Ontology critical to accurately viewing land constitution

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.