Department of History

Liza Black (Citizen of Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Indiana University. Her work interrogates necropolitical regimes and structural violence through the lens of settler-colonial governance, with particular attention to the juridical production of Indigenous precarity. 

Her first monograph, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), interrogates hegemonic visual economies, revealing how Indigenous labor was instrumentalized to sustain racialized spectacle while suppressing autochthonous modernity. Through archival recuperation and subaltern counterhistories, the text maps Indigenous agency within industrialized cultural production. American Indian Quarterly called this work 'a radical intervention,’ a characterization that has inspired both scholarly dialogue and community action.

As a 2024–25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, she excavates epistemic erasure in institutional archives, tracing how state-sanctioned narratives mediate Indigenous survivance under conditions of asymmetrical sovereignty. This project extends her broader critique of settler legalities as archival violence, a throughline in her scholarship.

Her forthcoming How Settlers Get Away with Murder (Beacon, 2026) employs legal studies to deconstruct carceral logics governing Indigenous life and death. By reframing jurisdiction as active necropolitical design, the project exposes how settler legal architectures operationalize Indigenous disappearance as a designed strategy of disposability in MMIWG2S cases, both historic and contemporary.

Recipient of fellowships from Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, Cherokee Nation, and the Ford Foundation, Black's research advances a transnational Indigenous critique. Black's community-engaged praxis includes extensive oral history collaboration with MMIWG2S families, documenting carceral violence through Indigenous narrative methodologies. Her work bridges scholarship and movements for Indigenous futures, circulating through media platforms including NPR, PBS Origins, and El País. She advises decolonial and carceral abolition initiatives nationally, including Harvard's Policing Project, and curates the field-defining New Directions in Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press.