Decolonial Struggle and History
A Critical Commentary on Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule
June 12, 2021
There is an important and ongoing discussion among antiracist and Indigenous scholars about how to understand the “politics of place.” How can we understand these politics in a way that does justice to different experiences and histories of displacement, dispossession, capture, and occupation at the hands of the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist state?1The discussion was sparked by Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120–43. For Sharma’s initial intervention, see Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2008/2009): 120–38. For an excellent overview of the discussion, see Rita Kaur Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism,” Feral Feminisms 4 (2015): 20–37. See also Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–21; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rinaldo Walcott, and Glen Coulthard, “Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange,” Studies in Social Justice 12, no. 1 (2018): 79–85; Sadef Arat-Koc, “Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing Up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place,” Studies in Social Justice 14, no. 2 (2020): 371–90. A key participant in these discussions is scholar and activist Nandita Sharma, who has spoken powerfully in defense of migrants and in support for a world without borders. Sharma’s work has culminated in a new book, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants2Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). which was the topic of her interview by Zachary Levenson in Spectre.3Nandita Sharma, “Beyond Borders: Nation-States, Migration, and the Struggle for the Global Commons, An Interview with Zachary Levenson,” Spectre 1, no. 2 (2020): 38–58. In her book and interview, she argues among other things that decolonial Indigenous struggles are incompatible with, and do not qualify as, radical struggles for a planetary commons beyond nation states and the reproduction of global capitalism.
The following commentary critically evaluates the reasoning in Home Rule that results in Sharma’s position on decolonial Indigenous struggles.4I presented an outline of this paper to the Toronto Spectre reading group on March 28, 2021. Thank you to everyone who participated in, and helped organize, that discussion. The book is a valuable global history of how racist citizenship and immigration restrictions were developed as populations were displaced in the transitions from territorial empires to the “Postcolonial New World Order” of nation states in contemporary capitalism. Though Sharma expresses support for struggle for the global commons, she does not center that struggle in her historical account. This misplaced emphasis, I argue, results in a mischaracterization of decolonial Indigenous struggles against a settler colonial state like Canada. My hope is that thinking these issues through here will clarify important features that a theory of history needs to include if it is to learn from and support radical struggles for a planetary commons beyond capitalism.
Sharma’s “Native”
For Sharma, the “Native” is a category that includes groups that assert exclusionary belonging to a place. Sharma calls exclusionary belonging to a place “autochthony.” Home Rule surveys the history of how the “autochthonous Native” was produced in imperial and colonial projects and how this production of the native continues in the postcolonial era of nation states, including in liberation struggles against the state. For Sharma, any political movement that organizes in defense of a place and sense of belonging to that place is against the “Migrant” and thus part of what Sharma calls the “Postcolonial New World Order.” By the end of Home Rule, the autochthonous native produced by European colonial rule and its dynamics comes to include the following: (1) European nation states today, including the now “nationalized” imperial states like Britain and France; (2) postcolonial states that emerged across the Global South as a result of national liberation struggles against European colonial powers; (3) settler colonial states that were formed by the relocation of European populations to a colony and the forcible dispossession of Indigenous people; and (4) anticolonial activity and decolonizing efforts against settler colonial states, which, for Sharma, include Indigenous groups claiming to be the First Peoples of the land and its original defenders.
For Sharma, these groups are, without exception, “autochthonous” formations that reproduce colonial dynamics.5Sharma, Home Rule, 208ff. They are formed in opposition to the migrant and foreigner, and their existence depends upon land dispossession, labor exploitation, and the forms of racial and gender oppression all of this involves. Thus, in Sharma’s view there is no historical basis for drawing strict distinctions between colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, and anticolonial and decolonial movements; each of these historical formations reproduces in different ways the supremacy of the native over the migrant, and the colonial dynamics of exclusionary belonging to a place. What lies beyond the world order of autochthonous political formations is what Sharma calls the “commons.” The commons, as I will elaborate below, is that space from which nobody is excluded and to which everybody equally belongs.
Sharma’s Historical Argument
How does Sharma arrive at the above theorization in Home Rule? Her theory results from a consideration, global in scope, of how imperial states categorized populations to achieve indirect rule: “Imperial states often superimposed their power over social and political structures in the colonies…by producing ‘Native leaders’…[as] imperially appointed chiefs.” The “Native” is thus an “imperial category.”6Ibid., 37.
