Paper short abstract:

The geopolitical cannot be separated from the biopolitical when it concerns Indigenous nations. This paper explores the bio-geopolitical nexus with Indigenous nations in North America and Europe whose liminality highlights why this matters for anthropology and border studies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to the anthropological exploration of geopolitics by placing it in dialogue with biopolitics. I argue that anthropologists cannot locate the geopolitical without considering the biopolitical. Recent scholarship on settler colonialism and Indigeneity (Dietrich and Knopf 2023) posits that geo- and biopolitics exist in a dialectical relationship, and taken together, these concepts help scholars to better understand settler colonialism. This paper will examine the geo-biopolitical nexus of two Indigenous communities: the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest of North America whose lands spans the Canada/US border, and the Sápmi (Sámi) whose territory is split by four nation-states in northern Europe. I consider the ways in which Indigenous nations are caught in a liminal position in borderlands and what this means for the anthropology of the geopolitical. The nation-state remains one of the more salient concepts for thinking about identity, yet, for Indigenous nations this relationship is always a contentious one. The lived experience of Indigenous peoples in the borderlands of nation-states is often neglected in both border studies and anthropology. This paper queries the local as a transnational space by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Coast Salish and putting it in dialogue with existing ethnography with the Sápmi.

Dietrich, René and Kerstin Knopf, eds. 2023. Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence. Durham: Duke University Press.