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Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, we seek alternative frameworks for building capacities for grounded relationality. By grounded we mean quite literally situated in relation to and from the land but without precluding movement, multiplicity, multidirectionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents of water and air. This is a being grounded and living relationalities in which the nonhuman world and the materiality of land and other elements have agential significance in ways that exceed liberal conceptions of the human. If the grounded relationalities of Indigenous philosophies might tell us anything, then, they remind us that knowledge must always remain grounded as the land calls to us and for us to find our place within the ongoing acts of interconnectivity that surround us. A number of questions arise with this shift from the epistemic trap of debt to the possibilities of relationality as affective and grounded alternatives to economies of dispossession and systems of extraction and exploitation. How might we apprehend relationality across systems of capitalism, colonialism, and chattel slavery and its afterlives? What happens when land is understood not as property or territory but as a source of relation with an agency of its own? How might reconceiving of land as relation shift the ground of racialized and embodied histories away from the territoriality of the state? How might building capacities for relationality outside the logics of propriation make it possible to handle incommensurate demands for justice? In other words, is there a way for land in itself to serve as an ontological condition for a different concept of the political that refuses conquest, doctrines of discovery, and the propriations of the propertied self? Finally, can land as the source of relation rather than the site of boundaries define a politics under which Indigenous sovereignty and Black reparations movements can (re)build capacities for relationality (aberrant to logics of propriation), rather than enact exclusivity or inclusion? In these times, when it is clear that liberal freedoms, misnamed democracy, fail to halt the expropriation of collective life by financial capitalism and its extractive resource mining, it is critical to turn our attention to ongoing praxes that build capacities for relationality beyond the logics of propriation. Because they have long understood inclusion in the liberal capitalist state as an unmaking of collective social being, as whitewashing ongoing violence, Black radical philosophy read alongside Indigenous critical theory may help us to think alternatives that are both transformative and realizable and, in fact, already manifest and discernable. Work by such scholars as Glen Coulthard, Saidiya Hartman, Shona Jackson, Tiffany Lethabo King, Lisa Lowe, Fred Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Denise Ferreira da Silva offers energizing responses to global predatory formations of debt-driven accumulation, each drawing on Black radical traditions, critical ethnic studies, and/or Indigenous critical theory for epistemic-material activism. As Saidiya Hartman observes, “Skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” are all the afterlife of slavery.30 That afterlife persists as we are all asked to confront the ontological, political, economic, and moral implications and entanglements of colonization and slavery as they ostensibly compete for originary source within dispossessive regimes. In his work, Moten confronts the predatory formation of subprime debt speculation and foreclosures from the point of view of the Black radical tradition, which constellates around the anticapitalist norms of “consent not to be a single being” and “preservation of the ontological totality” (the survival of Black collectivity). Moten celebrates the subprime debtor for enacting a guerrilla “collateral agency”31 when he writes: For a minute, by way of policy that accompanied another of those periodic attempts to deconcentrate that mass and its ongoing project/s, home ownership was infused with and disrupted by a kind of carnival, a country-ass hoedown, an embarrassing barbecue. This disownership renewed an old experiment that moves at the intersection of squatting and “the imposition of severalty” (… to eradicate the Indian who was not vanishing quite fast enough by liberal conferral of the gift of private property.) That imposition [was updated] … in the name of “the ownership society” … so that it could continue its brutal, violent habit of enclosing our common capacity.32 Moten refuses to compare and oppose Black and Native dispossessions in racial capitalist settler colonial modernity and instead offers a way to conceive of debt as disownership that links contemporary forms of foreclosure to the enclosures of settlement, severalty, and allotment. As home ownership and its subsequent subprime mortgage within the existing structures of a well-established settler colonialism became “a kind of carnival, a country-ass hoedown, an embarrassing barbecue,” Moten acknowledges how “the ownership society” continues its brutal drive toward enclosing our common capacity and our capacity for the commons. Building on questions of the spatialities of settler colonial geographies, Tiffany Lethabo King, in her recent work on Black fungibility, argues for an analytic framework through which to consider how “Blackness mediated the ways the natural world could be imagined as manipulable and an open landscape in flux.”33 Such a framework disrupts the spatial and embodied boundaries that have at times separated Indigenous and settler colonial critique from Black studies by demonstrating how “Black bodies in the fluttering, stretching, and changing states became a symbol of unstable borders, processes, and the shifting power relations … [and where] Blackness, as expansion and spatial possibility, becomes a constituting feature of the spatial imagination of the conquistador/settler rather than just another human laborer exploited as a mere technology to produce space.”34 Such moves help us decenter bodies as the site of pure labor within the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism to think more fluidly about the porousness of those same bodies as they are made to move and remove, build and destroy, relate and tear asunder. Dene scholar Glen Coulthard confronts the debt-driven predatory formations active in Canada, where austerity provides alibis for renewed thefts of Indigenous lands and resources and more indebtedness and precarity generally. Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s belief that those struggling against colonialism must turn away from the colonial state and find in their own transformative praxis the source of their liberation, Coulthard calls for the reinvigoration of land-based norms, of “indigenous laws … that uphold the relations of reciprocity that shape our engagement with the human and nonhuman world—the land.”35 He refers to this transformation praxis as “grounded normativity” in Red Skin, White Masks. Recently, writing with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg poet, intellectual, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, he has reframed this praxis as a baseline for anticolonial solidarities against the proprietary and possessive regimes undergirding settler colonialism in North America. “Our relationship to the land itself,” Coulthard and Simpson write, “generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. To willfully abandon them would amount to a form of auto-genocide.”36 Grounded normativity, as Coulthard and Simpson explain, provides an ethical way of knowing and being that is more expansive than those ontologies that prioritize the human as exceptional, and it is a placement that extends memory through vast kinship networks that assume life, vibrancy, and agency beyond the limits of enlightenment notions of self, liberty, and property. Such Indigenous interventions to the categories of being codified by settler law, policy, and territoriality are also fundamentally critiques of colonialism as they reorient knowledge and power within and through Indigenous returns to land, philosophy, diplomacy, activism, and kinship. By decentering the human, such theories require us to consider further how colonialism has already inflected our understanding of nature, memory, and history through the production of archives and certain kinds of knowledge production that favor hegemonic white possession. Here, as a way toward ending this introduction, we’d like to offer a series of provocations and questions that arise when Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions are held simultaneously as offering disruptions to propriation and possession: How might we develop Coulthard’s fruitful concept of “grounded normativity”—the ethical framework “informed by what land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way”?37 What would it be, then, to think and work for a grounded relationality, at once addressed to Black placemaking, geographies, and other racialized diasporas, as well as to proprietary violences incommensurate to yet not altogether separate from Indigenous land and sovereignty? What would it mean to consider the land itself as a site of an agentive fungibility that has been conscripted into the proprietary spatialities of colonial possessiveness and constrained into geographies of exploitation that no longer serve the relationalities of presence and care that have for so long been its domain as a common for all? The loss of land is not just a loss of property, territoriality, power, nation, or sovereignty; it is the loss of those philosophies that derive from the relationships the land itself activates, fosters, and nourishes. Working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, the essays that follow engage such questions and the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites economies of dispossession in the historical present.

What are the stakes of different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice? Settler colonialism describes a structure of exogenous domination in which Indigenous inhabitants of a territory are displaced by an outside population from an imperial center (Veracini 2010). Patrick Wolfe, in his classic formulation of the settler colonial situation, described it as an “inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies” (2006: 393). Land is the ultimate object of settlers’ desire. Settler states seek to extirpate Indigenous societies through a “logic of elimination,” which facilitates the taking of territory (387). This article explores ontologies of land as they are constituted across the contested political boundaries of settler states where settler ontologies work to dispossess, commodify, and extract economic value from land. We contrast this with Indigenous ontologies of land that seek to revitalize and maintain relationships of mutual obligation among humans and the other-than-human (Coulthard 2014; Wildcat et al. 2014).1 Indigenous efforts to contest and unsettle modes of conceiving of and relating to land, through their own practices and those created by settlers and settler-state institutions, are central to this analysis. Examples of these efforts include revitalization of land-based practices such as caring for and collecting culturally important plants, and the use of settler legal institutions to seek redress for dispossession and expand the landholdings of Indigenous polities. We term these kinds of practices “unsettling the land,” given their propensity to cultivate ontological hybridity and contribute toward decolonial futures. The importance of relationality and hybridity are key points made by scholars of Indigenous political ecology (Carroll 2015; Middleton 2010, 2015). Clint Carroll notes that “reconciling the resource- and relationship-based approaches [in Indigenous communities] has meant coming to terms with the development of an indigenous state” (2015: 10). The work of decolonization, the dismantling of the ideological and institutional structures of settler colonialism, is often expressed through hybrid modalities of land that work on multiple registers to advance Indigenous sovereignty over territory and revitalize land-based practices. Thinking through the different ways in which land is perceived and experienced helps to illuminate the role of ontology in movements for social and environmental justice for Indigenous peoples. We argue for an approach that examines the coexistence, contradictions, and consequences of different ontologies of land. As argued by Tania Li, land is an assemblage that can be viewed for its ontologies—“the nature of its thing-ness”—and its affordances—“what it’s good for—its values” (2014b: 589). Settler colonialism operates through ontological foreclosures that obfuscate Indigenous ontologies of land. Viewing land through the lens of ontology (what kind of thing it is), and how different people see land, helps to unwrap the diverse ways land is constituted. This is central to examining histories of Indigenous dispossession and contemporary struggles for revitalization, resurgence, and decolonization in settler colonial contexts. We highlight the work of scholars that complicate taken-for-granted and monolithic ontologies of land to problematize the very categories of land produced by colonial practice. This review explores four literatures: political economy, political ecology, post-humanism, and Indigenous studies. We also provide two case studies: oil palm as a settler plant in Indonesia and land revitalization as a practice of ontological hybridity in the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation of North America’s Intermountain West. Finally, we outline an agenda for scholars in anthropology, geography, Indigenous studies, and critical environmental studies to take up culturally constituted ontologies of land long highlighted by scholars of Indigenous studies, anthropology, and other fields (Deloria 1999, 2001; Hunt 2014). This article starts with an examination of the role of land, dispossession, and subsistence production in Marxian political-economic theory, which forms an important foundation for political ecology, albeit with certain limitations.

Indigenous self-determination is a crucial step in addressing colonial injustices. It is also an important step in establishing Indigenous climate justice (Whyte, 2020) and promoting Indigenous wellbeing (Murphy, 2014).Much of the literature within political philosophy on Indigenous self-determination has focused on its justification. Another question that political philosophers interested in Indigenous self-determination address is how it should be put into practice. This question concerns not primarily the justification of Indigenous self-determination but the political framework in which it is implemented. However, what is missing in the discussion of Indigenous self-determination within political philosophy is the role of political ontology. Until now, debates about political ontology have primarily occurred in the disciplines of anthropology, Indigenous studies, science and technology studies, and political ecology. Ontologies determine the ontological commitments of Indigenous peoples or settler states in governance and decision-making contexts. Consequently, they determine what kinds of entities exist for Indigenous peoples or settler states in the political realm and how political institutions and decision-making procedures are viewed by them. If self-determination is implemented without addressing the question of diverging ontologies, there is a risk that the ontology of the settler state will continue to prevail, meaning that colonial domination would continue on the ontological level. Settler ontologies that ignore Indigenous land claims and regard Indigenous territory as an extractable resource would be an example of such ontological domination. If such ontologies remain unchallenged, they will undermine any attempts to implement Indigenous self-determination. Hence, the struggle for Indigenous self-determination comprises an engagement with not only political practices, structures, and institutions but also dominant ontologies. In this paper, I argue that addressing dominating ontologies is crucial for achieving Indigenous self-determination. I first argue that Indigenous self-determination requires an engagement with political ontology. I then introduce Iris Young’s conception of self-determination as non-domination as a way to engage with diverging ontologies within the political framework of federalism. In the final section of the paper, I provide two constructive proposals about how Indigenous peoples and settler states can establish an ontology at the federal level that facilitates Indigenous self-determination.

Several of these blockades were quashed through interim injunctions obtained by the Canadian National Railway and Pipeline companies against protestors. An interim injunction request requires the court to consider whether there is a ‘serious question’ to be tried and to apply a ‘balance of convenience’ test, evaluating whether the harm done to those applying for the injunction outweighs the potential harm/ injustice done to those against whom the injunction would be obtained. Factoring into this calculus is the question of ‘irreparable harm’—if it can be established that those seeking the injunction would sufer irreparable harm as a result of the actions of (in the cases below) protestors, then it is highly unlikely that the ‘balance of convenience’ will weigh in favour of the targets of the injunction. In Enbridge Pipelines v Jane Doe, 3 the judge, citing Mr. Justice Sharpe, says in no uncertain terms: ‘Under our system of law, property rights are sacrosanct…[t]he balance of convenience and other matters may have to take second place to the sacrosanctity of property rights in matters of trespass’ (2014, p. 12). The judge goes on to note competing rights—for instance, freedom of expression—but the judgment proceeds from the axiom that property rights are sacrosanct whilst competing rights must argue for themselves—ultimately, this reasoning supports the granting of the injunction against the protestors. Similarly, in CNR v. Chief Chris Plain (2012), a case awarding an interim injunction against Aamjiwnaang First Nation members maintaining a blockade in solidarity with Idle No More in Sarnia, the judge explains: ‘Persons are free to engage in political protest…but the law does not permit them to do so by engaging in civil disobedience through trespassing on the private property of others’ (2012, p. 23). While the ideal of ‘freedom of expression’ is a point of pride within neoliberal frameworks (e.g. Whyte 2019), it must ultimately bow to private property, which is ‘elevated in terms no less extensive than those attributed to the transcendence of myth…the foundation of civilization, the very motor-force of the origin and development of society…the modality of appropriating nature’ (Fitzpatrick 1992, p. 50). The legal rationale in these cases, however, moves beyond the foundational transcendence of property rights alone to a broader construction of urgency in Canadian law relating to the ‘circuitry of capital’ (Pasternak and Dafnos 2017, p. 7). In Canadian National Railway Company v. John Doe, 4 the judge explains the cascade of consequences that would ensue from the blockade’s continuation: All the eastbound and westbound trafc between Toronto and Montreal will quickly become backlogged…This is because start up problems amount for every hour the Main Line is blocked—customers simply cannot process two days’ worth of trafc in one day, resulting in further backlogs. In turn, this will produce a shortage of empty equipment for subsequent loading, creating a further compounding efect. By the time the backlog is cleared, costs of these compounded delays will be much greater than the sum of the costs of the individual train delays. (2013, para. 22) This colonial-capitalist cluster of interdependent urgencies is not a universal means of understanding and organizing time.

