Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes "the image of the law of the Indigenous" as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin's Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.
Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, coeditor of Colonial Racial Capitalism, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.
Preface. Time Plays and Slow Runs ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. Playing Stories 1 1. What Remains 39 2. Silence Will Fall 77 3. Beast of America 112 4. "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted" 150 5. The Knight at the End of the World 187 Conclusion. Recursive Futures 222 Notes 237 Bibliography 263 Index 287
"Indigenomicon takes a clear-eyed look at how video games mediate the ongoing realities of North American settler colonialism. Historically grounded yet sharply attuned to the present, it interrogates why we remain drawn to worlds built on exclusion and dispossession. Unsettling traditional approaches to video game representation, race, and Indigeneity, Jodi A. Byrd's transformative text challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between power and play." - Tara Fickle, author of The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities "With vast intellectual prowess and deep knowledge, Jodi A. Byrd disrupts the extractive trajectory of settler colonial studies while outlining how Indigenous, First Nations, and American Indians are using technologies to tell their stories and assert sovereignty. Indigenomicon illuminates the importance of digital worlds and how we might employ them in anticolonial, antiracist, and decolonial projects. It is a work of importance and magnitude." - Mishuana Goeman, author of Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World
