为那些将追随的人;地球Marred和更新关系

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Yann Allard-Tremblay
{"title":"为那些将追随的人;地球Marred和更新关系","authors":"Yann Allard-Tremblay","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12679","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Wherever one is in North America, one is on Indigenous lands. Some Indigenous peoples may have been exterminated or removed to other locations, and their contemporary presence may not be highly visible, yet this remains Indigenous land. Nevertheless, rarely do non-Indigenous individuals and institutions consider the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands (cf. Asch, <span>2014</span>). To a large extent, this is because settlers regard the state they control as holding a legitimate claim to sovereign authority. Not only is this a claim that bars rightful relationships with Indigenous peoples, it also discloses contemporary settler societies’ disconnection from their Earthboundedness (Asch et al., <span>2018</span>; Borrows, <span>2018</span>) because it extends both over peoples and lands.</p><p>I propose to consider how, from the locality of some settler states such as Canada and the United States, an intimate connection between the settlers’ claim to sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality, is disclosed, which is significant for understanding the Anthropocene and for envisioning ways of acting otherwise that may help to remedy it. My claims regarding the Anthropocene and Modernity/Coloniality are thus perspectival; they do not pretend to offer complete and universal accounts of either, but rather hope to diagnose distinctive features of both, as experienced and disclosed from the underside of Modernity.</p><p>I see the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man, as a symptom of contemporary settler societies’ view of themselves as <i>floating free from the land</i>, to use Brian Burkhart's formulation (<span>2019</span>) and of their associated idea of Man. Man, in this context, does not refer to humanity as a whole, but rather to the Western white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Modernity/Coloniality (Mignolo, <span>2007, 2011</span>; Yusoff, <span>2018</span>) who is driven by a will to mastery and possession (Schulz, <span>2017</span>; Singh, <span>2018</span>). This Modern/Colonial Man presents himself as the universal subject, and thereby erases and disqualifies alternative ways of being human (Singh, <span>2018</span>, Chapter Introduction).</p><p>I engage with First Nation and Native American—hereafter Indigenous—political thought and movements to articulate an alternative to the un-earthbound political practices and associated subjectivity of the Man of the Anthropocene. I use Indigenous as a collective shorthand, but my focus is on the distinct political experiences, struggles, and traditions of some of the Indigenous peoples of the lands now claimed by Canada and the United States and the radical alternatives they disclose to dominant Modern/Colonial lifeways, the significance of which extends far beyond their respective contexts. Although I appeal to the distinction between Indigenous and Western thoughts, this is not to essentialize or deny the complexities of either, but in reference to the dynamics of erasure and destitution to which Indigenous lifeways in their diversity have been subjected to through Eurocentrism. In my argument, Indigenous thoughts offer a path, that has been destituted but which can be reconstituted (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>), to renew relationships and responsibilities to one another and to the rest of creation and to deviate from the path of ecological ruin our species currently follows, and which has already marred the Earth.<sup>1</sup></p><p>I begin by explaining how the Anthropocene can be associated with Modern/Colonial Man. I then argue that the claimed perfected sovereignty of settler states, such as Canada, expresses—and buttresses—Man's pretension to mastery and possession of the world. I consider how Indigenous peoples question the legitimacy and validity of settler sovereignty and how, in contrast, some articulate alternative political relationships of stewardship and of hospitality between hosts and guests. These political alternatives can decolonize and indigenize political relationships by im-perfecting settler sovereignty and by transcending mastery and possession in favor of reciprocal relationships and responsibilities, as they arise from and within concrete ecological contexts. I point to the Land Back movement as a practical project to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, through the transformation of political practices and subjectivities, which contributes to the renewal of reciprocal relationships to one another and with the land. As such, this article articulates a localized theoretical analysis of the Anthropocene, and a concrete path<sup>2</sup> to renew relationships with the land, in light and in the service of the demand and mobilization of Indigenous peoples to get their land back.</p><p>Although this article shares basic theses about reason and the mastery of nature with the <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, the method adopted is distinct. Horkheimer and Adorno engage with the <i>Odyssey</i>, for instance, to elucidate the present by unearthing the deep entanglement of the Enlightenment with National Socialism in the Western tradition (Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>, p. 218). For my part, I engage with Indigenous political traditions as critical and transformative sources of knowledge and insights that have been silenced and disavowed by Modernity/Coloniality. I refer to this approach as <i>disruptive conservatism</i> in that it challenges the dominating forms and terms of knowledge while revitalizing and recentering traditional lifeways. It seeks to engage with Indigenous thoughts and practices in their own voices (Allard-Tremblay, <span>2019</span>), not to preserve traditions but to ground critical reflections about disjunctive alternatives to currently dominating practices, in ways that may support Indigenous self-determination and freedom and harmony for all. Although it regards Indigenous traditions as having the required intellectual resources to negotiate contemporary problems, without having to be assisted by or reduced to Western voices, it does not preclude engagements and collaborations with other (decolonial) perspectives.</p><p>The concept of the Anthropocene first gained grounds in “geo- and environmental sciences” about 20 years ago (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, p. 2), but today the literature on the topic has diversified and increased multifold. This fruitfulness has led scholars familiar with the literature, such as Steve Mentz, to recognize that “readers and scholars may be forgiven for a certain befuddled or baffled attitude” to this multiplicity of discourses (<span>2019</span>, p. 1), especially if they expect a unified account of the Anthropocene. In response, Mentz (<span>2019</span>, pp. 1-13) suggests that the Anthropocene should be pluralized. Accordingly, I provide an account and interpretation of the Anthropocene which should not be taken as univocal and final, especially considering challenges to the concept that point to its role in disavowing Indigenous lifeways (Taylor, <span>2021</span>). This being said, the Anthropocene remains relevant to refer to deeply changing ecological circumstances faced by our species that are associated with human conduct and that trigger shared, though differentiated, political responsibilities, even if these circumstances have differently distributed causes and consequences (Sharp, <span>2020</span>).</p><p>I thus accept that humanity is on a path to ecological ruin, and I recognize the need to, individually and especially collectively, act in ways to prevent the collapse of ecosystems. Yet, I also recognize the need to think about human societies as embedded in broader natural contexts (Henderson, <span>2000</span>; Ladner, <span>2003</span>). This natural embeddedness informs how human agency should be conceptualized; specifically, the relationships in which human societies stand with the rest of Creation entail responsibilities (Asch et al., <span>2018</span>; Sioui, <span>1992</span>, p. 9). In that sense, I adopt elements of the “discontinuous-descriptive” perspective about the Anthropocene which sees it as “a radical break with the Holocene” with “potentially fatal” consequences that call for remedial human actions (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, pp. 4-5). Yet, I also adopt elements of the “continuous-ontological” perspective, according to which the Anthropocene offers “a theoretical opportunity to adopt a broader and more complex understanding of the shaping power that constitutes both human life and its environment as necessarily intertwined, and does not primarily reside in human reason” (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, pp. 5-6). Significantly, however, I refuse the positions associated with this last perspective, according to which recognizing our embeddedness in natural contexts diminishes the significance of human agency and that the point of the Anthropocene would not be “about deferring catastrophes but about enduring them, and building structures to address injustice as we do so” (Mentz, <span>2019</span>, p. 10). Rather, and similar to the Indigenous perspective discussed by Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter, I remain “unapologetically insistent that directed human agency is possible” (<span>2021</span>, p. 11). Indeed, while Indigenous worldviews often recognize the precarious balance of ecosystems, they also assert the importance of acting responsibly to sustain this balance, precisely by thinking about human agency in relation to natural contexts; as James Tully reports, the Haida “have a mantra to remind themselves of the tipping-point feature inherent in all living systems. They say, ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife’” (<span>2018</span>, p. 100). Accordingly, we need to act responsibly to avoid falling off the edge of the knife, not merely to learn to live with the falling off.</p><p>Furthermore, although I acknowledge that humanity stands on a path to ecological ruin, I recognize that the responsibility for the practices and lifeways that have produced the Anthropocene are not universally shared (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 49). Black peoples and Indigenous peoples have been severely oppressed and negatively impacted by the capitalist and colonial processes of enslavement, alienation, dispossession, and extraction that have fueled the growth of Western powers at the vanguard of the Anthropocene (Whyte, <span>2017</span>, p. 159; Yusoff, <span>2018</span>). As Yusoff (<span>2018</span>) writes: “The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations. The shift of grammar cannot keep the rawness out.” Accordingly, all of humanity may be threatened by the Anthropocene, but this threat and the responsibility for it are not born equally. To properly comprehend the Anthropocene, we need to see how it has been brought about by a specific, colonial, mode of relating to one another and to the world. As Yusoff puts it: “The ‘Age of Man’ is a dominant and dominating mode of subjectification—of nature, the non-Western world, ecologies, and the planet” (Yusoff, <span>2018</span>). This mode of subjectification denies Earthboundedness as it strives for mastery and possession of others and of nature. The Anthropocene, as seen from Coloniality, is the consummation of Modernity: It is the work of Modern/Colonial Man.</p><p>In saying that the Anthropocene is the work of Modern/Colonial Man, I affirm, following Karsten Schulz, that the “capitalist world-ecological system,” whose role in having produced the current ecological predicament is clear (Moore, <span>2015</span>; Parenti &amp; Moore, <span>2016</span>), needs to be understood as “inextricably linked to coloniality defined … as a racialised, androcentric, and class-based hierarchy of knowing and being which still marginalises non-western cultures and histories” (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 47). It is not merely the economic system that has produced the current ecological crisis, but the broader Modern/Colonial matrix of power of which it is an integral part.</p><p>As Walter Mignolo explains, Modernity has a “darker side, ‘coloniality’” which it hides, but which is nevertheless “constitutive of” it (2011, pp. 2−3).<sup>3</sup> Coloniality refers to core ideas of Modernity—such as progress, civilization, and reason—that give rise to correlative ideas—such as traditionalism, savagery, and superstition—that disqualify the thoughts, practices and knowledges of colonized, oppressed, dominated, and excluded groups and justify their subordinated and dominated positions. This results from the creation of and control, by Europeans, over the “colonial matrix of power,” which refers to the capacity to enunciate with universal pretensions the terms that constitute and structure “the economy,” “authority,” “gender and sexuality,” and “knowledge and subjectivity” (Mignolo, <span>2007</span>, p. 478; <span>2011</span>, p. 8). Significantly, the control of Europeans over these four domains was legitimated through a “racial and patriarchal foundation of knowledge” (Mignolo, <span>2007</span>, p. 478; <span>2011</span>, p. 8) that excluded non-Europeans, non-white, and non-men from full right- and power-bearing humanity. Importantly, Mignolo explains that the control claimed through the colonial matrix of power also depends on a fundamental “separation from <i>nature</i>” that sets Man/Human apart from other-than-humans (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>, p. 160). It is this broader matrix of power and its underlying constitutive separations in terms of “racism,” “sexism,” “humanism,” and “Eurocentrism” (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>, p. 163) that constitute subjects as agents of Modernity; hence my claim that the Man of the Anthropocene is the white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Western Modernity.</p><p>In sum, in implicating Modernity/Coloniality and its associated matrix of power and mode of subjectification, I am pointing to “the principles of thought, speech, and action which provide the seemingly ‘natural’ foundations for the idea of unlimited human mastery over the earth” (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 58).</p><p>Modern/Colonial subjectivity is driven by a will to master and possess (Singh, <span>2018</span>, p. 13). This drive of Modern/Colonial Man was clearly expressed by René Descartes, at the dawn of Modernity, for whom a rational method of inquiry had the potential to “make ourselves like the masters and possessors of nature” (<span>2000</span>, p. 99 my translation). In seeking and claiming to master others and other-than-humans, Man seeks to define, control, manage, and order them according to his wishes and judgments. In seeking and claiming to possess them, Man objectifies them by disavowing their agency; abstracts them by ignoring the concrete relationships in which they stand and replacing these with a relationship of ownership in which he is the determinant point of reference; and separates himself from nature and others by denying mutual responsibilities and accountability to those and that which he claims to possess. Mastery and possession allow Man to turn nature into an object, a good to be possessed, a resource to be used, extracted, exploited, and destroyed at will (Mentz, <span>2019</span>, p. 16; Mignolo, <span>2011</span>, pp. 11-13; Moore, <span>2015</span>); racialized and colonial others into living tools to be enslaved and sources of labor to be violently alienated (Wolfe, <span>2016</span>); and Indigenous peoples into inconveniences to be dispossessed through displacement and elimination to gain access to their lands (Nichols, <span>2020</span>; Wolfe, <span>2006</span>). Being central to the mode of subjectification of Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession fuel the matrix of colonial power by directing Man's relationship to nature and other humans, and thus drive the consolidation of the extractive, racial, and colonial features of capitalism.</p><p>In a world built by Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession find diverse expressions. As Julietta Singh (<span>2018</span>, p. 12) explains, Man's dominion over nature is one such expression, while sovereignty can be interpreted as an expression of this same logic at the political and state levels. Put differently, dominion and sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality are all closely enmeshed, and they are part of the fabric of the Anthropocene. To unravel the Anthropocene, then, I turn to the idea of sovereignty to explore alternative, Indigenous, non-sovereign ways of being in the world that undermine mastery and possession and that may thus transcend Modernity/Coloniality.</p><p>Man's pretension to mastery and possession of both the human and other-than-human world is given concrete form in the practice of sovereignty, associated with the modern state. As Christopher Morris (<span>2002</span>, p. 178) explains: “Sovereignty is the highest, final, and supreme political and legal authority and power within the territorially defined domain of a system of direct rule.” Across most variants, sovereignty is marked by a hierarchical view of authority, where some entity is vested with the power to make a final binding decision for all those under its authority. When this power is seen as absolute, it is not bound by any restriction or to any field of application. In an idealized form, he who is sovereign is practically the master and possessor of his domain and all it contains—humans and other-than-humans.</p><p>Yet, in practice, claims to sovereignty are rarely absolute or uncontested and through these challenges the hegemony of Modern/Colonial Man may be confronted. Yet, it is possible for such challenges to reproduce that which they oppose, as is the case when violence and mastery are used to oppose violence and mastery (Alfred, <span>2005</span>, p. 23; Singh, <span>2018</span>, pp. 2, 24; Tully, <span>2014</span>). Transformative and decolonial challenges to sovereignty need to enact a distinct mode of being together and of being in the world, not merely challenge sovereignty with a counterclaim of sovereignty. To explore such decolonial realities and practices that seek to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, and which allow us to perceive ways of being otherwise in the world, I begin to draw out how mastery manifests itself by engaging with the claims to a perfected sovereignty made by states in settler colonial contexts, with a focus on Canada, before engaging with Indigenous alternatives.