The legal concept of rights is an invitation to indigenous people to be a neoliberal possessive individualistic subject – a recognition politic that ontologizes dispossession by asking them to participate in the same logics

In this chapter we are concerned specifically with the discursive framing of indigenous peoples as dispossessed subjects. By this we mean not simply the ways in which indigenous peoples are recognised, increasingly, as having been dispossessed of their lands by settler colonial states and other regimes of power historically, but the ways in which their condition of dispossession is today valorised as a positive attribute of their ways of life. In contrast with the subject of Western modernity, it is claimed the indigenous have no interest in making the world they live in into their property. An indigenous approach to life and world starts from the principle, it is said, that we belong to the world, the world does not belong to us (Adese, 2014: 61). This is not just a normative claim. The task of becoming indigenous develops, it is supposed, from recognition of the truth that it is simply not possible to possess land in the ways that have been assumed in the West. The task is one of learning how to live with the land, in the understanding that we are possessed by it, rather than it belonging to us for our use and benefit. The conceit of the West, historically, and still today, it is maintained, is that of its belief in the ability to possess the land, subordinate it, and exploit it, as an object for human satisfaction.

Taking the logic of dispossession further, some argue that indigenous peoples have no concept of possession as such. In her recent book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost , the popular American writer Rebecca Solnit describes how in the language of the Wintu people of California there exists no account of the self as distinct from its other (2017: 17). Without an understanding of what is other the self has no understanding of possession, for only things that are other from the self can indeed be possessed. The self is the presupposition we make when we lay claim to possession. Linguistically this is evident in the many ways we make claim, in the English language at least, to possessing this or that. I say ‘my arm, my leg, my body, my thoughts, my imagination, my friend, my house, my world, my land’, and so on. In the language of the Wintu no such notion of ‘my’ this or that exists. As the anthropologist Dorothy Lee explains, this owes to the fact that ‘the Wintu have a conception of the self which is markedly different to our own’ (Lee, 1950: 538). For them the self is ontologically implicated in a world of things, which by dint of that prior implication it cannot possess but which may be said to possess it. This is an image of the self, availed to us by indigenous language and ways of being, as radically dispossessed, and itself an object of possession. For Solnit, this other way of being in the world and of experiencing the self is a source of wonder, attraction and potential emancipation, for the Western subject, which still errantly believes in its own autonomy from the world, and who is not the autonomous entity it sees itself as (Solnit, 2017: 17–25).

Against this emancipatory image of the dispossessed subject we will pose the figure of Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian, whose knowledge and intelligence is described in the ethnography of Carlos Castaneda. In the encounter between Castaneda and Don Juan what we see is precisely the mapping of a path toward becoming indigenous, but a path which projects itself toward a very different horizon than that being taken today. The world Don Juan teaches Castaneda about is not the ecological world of flora and fauna, knowledge about which has become strongly associated with indigenous peoples today, but the psychic world of the subject, and the faculties of will and practices of power through which the human can subdue it. Don Juan instructs his inquisitor indeed in how to ‘stop that world’ (1972: 15–243). There is nothing dispossessed in Don Juan. He seizes the world in order to stop it. Castaneda himself, the ethnographer, enters on a spiritual plane into his possession, entrapped by the old Indian (1972: 20). Don Juan instructs Castaneda, not in the knowledge of plants, but in techniques of the self, and especially in the arts by which one can avoid becoming possessed by others. The teachings of Don Juan are in other words a master class in the development of autonomy and freedom from others, and allow us to theorise indigeneity in conjunction with our own aspirations to theorise the human in its capacities to transcend its world and its relations to other people, and secure itself from that world and whatever it finds dangerous in it.

The concept of dispossession figures large in debates over indigenous peoples and the theorisation of their oppression. In terms of the will to combat liberalism and liberal theories and practices of the oppression of indigenous peoples this focus on the problem of dispossession is understandable. As is well detailed, liberal arguments dating back to the seventeenth century concerning the nature and right to property, especially arguments concerning the conditions for the exercise of the right to claim ownership of land, were fundamental for the colonial project and ‘gigantic process of expropriation’ by which indigenous peoples were subjected (Losurdo, 2016: 320; see also Lederman, 2016). Colonisers would not have been able to justify their projects without the underlying theories of property that served to legitimate the acts of dispossession of indigenous peoples.

