This essay is voiced by “IZ,” a character personifying the evolving field of “Native American” or “Indigenous” studies in the United States. IZ was introduced to readers in Aileen Moreton Robinson’s edited volume Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (2016), in which Moreton-Robinson wrote: “Twenty years into this century, Indigenous-centered approaches to knowledge production are thriving” and our “object of study is colonizing power in its multiple forms, whether the gaze is on Indigenous issues or on Western knowledge production.” Today, “critical Indigenous studies” represents a coming together of multiple national engagements by Indigenous scholars and sovereignty movements with universities around the world. In this essay, IZ’s object of study and critical polydisciplinamorous Indigenous engagement is a scientist searching for signs of “intelligent” life off-Earth.

Providing the history and significance of the varied collection of articles in this American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue, coeditors David Shorter and Kim TallBear describe involvement in an Indigenous studies working group formed in conjunction with the Making Contact 2018 workshop hosted by the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center. As a whole, “Settler Science, Alien Contact, and Searches for Intelligence” takes a critical eye to frontiers, space exploration, the history of science, and the colonial politics of surveillance technologies.

In 2018, the authors were invited to share their perspectives as Indigenous studies scholars to the work of Breakthrough Listen, an organization affiliated with both the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This collectively authored statement highlights some of the ethical concerns these authors perceived regarding the history colonialism and the expectations to find “advanced” or “intelligent” extraterrestrial life. A prologue contextualizes the short working group statement and we then provide the unedited original statement in its entirety.