</p><p>As Patrick Wolfe (<span>2006</span>) and Lorenzo Veracini (<span>2010, 2015</span>) explain, settler colonialism should be understood as a structure organized around the settler aim of acquiring land already occupied by Indigenous peoples. This gives rise to a logic of elimination whereby diverse policies have the effect of clearing land from Indigenous presence and thus of naturalizing settler presence. As Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun (<span>2012</span>, p. 42) explain, the wished-for endpoint of settler colonialism, which may never be achieved, is “the moment of colonial completion. That is when the settler society will have fully replaced Indigenous societies on their land, and naturalized this replacement.” In that sense, the ideological structure of settler colonialism essentially requires the disavowal of Indigenous presence and thus masks challenges to the legitimate presence and authority of settlers on and over these lands. It is accordingly fully consistent with settler colonialism for one to ignore the responsibilities that come with being on Indigenous land and even the fact of being on Indigenous lands.</p><p>Thinking more specifically in political and legal terms, this process of settler naturalization requires the consolidation of settler authority. Settlers cannot be satisfied with their presence being authorized, as if they were sojourners, migrants, or guests (Veracini, <span>2015</span>), because this makes their authority dependent on the good will of another. This is the case even if the authority of settlers was not, nor was it claimed to be, effectively sovereign from inception in most settler colonial contexts. It rather inserted and incorporated itself into existing legal and political orders, sometimes drawing on local practices (Hsueh, <span>2010</span>), and depended on the agreement of already present Indigenous peoples, who authorized the presence of newcomers through treaties (Asch, <span>2014</span>). Yet, as Lisa Ford explains, settlers progressively claimed and exerted supreme and final authority and extended the territorial reach of their authority to the whole of the lands they claimed. Through this process, settler sovereignty was perfected, notably “by subordinating indigenous jurisdiction” (Ford, <span>2010</span>, p. 183), such that the effective authority of settlers came to match their normative pretensions.</p><p>The need and wish for a perfected settler sovereignty allow making sense of the fact that, although Canada recognizes inherent Aboriginal rights and treaty rights—and although these rights are to some extent binding on the Crown by virtue of their recognition in article 35 of the Constitution Act—the right of settlers to be here and the associated sovereignty of the Crown are never under question. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada made this clear: “It is worth recalling that while British policy towards the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, … there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereignty and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands vested in the Crown” (<i>R. v. Sparrow</i>, <span>1990</span>). Indigenous rights and title are then not equivalent to a recognition of sovereignty; they are more like burdens on the constant and unquestionable underlying title of the Crown. The settler state cannot truly countenance Indigenous sovereignty and ownership of the land precisely because it undermines and denies its own perfected sovereignty. As Andrew Schaap (<span>2009</span>) puts it, in a settler colonial context, “aboriginal sovereignty” appears to be an “absurd proposition.”</p><p>The idea of a perfected sovereignty is also useful to make sense of the limited reach of the politics of reconciliation, as articulated, once again, by the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1997, in the <i>Delgamuukw</i> decision, it affirmed that “a basic purpose of s. 35(1) [that is the article in the constitution of Canada affirming aboriginal rights—was]—‘the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.’ Let us face it, we are all here to stay” (<i>Delgamuukw v. British Columbia</i>, <span>1997</span>). Such a formulation does not question the perfected sovereignty of the Crown because it is for Indigenous peoples to come to terms with the facts of settler presence and sovereignty.</p><p>Yet, if Indigenous peoples were here first, how did settlers—not as individuals, but as a society with distinct social, political, legal, and economic institutions—acquire the right to be on Indigenous lands and, more importantly, to claim sovereignty over these lands <i>and</i> over Indigenous peoples? In asking this question, my point is not to investigate possible answers, simply because none are convincing and conclusive, especially for Indigenous peoples. Indeed, a perfected settler sovereignty remains a contested issue (Asch, <span>2014</span>; Vowel, <span>2016</span>, Chapter 26). Even the doctrine of cession, according to which some Indigenous nations would have agreed through the numbered treaties to “…cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada … for ever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever, to the lands…” (Vowel, <span>2016</span>, p. 254) is denied by Indigenous peoples on the basis of their oral traditions. They hold that those treaties were not land transfer contracts, but compacts through which a durable relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples would be established in order to share the land (Asch, <span>2014</span>).</p><p>This is a question explored in detail by Michael Asch, with whom I agree when he writes that “the political rights of Indigenous peoples already existed at the time that Crown sovereignty was asserted and, therefore, it is the question of how the Crown gained sovereignty that requires reconciliation with the pre-existence of Indigenous societies and not the other way around” (<span>2014</span>, p. 11). Interestingly for our purposes, in asking this question we may explore ways to im-perfect settler sovereignty and thus undermine claims to mastery and possession.</p><p>In seeking to im-perfect sovereignty, I center Indigenous thoughts and practices that open relational alternatives to the Modern/Colonial mode of subjectification and of being in the world. This task is consistent with the calls to “turn toward evocations of subjectivities no longer wed to an uncritical politics of worldly mastery” (Singh, <span>2018</span>, p. 19)<sup>4</sup> as a way to decolonize the Anthropocene. I focus specifically on the idea that Indigenous peoples and settlers can engage in reciprocal relationships of hospitality that center on Indigenous stewardship of the land. This means that settlers must learn to be guests on the land and to Indigenous peoples.</p><p>Veracini explains that undoing settler colonialism requires undermining the claim of settlers to sovereignty. One way to do this is for settlers to “be compelled to reconsider themselves guests” (Veracini, <span>2015</span>, pp. 106-107). Yet, such an option risks not being properly transformative and decolonial if it is understood as replacing one sovereign claim—that of the settlers—by another—that of the Indigenous groups.<sup>5</sup> This issue can be avoided when we consider being a guest as referring, not to being authorized to enter the sovereign domain of a master-host, but to being in a distinctive relationship of reciprocal responsibilities and privileges, both on the part of the host and the guest, in which the host has a privileged relationship to place.</p><p>To make sense of this, we can turn to Ruth Kolezsar-Green's (<span>2019</span>) account of what it means to be a host, a guest, and a settler, which is informed by “teachings [that] originate from and span the land, from the east to the west coasts” and by her discussions with “Elders and Traditional Teachers from six different Nations” (<span>2019</span>, p. 166). Kolezsar-Green articulates the responsibilities of the host and of the guest, thus allowing one to understand what it means, according to Indigenous teachings and protocols regarding hospitality, for non-Indigenous peoples to behave in ways consistent with being on Indigenous lands and with the preexistence of Indigenous nations as nations. This makes it possible to envision ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can relate that do not sustain and perpetuate the settler order and thus Modernity/Coloniality.</p><p>Kolezsar-Green explains that a settler is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands but who does not commit to “unsettle their privilege” (<span>2019</span>, p. 174) and to take the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands. Settlers assert their rights in ways that make no space for reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations and that deny Indigenous political differences and distinct relationships to the land. In other words, they assume their perfected sovereignty over the land and over Indigenous peoples.</p><p>In contrast, a guest is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands and seeks to take responsibility for that fact.<sup>6</sup> A guest is in relationship with Indigenous peoples in ways that sustain Indigenous political differences and lifeways. It is also someone who recognizes and respects the distinct and special relationship of Indigenous peoples to their land. Put differently, a guest integrates an existing relationship to the land, it is not someone who disrupts, displaces, or disavows that relationship: This is why it can be said that a guest is “in relationship to the Land in a way that supports stewardship and not ownership” (Koleszar-Green, <span>2019</span>, p. 175). A guest is then both a guest <i>to</i> Indigenous peoples and <i>on</i> the land: Being a guest to Indigenous peoples is not abstracted from the land where that relationship is enacted and from the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on this land and that inform Indigenous governance. Correlatively, being a host is not equivalent to being master and possessor of the land—it is about having a privileged relationship of responsibilities and respect to and with the land where others are welcomed.</p><p>In general, settlers have been socialized precisely as settlers. This means that conscious efforts to think and behave differently, in everyday practices, must be made to become guests. Such a relationship is not enacted by legislating specific rights and duties, it must be learned through a transformative process whereby reclaimed and revitalized political relationships and responsibilities are enacted and embraced. Importantly, in learning to be a guest, not only is one learning to relate to others in non-sovereign ways, one is also supporting and enabling Indigenous governance and relationships to the land, which is a key strategy to undermine the Modern/Colonial logic and subjectivity that fuel the Anthropocene. This is because whereas Modern/Colonial governance is marked by mastery and possession and by a clear distinction between the natural and the human realms, Indigenous governance is typically marked by relationality and respect for humans <i>and</i> other-than-humans (Watts, <span>2013</span>). As Kiera Ladner explains, politics according to this view of governance is about “learning how to govern or how to live together in the best way possible within an ecological context” (<span>2003</span>, p. 130). Put differently, governance is about conduct that respects and takes responsibility for the diverse life-sustaining relationships in which we stand (Kimmerer, <span>2013</span>; Mohawk, <span>2010</span>, pp. 7-13): Indigenous governance is about stewardship, not ownership.</p><p>Indigenous governance deeply reframes governance away from mastery and possession toward relationships of reciprocity, responsibility, and stewardship that are embedded in concrete ecological contexts—becoming a respectful guest thus allows settlers to embed themselves in a broader system of mutual governance that extends to and is incorporated into the land. Learning to be guests requires a change of perspective about where and how one stands in the world: It is a transformation of dominant Modern/Colonial subjectivities associated with the decolonization and indigenization of political relationships. Such an evocation of decolonial subjectivities challenges mastery and possession and articulates a transformative modality of human agency to move through and out of the Anthropocene.</p><p>As Mignolo (<span>2007</span>, p. 458) writes, “if the colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of the damnés.” In this context, the significance of Indigenous governance and ways of being in the world is that they offer transformative alternatives that do not depend on or reproduce the subjectivities of mastery and possession associated with Modernity/Coloniality. However, for these Indigenous transformative alternatives to truly provide guidance, sovereignty needs to be practically im-perfected and Modern/Colonial subjectivities concretely transformed. This means that the guidance of Indigenous peoples must take the form of concrete political projects that reconstitute and recenter Indigenous jurisdictions and stewardship, so that mastery and possession may be forsaken, and relationships to one another and to the other-than-human world renewed. The Land Back movement is such a concrete political project; it has the potential to transform subjectivities through the transformation of political relationships.</p><p>Over the past few years, Canada has witnessed various mobilizations of Indigenous peoples around questions of land. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, railroads were blocked by various Indigenous groups in support of members of the Wet'suwet'en nation who were present on their land to stop the construction of a pipeline. The Wet'suwet'en land protectors were eventually arrested and removed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Unist'ot'en Camp, <span>2020</span>). More recently, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Québec sought to stop moose hunting to protect their relative/kin the moose, and Mi'kmaw fishers in Nova Scotia acted on their constitutionally protected and inherent right to fish despite the opposition and attacks of non-Indigenous fishers. In Ontario, members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve mobilized around the “1492 Land Back Lane” to stop a housing development on claimed land (Manuel &amp; Klein, <span>2020</span>). Though these various movements take different forms, have different immediate objectives, and are not coherently organized into a single movement, they remain united by the demand to respect or restore Indigenous authority and jurisdictions over land. They can be seen as diverse manifestations of the Land Back movement.</p><p>One of the minimal—albeit often criticized—ways in which we can concretely envision the process of giving the land back to Indigenous peoples is through the implementation of a robust form of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC is associated with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, <span>2007</span>) and is required for any decision or policy that would affect the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples or their land. For reasons of space, I cannot go into the detail of what FPIC requires to be understood as giving Indigenous peoples control of land, but this has been developed in the ‘<i>Land Back Red Paper</i>’ of the Yellowhead Institute (<span>2019</span>). Of concern here is the fact that institutionalizing Indigenous control over land in response to the Land Back movement would not merely be a way to address a demand for rights; it is more broadly a project of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization.</p><p>As Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai write in “Land Back is more than the sum of its part” (<span>2020</span>): “when we say ‘Land Back’ we aren't asking for just the ground, or for a piece of paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth. We want the system that is land to be alive so that it can perpetuate itself, and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That's what we want back: our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected.” The Land Back movement is a demand for Indigenous knowledge and jurisdiction to guide relationships to the land—it should be understood as properly meaning “relations back” (Gouldhawke, <span>2020</span>). It is thus a concrete path that can be followed in the Canadian context to renew relationships with one another and to the land, following Indigenous terms.<sup>7</sup></p><p>Although we should not romanticize Indigenous governance, the relational understanding of the land that informs Indigenous epistemologies, governance, and laws holds the promise that the reciprocal life-sustaining relationships embodied in the land and in which we always stand may be better protected than by Modern/Colonial governance. The scepter of sovereign authority held by Modern/Colonial Man has allowed him to conduct all of us into the Anthropocene. Although a significant portion of humanity may now live in relative abundance and comfort, the world is dying. Giving the land back may not be sufficient to address our ecological predicament, but it would be a way, for settlers and Modern/Colonial Man, of casting away their hubristic claim to mastery and possession of nature and of becoming, as Robin Kimmerer (<span>2013</span>, p. 112) puts it, “member[s] of the democracy of species.”</p><p>Giving the land back is not a utopian fantasy—as shown by the Yellowhead Institute's proposal—and although it may be highly discomforting for settlers to countenance, decolonization and learning to be guests are expectedly unsettling. Although this project is distinctive of settler colonial contexts like Canada and the United States, it is a significant refusal of widely shared Modern/Colonial political practices and associated subjectivities seen as bankrupt. The alternative political practices and subjectivities this refusal generates<sup>8</sup> would be disruptive of the current globalized economy and would beckon all to learn to act otherwise, wherever they are in the world: It calls Indigenous peoples to support the resurgence and revitalization of Indigenous lifeways, settlers on Indigenous lands to learn to be guests, and individuals embedded in the Modern/Colonial matrix of power to find concrete ways in which relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their specific contexts. Land Back thus offers a clear and concrete path for settlers and for Modern/Colonial Man to learn to be guests, to acknowledge their land-based responsibility to act in earthbound ways, and for all of us to try to mend the world for those who will follow.