“There are mentalities that need changing”: Constructing personhood, formulating citizenship, and performing subjectivities on a settler colonial frontier

Abstract

a b s t r a c tSettler colonial nations are sites of legal pluralism in which encounters between differing constructions of citizenship are formulated. These can involve customary, differentiated, and universal modes of citizenship. But the relationships amongst these are problematic, as are the ways they play out in the performance of subjectivities. To understand these dynamics, we need to think about ideas of personhood that are at their root. Based on research in Nunavik, this article focuses on how, through wildlife management, notions of personhood are being legally codified, particularly in relation to property. It examines the degree to which official ideas of personhood coincide with Indigenous ones in the construction of citizenship, and considers how these combine with property relations in the performance of subjectivities. Enforcing state wildlife regulations has altered the moral codes that define what persons are and determine how they should interact with one another. This research underscores the contradictions that arise as a result of codifying notions of personhood and citizenship in the context of settler colonialism.

What justice and for whom? A political ecology of voice study into ‘senses of justice’ in Peru's Loreto Region

“…National neoliberal and environmental governance models have created significant implications for indigenous people (Gombay, 2015; Perreault, 2003), who can become framed by the state as objects of development, resulting in a false choice between marginalisation and assimilation (Grydehøj and Ou, 2017; Theriault, 2017). This binary choice is exacerbated by indigenous peoples struggle for power over environmental governance and the recognition for alterative cosmologies and nature–society relations.…”

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…In order to avoid reifying dominant (white settler) frameworks, both political geography and settler colonial studies can engage with indigenous frameworks, particularly in ways that acknowledge their heterogeneity (Boutet, ). A growing body of work in indigenous studies challenges settler colonial meanings of land (Simpson, , ), sovereignty and jurisdiction (Bruyneel, ; Pasternak, , ), and citizenship and personhood (Gombay, ; Radcliffe, ). Political geographers engaging with these topics can better understand how sovereignty and territory are produced through both physical and ontological struggles (see, for example, Daigle, on the connections between indigenous ontologies of territorial sovereignty, relationality, and kinship).…”

Geography and ethics III: Whither the next moral turn?

“…The enslavement and killing of African people over a period of 400 years is an example of denying full moral status to large groups. To deny personhood to the extent justified in slavery, African people and their decedents had to be produced through laws, symbols, and everyday interactions as not suffering in the same way as whites, and possessing diminished capacity to possess moral thought and reason (Hartman, 1997; see also Gombay, 2015). In this example, it is the denial of both full moral status and moral agency which produce harm.…”