What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.
Every other liberatory lens in this school asks what a better arrangement would look like. This one asks a question with a harder edge, because the answer is not an arrangement. It is a transfer. Decolonization means the land goes back, and everyone in the room who is not Indigenous is standing on the thing under discussion. That is why this lens does not read like the others, and why Tuck and Yang open it rather than close it: their essay exists because people reliably convert this demand into a feeling, a curriculum, or a coalition, anything that does not involve the deed.
The positions here disagree with each other seriously, and the disagreements are not misunderstandings.
Anchor questions
- If decolonization means land is repatriated, what happens to you? Answer concretely, not in principle.
- Coulthard says asking the settler state for recognition is the trap. The Two Row Wampum says a treaty relationship between nations is possible. Can both be right?
- Tuck and Yang say decolonization is incommensurable with other justice movements. The Red Deal says it is the same fight as climate and anticapitalism. Who is right, and what does each position cost?
- The Wet’suwet’en refused, and the pipeline was built. Eureka gave Duluwat Island back with no fight at all. Which one is the model?
- The Cherokee Nation used its sovereignty to exclude the descendants of people it enslaved. Is that an argument against sovereignty, or the point of it?
- What is the smallest true version of Land Back that could happen where you live?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. This field is largely published by Minnesota and Duke and largely not free; where a book is paywalled, an honest free route is given.
The demand, stated exactly
- Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (2012). The essay that sets the terms for the lens. Decolonization is the repatriation of land, it is not social justice by another name, and their “ethics of incommensurability” insists it cannot be folded into other movements as an ally-item. Most of the essay catalogues the settler moves to innocence that let people feel decolonial while keeping everything. Shared with the pedagogy theme. Free: clas.osu.edu
Refusal and resurgence
- Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Red Skin, White Masks (2014). Do not ask. Recognition granted by the colonizer reproduces the colonial relation, because the asking concedes who decides. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu. The Institute for Advanced Study hosts the introduction and first chapter free, sixty-six pages, which is an excerpt rather than the book and is enough to argue from: ias.edu
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), As We Have Always Done (2017). Resurgence: rebuild from inside Nishnaabeg practice and stop organizing your politics around what Canada will concede. Turning inward, on purpose, as the opposite of retreat. Paywalled: upress.umn.edu. Her free Land as Pedagogy is in the theoretical lens.
- Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk), Mohawk Interruptus (2014). Kahnawake issues its own passports and declines Canada’s and America’s. Refusal as a political form: not a demand for recognition but a standing no, and a sovereignty that does not require anyone’s agreement to exist. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu
Treaty and nationhood
- Onondaga Nation, Two Row Wampum: Guswenta. The oldest treaty relationship on the continent, recorded in a belt: two vessels on one river, each steering itself, neither steering the other. It is the counter-position to refusal, because it says a relationship between nations was possible and was agreed, and it is the settler side that broke it. From the Onondaga Nation’s own site. Free: onondaganation.org
Everything at once
- The Red Nation, The Red Deal (2021). Decolonization, anticapitalism, and climate as a single programme. This is the direct answer to Tuck and Yang: the Red Nation does not accept that these are incommensurable, and stakes its politics on their being the same fight. Paywalled: commonnotions.org. Free route: Part II of the original pamphlet series, forty-six pages, at therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com. Parts I and III were lost when the movement changed hosts. Shared with the ecology theme.
- Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa), Our History Is the Future (2019). Standing Rock inside two centuries of Oceti Sakowin resistance, which makes tradition a theory of the future rather than nostalgia. Paywalled: versobooks.com; his free full-transcript interview is in the ecology theme.
Where this theme and the Black freedom theme collide
The school runs these as separate themes on purpose, and this is the case that proves why they cannot simply be merged.
- Circe Sturm, Race, Sovereignty, and Civil Rights: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy (2014). The Cherokee Nation enslaved Black people, took their descendants in by treaty in 1866, and later moved to exclude them from citizenship. Twenty-four open-access pages. This is a nation exercising exactly the self-determination this theme demands, in order to do this. Sturm is a settler anthropologist. Free: journal.culanth.org
- Marilyn Vann with High Country News (2021). Vann is a Freedmen descendant, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes, and the plaintiff who won the 2017 federal case restoring citizenship. Sturm explains the controversy from outside; Vann is in it. Free: hcn.org
Debates and disagreements
Four arguments, none of which this school resolves.
- Refusal against treaty. Coulthard and Audra Simpson hold that engaging the settler state’s legal order is itself the trap: what recognition grants, it defines, and accepting the grant concedes who does the granting. The Two Row Wampum answers that a relationship between nations was possible, was agreed, and that the betrayal is the settler’s rather than the form’s. One position says the table is rigged; the other says we built the table and they cheated at it.
- Tuck and Yang against nearly everyone practical. Incommensurability says decolonization cannot be coalitioned into other justice movements without being dissolved into them. But Sogorea Te’ runs through a land trust, which is a settler legal instrument, and the Red Deal fuses decolonization with climate and class politics on purpose. If Tuck and Yang are right, most of the practical lens is a settler move to innocence. If they are wrong, their essay is a counsel of paralysis. Read them against the Wiyot return and decide.
- What counts as winning. The Wet’suwet’en refused, held the line, and the pipeline was built anyway. Eureka handed Duluwat Island back with no litigation, no conditions, and no resistance, which means the land came back as a gift from a city council, granted by the same authority whose right to grant it is the thing in question. So: is the return that happened worth less than the refusal that failed?
- Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty, in tension and not merged. The Cherokee Freedmen case is where this school’s themes collide rather than harmonize. The Nation used anti-Blackness partly to perform the civilization the United States demanded of it, and then used its hard-won sovereignty to exclude the descendants of the people it enslaved. A framework that files anti-Blackness and settler colonialism as two faces of one thing cannot say anything useful here. Hold them apart, and let Vann speak last.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is built as an argument rather than a reading list, which is what the pedagogy asks for. Its honest weakness is access: Coulthard, both Simpsons, Estes, and the Red Deal are all paywalled, and the lens leans on excerpts, pamphlets, and interviews to stay usable. That is a real limit and not a design choice. Contributions welcome, especially Indigenous critiques of Land Back itself, which exist and are not represented here; Latin American and Pacific Indigenous liberation thought; and anything that lets Freedmen descendants speak at greater length than one interview.