</p><p>This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12679","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"For Those Who Will Follow; Earth Marred and Renewing Relationships\",\"authors\":\"Yann Allard-Tremblay\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/1467-8675.12679\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>Wherever one is in North America, one is on Indigenous lands. Some Indigenous peoples may have been exterminated or removed to other locations, and their contemporary presence may not be highly visible, yet this remains Indigenous land. Nevertheless, rarely do non-Indigenous individuals and institutions consider the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands (cf. Asch, <span>2014</span>). To a large extent, this is because settlers regard the state they control as holding a legitimate claim to sovereign authority. Not only is this a claim that bars rightful relationships with Indigenous peoples, it also discloses contemporary settler societies’ disconnection from their Earthboundedness (Asch et al., <span>2018</span>; Borrows, <span>2018</span>) because it extends both over peoples and lands.</p><p>I propose to consider how, from the locality of some settler states such as Canada and the United States, an intimate connection between the settlers’ claim to sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality, is disclosed, which is significant for understanding the Anthropocene and for envisioning ways of acting otherwise that may help to remedy it. My claims regarding the Anthropocene and Modernity/Coloniality are thus perspectival; they do not pretend to offer complete and universal accounts of either, but rather hope to diagnose distinctive features of both, as experienced and disclosed from the underside of Modernity.</p><p>I see the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man, as a symptom of contemporary settler societies’ view of themselves as <i>floating free from the land</i>, to use Brian Burkhart's formulation (<span>2019</span>) and of their associated idea of Man. Man, in this context, does not refer to humanity as a whole, but rather to the Western white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Modernity/Coloniality (Mignolo, <span>2007, 2011</span>; Yusoff, <span>2018</span>) who is driven by a will to mastery and possession (Schulz, <span>2017</span>; Singh, <span>2018</span>). This Modern/Colonial Man presents himself as the universal subject, and thereby erases and disqualifies alternative ways of being human (Singh, <span>2018</span>, Chapter Introduction).</p><p>I engage with First Nation and Native American—hereafter Indigenous—political thought and movements to articulate an alternative to the un-earthbound political practices and associated subjectivity of the Man of the Anthropocene. I use Indigenous as a collective shorthand, but my focus is on the distinct political experiences, struggles, and traditions of some of the Indigenous peoples of the lands now claimed by Canada and the United States and the radical alternatives they disclose to dominant Modern/Colonial lifeways, the significance of which extends far beyond their respective contexts. Although I appeal to the distinction between Indigenous and Western thoughts, this is not to essentialize or deny the complexities of either, but in reference to the dynamics of erasure and destitution to which Indigenous lifeways in their diversity have been subjected to through Eurocentrism. In my argument, Indigenous thoughts offer a path, that has been destituted but which can be reconstituted (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>), to renew relationships and responsibilities to one another and to the rest of creation and to deviate from the path of ecological ruin our species currently follows, and which has already marred the Earth.<sup>1</sup></p><p>I begin by explaining how the Anthropocene can be associated with Modern/Colonial Man. I then argue that the claimed perfected sovereignty of settler states, such as Canada, expresses—and buttresses—Man's pretension to mastery and possession of the world. I consider how Indigenous peoples question the legitimacy and validity of settler sovereignty and how, in contrast, some articulate alternative political relationships of stewardship and of hospitality between hosts and guests. These political alternatives can decolonize and indigenize political relationships by im-perfecting settler sovereignty and by transcending mastery and possession in favor of reciprocal relationships and responsibilities, as they arise from and within concrete ecological contexts. I point to the Land Back movement as a practical project to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, through the transformation of political practices and subjectivities, which contributes to the renewal of reciprocal relationships to one another and with the land. As such, this article articulates a localized theoretical analysis of the Anthropocene, and a concrete path<sup>2</sup> to renew relationships with the land, in light and in the service of the demand and mobilization of Indigenous peoples to get their land back.</p><p>Although this article shares basic theses about reason and the mastery of nature with the <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, the method adopted is distinct. Horkheimer and Adorno engage with the <i>Odyssey</i>, for instance, to elucidate the present by unearthing the deep entanglement of the Enlightenment with National Socialism in the Western tradition (Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>, p. 218). For my part, I engage with Indigenous political traditions as critical and transformative sources of knowledge and insights that have been silenced and disavowed by Modernity/Coloniality. I refer to this approach as <i>disruptive conservatism</i> in that it challenges the dominating forms and terms of knowledge while revitalizing and recentering traditional lifeways. It seeks to engage with Indigenous thoughts and practices in their own voices (Allard-Tremblay, <span>2019</span>), not to preserve traditions but to ground critical reflections about disjunctive alternatives to currently dominating practices, in ways that may support Indigenous self-determination and freedom and harmony for all. Although it regards Indigenous traditions as having the required intellectual resources to negotiate contemporary problems, without having to be assisted by or reduced to Western voices, it does not preclude engagements and collaborations with other (decolonial) perspectives.</p><p>The concept of the Anthropocene first gained grounds in “geo- and environmental sciences” about 20 years ago (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, p. 2), but today the literature on the topic has diversified and increased multifold. This fruitfulness has led scholars familiar with the literature, such as Steve Mentz, to recognize that “readers and scholars may be forgiven for a certain befuddled or baffled attitude” to this multiplicity of discourses (<span>2019</span>, p. 1), especially if they expect a unified account of the Anthropocene. In response, Mentz (<span>2019</span>, pp. 1-13) suggests that the Anthropocene should be pluralized. Accordingly, I provide an account and interpretation of the Anthropocene which should not be taken as univocal and final, especially considering challenges to the concept that point to its role in disavowing Indigenous lifeways (Taylor, <span>2021</span>). This being said, the Anthropocene remains relevant to refer to deeply changing ecological circumstances faced by our species that are associated with human conduct and that trigger shared, though differentiated, political responsibilities, even if these circumstances have differently distributed causes and consequences (Sharp, <span>2020</span>).</p><p>I thus accept that humanity is on a path to ecological ruin, and I recognize the need to, individually and especially collectively, act in ways to prevent the collapse of ecosystems. Yet, I also recognize the need to think about human societies as embedded in broader natural contexts (Henderson, <span>2000</span>; Ladner, <span>2003</span>). This natural embeddedness informs how human agency should be conceptualized; specifically, the relationships in which human societies stand with the rest of Creation entail responsibilities (Asch et al., <span>2018</span>; Sioui, <span>1992</span>, p. 9). In that sense, I adopt elements of the “discontinuous-descriptive” perspective about the Anthropocene which sees it as “a radical break with the Holocene” with “potentially fatal” consequences that call for remedial human actions (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, pp. 4-5). Yet, I also adopt elements of the “continuous-ontological” perspective, according to which the Anthropocene offers “a theoretical opportunity to adopt a broader and more complex understanding of the shaping power that constitutes both human life and its environment as necessarily intertwined, and does not primarily reside in human reason” (Randazzo &amp; Richter, <span>2021</span>, pp. 5-6). Significantly, however, I refuse the positions associated with this last perspective, according to which recognizing our embeddedness in natural contexts diminishes the significance of human agency and that the point of the Anthropocene would not be “about deferring catastrophes but about enduring them, and building structures to address injustice as we do so” (Mentz, <span>2019</span>, p. 10). Rather, and similar to the Indigenous perspective discussed by Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter, I remain “unapologetically insistent that directed human agency is possible” (<span>2021</span>, p. 11). Indeed, while Indigenous worldviews often recognize the precarious balance of ecosystems, they also assert the importance of acting responsibly to sustain this balance, precisely by thinking about human agency in relation to natural contexts; as James Tully reports, the Haida “have a mantra to remind themselves of the tipping-point feature inherent in all living systems. They say, ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife’” (<span>2018</span>, p. 100). Accordingly, we need to act responsibly to avoid falling off the edge of the knife, not merely to learn to live with the falling off.</p><p>Furthermore, although I acknowledge that humanity stands on a path to ecological ruin, I recognize that the responsibility for the practices and lifeways that have produced the Anthropocene are not universally shared (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 49). Black peoples and Indigenous peoples have been severely oppressed and negatively impacted by the capitalist and colonial processes of enslavement, alienation, dispossession, and extraction that have fueled the growth of Western powers at the vanguard of the Anthropocene (Whyte, <span>2017</span>, p. 159; Yusoff, <span>2018</span>). As Yusoff (<span>2018</span>) writes: “The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations. The shift of grammar cannot keep the rawness out.” Accordingly, all of humanity may be threatened by the Anthropocene, but this threat and the responsibility for it are not born equally. To properly comprehend the Anthropocene, we need to see how it has been brought about by a specific, colonial, mode of relating to one another and to the world. As Yusoff puts it: “The ‘Age of Man’ is a dominant and dominating mode of subjectification—of nature, the non-Western world, ecologies, and the planet” (Yusoff, <span>2018</span>). This mode of subjectification denies Earthboundedness as it strives for mastery and possession of others and of nature. The Anthropocene, as seen from Coloniality, is the consummation of Modernity: It is the work of Modern/Colonial Man.</p><p>In saying that the Anthropocene is the work of Modern/Colonial Man, I affirm, following Karsten Schulz, that the “capitalist world-ecological system,” whose role in having produced the current ecological predicament is clear (Moore, <span>2015</span>; Parenti &amp; Moore, <span>2016</span>), needs to be understood as “inextricably linked to coloniality defined … as a racialised, androcentric, and class-based hierarchy of knowing and being which still marginalises non-western cultures and histories” (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 47). It is not merely the economic system that has produced the current ecological crisis, but the broader Modern/Colonial matrix of power of which it is an integral part.</p><p>As Walter Mignolo explains, Modernity has a “darker side, ‘coloniality’” which it hides, but which is nevertheless “constitutive of” it (2011, pp. 2−3).<sup>3</sup> Coloniality refers to core ideas of Modernity—such as progress, civilization, and reason—that give rise to correlative ideas—such as traditionalism, savagery, and superstition—that disqualify the thoughts, practices and knowledges of colonized, oppressed, dominated, and excluded groups and justify their subordinated and dominated positions. This results from the creation of and control, by Europeans, over the “colonial matrix of power,” which refers to the capacity to enunciate with universal pretensions the terms that constitute and structure “the economy,” “authority,” “gender and sexuality,” and “knowledge and subjectivity” (Mignolo, <span>2007</span>, p. 478; <span>2011</span>, p. 8). Significantly, the control of Europeans over these four domains was legitimated through a “racial and patriarchal foundation of knowledge” (Mignolo, <span>2007</span>, p. 478; <span>2011</span>, p. 8) that excluded non-Europeans, non-white, and non-men from full right- and power-bearing humanity. Importantly, Mignolo explains that the control claimed through the colonial matrix of power also depends on a fundamental “separation from <i>nature</i>” that sets Man/Human apart from other-than-humans (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>, p. 160). It is this broader matrix of power and its underlying constitutive separations in terms of “racism,” “sexism,” “humanism,” and “Eurocentrism” (Mignolo &amp; Walsh, <span>2018</span>, p. 163) that constitute subjects as agents of Modernity; hence my claim that the Man of the Anthropocene is the white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Western Modernity.</p><p>In sum, in implicating Modernity/Coloniality and its associated matrix of power and mode of subjectification, I am pointing to “the principles of thought, speech, and action which provide the seemingly ‘natural’ foundations for the idea of unlimited human mastery over the earth” (Schulz, <span>2017</span>, p. 58).</p><p>Modern/Colonial subjectivity is driven by a will to master and possess (Singh, <span>2018</span>, p. 13). This drive of Modern/Colonial Man was clearly expressed by René Descartes, at the dawn of Modernity, for whom a rational method of inquiry had the potential to “make ourselves like the masters and possessors of nature” (<span>2000</span>, p. 99 my translation). In seeking and claiming to master others and other-than-humans, Man seeks to define, control, manage, and order them according to his wishes and judgments. In seeking and claiming to possess them, Man objectifies them by disavowing their agency; abstracts them by ignoring the concrete relationships in which they stand and replacing these with a relationship of ownership in which he is the determinant point of reference; and separates himself from nature and others by denying mutual responsibilities and accountability to those and that which he claims to possess. Mastery and possession allow Man to turn nature into an object, a good to be possessed, a resource to be used, extracted, exploited, and destroyed at will (Mentz, <span>2019</span>, p. 16; Mignolo, <span>2011</span>, pp. 11-13; Moore, <span>2015</span>); racialized and colonial others into living tools to be enslaved and sources of labor to be violently alienated (Wolfe, <span>2016</span>); and Indigenous peoples into inconveniences to be dispossessed through displacement and elimination to gain access to their lands (Nichols, <span>2020</span>; Wolfe, <span>2006</span>). Being central to the mode of subjectification of Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession fuel the matrix of colonial power by directing Man's relationship to nature and other humans, and thus drive the consolidation of the extractive, racial, and colonial features of capitalism.</p><p>In a world built by Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession find diverse expressions. As Julietta Singh (<span>2018</span>, p. 12) explains, Man's dominion over nature is one such expression, while sovereignty can be interpreted as an expression of this same logic at the political and state levels. Put differently, dominion and sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality are all closely enmeshed, and they are part of the fabric of the Anthropocene. To unravel the Anthropocene, then, I turn to the idea of sovereignty to explore alternative, Indigenous, non-sovereign ways of being in the world that undermine mastery and possession and that may thus transcend Modernity/Coloniality.</p><p>Man's pretension to mastery and possession of both the human and other-than-human world is given concrete form in the practice of sovereignty, associated with the modern state. As Christopher Morris (<span>2002</span>, p. 178) explains: “Sovereignty is the highest, final, and supreme political and legal authority and power within the territorially defined domain of a system of direct rule.” Across most variants, sovereignty is marked by a hierarchical view of authority, where some entity is vested with the power to make a final binding decision for all those under its authority. When this power is seen as absolute, it is not bound by any restriction or to any field of application. In an idealized form, he who is sovereign is practically the master and possessor of his domain and all it contains—humans and other-than-humans.</p><p>Yet, in practice, claims to sovereignty are rarely absolute or uncontested and through these challenges the hegemony of Modern/Colonial Man may be confronted. Yet, it is possible for such challenges to reproduce that which they oppose, as is the case when violence and mastery are used to oppose violence and mastery (Alfred, <span>2005</span>, p. 23; Singh, <span>2018</span>, pp. 2, 24; Tully, <span>2014</span>). Transformative and decolonial challenges to sovereignty need to enact a distinct mode of being together and of being in the world, not merely challenge sovereignty with a counterclaim of sovereignty. To explore such decolonial realities and practices that seek to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, and which allow us to perceive ways of being otherwise in the world, I begin to draw out how mastery manifests itself by engaging with the claims to a perfected sovereignty made by states in settler colonial contexts, with a focus on Canada, before engaging with Indigenous alternatives.