The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

Introduction

In settler colonial contexts, biopolitics is an instrument of naturalization and depoliticization. The categorization of Indigenous peoples as a specifically racialized population group of “Indians” works to construe conflicts with Indigenous peoples as merely domestic problems of the settler nation-state, such as the United States, best dealt with through implementation and enforcement of settler nation-state laws. At the same time, specific modes of living that are privileged by settler nation-state institutions such as heteronormative coupling, patriarchal households, nuclear family living arrangements, and individual land ownership, are biopolitically regulated so as not to appear linked to a particular form of settler governance but expressive of the natural course and order of life.

To this end, settler colonialism has been analyzed particularly in recent years not only as a geopolitical project, operating through logics of dispossession, removal, and containment, but also as a biopolitical project, operating through logics of racialization, regulation, and naturalization. ¹ At the same time, especially with the advancement of biopolitical theories in “mainstream” cultural studies and critical theory, numerous Indigenous studies scholars have also pointed out the necessity not to favor a biopolitical analysis of sovereignty, for instance, at the expense of geopolitical considerations that need to remain crucial for a thorough analysis and critique of settler colonialism, because: “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (P. Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). ² Notably, then, recent iterations of settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies approaches put an emphasis on how biopolitical and geopolitical forms of settler governance operate in conjunction, as for instance in the ongoing attacks against Indigenous lands, bodies, and lives so as to produce colonial space in the United States and Canada (Mishuana Goeman) or in the employment of “Indianness” for the transit of U.S. empire (Jodi Byrd) in geopolitical and biopolitical terms.

The attention to geopolitical and biopolitical forms of settler colonial violence and governance thus serves to address the manifold, and oftentimes intersecting ways in which settler nation-states attempt to control Indigenous lands, lives, and bodies. At the same time, however, it also helps to make manifest the settler colonial assumption that there is, at least in theory, a geos divorced from the bios, and vice versa, which can be targeted distinctly. Such a logic ultimately rests on a European tradition of thought (which is then universalized in settler colonial contexts) that land itself is not a living thing, is not animate, is not a form of life. Within a hierarchical order of the biopolitical, land is as such excluded from the sphere that constitutes political life. Such an exclusion, based on the Aristotelean hierarchy of all forms of life from the human to the seemingly inanimate stone, furthermore places political systems of thought and organization for whom the non-hierarchical relationality of all forms of life is constitutive, outside of the sphere that gets to count as political in dominant Euro-American society.

In this essay then, I want to interrogate how the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism work to discredit the validity of a place-based politics of relationality in which Indigenous land and all forms of life, including the land itself, make up, through their mutually constitutive relationships, the sphere of politics. Through the matrix of a settler colonial logic, such a politics is de facto placed outside the realm of what is acknowledged as political, since it extends its understanding of political life to spheres that are credited no political existence in Western or European accounts of politics. The essay is thus concerned with an issue similar to that outlined by Mark Rifkin (2009) in “Indigenizing Agamben” when he argues that “the state of exception produced through Indian policy creates a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive uncontestable right to define what will count as a viable legal or political form(ul)ation” (p. 91). My focus is slightly different, however, as I want to examine to what extent Indigenous polities are illegible and unrecognizable as political formations to universalized paradigms of European political thought in the first place, which then enables the constitution of settler states and the subsequent biopolitical production of Indigenous peoples as depoliticized populations or cultures.

My main object in this essay is thus to outline the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism as they are embedded in hierarchical distinctions of forms of life foundational to European political thought, and additionally to theorize a politics of place-based relationality that seeks to disrupt these logics. In order to do so, I will engage and connect two distinct sites of knowledge production. First, I turn to Foucault’s and Agamben’s theorizations of the biopolitical particularly so as to reread their use of Aristotle and to ask in which way certain premises of Aristotle’s philosophy inform Foucault’s and Agamben’s thoughts on life and politics in distinct ways—which then remain largely unacknowledged in their own writing, however, and can continue to operate without being subjected to a biopolitical analytic. Second, I address Cherokee scholar and author Daniel Heath Justice’s (2011) fantasy novel The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles not as a text on which to apply my reading of Foucault and Agamben, but rather with Mark Rifkin, as “a form of political theory” (2012, p. 2). Building also on the work of Indigenous legal theorists and law-and-literature scholars who posit that Native writing is characterized by, as David Carlson (2006) argues for early Native autobiography, “an engagement with colonial legal discourse,” (p. 23), I seek to read Justice’s novel as a means to theorize the possible framework for social, political, and legal formations of Indigenous peoples within, or opposed to, the settler state. My interest, however, lies not so much in reading Justice’s text as a possibility to enter into a contested dialogue with the legal framework of U.S. Indian policy, or as a way to counter through literature the legal racism Robert A. Williams (2005) has detected as being instrumental for the history of U.S. Indian policy. Instead, I seek to read Justice’s novel as a means to illuminate Native writing, conventionally perceived as foremost a form of cultural expression, in its possibility to indicate an alternative horizon of politics. More precisely, I read his novel as gesturing towards a form of political normativity based on what is also conventionally perceived as a mere cultural trait of Indigenous ways of being, that is the strong emphasis on the relationship among all forms of life and (including) the land. Precisely because of its position outside of the range of officially acknowledged politico-legal texts, while deeply engaging these discourses, Justice’s anticolonial fantasy offers itself to be analyzed as a site of Indigenous political knowledge production. I thus want to read it as a site of what I term disruptive relationality that generates ways to think about forms of political life which, in centering principles of relationality, exceed what officially gets to count as political in settler colonial contexts. As such, a reading of Justice’s novel can point out the potentials of the literary and the fantastical for denaturalizing settler colonial rule, imagining decolonization, and indicating the possibilities of Indigenous futurity beyond settler fantasy.

