Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally, despite the firm reality that it has many groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism. It then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis by delineating five minority groups in Japan: indigenous Ainu, burakumin, Zainichi Koreans, Okinawans, and foreign residents. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.

This chapter unpacks how narratives about Rwanda’s Twa are created. It seeks to understand how knowledge about Twa is produced, and how the Twa are created, re-created, and re-positioned as indigenous and development subjects in the jurisdictional encounters of the global discourses of development and indigeneity with national policies on unity and reconciliation. The chapter identities three main stories told of the Twa. The first story is that of indigeneity, of a forest people distinct, dispossessed, and suffering. The second tale is of a community historically marginalised but not ethnically different. The third account views Twa simply as poor and vulnerable, positioning them as national development subjects.

This chapter explores the processes and form of the imagined national community in Rwanda in light of global discourses of difference, focusing on the space of identity that the state narrative of unity allows for Twa to navigate their subjectivisation as Rwandans. Our data shows that many Twa buy into the government’s narratives of national unity and ‘Rwandan-ness’. They choose to identify themselves as Rwandan and appear willing to forgo Twa identity for the promise of belonging and progress that they understand national narratives of unity to offer. To understand this as forced assimilation – whether through the violence of law or economic circumstances – is too simple a reading: Twa individuals are actively using the ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ programme messaging to create spaces of inclusion for themselves within Rwandan society.

This chapter examines synergies between colonization and racism in the United States, including how colonization provides a foundation for various forms of bigotry and dehumanization. In the United States, colonial structures shape and racialize beliefs about Native Americans, leading to their mis-categorization as one of many ethnic minority groups. This creates misunderstandings about sovereignty and the foundation for many social policies and programs. This chapter describes what it means to be Indigenous and how colonial structures and social constructions of race in the US affect Native Americans. Social workers have played core roles in supporting colonial structures, but social workers can also challenge harmful structures. Legal threats to the Indian Child Welfare Act are examined, accompanied by a call to action for social workers.

This chapter examines the intersections between Indigeneity, Indigenization and CRT as paths to uncover structural racism and inequities, to resist and neutralize decolonizing ways. Indigeneity and Indigenization are grounded in radical remembering and reconceptualizing social work’s ethical and moral fortitude. They represent Indigenous identities, lifeways and values calling on us to examine all aspects of racism, power distribution, and wellbeing with the intent of strengthening communities. The dualism of CRT, white vs. black and other people of color, neglects Indigenous world views and perpetuates colonial dynamics by excluding ways of being and thinking beyond race. In this way, CRT detracts energy from restoration, securing of ancestral lands, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and impedes intergenerational healing. Indigenously defined social work practice holds the promise of universal wellbeing and opportunities to diversify a socially just agenda.

This chapter describes the foundations for and the possibilities of implementing a Queer AZN CRT framework in social work practice. Queer AZN CRT is rooted in critical, feminist, queer, Indigenist and Pasifika theories, and explores the impacts of colonization, imperialism, and indigeneity within intersectional Asian experiences. Six proposed tenets for Queer AZN CRT are listed along with core considerations for social work practice: (1) Queer, brown Asianization; (2) challenging mainstream ideologies about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and QTPI/QTAAm; (3) global, decolonial perspectives; (4) reconstructive histories; (5) multidisciplinary story, practice, praxis, and voice; and (6) social justice perspective. Two narratives depict the application of Queer AZN CRT in social work practice, first in a clinical social work scenario, and then within a macro practice framework. Additional reflections regarding the implications for Queer AZN CRT in social work practice and education are discussed.

Native Americans working in alternative media to Hollywood are overthrowing Indian stereotypes. The 1990s rise of an independent film festival circuit, especially the Sundance Film Festival, and multiplying cable channels and streaming services, have supported Indigenous self-representation and anti-colonial discourse. Documentaries by Native American filmmakers Sandra Osawa, George Burdeau, and Victor Masayesva Jr. critique stereotypes and express tribal aesthetics. Fiction films, like Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998), Naturally Native (1998), Doe Boy (2001), and Sterlin Harjo’s features, depict modern Native American life and characters while cable and streaming TV series are set in modern Indigenous communities. However, Martin Scorcese’s big-budget Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) garnered more attention and awards for portraying 1920s atrocities against the Osage Nation. Although sympathetic to Native Americans, the film is still a reiteration of history. Only with Native American artists are stories refocusing from fascination with the past to the present and future.

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

This chapter examines the intricate relationship between First Knowledging and First Languaging, highlighting their intersection through playfulness and precarity. Drawing on examples from Indigenous reindeer communities in Mongolia and Aboriginal schools across Western Australia, it explores how people live, perform, and negotiate these interwoven practices within and beyond classroom contexts. First Knowledging, rooted in ancestral wisdom, cultural practices, and land-based ontologies, is expressed through First Languaging – fluid, embodied, and spiritually infused forms of communication that transcend conventional linguistic boundaries. Storytelling, yarning, art, and song become vital modes through which these knowledges are enacted, shared, and sustained. Yet, this vitality unfolds amid precarity, as institutional constraints, standardised curricula, and settler-colonial systems continue to marginalise Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Within this tension, playfulness emerges as a radical form of resistance and resilience – a creative force enabling learners to navigate and subvert dominant norms while maintaining continuity with ancestral traditions.

With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

British imperial expansion reinforced expanded white supremacy from the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. Rather than weakening after the loss of American colonies, British concepts of racial superiority intensified through colonial encounters in India, Australia, and beyond. In India, British East India Company rule shifted from early trade partnerships to domination justified by claims of innate European superiority. In Australia, colonizers treated indigenous peoples as obstacles to be removed, implementing policies of displacement and ethnic cleansing in Tasmania. Meanwhile, emerging scientific disciplines like craniology provided justification for racial hierarchies, with researchers across Europe collaborating to measure and categorize human differences. Though the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British Empire marked significant humanitarian victories, these reforms did not challenge underlying assumptions of white supremacy. This period established enduring patterns of imperial rule based on presumed racial difference, whether through direct violence or supposedly benevolent administration.