Introduction
Liberal political theoristsFootnote 1 have become increasingly interested in questions of territory and territorial jurisdiction. Settler colonialism is a central preoccupation of this literature, as it “forms the basis of the current societies in the Americas and Australasia” (Moore, Reference Moore2015: 140) and is the source of a “common challenge to current [state] boundaries” (Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 20). This growing literature intersects with various debates about the demands of justice including political legitimacy and self-determination (Buchanan, Reference Buchanan2003; Moore, Reference Moore2015: 34–70; Nine, Reference Nine2022: 127–215; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 116–31; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 89–154, Reference Stilz2019b; Wellman, Reference Wellman2005); fair distributions of natural resources (Angell, Reference Angell2019; Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2017; Blomfield, Reference Blomfield2019, Reference Blomfield2023; De Biasio, Reference De Biasio2024; Moore, Reference Moore2015: 162–87, Reference Moore2019b; Nine, Reference Nine2015, Reference Nine2022: 239–58; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 187–212; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 219–48); borders and migration (Miller, Reference Miller2007: 201–30; Moore, Reference Moore2015: 188–218; Ochoa Espejo, Reference Ochoa Espejo2020; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 213–50; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 157–216); and climate change (Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2017, Reference Armstrong2022; Blomfield, Reference Blomfield2019; Nine, Reference Nine2010, Reference Nine2022: 259–82; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 219–48). Major works in this literature thus include remedies for territorial injustices involved in settler colonialism to create a morally legitimate (and therefore just) system of sovereign territorial states.
This article questions whether these remedies are sufficient to address ongoing settler colonialism in modern states such as Canada. Existing works have focused on justifying territorial rights within liberal political theory, and thus engage settler colonialism through its dominant debates and concepts. They generally do not confront current practices of colonialism in settler societies, scrutinize liberal theory's relationship to settler colonialism, or engage substantively with challenges from Indigenous and anticolonial scholars and activists. Consequently, their work risks reinforcing settler colonial structures of dispossession more than reforming them.
I contend that this problem flows from territory theorists’ methodological commitments, which emphasise abstraction and universality. Instead, I argue that grounded normative theory (GNT) is a more appropriate methodology because it situates both theory and theorist in the particular struggles from which they think, and towards which their thinking is oriented. In so doing, it reveals power relations and assumptions that often go unchallenged in liberal normative inquiry.
The article proceeds as follows. I begin with two clarifications about GNT. I then provide a general overview of liberal territorial rights theories, including their origins, central philosophical commitments, and methodological approach. I contrast this approach with the methodological commitments of GNT and then outline three worries with existing theories when applied to settler states. The last section suggests three ways that GNT can reorient territorial rights theory towards decolonization.
Terminological Clarifications
Before we proceed, two clarifications are called for. First, GNT is a relatively new term for a set of methodological commitments that have evolved organically in various subfields of political theory (for summaries, see Ackerly, Reference Ackerly2018; Herzog and Zacka, Reference Herzog and Zacka2017; Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022; Longo and Zacka, Reference Longo and Zacka2019). Not all examples of GNT are described as such by their authors. Its boundaries are also porous; there is disagreement amongst practitioners on whether GNT is distinct from what others have called “engaged political theory”, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. There is also disagreement on whether GNT requires original empirical data collection: Several cited examples of GNT rely solely on close engagement with empirical sources, including government documents, case law, and media and personal narratives. I think one can follow GNT's methodological commitments without collecting data; different practitioners may disagree.
The second clarification concerns the distinction between GNT and grounded normativities. Although GNT has evolved partially in response to calls from Indigenous scholars for more solidaristic thinking (especially Coulthard and Simpson, Reference Coulthard and Betasamosake Simpson2016), the two are distinct in important ways. GNT is a methodology codified (primarily) by liberal political theorists to “better align political philosophy with the questions, goals, and needs of communities seeking social justice” (Engaged Theory Community, 2022). Grounded normativities, as I understand them, are not simply a methodology, but comprehensive philosophical systems, which include and inform Indigenous methodologies.
My understanding of grounded normativities comes from thinking with the work of Yellowknives Dene theorist Glen Coulthard and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Coulthard defines grounded normativities as the “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure [Indigenous] ethical engagements with the world and [their] relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (Reference Coulthard2014: 13). Simpson describes Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg grounded normativity using the term Nishnaabewin, meaning “all of the associated practices, knowledge, and ethics that make us Nishnaabeg and construct the Nishnaabeg world” (Reference Simpson2017: 22–23). Nishnaabewin, Simpson writes, is “generated through relations with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg land, land that is constructed and defined by our intimate spiritual, emotional, and physical relationship with it” (Reference Simpson2017: 23). Grounded normativities are inherently relational: engagement in these practices, Coulthard and Simpson write, “teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests” in a “nonauthoritarian, nondominating, [and] nonexploitative manner” (Reference Simpson2016: 254). As I suggest later in the article, GNT is one way to orient liberal theory and theorists towards the particular places, responsibilities, and relationships in which we are enmeshed, in a manner akin but not identical to grounded normativities.
III. Different Questions, Different Methodologies
The recent rise of the territorial question in liberal philosophy is the result of two motivations. First is the relative absence of territory: political philosophy has historically focused on the appropriate relationship between citizens and states. One aim of this literature is to unsettle the longstanding assumption that a state has legitimate jurisdiction (the right to make and enforce laws) over a given geographic area if it secures basic justice for its citizens in that area (for example, Buchanan, Reference Buchanan2003). Justifying territorial jurisdiction, they argue, requires explaining how people relate to the places that they live and the moral and political claims that arise from these relationships. This is especially important since the boundaries of most existing states are the result of annexation, colonialism, and conquest.
The second motivation is to respond to cosmopolitan critiques of the modern states system. Cosmopolitans object to the state for various reasons including that noncitizens are affected by and/or subjected to states’ decisions without having a say in them (for example, Abizadeh, Reference Abizadeh2008, Reference Abizadeh2012; Goodin, Reference Goodin2007), that borders unfairly restrict individual movement and their opportunities to live a good life (for example, Carens, Reference Carens2013), and that the international norm of non-interference inhibits collective responses to global problems like climate change (for example, Goodin and Fishkin, Reference Goodin and Fishkin2016). So, another aim of liberal territory theories is to show “whether a system of territorially bounded political authorities can be justified in the first place” and how we might draw boundaries within such a system (Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 9; see also Moore, Reference Moore2015: 7–9; Nine, Reference Nine2022: 7–11; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 1–2).