</p><p>As Patrick Wolfe (<span>2006</span>) and Lorenzo Veracini (<span>2010, 2015</span>) explain, settler colonialism should be understood as a structure organized around the settler aim of acquiring land already occupied by Indigenous peoples. This gives rise to a logic of elimination whereby diverse policies have the effect of clearing land from Indigenous presence and thus of naturalizing settler presence. As Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun (<span>2012</span>, p. 42) explain, the wished-for endpoint of settler colonialism, which may never be achieved, is “the moment of colonial completion. That is when the settler society will have fully replaced Indigenous societies on their land, and naturalized this replacement.” In that sense, the ideological structure of settler colonialism essentially requires the disavowal of Indigenous presence and thus masks challenges to the legitimate presence and authority of settlers on and over these lands. It is accordingly fully consistent with settler colonialism for one to ignore the responsibilities that come with being on Indigenous land and even the fact of being on Indigenous lands.</p><p>Thinking more specifically in political and legal terms, this process of settler naturalization requires the consolidation of settler authority. Settlers cannot be satisfied with their presence being authorized, as if they were sojourners, migrants, or guests (Veracini, <span>2015</span>), because this makes their authority dependent on the good will of another. This is the case even if the authority of settlers was not, nor was it claimed to be, effectively sovereign from inception in most settler colonial contexts. It rather inserted and incorporated itself into existing legal and political orders, sometimes drawing on local practices (Hsueh, <span>2010</span>), and depended on the agreement of already present Indigenous peoples, who authorized the presence of newcomers through treaties (Asch, <span>2014</span>). Yet, as Lisa Ford explains, settlers progressively claimed and exerted supreme and final authority and extended the territorial reach of their authority to the whole of the lands they claimed. Through this process, settler sovereignty was perfected, notably “by subordinating indigenous jurisdiction” (Ford, <span>2010</span>, p. 183), such that the effective authority of settlers came to match their normative pretensions.</p><p>The need and wish for a perfected settler sovereignty allow making sense of the fact that, although Canada recognizes inherent Aboriginal rights and treaty rights—and although these rights are to some extent binding on the Crown by virtue of their recognition in article 35 of the Constitution Act—the right of settlers to be here and the associated sovereignty of the Crown are never under question. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada made this clear: “It is worth recalling that while British policy towards the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, … there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereignty and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands vested in the Crown” (<i>R. v. Sparrow</i>, <span>1990</span>). Indigenous rights and title are then not equivalent to a recognition of sovereignty; they are more like burdens on the constant and unquestionable underlying title of the Crown. The settler state cannot truly countenance Indigenous sovereignty and ownership of the land precisely because it undermines and denies its own perfected sovereignty. As Andrew Schaap (<span>2009</span>) puts it, in a settler colonial context, “aboriginal sovereignty” appears to be an “absurd proposition.”</p><p>The idea of a perfected sovereignty is also useful to make sense of the limited reach of the politics of reconciliation, as articulated, once again, by the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1997, in the <i>Delgamuukw</i> decision, it affirmed that “a basic purpose of s. 35(1) [that is the article in the constitution of Canada affirming aboriginal rights—was]—‘the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.’ Let us face it, we are all here to stay” (<i>Delgamuukw v. British Columbia</i>, <span>1997</span>). Such a formulation does not question the perfected sovereignty of the Crown because it is for Indigenous peoples to come to terms with the facts of settler presence and sovereignty.</p><p>Yet, if Indigenous peoples were here first, how did settlers—not as individuals, but as a society with distinct social, political, legal, and economic institutions—acquire the right to be on Indigenous lands and, more importantly, to claim sovereignty over these lands <i>and</i> over Indigenous peoples? In asking this question, my point is not to investigate possible answers, simply because none are convincing and conclusive, especially for Indigenous peoples. Indeed, a perfected settler sovereignty remains a contested issue (Asch, <span>2014</span>; Vowel, <span>2016</span>, Chapter 26). Even the doctrine of cession, according to which some Indigenous nations would have agreed through the numbered treaties to “…cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada … for ever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever, to the lands…” (Vowel, <span>2016</span>, p. 254) is denied by Indigenous peoples on the basis of their oral traditions. They hold that those treaties were not land transfer contracts, but compacts through which a durable relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples would be established in order to share the land (Asch, <span>2014</span>).</p><p>This is a question explored in detail by Michael Asch, with whom I agree when he writes that “the political rights of Indigenous peoples already existed at the time that Crown sovereignty was asserted and, therefore, it is the question of how the Crown gained sovereignty that requires reconciliation with the pre-existence of Indigenous societies and not the other way around” (<span>2014</span>, p. 11). Interestingly for our purposes, in asking this question we may explore ways to im-perfect settler sovereignty and thus undermine claims to mastery and possession.</p><p>In seeking to im-perfect sovereignty, I center Indigenous thoughts and practices that open relational alternatives to the Modern/Colonial mode of subjectification and of being in the world. This task is consistent with the calls to “turn toward evocations of subjectivities no longer wed to an uncritical politics of worldly mastery” (Singh, <span>2018</span>, p. 19)<sup>4</sup> as a way to decolonize the Anthropocene. I focus specifically on the idea that Indigenous peoples and settlers can engage in reciprocal relationships of hospitality that center on Indigenous stewardship of the land. This means that settlers must learn to be guests on the land and to Indigenous peoples.</p><p>Veracini explains that undoing settler colonialism requires undermining the claim of settlers to sovereignty. One way to do this is for settlers to “be compelled to reconsider themselves guests” (Veracini, <span>2015</span>, pp. 106-107). Yet, such an option risks not being properly transformative and decolonial if it is understood as replacing one sovereign claim—that of the settlers—by another—that of the Indigenous groups.<sup>5</sup> This issue can be avoided when we consider being a guest as referring, not to being authorized to enter the sovereign domain of a master-host, but to being in a distinctive relationship of reciprocal responsibilities and privileges, both on the part of the host and the guest, in which the host has a privileged relationship to place.</p><p>To make sense of this, we can turn to Ruth Kolezsar-Green's (<span>2019</span>) account of what it means to be a host, a guest, and a settler, which is informed by “teachings [that] originate from and span the land, from the east to the west coasts” and by her discussions with “Elders and Traditional Teachers from six different Nations” (<span>2019</span>, p. 166). Kolezsar-Green articulates the responsibilities of the host and of the guest, thus allowing one to understand what it means, according to Indigenous teachings and protocols regarding hospitality, for non-Indigenous peoples to behave in ways consistent with being on Indigenous lands and with the preexistence of Indigenous nations as nations. This makes it possible to envision ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can relate that do not sustain and perpetuate the settler order and thus Modernity/Coloniality.</p><p>Kolezsar-Green explains that a settler is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands but who does not commit to “unsettle their privilege” (<span>2019</span>, p. 174) and to take the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands. Settlers assert their rights in ways that make no space for reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations and that deny Indigenous political differences and distinct relationships to the land. In other words, they assume their perfected sovereignty over the land and over Indigenous peoples.</p><p>In contrast, a guest is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands and seeks to take responsibility for that fact.<sup>6</sup> A guest is in relationship with Indigenous peoples in ways that sustain Indigenous political differences and lifeways. It is also someone who recognizes and respects the distinct and special relationship of Indigenous peoples to their land. Put differently, a guest integrates an existing relationship to the land, it is not someone who disrupts, displaces, or disavows that relationship: This is why it can be said that a guest is “in relationship to the Land in a way that supports stewardship and not ownership” (Koleszar-Green, <span>2019</span>, p. 175). A guest is then both a guest <i>to</i> Indigenous peoples and <i>on</i> the land: Being a guest to Indigenous peoples is not abstracted from the land where that relationship is enacted and from the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on this land and that inform Indigenous governance. Correlatively, being a host is not equivalent to being master and possessor of the land—it is about having a privileged relationship of responsibilities and respect to and with the land where others are welcomed.</p><p>In general, settlers have been socialized precisely as settlers. This means that conscious efforts to think and behave differently, in everyday practices, must be made to become guests. Such a relationship is not enacted by legislating specific rights and duties, it must be learned through a transformative process whereby reclaimed and revitalized political relationships and responsibilities are enacted and embraced. Importantly, in learning to be a guest, not only is one learning to relate to others in non-sovereign ways, one is also supporting and enabling Indigenous governance and relationships to the land, which is a key strategy to undermine the Modern/Colonial logic and subjectivity that fuel the Anthropocene. This is because whereas Modern/Colonial governance is marked by mastery and possession and by a clear distinction between the natural and the human realms, Indigenous governance is typically marked by relationality and respect for humans <i>and</i> other-than-humans (Watts, <span>2013</span>). As Kiera Ladner explains, politics according to this view of governance is about “learning how to govern or how to live together in the best way possible within an ecological context” (<span>2003</span>, p. 130). Put differently, governance is about conduct that respects and takes responsibility for the diverse life-sustaining relationships in which we stand (Kimmerer, <span>2013</span>; Mohawk, <span>2010</span>, pp. 7-13): Indigenous governance is about stewardship, not ownership.</p><p>Indigenous governance deeply reframes governance away from mastery and possession toward relationships of reciprocity, responsibility, and stewardship that are embedded in concrete ecological contexts—becoming a respectful guest thus allows settlers to embed themselves in a broader system of mutual governance that extends to and is incorporated into the land. Learning to be guests requires a change of perspective about where and how one stands in the world: It is a transformation of dominant Modern/Colonial subjectivities associated with the decolonization and indigenization of political relationships. Such an evocation of decolonial subjectivities challenges mastery and possession and articulates a transformative modality of human agency to move through and out of the Anthropocene.</p><p>As Mignolo (<span>2007</span>, p. 458) writes, “if the colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of the damnés.” In this context, the significance of Indigenous governance and ways of being in the world is that they offer transformative alternatives that do not depend on or reproduce the subjectivities of mastery and possession associated with Modernity/Coloniality. However, for these Indigenous transformative alternatives to truly provide guidance, sovereignty needs to be practically im-perfected and Modern/Colonial subjectivities concretely transformed. This means that the guidance of Indigenous peoples must take the form of concrete political projects that reconstitute and recenter Indigenous jurisdictions and stewardship, so that mastery and possession may be forsaken, and relationships to one another and to the other-than-human world renewed. The Land Back movement is such a concrete political project; it has the potential to transform subjectivities through the transformation of political relationships.</p><p>Over the past few years, Canada has witnessed various mobilizations of Indigenous peoples around questions of land. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, railroads were blocked by various Indigenous groups in support of members of the Wet'suwet'en nation who were present on their land to stop the construction of a pipeline. The Wet'suwet'en land protectors were eventually arrested and removed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Unist'ot'en Camp, <span>2020</span>). More recently, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Québec sought to stop moose hunting to protect their relative/kin the moose, and Mi'kmaw fishers in Nova Scotia acted on their constitutionally protected and inherent right to fish despite the opposition and attacks of non-Indigenous fishers. In Ontario, members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve mobilized around the “1492 Land Back Lane” to stop a housing development on claimed land (Manuel &amp; Klein, <span>2020</span>). Though these various movements take different forms, have different immediate objectives, and are not coherently organized into a single movement, they remain united by the demand to respect or restore Indigenous authority and jurisdictions over land. They can be seen as diverse manifestations of the Land Back movement.</p><p>One of the minimal—albeit often criticized—ways in which we can concretely envision the process of giving the land back to Indigenous peoples is through the implementation of a robust form of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC is associated with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, <span>2007</span>) and is required for any decision or policy that would affect the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples or their land. For reasons of space, I cannot go into the detail of what FPIC requires to be understood as giving Indigenous peoples control of land, but this has been developed in the ‘<i>Land Back Red Paper</i>’ of the Yellowhead Institute (<span>2019</span>). Of concern here is the fact that institutionalizing Indigenous control over land in response to the Land Back movement would not merely be a way to address a demand for rights; it is more broadly a project of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization.</p><p>As Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai write in “Land Back is more than the sum of its part” (<span>2020</span>): “when we say ‘Land Back’ we aren't asking for just the ground, or for a piece of paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth. We want the system that is land to be alive so that it can perpetuate itself, and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That's what we want back: our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected.” The Land Back movement is a demand for Indigenous knowledge and jurisdiction to guide relationships to the land—it should be understood as properly meaning “relations back” (Gouldhawke, <span>2020</span>). It is thus a concrete path that can be followed in the Canadian context to renew relationships with one another and to the land, following Indigenous terms.<sup>7</sup></p><p>Although we should not romanticize Indigenous governance, the relational understanding of the land that informs Indigenous epistemologies, governance, and laws holds the promise that the reciprocal life-sustaining relationships embodied in the land and in which we always stand may be better protected than by Modern/Colonial governance. The scepter of sovereign authority held by Modern/Colonial Man has allowed him to conduct all of us into the Anthropocene. Although a significant portion of humanity may now live in relative abundance and comfort, the world is dying. Giving the land back may not be sufficient to address our ecological predicament, but it would be a way, for settlers and Modern/Colonial Man, of casting away their hubristic claim to mastery and possession of nature and of becoming, as Robin Kimmerer (<span>2013</span>, p. 112) puts it, “member[s] of the democracy of species.”</p><p>Giving the land back is not a utopian fantasy—as shown by the Yellowhead Institute's proposal—and although it may be highly discomforting for settlers to countenance, decolonization and learning to be guests are expectedly unsettling. Although this project is distinctive of settler colonial contexts like Canada and the United States, it is a significant refusal of widely shared Modern/Colonial political practices and associated subjectivities seen as bankrupt. The alternative political practices and subjectivities this refusal generates<sup>8</sup> would be disruptive of the current globalized economy and would beckon all to learn to act otherwise, wherever they are in the world: It calls Indigenous peoples to support the resurgence and revitalization of Indigenous lifeways, settlers on Indigenous lands to learn to be guests, and individuals embedded in the Modern/Colonial matrix of power to find concrete ways in which relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their specific contexts. Land Back thus offers a clear and concrete path for settlers and for Modern/Colonial Man to learn to be guests, to acknowledge their land-based responsibility to act in earthbound ways, and for all of us to try to mend the world for those who will follow.</p><p>This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":51578,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.2000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-06-10\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12679\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12679\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12679","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

