Unsettling the Land

Abstract

This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in political economy, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and post-humanism, we synthesize an approach to thinking with land to understand structures of dispossession and the possibilities for Indigenous revitalization through ontological hybridity. Using two different case studies—plantation development in Indonesia and land revitalization in the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation—we further develop how settler and Indigenous ontologies operate on the ground, illuminating the coexistence of multiple ontologies of land. Given the centrality of land in settler colonialism, hybrid ontologies are important to Indigenous movements seeking to simultaneously strengthen sovereignty over territory and revitalize land-based practices.

Gwaabaw: Applying Anishinaabe harvesting protocols to energy governance

“…However, dominant conceptualizations of natural law have focused on human nature and human communities. A persistent problem is the subjugated agency of nonhumans; even when applied to nonhumans, the concepts of agency and personhood are modified and limited (Middleton 2015;Burow et al 2018). Indigenous critiques of sovereignty are often based on the concept's inability to adequately account for intersocietal relations between humans and nonhumans (Carroll 2014;Simpson 2017).…”

Social scientific research on the American West: current debates, novel methods, and new directions

“…Some of the deeper epistemological and ontological conflicts are evident in the fact that communities view plants and animals in different ways (Burow et al 2018). They reflect on how people maintain attachments to the nonhuman, from the collection of culturally important plants to forms of livelihood, like ranching, that depend on natural resources from public lands.…”

“The forest is my wife”: The Ethno-political and Gendered Relationship of Land and the Indigene

“…Though different in terms of geo-political history, this susceptibility can be understood in the context of the indigenous lands in the Northeast India as well, particularly in the ongoing capitalization and commodification of tribal lands for resource extraction. The seemingly sustainable eco-political modules that aims to hybridize different land ontologies by merging indigenous land-based practices to settler based legal institutions -a situation argued by Burow (2018) as "conceiving of and relating to land, through their own practices and those created by settlers and settler-state institutions" (p.57) -is only begetting a new set of class structure within the indigenous populace. The gradual development of neo-tribal capitalism, that benefits a select few, may be seen as the most violent shift in tribal land ethics.…”