Of all theories of property it is that of John Locke which has proved the most influential and powerful in legitimating colonial dispossessions of indigenous peoples. The central claim being that only peoples who mix their labour with the soil of the land on which they live, and not only improve, cultivate and develop it, but in doing so, subdue it, can claim the right to own it. As Locke put it,

God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour, and the Penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the Benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his Labour. He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property , which another had no Title to, nor could without Injury take from him. (2016: 18)

The distinction between those who subdue and develop the land and those who leave it ‘to Nature without any improvement’ such that it becomes ‘un-cultivated waste’ (Locke, 2016: 20) has provided the basis for the dispossession of indigenous peoples of the right to land historically (Lederman, 2016). This distinction concerns not simply, of course, the relationships of peoples to particular lands, but their relationships to ‘the Earth’ and ‘the World’ as such, as evidenced in the quotation from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (2016). Is the people in question one which has subdued the world given to it by the Christian God and through its development of the soil become its master, or is it a people that lives ignorantly in subordination to the world, ‘rich in Land’ and yet ‘poor in all the Comforts of Life’, living off the land without improving it, and thus themselves forming part of the world which developed human beings can claim both mastery and ownership of (Locke, 2016: 22)? These are the questions which underlie the Lockean theory of property and which inevitably provided the basis not just for the dispossession of indigenous peoples of the lands on which they lived, as well as the denial of their right to land, but the racism which in turn legitimated the long history of continuing violence against them. No wonder, then, that the development of supposedly postliberal theories of political subjectivity is involving reflection upon the nature of dispossession itself.

It is utilised often by indigenous scholars and activists themselves (Barker, 2015; Coulthard, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Pasternak, 2015; Simpson, 2014) to flag up the fact that indigenous peoples have ‘not only been subjugated and oppressed by the West’ but also ‘divested of their lands, the territorial foundation of their societies, which in turn have become the territorial foundations for the creation of new, European-style, settler-colonial societies’ (Nichols, 2017: 8–9). As such, dispossession has been construed as a specific kind of process, intrinsic to colonialism, and fundamental to the indigenous experience of the violence of the West. This way of approaching indigeneity and understanding the nature of indigenous subjugation under conditions of colonialism can easily be encountered in Western thought itself. Karl Polanyi, writing in the mid-twentieth century, described how ‘the social and cultural system of native life’ is shattered once ‘the native’ is dispossessed of the land on which he or she depends (2001: 187–88). Indeed Polanyi, though a nineteenth-century Viennese economic historian, shared much of the ontological worldview we are now taught to associate with indigenous peoples. ‘Land’, he argued, ‘is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions . . . it invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well be born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land’ (Polanyi, 2001: 187). He decried the economic and political rationalities that motivated the dispossession of indigenous lands by colonisers for much the same reasons as today, construing it as a ‘death blow’ to indigenous peoples (Polanyi, 2001: 302).

As a concept within modern political discourse, however, dispossession has a much wider history, originating in the seventeenth century, not just in Locke, but in the ideas of activists and thinkers concerned with challenging the institutions of landed aristocracy in Europe, and developing in the eighteenth century, most significantly in the work of Rousseau, who identified in dispossession and the establishment of property, the origin of all violence, as well as the wide range of forms which warfare, conflict and competition would gradually assume among humankind, and their attendant emotions, desires and states of perception.

A black inclination to harm one another, a secret jealousy that is all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blow in greater safety: in a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflict of interests on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at another’s expense; all these evils are the first effect of property, and the inseparable train of nascent inequality. (Rousseau, 1997: 171)

By the nineteenth century it had become integral especially to anarchist claims concerning the illegitimacy of modern property, albeit articulated more often in terms of ‘expropriation’ (Nichols, 2017: 5). For Marx it played an absolutely essential role in understanding the historical development of capital and the downfall he predicted for it (1976: 928–30). ‘The expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil’ formed the prehistory of capital, he argued, while the expropriation of exploitative capitalists by a revolting working class would shape its end (Marx, 1976: 928–29). Eventually, the expropriators are themselves to be expropriated by this one revolutionary class that seeks the abolition of capital through its dispossession, while other classes fight against capital only to save their existences (Marx, 1976: 929–30).