摘要

在北美的任何地方,都是在原住民的土地上。一些土著民族可能已经灭绝或迁移到其他地方,他们的当代存在可能不太明显,但这仍然是土著土地。然而,非土著个人和机构很少考虑到居住在土著土地上的责任(参见Asch, 2014)。在很大程度上,这是因为定居者认为他们控制的国家拥有合法的主权权力。这一主张不仅阻碍了与土著人民的合法关系,还揭示了当代定居者社会与他们的地球性的脱节(Asch等人,2018;Borrows, 2018),因为它延伸到人民和土地。我建议考虑如何从加拿大和美国等一些移民国家的地方出发,揭示定居者对主权、掌握和占有的要求与现代性/殖民性之间的密切联系,这对于理解人类世和设想可能有助于补救它的其他行动方式具有重要意义。因此,我关于人类世和现代性/殖民化的主张是前瞻性的;他们并不假装对两者中的任何一个提供完整和普遍的描述,而是希望诊断出两者的独特特征,正如从现代性的背后所经历和揭示的那样。借用布莱恩·伯克哈特(Brian Burkhart)的表述(2019年)和他们对人类的相关概念,我认为人类世或人类时代是当代定居者社会认为自己游离于土地之外的一种症状。在这种背景下,人并不是指整个人类,而是指现代性/殖民性的西方白人顺性别异族父权制代理人(Mignolo, 2007, 2011;Yusoff, 2018),他被一种掌握和占有的意志所驱使(Schulz, 2017;辛格,2018)。这个现代/殖民时代的人将自己呈现为普遍的主体,从而抹去和取消了作为人类的其他方式(Singh, 2018, Chapter Introduction)。我参与了第一民族和印第安人(以下简称土著)的政治思想和运动,以阐明非地球政治实践和人类世的相关主体性的另一种选择。我使用土著作为一个集体的缩写,但我的重点是独特的政治经历,斗争,和一些土著人民的传统,他们现在被加拿大和美国声称拥有主权,以及他们对占主导地位的现代/殖民生活方式的激进选择,其意义远远超出了他们各自的背景。虽然我呼吁区分土著思想和西方思想,但这并不是要本质化或否认两者的复杂性,而是要参考欧洲中心主义对土著生活方式多样性的抹除和贫困的动态影响。在我的观点中,土著思想提供了一条道路,这条道路已经陷入贫困,但可以重建(米尼奥洛&Walsh, 2018),更新彼此之间的关系和责任,以及对其他创造物的责任,并偏离我们物种目前所遵循的生态破坏之路,这已经破坏了地球。我首先解释人类世如何与现代/殖民人类联系起来。然后,我认为,像加拿大这样的移民国家所宣称的完美主权,表达了——并巩固了——人类对主宰和占有世界的自命。我考虑土著人民如何质疑定居者主权的合法性和有效性,以及相反,一些人如何阐明主人和客人之间管理和款待的其他政治关系。这些政治选择可以使政治关系非殖民化和本土化,办法是不断完善定居者的主权,超越掌握和占有,有利于产生于具体生态环境和在具体生态环境内的互惠关系和责任。我认为土地归还运动是一个超越现代性/殖民性的实践项目,通过政治实践和主体性的转变,这有助于人与人之间以及与土地之间的互惠关系的更新。因此,本文对人类世进行了本土化的理论分析,并提出了一条具体的途径来更新与土地的关系,以满足土著人民夺回土地的要求和动员。虽然这篇文章与启蒙辩证法在理性和自然掌握方面的基本论点是一致的,但所采用的方法是不同的。例如,霍克海默和阿多诺通过《奥德赛》揭示了西方传统中启蒙运动与国家社会主义的深刻纠缠,从而阐明了现在(霍克海默和阿多诺)。阿多诺,2002,第218页)。 就我而言,我将土著政治传统视为知识和见解的关键和变革来源,这些知识和见解已被现代性/殖民主义沉默和否认。我把这种方法称为破坏性保守主义,因为它挑战了占主导地位的知识形式和术语,同时复兴和重新进入传统的生活方式。它试图以自己的声音参与土著思想和实践(Allard-Tremblay, 2019),不是为了维护传统,而是以可能支持土著自决、自由与所有人和谐的方式,对目前占主导地位的实践的分离替代方案进行批判性反思。虽然它认为土著传统拥有解决当代问题所需的智力资源,而不必得到西方的帮助或沦为西方的声音,但它并不排除与其他(非殖民化)观点的接触和合作。大约20年前,人类世的概念首次在“地球和环境科学”中获得了基础(Randazzo &Richter, 2021,第2页),但今天关于这个主题的文献已经多样化和增加了多重。这种成果使得熟悉文献的学者,如史蒂夫·门茨(Steve Mentz)认识到,“读者和学者可能会对这种多样性的话语持某种困惑或困惑的态度”(2019年,第1页),特别是如果他们期望对人类世有一个统一的描述。作为回应,Mentz (2019, pp. 1-13)建议人类世应该多元化。因此,我提供了一个关于人类世的解释和解释,不应该被认为是单一的和最终的,特别是考虑到对人类世在否定土著生活方式中所起作用的概念的挑战(Taylor, 2021)。话虽如此,人类世仍然与我们物种所面临的深刻变化的生态环境有关,这些环境与人类行为有关,并引发了共同的(尽管有区别的)政治责任,即使这些环境具有不同的分布原因和后果(夏普,2020)。因此,我承认人类正走向生态毁灭的道路,我认识到有必要个别地,特别是集体地采取行动,防止生态系统的崩溃。然而,我也认识到有必要将人类社会视为嵌入更广泛的自然背景(Henderson, 2000;拉,2003)。这种自然嵌入性告诉我们人类能动性应该如何概念化;具体来说,人类社会与其他受造物之间的关系需要承担责任(Asch等人,2018;Sioui, 1992, p. 9)。在这个意义上,我采用了关于人类世的“非连续性描述”观点的元素,认为它是“与全新世的彻底决裂”,具有“潜在的致命”后果,需要人类采取补救行动(Randazzo &Richter, 2021,第4-5页)。然而,我也采用了“连续本体论”观点的元素,根据这种观点,人类世提供了“一个理论机会,可以采用更广泛、更复杂的理解,来理解构成人类生活及其环境的塑造力量,这种力量必然交织在一起,并不主要存在于人类理性中”(兰达佐& &;Richter, 2021,第5-6页)。然而,值得注意的是,我拒绝与最后一种观点相关的立场,根据这种观点,认识到我们在自然环境中的嵌入性会削弱人类代理的重要性,人类世的意义不是“推迟灾难,而是忍受灾难,并在我们这样做的时候建立解决不公正问题的结构”(Mentz, 2019,第10页)。相反,与Elisa Randazzo和Hannah Richter讨论的土著观点相似,我仍然“毫无疑问地坚持认为,有指导的人类代理是可能的”(2021年,第11页)。事实上,虽然土著的世界观往往认识到生态系统的不稳定平衡,但他们也主张采取负责任的行动来维持这种平衡的重要性,正是通过思考人类与自然环境的关系;正如詹姆斯·塔利所报道的那样,海达人“有一个咒语来提醒自己所有生命系统固有的临界点特征。他们说,‘世界像刀刃一样锋利’”(2018年,第100页)。因此,我们需要采取负责任的行动,避免掉下刀尖,而不仅仅是学会忍受掉下的生活。此外,尽管我承认人类正走在生态毁灭的道路上,但我认识到,产生人类世的实践和生活方式的责任并不是普遍共有的(舒尔茨,2017年,第49页)。 黑人和土著人民受到资本主义和殖民主义奴役、异化、剥夺和剥削过程的严重压迫和负面影响,这些过程推动了西方列强在人类世的先锋地位的增长(Whyte, 2017,第159页;Yusoff, 2018)。正如尤索夫(2018)所写的那样:“人类世无法从它形成的库存中抹去自己的灰尘:从流血的橡胶的割伤的手,以肉为重出售的奴隶儿童,糖的锋利刀片,所有地理上挥之不去的错位,通过散居的世代掸去灰尘。”语法的变化并不能把原始的东西拒之门外。”因此,全人类都可能受到人类世的威胁,但这种威胁及其责任并不平等。为了正确地理解人类世,我们需要看看它是如何通过一种特定的、殖民的、相互联系以及与世界联系的模式产生的。正如尤索夫所说:“‘人类时代’是自然、非西方世界、生态和地球主体化的主导模式”(尤索夫,2018)。这种主体化模式否认了世俗性,因为它力求掌握和占有他人和自然。从殖民主义的角度来看,人类世是现代性的完善:它是现代/殖民人的作品。在说人类世是现代/殖民人的工作时,我肯定,跟随卡斯滕·舒尔茨,“资本主义世界生态系统”在产生当前生态困境中的作用是明确的(摩尔,2015;Parenti,Moore, 2016),需要被理解为“与殖民主义有着千丝万缕的联系,殖民主义被定义为一种种族化的、以男性为中心的、以阶级为基础的认识和存在的等级制度,它仍然将非西方文化和历史边缘化”(Schulz, 2017,第47页)。造成当前生态危机的不仅仅是经济体系,而是更广泛的现代/殖民权力矩阵,它是其中不可分割的一部分。正如Walter Mignolo所解释的那样,现代性有其隐藏的“黑暗的一面,即‘殖民性’”,但它仍然是现代性的“组成部分”(2011,pp. 2 - 3)殖民主义是指现代性的核心理念,如进步、文明、理性等,产生与之相关的理念,如传统主义、野蛮、迷信等,使被殖民、被压迫、被统治、被排斥群体的思想、实践和知识丧失资格,并为其从属和支配地位辩护。这源于欧洲人对“权力的殖民矩阵”的创造和控制,它指的是用普遍的主张来阐明构成和构建“经济”、“权威”、“性别和性”以及“知识和主体性”的术语的能力(Mignolo, 2007,第478页;值得注意的是,欧洲人对这四个领域的控制是通过“种族和父权制的知识基础”而合法化的(Mignolo, 2007, p. 478;2011年,第8页),将非欧洲人、非白人和非男性排除在完全享有权利和权力的人类之外。重要的是,米尼奥洛解释说,通过权力的殖民矩阵所主张的控制也依赖于一种基本的“与自然的分离”,这种分离将人/人与其他人类区分开来(米尼奥洛&Walsh, 2018,第160页)。正是这种更广泛的权力矩阵及其在“种族主义”、“性别歧视”、“人道主义”和“欧洲中心主义”方面的潜在构成分离(Mignolo &Walsh, 2018,第163页),将主体构成为现代性的代理人;因此,我认为人类世的男人是西方现代性的白人顺式性别异族父权制代理人。总而言之,在暗示现代性/殖民性及其相关的权力矩阵和主体化模式时,我指出“思想、言论和行动的原则为人类对地球的无限控制提供了看似‘自然’的基础”(舒尔茨,2017年,第58页)。现代/殖民时期的主体性是由掌握和占有的意志驱动的(Singh, 2018,第13页)。在现代性的黎明,雷诺·笛卡尔清楚地表达了现代/殖民人的这种驱动力,对他来说,理性的调查方法有可能“使我们成为自然的主人和拥有者”(2000年,第99页,我的翻译)。在寻求和声称自己能够主宰他人和人类之外的事物的过程中,人类试图根据自己的意愿和判断来定义、控制、管理和命令他人。在寻求和声称拥有它们的过程中,人类通过否认它们的能动性将它们物化;抽象它们的方法是忽略它们所处的具体关系,而代之以一种所有权关系,在这种关系中,人是决定的参照点;并通过否认对那些他声称拥有的人的相互责任和责任,将自己与自然和他人分离开来。 掌握和占有允许人类把自然变成一个对象,一个可以拥有的好东西,一个可以随意使用、提取、开发和破坏的资源(Mentz, 2019, p. 16;Mignolo, 2011,第11-13页;摩尔,2015);将他人种族化和殖民化,使其成为被奴役的生活工具和被暴力异化的劳动力来源(Wolfe, 2016);土著人民因流离失所和被消灭而被剥夺财产,以获得他们的土地(Nichols, 2020;乌尔夫,2006)。作为现代性/殖民性主体化模式的核心,掌握和占有通过指导人类与自然和其他人的关系,从而推动了资本主义的榨取、种族和殖民特征的巩固,从而推动了殖民权力的矩阵。在一个由现代性/殖民性构建的世界里,掌握和占有有不同的表现形式。正如Julietta Singh(2018,第12页)所解释的那样,人类对自然的统治就是这样一种表达,而主权可以被解释为在政治和国家层面上表达同样的逻辑。换句话说,统治和主权,掌握和占有,以及现代性/殖民性都是紧密相连的,它们是人类世结构的一部分。为了揭开人类世的面纱,我转向主权的概念来探索另一种、本土的、非主权的存在方式,这种方式破坏了控制和占有,从而可能超越现代性/殖民性。在与现代国家相关的主权实践中,人类对人类和非人类世界的掌控和占有的自命不凡被赋予了具体的形式。正如克里斯托弗·莫里斯(Christopher Morris, 2002,第178页)所解释的那样:“主权是在直接统治体系的领土范围内最高的、最终的、最高的政治和法律权威和权力。”在大多数变体中,主权以权力的等级观为标志,即某些实体被赋予权力,为其权力下的所有人做出具有约束力的最终决定。当这种力量被视为绝对的,它就不受任何限制或任何应用领域的约束。在理想化的形式中,君主实际上是他的领域的主人和拥有者,包括人类和非人类。然而,在实践中,对主权的要求很少是绝对的或没有争议的,通过这些挑战,现代/殖民人的霸权可能会面临挑战。然而,这种挑战有可能重现他们所反对的东西,就像暴力和控制被用来反对暴力和控制一样(Alfred, 2005, p. 23;Singh, 2018, pp. 2,24;塔利,2014)。对主权的变革性和非殖民化挑战需要制定一种独特的共同存在和在世界上存在的模式,而不仅仅是用主权的反诉来挑战主权。为了探索这种寻求超越现代性/殖民性的非殖民化现实和实践,并使我们能够感知世界上的其他方式,我开始描绘如何通过参与移民殖民背景下国家对完美主权的要求来体现自己,重点是加拿大,然后再参与土著替代方案。正如Patrick Wolfe(2006)和Lorenzo Veracini(2010、2015)所解释的那样,定居者殖民主义应该被理解为一种围绕定居者获取土著人民已经占领的土地这一目标而组织起来的结构。这就产生了一种消除的逻辑,即各种政策的效果是清除土著居民的土地,从而使移民归化。正如Elizabeth Strakosch和Alissa Macoun(2012,第42页)所解释的那样,定居者殖民主义的期望终点是“殖民完成的时刻”,这可能永远不会实现。到那时,移民社会将完全取代他们土地上的土著社会,并使这种替代社会归化。”从这个意义上说,定居者殖民主义的意识形态结构本质上要求否认土著居民的存在,从而掩盖了对定居者在这些土地上和对这些土地的合法存在和权威的挑战。因此,一个人忽视在土著土地上的责任,甚至忽视在土著土地上的事实,这完全符合定居者殖民主义。从更具体的政治和法律角度来看,定居者归化的过程需要定居者权威的巩固。