Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire

In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry contends that the empire of the United States was created and expanded through the intertwined public pedagogies about Indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants. By placing immigrant racialization within the development of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, she demonstrates the relationship between settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Perry explores how and why policy and media discourses about welfare, rape, foodways, and sexuality are key tools for the building of the US empire and its relationship to Indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants. Her study seeks to “expose and thereby help to dismantle the ongoing public pedagogy of US empire” (p. 30).Perry begins by examining the “proximal public pedagogies” of Native American law, immigration law, and the media. Policies for and about Indigenous peoples formed the foundation for gendered, sexualized, and racialized immigration policies. Furthermore, Native American policy, immigration policy, and the media representations of both groups coincided. Through these entanglements, Indigenous dispossession and anti-immigration policy formed and expanded the US empire in North America and abroad.By examining the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the sterilization abuses of the 1970s, and the neoliberal politics of the 1980s and 1990s, Perry builds upon her discussion of the federal government's gendered, sexualized, and racialized policies. These key moments demonstrate how welfare was a key component of Indigenous dispossession and anti-immigration policies. Furthermore, Perry finds the discourse between federal obligations to Indigenous peoples and public welfare services strikingly similar, especially during the Reagan administration's conservatism and neoliberal social policies.The author links Native Americans, Indigenous dispossession, and communities of color through her analysis of the culture of the United States. By tracing the long history of sexual exploitation of Native American women from the moment of Columbus's arrival and linking it to racialized pornography found throughout the twenty-first century, Perry finds that US culture is an “always-already rape culture” that advances the “white possessive logics” of settler colonialism (pp. 108–9). Both historically and in the modern neoliberal context, the sexual exploitation of Native American women and immigrant women has been a key facet in establishing and expanding the US empire.Perry further demonstrates the entanglement between Native Americans and immigrants by analyzing how the United States attacks and controls foodways. The United States has historically used starvation and control over sustenance systems, such as the hunting and intended extinction of the buffalo, to subdue Native American populations. Additionally, the federal government has demanded the adoption of Euro-American farming and land practices as a tool for assimilating Native Americans. A similar phenomenon exists in a modern context, as the United States has funneled immigrants into agricultural labor within food industries, dispossessed minority farmers, and demanded dietary assimilation from immigrants.She concludes her book with a discussion of hegemonic American sexuality. As a tool of the US empire, public pedagogies about sexuality place Indigenous peoples, immigrants of color, and queer people as incompatible with, or a threat to, the white heteropatriarchy. The uneven policing of the sexuality of Native Americans and immigrants, along with the formation of normative American sexuality, were key components to the expansion of the US empire.Perry has composed a well-written and thought-provoking book that illuminates how settler colonialism and anti-immigration are intimately linked. She convincingly illustrates how the United States empire, founded upon Indigenous dispossession and genocide, operates through various forms of public pedagogy, which include gendered and sexualized coloniality and racialized anti-immigration. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire highlights how the mechanisms of settler colonialism still pervade our society.