Marx himself often employed the German term enteignung only to shift in his later work to the Latin term ‘expropriation’. When Das Kapital was translated into English, the terms of dispossession and expropriation were employed interchangeably, suggesting that there is little to choose between the two concepts (Nichols, 2017: 6). Today, for whatever reason, the concept of dispossession would seem to have become the more powerful, at the very least with reference to indigenous politics, but also considering wider trends in critical theory, exemplified by influential works employing the concept by leading thinkers such as David Harvey and Judith Butler (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013; Harvey, 2005: 178–79, 2013: 137–82; Nichols, 2017). Within this trend it is possible to detect differences concerning the politics of dispossession. There is a contrast at the very least between Butler who eschews possessiveness as such as a property and capacity for progressive visions of what political subjectivity might become, as well as aligning herself forthrightly with indigenous movements the world over, and Harvey who maintains a belief in the progressive potentials of processes of dispossession insofar as they can contribute to more universally socialist futures, as well as being cognizant of the ways in which indigenous movements sometimes function to prevent the realisation of such futures, as long as they ‘refuse to abandon their own particularity’ (Harvey, 2013: 179). Indeed, Harvey also notes how in the recent past indigenous movements have not only prevented projects for the realisation of socialism, but created a ‘Trojan Horse’ for offensives sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency in promotion of neoliberal regimes, such as in Nicaragua in the 1980s where it took advantage of the resistance of Mesquito Indians to socialist development in order to wage war against the Sandinistas (Harvey, 2013: 165).

Regardless of these political differences, the concept of dispossession is argued to be of great relevance for understandings of the ‘territorial acquisition logic of settler colonization’ which has underpinned both liberal and socialist models of development emanating from the West (Nichols, 2017: 9). Glen Sean Coulthard writes,

A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and non-discursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. (Coulthard, 2014: 7)

Coulthard recognises the importance of the insights of Marx for our abilities to address the dispossessive natures of both colonialism and capitalism while also underscoring the distinctive nature of the experiences of indigenous peoples with regard to their exposures to these regimes of power. Rejecting Marx would be a mistake for indigenous peoples, he maintains, while arguing for the necessity of revising the Marxian framework in conversation with the critical thought and practices of indigenous peoples themselves (Coulthard, 2014: 8).

One crucial point for revision is that dispossession cannot be considered, as Marx suggested it might, a process confined to a particular historical period. It is indeed ongoing and alive today, Coulthard maintains (2014: 9). Secondly it cannot be considered, from an indigenous perspective at least, a necessary developmental stage in the process of capitalist expansion such that it provides the foundation for a subsequent developmental and progressive stage of socialism (Coulthard, 2014: 9–10). Indeed, Coulthard argues that Marx and Marxists have been mistaken in viewing colonialism as itself simply a feature of capitalism, and that it is necessary by contrast to focus on colonialism independently from capitalism, in order to comprehend the functions of dispossession from an indigenous perspective. The power relationship of a settler-state such as Canada to indigenous peoples has been fundamentally organised around the dispossession of their lands and not the extraction of their labour (Coulthard, 2014: 12–13). Crucially, as Coulthard also asserts, it is the dispossession of land and not the extraction of labour which continues to shape the dominant modes of indigenous resistance and critique (2014: 13). The theory and practice of indigenous resistance to colonialism has to be understood, he argues, as a struggle oriented around ‘the question of land’ (Coulthard, 2014: 13). As many other indigenous scholars have argued, as a historical process and technique of power it has particular relevance for indigenous peoples because so much of indigenous knowledge and culture emanates from their relations to land (Wildcat et al., 2014). Being dispossessed territorially has meant being dispossessed of the very knowledge on which indigenous cultures and ways of being are based. Thus the struggle against dispossession has to mean a struggle to foster systems of indigenous education premised on indigenous knowledge and intelligence emanating from the land (Wildcat et al., 2014: II). The indigenous subject strengthens itself, on account of the ability to recover its relation to the land. Its knowledge and intelligence grows the more and better it is able to recover that relation.

