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Rule of Innocents: White Settler Affect
and the Supreme Court

by Liza Minno

5.5 x 8.5, 100 pgs., $18

ISBN 978-1-962365-04-8

Forthcoming in 2025.

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Part of the series Essays in the Critical Humanities

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This book traces contemporary white settler grievance politics in the United States. These politics emerge from white settlers feeling both dispossessed and entitled to access to the highest powers to redress the dispossession—they’re a mode of “Can I speak to your manager?” politics. Through a close reading of three Supreme Court cases dealing with Federal Indian Law, Minno demonstrates how white settler's felt senses of innocence and victimization vis a vis Native people and Native sovereignty get encoded into law. Building off of Tuck and Yang’s (2012) trenchant analysis of “settler moves to innocence,” the book takes white settler feelings seriously as technologies of the settler state to legitimate its fundamentally contested sovereignty and to delimit the horizon of decolonial possibility.

 

Through historical context and analysis of the three cases—Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978), Brackeen v. Haaland (2023) and Arizona v. Navajo Nation (2023)—the book explores what makes the Supreme Court a unique vehicle to activate new realms of settler sovereignty and a unique repository for white settler grievance. Interrogating the nuances and adaptations of settler colonial power is urgent: the most hallowed institutions in the United States, including the Supreme Court, face unprecedented crises of legitimacy while, simultaneously, settler colonialism rabidly recruits apologists to its economy of violence across the globe. This book contributes to that interrogation and to ongoing conversations on affect in settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, performance studies, legal studies, and in social movements. Finally, it maps routes toward reducing white settler harm in the U.S.

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