It may seem contradictory to attribute the cause of a persistent pattern of judicial reasoning to the notion of discretion, but locating the equitable roots of injunctions within a broader settlercolonial framework suggests that this discretion is distinctly and historically bounded. The power to grant an injunction derives from an old and subsumed system of English law called the Court of Equity. Although injunctions eventually came under the jurisdiction of the combined courts of law and equity,92 the origin of injunctions can inform us about the meaning of its remedies. Since the Court of Equity could only grant specific relief where damages (i.e., awards of money) were deemed insufficient, injunctive relief required “irreparable harm”—of a kind which could not be compensated monetarily—to be granted.93 Irreparable harm, then, had jurisdictional importance for which court would hear the case and, therefore, what remedies would be available. The Court of Equity itself emerged from the dissatisfaction of English people with the rigidity of the common law system. This led to many complaints to the King, who delegated these matters to the Chancellor to resolve through a new legal venue.94 Since Chancellors tended to draw from ecclesiastic classes, they resolved matters in the new courts of equity largely by drawing on canon law principles of good conscience.95 No less discretionary than the common law, but less bound to strict rules, procedures, and established legal precedents, injunctions were included among the equitable remedies the court provided. Eventually, this looser system of law could not withstand the pressure exerted by commercial markets and land privatization for the more procedural and substantive rules of doctrines in the common law. As a result, the significance of the injunction as an equitable remedy must be understood in relation to the common law. Remedies have “distinct structure, justifications, and goals”,96 which are not integrated in a hierarchical way into the common law.97 There is much debate in Canada on where and how these discretionary lines are drawn. As Jeffrey Berryman explains: It is up to the defendant to refute the plaintiff’s remedy of choice. But for judges, who traditionally conceive of their role as the top of an adjudicative apex, it is difficult to escape from the position that the “discretion”, in that equitable remedies are said to be discretionary, is for the judge alone to exercise.98 Complicating this issue, though, is that these lines are not entirely clear, especially in Canada. Equitable remedies shape substantive rights and vice versa. We can see quite clearly, for example, in the case of injunctions and First Nations, how equitable remedies are shaping Indigenous peoples’ substantive rights. The ambiguity of the relationship between these remedies and the common law is complicated by the colonial relationship between Canadian courts and Indigenous peoples. Much of this ambiguity can be found in property law, which the courts ultimately seek to protect when they are tasked with maintaining the status quo in injunction proceedings. Brenna Bhandar’s exploration of racial regimes of ownership and, more specifically, her examination of the “development of the specific legal forms of private property relations”99 in settler-colonial sites points to a framework for understanding how our modern concept of “public interest” has evolved out of this process of development. As Bhandar writes, this property law system emerged from “political ideologies, economic rationales, and colonial imaginaries that gave life to juridical forms of property and a concept of human subjectivity that are embedded in a racial order.”100 She examines, for example, the titling registration regimes of the 19th century in the British colonies that relied on a new racial science to deny Indigenous peoples’ own tenure system through hierarchies of racial entitlement. Drawing on the work of geographer Nicholas Blomley, she also theorizes the process of racial property-making as “enactments” that must be repeated regularly and reproduced through legal techniques of denial.101 What does it mean, then, to reconsider equitable remedies as part of these “colonial modes of appropriation” that constitute the public interest? The public interest protected by injunctions is indelibly shaped by private property interests that underpin statutory schemes and common law constructs. Here, we need to dig a bit deeper into the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and property law in Canada. In his examination of settler colonialism in British settlements, Robert Nichols’ work in Theft is Property! offers a critical reformulation of Karl Marx’s important concept of “dispossession” or “expropriation” to the process of capital accumulation. Like many others, Nichols rethinks Marx’s theorization of a stadial view of violent dispossession as an essential condition for the next stage of development, a “silent compulsion of economic relations.”102 Rather, Nichols writes that “[t]here was no historical transition from extra-economic violence to silent compulsion, only a geographical displacement of the former to the imperial periphery.”103 Nichols’ reformulation avoids the common move that often follows this point, which is to prolong Marx’s theory of early “primitive accumulation” into the present in order to account for an ongoing, violent removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Instead, he rethinks the category of “dispossession” itself to produce an important insight into property relations in the settler colony. Ongoing dispossession is not only required to transform nature into commodities, but is part of the silent compulsion of capitalism where land is both “a conceptual and legal category that serves to relate humans to ‘nature’ and to each other in a particular, proprietary manner.”104 It is intrinsic to the culture of settler-colonialism. Nichols traces the emergence of what he calls a “hybrid private/public form” of juridical dispossession during the settlement of Canada and other settler-colonial states in ways that are helpful in working to connect the contemporary legal tool of injunctions and the concept of “public interest” to more foundational property relations.105 Dispossession, Nichols argues, “did not proceed through macro assertions of sovereignty but through microlevel practices that worked to dismantle one infrastructure of life and replace it with another.”106 We can apply Nichols’ observation to Canada, where the transformation of land into property proceeded through mechanisms like the Dominion Lands Act of 1872,107 which also privatized the theft of territory from Indigenous peoples. This federal legislation facilitated massive land redistribution of Indigenous lands to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), Canadian Pacific Railway, and other “colonization companies.”108 Prior to this redistribution, “Rupert’s Land” was acquired through a “Deed of Surrender” in 1869 between Canada and the HBC to the lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Ojicree, Inuit, Innu, Dene, Gwich’in, Métis, and more, who had lived on and governed these lands for thousands of years.These “Company lands” sold to Canada were then privatized again through the distribution of acreage to private companies and to European settlers.

The settler colonial infrastructures of perception work to absorb and inculcate perception into attentive modes and sensible habits in which the settler state is always at the center of experience, reality, designation, interpretation, and orientation. Such are the selective attentions of White supremacy. As the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz writes, the “scheme of interpretation” and “scheme of orientation” for members of an in-group determine systems of experiential relevance (1970: 120–121). Experiences are named and understood in terms of pre-experienced horizons of feeling and meaning that occur at the commonsense level (117–120). It is at this “communal” everyday understanding of events that the “politics of distraction” attempts to dominate the perception of emergencies. For example, in response to the threat of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en land protectors set up Unist’ot’en Camp to obstruct the path of the proposed project in 2010. Between 2018 and 2020, the conflict escalated, and courts issued injunctions against the land protectors, empowering the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to make arrests. In acts of solidarity, allies of the Wet’suwet’en including the Mohawk and other groups blocked rail lines and ports across the country. Covering these events, Canada’s Global News announced that the disagreement was “again disrupting trade and travel in this country” (Global News, 2020). This manner of speaking names or typifies the situation with a structure of intention built around a horizon of relevance that refers back to the settler state. It is not the homelands of the Wet’suwet’en that are being disrupted by the pipeline. Rather it is the trade and travel of Canadax that are being disrupted. Furthermore, Global News emphasized supposedly internal disagreements between certain Hereditary Chiefs and the Band Councils, stating, “Who speaks for the Wet’suwet’en people and who has authority over the 22,000 square kilometers of land in northern B.C. is not straightforward. There is confusion and misunderstanding” (Global News, 2020). But the Band Councils themselves were created under the Indian Act and structured specifically by the Canadian government to deal with negotiations for natural resources. So, the conflict was produced by Canadian interventions in traditional governance structures that were seen as unconducive to resource extraction. The Hereditary Chiefs who, as the anchor puts it, “believe they have authority over the territory,” never ceded that authority. Furthermore, the land upon which the original camp was made does not belong to the Wet’suwet’en as a whole or any of the neighboring Band Councils or tribal nations. It is on Unist’ot’en Clan territory that has never been ceded. As their website states, “The Unist’ot’en homestead is not a protest or demonstration. Our clan is occupying and using our traditional territory as it has for centuries” (Unist’ot’en, n.d.). Settler media distorts this view, arguing that it is not Canada but rather the Wet’suwet’en who are confused and divided. disregarding the fact that they are not simply “Canadians.” Corntassel wrote of the UN position on Indigenous relations, “an Indigenous political agenda is shifted and altered to fit the dominant norms of existing institutional structures” (2007: 140). Political marginalization, therefore, will not be solved by “inclusion” that does not somehow fundamentally allow the “included” to set their own terms on the manner of that inclusion and allow for decolonized forms of governance to take first precedence over laws, land, and life. The Wet’suwet’en are a sovereign nation. Freeland’s language subsumes Native political action into a nationalistic multicultural framework of forced democratic inclusion

Section 35(1) rights do not fit easily into the tripartite injunction test because they require lengthy and careful litigation or negotiation. Yet, the use of injunctions has by no means been discontinued on this basis. Of the 70 cases we coded, 42 (or 60 per cent) referred to Aboriginal rights, treaties, and/or title in motions brought by First Nations or as defences against injunctions. Almost a third of these cases address the legal question of consultation. Many of these legal arguments are countered in the courts by public interest-based counter-arguments and reasoning. The explicit consideration of public interest arguments, in fact, emerged concurrently with the emergence of s 35(1) case law discussed above, after the SCC made two critical decisions that emphasized the importance of public interest when balancing “convenience” in interlocutory injunctions. While Metropolitan Stores43 and RJR-MacDonald44 did not involve Indigenous people, these Charter cases became central to the shift away from injunctive relief for First Nations. Their importance was due to the presumption baked into the “public interest” that an equitable balance can exist between protecting the interests of distinct groups in society and the “concerns of society generally.”45 For First Nations already struggling to assert their inherent jurisdiction against the non-justiciable nature of Crown sovereignty, the paramountcy of the public interest further prejudices courts hearing injunction applications against them. In Metropolitan Stores, cited in RJR-MacDonald, the SCC made foundational comments defining the public interest, stating that “in all constitutional cases the public interest is a ‘special factor’ which must be considered in assessing where the balance of convenience lies, and which must be ‘given the weight it should carry’.”46 As the court decided: It is, we think, appropriate that it be open to both parties in an interlocutory Charter proceeding to rely upon considerations of the public interest… [E]ither the applicant or the respondent may tip the scales of convenience in its favour by demonstrating to the court a compelling public interest in the granting or refusal of the relief sought. “Public interest” includes both the concerns of society generally and the particular interests of identifiable groups. The public interest is further closely tied to the expectation that injunctions maintain or preserve the status quo. The status quo is considered critical to guiding judges’ decisions on what constitutes the public interest. For Indigenous claims litigation, however, the “status quo” or the “existing legal regime or the state of affairs on the ground” may include active mining or logging, preserving at minimum a circumstance of disputed land, and at most, maintaining a destructive or violent occupation. As detailed in this Part, the uneven pattern in injunction cases also persists through the courts’ interpretation of this “status quo” imperative. An interpretation that favours statutory regimes and private capital contradicts SCC decisions on the interplay of the duty to consult and the role of regulatory agencies and tribunals, which call for recognizing that the “duty to consult, being a constitutional imperative, gives rise to a special public interest that supersedes other concerns typically considered by tribunals tasked with assessing the public interest.”51 Thus, the post-Sparrow shift away from success for First Nations obtaining injunctions is not only due to the s 35(1) jurisprudence and a diversion towards constitutional litigation. It is also due to a public interest defined by market rationale and the demand for Indigenous lands. Reconciling the public interest of Canada’s resource economy with Indigenous rights lies at the heart of these cases. Less examined, though, is the way the courts manage, and often shield, private interests from exposure to counter-legal claims. For example, Hunter demonstrates that early injunctions involving First Nations were open to considering the interests of First Nations in the land, reflecting a time of relative calm within the cycles of capitalist crisis. As a case in point, the Ahousat and Clayoquot arguments for title to Meares Island led the judge to reject the public interest argument made by the forestry company to protect private investment.52 Though he admitted that the case was a “frontline” precedent for Nations across the province disrupting extraction on their land by asserting title, the fear expressed by the province and companies was not deemed a sufficient public interest argument, for this uncertainty would be up to each court in every circumstance to consider. But critically, the judge also did not find the importance of logging for the company to be a matter of “irreparable harm,” since “the timber will still be there” if MacMillan Bloedel were found to hold the right at trial, whereas “[t]he position of the Indians is quite different”, since logging may extinguish their food sources and ways of life. By 1989, Esson JA challenged this position in Westar Timber Ltd v Ryan et al. This case involved the Gitksan Nation’s conflict with a forestry company that sought to log and expand operations into a region over which the Nation was asserting title as part of the Delgamuukw case. The judge quoted Macfarlane JA’s dissenting reasons from MacMillan Bloedel at length, emphasizing the heading “Provincial concern about sovereignty over resources”, where Macfarlane JA wrote that Meares Island was a unique case because it was a small, isolated area. However, “[i]f an injunction were being sought with respect to the whole area the economic consequences of granting an injunction would probably weigh heavily against making the order.” Esson JA picked up this line of the thinking, and citing the importance of “public interest” in Metropolitan Stores, found that “the court should not grant an injunction if the economic consequences of doing so would have a serious impact upon the economic health of the province, the region or the logging company.” Thus, the public interest argument here smothers the possibility of challenging provincial regulation that may constitute irreparable harm to Indigenous rights. As Esson JA argued: …injunctions restraining the exercise of rights granted under the Forest Act could sterilize the working of that statutory scheme just as effectively as injunctions restraining the granting of licenses and other rights, that being so, the public interest must be considered in applications of this kind.