Most territory theorists use some version of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium (RRE), a dominant methodology in Anglo-American political philosophy. RRE inductively develops political principles through iterative testing against various moral and ethical commitments and specific real-world cases. Principles are at equilibrium when they are justified based on reasons all rational individuals would accept as compatible with their diverse beliefs, commitments, and intuitions. This process ensures that territorial rights are conceptualized in a way that is “accessible to the different groups that might conceivably lay claim to a particular territory” and can address “pressing contemporary issues relevant to territory” (Moore, Reference Moore2015: 10).
Although their specific articulations differ, territory theories define and justify the moral and political significance of territorial rights using three core principles:
1. All individuals possess fundamental material and associational interests that give rise to pre-institutional rights to access, reside on and not be removed from the places that are central to their life plans and relationships.Footnote 2 These interests are considered necessary conditions for individuals to live autonomous lives.
2. These material and associational interests require an institutional structure that secures basic justice, including the resources to meet one's basic needs, enforcement of some kind of property-like land tenure regime and a system of law that protects basic human rights.
3. Members of a political collective must reflectively endorse this institutional structure as legitimate. Legitimate institutions have territorial rights over the areas where their members have pre-institutional rights.
Territory theorists then show that these principles justify a system of distinct territorial units that is at equilibrium with our intuitions in specific real-world contexts and cases. It is here that theorists articulate their ideal vision of a territorial world and propose various corrective measures to reform the existing one. Settler colonialism is a central case of corrective justice not only because of its historical relevance to the present distribution of territory, but because its wrongness is “one of our fixed moral judgements” (Moore, Reference Moore2019a: 87–88). It is thus standard practice for territory theorists to explain the implications of settler colonialism for the territorial rights of modern states.
It is not my aim to evaluate the relative merits of these accounts or the methodological appropriateness of RRE for answering conceptual questions within liberal theory. Rather, I question the extent to which existing territory theories can generate solutions to “pressing contemporary issues relevant to territory” such as settler colonialism. This is not a new challenge: Many theorists have questioned whether RRE's methodological commitments to abstraction, ahistoricism, and universal reasoning can address contemporary political problems such as racism, sexism, and colonialism, whose injustice is often normalized in the real world (Ackerly, Reference Ackerly2018; Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; Allard-Tremblay, Reference Allard-Tremblay2021; Beausoleil, Reference Beausoleil2019; Hendrix, Reference Hendrix2012, Reference Hendrix2019: 34–40; C.W. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017; Tully, Reference Tully2016; Valentini, Reference Valentini2012).Footnote 3 Many theorists now argue that theorizing about injustices within liberal political theory requires a methodology that “[focuses] on the relationship between the [observed consequences of injustice] and the underlying forces of power inequalities and normalization” that sustain them (Ackerly, Reference Ackerly2018: 147; see also C.W. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017).
One such methodology, recently codified by Ackerly and colleagues (Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024), is GNT, which captures a broad range of theoretical approaches that centre lived experiences to orient political theory towards social justice and challenge dominant assumptions about “who is entitled to shape the norms and content of [this] justice” (Deveaux, Reference Deveaux2021: 10). Grounded normative theorists draw on a range of empirical sources including but not limited to original field data to develop an account of political responsibility for injustice that centres the political practices of those struggling against this injustice (for example, Ackerly, Reference Ackerly2018; Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; Deveaux, Reference Deveaux2021; Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022; Johnson and Porth, Reference Johnson and Porth2023).
Ackerly and colleagues characterize GNT as united by methodological commitments to comprehensiveness, recursivity, epistemological inclusion, and epistemic accountability (Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; see also Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022). Comprehensiveness refers to the range of actors, interests, and claims that are relevant to a normative inquiry. Grounded normative theorists draw on empirical data to “enrich, widen, and deepen” (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022: 54) their understanding of these relevant actors, interests, and claims, shedding light on how existing normative frameworks can “obfuscate rather than illuminat[e]” them (Vasanthakumar, Reference Vasanthakumar2021: 12). Normative principles are then generated and refined through recursive engagement with existing normative frameworks and the empirical context from which they theorize (Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022).
While comprehensiveness and recursivity draw the researcher's attention to the various actors speaking in a context, epistemological inclusion and epistemic accountability shape how they engage with what is being said. Epistemological inclusion invites the theorist to attend to the voices that are silenced by certain modes of inquiry, while epistemic accountability manages the risk of misrepresenting a group's desires, interests, and needs when speaking and writing about its members (Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022). Inclusion means seriously engaging the various claims at work in the empirical context, even if they are in tension with one another or with the theorist's ultimate normative theory, “figuring out what drives them, determining what is at stake in them, and working to either resolve or combat them” within the theory (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022: 55). Holding space for these claims is important, as it can draw attention to how oppression and injustice are normalized and obscured both in political practice and philosophy. Remaining accountable does not mean “assuming incommensurability” between various ontological perspectives (including the theorist's), but rather “committing to thoughtfully and deeply engaging with [these] perspectives, particularly those for whom the political stakes are high” (Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024: 167).
Different theorists emphasize these four commitments to varying degrees depending on their solidaristic orientation. Some view GNT as a way to practice solidarity with political activists, using their power, privilege and resources to directly support the goals of the communities with whom they produce knowledge (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022; Johnson and Porth, Reference Johnson and Porth2023). For these theorists, the goal is not simply to reveal previously obscured political actors and claims but to “actively [take a side] in [their] struggles for justice” (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022: 56); consequently, they foreground epistemological inclusion and accountability in their work. Other theorists engage empirics to expand, challenge, and revise existing theoretical frameworks and concepts (e.g., Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2022b; Deveaux, Reference Deveaux2021; Lu, Reference Lu2017; Vansanthakumar, Reference Vasanthakumar2021). These theorists typically place less emphasis on epistemic accountability and rely on empirical sources without conducting fieldwork. Some theorists (for example, Deveaux, Reference Deveaux2021) understand epistemic accountability to require fieldwork; others suggest that while this is of critical importance when doing fieldwork, it is also important for grounded theorists who do not (Ackerly et al., Reference Ackerly, Cabrera, Forman, Fuji Johnson, Tenove and Wiener2024; Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022). I understand epistemic accountability in this latter sense: Political theorists have a responsibility to account for the power structures in which we operate and have been trained and their impact on our normative work.
This is especially true for settler theorists like myself: members of the “non-Indigenous peoples who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority” of modern settler states (Vowel Reference Vowel2016, 16) and whose intellectual lineage derives from the European tradition.Footnote 4 Our political and intellectual lineages have long and deep entanglements with settler colonialism that continue in the present. These lineages generate entwined sets of responsibilities to scrutinize and confront how the “distortions and injustices of settler colonialism” shape our engagement with normative questions to continually dominate, erase, and invade Indigenous peoples, nations, knowledges, and lands (Sherwin, Reference Sherwin2022: 65; see also Allard-Tremblay, Reference Allard-Tremblay2021; Allard-Tremblay and Coburn, Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023; Archibald et al., Reference Archibald, Lee-Morgan and De Santolo2019; Beausoleil, Reference Beausoleil2020, Reference Beausoleil2022; Hendrix, Reference Hendrix2022; Ladner, Reference Ladner2017; L.T. Smith, Reference Smith2012). I discuss these responsibilities in more detail in the final section of this article.
