CWS Brownbag: Dr. Angela Calcaterra

This talk will consider how Indigenous political and legal thought, story, and material culture challenge the rhetoric and logics of American gun culture.  For centuries, Indigenous people have been on the frontlines of American gun violence and have analyzed the US settler state in terms of its guns. Building upon deep-rooted theories of relationality and human-material interactions, Indigenous understandings of gun violence run much deeper than the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Today’s American gun violence is, I argue, directly related to centuries of settler attacks on Indigenous governance and settler erasure of Indigenous thought. More broadly, this talk emphasizes the vital importance of Indigenous writing, philosophy, and archives to understanding America today.