Book Review: Joseph Pugliese's Biopolitics of the More-than-Human and Indigenous Subversion in the Canadian State

How does a new approach to biopolitics, the biopolitics of the more-than-human, help our understanding of Canada's relations with Indigenous peoples? This paper will review Joseph Pugliese’s book, Biopolitics of the More-than-Human (2020). Pugliese connects the practice of Western biopolitics, a power derived from making life and letting die, with the operation of speciesism, settler-colonialism, racism and environmental degradation in the Western state. After exploring his theory, this paper will draw on points raised by Paul Nadasdy in his earlier anthropological study, Hunters and Bureaucrats (2003), which characterizes the Canadian state as attempting to exert biopolitical power over the Kluane First Nation. Comparing these works expands on Pugliese’s theory of biopolitics of the more-than-human and his corollary argument that outside this form of Western power, Indigenous cosmo- epistemologies have existed and remained radically untouched by the biopower. Pugliese’s claim is richly showcased in Nadasdy’s book, suggesting that the Kluane worldview and practices are ways of resistance that defy a simpler theorization of biopolitics. Reading these books together helps illustrate the complex relationship between the environment, Indigenous nations and the Canadian government while also fleshing out biopolitical ecology theorizations.