Home Rule’s account of indirect rule begins with how Britain responded to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with a divide-and-rule strategy of organizing colonized populations into the separate legal and political groups of native and migrant. This colonial strategy informed the 1905 formal partitioning of Hindus and Muslims in Indian electoral politics. Soon the category of native itself was split into native and migrant subcategories. This separated natives who are confined to a place from natives who are displaced. The displacement of “Migrant-Natives” made them more dependent on the market and capitalist exploitation in this emerging regime.7Ibid., 41–2.
Sharma argues that imperial categories in this way were “materialized” by their relationship to property and the market. She also maintains that imperial categories were “productive” of reality, as Indigenous peoples internalized their categorization into their political and historical self-consciousness and thus came to adopt the categories as their own.8Ibid., 42–3. Sharma writes:
Indirect-rule colonialism, thus, changed how people in state-spaces came to know and relate to one another…Regimes of land tenure, political rights, and the minutia of daily life in the colonies were drastically changed, as were ideas of history, belonging, subjectivities, and the imagined space of “society” itself.9Ibid., 45.
Sharma surveys a wide range of other contexts around the world that were similarly shaped by dynamics of indirect rule, including contexts of settler colonialism. When the US state imposed its legal-political categorization on Indigenous populations, “Indianness” was “materialized”; this interpellation by the state “shape[s] social relations between these groups to this day.”10Ibid., 48. The same process of peoples coming to identify with their legal-political categorization by the settler-colonial state occurred in Canada. State categorization “had serious and long-lasting material, political, and affective outcomes for all concerned, and it profoundly shaped the subjectivities of both those identified by Canada as Indians and those who were not.”11Ibid., 51.
This brings us to Sharma’s position that resurgent Indigenous movements and decolonial struggles are the political and ideological offspring of the settler colonial state itself.12Ibid., 54. For Sharma, Indigenous peoples’ efforts to reclaim their self-determination are shaped by “deep and centuries-long histories of colonialism”; their felt cultural connections to a precolonial life are products of origin stories invented in a postcolonial context and retroactively inserted into the past to justify national sovereignty claims in the present.13Ibid., 61. Sharma offers examples of the Mohawk and Cherokee Nations, which at different times have restricted membership and access to their institutions and land on the basis of a “blood quantum” principle, a measure adopted from settler colonial states.14Ibid., 256–60.
In sum, for Sharma there is a “shared philosophical basis”15Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 42. between two groups that are commonly assumed to have fundamentally different relationships to capitalism and settler colonialism. On the one hand, there are “Nativists” who imagine themselves to be members of a racially and culturally homo- genous body politic united patriotically around shared opposition to immigrants and refugees, and who find common cause with reactionary elements of society. And on the other hand, there are “Natives,” the First Nations and original peoples of the land who in my context (that of settler colonialism in Canada) have survived centuries of genocidal policies and racist and sexist violence, and who are on the front lines of struggle for the survival of life on this planet against capitalism and ecocide. In Sharma’s view, the “shared philosophical basis” of these groups is that, despite appearances, both are variations of the first: both are nationalist formations that are internally united by opposition to migrants and by commitment to sovereignty in a state of their own.
The Question of Decolonial Resistance
There is a line of questioning that is not part of Sharma’s account but that should have been one of the first to consider: To what extent can Indigenous struggles be reduced to the categories and ruling relations of the settler colonial state? How does that reduction happen? When is it successful, and when does it fail? How is it contested? How did the reduction and the resistance to it change over time?
To what extent can Indigenous struggles be reduced to the categories and ruling relations of the settler colonial state? How does that reduction happen? When is it successful, and when does it fail?
Thinking this through in the context of a settler colonial state like Canada would require weighing what Indigenous thinkers themselves have to say about their history of resistance to the terms dictated by the settler colonial state. It would require specifying the difference between the legal traditions of the settler colonial state and those of Indigenous peoples, including the internal complexity of each, and how people variously related to that difference. Hence it would involve acknowledging the possibility, for instance, that Indigenous communities understand their relationship to the legal tradition of the Canadian state in a way that is entirely different than how the Canadian state understands its relationship to Indigenous modes of governance. It would require examining strategies used by the settler colonial state to undermine Indigenous legal and political traditions and modes of governance—strategies that in the Canadian context were found to meet the definition of cultural genocide under international law16Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Final Report of the Truth and Reconiliation Commission of Canada,” 2015, http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html. —and how Indigenous people experienced and resisted that genocide. It would require reflecting on instances of contradiction in settler colonial politics, how those contradictions arise, and how they are understood and misunderstood.