With the incorporation of Aboriginal rights in the constitution, the declining success of First Nations in obtaining or fighting injunctions appears to be a contradictory outcome at a key moment of recognition. At first glance, this recognition should have strengthened Aboriginal claims of “irreparable harm,” as such harms could now constitute a breach of constitutional rights. But Hunter argued that these new constitutional protections greatly complicated—and therefore lengthened— the duration of time necessary to determine the merits of a case, giving priority to other elements of the injunction test. First Nations were asserting rights and title to land in ways that disrupted, for example, provincial regulatory regimes; a growing jurisprudence established tests to challenge the application of provincial jurisdiction to First Nations.18 But how would these Aboriginal rights tests weigh within the tripartite test? First, the lengthening of trials specifically increased the inconvenience to business operations, therefore favouring their interests in the “balance of convenience” test.19 For a time, the uncertainty of title and rights claims had constituted sufficient cause to delay the interests of private companies; post-Sparrow, the uncertainty had a legal framework for determination that was lengthy, complicated, and lay outside the jurisdiction of the court hearing the injunction application. Compounding the issue of the time it would take to adjudicate the merits of injunction cases was the gradual emptying out of the s 35(1) “box” of rights, once expected to secure Aboriginal rights to land, water, and resources. The s 35(1) case law demonstrated that there were pathways around these rights and that state legislation could override Aboriginal claims. The uncertainty that once favoured First Nations asserting constitutional rights in injunction cases was now taken up by courts that pointed to the ambivalence of rights that were yet to be proven in costly title and rights litigation. A 1995 Gitskan injunction case—technically, a leave to appeal their denial of ongoing injunctive relief—is emblematic of this transition period. The landmark Delgamuukw v British Columbia case brought by the Wet’suwet’en and Gitskan Nations that first tested s 35(1) rights on Aboriginal title was a factor in the judge’s decision against two Gitskan houses23. The houses sought relief against Skeena Cellulose to restrain bridge construction that the company required for logging access. Proudfoot JA agreed with a lower court decision to discharge an injunction granted in 1988 to the Houses of Gwoimt and Tsabux. She held that the injunction had been founded on outstanding questions of Aboriginal title, but that the legal terrain had changed after the 1993 BC Court of Appeal decision in Delgamuukw25 that found that no ownership or jurisdiction rights had been established by the Gitskan. A few years later, in 1997, the SCC held that the Wet’suwet’en and Gitskan Nations might in fact hold Aboriginal title to their territory, defined for the first time as an underlying, collective, and sui generis proprietary interest. The SCC instructed the nations to return to court to assert this title over specific tracts of land.27 But while the Gitskan were undertaking this monumental, lengthy title case, lower court decisions had cost them interim protections, raising serious questions about the implications of injunctions on First Nations’ constitutional rights. One solution to this problem of reconciling rights and title cases with injunctions came in the form of another s 35(1) precedent conceived to protect Aboriginal rights even in the pre-proof stage of assertion: the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate. In the post-Sparrow case of Haida Nation, the SCC advised that First Nations should rely on their s 35(1) protected rights to consultation, rather than pursuing injunctions, because the duty to consult would better safeguard their interests.28 Reasoning the need for this legal shift, the Court laid out four limitations of injunctions: first, they may not capture the full range of government obligations; second, the duty to consult necessarily entails balancing interests and thus could go further towards reconciliation; third, the Court cited Hunter’s argument that the balance of convenience test favours industry and jobs, prejudicing the courts against First Nations before the merits can be determined; and fourth, stopgap measures like injunctions should not be used for complex matters, which must be given adequate time in courts to resolve.29 Since Haida Nation came down, however, it has not reduced the number of injunctions involving First Nations, nor protected them any better in proceedings. It may be the case that First Nations have had more success pursuing judicial reviews of regulatory decisions or lawsuits for failures of the Crown to engage in meaningful consultation. Although these legal avenues are beyond the scope of this article, such a comparison would undoubtedly shed light on this important question. Here, however, we seek to uncover whether Haida Nation and the s 35(1) protected rights to consultation created more opportunities for First Nations to assert and protect their rights in injunction cases. In particular, did the courts consider breaches of the Crown’s duty to consult an “irreparable harm”? If anything, we could conclude that failures on the part of governments to comply with the duty to consult have not been seen by the courts to constitute “irreparable harm”. Irreparable harm is at the core of injunctive relief since it is precisely what entitles litigants to “equity’s extraordinary and discretionary relief”.30 The plaintiff must show immediate harm that cannot await resolution at trial or be addressed any other way, especially through damages. For example, a 2008 Federal Court of Appeal decision in Canada v Musqueam First Nation held that the government’s failure to consult did not give rise to “a veto” on the basis of disputed territory alone, despite the fact that lands in the Musqueam First Nations’ traditional territory were being alienated by the Crown to third parties. In other words, the potential loss of lands was not considered an irreparable harm, the justice reasoned, unless it was coupled with “possible degradation” or a specific use claim to the territory. The prerequisite for injunctive relief was only damage in a narrow sense, not the historical, cumulative state dispossession that the Musqueam sought to prevent.32 This reasoning and the resultant outcome is disappointing, since injunctions could potentially provide a strong interim measure to prevent damage as more broadly construed, while other rights litigation moves through the courts. However, a long line of injunction cases rejects this logic. The duty to consult was also undermined in Behn v Moulton Contracting Ltd33 in 2013, when members of the Fort Nelson First Nation were chided for blockading their lands threatened by logging. Writing for a unanimous SCC, LeBel J concluded that “[t]o allow the Behns to raise their defence based on treaty rights and on a breach of the duty to consult at this point would be tantamount to condoning self-help remedies and would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.”In one of the few injunction cases ever brought to the SCC, the decision on the duty to consult set an unfortunate precedent that the applicants—as individuals, rather than as the Band— did not have standing to assert these rights, despite s 35(1) jurisprudence that has been successfully brought to protect individuals within communities.35 Moreover, the Behn family’s resort to blockades was rendered unlawful despite the uncertainty over proper title to the land in question. Behn has proven extraordinarily influential. Indeed, in Enbridge Pipelines Inc v Williams, a 2017 case involving representatives of the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, Broad J cited Behn and decided that the question of “whether the Crown has made efforts to comply with its duty to consult and accommodate is not relevant to the exercise of the court’s decision to deny an injunction sought by a private party such as Enbridge with an interest in land on discretionary grounds.” 36 The injunction was granted to Enbridge partially on the basis of the defendant’s resort to blockades, and the matter of treaty rights was deferred to proceedings in other courts.37 In Williams, the court went to great lengths to distinguish an earlier Ontario decision calling for judges to prioritize the duty to consult. In Frontenac Ventures Corporation v Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, 38 the Ontario Court of Appeal had made every effort to encourage consultation when Aboriginal treaty rights to hunt were impacted. As Macpherson JA instructed, citing Haida directly: “The court must further be satisfied that every effort has been exhausted to obtain a negotiated or legislated solution to the dispute before it. Good faith on both sides is required in this process”.39 Relying on Behn (and a key 2014 decision from the Newfoundland and Labrador Appeal Court40), Broad J instead framed the Haudenosaunee defendants’ invocation of the duty to consult in Williams as the imposition of a “precondition involving the exhaustion of efforts to consult”, dismissing their attempt to require the Crown to consult with respect to treaty rights as an illegitimate resort to self-help.41 These cases demonstrate the failure of injunctive relief for First Nations when s 35(1) consultation rights are brought to bear. On the one hand, in Haida Nation, the SCC tried to steer land claims out of the injunction arena, wisely counselling on its inherent limitations and the dangers of bias embedded in the tripartite test. But this warning backfired when—out of necessity—First Nations sought urgent relief or were faced with plaintiffs seeking to remove them from their lands. Judges can then interpret Haida Nation to reason that First Nation cases should be heard in different proceedings, as litigation for rights and title, or else attempt to adjudicate their rights and title on the merits based on scant evidence. The paradox that results is that the denial of injunctive relief to First Nations and the success of corporations and governments seeking injunctive relief against them practically constitutes a de facto resolution of disputed land claims. Put simply, the s 35(1) duty to consult, alongside the long delays and evidentiary hurdles standing in the way of establishing Aboriginal rights and title more generally, as demonstrated by Sparrow and Delgamuukw, has proven to mostly work against First Nations seeking injunctive relief.

This article begins with a simple question: what accounts for the profound discrepancy between the efforts by First Nations to obtain injunctions against corporations and governments versus the efforts by corporations and governments to obtain injunctions against First Nations? In 2019, a national study of over 100 injunctions was led by the Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University (Yellowhead) in Toronto. It found that from the years 1973-2019, 76 per cent of injunctions filed against First Nations by corporations were granted, while First Nations were successful against corporations only 19 per cent of the time. This research was updated by Yellowhead in 2020 and the gap had widened in that single year. The percentage of injunctions successfully sought by corporations against First Nations climbed from 76 per cent to 81 per cent. The study also examined rates of government-filed injunctions against First Nations. In 2020, governments were successful at obtaining orders 90 per cent of the time. Just one year earlier, that figure had been 86 per cent. Meanwhile, by 2020 First Nations were only successful at obtaining injunctions against governments 18 per cent of the time. In this article, we ask: what is it about the common law test for injunctions that leads to these results and, given this evidence, what makes injunctions such an effective tool in the hands of industry and the state against First Nations? Our research here builds on the original Yellowhead research and dataset, which we led and contributed to, by recoding the cases initially examined and refining the methodology to focus specifically on the grounds of adjudication in each case. Central to our methodology is an examination of the application of the tripartite test set out by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in RJRMacDonald Inc v Canada (Attorney General) to injunction cases involving First Nations. Scholars have noted the significant and disproportionate protections the RJR-MacDonald test provides to businesses and property owners over First Nation “protestors” and labour “picketers”. But the implications of these protections as they pertain to First Nation assertions of jurisdiction require further examination. De facto resolutions of First Nation land rights are currently being mediated through a discretionary, equitable remedy that is insulated from the reach of Aboriginal rights and title entitlements. This article undertakes a close reading of the way the courts interpret the RJR-MacDonald factors of “irreparable harm” and “balance of convenience” in injunction cases involving First Nations— most of which have unfolded in contestations over land, water, and resources—to reveal the ways colonization has been organized around a false distinction between public and private interests. We suggest thatderstand what accounts for corporate success in the courts against First Nations when seeking to develop and pursue extraction on Indigenous territories, we must understand how “public interest” arguments that are critical to applying the injunction test are weighed towards a specific understanding of the “status quo” in Canada that is rooted in a political economy of resource extraction. We argue that to understand the judicial reasoning that supports the “maintenance of the status quo” that is so critical to the “balance of convenience” test, we must revisit the equitable roots of the injunction remedy that lie at the heart of Canadian property law—the juridical underpinning of settler-colonialism. The methodology for this injunction research originally involved searches within two legal databases for all injunction cases involving First Nations in Canada. We did not code cases where injunctions involved community members obtaining injunctions against other community members, and we focused our research on First Nations rather than all Indigenous people, therefore excluding cases involving Inuit and Métis peoples. We returned to Yellowhead’s original dataset for this research, but we narrowed our analysis to focus on the role of “public interest” arguments in applications for injunctions under the RJR-MacDonald test. Each case was coded for the following criteria: the parties involved (i.e., corporations vs First Nations, or First Nations vs corporations), whether a blockade was involved, the type of injunction at play, the trigger for the conflict, the legal issues raised, and the key arguments made by the parties with respect to the tripartite injunction test (i.e., serious issue to be tried, irreparable harm, and balance of convenience). In total, we coded 70 cases, more than a quarter (19 decisions) of which contained detailed considerations of the “public interest.” By highlighting specific cases from this dataset to show this and other tendencies we found on a national scale, we hope that this research marks a focal point in a study of injunctions and First Nations, rather than being interpreted as the authoritative end of this inquiry. Our article is organized as follows: in Part I, we track the history of injunctions in the Aboriginal law context, paying particular attention to how the development of s 35(1) jurisprudence, which interpreted Aboriginal constitutional rights enshrined in the 1982 Constitution Act, ironically deprived First Nations of access to injunctions, despite a prior period of successful defence of Indigenous land rights using this legal tool. In Part II, we focus on the doctrinal and political function of the “public interest” consideration in injunction cases, positioning this concept within a broader political economy framework. In Part III, we turn to the origins of the injunction as an equitable remedy and argue that understanding its discretionary application requires understanding equity’s role within a broader historical trajectory of settler-colonial property relations. We conclude that the injunction playing field is inherently uneven because the common law test currently leaves no room for assertions of Indigenous law or governance. This imbalance is now baked into RJR-MacDonald and a juridical shift (as opposed to a political or policy fix) requires a different legal framework.

