Eco-decolonial communism against settler colonialism: Wayne Wapeemukwa, Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery, PhD dissertation, Penn State, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Eco-decolonial communism against settler colonialism: Wayne Wapeemukwa, Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery, PhD dissertation, Penn State, 2024

30Aug24

Abstract: In July 2022, Pope Francis undertook a penitential pilgrimage to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for “the evil” committed by Christians during the Age of Discovery. Then, in March 2023, the Holy See––the ‘government’ of the Catholic Church––issued a historic “Joint Statement [on] the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’” identifying this “Doctrine” as the philosophical framework Europeans used to colonize the globe and the articulation of a conjunction of factors that birthed anti-Indigenous racism. Despite this increased public profile, the “Doctrine of Discovery” is not salient to philosophers. Yet this paucity is not benign. Those who ignore this Doctrine’s historical and ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples offer missed opportunities at best or eliminationist agendas at worst. These are existential stakes, indeed; but there is also much at stake, philosophically. Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery stakes a claim on Indigenous social relations to land. In Chapter One, I examine how the Doctrine of Discovery evolved into a racialized “agricultural argument” for Indigenous dispossession and a new religion of whiteness. In Chapter Two, I reanimate Karl Marx’s lost texts on dispossession and offer my distinctive research contribution, speculative expropriation. In Chapter Three, I use my novel concept to demonstrate how the invention of private property and white masculinity lay at the social, political, and erotic origins of the settler state. In Chapter Four, I explore Indigenous responses to Discovery developed by Jim Brady (1908 – 1967), an Indigenous Marxist who established a partitioned mode of eco-decolonial communism. In the Conclusion, I suggest that Brady’s land-based economic co-ops pose crucial, urgent, and necessary implications for the history of our present climate crisis. As an urgent contribution to Indigenous philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Theory, this “journey” presents an alternative eco-political imaginary that opens up for us only when we seriously consider the wisdom embodied in Indigenous social relations to land, relations that contain concrete solutions for transcending capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. Responses to settler-colonialism must not merely seek to re-possess the land––as if it were inherently fungible––but take the even more radical step of ameliorating and recruiting land as a subject in decolonization; an ameliorative politics of territorial rematriation we hear echoed in the grassroots call, “Land Back.”

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