Of course, simply laying out these different methodological approaches is not sufficient to convince territory theorists that their prescriptions risk reinforcing settler colonial structures of dispossession, as I have claimed. I have not laid out what these prescriptions are, let alone shown why they might be cause for concern. It is this task that I turn to next.
The Limits of Territorial Rights Theory as an Account of Territorial Justice
This section motivates the turn to GNT by outlining three methodological worries with existing liberal territorial rights theories as accounts of territorial justice in settler states like Canada. I suggest that their prescriptions are part of a larger project in Western theory that radically rehabilitates dominant paradigms and thinkers to advance decolonization (C.W. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017; Tully, Reference Tully2008). As Coburn and Moore have observed in this journal, this approach is discursively powerful because it is “difficult for the majority settler-descendant population to reject the argument [for Indigenous territorial rights] as an argument” (Reference Coburn and Moore2022: 2, original emphasis).Footnote 5 However, they also caution that it leaves unchallenged “the extent to which settlers’ ideas and beliefs, legal rights and relationships with land have to be interrogated and dismantled” as part of territorial decolonization (16). This section argues that the rehabilitative project in territorial rights theory falls short for three reasons. First, its conception of settler colonialism's distinctive wrongs is developed without reference to current practices in settler societies. Second, it redefines pre-institutional rights like property without considering how these rights are used to sustain settler colonialism. Third, it ignores the challenges and alternatives emerging from Indigenous and anticolonial scholarship and practice. I focus on one major theory to illustrate each argument for concision's sake only; these problems apply equally to other major theories.
Problem 1: (Re)Conceptualizing Settler Colonialism
One aim of the territorial rehabilitation project is to correct the historically dominant narrative that settler colonialism involved many unjust practices but is not unjust in principle (for recent articulations, see Valentini, Reference Valentini2015; Weltman, Reference Weltman2023a, Reference Weltman2023b). Rather, they argue that settler colonialism is a distinctly territorial wrong with two inherent features: dispossession and political domination. On their view, settler colonialism in the Americas and Australasia is an historical injustice—land was taken and political authority imposed “at some point in the past” (Luoma and Moore, Reference Luoma and Moore2024: 2)—that remains unrectified in the present.
Territory theorists argue that political domination persists because settler governments continue to deny Indigenous political communities’Footnote 6 status as nations who are entitled to many, if not all, the jurisdictional rights currently exercised by modern states.Footnote 7 These are inherent rights that derive from Indigenous political communities’ morally significant relationships with their territories and their political will and institutional capacity to govern themselves through their own institutions and to represent their interests internationally (Luoma, Reference Luoma2022; Moore, Reference Moore2015; Nine, Reference Nine2022; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a, Reference Stilz2019b).Footnote 8 This echoes the arguments of Indigenous scholars (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Estes, Reference Estes2019; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, Reference Simpson2017; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017; Temin, Reference Temin2023) and long-standing international agreements on the rights of colonized peoples (United Nations General Assembly, 1960, 2007), while rejecting the predominant conception in settler states of Indigenous political communities as “internal” or “national” minorities with rights to special accommodation whose precise terms are subject to internal negotiation (Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka1989, Reference Kymlicka1996; Patten, Reference Patten2014; Taylor, Reference Taylor1993). We can characterize territory theorists’ remedy for political domination as a robust politics of recognition wherein settler states cease their unjust imposition of authority over Indigenous people, political communities, and territories, and negotiate power-sharing regimes that respect their rights.
Dispossession also persists: as Moore writes, “for indigenous people, it is not simply that their ancestors were wronged by being victims of theft, but that the injustice continues: they are still without their land” (Reference Moore2016: 458). Territory theorists consider dispossession a serious injustice, often resulting in a group's loss of self-determination, forced removal, or confinement to smaller portions of their territory (Luoma and Moore, Reference Luoma and Moore2024: 2). Yet fully remedying this injustice, they argue, is complicated by the fact that generations have passed: many people have now developed morally significant life plans on previously stolen land, either because they were born there or because they immigrated from elsewhere (Moore, Reference Moore2015: 141-51; Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 153–86; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 74–84, Reference Stilz2019b).
Consider Stilz's discussion of the Cherokee removal from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1839, along the Trail of Tears (Reference Stilz2019a: 75–84). Settlers in Georgia, she argues, cannot legitimately expect to remain in their new homes because they were aware of the Cherokee's legally recognized rights in the area and removed them anyway; they must leave and allow the Cherokee to return. However, subsequent generations of settlers can legitimately expect to remain in their homes because they did not participate in the displacement, while subsequent generations of Cherokee have established their life plans in Oklahoma. This is because the “territory a person has a right to occupy … depends on objective facts about his actual pursuits, not only his subjective desires and aspirations” (83–84).
Stilz uses the dispossession of the Cherokee as a “hard case” to test the limits of her intuitions about the persistence of occupancy rights through time. This is an important part of RRE, as it is in recursively testing principles against such complex, nonideal cases that Stilz ensures her core principles are at equilibrium with her other fixed commitments. Doing so requires a certain amount of abstraction from actual historical conditions to “[explicate] the morally salient aspects of individuals’ relationships to the places that they live” (Moore, Reference Moore2019a: 91). Yet others have observed that this kind of hypothetical reasoning can generate limited solutions to pressing political problems like dispossession because abstraction shapes both how theorists characterize normative problems and the appropriate solutions in specific ways (Ackerly Reference Ackerly2018; Hendrix, Reference Hendrix2012; C. W. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017: 151–53). Although Stilz draws on empirical evidence, her framing of the problem and her conclusions respond to dominant debates about territorial rights in the abstract rather than actual practices of dispossession in settler states.
