Indigenous Studies have not been long in the hands of political scientists. Indigenous peoples and scholars have had other priorities—training and representing themselves in courts of law; becoming teachers who can “go back home” and put an indigenous face and experience in the classrooms where indigenous children learn who they are and what to make of the world they live in; and mastering the (dominant society’s) knowledge base on mental health and behavioral counseling in order to serve the diverse needs for emotional healing in their own communities. What can political scientists bring to Indigenous Studies that others, who have been studying and writing about indigenous communities for decades, do not see? Two new works by political scientists answer this question. Political scientists bring theories of social power and power relations to bear on questions of indigenous politics that are both internal to indigenous communities and embedded within a network of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality,” or what Sarah Marie Wiebe, in Everyday Exposure, calls a “policy assemblage” (p. 14). The results provide insights that can be useful to the indigenous peoples they have studied and, more broadly, to a variety of communities and peoples situated in postcolonial political realities.

Wiebe’s book is a case study of the Aamjiwnaag First Nation who live in Lambton County, Ontario, in “Chemical Valley,” the home of 40% of the chemical manufacturing industry in Canada, with 62 chemical plants on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. The Aamjiwnaag people have lived here since time immemorial, and 411 members participated in a 2004–5 study of the health conditions in their community. The study found that “26 percent of adults experienced high blood pressure, 26 percent of adults and 9 percent of children experienced chronic headaches, 23 percent of children aged five to sixteen had learning and behavioral problems, 27 percent of children experienced skin rashes, and 39 percent of women had experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth” (p. 143). Asthma rates on the reserve were three times the national average and two to three times the average for Lambton County (p. 143). But the most striking indicator of health imbalances was the rapid decline in gender birth ratios from “relatively stable” and normal between 1984 and 2003, followed by a sharp decline in male births between 2004 and 2016, reported in the American Journal of Environmental Perspectives as 33% boys and 67% girls, as cited by the author. This “birth dearth” phenomenon was widely reported in national news and health journals (p. 143).

Most of these effects, according to community members and various municipal, county, provincial, and federal agencies, are dismissed on the grounds that pollution from the surrounding plants has “no offsite impact” (pp. 100–101). Still, citizens are on constant alert for warnings to go or stay inside in the aftermath of hazardous incidences, such as “spills, fires, explosions, nuclear emergency, extreme weather event, or transportation accident” (p. 11). “Each Monday at 12:30 pm the test sirens sound,” reports Wiebe. “Alongside waiting sirens, bodies clench as individuals jump for their radios, phones, and televisions to see whether there is any imminent threat” (p. 11). But the greater threat is the steady, silent, and stealthy infiltration of environmental disease, mental distress, and potentially genetic-altering contamination.

Wiebe frames her case study in terms of reproductive justice and “sensing policy” that locates the most important source of data in the bodies and lived experiences of the reserve’s citizens—“situated bodies of knowledge” disregarded or dismissed by Western science and Canadian public policy. The result is a practical application of theoretical contributions from Foucault, feminism, and critical theory to the problem of environmental reproductive justice among the citizens of Aamjiwnaag. “The affected, feeling, sensing body is a conduit for knowledge,” she says, located within a policy assemblage where “state power takes shape through institutions, discourses, and citizen practices” (p. 66; italics in original). Wiebe concludes by making a case for “decolonizing environmental justice,” an approach that renders “visible the ways that existing power relations shape policy processes and citizen struggles, and creating space for diverse ways of knowing” and “advocates for a decolonizing approach to policy making” (p. 194).

In Reservation Politics, Potawatomi political scientist Raymond I. Orr uses the tools of comparative politics to flesh out how three very differently situated indigenous communities have been shaped by histories of colonization. Orr makes theoretical use of a broad array of psychoanalytic, political, and social theorists, including Freud, Nietzsche, Slavoj Žižek, and Hume, along with preeminent Indigenous Studies scholars like James Fenelon, Duane Champagne, Stephen Cornell, Eduardo Duran, Matthew Snipp, and David Wilkins, among others. Orr’s thesis is that the interventions of colonially induced historical trauma (war, massacres, genocide, forced relocation and assimilation, destruction of infrastructure and economy) and the imposition of capitalist economies and practices led to the formation of dissonant worldviews that in turn explain “the political decisions and ideological orientation of the tribes” and, consequently, their intratribal politics (p. 18).