Theorizing the Faces, Roots, and Othering Violence of Al Empire The centuries-old tendency of Western epistemology to create a division between a Subject and a "Other" is at the heart of the violence inflicted by the unintended consequences of new media and technology, including Al systems (Arendt, 1958). Non-Western, non-white, non-male, poor, queer, transgender, dis/abled, non-Christian, non-capitalist, un-educated, subaltern, un-housed, un-free: people outside the dominant group are often perceived to be an obstacle in tech-progressive utopias and discarded as "surplus humanity," an afterthought, an impediment (Said, 1979; Muñoz, 1999). The Other is described as un-technological, or as only using technology for nefarious purposes, and therefore uncivilized, even though these communities are in truth the most heavily technologized for the purpose of their surveillance and control (Abdurahman and Ghoshal, 2021; Mavhunga, 2014). Dismantling the idea of the Other is no simple task, and it is therefore critical to keep in mind the caveats issued by transnational feminism reflected in the works of scholar-activists such as Chandra Mohanty. Combating the processes of othering marginalized communities cannot happen in the form of superficial empty signifiers such as "universal sisterhood," in the case of non-Western and Western women, because it is undeniable that there are significant differences in the conditions of these groups (Mohanty, 2005). These dehumanizing differences are brought about in no small part by the joint projects of coloniality, heteropatriarchy, and global racial capitalism the persistent sociopolitical, economic, and cultural order that engenders AI developments such as The Line and which is in turn shaped by them. The Line in Saudi Arabia, as well as the facial identification anti-protest crackdowns in Hong Kong, Iran, and Russia, along with NATO's "smart" weapons: The neo-imperialist race for power fueled by Al is so reminiscent of the imperial games of the past that leading political scientists have started talking about "Empire Resurgent," even though we live in ostensibly "postcolonial" times.? 2.1 Interlocking Matrices of the Al Empire: Data Colonialism, Data Commodification, Biometric Profiling, and Technological Apartheid As the world eagerly awaits the advent of a fully datafied city like The Line, where every action will be captured and translated into data in real time, the Uyghur people in the Chinese Xinjiang province one of China's largest ethnic and religious minorities— have had to live in a state of similar constant data capturing for years. Smart technologies enable the total integration of multiple data streams and sensorial information to surveil the online communication of journalists and dissidents critical of the monarchy in the form of military-grade "mercenary spyware" (House, 2022). The process by which governments and corporations privatize, weaponize, and claim ownership of the data produced by their users and citizens has come to be known as data colonialism (Coleman, 2018; Couldry and Mejias, 2019). In applying a colonial lens to the contemporary phenomena of datafication and data extraction, we should be careful not to erase the ongoing trauma and injustice brought about by the structures of modernity/coloniality, or the co-constitutive forces of colonialism and capitalism (Mignolo, 2007). The narrative of colonialism and modernity has come to shape many aspects of today's world through the material and epistemic violence issued by the West against its formal and informal colonies (Appiah, 2023). Much of today's state and corporate power relies on churning through large swaths of continuously captured data for decision-making and innovation. A big part 3 of these data streams are generated in former colonial spaces or made sense of through the labor of non-Western subjects. Take, for example, the recent revelations about the much-acclaimed OpenAI ChatGPT public user interface, whose remarkable properties are in part due to the $2 per hour labor of Kenyan content moderators.3 Once the data grab has occurred under the auspices of data colonialism, the context of data the human stories and circumstances keeping it tethered to the social world- is irretrievably lost, and data is turned into a commodity to be bought and sold in the Big Data marketplace of AI Empire. This process of data commodification stands in direct contrast to what makes us human: our sociality. Sociality implies building and maintaining relationships, not just within but also across identities, generations, and species. The neatly packaged data bundles of unified depersonalized aggregate data in which any trace of intersubjectivity is erased is just another product in the hands of the data brokers responsible for what Lamdan calls "the Costcoization of data" (Lamdan, 2022). This is the idea that data, even in its most diverse forms, is so ubiquitous and easy to find in one-stop data shops that acquiring it is akin to going to a big-box store to purchase everything you need in one place. Following this convenient data acquisition process is the analysis step, which enables Al systems to make predictions and categorize objects or humans for the purpose of determining their role and place in the world. This includes racial profiling and even the inference of human sexuality. In this context, the Uyghur experience in China is more properly understood as biometric mass surveillance, an extreme yet growing type of biometric profiling. This describes the use of systems or technologies that collect, analyze, and/or generate data (including biometric data) on large numbers of people instead of limiting surveillance to individuals about which there is 'reasonable suspicion' of wrongdoing (De Hert and Bouchagiar, 2022). Various streams of personal data such as skin color, height, face scans, and voiceprints from street surveillance cameras, and recently also mandatory DNA samples, are all fed into government integrated joint operations platforms where they can be linked to people's national identification numbers to yield a unique and comprehensive personal profile (Xu et al., 2022). Similar human rights concerns have been raised with respect to the introduction of the Unique Identification Authority of India's (UIDAI) Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric surveillance system, which has been critiqued as embodying Hindutva and neoliberal ideology aimed at surveilling and controlling Muslim, caste-oppressed, Indigenous minorities such as Dalits and Adivasis (Prabhakar, 2020). The adoption of cutting-edge Al-powered technology for state management and control by non-Western countries is often cloaked in the language of tech-progress. A case in point is the United Nation's enthusiastic welcome of Zimbabwe and Kenya's decision to introduce biometric-based identification, described as "leapfrogging] outdated tools and progressing] to modern innovations" (Toesland, 2021).

Fundamental to such seizures is a lack of case law, which compounds existing confusion over the provenance of authorship, the role of human contributors in creating input data, and the degree to which generative AI outputs are original and transformative. A class action lawsuit filed against OpenAI in July 2023 rejects the idea that their ChatGPT model is capable of genuine novelty. ‘A large language model’s output is ... entirely and uniquely reliant on the material in its training dataset’, they reason.77 According to this view, OpenAI has made illegal use of copywritten material. The company’s response, in August 2023, situates the case around the science of inference. ‘As Plaintiffs acknow- ledge, the ability of digital software to [interpret user prompts and generate convincingly naturalistic text outputs] reflects a legitimate scientific advancement in the field of arti- ficial intelligence, which seeks to “simulate human reasoning and inference.”’78 This lawsuit captures aspects of the evolving character of animo nullius after the 2010s. Unlike in the mid-century, it is now corporations, alongside some researchers, who stand to benefit materially from equivocation over the perceived authority and intellectual genealogy that underwrites AI. OpenAI’s valuation fluctuates in line with this perception; at the time of going to press it is the most valuable start-up in America. Post-war IBM sought only outputs from AI, not its brand. Another difference is that debate over these scientific merits has shifted from labs and markets to courtrooms, too. That territories seized under terra nullius remain stolen today, centuries later, bears out how mis- interpretations of the past can calcify into law and prolonged settlement. Discerning publics – including judges, legislators and dispossessed authors – would be forgiven for assuming, naively, that the statistical ‘intelligence’ and ‘learning’ on display in post GPT-era systems derive from, say, the empirics of Darwin rather than, in my account, the contingent social order elaborated by Smith. What else would history suggest? Birch, who theorizes the rise of assetization in modern technoscience, characterizes this form of economic system as rentiership. Unlike with the valuation of a commodity, which is generally extinguished upon its consumption, ownership and control of an asset extend one’s rights to copies and derivatives, which adds scope for control and extraction. ‘No one can tell you how to wear a coat you have bought, but they can tell you how to use the copyrighted music or data they have sold you’, he writes.79 Animo nullius figures in rentiership economics because the value of an asset requires ‘active and ongoing organization, governance, and management ... it is not a passive process’.80 In my account, animo nullius animates AI’s value as an asset by granting those who invoke it an outwardly credible and durable (that is, historical) claim to the authority of a prestige metaphor. Data colonialism In my introduction, I cited Mejias and Couldry’s interest in how these emerging branches of capitalism intersect with data colonialism. I will end by offering three conjectural par- allels that emerge from my account. The first is an observable convergence between state and corporate interests over privatizing the costs of speculation (and initial seizures) amidst imperial expansion. State involvement is central to the durability of the extractive project outlined above because, per Birch, ‘assets are legal constructs, in that ownership and control rest on the state enforcement of property and control rights’.81 In Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert argues that the commodification, processing and global trade of cotton illuminate the mechanics of historical colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, wherein empires backed merchants and colonial corporations with military force to facilitate expansion.82 I suggest that the race to enclose the knowledge commons and assetize key analytical processes to the benefit of the global rentier class (and their respective nation states) helps to structure how data colonialism will shape capitalism in the era ahead. A second parallel, which puts tension on the first, is states’ backing of corporate self- governance and claims to the commons. State-backed corporate agency was decisive to the settler colonial project in ‘New England’, the land upon which, centuries later, AI would initially be developed at MIT. In that instance, the mechanics of self-governance in colonial corporations helped to prototype and, upon maturation, to stabilize and cohere America’s legislative independence from the British Empire.83 Possession via occupation succeeded wildly for the Puritans of New England, and for the Massachusetts Bay Company.84 Suggestive of a disanalogy with terra nullius, however, Birch notes that it is contract law rather than property rights that is central to the ownership of intangible assets such as machine-learning models.85 In any case, corporate self-governance is sure to remain an area of contestation as notions of sovereignty and power intersect with the global use of proprietary inference models across governments, universities, hospitals and other civic institutions. One final line of continuity concerns modes of capture. Analysing the relationship between terra nullius and historical colonialism, Buchan centres the role of subversive acts of ‘trafficking’, meaning the provision of gifts, favours and symbols of office that – as tokens of exchange – subtly coerced consent from Indigenous peoples that European colonists encountered to initiate trade relations. Over decades and centuries, these disingenuous relations reduced to modes of assimilation, subordination and then subjugation. While capture is already a concern in areas of AI critique, its relation to historiography and coloniality deserves particular attention.86 Indigenous scholars have shown how historiographical claims naturalize dispossession. Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, for instance, charts how colonizers narrativized Indigenous peoples as extinct in order to assert and mythologize their own sovereignty, ancestry and social order. Notably, Zoe Todd advances a similar critique of the history of science itself.87 Conclusion As with terra nullius, animo nullius threatens the commons with enclosure and private management. Both merit rebuke. In this paper, I have resituated histographies of AI in the his- tory of corporate colonial expansion to account for the fields’ imbrications in systems of power that prefigure its emergence in the mid-twentieth century. I have shown how, as far back as the 1950s, corporate efforts to incorporate digital media into mainstream knowledge practices (and, in doing so, to sell standardized computing infrastructures, from IBM to Microsoft) have intertwined with positivist interpretations of mind-as-computer metaphors as both literal and perpetually looming. Even when these overlaps were the products of opportunism by one side or the other, privatization appears to be the outcome. This speaks to the political economy within which AI was formed – significant elements of which are usually neglected by practitioners, historians and media commentary, however critical, on AI. For historians, the decision to characterize ‘AI’ as primarily a science of the mind, rather than a science of operations and adminis- tration, is, in my view, just that – a decision, and one that neglects the breadth of AI’s origins and helps blind us to its imbrications.

FSS’s undertheorization of racism and colonialism also produces inaccurate genealogies of (life) sciences and technologies, most strikingly regarding the so-called digital and molecular revolutions. FSS scholars of these revolutions purport to update Foucault for “the age of life as information” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 106) and to describe epochal breaks in scientific understandings of life, corresponding with an equally epochal shift from a biopolitics of scientific racism to a new post-racial form of biopolitics. However, they do so without any serious attention to Foucault’s post-colonial critics, or any serious inquiry into lines of continuity between White supremacist scientific racism and these digital and molecular ‘revolutions’. Thus for instance Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008, 273) argue that “biopolitics is critically dependent, epistemically and ontologically, on what the sciences of life say that species life is”. As such, “[i]n the molecular age life is no longer simply the life of population as Foucault documented... because molecular science has transformed what we understand a living thing to be” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008, 286). Dillon and Reid similarly claim to trace shifting notions of life. They assert that over the past five decades “the very ontology of biological life has shifted to the ground of ‘information’” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 22) and that distinctions between animate and inanimate, biological and non-biological “have been newly construed and problematized” (Dillon and Reid, 2009, 22). Though much of this is derivative of Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose’s work, attention to the digital and molecular has particular impacts in the international and security fields. According to Dillon and Reid (2009, 22), digital and molecular ‘reproblematizations’ of life have impacted the biopolitical strategies of liberal internationalism: “[t]he very space of enmity is itself re-problematized. Who is dangerous, what is dangerous, how things become dangerous are all transformed” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 107). This has apparently resulted in a shift from scientific racism to ‘new racism’ with an emphasis on cultural difference rather than biological hierarchies. FSS’s ability to examine how science has shaped the biopolitical strategies of security and liberal internationalism is limited by its persistent Eurocentrism and undertheorization of race. Societal notions of ‘life’ are treated as interchangeable with the life sciences’ supposedly post-racial understanding of life as generic data. This fails to engage with either the ingrained (settler) coloniality of technoscience or the stubborn (and institutionalized) 2 As well as those deemed Jewish under the racist Nuremberg ‘race’ laws. 13 persistence of broader structures of White supremacy and antiblackness. This has serious empirical implications. For instance, Dillon’s discussion of ‘new’ risk analysis and biometrics does not consider how these security technologies have been designed to police enslaved populations and surveille Black people (cf. Browne 2015), as part of a long-standing legacy of colonial techniques of ‘identity dominance’ (Bell 2013). Similarly, FSS discussions of the molecular fail to engage with the contemporary racial politics of genetic science (Duster 2003; Nelson 2016; TallBear 2013), how molecular life sciences were and are fueled by experimentation on the bodies of racialized and indigenous people (Dudley 2012; Mosby 2013; Washington 2006), including the movement of pharmaceutical clinical trials from US prisons to the Global South (Petryna 2009), or the neo-eugenic functions of genetic reproductive technologies (Roberts 2013) and related racialized economies of labour in the global surrogacy industry (Twine 2011), to name just a few examples. Instead, highly abstract formulations stand in for historically specific forms of power. Dillon and Reid write that “[p]ower is palimpsestuous. New forms and relations of power become superimposed on older ones. Previous relations and accounts of power are rubbed out but may not be entirely effaced” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 124). This statement comes with no serious empirical engagement with the persistence – and modulation – of scientific racism into the 21st century. Instead we are to believe that racism is now cultural, not scientific – and for that matter, that science isn’t cultural itself. The result is an e(race)sure (Moore 2012) of the ways that racialized subjects continue to always already signify violence that once again shores up the foundational White FSS mythology that everyone is (potentially) dangerous and therefore vulnerable to the punitive and/or lethal dimensions of liberal power. Ironically, FSS discussions of post-WWII biopolitical liberal internationalism thus reproduce, rather than challenge, the promise that liberal war will transcend the global colour line (Richter-Montpetit, 2014)/

