI granted authority to Spain and Portugal to take all lands and possessions if no other Christian ruler had claimed them. These two bulls are called the Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine religiously sanctioned the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples especially in the Americas.” Thomas, “‘Studying Up’ in World Christianity: A Feminist Analysis of Caste and Settler Colonialism,” Journal of World Christianity 11, no. 2 (2021): 196.

83. For more on this, see Nishant Upadhyay, “Hindu Nation and Its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/coloniality in India,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 22, no. 4 (2020): 464–80.

84. Mootoo provides an endorsement for Shraya’s even this page is white (on the book’s back cover) in which she writes, “Like a Durga goddess, Shraya juggles with deft hands the multiple aspects of desire, race, gender, queerness, and contemporary pop culture.” Unlike Mootoo, however, Shraya comes from an upper caste background.

85. Tatonetti, Written by the Body, 21.

1. On Iroquois border crossings and the Jay Treaty of 1794, see chapter 5 of Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

2. Simpson, 115; on the transit of “Indian,” see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

3. For example, see Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Politics of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120–43.

4. Exemplary of such an interpretation of Indigenous movements is Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Migrants and Natives (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).

5. See the work of scholars such as Larissa Lai, Marie Lo, Malissa Phung, and Rita Wong, who have done formative work that accounts for relations of respect within Asian Canadian literature. Larissa Lai, “Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation,” in Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 99–126; Marie Lo, “Model Minorities, Models of Resistance: Native Figures in Asian Canadian Literature,” Canadian Literature 196 (2008): 96–114; Malissa Phung, “Asian-Indigenous Relationalities: Literary Gestures of Respect and Gratitude,” Canadian Literature 227 (2015): 56–72; Rita Wong, “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature,” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 158–80.

6. In interviews, Kazimi frequently recalls the aggressive questioning he was subjected to at the border by immigration officers who questioned the authenticity of their passports and visas. Ultimately, the officer told Kazimi, “The only reason I’m letting you in to my country is because you speak such good English. You will remember me and thank me for doing this.” Becky Rynor, “A Career Exploring Race, Racism and Stereotypes Earns Cinema Professor Ali Kazimi a Lifetime Achievement Award,” University Affairs, June 5, 2019, https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/a-career-exploring-race-racism-and-stereotypes-earns-cinema-professor-ali-kazimi-a-lifetime-achievement-award/.

7. Richard Fung’s projects “Shooting the System” and “Race to the Screen” are examples of such collective projects. See Monika Kin Gagnon and Richard Fung, 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (Montreal: Artextes Editions, 2002), 24–26.

8. Cf. Lai, “Epistemologies of Respect.”

9. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 134.

10. For example, see Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 264–74; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name—A Biomythography (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1982); Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher 7 (1978): 20–27; Richa Nagar with Ozlem Aslan, Nadia Z. Hasan, Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, Nishant Updahyay, and Begum Uzun, “Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 502–19.

11. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Maura Roberts, “Making Friends for the End of the World: A Conversation,” GUTS, May 23, 2016, https://gutsmagazine.ca/making-friends/.

12. Leah Claire Allen and John S. Garrison, “Against Friendship,” in Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, ed. Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), 233.

13. Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes, “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 2 (2015): 162.

14. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo’olelo, Aloha ’Āina, and Ea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), especially chapter 1.

15. Kim TallBear, “Reviving Kinship and Sexual Abundance,” For the Wild Podcast, April 27, 2022, https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/dr-kim-tallbear-on-reviving-kinship-and-sexual-abundance-encore-284.

16. TallBear, “Reviving Kinship and Sexual Abundance.”

17. Jafari S. Allen, ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 131.

18. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Audra Simpson, “Consent’s Revenge,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 326–33.

19. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 3.

20. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 11.

21. Deloria, 11.

22. Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 201.

23. See Shaista Patel, “Complicating the Tale of ‘Two Indians’: Mapping ‘South Asian’ Complicity in White Settler Colonialism Along the Axis of Caste and Anti-Blackness,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016): n.p.

24. See Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism.”

25. Lai, “Epistemologies of Respect”; SKY Lee, Disappearing Moon Café (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990); Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (New York: AK Press, 2013); Wong, “Decolonizasian.”

