Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization

Abstract

Unsettled Expectations is a critical multi-site ethnography that examines conflict over Indigenous land rights in Canada and the United States as a lens through which to understand historical and ongoing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in colonies. The goal of the research is to try to understand the lived practices and discourses of people defending and countering indigenous land rights--as a grounded point of departure to examine the limits and possibilities of decolonization. It uses an interdisciplinary approach including: ethnographic interviews with participants in land claims in Ontario and New York state; historical analyses (not only of the Enlightenment philosophies on which settler certainties depend, but also of the legal systems that derive from these philosophies); and theoretical analysis drawn especially from colonial studies, on the foundational ideologies--and illusions--on which states are built and by which Indigenous peoples and ways of being are discredited. The goal of the book is to invite readers into a rethinking of the legal and philosophical assumptions that feed conflicts between settlers and Indigenous peoples over the rights of (living on) the land. It hopes to generate understandings of where the widespread assumption of certainty comes from, why it is ultimately a doomed fantasy, and why a self-reflexive engagement with uncertainty is necessary to any process of decolonization.-- Provided by publisher.

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