When analyzing the complex role that warfare plays in our collective history, the role of biological warfare is often overlooked. Within the overwhelming instances of medical imperialism in human history, the protagonists in social explanations of colonial events are always human (Jansen, 2014). This is not to say that the historical and social analysis of colonialism necessarily ignores disease, agriculture, chemicals, or technology, but that these are 24 considered as “external” factors — nature, tools, obstacles, resources – whose role is essentially considered to be passive in the greater scheme of geopolitical conflict (Smithers, 2014). Yes, perhaps the Plasmodium falciparum that used the bodies of mosquitoes as a vehicle for infection during World War I simply interacted with the activities of their human agents, and nothing more. But they do, indeed, simultaneously make possible a variety of social and historical processes. Furthermore, advances in immunology show that human cells must actually cooperate with the bacteria that enters the body: immunity turns out to be a conversation between bodies and microbes. In this sense, disease becomes a relationship between pathogens and humans, and consequently, the trafficking of bacteria and other pathogens across land and oceans become political players in human history. This requires us to expand our definition of genocide, widening our understanding of the term to a greater interpretation of what harm and violence can look like. To do so, we must understand genocide as a sliding continuum that ranges from everyday practices to organized mass murder. There is a juxtaposition of our understanding of genocides — we often conceptualize them as singular events that are irrefutably intentional and violent (i.e the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, etc.) Though historical analyses of many colonial and imperial wars indicate that a more sinister end of this “sliding spectrum” exists. Biowarfare According to Norbert Finzsch, “historical phenomena which are commonly called genocides rest upon invisible everyday practices that do not appear on the radar of transgressions, forming different plateaus of a rhizomatic expansion, called settler imperialism” (Finzsch, 2008). Essentially, he makes a case that “low intensity” war against the indigenous populations through utilizing biological methods to drive away, decimate, or annihilate indigenous populations is still a form of organized method of warfare, but historical narratives tend to ignore or downplay their violence, as the violence can be attributed to “external” factors (i.e. pathogenic infections, environmental factors, innate immunity, etc.). Bio-power, which is a concept developed by Michel Foucault and later redefined by Giorgio Agamben, was first conceived as the type of kAnowledge that would help the maximization of life. Bio-power, Foucault argued, emerged initially with the movement towards improved health in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault stated, “Death was gradually ceasing to torment life so directly [...]. Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life [...]. For the first time in history no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention” (Foucault, 1978). This bio-power is not only exercised over the individual body, but also over the body of groups and larger communities, through the medical control of its vitality (e.g. reproduction, mortality, health, etc.) — that is to say legislative or governmental control, and regulation of populations. Thus, if we take into consideration the time period in which the initiation of bio-power is situated, bio-power simply becomes the continuation of war in relation to race – it includes the possibility of not only destroying a political foe, but also to destroy an adversary race as a whole. In Jansen’s anthropological model of biowarfare, human behavior can affect disease transmission in four areas: (a) exposure to the agent, (b) shedding of the disease agent from an infected human host, (c) creation of man-made habitats in which the transmission cycle can be completed, and (d) diffusion of the transmission system from one place to another. Historical findings indicate that the infection and the massacre of over 70% of the Native American population was instigated by the intentional weaponization of smallpox by European imperialists (Stearn, 1945). Although modern medicine was still in its infancy in the early 17th century, even with the limited knowledge of the time, it is reasonable to speculate that the European immigrants to the New World, and ultimately the Native Americans, understood that smallpox was a disease that could spread not only as a result of direct person-to-person contact, but also by clothing once worn by persons with smallpox. The use of biowarfare against indigenous populations is not unique to the colonization of the Americas, but has occurred throughout history in various parts of the world. The deliberate introduction of smallpox by British settlers to the Aboriginal population in Australia is one such example of the devastating impact of biowarfare on indigenous communities. This practice can be seen as an extension of colonialism's violent project to eliminate or subjugate “othered” populations. Such biowarfare can also be seen as a means of reducing the resistance of indigenous populations to other forms of exploitation and control. The use of biowarfare, therefore, can be seen as a deliberate tool of colonialism that reflects a larger system of oppression. Biopower, as theorized by Foucault and Agamben, operates not only on individual bodies but also on the collective health of populations. In the case of colonialism and biowarfare, this power is exerted to weaken, or eradicate the health and vitality of indigenous communities, making them more vulnerable to other forms of exploitation and control. The regulation and control of indigenous peoples' health is also a way for colonial powers to exert their dominance and reinforce their legitimacy as benevolent caretakers of “inferior” populations. In this sense, biopower can be seen as a means of perpetuating the larger system of oppression that colonialism 27 represents. In the 21st century, the disproportionate impact of antibiotic resistance on marginalized communities, including indigenous populations, highlights the ongoing legacy of colonialism and systemic oppression. Indigenous children in Canada are three times more likely to be infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria compared to non-indigenous children. This underscores the need to not only address the scientific and medical aspects of antibiotic resistance, but also the social and political factors that perpetuate health disparities. The impact of antibiotic resistance on marginalized communities is indicative of a larger system of oppression that has perpetuated health disparities for generations.

One of the core Foucauldian concepts that FSS develops is ‘biopolitics’. Yet the concept is not uncontroversial. Any assessment of its shortcomings must begin by admitting its virtues. As Foucault formulated it, ‘biopolitics’ powerfully challenged common sense understandings of liberalism as increasing human freedom. Foucault locates the origins of liberalism in the rise of capitalism, which required “political investment of the body” (Foucault 1977, 25) in order to “turn peasants into punctual, efficient industrial workers” (Aradau & Blanke 2010, 48, see also Scott 1999, 47-48). Instead of simply promoting “extractive-effects” on workers’ bodies, capitalism sought to produce “governing-effects” on the conduct of subjects (Scott 1999, 40, 51-52). As a result, with the formation of the administrative state from the late 16th to the 19th century, government focused on “controlling the mass of the population on its territory rather than controlling territoriality as such” (Jessop 2006, 37). Thus, according to Foucault, modern power came to intervene at the level of the individual human body (“anatomo-politics”) and at the level of the population as biological species (“biopolitics”) (Foucault 2003, 242-243). Foucault termed this novel technology of power biopower. To him, the shift away from sovereign power towards the seemingly benign modalities of biopower in fact gave rise to more insidious forms of governance. Foucault also challenged common sense understandings of liberal rule as domestically and internationally peaceful. In a widely cited passage, Foucault (1980, 137) wrote that with the shift to biopower, 4 wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who needs to be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity, massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men [sic] to be killed. Biopower casts enemies as threats to the health, wealth and wellbeing of the population (Foucault 2003, 256), and thus “the death of the other – that is, of those deemed dangerous, unfit, or diseased – will make life in general more healthy and pure” (Inda 2005, 16). The biopolitical logic that “[i]n order to live you must destroy your enemies” (Foucault 2003, 255) extends also to domestic sources of danger. Foucault thus argues that liberalism is predicated on the model of war, that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15). With the rise of biopower, war is no longer “a violent event ‘out there,’ but instead a vital presence permeating our everyday” (Nguyen 2012, xi). Likewise, the enemy is “no longer in a ‘military relationship of confrontation’ but in a ‘biological relationship’ to the life of the social body” (Medovoi 2007, 60). Foucault refers to this as social warfare (Foucault, 2003, 60; see also Jabri 2006; Howell 2014; Reid 2010). It is important to note that race and racism are not absent from Foucault’s thought (nor from FSS, as we will demonstrate). For Foucault, the sovereign decision over which life is to be protected and which is to be ‘rejected in death’ was fundamentally informed by racism. In a normalizing society, racism is “the break between what must live and what must die” and “the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Foucault 2003, 255-256). Society is defended through the improvement and regeneration of the race through such killing. Despite these strengths, Foucault’s narrative of the rise of modernity and the operations of modern power is undermined by his failure to deal with historically specific technologies of subjection centered on race. This led him not only to frequently overlook the ways in which certain subjects within Western liberal states are deemed incapable of self-regulation, making them ineligible for disciplinary or biopolitical governance, but also to two other key oversights. Foucault neglected the constitutive role of (settler) colonialism in the production of modernity, as well as the fundamental role of the Black or Savage Other in the ontological consolidation of Man or ‘the human’ necessary for biopower. As Black studies, post-colonial and critical race studies scholars have shown, Foucault’s account of the operations of modern power within Europe replicates White fantasies of a self-generating ‘Europe’ that uphold White innocence. Foucault seeks to account for how corporeal domination made possible capitalist accumulation, but his refusal to place “metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 4) means he cannot describe how (settler) colonial land theft, chattel slavery and indentured labour, and the related financial innovations around insurance and investment, produced the material conditions for the rise of capitalism (cf. Baucom 2005; Byrd 2011; Williams 1944). Foucault’s origin story for biopower remains sanitized of colonial domination and violence (Mignolo 2015, 107, see also da Silva 2015; Stoler 1995; Weheliye 2014a; Wynter 2003). As a result, while Foucault acknowledged a racial economy of life to be protected versus life to be 5 eliminated, he could only see race as a sorting process after the fact of the establishment of biopower. In contrast, Black, Indigenous, Decolonial and Postcolonial studies scholars have pointed out that racism is fundamental to the idea of the human that formed the basis for biopower. People indigenous to the Americas and the African continent not only supplied unpaid land and labour, but also acted as foils against which the meaning of ‘humanity’ emerged (Wynter 2003, 291; see also Byrd 2011; da Silva 2007; Hartman 1997; Spillers 1987; Wilderson 2010). Racist, colonial discourses constructed Europeans as racially ‘pure’ and cast Black people as the “bottom marker” of a “human scale of being” (Wynter 2003, 308- 309). Racial chattel slavery should be acknowledged as “infinitely more severe than exploitation and alienation” (Wilderson 2010, 9) since the Master/Slave relationship is not ‘simply’ characterized by theft of labour but by fungibility and gratuitous (not merely instrumental) violence (Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010). In sum, the Middle Passage turned people from the African continent into things. Ontologically speaking, the slave is socially dead, mere flesh and thus structurally defined out of subjectivity (Patterson 1982, Spillers 2003, Wilderson 2010; in IR, see Agathangelou 2010b, Richter-Montpetit 2014a, 2014b). The significance of this is not merely that some racialized subjects are deemed ineligible for biopolitics and thus subject to gratuitous, sovereign or necropolitical violence. Rather, it is that the political ontology of ‘humanity’ that sits at the core of the birth of biopower is “parasitic on the Black” (Wilderson 2010, 22). Foucault’s oversight in this regard is not only to misconstrue the history of biopower, but also its present expressions. These dynamics are not merely a thing of the past. Rather, racial chattel slavery animated “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone” (Hartman 2007, 6). In this context, Foucault’s reliance on the idea of an unspecified (White) body (Holland 2012, 11) or ‘human’ limits his ability to analyse, not only the colonial sphere, but also the internal power dynamics of the West. Foucault influentially claimed that, under biopolitics, torture and spectacular corporeal punishment had become superfluous. However, state practices of violent cruelty, including in public, remain critical to the production and management of populations deemed to lie outside the category of ‘human’ and the reach of rehabilitation. In particular, when dealing with (racialized, colonized, sub-human) populations subjected to detention or incarceration, state-administered spectacular forms of corporeal punishment, such as police beatings, rape, shock treatments, and death row, remain common (James 1996, 34; as cited in Rodríguez 2006, 160; see also Ben-Moshe 2014; Davis 2002; Gilmore 2007; James 1998, 2000, 2007; Khalili 2012; Nadesan 2008; Puar 2017; Richter-Montpetit 2014b; Tanis et al, 2018; Rodríguez 2006, 2007; Vargas and Alves 2013; Wadiwel 2017). It is precisely Foucault’s bracketing of the racial constitution of the human that made it possible for him to sanitize state repression in his account of modern biopower (James 1996, 28). Foucault’s failure to engage with these histories cannot be dismissed as mere oversight. As Heiner (2007) has traced, significant elements of Foucault’s reconceptualization of modern power came out of his anti-prison activism and engagement with the Black Panther Party 6 (BPP). BPP political thought described the US domestic social fabric as shot through with inter-national relations of war. Conceptualizing the US state’s relationship to Black people as one of internal colonialism (“a stolen people on stolen land”), the BPP theorized the concomitant continuities between politics and war for Black people and the central role of the prison in this White supremacist order. The writings and speeches of Angela Davis, George Jackson and Huey P. Newton led Foucault towards conceptualizing power through the analytic of war. Yet Foucault failed to ever cite or make explicit reference to the BPP in his published works (Heiner 2007, 343). In sum, while racism and colonialism are not absent in Foucault’s work on biopolitics and war, he fails to comprehend “the colonial global” (Bhambra 2013, 309) - the entwined, constitutive relations between social, political and economic processes and actors in Europe and the colonies, and the concomitant fundamental raciality and coloniality of the modern subject. He whitewashes not only the role of racial-sexual terror, plunder and occupation in the making of ‘modernity/coloniality’ (Quijano 2000), but also the stubborn persistence of racialized relations in the postcolonial/settler colonial present. Foucault’s Eurocentrism is not incidental to ‘biopolitics’, and cannot be remedied by adding colonial or racialized subjects. Foucault’s reliance on an unspecified human as the object of biopolitics causes him to fundamentally misapprehend the constitutive and continuing role of genocide and enslavement in modernity/coloniality. We turn now to an assessment of whether these problems are overcome or replicated in the FSS literature on liberal war.

