Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top of the existing national boundaries maintained by Indigenous nations. What I aim to do here is trouble the way in which we accept the sovereign authority produced by the inter-state system at face value, using the [Unist’ot’en Action] Camp as an example of Indigenous nations complicating this view. Taking up more recent understandings of borders as a productive tool, I argue that in the case of what is today Canada, instead of reifying settler coloniality, Indigenous communities are using borders (and bordering practices more broadly) to deconstruct norms of settler sovereignty and claims to authority. In this way, instead of being tools used in service of building a colonial state, borders are being used to create the kind of decolonial futures imagined by Indigenous theorists, and which rest on a refusal of contemporary settler coloniality instead of an acceptance of it.