定居者不能满足于他们的存在被授权,就好像他们是外国人、移民或客人一样(Veracini, 2015),因为这使得他们的权威依赖于他人的善意。即使在大多数移民殖民背景下,定居者的权威从一开始就不是,也没有声称是有效的主权,情况也是如此。 它将自己插入并融入现有的法律和政治秩序,有时会借鉴当地的做法(Hsueh, 2010),并依赖于已经存在的土著人民的协议,他们通过条约授权新来者的存在(Asch, 2014)。然而,正如丽莎·福特(Lisa Ford)所解释的那样,定居者逐渐主张并行使最高和最终的权力,并将其权力的领土范围扩展到他们所主张的整个土地。通过这一过程,定居者的主权得到了完善,特别是“通过从属于土著的管辖权”(Ford, 2010,第183页),这样,定居者的有效权威就能与他们的规范性主张相匹配。对完美的定居者主权的需要和愿望使我们能够理解这样一个事实:尽管加拿大承认固有的土著权利和条约权利——尽管这些权利在某种程度上由于《宪法法案》第35条的承认而对王室具有约束力——但定居者在这里的权利和相关的王室主权从未受到质疑。的确,加拿大最高法院明确指出:“值得回顾的是,虽然英国对土著居民的政策是以尊重他们占有传统土地的权利为基础的,但……从一开始就没有任何疑问,这些土地的主权和立法权,以及根本的所有权,都属于王室”(R. v. Sparrow, 1990)。因此,土著居民的权利和头衔并不等同于承认主权;它们更像是对王室不变的、不容置疑的基本头衔的负担。移民国家不能真正支持土著主权和土地所有权,正是因为它破坏和否认了自己完善的主权。正如Andrew Schaap(2009)所说,在移民殖民背景下,“原住民主权”似乎是一个“荒谬的命题”。完美主权的概念也有助于理解和解政治的有限范围,正如加拿大最高法院再次阐明的那样。1997年,在Delgamuukw案的判决中,最高法院申明,“第35条第1款(即加拿大宪法中确认土著居民权利的条款)的基本目的是‘使土著社会先前的存在与王室主权达成和解’。”“让我们面对现实吧,我们都要留下来”(Delgamuukw诉不列颠哥伦比亚省,1997年)。这种提法并不质疑国王的完美主权,因为土著人民必须接受定居者的存在和主权的事实。然而,如果原住民先到这里,那么定居者——不是作为个人,而是作为一个具有独特社会、政治、法律和经济制度的社会——如何获得在原住民土地上的权利,更重要的是,如何对这些土地和原住民提出主权要求?在提出这个问题时,我的观点不是调查可能的答案,仅仅因为没有一个是令人信服和结论性的,特别是对土著人民而言。事实上,一个完美的定居者主权仍然是一个有争议的问题(Asch, 2014;元音,2016,第26章)。即使是割让原则,根据该原则,一些土著民族将通过编号的条约同意“……割让,释放,投降和屈服于加拿大自治领政府……永远,他们对土地的所有权利,头衔和特权……”(Vowel, 2016, p. 254),土著人民也以口头传统为基础否认了这一点。他们认为,这些条约不是土地转让合同,而是契约,通过契约,定居者和土著人民之间将建立持久的关系,以分享土地(Asch, 2014)。这是Michael Asch详细探讨的一个问题,我同意他的观点,他写道:“土著人民的政治权利在王权被主张的时候已经存在,因此,王权如何获得主权的问题需要与土著社会的预先存在和解,而不是相反”(2014,第11页)。就我们的目的而言,有趣的是,在提出这个问题时,我们可能会探索如何完善定居者的主权,从而削弱对控制和占有的要求。在寻求不完美的主权时,我以土著思想和实践为中心,这些思想和实践为现代/殖民的主体化和在世界上的存在模式开辟了关系选择。这项任务与“转向不再与世俗统治的不加批判的政治相结合的主体性唤起”(Singh, 2018,第19页)作为人类世非殖民化的一种方式的呼吁是一致的。我特别关注的是这样一个想法,即土著人民和定居者可以建立以土著对土地管理为中心的互惠好客关系。 这意味着定居者必须学会成为这片土地和土著人民的客人。Veracini解释说,要消除定居者的殖民主义,就需要削弱定居者对主权的主张。一种方法是让定居者“被迫重新考虑自己是客人”(Veracini, 2015, pp. 106-107)。然而,如果这种选择被理解为用土著群体的主权要求取代定居者的主权要求,那么这种选择就有可能不是适当的变革和非殖民化这个问题可以避免,当我们认为作为客人,指的不是被授权进入主人-主人的主权领域,而是处于一种独特的互惠责任和特权关系中,无论是主人还是客人,主人都有特权关系。为了理解这一点,我们可以求助于露丝·科列兹萨-格林(2019)对主人、客人和定居者意味着什么的描述,其中包括“从东海岸到西海岸,源自并跨越这片土地的教义”,以及她与“来自六个不同国家的长老和传统教师”的讨论(2019年,第166页)。Kolezsar-Green明确了主人和客人的责任,从而使人们能够理解,根据土著关于好客的教义和协议,非土著人民的行为方式与土著土地上的生活方式和土著民族作为民族的先民的存在相一致意味着什么。这使得我们有可能设想土著和非土著人民可以相互联系的方式,而不是维持和延续定居者秩序,从而延续现代性/殖民性。Kolezsar-Green解释说,定居者是承认他们在土著土地上,但不承诺“动摇他们的特权”(2019年,第174页),并承担在土著土地上所带来的责任的人。定居者主张其权利的方式不允许与土著民族建立互惠关系,否认土著民族的政治差异和与土地的独特关系。换句话说,他们对土地和土著人民拥有完全的主权。相比之下,客人是承认自己生活在土著土地上,并试图为此负责的人客人与土著人民的关系维持着土著人民的政治差异和生活方式。它也是承认和尊重土著人民与其土地之间独特和特殊关系的人。换句话说,客人整合了与土地的现有关系,而不是破坏、取代或否认这种关系的人:这就是为什么可以说客人“以支持管理而不是所有权的方式与土地建立关系”(Koleszar-Green, 2019, p. 175)。客人既是土著人民的客人,也是土地上的客人:作为土著人民的客人,并没有从建立这种关系的土地上抽象化,也没有从生活在这片土地上的责任中抽象化,这也为土著治理提供了信息。相对而言,做主人并不等于做土地的主人和拥有者——它是指在欢迎他人的地方,对土地有一种特殊的责任和尊重关系。总的来说,定居者被社会化了。这意味着,在日常实践中,必须有意识地努力以不同的方式思考和行为,才能成为客人。这种关系不是通过立法规定具体的权利和义务来建立的,它必须通过一个变革过程来学习,在这个过程中,重新确立和振兴的政治关系和责任得以建立和接受。重要的是,在学习成为客人的过程中,一个人不仅学习以非主权的方式与他人相处,而且还支持和促进土著治理以及与土地的关系,这是破坏现代/殖民逻辑和主观性的关键策略,这些逻辑和主观性为人类世提供了动力。这是因为现代/殖民统治的特点是掌握和占有,并明确区分自然领域和人类领域,而土著统治的特点是关系和对人类和非人类的尊重(Watts, 2013)。正如基拉·拉德纳(Kiera Ladner)所解释的那样,根据这种治理观,政治是关于“学习如何在生态环境中以最好的方式治理或如何共同生活”(2003年,第130页)。换句话说,治理是一种尊重并对我们所处的各种维持生命的关系负责的行为(基默尔,2013;莫霍克,2010,第7-13页):土著治理是关于管理,而不是所有权。 土著治理深刻地将治理从掌握和占有转变为嵌入具体生态环境中的互惠、责任和管理关系——成为一个受人尊敬的客人,从而使定居者能够将自己嵌入到一个更广泛的相互治理体系中,这个体系延伸到并融入到土地中。学习成为客人需要改变对自己在世界上的位置和地位的看法:这是与政治关系的非殖民化和本土化相关的占主导地位的现代/殖民主体性的转变。这种对非殖民化主体性的唤起挑战了掌握和占有,并阐明了人类能动性的变革模式,以穿越和走出人类世。正如Mignolo (2007, p. 458)所写,“如果殖民者需要去殖民化,如果没有damn<s:1>的思想指导,殖民者可能不是去殖民化的合适代理人。”在这种背景下,土著治理和在世界上存在的方式的意义在于,它们提供了变革的选择,不依赖或再现与现代性/殖民性相关的主体性的掌握和占有。然而,要使这些土著的变革替代方案真正提供指导,主权需要在实践中得到不完善,现代/殖民主体性需要具体转化。这意味着对土著人民的指导必须采取具体的政治项目的形式,以重建和重新确定土著的管辖和管理,以便放弃掌握和占有,并更新彼此之间以及与非人类世界之间的关系。土地归还运动就是这样一个具体的政治项目;它有可能通过政治关系的转变来改变主体性。在过去几年中,加拿大目睹了土著人民围绕土地问题进行的各种动员。就在COVID-19大流行开始之前,各种土著团体为了支持居住在他们土地上的Wet'suwet'en民族成员,阻止管道的建设,封锁了铁路。Wet'suwet'en土地保护者最终被加拿大皇家骑警逮捕并驱逐(Unist'ot'en Camp, 2020)。最近,魁姆塞克巴里埃尔湖的阿尔冈昆人试图停止狩猎驼鹿,以保护他们的驼鹿亲戚;新斯科舍省的米克莫渔民不顾非土著渔民的反对和攻击,行使宪法保护和固有的捕鱼权利。在安大略省,大河保护区的六个民族的成员在“1492土地后巷”周围动员起来,阻止在声称的土地上进行住房开发。克莱恩,2020)。虽然这些不同的运动采取不同的形式,有不同的直接目标,并没有连贯地组织成一个单一的运动,但它们仍然团结一致,要求尊重或恢复土著对土地的权力和管辖权。它们可以被看作是土地归还运动的不同表现形式。我们可以具体设想将土地还给土著人民的过程,其中一个最小的方法——尽管经常受到批评——是通过实施一种强有力的自由、事先和知情同意(FPIC)形式。FPIC与联合国原住民权利宣言(联合国,2007年)有关,任何影响原住民或其土地权益的决定或政策都需要FPIC。由于篇幅有限,我无法详细说明FPIC需要被理解为给予土著人民土地控制权,但这已经在黄头研究所(2019年)的“土地回归红文件”中得到了发展。这里值得关注的事实是,将土著对土地的控制制度化,作为对土地归还运动的回应,不仅是解决权利要求的一种方式;更广泛地说,这是一个土著复兴和振兴的项目。正如尼基塔·朗曼、艾米丽·里德尔、亚历克斯·威尔逊和萨马·德赛在《土地回归不仅仅是部分的总和》(2020年)中所写的那样:“当我们说‘土地回归’时,我们要求的不仅仅是土地,也不仅仅是一张让我们撕裂和污染地球的纸。我们希望土地这个系统是有生命的,这样它就能使自己永存,使我们作为它自身的延伸而永存。这就是我们想要的:我们在保持土地活力和精神联系方面的地位。”土地归还运动是对土著知识和管辖权的需求,以指导与土地的关系-它应该被理解为正确的含义“归还关系”(Gouldhawke, 2020)。因此,这是一条在加拿大范围内可以遵循的具体道路,以便按照土著条件恢复彼此之间和与土地之间的关系。 7 .虽然我们不应将原住民治理浪漫化,但原住民认识论、治理和法律中对土地的关系理解带来了希望,即我们一直站在土地上的互惠的维持生命的关系,可能比现代/殖民治理更好地得到保护。现代/殖民地人持有的主权权力权杖允许他引导我们所有人进入人类世。虽然很大一部分人现在可能生活得相对富足和舒适,但世界正在消亡。归还土地可能不足以解决我们的生态困境,但对于定居者和现代/殖民地人来说,这将是一种方式,可以抛弃他们对掌握和拥有自然的傲慢主张,并成为罗宾·基默尔(2013,p. 112)所说的“物种民主的成员”。归还土地并不是一个乌托邦式的幻想——正如黄头研究所的提议所显示的那样——尽管这可能会让定居者感到非常不安,但非殖民化和学会成为客人却令人不安。虽然这个项目与加拿大和美国这样的移民殖民背景不同,但它是对广泛共享的现代/殖民政治实践和相关主体性的重要拒绝,这些政治实践和主体性被视为破产。这种拒绝所产生的另一种政治实践和主观性将破坏当前的全球化经济,并将召唤所有人,无论他们身在何处,都要学会采取不同的行动。它呼吁土著人民支持土著生活方式的复兴和振兴,呼吁土著土地上的定居者学会成为客人,呼吁嵌入现代/殖民权力矩阵的个人找到具体的方式,在各自的具体背景下更新彼此之间以及与他人之间的关系。因此,Land Back为定居者和现代/殖民地人提供了一条清晰而具体的道路,让他们学会成为客人,承认他们以土地为基础的责任,以世俗的方式行事,并让我们所有人都努力为那些追随他们的人修复世界。本文借鉴了社会科学与人文研究理事会支持的研究。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
For Those Who Will Follow; Earth Marred and Renewing Relationships

Wherever one is in North America, one is on Indigenous lands. Some Indigenous peoples may have been exterminated or removed to other locations, and their contemporary presence may not be highly visible, yet this remains Indigenous land. Nevertheless, rarely do non-Indigenous individuals and institutions consider the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands (cf. Asch, 2014). To a large extent, this is because settlers regard the state they control as holding a legitimate claim to sovereign authority. Not only is this a claim that bars rightful relationships with Indigenous peoples, it also discloses contemporary settler societies’ disconnection from their Earthboundedness (Asch et al., 2018; Borrows, 2018) because it extends both over peoples and lands.