Anger at having been dispossessed of one’s own land pervades the literatures of indigenous peoples. It is an anger that is directed at what the Aboriginal thinker Aileen Moreton-Robinson names the White Possessive: that subject whose sense of belonging, home and place in the world derives from the dispossession of ‘the original owners of the land’ (2015: 3), including indigenous peoples such as her own people, the Goenpul tribe, a part of the Quandamooka nation of Stradbroke Island in Queensland, Australia. Unlike other exponents of indigenous ways, however, Moreton-Robinson does not reject the concept of possession altogether. Her critique is concerned with distinguishing between indigenous and Western accounts of who is the land’s rightful possessor. In this context, she sees not simply a conflict between two different parties, but a struggle that pitches two conflicting concepts of possession against each other. On the one hand that concept of the White Possessive who subscribes to a liberal account of possession compatible with ‘the logic of capital’ (2015: 3), and on the other an indigenous concept of possession, in its ‘incommensurable difference’, based as Moreton-Robinson asserts it to be, on ‘an ontological relationship with land’ (2015: 11). In claiming possession of the land, indigenous subjects also understand themselves, in what might seem like a paradox, as belonging to the land. For this is what having an ontological relationship to land entails. One is part of the land as much as the land is part of you, rather than being simply its transcendental possessor, in the supposedly non-ontological sense in which the White Possessive claims ownership.

Some ambiguity exists, then, as to whether the indigenous project implies an attempt to recover a prior relation of possession with land, on account of their being the rightful owners of the land, because they are ‘ontologically’ embedded in it, or whether it is a project based around the celebration of dispossession as such. The latter perspective is better expressed in the work of Jennifer Adese who distinguishes more simply and clearly between indigenous peoples who ‘live with the land’ instead of living in domination and exploitation of it as Westerners are said to do (Adese, 2014: 53). In the words of one Metis elder quoted by Adese, Adrian Hope, ‘we belong to the land, the land does not belong to us’ (Adese, 2014: 61). From the perspective of an indigenous community such as the Metis, it is simply not possible to possess land, irrespective of what Moreton-Robinson might say. The task is one of learning how to live with the land, in the understanding that we are possessed by it. The conceit of the West, historically, and still today, it is maintained in these indigenous approaches, is that of its belief in the ability to possess it.

The condition of being without possession of land, then, when seen from some influential indigenous perspectives, is not in itself to be decried. The problem is that of being dispossessed of the relation with the land, which founds indigenous subjectivity, knowledge and intelligence. To a certain extent this nuancing of the condition of dispossession, and loss of land, in indigenous critique, powerfully rearticulates the widely made assertion as to the ‘theft’ of indigenous lands by colonial powers. What has been stolen is not simply the land but a way of being in relation with land that is avowedly not based on possession of land as such, and for this reason loss of world might be a better operative conception than merely theft of property.

It is for this reason perhaps, also, that the colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples has rarely led to arguments merely for the return of those lands to indigenous peoples, but an articulation of the experience and condition of indigenous dispossession itself as a basis on which to theorise not only their subjectivity under conditions of colonialism, but political subjectivity on a universal scale. Such thinking is encountered forcefully in the work of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, titled Dispossession , which engages in it explicitly (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013). Their project is to consider dispossession both as an act, ‘as one way that subjects are radically de-instituted’, and also as an attribute of the subject which offers a counter-movement to the forces of dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 28). In other words in addressing the histories and continuing realities of powers which dispossess indigenous peoples and others groups they want to contest it on these deeper terrains of its subject-formations. The problem they identify is that not simply of the right to dispossess but the assumption of possession at the heart of the liberal subject. The assumption of having transcended nature that was crucial to the distinction between colonising and colonised subjects. They want to avoid any avowal of a subject which ‘possesses itself and its object world, and whose relations with others are defined by possession and its instrumentalities’ in the development of struggles against regimes of power which serve to dispossess indigenous peoples (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 28). ‘Prizing the forms of responsibility and resistance that emerge from a “dispossessed” subject’ they underline their awareness that ‘dispossession constitutes a form of suffering for those displaced and colonized’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: ix). For this reason, they express a gesture of solidarity toward those indigenous peoples who have been historically dispossessed of their lands accompanied by a normative gesture of constraint upon the indigenous, lest they seek recourse to the forms of possessive individualism Butler and Athanasiou otherwise identify with colonisers. ‘How to become dispossessed of the sovereign self and enter into forms of collectivity that oppose forms of dispossession that systematically jettison populations from modes of collective belonging and justice’ is thus their question (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: xi).