The term “treadmill of militarism” reflects our debt to the treadmill of production for drawing attention to expansionary dynamics that result in the creation and deposition of toxins in the environment. But this terminology also reflects the specificity of the phenomena we examine and the importance of looking beyond capitalism and markets (including those markets distorted by institutional racism) to understand the full range of environmental inequality. Militarism and coercion have played a pivotal role in all aspects of the Native American experience. With regards to environmental inequality, the treadmill of militarism – like the military-industrial complex – is marked by the influence of geopolitics in the spatial distribution of environmental “bads.” This type of environmental inequality is also marked by a coercive (and often racist) state through which vulnerable populations are forced to live in proximity to dangerous facilities. Erik O. Wright provides an insightful discussion of non-economic forms of oppression: In the case of nonexploitive oppression, the oppressors would be happy if the oppressed simply disappeared. Life would have been much easier for the European settlers in North America if the continent had been uninhabited by people. Genocide is thus always a potential strategy for nonexploitive oppressors…. The contrast between North America and South Africa in the treatment of indigenous peoples reflects this difference poignantly: in North America, where the indigenous people were oppressed (by virtue of being coercively displaced from the land) but not exploited, genocide was the basic 24 policy of social control in the face of resistance; in South Africa, where the European settler population heavily depended upon African labor for its own prosperity, this was not an option (Wright 1997: 11-12). It is not only the case that exploitation was not the dominant form of oppression, but the areas in which Native Americans are concentrated is characterized by relatively low levels of economic activity and relatively few employment opportunities. For those emphasizing the treadmill of production, the state does not directly benefit from environmental inequality; but it promotes regional growth (Szasz and Meuser 2000) and the profitability of large corporations (Pellow 2000). For Pellow (2000: 594), this facilitative role has become pronounced in recent years, accelerated by globalization. However, the actions that concern us preceded this recent wave of globalization and were not pursued for the sake of corporate profitability. During a time of war, the state exercises expansive property rights and uses these powers to acquire land and other resources. Military bases were built and operated in the name of national security; national security planners were concerned with strategic planning and with the secrecy and security of military operations (Hooks 1994a). Over the first 150 years of its existence, the United States was exceptional among the world’s leading powers because the “backbone of the American army was a locally based militia system” (Skowronek 1982: 86). Its standing army and professional officer corps were modest when compared to the European powers of the 19th Century. However, the demographic, technological, and logistical advantages enjoyed by the United States -- coupled with the devastating impact of Old World diseases -- overwhelmed Native American resistance as the nation expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific (Diamond 1999). “It is generally supposed that the American ideal is peace. But 25 unfortunately for this high-school classic, the U.S. Army, since 1776, has filched more square miles of the earth by sheer military conquest than any army in the world, except only that of Great Britain” (Fortune Magazine in Mills 1956: 177). Even if the military was less professionalized than the great powers of Europe, through a succession of 19th Century wars, the United States exerted its claim over the lands of North America. Native American peoples were forcibly relocated to much smaller – and in the eyes of European-Americans – unattractive (if not useless) tracts of land. In their study of Silicon Valley, Szasz and Meuser (2000) emphasize the inexorability of economic growth and resulting ecological harm. In the 19th Century, the westward expansion of the United States – and the accompanying displacement of Native American peoples – was also inexorable. While capitalism contributed to this expansion, the conquest of North America was propelled by demographic and geopolitical dynamics. This expansion was in large measure a statist project to prevent a geopolitical threat to the young nation’s west. That is, the United States was very concerned that a European power would conquer and control the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains and subsequently west of the Mississippi River. In the 20th Century, the military’s claims on economic and natural resources grew exponentially – as did the lands that were damaged by military activities (Jacob 1992; Shulman 1992). As the United States ascended to a position of international military hegemony, the inexorability of military expansion was driven by geopolitical competition and arms races – not the voraciousness of capitalism. As it fought two global wars, the United States built and maintained a military force of unmatched potency. The expanse of lands controlled by the military and the intensity of the land use (i.e., the 26 destructiveness of materials stored and deployed on these lands) increased sharply. For example, in 1940 as the nation began to mobilize for World War II, President Roosevelt created with the stroke of his pen the single largest gunnery range in the world (Loomis 1993). Originally known as the Las Vegas Bomber and Gunnery Range, now known as Nellis Range, this gunnery range measured 3.5 million acres. This history of military expansion illustrates the idea that different ethnic groups experience different types of environmental inequality (Getches and Pellow 2002). Native Americans as a byproduct of the treadmill of militarism experience the impacts of extraction of natural resources while also the testing and storage of the weapons those natural resources built. In a strange paradox then, Native Americans experience both the front end (extraction) and the back end (weapons testing, storage) of these environmental hazards (Pellow 2000). Further exhibiting the uniqueness of the Native American experience with respect to the military is the fact that Native Americans are the only minority population affected by environmental inequality in the United States with a claim of sovereignty. Though the history of this tribal sovereignty is inconsistent (Fredericks III 1999) it can largely be described as one of “dependent sovereignty” (Krakoff 2002). This adds another layer to our conception of how environmental inequality affects Native Americans as on many occasions coercion superceded legal treaties in the spatial distribution of Native Americans

What sounds absurd at first glance is quite plausible. From 1944 onward, the U.S. government mined uranium on the Navajo reservation in the state of Nevada as part of the military's Manhattan Project. The sole purpose: the development and construction of the atomic bomb. Mining continued during the Cold War. Nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from 500 mines. The workers were majority Navajo, and there wasn’t even the slightest protection against radioactivity. The nuclear bomb tests took place at the Nevada National Security Site. From 1951 to 1992, over a thousand nuclear weapons were detonated here. The wind carried the fallout primarily into the Navajo settlement area. On July 16, 1979, a serious accident occurred at a uranium mill near Church Rock on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. As a result of a dam failure, more than a thousand tons of solid radioactive material and 360 million liters of highly toxic wastewater spilled into the Puerco River, spreading over a vast area and entering the groundwater. Residents of the reservation were not informed about the life-threatening contamination of their drinking water for days. The incident is considered the most serious civilian nuclear accident in U.S. history because of the amount of radioactivity released – significantly worse than the meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor four months earlier, which drew much more public attention. The encryption codes did in fact originate on the reservation as well. The Americans used Navajo as a secret language during the Pacific War against the Japanese beginning in 1942. It is considered one of the most difficult languages of all. Navajo is not related to any European language, and follows completely different rules. For an outsider, even for other Native Americans, it can be learned only with great effort. Military research in 1942 revealed that there were only 28 non-Navajo who spoke the language (mostly missionaries and ethnologists), and that there were no Japanese nor Germans among this small population. The so-called code talkers – all Navajo – translated the military radio messages from English to Navajo, and on the other end of the line they translated the information back. The Japanese were never able to crack the code. Thus, Neztsosie is quite correct in emphasizing the central role of the Navajo reservation in World War II. However, this role has brought nothing to the people there. The Navajo were not thanked for their encryption services until 2001, when they received a Congressional Gold Medal. Worse than this belated recognition, however, were the consequences of three decades of radioactive exposure – due to uranium mining, nuclear bomb testing and the Church Rock accident. Water on the Navajo reservation contained an average of 90 micrograms of uranium per liter when last measured in 2012. In some areas, the value rises to 700 micrograms. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers anything more than 30 micrograms to be harmful to health. This is why an above-average number of Navajo suffer from radiation sickness. For example, the rate of end-stage renal disease among Navajo is 0.63%, while the national average is 0.19%. Similarly excessive levels of various types of cancer and respiratory diseases have also been observed. Neztsosie, a former farrier, is a living example. He is suffering from advanced gastric cancer. When he began radiation and chemotherapy last year, doctors estimated he had three months to live. In the past, he and his family used the water from the nearby stream. Since they now know how contaminated the water still is, they today have to buy water in Cameron and transport it home by car. One-third of Navajo lack access to running water, 67 times the U.S. average. Therefore, they often turn to open, contaminated waters. Neztsosie’s father worked in the mines, but without a contract. As a result, he was never entitled to a pension or compensation. His mother suffered five miscarriages. Most of his siblings and other relatives died early. His wife also died 15 years ago. «Probably the only reason I got this old is because I went to boarding school in Tuba City when I was a kid,» Neztsosie says. He remembers that during the rainy season, the uranium pits would fill with water and children would bathe in it. At least he only did that when he was at home on vacation. His sister Lula’s wooden house is full of cracks, with water dripping through the roof. Years ago, Neztsosie and she built a new stone house nearby. But later it turned out that the sand they had used for the wall was radioactively contaminated. The beautiful house is uninhabitable. The siblings used to keep livestock, but they were told it was dangerous to consume the animals’ milk and meat. Now they just have a small garden and an old horse. «When we pointed out all the illnesses and deaths to a doctor many years ago, he said it was because of ‹inbreeding among the Indians,›» Netzsosie says. In the early 1990s, he met his wife, a lawyer, who alerted him to the radioactive contamination. «Until then, neither the U.S. government nor the Navajo administration had told us about the dangers,» he says. He then informed his relatives and they took precautions. The day after our interview, an assembly is held at Cameron’s school. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and El Paso Natural Gas, the company responsible for uranium mining, are inviting local residents to discuss the future of the abandoned CH12 mine. Uranium was mined here between 1953 and 1961. In the 1990s, the open pit was filled with the contaminated debris from the surrounding area, the whole thing was covered with earth, and the zone was fenced. Nevertheless, radioactivity is still escaping. The meeting is about how to deal with the area in the future: Should the pit be sealed according to modern standards, and the radioactive material transported to a repository outside the reservation? Or should it be left as it is. Only seven interested people come. Priscilla Tom, a Navajo who works for the EPA, is disappointed. «You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,» she says. However, she also expresses understanding for the lack of interest: «These issues have been discussed for half a century,» she says. The organizers have prepared a detailed presentation. However, the attendees only rarely refer to the future of CH12 in their questions. Rather, they express their deep frustration. «Why has no one been interested in our fate for decades?» one woman asks. Indeed, the political process has been slow. As early as 1951, the U. S. Public Health Service examined Navajo miners without their knowledge, and found serious health problems. Nevertheless, the working conditions hardly changed at all. Only after many lawsuits, newspaper articles and unsuccessful political efforts did Congress pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, which provided compensation for former miners. However, the bureaucratic hurdles were high, and again led to protests. In 2000, the formal requirements were changed as a result, but the reform didn’t come into force until 2018. Efforts to make the former mines safe also remain ongoing. According to the EPA, evaluations and cleanups at 219 out of a total of 523 mines began only in 2019. In October 2021, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights agreed to hear a lawsuit filed by the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining, a nongovernmental organization that alleges the U.S. government has violated Navajo human rights. The fence can’t stop contamination At the former CH12 mine, a sign on the chain-link fence warns of radioactive contamination. A hundred meters away is a sweat lodge (a kind of ritual sauna), with a courtyard a little further on. Old rusted cars, scrap metal and tires are scattered around the property, and dogs are barking. This is where 51-year-old Samuel Spencer lives. He also grew up in this house. «As kids, we played in the open pit,» he says. «Today, everyone here suffers from asthma.» In the past, his animals would have grazed here, but now almost nothing grows. He still uses the sweat lodge, though. His mother, 75-year-old Fayt Spencer, lives nearby, along with two grandchildren. «Mother Earth is badly wounded,» she says. «Why did they build a fence? The poison has long been everywhere, and the fence can’t stop the wind either.» Because there isn’t any electricity, she has to start the generator in the evening. But fuel is expensive, she says. «They mined uranium here for the atomic bomb, but we don’t even have enough energy left to turn on a light,» she says. Why didn’t she go to the meeting? «There’s so much pain here. I don’t feel like those meetings anymore,» she says. «What’s the point?» Has she never thought about moving away? «There’s no point, it’s the same everywhere,» she says. However, some residents acknowledge that the Navajo administration also imposes high hurdles for relocation. May Franklin, 64, who also lives in the area, says: «My father died when I was young. He shoveled uranium ore onto a truck and hauled it with his bare hands – no mouth guard, no gloves.» She and her husband couldn’t have children. «We live in an empty nest,» she says. Franklin notes that many young people, especially well-educated ones, are moving off the reservation. «There is too little work and too few houses. Often, three generations live under one roof.» She says people can be in touch with the world via the internet from here. However, the Navajo traditionally didn't live in villages, but on farms that were far apart, she says. That is too boring for many young people, she adds. The wounds won’t heal In truth, some help is available. In Tuba City, the largest city on the Navajo reservation, there is a hospital with a cancer unit and two oncologists. Chemotherapy is also done there. «But many, especially in the countryside, don’t even know about the hospital or don’t dare go,» says one nurse. After a puzzled follow-up question, she adds: «The level of education is often very low.» Associated with the hospital is the Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program (RESEP), based on the Compensation Act (RECA). Affected persons or relatives of radiation victims can claim damages of $50,000 to $100,000 here. To date, approximately 39,000 applications have been approved and a total of more than $2.5 billion has been disbursed. But maybe it just took too long for something to finally happen. «Action should have been taken much sooner,» says Fayt Spencer. «The wounds will never heal.»

In World War II–era Hawai‘i, the medical care and surveillance of individual bodies, indeed “life” itself, was not only a biological resource but also a nationalist metaphor for military security. Biomedical discourses of health and immunity empowered, and were empowered by, Manichaean wartime logics of “the familiar and the foreign” and “good versus evil.”21 In spring 1942 the Office of the Military Governor mandated a compulsory immunization program that required all civilians (other than infants and the elderly) in Hawai‘i to be vaccinated against smallpox, typhoid, and paratyphoid fevers.22 Harriet Kuwamoto, a public health nurse who administered typhoid immunizations, recalls receiving supplies such as syringes, needles, and vaccine from the US military, and conducting vaccinations alongside volunteers, military members, and other nurses in the health department basement, a process she estimated took months to complete.23 By August, over 90 percent of the target population had been immunized, and during the war, at least 363,000 civilians were immunized out of Hawai‘i’s total population, which grew from about 424,000 to 500,000.24 In 1943 the military government made vaccination for diphtheria mandatory for children, and it required booster shots in 1944.25 The Board of Health also worked to combat venereal disease, the bubonic plague, tetanus, and dengue fever. Vaccines for the bubonic plague and tetanus were recommended but not mandatory.26 The military government considered the security and productivity of the military base in the islands to be fundamentally reliant on the health of local civilians, defense workers, and soldiers. It chose smallpox and typhoid as the mandatory immunizations because they were the most common “war diseases.”27 Mandatory immunization, then, was employed not simply to decrease death and disease but to cultivate the highest level of life in all its capacities within the population. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hawai‘i, the Board of Health established racially exclusionary medical programs, such as the Kalaupapa leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka‘i, and the quarantine and disastrous “controlled burning” of Honolulu’s Chinatown.28 In particular, the practice of forcibly sending leprosy patients, the majority of whom were Native Hawaiian, to the Kalaupapa settlement is an example of how colonial health policies that claimed to “protect” or “rehabilitate” Indigenous people also worked to displace and eliminate them. Yet Native Hawaiians have always resisted these projects: leprosy patients exercised autonomy over their health practices by refusing to separate from family members, protesting against the Board of Health, voting in Hawai‘i’s elections, and even by using physical force.29 Moreover, we continue to see traces of these carceral health policies during World War II. Under martial law, the military government asserted, “for the protection of the public health and safety. . . . Hawaii must be viewed as an isolated and congested stockade, crammed with a half million men, women, and children.”30 This characterization of Hawai‘i as a “stockade” that sequestered its inhabitants in order to protect them again combined logics of detention and medical security, and this time incorporated the entirety of the islands out of military necessity. During World War II, the pressures of wartime mobilization against the “racist states” of Germany and Japan required the United States to employ a wartime “antiracism,” which in Hawai‘i promoted the participation of all civilians, the majority of whom were nonwhite. Military policies proclaimed liberal inclusion even as they continued the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups. While General Emmons called for racial tolerance at the start of the war, the military government still compelled Japanese and Japanese Americans to demonstrate loyalty: “The Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and various Caucasian people caused no concern. . . . The big question mark were the Japanese . . . poorly assimilated into our western civilization.”31 Provisional wartime racial liberalism strengthened the code of white patriotism as a regulatory power through regimes of health that bifurcated the population into “good subjects” who complied and un-American “others” who refused. These projects created an asymptotic horizon of possibility for inclusion that demanded assimilation without addressing inequalities created by past and present racial violences. Furthermore, the military government’s provisional racial liberalism still relied on spaces of racial exclusion and imprisonment: during the war, Hawai‘i’s only quarantine center was converted into an internment camp that segregated Japanese and Caucasian internees, thus concretizing the imbricated logics of race, health, and military security.