Biopolitical Normativities, Hierarchies of Life, and Competing Frameworks of Politics

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question. (Foucault, 1978, p. 143)

In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined—as merely reproductive life—to the sphere of the oikos, “home.” . . . [W]hen Aristotle defined the end of the perfect community in a passage that was to become canonical for the political tradition of the West . . ., he did so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living . . . to politically qualified life. (Agamben, 1995/1998, p. 2)

To discern the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism and to interrogate in which way it limits Indigenous political life, it is necessary to ask for the limits of biopolitics in grasping the sphere of Indigenous socio-political formations. In other words, what kind of premises inform the biopolitical imaginary of the settler nation-state? And how do these premises contribute to the settler state’s failure to account for the prior and ongoing existence of political formations of Indigenous peoples that constitute their body politic not through processes of exclusion and hierarchical distinction but as a relationality of land and all forms of life, including the land itself? ³

In order to address these questions, I want to take a closer look at Foucault’s and Agamben’s use of Aristotle for their respective development of biopolitical theory. Specifically, I want to ask how their reliance on foundational premises of Western/European traditions of political thought, specifically with regard to the definition of life in relation to the political sphere, by necessity limits their thoughts on the biopolitical. It not only naturalizes a hierarchical distinction of life forms in relation to the political. In addition, it naturalizes politics itself as being a project of hierarchization and distinction, a project whose order and legitimacy rests on hierarchically ordering forms of life in relation to, and possibly in exclusion from, the sphere of politics.

Both Foucault and Agamben refer to Aristotle to challenge him, and one might add, Agamben refers to a similar passage as Foucault also in order to challenge, or expand, the latter’s account of biopolitics. Although both do so in distinct ways, they both refer to Aristotle for the purpose of demonstrating how their account of biopolitics and biopower differs from classical accounts of politics in European philosophical tradition, most clearly represented by Aristotle. Yet, I would maintain that even in their challenge of Aristotle, they remain invested in the European, Western, or classical notion of what constitutes politics, particularly what kind of life possesses the potential of a political life. This continuing, even if inadvertent, investment produces mostly unacknowledged consequences for their further theorizations of the biopolitical as a fundamental technique of European politics since the advancement of modernity (Foucault) or Greek democracy (Agamben), as I want to point out in the following.

For Foucault (1978), Aristotle’s definition of the human being as “a living being with the additional capacity for political existence” (p. 143) is an indicator of a pre-modern way of thinking about the relation between life and politics. In his analysis of modernity, Foucault then seizes upon this relation in order to turn it around: “political existence” is no longer a quality, a gift to “man” defining him or her as human; instead, life itself is subject to politics, ready to be seized by power and to be controlled and managed so as to either be fostered or to be abandoned to death. Agamben, by contrast, does not perceive Aristotle’s term of man as “political animal” as a way of thinking the classical relation between life and politics, which modernity then overthrows. Instead, he draws on the Aristotelean distinction between bios and zoe, the “politically qualified life” and “the simple fact of living” as a fundamental division animating any politcal thought (Agamben, 1995/1998, p. 2). Agamben further posits, however, that for sovereign rule it has been a central objective to transform this relation of division into a relation of inclusive exclusion. To summarize Agamben’s argument he makes throughout his Homo Sacer-trilogy: “Natural life” is included within the rule of law while excluded from being protected from the same rule of law, thereby creating the condition of bare life subject to be exposed to sovereign violence. As such, “bare life” signifies the “state of exception,” which is constitutive for the exercise of sovereignty in the first place, whether in the guises of monarchies, totalitarianisms, or liberal democracies (cf. Agamben, 1995/1998). The Aristotelean distinction between bios and zoe is thus crucial for Agamben’s account of biopolitics, but only in the way it is permanently troubled in the ongoing constitution of sovereignty.