After carefully laying out his argument that these interventions led to worldviews mobilized around “pain” (trauma) and “profit” (market capitalism) evident in narratives of melancholia and self-interest, Orr offers a comparative study of the Citizen Potawatomi in Oklahoma, the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, and the Rosebud Lakota in South Dakota. Oil resources made the Potawatomi especially vulnerable to capitalist intervention and enabled a large sector of the community to acquire wealth and mobilize around an identity narrative of self-interest. Orr astutely notes that this subset of the population is inclined to perceive inherent (Potawatomi) traits, those associated with successful entrepreneurship as the fertile soil in which capitalist investment and ideology was planted and flourished, as a way of explaining their economic success. Alternatively, the Potawatomi who claim a more traditional identity that is also constructed in greater opposition to non-Indians, or whites, tend to mobilize around a melancholic view that both valorizes traditional identity and sharply criticizes the entrepreneurial sector as, essentially, sellouts, or “entrepreneurial to the point of engaging in sexual colonialism” (p. 98). These two factions and their corresponding worldviews displaced the logic of communal affect, which, according to Orr, was characterized by community harmony, social cohesion, and a moral economy grounded in a practical understanding that commitment to community interest over self-interest and redistributive economies increased their chances for collective survival. As the self-interested and melancholic logics replaced the logic of communal affect, the resulting political relationship reflected a deep and abiding acrimony between the two factions.

Orr argues that these three logics—communal affect, self-interest, and melancholic pain—structure worldviews in the other two communities as well. While among the Potawatomi the two logics created as a result of historical trauma and the intrusion of a capitalist economy are roughly balanced, and thus perpetually antagonistic, in the other two cases one of the postcontact logics is predominant. The Isleta Pueblos experienced much less historical trauma, though colonized by the Spanish and then ceded to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. No wars, massacres, or genocide and little cause for capitalist encounters or encroachment occurred. One of the most interesting features of this case study is the secretiveness of Isleta Pueblos about their beliefs in and practice of witchcraft. Although much too rich to fully discuss here, it suggests that another reason this community has remained psychically and socially insulated against the effects of trauma and capitalism might be that this “projecting” and scapegoating otherness internally has a therapeutic effect on communal resilience. Orr allows that the preservation of the communal affect logic could be undermined by economic (casino) development in the future, but the fact remains that the Isleta Pueblo did not experience the same severity of historical trauma as the other two tribes in this study, and thus communal affect remains predominant.

The case of the Rosebud Lakota may be the best known to the nonindigenous public at large, both because it is one of the most visible tribes or indigenous nations in popular culture, and because of its steadfast refusal to accept a $1.2 billion payment for the Black Hills in spite of living under some of the worst socioeconomic conditions in Indian country. On any scale of historical trauma, the Rosebud Lakota would rank as one of the most traumatized communities, epitomized by the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890. Here, Orr finds the political culture most defined by melancholic loss, though some community members advocate for and/or have benefited from the dominant capitalist economy, either as government employees or ranchers. But they do not assert much political influence, and the acrimonious factions evident among the Potawatomi did not develop among the Rosebud Lakota. Orr is careful not to oversimplify, but admits that it is the nature of good theories to do so. Here, he finds the most compelling illustration of how historical trauma can give rise not only to widespread and deeply held pathological grief but also to the perpetuation of self-harm at the individual and community level in the present. “Accompanying the loss and anger are melancholy and an obsession that undermines healing,” he says of pathological grief. “It is this obsession, mixed with the characteristics of PTSD, that makes a future life beyond this loss difficult” (p. 188).

Both of these books should be read, not only by those interested in indigenous and postcolonial politics but also by those engaged in the study of public policy, public administration, applied normative political theory, and comparative politics. Both books interrogate the interface between indigenous peoples and the western settler states that have subjugated them politically and economically, and they do so using the theoretical and methodological tools of political science. Notably, both also employ research methods that Linda Tuhiwai Smith so articulately outlined in Decolonizing Methodologies (1999). I believe that both authors also asked themselves how their work could benefit the people studied. Wiebe is clearly intent on recruiting more advocates for environmental reproductive justice to the cause of stopping ongoing injuries and remedying those sustained by the citizens of Aamjuqnaag First Nation. Orr’s hope is to open a new window into an understanding of the present dynamics of indigenous politics in the context of historical experiences and the influence of those experiences, not only on the ideological worldviews but also on the psychosocial well-being of present and future generations of indigenous communities. He exposes what he calls “common secrets” (Reservation Politics, p. 22), that narratives of indigenous identities and indigenous political behaviors today are shaped by histories of direct and structural violence.

Both books should be widely read by political scientists, including theorists as well as those engaged in various kinds of empirical scholarship. Not only the present effects of past injuries inflicted by colonialism, but also the continued subjugation of indigenous peoples to colonial rule, especially in settler states, are the unfinished business of decolonization, and, regrettably, often remain invisible to the majority of nonindigenous political scholars.