Playing Indian and other settler stories: disrupting Western narratives of Indigenous girlhood

Abstract

This article explores the discourses and practices about and by Indigenous girls that are emerging in an era of globalized, postfeminist girlhood. Post-girl-power discourses impact representations of Indigenous girls in damaging ways by reifying their construction as objects of the colonial imaginary and as cultural commodities. To disrupt their persistent representation as disposable and ungrievable, I tackle three kinds of performances in girl-focused popular culture and media: spectral narratives,epistemologies of ignorance and playing Indian. I then draw on a growing decolonization scholarship in Indigenous studies to take stock of the cultural and political possibilities enabled by Indigenous girl cultures in Western-colonized settler states.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. I identify the girls in the ways they requested, including whether or not they wanted their real name or a code name used, their age and other descriptors, and how they self-identified their ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandrina de Finney

Dr. Sandrina de Finney is an Associate Professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. She is co-founder of antidote, an award-winning grassroots network for racialized girls and women, and a research advisor for the Siem Smun'eem Indigenous Child Welfare Research Network (http://web.uvic.ca/icwr/home.htm).