Let me elaborate. Stilz, like other territory theorists, characterizes dispossession as an interactional wrong: land was stolen at some past time by individual settlers or their governments, and Indigenous political communities now seek to reclaim this land.Footnote 9 The central question for a decolonized liberal territorial world is how much of this stolen land can permissibly be returned, given that many present-day individuals have morally legitimate expectations in relation to this land. The origins of this debate lie in Waldron's argument that historic injustices can be superseded by the passage of time and changing demands of justice (Reference Waldron1992; for criticisms, see Christie, Reference Christie2022; Hendrix, Reference Hendrix2022; Irlbacher-Fox, Reference Irlbacher-Fox, Irene Tomsons and Mayer2013; Murdock, Reference Murdock2022; Reibold, Reference Reibold2022). Although liberal theorists differ on whether Indigenous land theft has been superseded, they all insist that claims to “huge amounts of land” are unjustified due to present fairness constraints (Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 131; see also Luoma and Moore, Reference Luoma and Moore2024; Moore, Reference Moore2015: 141; Reference Moore2016: 458; Stilz Reference Stilz2019a: 78–84; Reference Stilz2019b.). Instead, their prescriptions for a decolonized territorial world hinge on rectifying the “persistent denial of [Indigenous political communities’ territorial] claims” by settler states and appropriately compensating them for land that can no longer be returned (Luoma and Moore, Reference Luoma and Moore2024: 12).Footnote 10
Yet when we step outside this debate, the problem of dispossession and its potential solutions change. The dominant view across diverse bodies of empirically oriented scholarship is that settler colonial dispossession is a structure of processes that aim to eliminate Indigenous people, political communities, and jurisdictions as Indigenous while simultaneously producing “legitimate” settler jurisdiction in their place (for example, Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Nichols, Reference Nichols2020; Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, Reference Simpson2016, Reference Simpson2017; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017; Starblanket and Stark, Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018; Stark, Reference Stark2016; Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006). Dispossession is not a series of historic events, but the “primary experience” of Indigenous peoples in modern settler states (L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017: 40), perpetuated by social processes and norms that “have been structured [to continually facilitate]” this dispossession (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014: 6–7). These forms of dispossession are not “immediate, explosive, [or] spectacular,” but an expansive, iterative violence that “unfolds over… a long duration” (Estes, Reference Estes2019: 166) through normalized discourses and legal processes that simultaneously target Indigenous bodies, political communities, and grounded normativities (L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017: 43; see also Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014; Stark, Reference Stark2016). Indigenous bodies must be “eradicated—disappeared and erased into Canadian society, outright murdered or damaged to the point where [they] can no longer reproduce Indigeneity” (L. Simpson Reference Simpson2017, 41; see also Estes, Reference Estes2019; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, Reference Simpson2016). Indigenous political communities are constructed as “inferior” or “subordinate” to the settler political communities and the settler state through legal and philosophical narratives that allow these states to dictate the contours of their membership (A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014), impose governance structures (Estes, Reference Estes2019; Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017), erase their laws (Christie, Reference Christie2022; A. Mills, Reference Mills2016; Napoleon, Reference Napoleon2005; Turner, Reference Turner2006, Reference Turner, Hokowhitu, Moreton-Robinson, Tuhiwai-Smith, Andersen and Larkin2020), and define the content and boundaries of their territorial rights (Borrows, Reference Borrows2002: 77–110; Tully, Reference Tully2008). Large-scale resource extraction projects and infrastructure, legally constructed as “justifiable infringements” on Indigenous jurisdictions, terraform Indigenous territories, decimating their economies, grounded normativities, and jurisdictions (Estes, Reference Estes2019; Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017). As Lakota historian Nick Estes writes, Indigenous dispossession is more than the elimination of people or political communities, but the “wholesale destruction of nonhuman relations” within which grounded normativities are generated and sustained (Reference Estes2019: 90).
This structure of dispossession is also iterative: the settler state must continually invest time, energy, and resources into maintaining these structures in the face of Indigenous peoples and political communities’ continued refusal to disappear (A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, Reference Simpson2017; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017; Tully, Reference Tully2008; Whyte, Reference Whyte2018a).Footnote 11 Despite normalized narratives to the contrary, the jurisdictional question in Canada is not settled but in fact a “perpetual struggle… over the authority to have authority” (Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017: 3, 2, original emphasis). This generates a “politics of domination that requires considerable levels of state violence and criminalization to manage the Indigenous opposition to settler occupation” (Pasternak et al., Reference Pasternak, Cowen, Clifford, Joseph, Nadine Scott, Spice and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark2023: 5). We need look no further than the repeated mobilization of the RCMP's Community-Industry Response Group, which violently defends so-called critical infrastructure against Wet'suwet’en and Secwépemc land defenders to see this iterative work in action (Forester, Reference Forester2022; Pasternak et al., Reference Pasternak, Cowen, Clifford, Joseph, Nadine Scott, Spice and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark2023). Dispossession is also reiterated in the everyday actions of individuals within the settler state: when corporations and governments file injunctions to continue resource development projects on Indigenous territories or court justices insist that Indigenous territorial rights must be reconciled with underlying Crown sovereignty, they continue the ongoing “usurpation, dispossession, incorporation, and infringement” of Indigenous jurisdictions (Tully, Reference Tully2008: 264–5).Footnote 12
Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between political domination and dispossession discussed above collapses. It is not immediately intuitive, as Stilz suggests, that subsequent generations of settlers are “morally innocent” of Indigenous dispossession. Perhaps it is true that many of us are not actively removing Indigenous peoples from their homes and settling ourselves there, but we participate in the structures that sustain dispossession and propagate the background narratives that legitimate it and so bear responsibility to redress them (see Lu, Reference Lu2017; Young, Reference Young2011).Footnote 13 We live, as Kanien'kehá:ka anthropologist Audra Simpson asserts, in “still settling states” (Reference Simpson2017: 20, original emphasis). To position ourselves as morally innocent in this larger structure is, from the perspective of Indigenous people and their allies, what Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) have called a “settler move to innocence.” These moves are the result of embedded “structures of feeling” that shape settlers’ emotional attachments to place in particular, normalized ways (Rifkin, Reference Rifkin, Levander and Levine2011, cited in Mackey, Reference Mackey2016). Mackey argues that emotional reactions such as fear, anger, and resentment to the perceived risk and uncertainty sparked by Indigenous jurisdictional assertions are normal responses within settler structures of feeling because settler “ownership of property… and the territorial integrity of [the] nation” are longstanding “settled expectations” within this structure (Reference Mackey2016: 17–18). Individual and collective settler emotions in the face of these assertions “both reflect [and] reproduce key assumptions” of settler colonialism including “certainty, uncertainty, and anxiety” (19). Lurking behind this anxiety, Murdock has argued, is the fallacy that realizing justice for Indigenous political communities is entwined with “the ability and desire for Indigenous nations to dispossess and dominate settlers in the same way” settlers dispossess and dominate them (Reference Murdock2022: 418).
