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Elle-Maija Tailfeathers’s 2012 short film, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” confronts the crisis of sexual violence in Indian Country as a failure of the settler criminal justice system. Delia, the main character, proves the rhetoric of repair and reconciliation is a state sponsored fallacy. Acting as an avenger in service to her community, Delia demonstrates how Indigenous sovereignty is a site of potential for imagining alternative structures of justice. This talk explores how revenge can act as an assault on settler structures in the interest of achieving peace for Indigenous and other racialized peoples rather than pursuing the farce of settler justice as though it can be achieved through empty promises of repair.

About the Speaker

Dr. Laura Terrance is Akwesasne Mohawk from what is now known as Northern New York, Southern Ontario, and Southern Quebec. She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022 and a master’s degree in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Indigenous Studies Department at the University at Buffalo and was previously a University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her manuscript, Generative Violence: Revenge and the Unsavage Body, considers the relationship between violent revenge inflicted on the settler body by Indigenous and other racialized people and the ways that violence can influence and direct anti-colonial thought and action.