Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy

Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill address gender and women’s studies directly in “Decolonizing Feminism,” published in Feminist Formations 25(1) in Spring 2013, pages 8–34. Their intervention is not simply that Indigenous women deserve more representation in an existing feminist canon. It is that settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy have helped shape the categories, institutions, and political horizons through which that canon understands gender in the first place. The authors draw on Native feminist theories to ask what changes when colonialism is treated as a present structure rather than a finished chapter of national history.

That shift depends on distinguishing two connected terms. The authors use heteropatriarchy for social systems that make heterosexuality and patriarchy appear normal and natural. Heteropaternalism names a related political assumption: that the father-led heterosexual nuclear household should serve as a model for state and institutional order. Read together with settler colonialism—a structure that claims Indigenous land and works to erase Indigenous peoples and political relations—these concepts make gender governance part of the colonial project, not a separate “women’s issue.” The question is not only who is recognized as a woman or citizen, but how land, kinship, sexuality, reproduction, and authority are reorganized to produce the settler state.

The article grounds that argument in specific histories. It describes how Canada’s 1876 Indian Act regulated Indigenous marriage and descent in ways that directed property and landholding through men, despite the matrilineal organization of many societies. It also discusses U.S. and Canadian boarding schools, which removed children from families and communities while imposing Western gender roles and disrupting the transmission of Indigenous identities and political traditions. These are not interchangeable examples of generic “colonial harm”: each shows how state administration of family and gender can alter collective continuity, land relations, and the conditions under which a people can govern itself.

A further example comes from Hawai‘i. The authors discuss the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, under which Native Hawaiians meeting a 50-percent blood-quantum threshold could lease small homestead plots from the government rather than receive broader land rights. The policy’s genealogical measure could turn intimacy and reproduction into a pressure to preserve a state-defined percentage across generations; the article notes that Native Hawaiian women could be judged for not partnering in ways imagined to “save” that percentage. This example makes the entanglement of land policy and heteropaternalism unusually visible. It must remain what the article makes it: a historically and geographically situated account, not a template for every Indigenous nation or a claim that Indigenous women need outside rescuing.

The second challenge—refusing erasure while doing more than inclusion—changes what representation is expected to accomplish. Adding Indigenous authors to a syllabus can matter, but it is not enough if the field still treats settler sovereignty as the unquestioned frame and Indigenous scholarship as a specialist supplement. The authors ask disciplines to be changed by the knowledge they include: gender and women’s studies must center indigeneity and settler colonialism, while other fields must confront the gendered structures they have left aside. Their preference for the plural “Native feminist theories” is deliberate. It points to an intellectual and political field, not a single identity label or a universal doctrine; the article also recognizes that some Indigenous women have good reasons to distance themselves from feminism because of its association with whiteness.

The third challenge is to build alliances without smoothing away differences in land, sovereignty, and belonging. Solidarity becomes shallow when Indigenous political causes turn into a fashionable cause for outsiders, or when “help” repeats a savior relation in which non-Indigenous feminists set the agenda. The authors recall settlers dressing as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party: the performance borrowed an Indigenous identity to tell a story of settler independence while obscuring actual Mohawk sovereignty. They also discuss a 2011 television report about Pine Ridge that framed Indigenous life through deprivation, and the response by Rosebud students insisting on a fuller account of their intelligence, relationships, hopes, and futures. Together, these examples show that appropriation and pity can look opposite while producing a similar erasure of Indigenous agency and contemporary life. For the authors, alliance is a sustained commitment to structural change, not a temporary interest or an invitation to consume Indigenous culture.

The fourth challenge is epistemic: recognize Indigenous ways of knowing without extracting them as spiritual motifs or treating them as relics of an untouched past. In the discussion of land, the article contrasts settler-colonial understandings of land as property and extractable value with Indigenous accounts in which place is a relation that shapes knowledge, responsibility, and ways of being. A Native Hawaiian account of “land/ocean” helps the authors show why access to land and sea is not merely an economic asset question. But they warn against turning such ideas into a generalized mystical “Indigenous connection to nature.” The point is to engage specific intellectual traditions as living, complex, and capable of theory—not to claim them as a metaphor for someone else’s politics.

This account of knowledge opens onto sovereignty and futurity. The authors show how Native feminist theories question the assumption that liberation must culminate in recognition by, or equality within, the existing settler nation-state. They are careful not to dismiss civil-rights struggles, which may be vital; rather, they ask whether those struggles exhaust the imaginable forms of self-determination and collective responsibility. Their discussion of Indigenous futures also complicates strands of queer theory that celebrate “no future” as refusal of reproductive social order. Where Indigenous peoples have been subjected to child removal, reproductive control, and narratives that cast them as destined to disappear, rejecting futurity cannot be treated as a universally available gesture. This is a pointed critique of theory’s unmarked assumptions, not a claim that all Indigenous communities share one account of sovereignty, gender, or the future.

The fifth challenge turns the lens back on the academy. The authors ask departments to examine curricula, research practices, institutional relationships, and the lands on which universities are built. Teaching Pocahontas or Sacagawea only as distant “foremothers” of American feminism can turn Indigenous women into static figures in the nation’s past while leaving contemporary Indigenous politics outside modernity. The alternative is not to abandon feminist teaching, but to read Indigenous feminist scholarship alongside other work as contemporary theory and to ask how a university’s own practices relate to local Indigenous peoples. The article explicitly offers no universal checklist for divesting from dispossession; the questions must be investigated in specific places and institutional relationships.

The essay’s force lies in making a feminist framework answerable to land, sovereignty, and the conditions of Indigenous futures—not in offering a portable formula. Its scope is chiefly a challenge to gender and women’s studies and allied scholarship in settler-colonial contexts, with examples located in particular communities and histories. Reading it well means holding two points together: civil and gender equality can be necessary, while still leaving the structure that organizes land and political authority untouched. For a related path, read Andrea Smith’s “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change”, The Red Nation’s “Queer Indigenous Feminism”, and Reclaiming Two-Spirits as distinct, adjacent works rather than a single consensus. Bibliographic details are checked against the journal issue record; the analysis is grounded in the author-shared article text and its DOI record.