Imagining autonomy on stolen land: settler colonialism, anarchism and the possibilities of decolonization?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the connections between anarchist organizing, Indigenous resistance, settler colonial studies, questions of land, and prospects for decolonization. I challenge anarchism, and anarchist projects that occur on stolen Indigenous lands, to integrate analysis of historical and contemporary colonization into their theory and practice and begin to explore what decolonizing relationships to land might look like. Indigenous theorists such as Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson have called for increased attention to the anti-colonial and decolonizing imperatives in settler-dominated movements and political projects. The example of the recent Occupy movements shows the danger of experiments in alternative futures that risk reinscribing structures of settler colonialism if their underlying context on Indigenous land is not challenged. Settler colonialism, connected to white supremacy, is the necessary context of resistance in settler colonial North America and within social movements that exist on these lands. I suggest a turn towards Indigenous theory and action that aims to construct prefigurative futures outside the state and capitalism as a necessary reference point that all radical projects need to defer to explicitly, to foster direct relational accountability to Indigenous laws and lifeways.