Indigenous Relationality in the Grind of the Shitty Future

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession (Duke University Press, 2025), Jodi A Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centres Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). A reception in the Piano Lounge, Graham House, will follow this event. 

This lecture is co-sponsored by UBC's Critical Play Lab and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice

Series image: Germaine Koh, Tools and Twister, part of League Nanaimo, 2025.

Jodi A Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their first book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) won the 2013 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle Award for Academic Work of the Year. Byrd co-edited the collection Colonial Racial Capitalism with Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, and Brian Jefferson published by Duke University Press in 2022, and also co-edits the Northwestern University Press’ Critical Insurgencies series with Michelle Wright. Their book, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession was published by Duke in late 2025. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, they were a professor in Literatures in English at Cornell University. They also helped build the American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2006–15, and served as acting director of AIS during the 2013–14 academic year. They have held an appointment in Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and they received their PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 2002.