My claim here is not that territory theorists intend to construct their arguments as moves to innocence that reinforce these structures of feeling. Nor is it my claim that these theorists believe that returning stolen land would result in mass dispossession of settlers or that they understand Indigenous political communities to be making these claims. My point is that by developing their ideal territorial world in response to dominant liberal debates on the nature and associated wrongs of settler colonialism in the abstract, territory theorists advance prescriptions that can be used to legitimize the structures of feeling animating these debates in settler states. Rather than centring these debates, they might have centred the visions of restitution articulated by Indigenous and allied scholars, which emphasize changing the ways that settlers relate to the earth and other political communities rather than their removal (for example Allard-Tremblay and Coburn, Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023; Asch, Tully, and Borrows, Reference Asch, Tully and Borrows2018; Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Coulthard and Simpson, Reference Coulthard and Betasamosake Simpson2016; Ladner, Reference Ladner, Goodyear-Grant and Hanniman2019; A. Mills, Reference Mills2016, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017, Reference Mills, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018; Starblanket and Stark, Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018; Stark, Reference Stark, Borrows and Coyle2017; Temin, Reference Temin2023; Tully, Reference Tully, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018). Section V revisits these alternative visions.
Problem 2: Redefining Pre-institutional Rights
Another goal of the territorial rehabilitation project is to refute the racist and colonial conceptions of pre-institutional rights in the works of classical theorists like Locke, Kant, and Grotius used to historically justify the seizure of Indigenous lands. Territory theorists wish to retain the “power and plausibility” of these concepts in explaining why individuals and groups have rights over particular places, while rejecting the “practical use to which [these theories] were put”: denying Indigenous people had political communities and territorial rights at the time of European contact (Simmons, Reference Simmons2016: 121). In their view, we acquire rights over particular places because they are part of our individual and collective plans and this gives us an important autonomy interest in being able to exercise control over these places (Moore, Reference Moore2015: 34–70; Nine, Reference Nine2022: 104–23; Stilz, Reference Stilz2019a: 33–58).
Simmons’ (Reference Simmons2016) recent rehabilitation of Locke's social contract theory is an ambitious example of this goal. Simmons accepts the general Lockean formulation that we gain property rights over land through use but rejects Locke's narrow conception of use as improvement through settled agrarian labour. Instead, he adopts a broader conception of use that relates to the significance of a place to an individual's life plans: we gain property rights by incorporating things into the “legitimate purposive activities” that give our lives meaning (Reference Simmons2016: 181). Property rights, he argues, are only justified so long as “we leave a fair share of the world for others to use or appropriate” and can therefore change “as the size of a ‘fair share’ itself changes” (119). Simmons claims that this conception of property can “make good moral sense of the particularity” of Indigenous territorial claims without depriving settlers of their fair share (182, n61).
Simmons’ view conforms to the assumptions, unpacked above, about settler colonialism and the possibility of territorial restitution. I will not rehearse that argument here. Instead, I question how much his conceptual reformulation of property rights advances territorial decolonization because it does not engage with the operationalization of property rights in settler states (C.W. Mills, Reference Mills2017: 84). That Simmons fails to engage so-called empirical considerations is not surprising; his goal is to convince other territory theorists that Lockean voluntarism best captures their intuitions about the nature and scope of state territorial rights in the abstract. Yet his conception of property rights is also central to his ideal of a decolonized territorial world, and it is not clear to me whether this ideal is attainable without engaging the “particular historically and socially located struggle[s]” from which concepts like property are produced in settler states—especially since Locke's work is foundational to them (Nichols, Reference Nichols2020: 13; see also Arneil, Reference Arneil1996; Bhandar, Reference Bhandar2018: 33–75).
One of the pressing problems in settler states is that concepts like property and occupancy are tools to produce settler jurisdiction. Nichols, for example, argues that property and dispossession are conceptually entwined in Anglo-American settler law because Indigenous relations to land are made legally legible “under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation” (Reference Nichols2020: 8)—that is, by surrendering their land to settler law as property. Dispossession is thus a “form of property-generating theft” (9) because “[Indigenous people] come to ‘have’ something they cannot use [property], except by alienating it to another” (8; see also A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017). This is a recursive process wherein settler authority is asserted “extra-legally” over Indigenous land by individuals, corporations, or governments and then “retroactively validated” by the state (Nichols, Reference Nichols2020: 39; see also Bhandar, Reference Bhandar2018: 33–75; Borrows, Reference Borrows2002: 77–110; Estes, Reference Estes2019).
Retroactive validation is not limited to historic settler land-grabbing practices such as pre-emption and homesteading: it continues in the modern day through legal constructions that limit the potential uses of Indigenous lands. The Supreme Court of Canada, for example, ruled in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia that Indigenous political communities “cannot put [their title lands] to uses which would destroy that [historic and traditional] value” used to justify their title claim (1997: par. 129). “If aboriginal people wish to use their lands in a way that aboriginal title does not permit,” the Court writes, “then they must surrender those lands [to the Crown] and convert them into non-title lands to do so” (1997: par. 131). In other words, Indigenous political communities may “transform” their land into property, but only by “surrendering” it to settler law. The goal of this and other legal processes such as modern land claims is ostensibly to secure a “fair share” for settler and Indigenous communities through “lasting certainty regarding the parties’ respective rights to ownership, use and management of resources” (CIRNAC, 2018, quoted in Papillon, Reference Papillon, Bickerton and Gagnon2020: 227). The result is an attempt to eliminate Indigenous jurisdiction and produce settler jurisdiction in its place.
Part of the problem is that settler conceptions of property rights “overwhelmingly [disregard] […] Indigenous understanding[s] of land-people relations, law and normativity” (Christie, Reference Christie2022: 427). As Pasternak's work with the Mitchikanibikok Inik (Algonquins of Barriere Lake) shows, property rights can be tools of dispossession even when they are implemented with good intentions. Mitchikanibikok Inik jurisdiction arises from what Pasternak calls an “ontology of care” that “retains its integrity through quotidian land use and stewardship” (Reference Pasternak2017: 95). Mitchikanibikok Inik employed a communal land tenure system where the customary council regulated the distribution of families across hunting territories to ensure responsible and sustainable use (117). This system was disrupted by the Quebec government's implementation of the registered trapline system. Although the provincial government acted with the intention of securing each family their “fair share” against settler encroachment, the end result was a system that distorted and denied “the ways of life that embodied and enacted the Algonquin legal and political order” because it failed to recognize that hunting and trapping were exercises of jurisdiction and not simply land-based or usufructuary practices (120). In attempting to preserve Mitchikanibikok Inik jurisdiction on settler rather than Algonquin terms, the government in fact jeopardized what it intended to defend.
