Thus the alternative is Grounded Relationality – A reconception of land as not merely property or territory but a reciprocal relationship and an agential source of relation which builds capacities for relationality beyond proprietary logics

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.