Sherene H. Razack

In Unimaginable Fury: Contemporary White Settler Violence Towards Indigenous Women, Razack suggests it will be impossible to decolonize unless we begin to name and analyze the nature, function and extent of white men’s violence against Indigenous women in a settler colonial state. We need to understand how what is done to Indigenous women’s bodies supplies the settler and the settler state with power.  My project is to focus on white men’s violence towards Indigenous women not only for the reason that this violence is seldom explicitly named but because the omission is a dangerous one. We miss something very significant about the violence that is directed at Indigenous women by white men, whether that violence occurs in prostitution, policing, the justice system or in everyday street encounters. What we miss is the very core of how the colonial project is made, namely an aggressive, white masculinity, a self-making that is accomplished directly on the Indigenous woman’ body and given social and legal approval. If sexual violence is how you do colonialism, projects that stand a chance of undoing colonialism, of decolonizing, must surely pay considerable attention to the violence white men direct at Indigenous women.