But despite—or maybe even because of—the different challenges to Aristotelean conception of politics, life, and the human as a respective point of departure for the Foucauldian and Agambenian strands of biopolitics, neither of them interrogates the assumption that, in classical terms and foundational to a tradition of European political thought, man can rightly be called “the animal with the additional capacity for political existence” (1978, p. 143, italics added) or that there exists the criteria for neatly categorizing “a politically qualified life” only attainable for human beings distinct from the “simple fact of living” (Agamben 1995/1998, p. 2) inherent to all other forms of life. In other words, the political frame of reference Foucault and Agamben evoke before departing from it so as to develop their own respective theorizations of the biopolitical is already a biopolitical one itself. Not analyzed as such, however, but seemingly constituting the normative horizon of politics itself, it never substantially enters Foucault’s theoretical framework in the analysis of a “technology of power centered on life” (1978, p. 144) or of the “break into the domain of life that is under power’s control” (Foucault, 2003, p. 255) effected through state racism. And neither is this Aristotelian frame of reference challenged in the paradigm of biopolitics Agamben articulates in the inclusive exclusion of “bare life” as a “state of exception.” ⁴ Following from that, a biopolitical framework that exists beyond (or prior) to what comes to be analyzed as biopolitics via influential Foucauldian and Agambenian thought fails to come sharply into focus through a biopolitical analytic while continuing to operate within biopolitical regimes as the normative framework of European political thought itself. On this level, biopolitics is most helpfully understood not primarily as a set of governmental techniques and practices that seek to produce, regulate, manage, and discipline the bodies and lives of a population to specific ends, but as a system of thought through which life is organized and ordered in relation to the polis. The polis, furthermore, might then be read not so much as strictly signifying the state, but as the sphere that gets to constitute and make legible the social and political, the sphere in which life becomes political in recognizable distinction from a mere reproductive process at “home.”

Denying any form of life except human beings the capability of leading “a politically qualified life,” then, posits what Joseph Pugliese (2013) has termed “biopolitical hierarchies of life” (p. 89) as a defining characteristic of a system of thought that, in Agamben’s words, is “canonical for the political tradition of the West.” Such a hierarchization of life as a foundational moment of European political thought produces two related effects. First, it creates an anthropocentric and speciest model of politics in which the inscription of the human as the political category of privilege correlates with a model of politics of “the human” based on racist, sexist, classed, ableist, speciest biases, to name a few. This model redefines the term of humanity as only referring to a specific “genre of being human” (Wynter, 2003, p. 269), namely, “Man” as the “present ethnoclass (i.e. Western bourgeois) conception of the human” (p. 260) as Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter states. Such a model therefore enables gradations from the “fully human” to the “not-quite-human” and to the “non-human” (cf. Wynter, 2003, p. 301, also Weheliye, 2014, p. 3) a process which Sherene Razack importantly identifies and confronts specifically as a constitutive quality of the settler colonial project based on dehumanizing and disposing of Indigenous peoples “[v]iewed as abject bodies always on the brink of death” and “trapped” in “the state of nature,” subsequently giving “birth to the settler as fully human” (Razack 2015, p. 59). Referencing central aspects of Wynter’s critique of Western Humanism as a project of transforming “Man” into the only genre inhabiting the space of the fully human, Pugliese then articulates such a project in the terms of a combined “racio-speciesm” and summarizes the functions and effects of this hierarchization thus:

Racism and speciesm work co-extensively to articulate positions of assignation along a biopolitically determined hierarchy of life. At the apex of this hierarchy of life is the tautological European-white-Christian-man and the various intraspecies and subspecies that can be traced in a downward movement. The descent from the racio-gendered figure of “man” articulates a vertical speciesist scale that, by degrees, divests the positioned subject of the very qualities that work to construct the figure of “the human.” (Pugliese, 2013, p. 41)

Such a hierarchization of life in relation to the political, social, and public sphere—which is also in accordance with the Chain of Being Aristotle develops in De Anima—is ultimately productive of a politics of naturalized hierarchies that enables conditions of enslaveability, colonization, settlement, genocide, heteropatriarchy, or oppressive extraction of labor. In addition, it produces systems of species extinction, mass meat production and consumption, as well as, beyond the realm of human and non-human animals, the depletion, pollution, and degradation of land and waters.

