Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga, Cutcha Risling Baldy, Gina Caison, and Brook Colley will discuss how the settler state requires the active creation of “fake news” to control and normalize ongoing occupation. These false narratives move from sites of original publication, including newspapers and other “sanctioned” forms of contemporaneous media, to the present-day archive, requiring approaches that ask scholars to weigh epistemologies of “truth” when conducting research in materials created by settler colonial societies. Despite Indigenous interventions on archives, there remains an assumed superiority of historical news sources, which manufactures complacency within institutions and dismisses Native produced archives such as oral history and community memory. This roundtable contextualizes “fake news” alongside decolonial interventions that shatter the archive and provide Indigenous-informed theoretical constructions of truth and history.

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2018 Annual Meeting

Los Angeles, CA