Indigenomicon

American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession

By: Jodi A. Byrd

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Paperback | 11 November 2025

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312 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24

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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.

Industry Reviews

"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, 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

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