The analytic of militarism requires first a focus on the United States as produced through settler colonialism (Morgensen 2011; Smith 2012; Hixson 2013; Veracini 2013). A. Bonds and Inwood (2015) explained settler colonialism as a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. This includes the removal of Native peoples and geographies of indentured servitude, slavery, sharecropping, and, more contemporarily, urban abandonment and practices of mass imprisonment. Settler colonialism, therefore, emphasizes the ongoing processes of racialized capital accumulation and displacement necessary to sustain the permanent occupation of a territory. In this sense, it is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state (Wolfe 2006). Because of the constant reworking of social and political economic hierarchies necessary to sustain settler relations, this sociospatial dialectic is central to understanding how particular place-based configurations of race, class, ethnicity, and gender come to predominate in the United States (for a broader discussion see S. Hall 1996; Gilmore 1999; A. Bonds and Inwood 2015). According to Smith (2012), settler colonialism is sustained by three primary logics that enshrine white supremacy. The first of these logics is that of slavery, which is usually premised on the enslavement of black people, the devaluation of black life, and the racialized political economy established through this system. Rather than being located in the past, the logic of slavery mutates and mobilizes across time and space, systematized through various structures of social control that dispossess and retain black bodies as permanent property of the state. This logic connects slavery, sharecropping, welfare programs, and mass imprisonment (Smith 2012). The logic of slavery rationalizes racial exploitation and is the cornerstone for the very notion of private property. As Harris (1993) argued, “The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination” (1734) that is connected to slavery and gives rise to a very specific form of U.S.-style political economy built on and through the subordination of persons of color. Thus, slavery introduces into the life of the nation the routine and naturalized “statesanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” that is the heart of U.S.-style racism (Gilmore 2007, 28). The associated practices and systems not only justify death as the “collateral consequences” of U.S. development, but they undergird the social and premature death of structural racism (Gilmore 2007). A second and interconnected logic is genocide, premised on the ongoing disappearance of indigenous peoples in support of the appropriation and privatization of indigenous lands (Smith 2012). Genocide sustains a spatial politics of erasure and exclusion, institutionalized by state practices that justify indigenous removal and settler land claims. The practices of genocide are animated by and through logics of private property that connect geographies of indigenous disappearance with labor systems meant to make the land productive. Finally, a third pillar is orientalism, grounded in the belief of the inferiority and threatening menace of non-Western nations and peoples (Smith 2012).1 This introduces into the United States a state of permanent warfare in which the nation is consistently besieged by enemies (externally and internally); as a consequence, there is a constant need to protect “the well-being of empire” (Smith 2012, 69). The foundational rationales of slavery, genocide, and orientalism contour the white supremacist settler state: The founding moments of US nationalism [meaning the social and cultural identity of the nation] are foundational to both state and culture. The US was conceived in slavery and christened by genocide. These early practices established high expectations of state aggression against enemies of the national purpose and that valorized armed men in uniform as the nation’s true sacrificial subjects. (Gilmore 2002, 20) These logics are reformulated and continue to take shape in an era of ostensible color-blindness predominated by official discourses and government commitments to racial equality. Even as overt racism is eschewed, taken for granted socioeconomic hierarchies, racial exploitation, and the redistribution of wealth reproduce and sustain white supremacy. The U.S. settler state internalizes a “righteous violence” predicated on an expanding “quest for total security” that has come to characterize domestic and foreign policy (Hixson 2013, 198). Although there are myriad ways to explore the interrelations between state-sanctioned violence and militarism, we find the connections between domestic policing and the U.S. military-industrial complex to be particularly illustrative. Kraska and Cubellis (1997) noted that there is a long history of collusion between the military and police departments in the United States and the military paradigm is an important organizing principle within the development of modern policing practices, organization, and tactics (e.g., Bittner 1970; Manning 1977; Enloe 1980; A. Hall and Coyne 2012). These practices took on added significance during the latter half of the twentieth century as U.S. cities faced increased pressure to “get tough on crime” and as local police departments developed specially trained tactical teams, commonly referred to as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (Kraska and Cubellis 1997). The interactions between the military and domestic police practices intensified yet again during the “war on drugs” and in a post–11 September 2001 world where domestic terror concerns have fueled the explosive growth of military and police cooperation (A. Hall and Coyne 2012). Although ostensibly unconnected to questions of race and economic inequality, militarism is fundamentally linked to structural violences of poverty and social difference (Loyd 2009, 2014), and the pursuit of total security connects settler state militarism across scales, legitimating the expansion and protection of the nation-state, the policing of its borders and communities, and internal and external monitoring and surveillance in the name of defense. Securing the white supremacist settler state relies on racial, gender, and class hierarchies that enable the coherence of an imagined nation with clearly marked inclusions and exclusions. That is, the targeted and widespread violence that characterizes the U.S. settler state—seen in everything from the genocide directed toward Native peoples to the criminalization of communities of color—depends on and reinforces discursive constructions that demonize those who stand in the way of the settler state and, more often than not, culminates in national campaigns against those beyond the scope of U.S. settler state justice. The indiscriminate killing associated with this kind of violence is easily dismissed as an unfortunate consequence of war (Hixson 2013). U.S. interventionism relies on a “defensive solidarity ... built on the institution of slavery and the racialization of Blackness” that reaffirms white supremacist cultural identity by managing both internal and external threats (Loyd 2009, 406). These practices continue even after the settler state has displaced and “removed” native peoples who had previously occupied the land, creating political landscapes with an aggressive propensity for violence (Veracini 2010). This understanding of the United States as a settler state is significant for theorizing militarism, we argue, because it situates the persistent violences of genocide and slavery as enduring structures shaping social and political economic relations. Rather than being projects of the past, settler practices are central to the continued development and futurity of the United States. A settler colonial perspective disrupts the spatial imaginaries of war by emphasizing the ongoing racialized violence necessary to secure contested, although taken for granted, homelands in settler nations. Moreover, it connects the indiscriminate violence stretching from U.S. settler colonial history to contemporary military engagements (Hixson 2013). As Blackhawk and Apache helicopters swoop and attack and Tomahawk cruise missiles explode, and as U.S. Special Forces head into “Indian country” to search and destroy the enemy, the ramifications and taken for granted sensibilities of settler geographies become all too clear (Hixson 2013, 198). Hixson (2013) further clarified, “American settler colonialism is a winnertakes-all proposition that demanded the removal of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures,” and these geographies have “profound consequences for national identity and subsequent foreign policy” (197). The settler state is premised on permanent war, inscribing militarism and violence into everyday geographies and naturalizing racialized power hierarchies and the dispossession and erasure of racialized bodies.

When discussing space exploration and travel today, two concerns are often raised: its environmental cost, and who should or will benefit from it. These are both sensible concerns. Our current age of space exploration is characterised by a ‘space race’ between billionaires Bezos, Branson, and Musk, and primarily those who have been able to take advantage of space technologies and tourism have been either wealthy, celebrities, or wealthy celebrities. While government-funded agencies like NASA are still active—in particular, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission recently became the first to land on the south pole of the moon—there are concerns that the benefits of space travel will be distributed among the wealthy, and the costs among those who are not. Furthermore, in light of the current climate crisis, it is concerning that space travel can have between 550 to 1300 times the impact of an average person’s yearly climate impact per launch. While space institutions like Space Scotland are certainly aware of this and work to mitigate their impact, just as there are programmes aiming to democratise the space industry, most approaches in the space sector to these two issues ignore a crucial factor that ties them together: the legacy of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is characterised by the wholesale destruction of previous ecosystems and cultures to make way for the settlers’ own. This encompasses both the eviction of other humans from an area as well as physical changes made to the natural environment itself, such as settlers introducing foreign species in order to colonise and shape the environment into something familiar to them. Such an attitude frames a space not as a living thing to be respected, but as a resource to be exploited, which is the fundamental view of settler colonialism, towards people, land, and ecosystems alike. In contrast, while they cannot be generalised into one philosophy, many Indigenous cultures historically had a more sustainable relationship with the natural world around them, characterised by the understanding that living things are worthy of respect and that humans have a responsibility to respect them, in order to maintain a stable, sustainable lifestyle. Settler colonialism is a dominant paradigm in Western philosophy dating back to the Enlightenment; today, we still observe a false dichotomy between humans and nature in which nature is inferior and humans should be free to shape and use it at will. This article will touch on two crucial ways this shapes space exploration: its attitude towards new environments, and how it disadvantages historical targets of colonialism further. Whether or not space counts as an environment has been hotly debated in academia. Arguments against the classification are that it is not a closed system the same way Earth is, but infinite, so there is no concern around polluting it; it is abiotic and hosts no life, and therefore of little worth; and that it does not seem like any other intelligent life is interested in our solar system, so there is nothing stopping us from exploiting it. These arguments are primarily geared towards justifying its exploitation and pollution—both attitudes seen historically in humans’ exploitation of nature. On the other hand, arguments in favour of considering space an environment address this. Not only does the word ‘environment’ immediately raise ethical questions which restrain us from causing unnecessary damage, either intentionally or ignorantly, but treating space as one reminds us of multiple stakes and interests in it from across the global, helping to emphasise a shared stake and responsibility in it. Likewise, our limited reach in space means that any action we take has the risk of impacting Earth (as will be shown later), so space is hardly a closed system in such close quarters. And, finally, space still has inherent value, even if it cannot support or be used by humans. Furthermore, from an academic perspective, framing space as an extreme environment, like how we view the Antarctic, provides a window into researching its history, from how the challenge of the extreme environment limited exploration to how exploration in other such environments produced knowledge useful for this challenge. (NASA have researched historical examples of polar exploration, such as the 1897 expedition of the Belgica, which spent a winter in Antarctica, with the anticipation that issues such as the explorers’ relationship with food, sunlight, and their crewmates could be comparable to that of what astronauts undergo). As such, considering space as an environment contextualises space travel within the long history of achievements in exploration and enables it to draw on those experiences. But it also shows how it is characterised by the same exploitative urge that these achievements, and all of settler colonialism, were. It makes sense that current ideas of space exploration share roots with colonial ideas: much of the original imaginings of space exploration came from European and American science fiction during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the height of Empire. Benjamin Goossen, in his examination of global astroculture, argues that the current Space Age is inherently European in its thinking despite Europe’s lacklustre involvement, due to the European science fiction literature that shaped its imagination. Even the original Star Trek series, a classic of science fiction and (rightly) recognised as enormously progressive for its time, had a distinctly ‘civilising’ theme in how the crew of the Enterprise interacted with new cultures—which makes perfect sense considering it was inspired by an earlier TV series, Wagon Train, about American settlers travelling west. Once observed, these themes are difficult to miss, especially when a common aim of space travel is to reach and colonise Mars. Not only is the popularity of moving to Mars largely due to fears around the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to the climate crisis caused by settler colonialism’s exploitation of nature, terraforming Mars to make it fit for human habitation is born of the priorities of settler colonialism. The project is literally called the colonisation of Mars. As discussed, such attitudes towards space justify themselves with the argument that space—and Mars—are currently lifeless, therefore no harm will be done by this. But not only does my earlier point that space has inherent value still stand, we do not know if there is life in space. Our ignorance could cause devastation. Furthermore, it is impossible to ignore the ongoing violence of settler colonialism against Indigenous communities themselves, and how the space industry reflects this today. This is because, as mentioned earlier, the primary benefits of space exploration are enjoyed by those who are already wealthy. Patterns of discrimination mean Indigenous communities are not among these people. However, it is also reflected in the literal fallout of space exploration: orbital debris. There are enormous amounts of debris in near-earth orbit. NASA estimates over 25,000 pieces are larger than ten centimetres, and approximately 500,000 pieces between one and ten centimetres. This has been a concern since the first satellites were launched in the 1950s, as debris can collide with and damage satellites and other orbital objects, potentially cascading until entire orbit areas are entirely impassable due to its density. In fact, debris is often created because of the perception that space is not an environment, but rather unchanging and static, which means that unanticipated stormy space weather, solar maximums, the expansion and retraction of Earth’s atmosphere, and high ultraviolet emissions cause wear and tear on satellites until pieces break off. In many cases, defunct and destroyed pieces of satellites will fall back to Earth—and they rarely fall on the people that produced them. In 1960, hundreds of Cubans and seven cows protested at the US Embassy in Havana after American space debris crashed in a cow field. Likewise, in 1972 a farmer from Aotearoa (New Zealand) had his crops burnt when sphere of titanium alloy made by the Soviets crashed on his field, and the local police shut it in jail after considering if it might be radioactive. But a crucial example of the legacy of settler colonialism in the impact of space debris is that of Cosmos 954 in 1978, a Soviet reconnaissance satellite that fell in Arctic Canada, close to where First Nations communities lived. It scattered radioactive debris across the landscape before landing, thus impacting the ecosystem that the local people relied on for food and clothing. The Canadian authorities’ cleanup response, though admittedly limited by the Arctic terrain, was lacklustre. Concerns have been raised since then that far less effort was put in because those impacted were primarily First Nations communities. Little attention was given to translating the threat to the communities, who did not have a concept of ‘radioactivity’ in their language; instead, the fact that their food might be dangerous to consume was inadequately explained in a way that caused panic. As such, space exploration is not only predicated on the same ideas behind settler colonialism, but also perpetuates the injustices and inequalities created by past settler colonialism, in that communities historically prejudiced against bear the brunt of the costs and enjoy few of the benefits. The increasing awareness of space exploration’s issues with sustainability and equality, therefore, is an excellent shift in the sector’s thinking. But the link between the two issues is rarely articulated. Indeed, these they are simply the symptoms of a much larger philosophical approach towards space and exploration that draws on a long history that built the world as we know it today. Specifically, the extractive, exploitative thought behind settler colonialism is intrinsic to many of our current conceptions of space exploration, and there has been little acknowledgement of the colonial underpinnings of much of our imagination when it comes to space. Furthermore, the legacies of colonialism feed inequalities in the modern world that mean that those who suffered from colonialism suffer likewise from space exploration today, because of how they, their relationships to the world, and their land, are dismissed, ignored, and devalued by Western powers. If, as promised by numerous science fiction works as well as many world leaders, exploration in space is going to help us build an interstellar utopia, then an enormous shift in philosophy and methodology is required. Space exploration should not be a repeat of past atrocities. And to start, we must view space, and spaces more generally, as full of value—not because they can be useful to us, but because they simply are.

