« Humanitarian settler colonialism? Alison Holland, ‘The “Native Question” in Australia: Exploring the Anglo-Australian Humanitarian Response, 1904–1939’, The Joutnal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2022
The fragility of relapsing settlers: Avril Bell, ‘Building stamina, fighting fragility: The account of a white settler “recovering racist”‘, Ethnicities, 2022 »

Decolonisation against settler ‘democracy’: Yann Allard-Tremblay, ‘The Two Row Wampum: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Democratic Autonomy’, Polity, 2022

22Feb22

Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to the decolonization and Indigenization of democratic theory. Regarding decolonization, I explain that democratic self-determination is typically associated with sovereign autonomy and can serve to justify policies and discourses of settler colonial control, erasure, and assimilation. Regarding Indigenization, I reconceptualize democratic self-determination from an Indigenous starting point. I discuss the Two Row Wampum of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and offer an account of the political principles it embodies. I interpret it as advancing a relational conception of democratic autonomy, which makes it possible to embrace a plurality of political arrangements and political actors, to blur the distinction between internal authority and external sovereignty, and to de-emphasize the enforcement of decisions in favor of the maintenance of commitments to a political relationship.


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