The second effect of such a hierarchization of life as the biopolitical normative framework of Western politics has less to do with naturalizing a specific hierarchy in this network of presumed supremacies. Instead, it works to legitimize and naturalize politics itself as a project of hierarchization, indicating the inscription within systems of hierarchy as an essential characteristic of political life. As a result, political systems that operate according to such logics legitimize themselves not only as being preferable (more developed, sophisticated, civilized) to other political systems but also by ostensibly constituting per definition what gets to count as the political, and thus claiming to be—taking Sylvia Wynter’s term—the only “genre” of politics that can fully inhabit the realm of possibility for socio-political formations. Namely, settler nation-states distinctively operate on the basis of a European conception of politics, which they then universalize so as to be able to extend authority over Indigenous lands and peoples and thus establish settler colonial rule. What is “canonical for the political tradition of the West” (Agamben, 1995/1998, p. 2) is thus a crucial element of settler nation-states but at the same time is made to appear as constitutive of politics as such, eclipsing all other forms of political philosophy or political tradition so as to minimize any counter-claim to settler nation-state sovereignty (see Bruyneel, 2007; Byrd, 2011). If politics, then, in the “political tradition of the West” outlined above is characterized by a naturalized sense of hierarchy, then the hierarchies integral to the settler state order do not appear as the result of a specific kind of politics that might invite debate or challenge, but instead appear as expressive of the only “genre” of politics that can lay claim to absolute legitimacy by working to secure a “natural” order of life, and a “natural” way of constituting political formations.

From such a perspective, competing Indigenous theorizations and formations of the political that do not proceed from a normative framework of hierarchical distinction, but from a normative framework of a non-hierarchical relationality, are discredited as not qualifying as fully political because they refuse to inhabit the space of Western politics, which, in turn, is universalized as the framework of the political as such. Relationality, when acknowledged as a constitutive quality for Indigenous ways of being, is displaced on the ream of the cultural, mythical, or spiritual (see also Watts 2013), and becomes thus available to reify stereotypes of the ecological, nature-loving, and spiritual “Indian,” as strictly a-historical and a-political. Such a settler mode of displacment can only work, however, upon ignoring how forms of religion, spirituality, governance, and sovereignty are themselves deeply related in the formations of Indigenous societies and politities that include all forms of life and the land. Leanne Simpson has thus written on precolonial Nishnaabeg diplomatic and treaty relationships: “Although these agreements were political in nature, viewed through the lens of Indigenous worldviews, values, and traditional political cultures, one can begin to appreciate that these agreements were also sacred, made in the presence of the spiritual world, and solemnized in ceremony” (p. 29). This expansive, relational view of what constitutes politics, and of the work necessary to constitute and maintain societies and polities is elaborated on further:

“Clans connected families to particular animal nations and territories, where relationships with those animal nations were formalized, ritualized, and nurtured. … Individual clans had responsibilities to a particular geographic region of the territory, and their relationship with that region was a source of knowledge, spirituality, and sustenance. … Animal clans were highly respected and were seen as self-determining, political “nations” (at least in an Indigenous sense) with whom the Nishnaabegs had negotiated ritualized, formal relationships that required maintenance through an ongoing relationship” (p. 33).

Such a perspective clearly makes manifest an understanding of political life that is diametrically opposed to any biopolitical hierarchy outlined above. Instead, a politics of life emerges, signified through a place-based relationality, for whom the grounds for a distinction between bios and zoe prevalent in biopolitical thought are irrelevant as any life is only qualified, also and especially politically so, through its equal and reciprocal relation to any “natural life,” all forms of life including the land itself. In such a framework, the relations to all forms of life that make up the lands and waters, and exist on, above, and below them (see also Justice, 2008), are not seen as merely metaphorically linked to kinship systems of Indigenous societies; instead, these forms of life are part of the constituency of Indigenous societies and polities made up through their interdependent and non-hierarchical relationality.

Asserting the significance of relationality for the formation of Indigenous societies and politics, however, has not only a descriptive or informative function, as Leanne Simpson also observes, when she notes that the refocusing of the precolonial treaty relationships can be a means to “decolonize our relationships with our neighboring nations” and with “the Canadian state” (p. 102). These assertions of relationality as foundational for Indigenous polities are thus themselves inherently political. And notably, Indigenous theorists and activsts have recently emphasized a centering of the principles of relationality so as to de-center and de-stabilize settler colonial logics, and furthermore de-legitimize exclusive settler claims to political authority. The relational thus becomes a means to formulate competing accounts of Indigenous polities and politics in opposition to the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism. Joanne Barker (2015), for instance, describes how the work of Indigenous feminism that opposes forces of U.S. imperialism through “an anticolonial politics of gender and sexuality” (par. 2) can only be accomplished through “asserting the polity of the Indigenous” as “the unique governance, territory, and culture of an Indigenous people in a system of (non)human relationships and responsibilities to one another” (par. 2., italics in original). Similarly, Glen Coulthard (2014) writes of the importance of a “grounded normativity” (p. 60) for an Indigenous politics of resurgence, a normativity that is characterized by “living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating, and nonexploitative way” (p. 60). He further elaborates,

