How can institutions be “racist?” What additional challenges are posed when bias is produced and reproduced by everyday institutional practices? This chapter traces the historical evolution of institutional discrimination from Reconstruction to the present, highlighting explicit legal and implicit policy-level discrimination in the Jim Crow era, the New Deal, and historical immigration policy. It also provides more in-depth analysis of the role of race in the present-day housing market, in the criminal justice system, and in election administration.

St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.

The North American region presents a case of multiple rival colonial initiatives intersecting with multiple rival native nations, giving way to settler colonialism under the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Missionaries were active in attempting to eradicate Indian culture and religion, while for some, Christianity provided a place of refuge in the midst of trauma. Dual participation, the compartmentalized practice of both religions, was often the result.

From the uncanny werewolf families and zombie border patrol guards in the novels of Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) to the digital citizens and virtually-enhanced tourists in Cherokee writer Blake Hausman's novel Riding the Trail of Tears, Native Americans are creating strange and scintillating new worlds of unforeseen horrors and possibilities. Such works engage the popular genres of horror and fantasy in order to mobilize sophisticated political critiques of capitalism, globalization, and the colonial imbrications of Indigenous peoples, albeit in surprising, genre-bending forms. This chapter explores the features of this new and vibrant field, offering readings of some of its most provocative titles and suggesting ways that such works can help critics and readers chart fresh, productive pathways into both the histories and the futures of North American Indigenous populations. In the very act of strengthening and deepening the connections between the speculative and the real, Native writers craft methodologies of resistance.