This chapter lays the foundation for the book by providing a brief overview of colonization, racialization, and coercive labor mechanisms in British Guiana. The entangled histories of dispossession, enslavement, and indenture frame this chapter’s exploration of how difference was produced, how “divide and rule” operated, and how the sugar industry came to dominate the political life of the colony. The chapter closes with a discussion of the 1928 decision to adopt Crown Colony government. A small white elite, fearing the expansion of a tiny but growing electorate of color, opted out of the then barely representative system of government and placed decision-making firmly in the hands of the Crown. Through an examination of colonial correspondence, the politics of the census, legal documents, newspaper articles, and missionary records, this chapter provides an analysis of the nature of British colonialism in the first third of the twentieth century, which contends that the racialization of the laboring population developed from governance built on dispossession, captive labor, segregation, taxonomy, and law.

Chapter 1 uses the picture of human creation to “rule” other creatures in Genesis 1 as an entry point for exploring how the category of “animal” most fundamentally identifies a nonhuman being that is a) exploitable if useful or b) expendable if not. At the same time, Genesis 1 provides an occasion to reflect on how agriculturally oriented humans created gods in their image, gods who exhibited both the power and the care of other beings characteristic of domesticators.

Chapter 4 analyzes primeval stories of how the earth is polluted by inter-species violence, starting with the Cain-Abel story in Genesis 4 and continuing to Lamech, semi-divine warriors, and a violence of “all flesh” that causes a global flood (Gen 6:1-13). The domesticator-like God depicted in these stories turns out to be implicated in the violence in them, and – in the wake of the flood – this God character ends up endorsing human killing of animals for food.

Chapter 7 explores alternatives to exploitative domination by turning to themes of the Biblical Sabbath, starting in the Genesis primeval history (Gen 2:2-3) and continuing to laws later in the Torah (Exod 16; 20:8-11; 23:12; Deut 5:12-15) that depict freedom from labor for humans (including enslaved humans) and animals alike as a counter to domination. It argues that resisting this system necessitates collective cultivation of more genuinely social forms of relation, knowledge and spirituality that affirm the intrinsic worth of all beings rather than reducing life to utility.

Chapter 3 examines the Bible’s Garden of Eden story, an episode that connects male “rule” of women (Gen 3:16) with the human journey toward farming. This link of gender domination with domestication is well documented in many cultures, but the Eden origin story also insists that such domination is a fall from a more egalitarian ideal.

Phosphorus mining has devastated Indigenous lifeways on the Pacific Islands of Nauru, Banaba, and the Republic of Kiribati. This chapter explains why the colonial impact of phosphate mining and contemporary planetary concerns over food security must attend to how Indigenous peoples were severed from their ways of knowing and relating to lands and waters through western economic and cultural imposition. It situates the planetary boundaries and efforts in global food security with respect to achieving restorative futures that do not reproduce logics of violence and dispossession. Using materials and images from a recent exhibition, the chapter challenges us to think anew about how stories of phosphate circulate beyond academic appraisals or scientific assessments, and among families and communities to whom justice is owed.

Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally, despite the firm reality that it has many groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism. It then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis by delineating five minority groups in Japan: indigenous Ainu, burakumin, Zainichi Koreans, Okinawans, and foreign residents. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.

This chapter unpacks how narratives about Rwanda’s Twa are created. It seeks to understand how knowledge about Twa is produced, and how the Twa are created, re-created, and re-positioned as indigenous and development subjects in the jurisdictional encounters of the global discourses of development and indigeneity with national policies on unity and reconciliation. The chapter identities three main stories told of the Twa. The first story is that of indigeneity, of a forest people distinct, dispossessed, and suffering. The second tale is of a community historically marginalised but not ethnically different. The third account views Twa simply as poor and vulnerable, positioning them as national development subjects.

This chapter explores the processes and form of the imagined national community in Rwanda in light of global discourses of difference, focusing on the space of identity that the state narrative of unity allows for Twa to navigate their subjectivisation as Rwandans. Our data shows that many Twa buy into the government’s narratives of national unity and ‘Rwandan-ness’. They choose to identify themselves as Rwandan and appear willing to forgo Twa identity for the promise of belonging and progress that they understand national narratives of unity to offer. To understand this as forced assimilation – whether through the violence of law or economic circumstances – is too simple a reading: Twa individuals are actively using the ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ programme messaging to create spaces of inclusion for themselves within Rwandan society.

This chapter examines synergies between colonization and racism in the United States, including how colonization provides a foundation for various forms of bigotry and dehumanization. In the United States, colonial structures shape and racialize beliefs about Native Americans, leading to their mis-categorization as one of many ethnic minority groups. This creates misunderstandings about sovereignty and the foundation for many social policies and programs. This chapter describes what it means to be Indigenous and how colonial structures and social constructions of race in the US affect Native Americans. Social workers have played core roles in supporting colonial structures, but social workers can also challenge harmful structures. Legal threats to the Indian Child Welfare Act are examined, accompanied by a call to action for social workers.

This chapter examines the intersections between Indigeneity, Indigenization and CRT as paths to uncover structural racism and inequities, to resist and neutralize decolonizing ways. Indigeneity and Indigenization are grounded in radical remembering and reconceptualizing social work’s ethical and moral fortitude. They represent Indigenous identities, lifeways and values calling on us to examine all aspects of racism, power distribution, and wellbeing with the intent of strengthening communities. The dualism of CRT, white vs. black and other people of color, neglects Indigenous world views and perpetuates colonial dynamics by excluding ways of being and thinking beyond race. In this way, CRT detracts energy from restoration, securing of ancestral lands, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and impedes intergenerational healing. Indigenously defined social work practice holds the promise of universal wellbeing and opportunities to diversify a socially just agenda.

This chapter describes the foundations for and the possibilities of implementing a Queer AZN CRT framework in social work practice. Queer AZN CRT is rooted in critical, feminist, queer, Indigenist and Pasifika theories, and explores the impacts of colonization, imperialism, and indigeneity within intersectional Asian experiences. Six proposed tenets for Queer AZN CRT are listed along with core considerations for social work practice: (1) Queer, brown Asianization; (2) challenging mainstream ideologies about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and QTPI/QTAAm; (3) global, decolonial perspectives; (4) reconstructive histories; (5) multidisciplinary story, practice, praxis, and voice; and (6) social justice perspective. Two narratives depict the application of Queer AZN CRT in social work practice, first in a clinical social work scenario, and then within a macro practice framework. Additional reflections regarding the implications for Queer AZN CRT in social work practice and education are discussed.

Native Americans working in alternative media to Hollywood are overthrowing Indian stereotypes. The 1990s rise of an independent film festival circuit, especially the Sundance Film Festival, and multiplying cable channels and streaming services, have supported Indigenous self-representation and anti-colonial discourse. Documentaries by Native American filmmakers Sandra Osawa, George Burdeau, and Victor Masayesva Jr. critique stereotypes and express tribal aesthetics. Fiction films, like Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998), Naturally Native (1998), Doe Boy (2001), and Sterlin Harjo’s features, depict modern Native American life and characters while cable and streaming TV series are set in modern Indigenous communities. However, Martin Scorcese’s big-budget Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) garnered more attention and awards for portraying 1920s atrocities against the Osage Nation. Although sympathetic to Native Americans, the film is still a reiteration of history. Only with Native American artists are stories refocusing from fascination with the past to the present and future.

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.