As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo's ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule.

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The project of "Indigenizing Shakespeare" in performances or adaptations of Shakespeare's plays has gained well-deserved attention over the past several decades in theatre, film, and criticism. As such, the term has functioned as a catch-all for a very diverse, multiply located set of non-Western appropriations of these late sixteenth and early seventeenth century English dramas. What counts as "Indigenizing" is as varied as the languages, cultural traditions, and Peoples whose political and economic relationships to European and American colonization spur those Peoples' artists and scholars to "talk back to" or transform Shakespeare's works through their appropriations. In doing so, "Indigenizing" attempts to wrest control of texts that were instrumental in violent public and private colonial assimilation programmes from their continuing usage to uphold imperial, white settler-colonial and racist structures of political and cultural domination.Some of the hardest hit populations in the U.S. during this COVID pandemic have been American Indian tribes. Native Nations of Arizona and Southern Utah, including Navajo, Hopi, and White Mountain Apache, badly need supplies to take care of their citizens. In answer to local tribes' general requests for aid, the Southwest Shakespeare Company of Mesa, Arizona invited awardwinning writer/actor/director Ty Defoe (Giizhig)(Oneida/Ojibwe) to direct a single performed-reading over Zoom of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as a fundraiser for PPE for Navajo First Responders. Defoe assembled and led a unique cast of largely BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Color) performers from locations thousands of miles apart, enlisting Lydia Garcia as dramaturg and Leslie Ishii as voice/speech coach, to create an "Indi-giQueer+" online production of the play. This ensemble's Indigenizing of Midsummer, according to Defoe, Garcia, Ishii, and the performers, focused on activating the deeper "indigeneity" of the stories appropriated by Shakespeare in his playlike Puck and the faeries' ancient presence in the British Islesand using the play's performance