26. Wong, “Decolonizasian,” 158.

27. Carole McGranahan, “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319.

28. McGranahan, 322.

29. Simpson, “Consent’s Revenge,” 330.

30. McGranahan, “Theorizing Refusal,” 323.

31. McGranahan, 323.

32. See Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

33. Robinder Kaur Sehdev, “Lessons from the Bridge: On the Possibilities of Anti-Racist Feminist Alliances in Indigenous Spaces,” in This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades, ed. Keira Ladner and Leanne Simpson (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010), 106.

34. Kaushalya Bannerji, “Oka Nada,” in A New Remembrance: Poems (Toronto: TSAR, 1993), 20.

35. Rajinderpal S. Pal, “Collective Amnesia,” Rungh Magazine 4, no. 1–2 (1998): 25.

36. Sharron Proulx-Turner and Sanhita Brahmacharie, “A Braided Silken Cord: Aboriginal Women & Women of Colour Working Together,” Rungh Magazine 4, no. 1–2 (1998): 12.

37. Proulx-Turner and Brahmacharie, 13.

38. Proulx-Turner and Brahmacharie, 13.

39. John Kennedy, “Bollywood Blow-Up: Fashion Cares’ Hijacking of Hindu Religious Symbols Sparks Outrage,” NOW Magazine, June 2, 2005.

40. Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, “Rethinking Bollywood Cowboy: A Statement from the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention” (press release), http://canadiandesi.com/community_news.php?news_id=18.

41. For example, Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Tiffany Lethabo King, “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly),” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39; Lai, “Epistemologies of Respect”; Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism”; Ruthann Lee, “Portraits of (Un)settlement: Troubling Multicultural Masculinities in Dominique Hui’s Quiet North and Kent Monkman’s Shooting Geronimo,” GLQ 21, no. 4 (2015): 459–99; Lo, “Model Minorities, Models of Resistance”; Patel, “Complicating the Tale of ‘Two Indians’”; Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Wong, “Decolonizasian.”

42. Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979); Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 267–91; Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005).

43. Other Native photographers have similarly engaged with Curtis’s oeuvre. A 2016 exhibition entitled “Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy” at Portland Art Museum, Oregon, features the work of Wendy Red Star (Montana Crow Tribe), Will Wilson (Dine), and Zig Jackson (Mandan/Hidatasa/Arikara), who share distinct but similarly complex, negotiated relationships to Curtis’s work. See Tess Thackara, “Challenging America’s Most Iconic (and Controversial) Photographer of Native Americans,” Artsy, March 1, 2016, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-challenging-america-s-most-iconic-and-controversial-photographer-of-native-americans.

44. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. V. Lawrence and R. Nettleford (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57.

45. Ishtiaq Ahmed, “Foreword,” in The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad, ed. Anjali Gera Roy (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), xiv.

46. JoEllen Shively, “Cowboys and Indians: Perceptions of Western Films among American Indians and Anglos,” American Sociological Review 57, no. 6 (1992): 727.

47. The “lazy Aboriginal” stereotype is a close cousin of the “noble savage”—stoic and strong, but outside of civilization—that was the fantasy of Curtis, and of Kazimi at the start of the film. “Laziness” fed into colonizers’ perceptions of Native lands as empty, unworked, uncultivated, and available for conquest. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).

48. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 31.

49. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76.

50. Daniel Jewesbury, “On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film,” in Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited, ed. Gail Pearce and Jill Daniels (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 67.

51. Margot Francis, “Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives of Indians ‘Shooting Indians,’” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (2002): 5–26; Peter X. Feng, “Ethnography, the Cinematic Apparatus, and Asian American Film Studies,” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 40–55.

52. See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

53. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 176–77.

54. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 10.

55. Francis, “Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives,” 6–7.

56. Joanna Hearne has noted that “indigenous repurposing of earlier photographs and footage in a cinematic narrative accomplishes both a critical, pedagogical stance that remembers the history of colonization, and simultaneously a more direct embracing of indigenous subjects, images, and memories in intimate tribal, clan, and familial terms.” Thomas’s repurposing of Curtis’s work similarly recalls not only histories of colonization but also an active, agentive Indigenous gaze, one that Thomas both documents and practices. Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 185.

57. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2007), 9.

58. Francis, “Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives,” 14.

59. Francis, 14.

60. Ann Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 276.

61. Simpson, “Consent’s Revenge,” 329.

62. Dustin Tahmahkera, “Becoming Sound: Tubitsinakukuru from Mt. Scott to Standing Rock,” Sounding Out!, October 9, 2017, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2017/10/09/becoming-sound-tubitsinakukuru-from-mt-scott-to-standing-rock/; Byrd, The Transit of Empire.

63. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 222.