Now, we cannot expect a global history like Home Rule to dive into the kind of inquiry I outline here as that would require a different kind of book. Still, this does not mean that the issues can be set aside, which is what Sharma appears to do by suggesting that the mere passage of time—the “centuries-long histories of colonialism”—had enough of a “deep and lasting” impact on Indigenous peoples to support the conclusion that Indigenous peoples have internalized the terms of modern law and statehood, and adopted capitalist, colonial aspirations as the horizon of their self-knowledge and political agency.17Sharma, Home Rule, 51, 61. It is hard to find this convincing after weighing for a moment the kind of issues I raise above. Those issues would open a new dimension in the history that Sharma traces. It would recall Walter Benjamin’s wisdom that the mere passage of “homogenous, empty time”—the increase in linear, temporal distance from an empirically located past—never closes the door to the ethical dimension of “Messianic time” in which downtrodden ancestors lay claim to resistance and struggle in any present moment.18Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 389–400.
What is missing in Sharma’s account is consideration of how state categories are resisted and challenged in pursuit of radical alternatives to the capitalist social relations to which the state belongs. If history only moved in imperial categories, unfolding in the passage of homogenous empty time, then it might follow that Indigenous freedom struggles against the state are mere variations and innovations of colonial institutions. Indigenous struggles in that case would be reduced to what lawyers are compelled to argue for in court using principles of Canadian law that aim to assimilate Indigenous peoples into capitalist social relations. They would be national sovereignty movements aspiring to replace the settler state with a patchwork of nation states in a further development of postcolonial capitalism.19Sharma, Home Rule, 245.
But this would leave much out of the picture. Though Indigenous nations cannot avoid defending themselves in the courts and thus articulating claims in vocabularies that Canadian governing bodies, for example, are willing to hear, Indigenous scholars repeatedly teach us that Indigenous legal traditions involve modes of thinking and being that do not lend themselves to assimilation to the legal reasoning in play in the modern sovereign state.20John Borrows, Freedom & Indigenous Constitutionalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Law’s Indigenous Ethics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). The double bind of a settler colonial context makes contradictions unavoidable, politics messy, and strategies of resistance necessary. That, as always, is the terrain of struggle in history.
The Commons Beyond Autochthony
In Home Rule, Sharma convincingly dispels the belief that sovereign states can be vehicles of liberation. Unfortunately, however, the book reduces all social struggles against the state to struggles for national sovereignty in new or different states. Though Sharma does express support for struggles for a planetary commons,21Sharma, Home Rule, 281–82, citing Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 57–58. A fuller account is found in Sharma and Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance,” 131–33. As I argue below, in these works there is an unresolved tension between endorsing struggle for the commons and theorizing Indigenous struggle. See Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach,” 20–24. the reach of this endorsement exceeds the limits of her theoretical framework. For, if a struggle for the commons is to take place, it can occur only in a place and context where people challenge the state and the social relations of the state. But if struggle occupies a place, has a distinct direction and persistence with clear boundaries about what it is and is not, organizes around demands or refusals that would alter the course of things, and thus becomes a space of belonging for those who support and act on those demands or refusals, in Sharma’s framework such struggle would count as yet another autochthonous formation that repeats colonial dynamics. Struggle becomes a reflection of the problem it aims to address, forever turning into its mirror opposite, and the “Postcolonial New World Order” becomes a
permanent condition at the end of history.
Struggle becomes a reflection of the problem it aims to address, forever turning into its mirror opposite, and the ‘Postcolonial New World Order’ becomes a permanent condition at the end of history.
Thus, a question arises: if struggles against autochthonous states are themselves autochthonous, how are the commons ever possible, and what meaning can the commons have for people who are struggling for it now? To clarify this issue, it may help to distinguish two different ideas of what the commons could be, each one involving a different politics of struggle.
On the one hand, the commons could be the territoriality of transnational corporations and capital that shed political and geographical constraints in the name of extracting surplus value. It is against such commons that nativists call on the state to protect jobs at home by, for example, raising tariffs on imports, tightening border controls, and deporting migrants. Defending the commons against the nativists in this context would mean forcing them to compete in the global market.
