Home / Books / Indigenomicon

Indigenomicon

American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession

Cover of Indigenomicon features a stylized, pixelated landscape that transitions into a painted forest scene. A river runs along the bottom, where a figure sits in a canoe. In the background, a wooden palisade, tall trees, and two stork-like birds in

Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture

More about this series

Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 320

Illustrations: 15 illustrations

Published: November 2025

Author: Jodi A. Byrd

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

Praise

“Indigenomicon takes a clear-eyed look at how video games mediate the ongoing realities of North American settler colonialism. Historically grounded yet sharply attuned to the present, it interrogates why we remain drawn to worlds built on exclusion and dispossession. Unsettling traditional approaches to video game representation, race, and Indigeneity, Jodi A. Byrd’s transformative text challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between power and play.” - Tara Fickle, author of The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities

“With vast intellectual prowess and deep knowledge, Jodi A. Byrd disrupts the extractive trajectory of settler colonial studies while outlining how Indigenous Peoples, First Nations, and American Indians are using technologies to tell their stories and assert sovereignty. Indigenomicon illuminates the importance of digital worlds and how we might employ them in anticolonial, antiracist, and decolonial projects. It is a work of importance and magnitude.” - Mishuana Goeman, author of Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in "The New World"

Buy

Availability: In stock

Price: $28.95

Request a desk or exam copy

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top
Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, coeditor of Colonial Racial Capitalism, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Preface. Time Plays and Slow Runs  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Playing Stories 1
1. What Remains  39
2. Silence Will Fall  77
3. Beast of America  112
4. “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted”  150
5. The Knight at the End of the World  187
Conclusion. Recursive Futures  222
Notes  237
Bibliography  263
Index  287

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3264-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2927-4 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6149-6 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478061496