Burning settler colonialism down: Marcus Baynes-Rock, ‘Cultural Burning as Resistance to Colonisation’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Burning settler colonialism down: Marcus Baynes-Rock, ‘Cultural Burning as Resistance to Colonisation’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: In the context of a changing climate and an increasing threat of wildfires, interest in First Nations cultural burning has intensified. One response to this has been an increase in private and government funded burning programs involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors. These collaborations can be fraught in that modes of land tenure, government regulations, and state and capitalist structures are at odds with First Nations modes of engagement with Country. Here, I argue that tensions within these collaborations reflect a deeper structural conflict zone in which cultural burning resists colonisation. This resistance stems from an Indigenous relational ontology that prioritises relations and engagement with the land as the basis for prescriptions pertaining to action in socio-cultural landscapes. It is in this conceptual and practical realm that cultural burning resists a triumvirate of colonial forces: modernity, state, and capitalism. The conflict lies in the way of engaging with land, in that Indigenous ontologies see land as part of a cosmological totality, while colonial ontologies conceive of and act towards land as a resource. I argue that this conflict represents not just a threat to cultural burning, but to capitalism itself as the land rapidly diminishes the conditions needed for capitalism’s existence.

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