On the other hand, the commons could be something radically different: it can be a goal generated in struggles against capital’s access to natural resources of trees, fish, minerals, water, and so on, against capital’s access to the land for pipelines, infrastructure, and real estate developments, and thus against the political entities that regulate, coercively impose, and tax this activity. This second definition of the commons refers to a relation of belonging in support of decolonial Indigenous struggles that oppose reckless resource extraction and other incursions on Indigenous lands. Acknowledging struggle for a commons in this second, decolonial, communist sense requires at minimum a theoretical framework that can grasp how history involves conflict between the two rival and incompatible ideas of the commons I just outlined.
With the above distinction in mind, it is easier to see that, since Sharma assumes that collective struggles are tied to the state form and the reproduction of capitalism, a struggle for the commons in the second, radical sense is missing in her theory. Sharma thus veers from her own reliance on the work of Linebaugh and Rediker, for whom the commons is a site of struggle alongside the “the plantation, the ship, and the factory.”22Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 327; Sharma, Home Rule, 56–57; Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 53. See also note 21 above. In Sharma’s account, struggles against capital accumulation are simply efforts to live with it more securely in a sovereign state. In her interview in Spectre, Sharma suggests that people make “recourse to autochthony” to make “non-market-based claims” in a context where the market provides the only access to “land, water, jobs, and more.”23Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 48–49, 54, 57. See also Sharma and Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance,” 129. We find the same thinking in Home Rule.24Sharma, Home Rule, 41–42, 276–78, and ch. 6. On this view, Indigenous efforts to fight corporations and resist capitalist social relations as such are made comparable to efforts by racist nativists to call upon the state to protect jobs at home with anti-immigrant policies and protectionist trade policies.
The idea of the commons in Sharma’s theory, then, is trapped in a problem of the theory’s own making: it is beyond autochthony, yet it returns to autochthony when it becomes a struggle to escape autochthony. Though this circularity does not have a solution in Sharma’s framework, it is not difficult to find one. It simply requires clarifying the limits to state power in the history of capitalism so that the role of struggle in that history becomes visible. This means remembering the practical implications of the Marxist insight that even though the sovereign state can react in different ways to the economy, it is not neutral in relation to it. Rather, the state exists to support and help enforce capital accumulation and thereby fuel the very crises and instabilities the state claims to manage and minimize.25Simon Clarke, “State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital” in The State Debate, Clarke, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 183–203; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism,” in Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–48.
My point here is that since the state is a contradictory institution of capitalist social relations, it depends on the reproduction of those relations on the open terrain of class struggle where the possibility always exists for them to be resisted and refused. That rupture happens with every direct action in defense of Indigenous life and land against incursions by states and corporations. Recovering this dimension of struggle would overcome the impasse in Sharma’s theory, where seeking the commons beyond autochthony simply returns one to the problem of autochthony with which one began.
The indeterminate place of the commons in Sharma’s theory involves a related problem, namely, how to conceive of historical change. If there is no struggle against autochthonous formations that does not itself reproduce autochthony, how are we to understand historical change and its agents? Since Sharma does not center the dynamics of struggle in her account, the only agent of change remaining is that of a sovereign state that has the power to enforce economic and immigration policies and tighten borders. This is reflected in Home Rule, which is principally a history of treaties, constitutions, pieces of legislation, and court rulings. Despite the force of Sharma’s criticism of nation states, her framework remains premised on the view that the state is the only agent of history.
