Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues

I am a Dena’ina woman born and raised on my ancestral homelands in what is now known as southcentral Alaska, and currently working on Patwin lands in what is now known as Davis, California. A majority of my personal and professional activities are dedicated to correcting erroneous myths and falsehoods academia and popular culture continues to tell southern audiences about Indigenous Peoples in/and Sub/Arctic places, stories which hold concrete implications for our sovereignty and self-determination projects. I offer this brief relational introduction to better situate my review of Juliana Hu Pegues’s beautifully written book Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian  Entanglements. In it, Pegues offers multiple entry points into one of our most vexing questions: “why is Alaska not considered a colonial space, given the imperial ambitions of American administrators as well as the perspectives and experiences of Alaska Native peoples?” (3).

There are many non-Native, non-Alaskan, and often senior scholars who argue that settler colonialism is not an appropriate framework for understanding the histories and ongoing predicaments facing Indigenous Peoples and places in the so-called “Last Frontier.” At its core, such denials of settler colonial structures in Alaska serve to uplift exceptional narratives about Alaska’s occupation by and incorporation into the colonial U.S. nation-state, narratives that mask immense violence as well as overdeterminations of our lives, lands, and waters as logical colonial accumulations for a global American empire. Yet an emerging generation of intellectuals, including Pegues, are crafting more trenchant evaluations of Alaska as “an imperial project of a settler colonial nation” with analytics that refuse heteronormative white supremacist and settler colonial multiculturalist frames (16).