Epilogue: Indigenous Futurities and the Afterlives of Institutionalization

The epilogue offers a meditation on powerful historical continuities between past and present patterns of racialized surveillance, institutionalized white supremacy, and seemingly localized instances of racism that conditioned the lives of many Native historical actors who lived at the start of the twentieth century. With US Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland’s historic announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigation, we are again reminded that for many Indigenous people, the past is never past; the legacy of settler institutions persists into the present, living on in the very fabric of our communities. The epilogue examines the signs of institutionalization’s afterlife and explores how ongoing fights for tribal sovereignty manifest new visions of Indigenous futurity.