Rooting Ourselves in Earth: Towards a Theory of Territorial Decolonization

Canada is founded on a contradiction: it claims sovereign jurisdiction over Indigenous people, territories, and jurisdictions without their consent and despite their refusal. This contradiction is maintained through laws, policies, institutions, and norms that continually colonize Indigenous people, communities, knowledges, and lands. Indigenous and settler scholars argue that resolving this contradiction requires decolonization—changing laws, policies, institutions, and norms that maintain settler supremacy—and Indigenization—recentring Indigenous knowledge, institutions, and practices. This is the work of Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada. This thesis, in dialogue with Indigenous philosophies, investigates the implications of these calls for territorial justice in settler states. Decolonization and Indigenization raise several related philosophical questions in these contexts. First are questions concerning relationships between self-determining communities with distinct systems of law and governance whose jurisdictions overlap, including what constitutes mutual respect between these communities, how their jurisdictions should be exercised in relation to each other, and the kinds of transformational processes required to realise these relationships in settler states. Second are questions concerning how accountability is maintained in political relationships over time, its role in restoring relationships, and how agents respond to demands for accountability. Third are questions concerning mutual understanding between communities with diverse lifeways and the processes required to achieve them. I argue that territorial justice in settler states requires rooting the settler lifeway in the principles of the Earth: mutual respect, reciprocity, and renewal. This process will involve sustained intercultural dialogues between settler and Indigenous peoples and philosophies to develop a mutual understanding of the concepts, values, and norms that express the value of mutual respect, reciprocity, and renewal in these unique relationships. Developing and maintaining these relationships necessitates an active and ongoing practice of relational accountability, realised through the reconceptualization of jurisdictional rights as gifts between interdependent communities. This broader argument about territorial decolonization is developed through three interrelated sub-arguments about the role of mutual understanding and relational accountability in political, normative, and disciplinary relationships.

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