With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars.
 
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice.
 
Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

View the Table of Contents here.

Contributors:

Hokulani K. Aikau
Chris Andersen
Larissa Behrendt
Vicente M. Diaz
Noelani Goodyear Kaopua
Daniel Heath Justice
Brendan Hokowhitu
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Jean M. O'Brien
Noenoe Silva
Kim Tallbear
Robert Warrior       

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman from Quandamooka First Nation in Queensland, Australia. She is a professor of Indigenous studies and director of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network at Queensland University of Technology. She is the author or editor of several works, including The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty.

“[This book] is distinguished by the questions it raises and debate it provokes about the imperative of decolonization. Indeed it pushes beyond that imperative, marking the ontological, intellectual/cultural/linguistic, spatial (and empirical) terrain in which that world exists and its fundamental relationships are reproduced.”—Amy Den Ouden, author of Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England

 “[Critical Indigenous Studies] poses uneasy yet important questions and challenges for indigenous scholars and our communities to grapple with as we move onward.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal