Internal Dispossession as Epistemic Injustice: A Concept Analysis of American Indian Identity Appropriation

<p>Across the academy and health professions, individuals and organizations claim American Indian identity they do not hold, capturing positions, grants, and the authority to speak for Native peoples. This harm has been described across separate literatures—federal law, internal colonialism, internalized colonialism, and identity appropriation—but was never named or theorized as a single concept. This article reports an evolutionary concept analysis of internal dispossession, drawing on literature from 1887 to 2026 across five bodies of work and grounded in autoethnographic and public-record evidence, selected under a sovereignty-consistent citational criterion. Internal dispossession is defined as the harm produced when the authority of a sovereign people to define its own belonging is relocated onto individuals, institutions, and markets through identity appropriation, eroding the nation's capacity to define itself and displacing individual citizens. The concept is constituted by five attributes; arises from three antecedents—settler colonialism, the confusion of race with political status, and incentive structures with weak verification—and operates through interlocking relational, structural, and epistemic harms that continue the colonial logic of taking and turn, over time, inward upon the people. Understood as epistemic injustice, internal dispossession names the newest form of colonial dispossession and gives nursing analytic language to protect the integrity of its Indigenous workforce data, its health-equity funding, and the Indigenous health knowledge base—an analytic tool transferable to other settler-colonial contexts where belonging is constituted politically rather than racially.</p>