My claim here is not that revised conceptions of property or occupancy in existing territory theories are incompatible with the ontologies of care animating Indigenous grounded normativities. Territory theorists acknowledge that land can play a significant, nonfungible role in the lives of particular groups, and consider Indigenous relationships to land a paradigm case of this. Simmons would consider the stewardship and use practices of the Mitchikanibikok Inik purposive activities that sustain their jurisdiction and lifeworld and give rise to property rights. Moore, Stilz, and Nine would say the same. Rather, my point is that in redefining pre-institutional rights only in relation to an abstract set of material and associational interests deemed essential for individual and collective autonomy, territory theorists fail to show that their reformulations are not vulnerable to co-optation by the “recursive feedback loop[s]” (Nichols, Reference Nichols2020: 13) in settler law and policy that “give the appearance [of change]” while “further [consolidating their] power” and “[neutralizing Indigenous] resistance” (L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2017: 46; see also Whyte, Reference Whyte2018b). Simmons may find the practical application of Locke's theory morally repugnant, but grappling with this empirical legacy is, I think, necessary to show that Locke's principles are the most “powerful and plausible” path to a decolonized territorial world.
Problem 3: Ignoring Alternative Visions
Reconceptualizing settler colonialism and redefining pre-institutional rights are necessary steps towards the territorial rehabilitation project's ultimate goal: envisioning a decolonized territorial world that respects Indigenous political communities’ rights in terms broadly compatible with Indigenous grounded normativities. This project radically reframes liberal conceptions of territory to justify rights for all political communities on terms that are accessible to various different groups, even if these groups might not understand their relationship to land and territory in these terms. Territory theorists are not attempting to speak for Indigenous people and communities but create a “common language” without requiring resolution of “deeper ethical and ontological disagreements” about how we should understand our relationship to land or territorial rights and the potential incommensurability of these views (Luoma, Reference Luoma2022: 26).
This project is a powerful refutation of the dominant view in liberal theory and settler society that Indigenous peoples are distinctive cultural groups rather than political communities with jurisdictional rights. But it also avoids more fundamental challenges emerging from Indigenous grounded normativities and anti-colonial scholarship, and the philosophically rich alternatives these literatures propose. For example, the latter wonders if settler colonialism is “entangled in the very system of territorial sovereignty [liberal theorists] seek to defend” (Jurkevics, Reference Jurkevics2021a: 865), while the former understands land “not as a quantifiable good we live on, [but] a living entity we live with and generate knowledge through” (Starblanket and Stark, Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018: 182, original emphasis; see also Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; A. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017, Reference Mills, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018; Pasternak, Reference Pasternak2017; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2008, Reference Simpson2011, Reference Simpson2017; Stark, Reference Stark, Borrows and Coyle2017; Temin, Reference Temin2023; Whyte, Reference Whyte2018a).
To see this problem more clearly, consider Nine's recent book Sharing Territories (Reference Nine2022). Nine takes issue with other territory theories, whose foundations rest on the relationships between “one people [and] one particular territory” (2). Instead, she argues, we should start from the assumption that groups are “interdependent and overlapping” (3, original emphasis). This leads her to defend “foundational territories” as the fundamental unit of territorial rights: lower-scale (often transnational) political communities encompassing “individuals who hold special obligations to manage their located actions collectively” (8). The governments of these foundational territories need not be liberal democratic institutions: foundational territories that encompass Indigenous territories, Nine argues, should be governed by Indigenous systems, provided that non-Indigenous residents are included as equal members. Where foundational territories overlap with multiple Indigenous territories, they must be managed in ways that “substantially incorporate” Indigenous governance protocols (228–9).
Nine engages Indigenous scholarship in her work, drawing repeatedly on scholars like Leanne Simpson, Glen Coulthard, and Taiaiake Alfred. Yet how she engages with these works is shaped by her methodological commitment to showing, among other things, that natural law theorists must respect “the relatively independent spaces of indigenous self-determination on terms set by the indigenous groups themselves” (220). Although she cites settler-Indigenous jurisdictions as a motivational case for a theory of “nested and overlapping self-determination,” she draws exclusively on the natural law theories of Locke and Pufendorf and feminist theories of relational autonomy to develop her account of foundational territories (Reference Nine2022: 25). She does not, for example, reference the work of Audra Simpson, even though Nine's conception of “nested” territorial rights implicitly appeals to Simpson's notion of “nested sovereignty” (Reference Simpson2014: 11). Rather, Nine draws on Indigenous scholarship primarily to illustrate how settler colonialism has been harmful to their people, political communities, and grounded normativities (Reference Nine2022: 229–35). Citing Alfred, she argues that “decolonial projects need to provide sufficient space for unique indigenous ways of governing” (Reference Nine2022: 224). Her view, she claims, provides this space by giving “inherent moral weight” to Indigenous peoples’ pre-existing moral obligations to their human and nonhuman relations and requiring the substantive incorporation of these obligations into the governance practices of foundational territories and the larger states within which they are nested (225).
Yet we might wonder whether “providing sufficient space” for Indigenous governance practices through a modified framework of self-determination rights is sufficient to achieve a decolonized territorial world. It is certainly not clear to me that Simpson, Coulthard, or Alfred would be satisfied with this claim. Certainly, these scholars—and Indigenous people generally—argue that this is an important part of self-determination. But their works also question the liberal rights framework itself—a challenge that goes overlooked in Nine's and other major works.
In contrast, consider Sàmi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen's (Reference Kuokkanen2019) grounded theory of self-determination. Kuokkanen draws on interviews with Indigenous women in Canada, Greenland, and Sàpmi to develop a rich and nuanced theory of Indigenous self-determination as a relational value that is realized through “restructuring [all] relations of domination,” not simply those between Indigenous political communities and state institutions (22). Like Nine, Kuokkanen uses feminist relational autonomy frameworks to develop her conception of self-determination; unlike Nine, her view emerges from deep, recursive engagement with conflicting conceptions of self-determination in international law, liberal theory, various settler state policies, state-Indigenous discourses, Indigenous anticolonial activism, and her interviews (22–59). One key insight of this process is that the focus in political theory and international law on Indigenous-state relations elides the tensions and complexities within and across Indigenous conceptions of self-determination, and in particular, silences Indigenous women's alternative conception of self-determination as a relational value. Rights, on Kuokkanen's view, are revealed to be one of many tools through which Indigenous people might realize these relational values rather than the appropriate normative framework to capture the central elements of these values.
Of course, Kuokkanen is engaged in a different project: why “it is so difficult to write and speak as an Indigenous woman, explicitly from an Indigenous woman's experience, about the broader political issues of self-determination” (Napoleon, Reference Napoleon, Richardson, Imai and McNeil2009: 235–6, quoted in Kuokkanen, Reference Kuokkanen2019: 1). Yet I think this question raises an important point that territory theories have largely sidestepped: part of this difficulty is that we live in a territorial world that has been profoundly shaped in the image of natural law theories. This gives us reason to be sceptical of whether rehabilitated versions of these theories can propose ideal territorial worlds that are also decolonized worlds. Perhaps this is possible, but to do so requires, at minimum, seriously taking up Indigenous challenges to the theoretical core of these accounts and the alternate visions of decolonization they propose; otherwise, we risk what Charles Mills (Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017: 188) calls “conceptual tokenization.”Footnote 14 As Starblanket and Stark write: “it is not enough to make space for Indigenous knowledge. We must allow for this space to be reconfigured by Indigenous knowledge” (Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018: 182, my emphasis).
