The state, the academy and Indigenous justice: a counter-colonial critique

The focus of this thesis by publication is the response of the settler-colonial state, criminology and the wider academy, to two inter-related wicked problems confronting the policy sector, firstly the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in the formal criminal justice system and second, Indigenous peoples’ critique of the response of the state and the Academy to the issue of continued Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system. The author was motivated to undertake this thesis due to the following: that the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in the formal criminal justice system has been a statistical fact in settler-colonial societies (e.g. New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the U.S) for close to thirty years; the persistence of this situation despite significant political, media, academic and policy attention to this issue over that time period; a significant amount of the material produced on the issue of Indigenous overrepresentation has been completed without direct input from Indigenous peoples; and the Indigenous voice has been particularly silent (or silenced) in the work produced by criminologists working in settler-colonial contexts.