To avoid these problems, histories must recognise what Sharma’s theorizing in Home Rule misses, namely how decolonial thinking rooted in place-based struggle with aspirations for life beyond postcolonial and settler capitalism is possible. That radical thought is described, for example, in Glen Coulthard’s account of how the Dene Nation’s opposition to the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was based on notions of property, culture, and belonging that are incompatible with the capitalist mode of production.26Glen Coulthard, “Place Against Empire: The Dene Nation, Land Claims, and the Politics of Recognition in the North,” in Recognition Versus Self-Determination: Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics, Coulthard et al, eds. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014): 158–85. It is in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s teachings about how Nishnaabeg internationalism includes nations of plants, animals, rivers, and lakes, and constitutes the life-giving and life-sustaining “deep relationality” of a “generative refusal” of the state and capitalist social relations.27Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
It is in the work of Indigenous legal scholars like John Borrows, who explores the difference between Canadian and Indigenous legal traditions in search of a basis for
decolonial reconciliation between Indigenous and settler societies that would transform both alike.28See note 20 above. A separate issue is the relation that intersocietal encounters in jurisprudence have to broader resistance to the Canadian state’s requirement that all parties support capital accumulation and capitalist social relations. It is in Shiri Pasternak’s rich study of the struggle by Algonquins at Barriere Lake for an “ontology of care” against the state.29Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). It is expressed in novels, poems, songs, and artworks by Indigenous artists and thinkers whose resistance to genocidal forces expresses wisdoms and insights that can support any struggle for life on the planet against social and environmental collapse.
Though Sharma is familiar with this field, it does not move her theorizing in Home Rule. This blurs the critical edge of her otherwise impressive research into the history of population displacement and immigration controls in postcolonial capitalism. Since it does not acknowledge the possibility of decolonial Indigenous struggle for a radical commons, Sharma’s theory lacks a basis for thinking its own core distinction between the autochthonous regime of natives and the commons in which migrants would find belonging. If the category of the native imposed by imperial powers is believed to subsume possible decolonial and anticolonial resistance to those powers, the commons becomes a space beyond collective struggle and therefore beyond history.
For these reasons, it is important that studies be guided from the start by the insight that no polity gains hegemony without contestation, and no power is asserted without resistance. No command relation can impose policy and reality on a people to such an extent that there no longer exists an agency that experiences, suffers, and objects to that domination. The agency that survives hears and tells the stories, shares the meals, and develops the theory that can create a sense of belonging in collective struggles—the kind of belonging that haunts capitalist power and resists it.
Notes & References
- The discussion was sparked by Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120–43. For Sharma’s initial intervention, see Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2008/2009): 120–38. For an excellent overview of the discussion, see Rita Kaur Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism,” Feral Feminisms 4 (2015): 20–37. See also Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–21; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rinaldo Walcott, and Glen Coulthard, “Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange,” Studies in Social Justice 12, no. 1 (2018): 79–85; Sadef Arat-Koc, “Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing Up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place,” Studies in Social Justice 14, no. 2 (2020): 371–90.
- Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
- Nandita Sharma, “Beyond Borders: Nation-States, Migration, and the Struggle for the Global Commons, An Interview with Zachary Levenson,” Spectre 1, no. 2 (2020): 38–58.
- I presented an outline of this paper to the Toronto Spectre reading group on March 28, 2021. Thank you to everyone who participated in, and helped organize, that discussion.
- Sharma, Home Rule, 208ff.
- Ibid., 37.
- Ibid., 41–2.
- Ibid., 42–3.
- Ibid., 45.
- Ibid., 48.
- Ibid., 51.
- Ibid., 54.
- Ibid., 61.
- Ibid., 256–60.
- Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 42.
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Final Report of the Truth and Reconiliation Commission of Canada,” 2015, http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html.
- Sharma, Home Rule, 51, 61.
- Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 389–400.
- Sharma, Home Rule, 245.
- John Borrows, Freedom & Indigenous Constitutionalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Law’s Indigenous Ethics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).
- Sharma, Home Rule, 281–82, citing Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 57–58. A fuller account is found in Sharma and Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance,” 131–33. As I argue below, in these works there is an unresolved tension between endorsing struggle for the commons and theorizing Indigenous struggle. See Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach,” 20–24.
- Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 327; Sharma, Home Rule, 56–57; Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 53. See also note 21 above.
- Sharma, “Beyond Borders,” 48–49, 54, 57. See also Sharma and Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance,” 129.
- Sharma, Home Rule, 41–42, 276–78, and ch. 6.
- Simon Clarke, “State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital” in The State Debate, Clarke, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 183–203; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism,” in Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–48.
- Glen Coulthard, “Place Against Empire: The Dene Nation, Land Claims, and the Politics of Recognition in the North,” in Recognition Versus Self-Determination: Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics, Coulthard et al, eds. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014): 158–85.
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
- See note 20 above. A separate issue is the relation that intersocietal encounters in jurisprudence have to broader resistance to the Canadian state’s requirement that all parties support capital accumulation and capitalist social relations.
- Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).