Colonial Unknowing and Heterogeneous Relationalities

Abstract

Abstract Colonial unknowing works to delegitimize Indigenous claims to land by disavowing philosophies and political systems of relation to land as alternative formations of knowledge, power, and freedom. If colonization is dependent on a disavowal of legitimate claims to land, then it is tied also to dismissal and rejection of the philosophies and politics of rooted relationality that ground those claims. This chapter addresses misperceptions of Indigenous philosophies of relation to land as essentialist affirmations of fixed and homogeneous traditions. Against these misperceptions, Indigenous critical theories formulate relations to land in philosophies and politics of heterogeneous relationalities and rooted dynamisms. This chapter takes up formulations of heterogeneous relationalities in interrelated theories of knowledge, freedom, self-identity, collective identity, and political governance, to argue that a polycentric understanding of knowledge as dispersed among interdependent beings and an understanding of freedom as participation in relations of interdependence support a radically democratic coalitional politics of decolonization.