Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
“This Is [Not] Our Land”: Settler Colonial Commoning, Self-Indigenization, and the Bowl with One Spoon
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Extending the deployment of settler colonial and critical Indigenous theories toward an understanding of political and social dynamics in Appalachia, this paper critically analyzes the recent resurgence of the idea of an environmental commons in regional activist discourse. Recent scholarship in the field has positioned the Appalachian – placed as a white indigene – as a commoning people and culture with a non-commodity relationship to the land, counterposed to the ecocidal orientation of mountaintop removal mining interests. This paper deconstructs that narrative, arguing instead that this discourse and practice, emerging from a long history of competing capitalist land claims between two settler blocs, instead constitutes a distinct settler identity politics grounded in a conservative multiculturalism. Regional settler conceptions of commoning, which suggest the establishment of a dispensation in which all ‘citizens’ (commoners) have equal right and access to the land and its resources, is positioned as a project which empties the concept of Indigeneity of meaning to recapitulate and justify original dispossession. In response, this paper attempts to gesture toward features of a decolonial regional political and research projects through an engagement with the Native commoning practices and political philosophies of the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Stephen Pearson is an adjunct instructor at Shawnee State University.
“This Is [Not] Our Land”: Settler Colonial Commoning, Self-Indigenization, and the Bowl with One Spoon
Extending the deployment of settler colonial and critical Indigenous theories toward an understanding of political and social dynamics in Appalachia, this paper critically analyzes the recent resurgence of the idea of an environmental commons in regional activist discourse. Recent scholarship in the field has positioned the Appalachian – placed as a white indigene – as a commoning people and culture with a non-commodity relationship to the land, counterposed to the ecocidal orientation of mountaintop removal mining interests. This paper deconstructs that narrative, arguing instead that this discourse and practice, emerging from a long history of competing capitalist land claims between two settler blocs, instead constitutes a distinct settler identity politics grounded in a conservative multiculturalism. Regional settler conceptions of commoning, which suggest the establishment of a dispensation in which all ‘citizens’ (commoners) have equal right and access to the land and its resources, is positioned as a project which empties the concept of Indigeneity of meaning to recapitulate and justify original dispossession. In response, this paper attempts to gesture toward features of a decolonial regional political and research projects through an engagement with the Native commoning practices and political philosophies of the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh.
