The alternative is incommensurability – decolonization is a project that requires the repatriation of indigenous lands, the abolition of slavery and property, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole including notions of western property.

Having elaborated on settler moves to innocence, we give a synopsis of the imbrication of settler colonialism with transnationalist, abolitionist, and critical pedagogy movements - efforts that are often thought of as exempt from Indigenous decolonizing analyses - as a synthesis of how decolonization as material, not metaphor, unsettles the innocence of these movements. These are interruptions which destabilize, un-balance, and repatriate the very terms and assumptions of some of the most radical efforts to reimagine human power relations. We argue that the opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts. We offer these perspectives on unsettling innocence because they are examples of what we might call an ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct, what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. There are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied. We make these notations to highlight opportunities for what can only ever be strategic and contingent collaborations, and to indicate the reasons that lasting solidarities may be elusive, even undesirable. Below we point to unsettling themes that challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors broadly assembled into three areas: Transnational or Third World decolonizations, Abolition, and Critical Space-Place Pedagogies. For each of these areas, we offer entry points into the literature - beginning a sort of bibliography of incommensurability. Third world decolonizations The anti-colonial turn towards the transnational can sometimes involve ignoring the settler colonial context where one resides and how that inhabitation is implicated in settler colonialism, in order to establish “global” solidarities that presumably suffer fewer complicities and complications. This deliberate not-seeing is morally convenient but avoids an important feature of the aforementioned selective collapsibility of settler colonial-nations states. Expressions such as “the Global South within the Global North” and “the Third World in the First World” neglect the Four Directions via a Flat Earth perspective and ambiguate First Nations with Third World migrants. For people writing on Third World decolonizations, but who do so upon Native land, we invite you to consider the permanent settler war as the theater for all imperial wars: ● the Orientalism of Indigenous Americans (Berger, 2004; Marez, 2007) ● discovery, invasion, occupation, and Commons as the claims of settler sovereignty (Ford, 2010) ● heteropatriarchy as the imposition of settler sexuality (Morgensen, 2011) ● citizenship as coercive and forced assimilation into the white settler normative (Bruyneel, 2004; Somerville, 2010) ● religion as covenant for settler nation-state (A.J. Barker, 2009; Maldonado-Torres, 2008) ● the frontier as the first and always the site of invasion and war (Byrd, 2011), ● U.S. imperialism as the expansion of settler colonialism (ibid) ● Asian settler colonialism (Fujikane, 2012; Fujikane, & Okamura, 2008, Saranillio, 2010a, 2010b) ● the frontier as the language of ‘progress’ and discovery (Maldonado-Torres, 2008) ● rape as settler colonial structure (Deer, 2009; 2010) ● the discourse of terrorism as the terror of Native retribution (Tuck & Ree, forthcoming) ● Native Feminisms as incommensurable with other feminisms (Arvin, Tuck, Morrill, forthcoming; Goeman & Denetdale, 2009). Abolition The abolition of slavery often presumes the expansion of settlers who own Native land and life via inclusion of emancipated slaves and prisoners into the settler nation-state. As we have noted, it is no accident that the U.S. government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery. Likewise, indentured European laborers were often awarded tracts of ‘unsettled’ Indigenous land as payment at the end of their service (McCoy, forthcoming). Communal ownership of land has figured centrally in various movements for autonomous, self-determined communities. “The land belongs to those who work it,” disturbingly parrots Lockean justifications for seizing Native land as property, ‘earned’ through one’s labor in clearing and cultivating ‘virgin’ land. For writers on the prison industrial complex, il/legality, and other forms of slavery, we urge you to consider how enslavement is a twofold procedure: removal from land and the creation of property (land and bodies). Thus, abolition is likewise twofold, requiring the repatriation of land and the abolition of property (land and bodies). Abolition means self-possession but not object-possession, repatriation but not reparation: ● “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men” (Alice Walker, describing the work of Marjorie Spiegel, in the in the preface to Spigel’s 1988 book, The Dreaded Comparison). ● Enslavement/removal of Native Americans (Gallay, 2009) ● Slaves who become slave-owners, savagery as enslavability, chattel slavery as a sign of civilization (Gallay, 2009) ● Black fugitivity, undercommons, and radical dispossession (Moten, 2008; Moten & Harney, 2004; Moten & Harney, 2010) ● Incarceration as a settler colonialism strategy of land dispossession (Ross, 1998; Watson, 2007) ● Native land and Native people as co-constituitive (Meyer, 2008; Kawagley, 2010) Critical pedagogies The many critical pedagogies that engage emancipatory education, place based education, environmental education, critical multiculturalism, and urban education often position land as public Commons or seek commonalities between struggles. Although we believe that “we must be fluent” in each other’s stories and struggles (paraphrasing Alexander, 2002, p.91), we detect precisely this lack of fluency in land and Indigenous sovereignty. Yupiaq scholar, Oscar Kawagley’s assertion, “We know that Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture” (2010, p. xiii), directs us to think through land as “more than a site upon which humans make history or as a location that accumulates history” (Goeman, 2008, p.24). The forthcoming special issue in Environmental Education Research, “Land Education: Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research” might be a good starting point to consider the incommensurability of place-based, environmentalist, urban pedagogies with land education. ● The urban as Indigenous (Bang, 2009; Belin, 1999; Friedel, 2011; Goeman, 2008; Intertribal Friendship House & Lobo, 2002) ● Indigenous storied land as disrupting settler maps (Goeman, 2008) ● Novels, poetry, and essays by Greg Sarris, Craig Womack, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor ● To Remain an Indian (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) ● Shadow Curriculum (Richardson, 2011) ● Red Pedagogy (Grande, 2004) ● Land Education (McCoy, Tuck, McKenzie, forthcoming) More on incommensurability Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world (Fanon, 1963). This is not to say that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round. The goal is to break the relentless structuring of the triad - a break and not a compromise (Memmi, 1991). Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole. Decolonization “here” is intimately connected to anti-imperialism elsewhere. However, decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not shared equally, nor do they bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly not for settlers. Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is incommensurable. There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t be figured, that cannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The same yellow pollen in the water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, is the same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2 flashes. The same yellow pollen that poisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war that took a generation of young Pueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko writes, “Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you saw the witchery ranging as wide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where Silko lives, her books are now banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the settler innocence, ingenuity, and right to America may be taught. In “No”, her response to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Mvskoke/Creek poet Joy Harjo (2004) writes, “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.” Don’t Native Americans participate in greater rates in the military? asks the young-ish man from Viet Nam. “Indian Country” was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for ‘enemy territory’. The first Black American President said without blinking, “There was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden.” Elmer Pratt, Black Panther leader, falsely imprisoned for 27 years, was a Vietnam Veteran, was nicknamed ‘Geronimo’. Geronimo is settler nickname for the Bedonkohe Apache warrior who fought Mexican and then U.S. expansion into Apache tribal lands. The Colt .45 was perfected to kill Indigenous people during the ‘liberation’ of what became the Philippines, but it was first invented for the ‘Indian Wars’ in North America alongside The Hotchkiss Canon- a gattling gun that shot canonballs. The technologies of the permanent settler war are reserviced for foreign wars, including boarding schools, colonial schools, urban schools run by military personnel. It is properly called Indian Country. Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native, disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964.