Violence and Vigilantism in Native American Crime Fiction: Settler Criminality in the Novels of LaFavor, Rendon, and Boulley

In classic mystery fiction, criminality is represented at the level of the individual, with a heavy emphasis placed on the moral culpability and guilt of the singular criminal. These retributivist representations are often burdened by a neglect of institutional and structural causes for criminal behaviour. By emphasising individual ‘evil’ and guilt, they have the potential to be read as whitewashing carcerality and systemic inequality. In Native American crime fiction, on the other hand, the individualisation of criminality has a very different value: laying bare the history of settler vigilantism, unlawful violations of American criminal statutes and treaty law carried out by individual settlers against Native peoples. As Audra Simpson has noted, settler colonial states ‘do not always have to kill, its citizens can do that for it’. In the novels of Ojibwe writers Carole laFavor, Marcie R. Rendon, and Angeline Boulley, the conventions and tropes of crime fiction are utilised in order to indict settler vigilantism and the violence it inflicts on Native communities. These writers go on to demonstrate how settler vigilantes are often aided and abetted by the colonialist state, allowing them to produce a genre-based critique of settler colonialism with both individual and structural dimensions.