Within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this means that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. (p. 61)

In addition, Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015), in outlining “critical place inquiry” which “addresses spatialized and place-based processes of colonization and settler colonialism” (p. 635), advocate “relational validity” as a “set of precepts and implications for critical place inquiry” and elaborate, “Relational validity is based on paradigmatic understandings of the relationality of all life. . . . Relational validity prioritizes the reality that human life is connected to and dependent on other species and the land” (p. 636).

In all of these recent formulations, relationality is not just used to describe an Indigenous status quo, but is mobilized as a strategy—whether in terms of Indigenous feminism (Barker), a politics of Indigenous resurgence (Coulthard and Simpson), or a critical place inquiry (Tuck/McKenzie)—that can work to critique, denaturalize, and disrupt settler colonial logics. If one understands, then, settler nation-states operating through a set of biopolitical logics defined by systems of hierarchical distinction that can be traced back to foundational premises of European political thought, then I want to suggest that principles of Indigenous polities and politics—animated through discourses and practices of non-hierarchical relationality, interdependence, mutuality, and connectivity among human and other-than-human peoples as well as all forms of life including the land—can be productively understood in terms of a “disruptive relationality.” As such, relationality is conceived of as a mode of being and living in the world, as well as a mode of political life and existence that can work to disrupt settler colonial logics and unsettle systems of thought in which biopolitical hierarchies are implemented that naturalize hetero-patriarchal White settler rule.

Relationality as principle and strategy does not only serve to delegitimize the idea that only a specific form of life and only a particular definition of the human, specifically as the concept of Western Man, get to count as categories privileged to constitute the public, social, and political sphere. Beyond that, an analysis of Indigenous political life in the terms of “disruptive relationality” can work to dismantle the ostensibly commonsensical claims of such systems of political thought to exclusive legitimacy—and therey by trouble the settler logics of legitimacy and authorization through which one particular form of political life can always be cast as illegitimate and improper.

Troubling these distinctions, instead of reinstating them in different ways, strategies of disruptive relationality can be observed operating at, and actively working toward destabilizing, the liminal, blurry, oscillating threshold of the political. Due to what one might term a settler commonsensical failure to realize relationality also as a principle of Indigenous political organization, principles of relationality are not easily incorporated and domesticated within settler discourses and administrative practices of, for instance, U.S. Indian policy. At the same time, relational ways of thinking and being can enter discourses and sites that in terms of settler conventions do not register as officially political, but which thus all the better offer themselves as a position from which to formulate a decolonial critique of settler logics of hierarchization. In this way, I want to investigate the politics and potential of reading Native texts as literary sites of disruptive relationality. Both making use of and troubling the routine settler mode of displacing the relational onto the sphere of the cultural as a marker of Indigeneity, I want to look at how Native writing employs strategies of relationality—which has also generally been noted as a literary quality of Native writing in form and content—as a means to project, dramatize, and enact decolonial thought. Positioned as a form of literary-cultural production, Native writing can be read to act as a site and generator of political knowledge, engagement, and dissent indicating the potential of a decolonial imaginary: the projecton of an alternative horizon of politics unhindered by settler colonial structures and strictures. It is in this way, then, that I turn to a reading of Daniel Heath Justice’s (2011) The Way of Thorn and Thunder as a literary site of disruptive relationality that imagines (and fantasizes) Indigenous futurity and decoloniality through a politics of life and/as land, as well as through strategies of relativizing the human as only one form of life among all the others that constitute the political sphere.

