NYU LeBoff Public Lecture with Jodi Byrd

Cosponsored by the NYU Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands; and the NYU Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab.

Indigenomicon: Indigenous Relationality in the Grind of the Video Games

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.

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their first book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) won the 2013 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Byrd co-edited the collection Colonial Racial Capitalism with Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, and Brian Jefferson published by Duke in 2022 and also co-edits the Northwestern University Press’ Critical Insurgencies series with Michelle Wright. Their book, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession, was just released by Duke University Press early November 2025. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, they were a professor in Literatures in English at Cornell University. 

The 2026 LeBoff Public Lecture is part of the NYU LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program, sponsored through the generous support of Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff (PhD '12). The program brings to the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication the world's most prominent scholars, writers, and creative thinkers in media, communication, and cultural studies.