Inoculating whiteness: Vaccines, racial formation, and settler colonial immunity on Lingít Aaní

Abstract

In settler colonial contexts, health interventions are often sites for contesting authority, belonging, and protection. On Lingít Aaní, colonial responses to infectious disease illustrate how vaccination and public health practices produced racial hierarchies and secured white futurity by exposing Tlingit people to biomedical extraction, risk, and surveillance. I conceptualize this dynamic as inoculating whiteness, a situated analytic for understanding how immunological interventions shielded settler bodies from biological and political threat while exposing Indigenous bodies to experimentation, surveillance, and managed vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on colonial public health based in Sheet'ká, this article examines how inoculating whiteness operated during COVID‐19 before tracing its genealogy through smallpox vaccination under Russian colonialism and BCG experimentation and tuberculosis sanatoria under U.S. governance. It argues public health has been instrumental to settler colonial governance and racialization and highlights Tlingit practices of collective care that articulate alternative frameworks for health and sovereignty.