Research on the consequences of targeted incarceration primarily caters to the male Black and white racial binary that has been the cornerstone of American racial politics. While there has been an increase of research generated on the consequences of hypersurveillance, policing, and incarceration for those outside of carceral institutions, much of this research invisiblizes the experiences of system-impacted Chicanxs/ and Mexicanas. These unimprisoned women also live carceral lives, as they experience the slow violence endemic to both incarceration and neoliberal austerity (Story 111). Utilizing a critical carceral studies and Xicanx feminist lens, I explore the scope of their experiences as racialized and colonized people that have bear the brunt of the carceral system as they support currently and formerly incarcerated family members that have been targeted for premature death. This case study uses a combination or oral histories from four Chicana and Mexicana women residing in El Paso, Cuidad Juarez, and Las Cruces as well as my own autoethnographic experience via photo elicitation, to illuminate the ways that the profound material and ideological consequences of carcerality are experienced by those beyond prison walls. Furthermore, the carceral carework that Chicana/x and Mexicana family members of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated boys and men do as carceral brokers through racial and gendered social reproductive labor connects the projects of colonization to current iterations of criminalization that impacts indigenous/Chicanx/and Mexican communities broadly. By centering Chicana/Mexicana voices through oral histories, I formed a third space where the unheard, the unthought and the unspoken can be taken up and used in a decolonial analysis and alternative future-making. This project better understands settler-colonial origins of racial criminalization and ultimately provides a framework to undo these legacies and build towards decriminalization and decolonization of the history and presence of Mexican origin peoples in what is currently known as the United States.

"Spacetime Manipulation: Difference and Futurisms in Black and Indigenous Speculative Fiction" draws connections between the manifestos of Black Lives Matter (as a transnational social movement for abolition started in the United States) and Idle No More (as a transnational social movement for decolonization started in Canada) and Black and Indigenous radical aesthetic practices aesthetics thematically and/or politically connected to those movements. Radical aesthetic practices are instances of cultural production that use time, space, and story to unsettle dominant structures⁠. In this project, the practices examined include: a time-bending Indigenous performance, a Black horror television show, an Indigenous zombie movie, a Black apocalypse film, Black and Indigenous monster-hunting novels, and the manifestos of Black Lives Matter and Idle No More. Through the analysis of these speculative aesthetics from the United States and Canada, this project troubles the discourse that separates abolition and decolonization as either unrelated or only legible through the lens of solidarity. This study builds on conversations within Black feminism and Native feminisms' conceptions of space and time to argue that radical aesthetic practices can cause epistemic and material bends in spacetime to realize other worlds. What if the path to abolition and decolonization require a different understanding of space and time? Through these conversations, this analysis takes up calls from scholars and activists to consider Black and Indigenous futures in relation and does so through queering spacetime.

My methodological approach involves a healing/encountering framework. In this project, healing involves moves toward abolition and/or decolonization while encountering reinforces the colonial-capitalist status quo. The framework analyzes each radical aesthetic practice through three overlapping phases. First, the films, performances and literature are considered separately in the unreconcilable place. Second, the analysis moves to the meeting point. The meeting point is a space where Blackness and Indigeneity come together, not in comparison, but instead in a tense relation. Third, I consider the aesthetics along the healing/encountering framework and evaluate whether the connection of the meeting point is closer to healing or encountering (or is some complicated combination of the two). This framework is rooted in Indigenous protocols of relationality, particularly those used by the Iroquois pre-colonization to safely move through the different tribal territories. The framework also prioritizes Black feminist theories of difference to move beyond normative moves toward comparison in Ethnic Studies. By applying this framework to cultural production from 2012 to the present, this study takes up a theorization of relationality that foregrounds difference and tension. The feminist/queer analysis of spacetime within speculative aesthetics opens up pathways of connection and knowledge, mirroring work happening "on the ground" in activist circles, to pull visions of abolition and decolonization closer together.

When critical radical aesthetic practices are considered together and through the erotic, they illuminate a long-standing power that challenges heteronormative time, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. This dissertation starts with the Black Lives Matter and Idle No More manifestos as speculative documents, and then enacts the healing/encountering framework through Black and Indigenous apocalypse films, two episodes of Lovecraft Country, and novels about time-traveling Black and Indigenous girls. Mobilizing Black feminism, Native American feminisms, queer of color critique, queer Indigenous critique, the dissertation situates these radical aesthetic practices and the visions of the artists as central to struggles for decolonization and abolition in the contemporary moment.

“Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms” examines Indigenous engagements with the uneven textual, legal, and environmental terrains of the United States federal Indian policy known as allotment, which aimed to “assimilate” and “civilize” Indigenous Peoples in the United States by disrupting Indigenous forms of collective land tenure and by extending new regimes of racial capitalist property. Intensifying with the Dawes Act of 1887, allotment extinguished recognized tribal sovereignty and privatized Native lands held in common into parcels, which were then “allotted” to individual tribal members, along with US citizenship. Allotment introduced new racialized and gendered geographies that facilitated one of the most significant transfers of land and extractions of wealth in US history. As a scheme of Indigenous expropriation through privatization, allotment has been deployed elsewhere across the globe, and I argue that its terrains, then and now, play a significant role in the history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Through an interdisciplinary, community-engaged study of both literary and community texts, my dissertation shows how Indigenous authors engage with, resist, and challenge allotment’s enduring forms of domination. Continuous with longstanding Indigenous knowledges and practices, these engagements with “allotment modernity” work in and through allotment’s privatization schemes to extend Indigenous sovereignty and land relations into the future. My project argues that reading allotment through Indigenous texts, past and present, both critiques settler colonial and racial capitalist features of the policy that continue to impact present-day Indigenous communities, and shows how Indigenous Peoples have imaginatively appropriated and converted allotment features toward Indigenous ends.