Abstract: This essay interrogates settler scholar positionality in relation to equity and collaborative commitment within higher education reform, arguing that meaningful decolonization requires reflexive, ethically grounded partnerships with Indigenous communities. Drawing on frameworks such as Two-Eyed Seeing, Movement-based Participatory Action Research, and transformative leadership, the paper situates settler scholars within colonial legacies that shape knowledge production, curriculum, governance, and climate justice narratives. It explores how entrenched power dynamics and systemic barriers—manifested in curricula, institutional policy, and philanthropic reconciliation discourses — undermine Indigenous epistemologies and perpetuate exclusion unless actively addressed. Through case studies and theoretical synthesis, the work articulates models for equitable engagement, including the institutionalization of Indigenous Knowledge Holders Councils, co-created research agendas, and culturally responsive pedagogy. The analysis emphasizes the necessity of accountability, sustained reflexivity, and ethical research practices that center Indigenous agency, data sovereignty, and shared governance. Challenges in forming genuine partnerships are examined, including historical distrust, divergent epistemic expectations, and institutional inertia, along with strategies to overcome them. The essay concludes with a call to action for settler scholars: to move beyond performative allyship toward sustained structural change by embedding Indigenous methodologies, supporting Indigenous leadership, and co-developing knowledge systems that advance equity, resilience, and reconciliation.






Abstract: This article introduces the concept of “speculative expropriation” to reframe Marx’s analysis of expropriation in the context of settler colonialism and capitalism in the West. I begin by examining Marx’s ideas of primitive accumulation and original expropriation, showing how his incomplete analysis of social relations to land can be extended to the transAtlantic context. Drawing on Marx’s pre-Capital manuscripts, I examine his treatment of ground rent and its relationship to feudalism, highlighting how the development of capitalism in the West relied on mechanisms overlooked in conventional readings of Marx’s work. I argue that settler colonialism in the New World did not follow the same logic as European primitive accumulation, where land was taken from peasants. Instead, speculative expropriators gave land to settlers, but only under specific racial and gendered conditions that tied landowners to the financial and political systems of the settler state. The land was often granted with mortgages and preemptive land sales, which placed settlers in debt and subjected them to the control of colonial institutions. This financial framework, grounded in the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, allowed capitalism to expand through speculative real estate and colonial constructs. By theorizing speculative expropriation, I show how the dynamics of settler colonialism reinvented capitalist accumulation, turning land ownership into a means of controlling settlers through debt rather than directly extracting their labor. This framework provides a new lens for understanding how capitalism expanded across the Atlantic and solidified its global reach in tandem with Indigenous dispossession and population replacement.








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