Description
Book SynopsisUnsettling Colonial Automobilities explores the vehicle's role in imposing colonialism on Indigenous people and proposes an Indigenous automobility that reclaims sovereignty over place and centricity.
Based on extensive fieldwork within First Nations communities, accounts from Indigenous scholars and activists in Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Canada and the United States, and cinematic/literary representations, this contribution challenges unrestricted mobility in modernity and highlights the vehicle's impact on Indigenous communities. Chapters examine how Indigenous people are criminalized for non-compliance with vehicle regulations, explores the vehicle as a tool of racial violence, and discusses how Indigenous communities utilize vehicles for protection, cultural expression, and reconnection with their land.
By demonstrating the vehicle's involvement in colonial violence and its potential for empowering Indigenous cultures, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities acknowledges the significance of human movement, migration, and boundary-transcendence in modern life while acknowledging the dark history associated with these phenomena.
Trade ReviewWith the turn of every page, you will be intrigued, because who would have ever thought that a motor vehicle and its relationship with First Nations Australians would be so intense and ever so present in our criminalization since colonization that it continues even today.
-- Leanne Liddle, Arrernte Woman, Northern Territory Australian of the Year 2022 and Director of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Justice Unit
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. Colonial Processes of Enforced Mobility and Immobility
Chapter 2. Neo-colonial Interventions – Regulating First Nations Peoples’ Motor Vehicles and Criminalising Drivers
Chapter 3. Cars, Courts and Carceralism
Chapter 4. Necroautomobility and the Colonial Chase in the Cultural Imagination
Chapter 5. No Justice, No Peace: Police Necroautomobility and Lack of Accountability
Chapter 6. “I’ve Been Chased by People in Cars – White People in Cars” – Settler Necroautomobility in the Murders and Disappearances of First Nations Peoples
Chapter 7. Automobility in First Nations Sovereignty-Making
Conclusion
