Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession [Paperback]

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. InIndigenomicon, 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 includingAssassin’s Creed,Animal Crossing,BioShock Infinite, andDemon 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.USJodi A. Byrd examines the differences between settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies by bringing video game studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique.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 ofColonial Racial Capitalism, also published by Duke University Press, and author ofThe Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.“Indigenomicontakes 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 challengesl+