64. Naficy, 223.

65. Celia Haig-Brown, “Decolonizing Diaspora: Whose Traditional Land Are We On,” Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2009): 16.

66. Jeff Thomas, The Bear Portraits, https://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/the-bear-portraits/.

67. The only other definitively Toronto-based scene is filmed at the edge of the city, around the Toronto Island docks.

68. Byrd, The Transit of Empire.

69. Bruno Cornellier and Michael R. Griffiths, “Globalizing Unsettlement: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 306.

70. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 148.

71. Smith, 148.

72. Adivasi is a collective self-identification referring to the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. They are not officially recognized by the Indian state.

73. Quoted in Michael Hoolboom, “Shooting Indians: An Interview with Ali Kazimi,” https://mikehoolboom.com/?p=19663.

74. This was a choice Kazimi made in response to an essay by film scholar Tom Waugh. He notes in an interview that “Tom Waugh had written a piece in Cineaction on the documentary . . . and one of the things he’d [talked about] in it was the dominance of the talking group shot in Indian cinema. His argument in this article—which I’d read just before going to do the shoot, and in a sense it motivated me, because it did upset me—his argument was that the one-to-one interview comes out of a very Western notion of the confessional and that one-to-one discussions in collectivized societies and cultures like India were uncommon. And it would take an extremely talented director to draw out of ordinary Indians how they really felt. And therefore he concluded the lack of single one-to-one interviews. I was outraged. And I felt that, ok I will do one-to-one interviews with people who are ostensibly the most disempowered, the most unprivileged, the most oppressed people in India, and see how it works. And that’s why I did all the interviews [that way]. I wanted to interview all the people, both the tribal and the rural people in a straightforward way, giving them the same kind of respect and screen space and angles and positioning that is given to the so-called ‘experts’ in documentaries. It was a very clearly thought out process that I wanted to use.” Quoted in Marcy Goldberg and Firoza Elavia, “An Interview with Ali Kazimi,” Cineaction 37 (1995): 16.

75. Kazimi makes note of these privileges and affinities along class and linguistic lines. See Hoolboom, “Shooting Indians.”

76. Srimoyee Mitra, “Learning through Crossing Lines: An Intercultural Dialogue,” in Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, ed. Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagne (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2011), 280.

77. Mitra, 282.

78. Mitra, 278.

79. Mitra, 283–84.

80. Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 90–103.

81. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (New York: AK Press, 2013), chapter 2, “Cartography of NOII,” 95–118; South Asian Settler Colonialism Group, “South Asians in Solidarity with Idle No More,” Facebook, January 9, 2013, https://www.facebook.com/aruna.zehra/posts/313177328801507. The latter’s call, which arose out of the organizing context documented in this paper, echoes the ethics of refusal elaborated in Kazimi’s film: “[Idle No More] is a call to collectively commit to decolonizing ourselves, our communities and our relationships with Indigenous peoples and nations. To this end, it is not enough to just take part in protests, marches, flash mobs—although our presence is necessary. We also need to develop an ethic of cultivating relationships with Indigenous sovereignty movements by learning the colonial nature of the Canadian state, the treaties and status of land claims on the lands we occupy, the historical and ongoing struggles of Indigenous communities and understanding our complicities on these colonized lands. Decolonization of Turtle Islands is not just an Indigenous issue. Idle No More and Indigenous sovereignty is not just the responsibility of Indigenous peoples. It is part of broader of [sic] anti-racist or anti-capitalist struggles. We need to join Indigenous communities in imagining and working towards a stronger and sustainable future for all by recentering Indigenous struggles, knowledges and worldviews.”

1. Walidah Imarisha, “Introduction,” in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha (Chico, Calif.: AK Press, 2015): 3.

2. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 117, 118–19.

3. Helen Lee’s independent feature The Art of Woo, starring Sook-Yin Lee and Adam Beach, is another notable film that features Indigenous–diasporic interracial romance. Films such as Thomasine and Bushrod and Posse include Native characters in supporting roles.

4. Mishuana Goeman, “Flirtations at the Foundations: Unsettling Liberal Multiculturalism in Helen Lee’s Prey,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 139.

5. Ruthann Lee, “Portraits of (Un)settlement: Troubling Multicultural Masculinities in Dominique Hui’s Quiet North and Kent Monkman’s Shooting Geronimo,” GLQ 21, no. 4 (2015): 483.

6. On homonationalism, see Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). On pinkwashing, see Sarah Schulman, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’” New York Times, November 22, 2011.