I propose to consider how, from the locality of some settler states such as Canada and the United States, an intimate connection between the settlers’ claim to sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality, is disclosed, which is significant for understanding the Anthropocene and for envisioning ways of acting otherwise that may help to remedy it. My claims regarding the Anthropocene and Modernity/Coloniality are thus perspectival; they do not pretend to offer complete and universal accounts of either, but rather hope to diagnose distinctive features of both, as experienced and disclosed from the underside of Modernity.

I see the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man, as a symptom of contemporary settler societies’ view of themselves as floating free from the land, to use Brian Burkhart's formulation (2019) and of their associated idea of Man. Man, in this context, does not refer to humanity as a whole, but rather to the Western white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Modernity/Coloniality (Mignolo, 2007, 2011; Yusoff, 2018) who is driven by a will to mastery and possession (Schulz, 2017; Singh, 2018). This Modern/Colonial Man presents himself as the universal subject, and thereby erases and disqualifies alternative ways of being human (Singh, 2018, Chapter Introduction).

I engage with First Nation and Native American—hereafter Indigenous—political thought and movements to articulate an alternative to the un-earthbound political practices and associated subjectivity of the Man of the Anthropocene. I use Indigenous as a collective shorthand, but my focus is on the distinct political experiences, struggles, and traditions of some of the Indigenous peoples of the lands now claimed by Canada and the United States and the radical alternatives they disclose to dominant Modern/Colonial lifeways, the significance of which extends far beyond their respective contexts. Although I appeal to the distinction between Indigenous and Western thoughts, this is not to essentialize or deny the complexities of either, but in reference to the dynamics of erasure and destitution to which Indigenous lifeways in their diversity have been subjected to through Eurocentrism. In my argument, Indigenous thoughts offer a path, that has been destituted but which can be reconstituted (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), to renew relationships and responsibilities to one another and to the rest of creation and to deviate from the path of ecological ruin our species currently follows, and which has already marred the Earth.1

I begin by explaining how the Anthropocene can be associated with Modern/Colonial Man. I then argue that the claimed perfected sovereignty of settler states, such as Canada, expresses—and buttresses—Man's pretension to mastery and possession of the world. I consider how Indigenous peoples question the legitimacy and validity of settler sovereignty and how, in contrast, some articulate alternative political relationships of stewardship and of hospitality between hosts and guests. These political alternatives can decolonize and indigenize political relationships by im-perfecting settler sovereignty and by transcending mastery and possession in favor of reciprocal relationships and responsibilities, as they arise from and within concrete ecological contexts. I point to the Land Back movement as a practical project to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, through the transformation of political practices and subjectivities, which contributes to the renewal of reciprocal relationships to one another and with the land. As such, this article articulates a localized theoretical analysis of the Anthropocene, and a concrete path2 to renew relationships with the land, in light and in the service of the demand and mobilization of Indigenous peoples to get their land back.

Although this article shares basic theses about reason and the mastery of nature with the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the method adopted is distinct. Horkheimer and Adorno engage with the Odyssey, for instance, to elucidate the present by unearthing the deep entanglement of the Enlightenment with National Socialism in the Western tradition (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 218). For my part, I engage with Indigenous political traditions as critical and transformative sources of knowledge and insights that have been silenced and disavowed by Modernity/Coloniality. I refer to this approach as disruptive conservatism in that it challenges the dominating forms and terms of knowledge while revitalizing and recentering traditional lifeways. It seeks to engage with Indigenous thoughts and practices in their own voices (Allard-Tremblay, 2019), not to preserve traditions but to ground critical reflections about disjunctive alternatives to currently dominating practices, in ways that may support Indigenous self-determination and freedom and harmony for all. Although it regards Indigenous traditions as having the required intellectual resources to negotiate contemporary problems, without having to be assisted by or reduced to Western voices, it does not preclude engagements and collaborations with other (decolonial) perspectives.

The concept of the Anthropocene first gained grounds in “geo- and environmental sciences” about 20 years ago (Randazzo & Richter, 2021, p. 2), but today the literature on the topic has diversified and increased multifold. This fruitfulness has led scholars familiar with the literature, such as Steve Mentz, to recognize that “readers and scholars may be forgiven for a certain befuddled or baffled attitude” to this multiplicity of discourses (2019, p. 1), especially if they expect a unified account of the Anthropocene. In response, Mentz (2019, pp. 1-13) suggests that the Anthropocene should be pluralized. Accordingly, I provide an account and interpretation of the Anthropocene which should not be taken as univocal and final, especially considering challenges to the concept that point to its role in disavowing Indigenous lifeways (Taylor, 2021). This being said, the Anthropocene remains relevant to refer to deeply changing ecological circumstances faced by our species that are associated with human conduct and that trigger shared, though differentiated, political responsibilities, even if these circumstances have differently distributed causes and consequences (Sharp, 2020).

I thus accept that humanity is on a path to ecological ruin, and I recognize the need to, individually and especially collectively, act in ways to prevent the collapse of ecosystems. Yet, I also recognize the need to think about human societies as embedded in broader natural contexts (Henderson, 2000; Ladner, 2003). This natural embeddedness informs how human agency should be conceptualized; specifically, the relationships in which human societies stand with the rest of Creation entail responsibilities (Asch et al., 2018; Sioui, 1992, p. 9). In that sense, I adopt elements of the “discontinuous-descriptive” perspective about the Anthropocene which sees it as “a radical break with the Holocene” with “potentially fatal” consequences that call for remedial human actions (Randazzo & Richter, 2021, pp. 4-5). Yet, I also adopt elements of the “continuous-ontological” perspective, according to which the Anthropocene offers “a theoretical opportunity to adopt a broader and more complex understanding of the shaping power that constitutes both human life and its environment as necessarily intertwined, and does not primarily reside in human reason” (Randazzo & Richter, 2021, pp. 5-6). Significantly, however, I refuse the positions associated with this last perspective, according to which recognizing our embeddedness in natural contexts diminishes the significance of human agency and that the point of the Anthropocene would not be “about deferring catastrophes but about enduring them, and building structures to address injustice as we do so” (Mentz, 2019, p. 10). Rather, and similar to the Indigenous perspective discussed by Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter, I remain “unapologetically insistent that directed human agency is possible” (2021, p. 11). Indeed, while Indigenous worldviews often recognize the precarious balance of ecosystems, they also assert the importance of acting responsibly to sustain this balance, precisely by thinking about human agency in relation to natural contexts; as James Tully reports, the Haida “have a mantra to remind themselves of the tipping-point feature inherent in all living systems. They say, ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife’” (2018, p. 100). Accordingly, we need to act responsibly to avoid falling off the edge of the knife, not merely to learn to live with the falling off.

Furthermore, although I acknowledge that humanity stands on a path to ecological ruin, I recognize that the responsibility for the practices and lifeways that have produced the Anthropocene are not universally shared (Schulz, 2017, p. 49). Black peoples and Indigenous peoples have been severely oppressed and negatively impacted by the capitalist and colonial processes of enslavement, alienation, dispossession, and extraction that have fueled the growth of Western powers at the vanguard of the Anthropocene (Whyte, 2017, p. 159; Yusoff, 2018). As Yusoff (2018) writes: “The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations. The shift of grammar cannot keep the rawness out.” Accordingly, all of humanity may be threatened by the Anthropocene, but this threat and the responsibility for it are not born equally. To properly comprehend the Anthropocene, we need to see how it has been brought about by a specific, colonial, mode of relating to one another and to the world. As Yusoff puts it: “The ‘Age of Man’ is a dominant and dominating mode of subjectification—of nature, the non-Western world, ecologies, and the planet” (Yusoff, 2018). This mode of subjectification denies Earthboundedness as it strives for mastery and possession of others and of nature. The Anthropocene, as seen from Coloniality, is the consummation of Modernity: It is the work of Modern/Colonial Man.

In saying that the Anthropocene is the work of Modern/Colonial Man, I affirm, following Karsten Schulz, that the “capitalist world-ecological system,” whose role in having produced the current ecological predicament is clear (Moore, 2015; Parenti & Moore, 2016), needs to be understood as “inextricably linked to coloniality defined … as a racialised, androcentric, and class-based hierarchy of knowing and being which still marginalises non-western cultures and histories” (Schulz, 2017, p. 47). It is not merely the economic system that has produced the current ecological crisis, but the broader Modern/Colonial matrix of power of which it is an integral part.

As Walter Mignolo explains, Modernity has a “darker side, ‘coloniality’” which it hides, but which is nevertheless “constitutive of” it (2011, pp. 2−3).3 Coloniality refers to core ideas of Modernity—such as progress, civilization, and reason—that give rise to correlative ideas—such as traditionalism, savagery, and superstition—that disqualify the thoughts, practices and knowledges of colonized, oppressed, dominated, and excluded groups and justify their subordinated and dominated positions. This results from the creation of and control, by Europeans, over the “colonial matrix of power,” which refers to the capacity to enunciate with universal pretensions the terms that constitute and structure “the economy,” “authority,” “gender and sexuality,” and “knowledge and subjectivity” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 478; 2011, p. 8). Significantly, the control of Europeans over these four domains was legitimated through a “racial and patriarchal foundation of knowledge” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 478; 2011, p. 8) that excluded non-Europeans, non-white, and non-men from full right- and power-bearing humanity. Importantly, Mignolo explains that the control claimed through the colonial matrix of power also depends on a fundamental “separation from nature” that sets Man/Human apart from other-than-humans (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 160). It is this broader matrix of power and its underlying constitutive separations in terms of “racism,” “sexism,” “humanism,” and “Eurocentrism” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 163) that constitute subjects as agents of Modernity; hence my claim that the Man of the Anthropocene is the white cis-gendered heteropatriarchal agent of Western Modernity.

In sum, in implicating Modernity/Coloniality and its associated matrix of power and mode of subjectification, I am pointing to “the principles of thought, speech, and action which provide the seemingly ‘natural’ foundations for the idea of unlimited human mastery over the earth” (Schulz, 2017, p. 58).

Modern/Colonial subjectivity is driven by a will to master and possess (Singh, 2018, p. 13). This drive of Modern/Colonial Man was clearly expressed by René Descartes, at the dawn of Modernity, for whom a rational method of inquiry had the potential to “make ourselves like the masters and possessors of nature” (2000, p. 99 my translation). In seeking and claiming to master others and other-than-humans, Man seeks to define, control, manage, and order them according to his wishes and judgments. In seeking and claiming to possess them, Man objectifies them by disavowing their agency; abstracts them by ignoring the concrete relationships in which they stand and replacing these with a relationship of ownership in which he is the determinant point of reference; and separates himself from nature and others by denying mutual responsibilities and accountability to those and that which he claims to possess. Mastery and possession allow Man to turn nature into an object, a good to be possessed, a resource to be used, extracted, exploited, and destroyed at will (Mentz, 2019, p. 16; Mignolo, 2011, pp. 11-13; Moore, 2015); racialized and colonial others into living tools to be enslaved and sources of labor to be violently alienated (Wolfe, 2016); and Indigenous peoples into inconveniences to be dispossessed through displacement and elimination to gain access to their lands (Nichols, 2020; Wolfe, 2006). Being central to the mode of subjectification of Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession fuel the matrix of colonial power by directing Man's relationship to nature and other humans, and thus drive the consolidation of the extractive, racial, and colonial features of capitalism.

In a world built by Modernity/Coloniality, mastery and possession find diverse expressions. As Julietta Singh (2018, p. 12) explains, Man's dominion over nature is one such expression, while sovereignty can be interpreted as an expression of this same logic at the political and state levels. Put differently, dominion and sovereignty, mastery and possession, and Modernity/Coloniality are all closely enmeshed, and they are part of the fabric of the Anthropocene. To unravel the Anthropocene, then, I turn to the idea of sovereignty to explore alternative, Indigenous, non-sovereign ways of being in the world that undermine mastery and possession and that may thus transcend Modernity/Coloniality.

Man's pretension to mastery and possession of both the human and other-than-human world is given concrete form in the practice of sovereignty, associated with the modern state. As Christopher Morris (2002, p. 178) explains: “Sovereignty is the highest, final, and supreme political and legal authority and power within the territorially defined domain of a system of direct rule.” Across most variants, sovereignty is marked by a hierarchical view of authority, where some entity is vested with the power to make a final binding decision for all those under its authority. When this power is seen as absolute, it is not bound by any restriction or to any field of application. In an idealized form, he who is sovereign is practically the master and possessor of his domain and all it contains—humans and other-than-humans.

