Law as Infrastructure of Colonial Space: Sketches from Turtle Island

Abstract

Heraclitus's words remind us that law and infrastructure have lived in intimate relation, in practice and thought, for millennia. This intimacy is palpable in the context of settler worldmaking where colonial jurisdiction is enacted by constraining, with an eye to replacing, Indigenous jurisdiction. Here, the authority to have authority is often asserted in practice through violent attempts to control connectivity and movement. To this day, imperial powers assert jurisdiction over space through infrastructures that enhance or inhibit the motion of goods and people, like railroads, pipelines, border walls, and police.2 This Essay investigates the co-production of colonial law and infrastructure on Turtle Island—an Indigenous name for the continent of North America, which already highlights a different conception of jurisdiction and law through its anchor in creation stories. The brief sketches that follow emphasize the co-constitution of law and infrastructure, yet they also propose a relationship that exceeds proximity or metaphor. Law operates through the ordering of extension, and in this sense, can productively be thought of infrastructurally, as “the movement or patterning of social form.”3 This Essay argues that approaching law infrastructurally foregrounds the contingency of seemingly solid structures, including centrally that of settler jurisdiction.