To Forsake Becoming: Indigenous Ontologies, Land Defence, and the Resistance at Standing Rock
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Indigenous studies and elsewhere in academia, ‘grounded normativity’ is proclaimed to not only defy settler and extractive colonialism, but liberate humanity from the violence of modernity, the ways of knowing and being imposed upon the world by the West. Whereas possession – of property, of the self, of one’s will to influence their surroundings – is understood by scholars to replicate the domination of Indigenous peoples, their embeddedness and primordial attachment to the Earth is argued to disrupt colonial power relations. But do Indigenous ontologies offer a way out of a dead-end modernist paradigm? Close examination reveals this conceptualization aligns well with the hegemonic status of neoliberalism today. If Indigenous lifeworlds exist as webs of reciprocal relations, they may in fact inform rather than resist the systems that continue to govern by new and evolving means. As neoliberalism is increasingly premised on posthuman rationalities, the non-possessive disposition of Indigenous peoples is celebrated, putting their acts of protest in a paradoxical bind. In this article I build on the arguments of David Chandler and Julian Reid in their respective works, and join their critique of ‘becoming Indigenous’ – to become one with nature, to become more-than-human, to act out ‘choreographies of becoming’ that affirm, no less, an endless relational entanglement. I instead bring attention to the immediacy of Indigenous land defence, and argue that in the resistance at Standing Rock, another Indigenous subject is visible, one that is possessing, and acts on their political agency commensurate with the human.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".