[October 26, 2020, “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space,” Society and Space Journal, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-space]

“In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must always remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier. America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars…The American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest and most determined men and women ever to walk on the face of the Earth… Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, settled the Wild West…This is our glorious and magnificent inheritance. We are Americans. We are pioneers. We are the pathfinders. We settled the New World. We built the modern world.” -President Donald J. Trump, 2020 State of the Union address To most scholars, and certainly to the virtual majority of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, it is no secret that the country we call the United States of America was built upon the brutal subjugation of Indigenous people and Indigenous lands. Fueled by the American settler myths of terra nullius (no man’s land) and Manifest Destiny, the American settler state proceeded upon a project of cultural and physical genocide, with lasting effects that endure to the present day. The ‘settler myth’ permeates American culture. Words such as ‘pioneer’, the ‘West’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ grab the imagination as connected to the growth of the country in its early history. America sprang forth from a vast open ‘wilderness’. Of course, for Indigenous people, we know differently—these lands had complex cultural frameworks and political entities long before colonization. Words like ‘pioneer’ and ‘Manifest Destiny’, have deep meanings for us too, as they are indicative of the very real damage dealt against our cultures and nations, damage that we have had to work very hard to undo. Trump’s address raises key insights into the continuing logics of settler colonialism, as well as questions of its future trajectories. Trump’s invocation of ideas such as the ‘frontier’ and ‘taming the wilderness’ draws attention to the brutal violence that accompanied the building of the American state. Scholars such as Greg Grandin (2019) make the case that the frontier is part of what America is—whether it is the ‘Wild West’, or the U.S.-Mexican border, America is always contending with a frontier that must be defined. Language surrounding ‘frontier’ is troubling because it perpetuates the rationale of why the American settler state even exists—it could make better use of the land than Native people would, after all, they lived in wilderness. This myth tells us that what we know as the modern world was built through the hard work of European settlers; Indigenous people had nothing to offer or contribute. For someone like Mr. Trump, whose misgivings and hostility towards Native people have been historically documented, this myth fits well with his narrative as President—he is building a ‘new’ America, one that will return to its place of power and influence. The fact that similar language is being used around the potential of American power being extended to space could reasonably be expected, given the economic and military potential that comes from such a move. Space represents yet another ‘unknown’ to be conquered and bent to America’s will. However, such interplanetary conquest does not exist solely in outer space. I wish to situate the very real colonial legacies and violence associated with the desire to explore space, tracing the ways that they are perpetuated and reified through their destructive engagements with Indigenous peoples. I argue that a scientific venture such as space exploration does not exist in a vacuum, but instead draws from settler colonialism and feeds back into it through the prioritization of ‘science’ over Indigenous epistemologies. I begin by exploring the ways that space exploration by the American settler state is situated within questions of hegemony, imperialism, and terra nullius, including a brief synopsis of the controversy surrounding the planned construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. I conclude by exploring Indigenous engagement with ‘space’ in both its Earthbound and beyond-earth forms as it relates to outer space, and what implications this might have for the ways we think about our engagement with space as the American settler state begins to turn its gaze skyward once again. I position this essay alongside a growing body of academic work, as well as journalistic endeavors (Haskins, 2020; Koren, 2020) that demands that the American settler colonial state exercise self-reflexivity as to why it engages with outer space, and who is advantaged and disadvantaged here on Earth as a result of this engagement. A brief exploration of what settler colonialism is, and its engagement with ‘space’ here on Earth is necessary to start. Settler colonialism is commonly understood to be a form of colonialism that is based upon the permanent presence of colonists upon land. This is a distinction from forms of colonialism based upon resource extraction (Wolfe, 2006; Veracini, 2013). What this means is that the settler colony is intimately tied with the space within which it exists—it cannot exist or sustain itself without settler control over land and space. This permanent presence upon land by ‘settlers’ is usually at the expense of the Indigenous, or original people, in a given space or territory. To reiterate: control over space is paramount. As Wolfe states, “Land is life—or at least, land is necessary for life. Thus, contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life” (2006: 387). Without land, the settler state ‘dies’; conversely, deprivation of land from the indigenous population means that in settler logic, indigeneity dies (Povinelli, 2002; Wolfe, 2006.) The ultimate aims of settler colonialism is therefore the occupation and remaking of space. As Wolfe (2006) describes, the settler state seeks to make use of land and resources in order to continue on; whether that is through homesteading/residence, farming and agriculture, mining, or any number of activities that settler colonial logic deems necessary to its own survival. These activities are tied to a racist and hubristic logic that only settler society itself possesses the ability to make proper use of land and space (Wolfe, 2006). This is mated with a viewpoint of landscapes prior to European arrival as terra nullius, or empty land that was owned by no one, via European/Western conceptions of land ownership and tenure (Wolfe, 1994). Because of this overarching goal of space, there is an inherent anxiety in settler colonies about space, and how it can be occupied and subsequently rewritten to remove Indigenous presence. In Anglo settler colonies, this often takes place within a lens of conservation. Scholars such as Banivanua Mar (2010), Lannoy (2012), Wright (2014) and Tristan Ahtone (2019) have written extensively on the ways that settler reinscription of space can be extremely damaging to Indigenous people from a lens of ‘conservation’. However, dispossession of Indigenous space in favor of settler uses can also be tied to some of the most destructive forces of our time. For example, Aboriginal land in the Australian Outback was viewed as ‘empty’ land that was turned into weapons ranges where the British military tested nuclear weapons in the 1950s, which directly led to negative health effects upon Aboriginal communities downwind from the testing sites (Vincent, 2010). Indigenous nations in the United States have struggled with environmental damage related to military-industrial exploitation as well. But, what does this all look like in regard to outer space? In order to really understand the potential (settler) colonial logics of space exploration, we must go back and explore the ways in which space exploration became inextricably tied with questions of state hegemony and geopolitics during the Cold War. US and Soviet space programs were born partially out of military utility, and propaganda value—the ability to send a nuclear warhead across a great distance to strike the enemy via a ICBM and the accompanying geopolitical respect that came with such a capability was something that greatly appealed to the superpowers, and when the Soviets took an early lead in the ‘Space Race’ with Sputnik and their Luna probes, the United States poured money and resources into making up ground (Werth, 2004). The fear of not only falling behind the Soviets militarily as well as a perceived loss of prestige in the court of world opinion spurred the US onto a course of space exploration that led to the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and the early 70s (Werth, 2004; Cornish, 2019). I argue that this fits neatly into the American settler creation myth referenced by Trump—after ‘conquering’ a continent and bringing it under American dominion, why would the United States stop solely at ‘space’ on Earth? To return to Grandin (2019), space represented yet another frontier to be conquered and known by the settler colonial state; if not explicitly for the possibility of further settlement, then for the preservation of its existing spatial extent on Earth. However, scholars such as Alan Marshall (1995) have cautioned that newer logics of space exploration such as potential resource extraction tie in with existing military logics in a way that creates a new way of thinking about the ‘openness’ of outer space to the logics of empire, in what Marshall calls res nullius (1995: 51)[i]. But we cannot forget the concept of terra nullius and how our exploration of the stars has real effects on Indigenous landscapes here on Earth. We also cannot forget about forms of space exploration that may not be explicitly tied to military means. Doing so deprives us of another lens through which to view the tensions between settler and Indigenous views of space and to which end is useful. Indeed, even reinscribing of Indigenous space towards ‘peaceful’ settler space exploration have very real consequences for Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous spaces. Perhaps the most prominent example of the fractures between settler space exploration and Indigenous peoples is the on-going controversy surrounding the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, on the island of Hawaii. While an extremely detailed description of the processes of construction on the TMT and the opposition presented to it by Native Hawai’ians and their allies is beyond the scope of this essay, and in fact is already expertly done by a number of scholars[ii], the controversy surrounding TMT is a prime example of the logics presented towards ‘space’ in both Earth-bound and beyond-Earth contexts by the settler colonial state as well as the violence that these logics place upon Indigenous spaces, such as Mauna Kea, which in particular already plays host to a number of telescopes and observatories (Witze, 2020). In particular, astronomers such as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lucianne Walkowicz, and others have taken decisive action to push back against the idea that settler scientific advancement via space exploration should take precedence over Indigenous sovereignty in Earth-space. Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz, alongside Sarah Tuttle, Brian Nord and Hilding Neilson (2020) make clear that settler scientific pursuits such as building the TMT are simply new footnotes in a long history of colonial disrespect of Indigenous people and Indigenous spaces in the name of science, and that astronomy is not innocent of this disrespect. In fact, Native Hawai’ian scholars such as Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar strike at the heart of the professed neutrality of sciences like astronomy: One scientist told me that astronomy is a “benign science” because it is based on observation, and that it is universally beneficial because it offers “basic human knowledge” that everyone should know “like human anatomy.” Such a statement underscores the cultural bias within conventional notions of what constitutes the “human” and “knowledge.” In the absence of a critical self-reflection on this inherent ethnocentrism, the tacit claim to universal truth reproduces the cultural supremacy of Western science as self-evident. Here, the needs of astronomers for tall peaks in remote locations supplant the needs of Indigenous communities on whose ancestral territories these observatories are built (2017: 8). As Casumbal-Salazar and other scholars who have written about the TMT and the violence that has been done to Native Hawai’ians (such as police actions designed to dislodge blockades that prevented construction) as well as the potential violence to come such as the construction of the telescope have skillfully said, when it comes to the infringement upon Indigenous space by settler scientific endeavors tied to space exploration, there is no neutrality to be had—dispossession and violence are dispossession and violence, no matter the potential ‘good for humanity’ that might come about through these things. Such contestations over outer space and ethical engagement with previously unknown spaces will continue to happen. Outer space is not the first ‘final frontier’ (apologies to Gene Roddenberry) that has been discussed in settler logics and academic spaces. In terms of settler colonialism, scholars have written about how Antarctica was initially thought of as the ‘perfect’ settler colony—land that could be had without the messy business of pushing Indigenous people off of it (see Howkins 2010). Of course, we know now that engagement with Antarctica should be constrained by ecological concern—who is to say that these concerns will be heeded in ‘unpopulated’ space? What can be done to push back against these settler logics? I want to now turn our attention towards the possibilities that exist regarding Indigenous engagement with outer space. After all, the timing could not be more urgent to do so—we are now at a point where after generations and generations of building the myth that America was built out of nothing, we are now ready to resume the project of extending the reach of American military and economic might in space. To be fair, there are plenty of advances that can be made scientifically with a renewed focus on space exploration. However, history shows us that space exploration has been historically tied to military hegemony, and there is nothing in Mr. Trump’s temperament or attitude towards a re-engagement with space that suggest that his push toward the stars will be anything different. A sustained conversation needs to be had—will this exploration be ethical and beneficial to all Americans? One potential avenue of Indigenous involvement comes through the active involvement of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous perspectives in space exploration, of course. This involvement can be possible through viewing outer space through a ‘decolonial’ lens, for instance. Astronomers such as Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz have spoken about the need to avoid replicating colonial frameworks of occupation and use of space when exploring places such as Mars, for example (Mandelbaum, 2018). The rise of logics of resource extraction in outer-space bodies have led to engagements by other academics such as Alice Gorman on the agency and personhood of the Moon. Collaborations between Indigenous people and space agencies such as NASA help provide the Indigenous perspective inside space exploration and the information that is gleaned from it, with implications both in space and on a Earth that is dealing with climate crisis (Bean, 2018; Bartels, 2019). Another potential avenue of engagement with Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies related to space comes with engaging with Indigenous thinkers who are already deeply immersed into explorations of Indigenous ‘space’ here on Earth—the recent works of Indigenous thinkers such as Waziyatawin (2008) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), Natchee Blu Barnd (2018) and others provide a unique viewpoint into the ways that Indigenous peoples make and remake space—perhaps this can provide another blueprint for how we might engage with space beyond Earth. And that is just the work that exists within the academic canon. Indigenous people have always been engaged with the worlds beyond the Earth, in ways that often stood counter to accepted ‘settler’ conventions of space exploration (Young, 1987). In one example, when asked about the Moon landings, several Inuit said, "We didn't know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time...We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go (Young, 1987: 272).” In another example, turning to my own people, the Ojibwe, we have long standing cultural connections to the stars that influence storytelling, governance, and religious tenets (CHIN, 2003). This engagement continues through to the present day, and points to a promising future. A new generation of Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and writers are beginning to create works that place the Indigenous individual themselves into narratives of space travel and futurity, unsettling existing settler notions of what our future in space might look like. As Leo Cornum (2015) writes, “Outer space, perhaps because of its appeal to our sense of endless possibility, has become the imaginative site for re-envisioning how black, indigenous and other oppressed people can relate to each other outside of and despite the colonial gaze.” These previous examples should serve as a reminder that the historical underpinnings of our great national myth are built upon shaky intellectual ground—we need to be honest about this. America did not just spring forth out of nothing; it came from the brutal occupation and control of Native lands. Despite the best efforts of the settler state, Native people are still here, we still exist and make vital contributions to both our tribal communities and science. We cannot expect Donald Trump to turn his back on the national myth of what made the United States the United States—in his mind, this is the glorious history of what made America great in the past. And it should serve as no surprise that Trump and others wish to extend this history into outer space. Even when Trump’s days in the White House are over, the settler colonial logics that underpin our engagement with land on Earth will still loom large over the ways that we may potentially engage with outer space. But for those of us who do work in Indigenous geographies and Indigenous studies, it becomes even more vital that we heed the calls of Indigenous thinkers inside and outside formal academic structures, validate Indigenous histories, and push to deconstruct the American settler myth and to provide a new way of looking at the stars, especially at a crucial moment where the settler state turns its gaze towards the same.