7. For context, many of the winners of the TIFF People’s Choice Award have gone on to receive further honors, such as the best picture Oscar Award. See https://www.indiewire.com/2022/09/tiff-2022-peoples-choice-award-winners-list-1234763848/.

8. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547–66; Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kim TallBear, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” in Making Kin Not Population, ed. Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2018).

9. Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Indigenous Studies Beside Itself,” Somatechnics 7, no. 2 (2017): 184.

10. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

11. Vizenor, vii.

12. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman, 2002).

13. Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56; Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120–43; Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–24.

14. The term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) has received mainstream press criticism in venues such as the New York Times, which seem to misapprehend the term as an identity category rather than as a political project, particularly one grounded in feminist histories of coalition building. See John McWhorter, “‘BIPOC’ Is Jargon. That’s OK, and Normal People Don’t Have to Say It,” New York Times, March 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/bipoc-latinx.html.

15. Min Sook Lee, Marvellous Grounds Short Film (2016), http://marvellousgrounds.com/short-film/.

16. See http://www.jessxsnow.com/ABOUT.

17. See https://apa.nyu.edu/event/jess-x-snow-fall-2021-student-artist-in-residence-welcome-event/.

18. Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 30.

19. Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2011), 35.

20. Hanhardt, Safe Space, 31.

21. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in response to the Indian Residential School Agreement negotiated between the Canadian government and several thousand residential school survivors in 2006. See https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525.

22. Chelsea Vowel, “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments,” âpihtawikosisân (blog), September 23, 2016, https://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/.

23. For more on the debates surrounding land acknowledgment, see Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions,” Social Text 39, no. 1 (2021): 21–46; Michelle Daigle, “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37, no. 4 (2019): 703–21; Richard Pickard, “Acknowledgement, Disruption, and Settler-Colonial Ecocriticism,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 2 (2018): 317–26; Theresa Warburton, “Land and Liberty: Settler Acknowledgement in Anarchist Pedagogies of Place,” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2021, no. 1 (2021): 43–70; Rima Wilkes, Aaron Duong, Linc Kesler, and Howard Ramos, “Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties, and Peoples,” Canadian Review of Sociology 54, no 1. (2017): 89–120.

24. On Nayani’s journalism background and transition to dramatic film, see Christine Aguilar, “Journalism Alum V. T. Nayani’s Feature Film Debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival,” Toronto Metropolitan University Creative School, September 13, 2022, https://www.torontomu.ca/the-creative-school/news-events/news/2022/09/journalism-alum-v-t-nayani-s-feature-film-debuts-at-the-toronto/.

25. See Radheyan Simonpillai, “TIFF 2022: This Place Is about Community and Allyship,” NOW Toronto, September 3, 2022, https://nowtoronto.com/movies/tiff-2022-this-place-is-about-community-and-allyship.

26. For more on the Sri Lankan war and Tamil genocide, see Francis Boyle, The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights under International Law (Atlanta: Clarity, 2009).

27. The solidarity statement was published in the BASICS newsletter, January 24, 2013, http://basicsnews.ca/2013/01/6-nations-tamil-activists-publish-joint-solidarity-statement/.

28. V. T. Nayani qtd. in Simonpillai, “TIFF 2022.”

29. LeAnne Howe, “The Chaos of Angels,” Callaloo 17, no. 1 (1994): 108.

30. Howe, 108.

31. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxvii.

32. Joan S. Wang, “Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850–1950,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 1 (2004): 58–99.

33. Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

34. “90” refers to the military siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawake in 1990.

35. María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 17.

36. Nayani is riffing off Spike Lee’s “A Spike Lee Joint” here.

37. Larry Fried, “This Place TIFF 2022 Interview—Director V.T. Nayani Invites Us Into ‘A V.T. Nayani World,’” Geek Vibes Nation, October 2, 2022, https://geekvibesnation.com/this-place-tiff-2022-interview-director-v-t-nayani-invites-us-into-a-v-t-nayani-world/.

38. Golshan Abdmoulaie quoted in Simonpillai, “TIFF 2022.”

39. See https://www.catherinehernandezcreates.com/about.html.

40. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010)

41. On hiring Nakhai and Williamson to direct, see CBC Books, “Catherine Hernandez Reflects on How Race, Class and Community Inspired Her Canada Reads Novel Scarborough,” Canada Reads, March 7, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/catherine-hernandez-reflects-on-how-race-class-and-community-inspired-her-canada-reads-novel-scarborough-1.6369591. On the film’s casting, see Daniel Garber, “Daniel Garber Talks with Filmmaker Shasha Nakhai about Scarborough,” Cultural Mining, February 2, 2022, https://culturalmining.com/2022/02/02/daniel-garber-talks-with-filmmaker-shasha-nakhai-about-scarborough/.

