After centuries of colonisation, the contemporary position of Indigenous peoples in the wealthy settler colonial states of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and the US is one of profound social, economic and political marginalisation. High rates of victimisation, high levels of over-representation in criminal justice systems, racial discrimination and hate crime are all features of Indigenous peoples’ experience of settler colonialism. The significant over-representation of Indigenous peoples is generally acknowledged by policy makers and criminologists. However, dominant explanations, policies and interventions tend to rely on a narrow set of assumptions about individual offending, and on theoretical and conceptual frameworks that pathologise Indigenous peoples and problematise their cultural beliefs and practices.

For this reason, Indigenous criminology sets out to provide the basis for a new explanatory model for understanding Indigenous peoples’ contact with the criminal justice systems; one that is firmly based in the historical and contemporary conditions of colonialism and settler colonialism. In attempting to do so, we seek to build on the work in other disciplines that has argued for the importance of Indigenous methodologies and the prioritisation of Indigenous voices in understanding contemporary problems, such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality and bias, and the high levels of violence in some Indigenous communities. The book will address theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to the development of an Indigenous criminology, by drawing on comparative Indigenous material from North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to the gendered nature of settler colonial crime control; the policing and sentencing of Indigenes; the construction and use of Indigenous (criminological) knowledge; and the globalisation of crime control. We see a number of core conceptual elements to developing an Indigenous criminology. These include the recognition of the fundamental importance of Indigenous knowledges and the use of engaging methodologies, the long-term and ongoing impact of colonialism, the Indigenous right to self-determination, and the importance of Indigenous agency. Finally, we argue for a critical understanding of the connections between criminology (and the wider academy) and the structures of knowledge, discourse, politics and practices that define settler colonialism.

Before discussing our conceptual framework in more detail, we begin by detailing who we are referring to when we speak of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts, their social and economic position within those societies, and an overview of Indigenous engagement with criminal justice systems.