Territory theorists have largely succeeded in showing that rights over territory must be justified within liberal theory rather than simply assumed. They also provide persuasive normative justifications for a territorially bounded system of political authority. Yet as normative models of territorial decolonization, their theories leave much to be desired because they fail to engage with the empirical realities of settler states, the diverse (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) epistemological perspectives articulated therein, and the different questions, challenges, and potential solutions they propose. The next section considers how GNT can reorient these models.
Why Grounded Normative Theory?
I have drawn on empirically oriented and grounded scholarship to illustrate some limits of the territorial rehabilitation project. I am not against this project; on the contrary, I think that it is part of working towards decolonization. I do think, however, that existing works have pursued the rehabilitation project in a narrow sense that confines it within the dominant discourses and debates of liberal political theory. In this section, I suggest three ways that GNT can expand and reorient the territorial rehabilitation project towards decolonization.
Firstly, GNT changes the project's starting point: instead of seeking the necessary and sufficient conditions for territorial rights in the abstract, GNT begins by investigating the political problems that settler colonialism creates and their normative implications. These problems are diverse and entwined and can be tackled in different ways. Theorists might think in explicit solidarity with an Indigenous nation's struggle, as Pasternak did with the Mitchikanibikok Inik (Reference Pasternak2014, Reference Pasternak2017). They might develop a theory of territorial decolonization that revises liberal self-determination theories in dialogue with Indigenous grounded normativities (Luoma, Reference Luoma2023), or consider the strengths and limitations of these theories to capture the territorial rights of particular Indigenous political communities (Coburn and Moore, Reference Coburn and Moore2022; Luoma, Reference Luoma2022). They might focus on the intersection of settler colonialism with other land-related injustices, such as environmental injustice or the increasing concentration of private ownership enabled by capitalist accumulation and modern private property regimes.Footnote 15 These are all fruitful lines of normative inquiry that can “point the way towards liberation and [decolonial] justice in the real world” (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022: 54). I focus on the jurisdictional problem—that settler jurisdiction is produced through various processes that iteratively and expansively dispossess Indigenous people, political communities, and grounded normativities—and the normative challenges it poses for territorial rights theory.
The jurisdictional problem raises a normative challenge for liberal conceptions of jurisdiction because they share the same intellectual foundations—the natural law theories territory theorists attempt to rehabilitate (Jurkevics, Reference Jurkevics2021a, Reference Jurkevics2021b). But it also raises a broader normative challenge about settlers’ responsibility to respond to this deeply unjust power relation at the heart of our political community. When we start from the political problem of what jurisdiction does in settler states, the normative question changes from what justifies jurisdiction in principle to what is required to decolonize jurisdiction in settler states. Corrective, not distributive, justice is our central aim.
Moreover, GNT's commitment to comprehensive, recursive engagement with the empirical realities of settler colonialism foregrounds the normative significance of power relations that are often dismissed in liberal philosophy. One is the relationship between dispossession and particular economic structures—in particular, capitalist modes of production. Liberal theorists acknowledge that individual and collective plans might be structured around incompatible land use patterns; boundary-drawing and shared political institutions are necessary precisely to regulate these various uses (Moore, Reference Moore2015, Reference Moore2019; Nine Reference Nine2022, Reference Nine2023; Stilz Reference Stilz2019a). However, they generally avoid evaluating actual modes of production: so long as a group is not violating the rights of others and securing basic justice for their members, they are allowed to use and manage the land in whatever way best reflects their practices and values. Yet in practice capitalist modes of production in settler states are deeply entwined with the construction and exercise of jurisdiction as a structure of dispossession. Moreover, feminist scholarship decisively shows how these relationships are intimately connected to the genocide of Indigenous women, girls, and transgendered, nonbinary, and two-spirit peoples (Bourgeois, Reference Bourgeois and Green2017; Eberts, Reference Eberts and Green2017; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014, Reference Simpson2016; L. Simpson Reference Simpson2011, Reference Simpson2017; Stark, Reference Stark2016). A central part of the normative problem, then, is how to conceptualize jurisdiction in a way that radically rejects land use patterns premised on destroying the collective and interdependent ecological relationships that shape and enable human and nonhuman lives.
Second, GNT's commitment to epistemological inclusion insists that we cannot theorize territorial decolonization without centring the diverse and nuanced claims made by Indigenous people and the alternative territorial worlds contained in their grounded normativities. One of these alternatives is resurgence, which turns away from settler politics, theories, interests, and actors to focus on revitalizing Indigenous grounded normativities, worlds, and futures (for example, Allard-Tremblay and Coburns Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023; Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Coulthard and Simpson, Reference Coulthard and Betasamosake Simpson2016; Estes, Reference Estes2019; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014; L. Simpson, Reference Simpson2008, Reference Simpson2017, Reference Simpson2021; Starblanket and Stark, Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018). The resurgence project is not “accountable to settlers, or settler futurity, but to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” (Tuck and Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012: 35). Indigenous grounded normativities are, as Leanne Simpson writes, the “intellectual home” of resurgence because they are “continually generated in relation to place” (Reference Simpson2017: 16), unlike liberal thought systems which traditionally prioritize a view from “nowhere” (Allard-Tremblay, Reference Allard-Tremblay2021; Beausoleil, Reference Beausoleil2020).
Resurgence advances an alternative territorial ideal where settler authority exists in relation to, and is therefore legitimated by, Indigenous political worlds. This is not a new argument; it has been articulated in many ways by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike (for example, Borrows, Reference Borrows2002, Reference Borrows2016, Reference Beausoleil2019; Ladner, Reference Ladner, Goodyear-Grant and Hanniman2019; Turner, Reference Turner, Hokowhitu, Moreton-Robinson, Tuhiwai-Smith, Andersen and Larkin2020; Tully, Reference Tully2008). However, it has not been seriously taken up in liberal territorial rights theory, likely due to the hegemony of the natural law theories and the “sovereign territorial imaginaries” on which they are founded (Jurkevics, Reference Jurkevics2021b: 861). How should settlers understand our jurisdiction in a resurgent world?
