Political communities are defined, and often contested, through stories. Scholars have long recognized that two foundational sets of stories – narratives of contact and narratives of arrival – helped to define settler societies. Storied Communities disrupts the assumption that Indigenous and immigrant identities fall into two separate streams of analysis. The authors juxtapose narratives of contact and narratives of arrival as they explore key themes such as narrative form, the nature of storytelling in the political realm, and the institutional and theoretical implications of foundation narratives. By doing so, they open up new ways to imagine, sustain, and transform political communities.

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Rebecca Johnson is a professor of law and the associate director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.

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The book is a welcome addition to the recent work of scholars such as Andrea Smith, Patrick Wolfe, Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani, who have drawn fundamental connections between the structural elimination of Native peoples and the racialization of (and violence against) non-Native minority groups in settler colonial states.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 13 No. 3, Winter 2012