Yet, in practice, claims to sovereignty are rarely absolute or uncontested and through these challenges the hegemony of Modern/Colonial Man may be confronted. Yet, it is possible for such challenges to reproduce that which they oppose, as is the case when violence and mastery are used to oppose violence and mastery (Alfred, 2005, p. 23; Singh, 2018, pp. 2, 24; Tully, 2014). Transformative and decolonial challenges to sovereignty need to enact a distinct mode of being together and of being in the world, not merely challenge sovereignty with a counterclaim of sovereignty. To explore such decolonial realities and practices that seek to transcend Modernity/Coloniality, and which allow us to perceive ways of being otherwise in the world, I begin to draw out how mastery manifests itself by engaging with the claims to a perfected sovereignty made by states in settler colonial contexts, with a focus on Canada, before engaging with Indigenous alternatives.

As Patrick Wolfe (2006) and Lorenzo Veracini (2010, 2015) explain, settler colonialism should be understood as a structure organized around the settler aim of acquiring land already occupied by Indigenous peoples. This gives rise to a logic of elimination whereby diverse policies have the effect of clearing land from Indigenous presence and thus of naturalizing settler presence. As Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun (2012, p. 42) explain, the wished-for endpoint of settler colonialism, which may never be achieved, is “the moment of colonial completion. That is when the settler society will have fully replaced Indigenous societies on their land, and naturalized this replacement.” In that sense, the ideological structure of settler colonialism essentially requires the disavowal of Indigenous presence and thus masks challenges to the legitimate presence and authority of settlers on and over these lands. It is accordingly fully consistent with settler colonialism for one to ignore the responsibilities that come with being on Indigenous land and even the fact of being on Indigenous lands.

Thinking more specifically in political and legal terms, this process of settler naturalization requires the consolidation of settler authority. Settlers cannot be satisfied with their presence being authorized, as if they were sojourners, migrants, or guests (Veracini, 2015), because this makes their authority dependent on the good will of another. This is the case even if the authority of settlers was not, nor was it claimed to be, effectively sovereign from inception in most settler colonial contexts. It rather inserted and incorporated itself into existing legal and political orders, sometimes drawing on local practices (Hsueh, 2010), and depended on the agreement of already present Indigenous peoples, who authorized the presence of newcomers through treaties (Asch, 2014). Yet, as Lisa Ford explains, settlers progressively claimed and exerted supreme and final authority and extended the territorial reach of their authority to the whole of the lands they claimed. Through this process, settler sovereignty was perfected, notably “by subordinating indigenous jurisdiction” (Ford, 2010, p. 183), such that the effective authority of settlers came to match their normative pretensions.

The need and wish for a perfected settler sovereignty allow making sense of the fact that, although Canada recognizes inherent Aboriginal rights and treaty rights—and although these rights are to some extent binding on the Crown by virtue of their recognition in article 35 of the Constitution Act—the right of settlers to be here and the associated sovereignty of the Crown are never under question. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada made this clear: “It is worth recalling that while British policy towards the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, … there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereignty and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands vested in the Crown” (R. v. Sparrow, 1990). Indigenous rights and title are then not equivalent to a recognition of sovereignty; they are more like burdens on the constant and unquestionable underlying title of the Crown. The settler state cannot truly countenance Indigenous sovereignty and ownership of the land precisely because it undermines and denies its own perfected sovereignty. As Andrew Schaap (2009) puts it, in a settler colonial context, “aboriginal sovereignty” appears to be an “absurd proposition.”

The idea of a perfected sovereignty is also useful to make sense of the limited reach of the politics of reconciliation, as articulated, once again, by the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1997, in the Delgamuukw decision, it affirmed that “a basic purpose of s. 35(1) [that is the article in the constitution of Canada affirming aboriginal rights—was]—‘the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.’ Let us face it, we are all here to stay” (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 1997). Such a formulation does not question the perfected sovereignty of the Crown because it is for Indigenous peoples to come to terms with the facts of settler presence and sovereignty.

Yet, if Indigenous peoples were here first, how did settlers—not as individuals, but as a society with distinct social, political, legal, and economic institutions—acquire the right to be on Indigenous lands and, more importantly, to claim sovereignty over these lands and over Indigenous peoples? In asking this question, my point is not to investigate possible answers, simply because none are convincing and conclusive, especially for Indigenous peoples. Indeed, a perfected settler sovereignty remains a contested issue (Asch, 2014; Vowel, 2016, Chapter 26). Even the doctrine of cession, according to which some Indigenous nations would have agreed through the numbered treaties to “…cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada … for ever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever, to the lands…” (Vowel, 2016, p. 254) is denied by Indigenous peoples on the basis of their oral traditions. They hold that those treaties were not land transfer contracts, but compacts through which a durable relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples would be established in order to share the land (Asch, 2014).

This is a question explored in detail by Michael Asch, with whom I agree when he writes that “the political rights of Indigenous peoples already existed at the time that Crown sovereignty was asserted and, therefore, it is the question of how the Crown gained sovereignty that requires reconciliation with the pre-existence of Indigenous societies and not the other way around” (2014, p. 11). Interestingly for our purposes, in asking this question we may explore ways to im-perfect settler sovereignty and thus undermine claims to mastery and possession.

In seeking to im-perfect sovereignty, I center Indigenous thoughts and practices that open relational alternatives to the Modern/Colonial mode of subjectification and of being in the world. This task is consistent with the calls to “turn toward evocations of subjectivities no longer wed to an uncritical politics of worldly mastery” (Singh, 2018, p. 19)4 as a way to decolonize the Anthropocene. I focus specifically on the idea that Indigenous peoples and settlers can engage in reciprocal relationships of hospitality that center on Indigenous stewardship of the land. This means that settlers must learn to be guests on the land and to Indigenous peoples.

Veracini explains that undoing settler colonialism requires undermining the claim of settlers to sovereignty. One way to do this is for settlers to “be compelled to reconsider themselves guests” (Veracini, 2015, pp. 106-107). Yet, such an option risks not being properly transformative and decolonial if it is understood as replacing one sovereign claim—that of the settlers—by another—that of the Indigenous groups.5 This issue can be avoided when we consider being a guest as referring, not to being authorized to enter the sovereign domain of a master-host, but to being in a distinctive relationship of reciprocal responsibilities and privileges, both on the part of the host and the guest, in which the host has a privileged relationship to place.

To make sense of this, we can turn to Ruth Kolezsar-Green's (2019) account of what it means to be a host, a guest, and a settler, which is informed by “teachings [that] originate from and span the land, from the east to the west coasts” and by her discussions with “Elders and Traditional Teachers from six different Nations” (2019, p. 166). Kolezsar-Green articulates the responsibilities of the host and of the guest, thus allowing one to understand what it means, according to Indigenous teachings and protocols regarding hospitality, for non-Indigenous peoples to behave in ways consistent with being on Indigenous lands and with the preexistence of Indigenous nations as nations. This makes it possible to envision ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can relate that do not sustain and perpetuate the settler order and thus Modernity/Coloniality.

Kolezsar-Green explains that a settler is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands but who does not commit to “unsettle their privilege” (2019, p. 174) and to take the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on Indigenous lands. Settlers assert their rights in ways that make no space for reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations and that deny Indigenous political differences and distinct relationships to the land. In other words, they assume their perfected sovereignty over the land and over Indigenous peoples.

In contrast, a guest is someone who acknowledges that they are on Indigenous lands and seeks to take responsibility for that fact.6 A guest is in relationship with Indigenous peoples in ways that sustain Indigenous political differences and lifeways. It is also someone who recognizes and respects the distinct and special relationship of Indigenous peoples to their land. Put differently, a guest integrates an existing relationship to the land, it is not someone who disrupts, displaces, or disavows that relationship: This is why it can be said that a guest is “in relationship to the Land in a way that supports stewardship and not ownership” (Koleszar-Green, 2019, p. 175). A guest is then both a guest to Indigenous peoples and on the land: Being a guest to Indigenous peoples is not abstracted from the land where that relationship is enacted and from the responsibilities that come with the fact of being on this land and that inform Indigenous governance. Correlatively, being a host is not equivalent to being master and possessor of the land—it is about having a privileged relationship of responsibilities and respect to and with the land where others are welcomed.

In general, settlers have been socialized precisely as settlers. This means that conscious efforts to think and behave differently, in everyday practices, must be made to become guests. Such a relationship is not enacted by legislating specific rights and duties, it must be learned through a transformative process whereby reclaimed and revitalized political relationships and responsibilities are enacted and embraced. Importantly, in learning to be a guest, not only is one learning to relate to others in non-sovereign ways, one is also supporting and enabling Indigenous governance and relationships to the land, which is a key strategy to undermine the Modern/Colonial logic and subjectivity that fuel the Anthropocene. This is because whereas Modern/Colonial governance is marked by mastery and possession and by a clear distinction between the natural and the human realms, Indigenous governance is typically marked by relationality and respect for humans and other-than-humans (Watts, 2013). As Kiera Ladner explains, politics according to this view of governance is about “learning how to govern or how to live together in the best way possible within an ecological context” (2003, p. 130). Put differently, governance is about conduct that respects and takes responsibility for the diverse life-sustaining relationships in which we stand (Kimmerer, 2013; Mohawk, 2010, pp. 7-13): Indigenous governance is about stewardship, not ownership.

Indigenous governance deeply reframes governance away from mastery and possession toward relationships of reciprocity, responsibility, and stewardship that are embedded in concrete ecological contexts—becoming a respectful guest thus allows settlers to embed themselves in a broader system of mutual governance that extends to and is incorporated into the land. Learning to be guests requires a change of perspective about where and how one stands in the world: It is a transformation of dominant Modern/Colonial subjectivities associated with the decolonization and indigenization of political relationships. Such an evocation of decolonial subjectivities challenges mastery and possession and articulates a transformative modality of human agency to move through and out of the Anthropocene.

As Mignolo (2007, p. 458) writes, “if the colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of the damnés.” In this context, the significance of Indigenous governance and ways of being in the world is that they offer transformative alternatives that do not depend on or reproduce the subjectivities of mastery and possession associated with Modernity/Coloniality. However, for these Indigenous transformative alternatives to truly provide guidance, sovereignty needs to be practically im-perfected and Modern/Colonial subjectivities concretely transformed. This means that the guidance of Indigenous peoples must take the form of concrete political projects that reconstitute and recenter Indigenous jurisdictions and stewardship, so that mastery and possession may be forsaken, and relationships to one another and to the other-than-human world renewed. The Land Back movement is such a concrete political project; it has the potential to transform subjectivities through the transformation of political relationships.

Over the past few years, Canada has witnessed various mobilizations of Indigenous peoples around questions of land. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, railroads were blocked by various Indigenous groups in support of members of the Wet'suwet'en nation who were present on their land to stop the construction of a pipeline. The Wet'suwet'en land protectors were eventually arrested and removed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Unist'ot'en Camp, 2020). More recently, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Québec sought to stop moose hunting to protect their relative/kin the moose, and Mi'kmaw fishers in Nova Scotia acted on their constitutionally protected and inherent right to fish despite the opposition and attacks of non-Indigenous fishers. In Ontario, members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve mobilized around the “1492 Land Back Lane” to stop a housing development on claimed land (Manuel & Klein, 2020). Though these various movements take different forms, have different immediate objectives, and are not coherently organized into a single movement, they remain united by the demand to respect or restore Indigenous authority and jurisdictions over land. They can be seen as diverse manifestations of the Land Back movement.

One of the minimal—albeit often criticized—ways in which we can concretely envision the process of giving the land back to Indigenous peoples is through the implementation of a robust form of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC is associated with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2007) and is required for any decision or policy that would affect the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples or their land. For reasons of space, I cannot go into the detail of what FPIC requires to be understood as giving Indigenous peoples control of land, but this has been developed in the ‘Land Back Red Paper’ of the Yellowhead Institute (2019). Of concern here is the fact that institutionalizing Indigenous control over land in response to the Land Back movement would not merely be a way to address a demand for rights; it is more broadly a project of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization.

As Nickita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Saima Desai write in “Land Back is more than the sum of its part” (2020): “when we say ‘Land Back’ we aren't asking for just the ground, or for a piece of paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth. We want the system that is land to be alive so that it can perpetuate itself, and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That's what we want back: our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected.” The Land Back movement is a demand for Indigenous knowledge and jurisdiction to guide relationships to the land—it should be understood as properly meaning “relations back” (Gouldhawke, 2020). It is thus a concrete path that can be followed in the Canadian context to renew relationships with one another and to the land, following Indigenous terms.7

Although we should not romanticize Indigenous governance, the relational understanding of the land that informs Indigenous epistemologies, governance, and laws holds the promise that the reciprocal life-sustaining relationships embodied in the land and in which we always stand may be better protected than by Modern/Colonial governance. The scepter of sovereign authority held by Modern/Colonial Man has allowed him to conduct all of us into the Anthropocene. Although a significant portion of humanity may now live in relative abundance and comfort, the world is dying. Giving the land back may not be sufficient to address our ecological predicament, but it would be a way, for settlers and Modern/Colonial Man, of casting away their hubristic claim to mastery and possession of nature and of becoming, as Robin Kimmerer (2013, p. 112) puts it, “member[s] of the democracy of species.”

Giving the land back is not a utopian fantasy—as shown by the Yellowhead Institute's proposal—and although it may be highly discomforting for settlers to countenance, decolonization and learning to be guests are expectedly unsettling. Although this project is distinctive of settler colonial contexts like Canada and the United States, it is a significant refusal of widely shared Modern/Colonial political practices and associated subjectivities seen as bankrupt. The alternative political practices and subjectivities this refusal generates8 would be disruptive of the current globalized economy and would beckon all to learn to act otherwise, wherever they are in the world: It calls Indigenous peoples to support the resurgence and revitalization of Indigenous lifeways, settlers on Indigenous lands to learn to be guests, and individuals embedded in the Modern/Colonial matrix of power to find concrete ways in which relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their specific contexts. Land Back thus offers a clear and concrete path for settlers and for Modern/Colonial Man to learn to be guests, to acknowledge their land-based responsibility to act in earthbound ways, and for all of us to try to mend the world for those who will follow.

This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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