Fantasy, the (Un)Human, and the Politics and Potential of Disruptive Relationality

In a reading of Daniel Heath Justice’s (2011) The Way of Thorn and Thunder as a site of political theorization and knowledge production—outside of the registers conventionally reserved for official political discourse—his use of the fantasy genre takes on a more specific meaning than generally signaling a rewriting of the popular fantasy novel from an Indigenous perspective. First, it must be noted that the fantastical is difficult and contested terrain for Indigenous people, because the settler imaginary of Indigeneity in terms of fantasy or the mythical has been so pervasive in denying Indigenous claims on the real, such as rights to sovereignty or self-determination. In addition, the space of the fantastical, speculative, and spectacular can be used to displace, as Audra Simpson (2011) argues for James Cameron’s Avatar “matters of settlement and genocide” in settler societies: “genocide is always present in the film and yet never fully acknowledged . . . it is the terrible thing (like colonialism) that happened elsewhere” (p. 206). Indigenous uses of fantasy, though, can also offer a corrective to such modes of elision, as Mark Rifkin shows with regard to Deborah Miranda’s poetry: “Miranda’s text portrays indigeneity as occupying the space of fantasy, although not in the sense of that which is not real (invented, inauthentic, false) but that which is denied the status of the real” (2012, p. 129). In a slightly different way, I would also read Justice’s work in the fantasy genre as an interrogation of the significance of the fantastical in settler colonial contexts: as a way to both expose foundational and ongoing settler fantasies particularly of universal legitimacy and supremacy, and at the same time to charge fantasies of Indigeneity with a decolonial imperative, which can also work as a corrective to the persistent settler fantasies of Indigeneity as ahistorical and apolitical—and point to the possibilities of Indigenous futurity beyond settler fantasy.

Particularly, then, for working within and oftentimes against certain generic (and gendered) conventions of the fantasy genre, Heath’s trilogy is notable for the way it intervenes in a widespread re-production of Indigeneity as population and culture by mobilizing an emphasis on the relational as a signifier of Indigenous peoples and polities, particularly in stark contrast to and conflict with a non-Indigenous politics of hierarchy and subjugation. Within the world of the novel, the position of settler-invaders is occupied by the “Humans” (Justice 2011, p. 601), regularly referred to also as “Men” (p. 19) making manifest how “humanity” is subsumed under the Western concept of “Man” in both literary and literal terms. In contrast, the Indigenous peoples under assault are represented through the “Folk” of the Everland, made up by the nations of “the Kyn, Tetawi, Gvaergs, Ferals, Beast-tribes, Wyrnach, Ubbetuk, and the distantly related Jaagas, among others” (p. 598). The novel thus clearly defines the “Folk” as other-than-human peoples, whom the “Humans” in the novel pejoratively call “Unhumans” (p. 614).

However, with the main protagonists being of the “Folk” and the center of attention directed toward the fate of the Everland, their homelands, the juxtaposition of “Humans”/“Folk” does not exoticize the novel’s version of Indigenous polities as cultural curiosity, but rather denaturalizes the assumed superiority and universalization of the “Humans” as the only viable agent in the political sphere. The novel turns the recognition of the relationality of all life forms as being constitutive of Indigenous polities into a constitutive element of the novel’s cultural, social, and political world, as the “Folk” are made up of various other-than-human life forms that relate to each other and the land in a particular way, so as to create the “Seven Sister nations” (p. 610). ⁵ At the Sevenfold Council, the Beast-Tribes and the Ferals (“whose bodies resemble a union of Humans and Beasts,” p. 598) are represented along with all other nations of the Folk. The infamous history and ongoing tendency to animalize and de-humanize Indigenous peoples as a manifestation of a lower stage of life, and in biopolitical terms the life incapable of politics, is thus reframed as a limitation of the socio-political imagination. As all forms of life become integral to the principles and practices of the political as a lived experience of peoplehood among the “Folk,” so the rule of “Humans” based on a naturalization of hierarchy that supposes supremacy and sole political legitimacy for itself appears as being rooted within a fantasy of one’s own natural dominance that simultaneously and paradoxically seeks to impose its version of reality on others while being utterly divorced from the world it claims to represent in its universalizing worldview; and which reveals its limits and failure precisely in the way it seeks to universalize itself.

The usage of the terms “Human” and “Man” thus creates various resonances in the novel, whether “Men” speak of it “as Human decency give[s] way to Unhuman license” (p. 28) in the “Unhuman wilderness” (p. 29) or claim that “Human civilization will long endure” (p. 29), or characters belonging to the Folk consider “the threat of Human encroachment” (p. 59) and “the grasping hand of Humanity.” In its glossary, the novel defines “Humans” as the “collective term for those peoples and nations originating from the lands beyond the Eld Green” (p. 601) and allows that “such an encapsulating term . . . can also erase their significant cultural, political, and physical differences” (which the glossary also similarly states for the term “Folk,” see p. 598). In the novel, however, the “theocratic Dreyd” (p. 601) who are most determined to eliminate the Folk make most sustained use of “Humans” and “Men” as a collective with assumedly universal values, thus demonstrating how the term is wielded to mask particular interests by evoking a level seemingly universal and above one’s own political and cultural positioning.