42. Quoted in S. Bear Bergman, “Growing Up Queer in Suburbia: Catherine Hernandez Gracefully Adapts Her Hit Novel ‘Scarborough’ for the Big Screen,” Xtra Magazine, January 27, 2022, https://xtramagazine.com/culture/tv-film/catherine-hernandez-scarborough-216903.

43. Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (2006): 557.

44. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

45. Hernandez, quoted in Radheyan Simonpillai, “Scarborough Is a New Look for TIFF—and Canadian Film,” NOW Magazine, September 8, 2021, https://nowtoronto.com/movies/scarborough-is-a-new-look-for-tiff-and-canadian-film.

46. The publication and production of Scarborough, along with Carrianne Leung’s 2018 short story collection That Time I Loved You and David Chariandy’s 2017 novel Brother (now also adapted into film) in this particular moment speak both to the thirst for the perspectives and experiences of writers of color as well as their perceived marketability.

47. Ruha Benjamin, “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016): 2.

48. On critical race studies critiques of Canadian multiculturalism, see Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Racism (Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2000); Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).Notes to Chapter 4

49. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

50. See this interview with Cherish Violet Blood and others on the Marvellous Grounds website, where she reflects on being a queer Native arts practitioner within the cultural political landscape of Toronto: “Round Dance Square: Community. Art. Parties. A Roundtable Discussion with Cherish Violet Blood, Ange Loft, and Jada Reynolds Tabobondung,” February 12, 2017, http://marvellousgrounds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RoundDanceSquare_community-art-parties.pdf.

51. The book does not announce these identities, either. There is one mention of Sylvie and her family as Mi’kmaq that is buried in a letter written from Marie (Sylvie’s mother) to the administrators of the literacy program.

52. On expectation, see Phillip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

53. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

54. Billy-Ray Belcourt in Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon [Jas Morgan], “What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?” Canadian Art, May 23, 2018, https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics/.

55. Belcourt in Belcourt and Nixon [Morgan].

56. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

57. Sandra Harvey in Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, and Tiffany King, “Other Intimacies: Black Studies Notes on Native/Indigenous Studies,” Postmodern Culture 31, no. 1 & 2 (2020/2021): n.p.

58. Karyn Recollet, “Choreographies of the Fall: Futurity Bundles & Land-ing when Future Falls Are Immanent,” Theater 49, no. 3 (2019): 91.

59. TallBear, “Making Love and Relations,” 154.

1. Edward Buscombe, “Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography and the Western Film,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), 129.

2. See https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/p15831coll8/id/165.

3. Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 208.

4. Maile Arvin, “Indigenous Feminist Notes on Embodying Alliance against Settler Colonialism,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 18, no. 2 (2019): 338.

5. See a selection of Yoon’s works at http://jin-meyoon.com/index.html. See also Ming Tiampo, Jin-me Yoon: Life and Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2022), https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/jin-me-yoon/.

6. See https://www.alberta.ca/calgary-ring-road.

7. Tsering Asha, “Colonialism, Land and Reconciliation between Immigrants and Indigenous Peoples Explored in Art Exhibition,” Cochrane Today, October 1, 2020, https://www.cochranetoday.ca/beyond-local/colonialism-land-and-reconciliation-between-immigrants-and-indigenous-peoples-explored-in-art-exhibition-2756104.

8. On sonic dissonance, see Dustin Tahmahkera, “Becoming Sound: Tubitsinakukuru from Mt. Scott to Standing Rock,” Sounding Out!, October 9, 2017, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2017/10/09/becoming-sound-tubitsinakukuru-from-mt-scott-to-standing-rock/; on colonial cacophony, see Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

9. See https://web.archive.org/web/20230602005535/https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/sp/untunnellingvision.

10. See workshop listing here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240228164903/https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/relation-making.

11. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 138–39.

12. See https://web.archive.org/web/20240228164903/https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/relation-making.

13. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 138–39.

14. Ashley Bedet, “Relaxing into Relation,” Public Parking, February 12, 2019, https://thisispublicparking.com/posts/relaxing-into-relation.

15. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 140.

16. Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016): n.p.