Description:

Close Encounters of the Colonial Kind - Kim Tallbear

Co-presentend by the Science in Human Culture Program's Klopsteg Lecture Series and the Kaplan Humanities Institute's 2022-2023 Dialogue, ENERGIES: A year-long conversation about energies—personal, collective, planetary—from different humanistic perspectives.

Much of this talk is written in the voice of IZ, a character Kim TallBear introduced in the 2016 chapter, “Dear Indigenous Studies, It’s Not Me, It’s You: Why I Left and What Needs to Change.” IZ represents the evolving field that began as American Indian or Native American studies in the United States in the later twentieth century. Today, a later disciplinary iteration, Critical Indigenous Studies, represents a coming together of multiple “Indigenous self determination and sovereignty political movements” around the world, as described by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, wherein “Indigenous scholars began to define the terms of their intellectual engagement within universities” (2016: 7). The IZ whom TallBear spoke to in the 2016 essay, and from whose collective body she performs this talk, has grown into a twenty-first-century expanding discipline. As Moreton-Robinson writes, our “object of study is colonizing power in its multiple forms, whether the gaze is on Indigenous issues or on Western knowledge production” (2016: 4) In this talk, TallBear's object of study and critical polydisciplinamorous engagement is a scientist character who searches for signs of “intelligent” life off-Earth.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena. You can follow her research group at https://indigenoussts.com/. She tweets @KimTallBear. You can also follow her monthly posts on her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization.