How Settlers Get Away With Murder: Narrative Arbitrage and the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Liza Black is Associate Professor of US History and Native American & Indigenous Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard 2024-2025. She is a citizen of Cherokee Nation whose work sits at the intersections of history, Indigenous Studies, gender studies, and film studies to explore issues of Native dispossession, violence against Indigenous women, and the representation of Indigenous peoples in film and television. Her research and public scholarship have been featured on NPR, PBS, Red Nation podcast, and High Country News. Her first book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, was published in 2020. Her forthcoming second book is titled How Settlers Get Away With Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon Press, 2026) and will be the focus of this talk. Please join us for this talk on issues central to Native American Studies and US History.