Biopolitical structures and settler colonialism work in conjunction, it is key that we tackle them both.

Introduction In settler colonial contexts, biopolitics is an instrument of naturalization and depoliticization. The categorization of Indigenous peoples as a specifically racialized population group of “Indians” works to construe conflicts with Indigenous peoples as merely domestic problems of the set tler nation-state, such as the United States, best dealt with through implementation and enforcement of settler nation state laws. At the same time, specific modes of living that are privileged by settler nation-state institutions such as heteronormative coupling, patriarchal households, nuclear family living arrangements, and individual land ownership, are biopolitically regulated so as not to appear linked to a particular form of settler governance but expressive of the natural course and order of life. To this end, settler colonialism has been analyzed particularly in recent years not only as a geopolitical project, operating through logics of dispossession, removal, and containment, but also as a biopolitical project, operating through logics of racialization, regulation, and naturalization.1 At the same time, especially with the advancement of biopolitical theories in “mainstream” cultural studies and critical theory, numerous Indigenous studies scholars have also pointed out the necessity not to favor a biopolitical analysis of sovereignty, for instance, at the expense of geopolitical considerations that need to remain crucial for a thorough analysis and critique of settler colonialism, because: “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (P. Wolfe, 2006, p. 388).2 Notably, then, recent iterations of settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies approaches put an emphasis on how biopolitical and geopolitical forms of settler governance operate in conjunction, as for instance in the ongoing attacks against Indigenous lands, bodies, and lives so as to produce colonial space in the United States and Canada (Mishuana Goeman) or in the employment of “Indianness” for the transit of U.S. empire (Jodi Byrd) in geopolitical and biopolitical terms. The attention to geopolitical and biopolitical forms of settler colonial violence and governance thus serves to address the manifold, and oftentimes intersecting ways in which settler nation-states attempt to control Indigenous lands, lives, and bodies. At the same time, however, it also helps to make manifest the settler colonial assumption that there is, at least in theory, a geos divorced from the bios, and vice versa, which can be targeted distinctly. Such a logic ultimately rests on a European tradition of thought (which is then universalized in settler colonial contexts) that land itself is not a living thing, is not animate, is not a form of life. Within a hierarchical order of the biopolitical, land is as such excluded from the sphere that constitutes political life. Such an exclusion, based on the Aristotelean hierarchy of all forms of life from the human to the seemingly inanimate stone, furthermore places political systems of thought and organization for whom the non-hierarchical relationality of all forms of life is constitutive, outside of the sphere that gets to count as political in dominant Euro-American society. In this essay then, I want to interrogate how the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism work to discredit the valid ity of a place-based politics of relationality in which Indigenous land and all forms of life, including the land itself, make up, through their mutually constitutive relation ships, the sphere of politics. Through the matrix of a settler colonial logic, such a politics is de facto placed outside the realm of what is acknowledged as political, since it extends its understanding of political life to spheres that are credited no political existence in Western or European accounts of politics. The essay is thus concerned with an issue similar to that outlined by Mark Rifkin (2009) in “Indigenizing Agamben” when he argues that “the state of exception pro duced through Indian policy creates a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive uncontest able right to define what will count as a viable legal or polit ical form(ul)ation” (p. 91). My focus is slightly different, however, as I want to examine to what extent Indigenous polities are illegible and unrecognizable as political forma tions to universalized paradigms of European political thought in the first place, which then enables the constitu tion of settler states and the subsequent biopolitical produc tion of Indigenous peoples as depoliticized populations or cultures. My main object in this essay is thus to outline the biopo litical logics of settler colonialism as they are embedded in hierarchical distinctions of forms of life foundational to European political thought, and additionally to theorize a politics of place-based relationality that seeks to disrupt these logics. In order to do so, I will engage and connect two distinct sites of knowledge production. First, I turn to Foucault’s and Agamben’s theorizations of the biopolitical particularly so as to reread their use of Aristotle and to ask in which way certain premises of Aristotle’s philosophy inform Foucault’s and Agamben’s thoughts on life and poli tics in distinct ways—which then remain largely unac knowledged in their own writing, however, and can continue to operate without being subjected to a biopolitical analytic. Second, I address Cherokee scholar and author Daniel Heath Justice’s (2011) fantasy novel The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles not as a text on which to apply my reading of Foucault and Agamben, but rather with Mark Rifkin, as “a form of political theory” (2012, p. 2). Building also on the work of Indigenous legal theorists and law-and-literature scholars who posit that Native writing is characterized by, as David Carlson (2006) argues for early Native autobiography, “an engagement with colonial legal discourse,” (p. 23), I seek to read Justice’s novel as a means to theorize the possible framework for social, political, and legal formations of Indigenous peoples within, or opposed to, the settler state. My interest, however, lies not so much in reading Justice’s text as a possibility to enter into a con tested dialogue with the legal framework of U.S. Indian policy, or as a way to counter through literature the legal racism Robert A. Williams (2005) has detected as being instrumental for the history of U.S. Indian policy. Instead, I seek to read Justice’s novel as a means to illuminate Native writing, conventionally perceived as foremost a form of cultural expression, in its possibility to indicate an alterna tive horizon of politics. More precisely, I read his novel as gesturing towards a form of political normativity based on what is also conventionally perceived as a mere cultural trait of Indigenous ways of being, that is the strong empha sis on the relationship among all forms of life and (includ ing) the land. Precisely because of its position outside of the range of officially acknowledged politico-legal texts, while deeply engaging these discourses, Justice’s anticolonial fantasy offers itself to be analyzed as a site of Indigenous political knowledge production. I thus want to read it as a site of what I term disruptive relationality that generates ways to think about forms of political life which, in center ing principles of relationality, exceed what officially gets to count as political in settler colonial contexts. As such, a reading of Justice’s novel can point out the potentials of the literary and the fantastical for denaturalizing settler colonial rule, imagining decolonization, and indicating the possibilities of Indigenous futurity beyond settler fantasy.