Likewise it is the question of how to oppose forms of dispossession in ways that function doubly to produce dispossessed forms of subjectivity (Goldstein, 2014; Porter, 2014). Too many social and political struggles against dispossession are thought to recuperate the same logic of possession that accounted for the original dispossession from which the struggles in question emerged. As Libby Porter expresses it, ‘the social field of rights-based struggle becomes stuck in a mode that seeks parity only within the frame of liberal “possessive individualism”. Rights under this conception are a bundle of things that can be possessed, held, alienated and exchanged, and express the positionality of a possessing unitary subject’ (Porter, 2014: 394). The project of liberalism, taken to be that not simply of dispossessing peoples of their lands for liberal development, but of reconstituting those peoples as liberal, requires that they too partake in the logic of possession, becoming themselves, possessive subjects, claiming rights to property and procedures consistent with their liberalisation. This invitation, to become possessive, partake in the logic of possession, and emerge a fully fledged liberal subject, has to be refused. Indeed one could summarise the thrust of a wide range of critiques, deriving from postcolonial theorists and critical indigenous scholars, as expressing the urgency of this refusal, including preeminent authors such as Porter, Pasternak, Coulthard, Moreton-Robinson, Simpson and Nichols (Barker, 2015; Coulthard, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Nichols, 2017; Pasternak, 2015; Porter, 2014; Simpson, 2014).

In many ways this critique lives in and off the shadow of Fanon, still. Since Fanon, at the very least, we have known that the invitation is not what it seems to be. One cannot move from colonised subject to liberal subject without conceding fully to one’s subjugation to the colonial schema itself. The sustainability of colonial power depends on the capacity to transform the colonised population into subjects of imperial rule (Coulthard, 2007: 6). Liberation from colonial subjugation requires the colonial subject to wage war on that schema itself (Reid, 2006). Embracing the logic of possession cannot work, therefore, as a mode of resistance to liberal colonialism. It does not work to produce justice even in the most naive senses. In situations where peoples have been dispossessed of the lands on which they live, or as is often the case nowadays, displaced, from one place of abode to another, the ability to come into possession of another land, or other place, simply does not do justice to the loss experienced. ‘There is no genuine space in compensation payment calculus to attend to the loss and grief of a neighbourhood abandoned, the bulldozing of a home, the erasing of memories or the shattering of lives’ as Porter argues (Porter, 2014: 397).

Of course, as Porter admits, this critique does not quite apply in the context of indigenous claims. It is, as she expresses it succinctly, ‘a different manifestation of a possessory calculus at work in the recognition politics around indigenous land rights, for clearly indigenous claims are intrinsically linked to particular spaces. The whole notion of indigenous property is that it is inalienable, and cannot be traded for another locale on the planet’ (Porter, 2014: 397). The struggles of indigenous peoples, in Australia for example, to repossess their lands through the claiming of indigenous title rights is real and ongoing, and meeting with some success. The royalties being paid to title-owning indigenous people by mining companies in Australia has led to a growing Aboriginal middle class. Of course, success here is measured simply in terms of the socio-economic betterment of Aboriginal peoples under market conditions—their abilities to exploit their possessions through trade with other market actors, particularly resource-seeking extractive industries. A fact deeply problematic for anyone concerned with the deeper political problem of the growing entrenchment of liberalism and the underlying colonisation of the indigenous which such socio-economic success implies.

Similar problems and dynamics have been observed, in the Canadian context, by Shiri Pasternak, who describes the ways in which indigenous struggles against the legacies of colonialism, and in particular attempts to overhaul the Indian Act in Canada, involve indigenous groups in taking political positions, which only serve to entangle them further with neoliberal logics of possession (2015). The lack of private property rights on Indian reserves deprives indigenous groups of the abilities to access home mortgages, and therefore credit, which in turn excludes them from the market economy, it is argued by some representatives of indigenous communities in Canada (Pasternak, 2015: 179). In these terms, the struggle for indigenous enfranchisement asserts a logic of the right to possession which in turn serves to subject indigenous groups to neoliberal governance (Pasternak, 2015: 180). It is for these reasons that opposition to dispossession is believed to require a different mode of engagement: something other than a mere assertion of struggles for possession.