The shift between a seemingly universal marker and an indicator of specific interests and intents—by not distinguishing between humans as one form of life and the “genre” of humans as Western Men who occupy in the novel the position of settler-invaders—also indicates the shifting, instable, and volatile position of “human” and “humanity” as concepts operative in current settler colonial formations. Justice’s particular usage of the “Human” poignantly evokes how processes of conquest and colonization are regularly being advanced “in the name of” or “for the sake of humanity,” to the point that “humanity” (as a stand-in for the equally charged term “civilization”) appears to signify foremost a weapon wielded against Indigenous peoples in the assault on their lands, societies, and bodies. Similarly, the novel’s display how the “Humans” simulate a stance above their particular political interests through a gesture to universal values helps to interrogate more recent iterations of a discourse of the human in settler colonial contexts—such as humane treatment, humanitarian effort, recognition of human rights—as maneuvers that cloak their specific agenda to secure settler rule and to cast Indigenous people as in need to be recognized as human or being made “properly” human so as to fit into the settler state order. Through the lens of Justice’s novel, all of these instances make legible a settler colonial biopolitical governmentality of the “Human” in which both the standards for proper human living are defined in adherence to the categories of Whiteness, settlement, heteropatriarchy, and through which a politics of hierarchization of life, with “Human” occupying the positon deserving full rights and privileges, is naturalized, to the effect of discrediting political systems of a place-based relationality of all life forms.

As the novel interrogates the position of the “Human” within settler colonial discourse, it also renders transparent and denaturalizes the hierarchization of humanity as a political principle of settler colonial rule. This happens particularly as the rule of “Humanity” is confronted with other, “Folk” modes of thought and life. At one point, the draconian leader of the “theocratic Dreyd,” the Dreydmaster Lojar Vald, is in conversation with an ambassador of the Folk in the Dreydmaster’s home; while there on diplomatic mission, the threat of violence against the Folk is ever present, charging every conversation. Thus, the position Vald utters:

All men must have land of their own, to use it as best as they see fit. What else will a Man fight and die for if not for the soil under his feet, his measure of immortality? Otherwise, what can be the impetus for improvement? (p. 148)

is countered by Daladir, the ambassador:

[M]y own people don’t believe that the land is something to be used as such, no. She belongs to us, just as we belong to Her. We owe our lives to the green world, we honor Her as Kith, as family. (p. 148)

When further questioned by the Dreydmaster, “but then what is the motivation for advancement?” (p. 148), Daladir elaborates,

We don’t generally measure success as Men do, Dreydmaster. We are linked to one another, and to the rest of the world, by bonds of kinship and history. To follow my own desires at the unthinking expense of others would be an act of gradual suicide, for those actions would always come back again to me. It’s a philosophy of responsibility to all things, not just unfettered freedom for oneself. (p. 148)

Daladir outlines relationality and responsibility as organizing principles for modes of action in the social sphere and thus advocating them as instrumental for the life of the polis, and the good life within the polis. The Dreydmaster’s position of individuated liberty and private ownership, rooted within the principles of hierarchy through his insistence on “improvement” and “advancement”—implicitly, over others—is formulated in terms of universal applicability (“the lifeblood of a nation,” “every nation’s continued health,” “A people,” “All Men,” p. 148), in contrast to Daladir’s. Yet exactly this assumption of universality, and of a universalized hierarchy as paradigmatic of politics as such, is punctured and relativized by the account of a philosophy that is formative to the social and political life of the Folk. It is notable that even in the account of “this philosophy of responsibility,” Daladir does not claim universality, but emphasizes the relational and communal aspect through the repeated use of the “We”—a “we” that does not seek to represent a homogeneous and conformist group identity but is instead defined through its emphasis on the expansive and pluralist.

The plurality of Indigenous “Folk” identities—particularly in contrast to the monolithic category of racio-gendered Man—comes to the fore through a variety of gender and sexual identities. As female heroines abound in the novel—among them the central character Tarsa, a she-Kyn—the novel already disrupts the mainstream association of the genre with fantasies of masculine heroism. Furthermore, with a prominent zhe-Kyn character transcending male/female categorization, and a powerful scene of healing through erotic experience that surpasses clear demarcations of heteronormativity or homonormativity (cf. p. 504-505), Justice suggests a queering of the fantasy novel as necessary to develop its decolonial imperative and to successfully transmit and animate the liberating and transformative potential of a lived pluralist relationality.