An important element of resurgence theory, as I understand it, is that it is prefigurative: it “draw[s] from long-standing Indigenous imaginaries to sidestep the settler colonial present, actualizing a different, already existing world, that has been and is targeted for elimination by settler colonialism, but that may be revitalized and renewed” (Allard-Tremblay and Coburn, Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023: 372). Allard-Tremblay and Coburn use the Dish with One Spoon as an Indigenous political imaginary that can ground resurgence practices by holistically “emphasiz[ing] responsibilities to the Earth, to future generations, and to other peoples who depend on the Dish for survival and well-being; achieved by a refusal of greed, of division and through commitments to careful deliberation” (Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023: 373). Indigenous political imaginaries like the Dish with One Spoon articulate “constitutional vision[s] in which settler lives can be accounted for and legitimized” alongside Indigenous ones because Indigenous constitutional orders are based on an ethic of mutual aid, not coercion: individuals participate in political association because they recognize their dependence on each other to meet their needs and because they are taught to “create and sustain diverse but always respectful relationships” through discussion and debate (A. Mills, Reference Mills, Coyle and Borrows2017: 238, 234–35).
In these imaginaries, settler jurisdiction is not an inherent “right to do wrong” within our legitimate bounded territory (Stilz, Reference Stilz2019: 144), but one of many interdependent and deeply entangled relationships in a shared space. In fact, the very concept of a territorial right is itself in question, at least in its predominant formulation; to use this concept would require radically reformulating the relationship this right enshrines—for rights are a kind of relationship, even if they are conventionally articulated in restrictive rather than relational terms. Such a reformulation requires nondominating processes through which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can continually negotiate the shared terms of our relationships. But first, settlers must transform how we understand our land-based practices (of which governing is but one of many) through deep, reflexive engagement with the meaning of living in a resurgent world to understand the networks of relationships in which our authority is situated and the obligations these relations generate (for example, Stark, Reference Stark, Borrows and Coyle2017; Tully, Reference Tully, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018).
Finally, GNT's commitment to epistemic accountability highlights the ways that we as theorists are produced by and think from particular places and intellectual lineages. Accountability is particularly important for settler theorists engaged in the territorial rehabilitation project, who are trained, as Stó:lō musicologist Dylan Robinson argues, to be “hungry listeners”: to recognize and seek out standardized structures, concepts, and arguments, and to “fit” the unfamiliar within these predetermined frameworks (Reference Robinson2020: 51; see also Allard-Tremblay, Reference Allard-Tremblay2021). “To be starving,” Robinson writes, “is to be overcome with hunger in such a way that one loses the sense of relationality and reflexivity in the drive to satisfy that hunger” (53). Settler theorists’ intellectual lineage trains us to read, think, and listen “hungrily”; we are trained by default to translate knowledge into our dominant paradigms to achieve the “satisfaction”—or, in Rawlsian terms, equilibrium—of understanding (Robinson, Reference Robinson2020: 51–52). Importantly, hungry listening is a continuum—while settler theorists may begin from this position, we are not hermetically sealed within it, but can and do develop critically reflexive attitudes through accountable engagement with other perspectives.
Epistemic accountability also explains why it would be inappropriate for settler theorists to simply adopt one or several Indigenous grounded normativities as the theoretical blueprint for territorial decolonization: We have different practices and ways of relating to the world.Footnote 16 Currently, settler colonialism structures our politics and practices to “obscure” and “naturalize” our “collective… identity and history of being a settler people” insulating us from how we continually participate in Indigenous dispossession (Beausoleil, Reference Beausoleil2020: 667, my emphasis). As I understand it, one of the ways that settler theorists are being invited to practice solidarity with Indigenous peoples and political communities is by turning away from these structures and processes that sustain their dispossession in our name and for our benefit, and “root [our] political communities in earth” (A. Mills, Reference Mills, Asch, Borrows and Tully2018: 135).Footnote 17 This requires “[working] in concert with Indigenous-led endeavours to end colonialism, return Indigenous lands, and support the resurgence of Indigenous peoples” (Johnson, Reference Johnson, Ercan, Asenbaum, Curato and Mendonça2022: 58). It also requires careful and attentive engagement with Indigenous grounded normativities to understand the contours of the political worlds in which we live and the labour we are being asked to undertake to support the resurgence of these worlds (Beausoleil, Reference Beausoleil2020, Reference Beausoleil2022). GNT is a methodology that orients settler theorists more explicitly towards these tasks.
Conclusion
This article has argued for grounded normative theory as a more appropriate methodology to tackle questions of territorial justice in settler states. I began by contrasting the central aims and methodological commitments of liberal territory theories and GNT: the former are engaged in an ideal, conceptual project primarily directed at other liberals, while the latter is oriented towards addressing injustices through deep engagement with the narratives and power relations that normalize them. I then outlined three limitations of the rehabilitation project undertaken by territory theorists that result from their failure to engage the robust critical and empirical literature on settler colonialism. First, they conceptualize settler colonialism as an historic injustice that forms the basis of modern states, rather than a structure of processes that continues to dispossess Indigenous political communities. Second, they fail to show that their revision of colonial concepts can withstand co-optation by these structures. Third, their focus on expanding liberal theories to include Indigenous views overlooks the fundamental challenges these views propose and the alternative visions of decolonized justice they envision. I then sketched three ways GNT might reorient the territorial rehabilitation project towards decolonization.
The transformational potential of the revised territorial rehabilitation project I have sketched is more limited than explicitly solidaristic and coalitional projects co-created Indigenous peoples and nations. Yet I think these two kinds of projects can coexist, and potentially inform each other. Perhaps the territorial rehabilitation project is merely a method of “settler harm reduction” that functions as a stopgap to enable “the resuscitation of practice and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies” (Tuck and Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012: 21). Despite its limitations, I think that radically reorienting settler theorists (and settlers more generally) towards the goals of resurgence by seriously considering how to root both our theory and practice in relation to Indigenous political worlds is important normative work. Settler colonialism can only be transcended when “the structures that sustain [it] have finally been transcended” (Allard-Tremblay and Coburn, Reference Allard-Tremblay and Coburn2023: 374); part of this transcendence is for settlers to confront how our practices and relationships with others are shaped by these structures, and to refuse the norms and structures of feeling that sustain them. This kind of work can pave the way for, or work complimentarily alongside, more explicitly solidaristic projects of transformation.
Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to Margaret Moore for detailed feedback on many drafts of this article. I am grateful to Yerin Chung, Kayla Dold, Danielle McNabb, and Jana Walkowski for their support and constructive feedback throughout this process. Many thanks to audiences at the Canadian Political Science Association (May 2023), MANCEPT Political Theory Workshop on Decolonial Conceptions of Territory, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination (September 2023) and the Political Philosophy Reading Group at Queen's University (March 2024) for their helpful questions and feedback. Finally, I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers at the Canadian Journal of Political Science for their generative comments, questions, and reading suggestions, which proved invaluable in sharpening the scope and contributions of this article.
Disclosure of funding
This project was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares none.
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