The expansive nature of the Indigenous Folk “we,” however, manifests itself most strongly in the Folk’s pronounced ties to the land, not only as an entity full of life, a form of life in itself, but also as a force that can generate life, and is indeed decisive for the continuity and futurity of Indigenous peoplehood and sociality. Such a life force is pictured through the “wyr” (p. 615) that connects the Folk, their land, and the spirits residing within a powerful web of connectivity. Tarsa, granted the gifts of a “wielder” (p. 615), is able to connect to the “wyr” after she has been fully initiated into the old ways of the “Deep Green” (p. 595; given up by some Folk for the Human-oriented “Celestial Path,” p. 593) through her encounter with the “Eternity Tree” (p. 597), the central node of the “wyr” and a place of high spiritual and communal significance—maybe deliberately evocative of the Iroquois “Great Tree of Peace” as an originary site for a place-based politics of relationality.

Transformed through this deeply felt experience of being connected to the land as life force, Tarsa speaks out in the Seven-Fold Council of the Folk, which is held (in an evocation of Cherokee history) to decide on the question of “removal or death” (p. 173) posed to them by Dreydmaster Vald. Tarsa speaking out against removal marks the first moment of her becoming the central figure of anticolonial resistance, a movement that is from the start defined by her commitment to a place-based politics of relationality as a source for all life forms to survive and thrive:

We belong to this land; its heartblood pulses through us, giving us strength and life. . . . Our lives are bound to this world, and its survival is bound to us—life to life. If we abandon our responsibilities to our homeland, it will weaken, as will we. . . . This is our inheritance, our legacy. What could possibly matter more? (p. 178)

With such a passionate plea, the novel lays open the settler fantasy of being able to divorce the geos from the bios, and instead provides a powerful literary rendering of P. Wolfe’s (2006) phrase: “Land is life” (p. 387)—and charging it with meaning that exceeds his more modest elaboration that “at least, land is necessary for life” (p. 387). Tarsa thus mobilizes relationality to all life forms and the land as a mode of anticolonial resistance and decolonial thought that has the potential to disrupt naturalized settler rule. The emphasis on the relatedness of the Folk to the land, as “life to life,” as being constitutive for their peoplehood—their communal, social, and political formation as peoples—brings to the fore what is at stake in the decision for or against removal: the political life and existence of the Folk in its formative connection to all forms of life including the land.

Finally, the Eternity Tree is split in half in a violent confrontation and the Folk are forced into removal with disastrous consequences, so that all appears to be lost. However, as Tarsa returns to the desolate Folk, she now carries the life force within her body, as she has absorbed the force of the Eternity Tree when it was chopped down so that she can state, “I am the Eternity Tree” (Justice 2011, p. 425). She is able to restore life, to heal wounds, to give back life to the barren land to which the Folk were removed. It becomes clear, then, that the transformative potential of a lived relationality also extends to the possible transformation of the old ways into something new, a re-innovation of tradition, which also means that the Folk can reinvent and reform themselves as societies, peoples, polities as long as they remain committed to creating ties to their land, even to new land, according to the principles of a place-based politics of relationality. Ultimately, the Dreyd are beaten and the Everland is restored in a new form, so that the continued and unbroken commitment to Indigenous ways of being and living in the world in an intimate relationality to the land as life in opposition to a settler hierarchy of life creates in the novel the condition for defeating settler colonial domination, reminiscent of Jodi Byrd’s (2011) appeal to “imagine indigenous decolonization as a process that restores life” (p. 229). In this way, Tarsa, endowed with a force that can restore life, becomes an embodiment of decolonial agency.

Thus, the novel uses the conventions of fantasy not merely to expose settler fantasies or to correct fantasies of Indigeneity but to use the registers of the fantastical to create a vision of Indigenous futurity unfettered by settler fantasies of naturalized hierarchies and a naturalized politics of hierarchization with the potential to disrupt biopolitical logics of settler colonialism and dismantle structures of settler governance. Justice manages to create a vision of Indigenous futurity in his novel while not negating or neglecting a genocidal past and its ongoing legacy. Instead, the novel finds ways to work through, and ultimately transform, traumatic histories and their lasting presence, precisely in that it combines a revisiting of moments in Cherokee history, a rewriting of the fantasy genre as a means to render Indigenous ways of being, and a reinnovaiton of traditional forms of storytelling; the novel is interspersed with stories that are offset from the rest of the novel by being set into italics, and evoke the rituals of the oral tradition by beginning and ending with: “This is a teaching.” Justice projects onto a fantasy world whose political situation closest resembles 19th century North America a vision of Indigenous decolonial futurity that restores an intimate connection to the ancient world while emphasizing the potential of reinnovation, of being open to the new. The “Eternity Tree” is reborn in “Folkhome,” the name for the place in which most Folk choose to settle after the traumatic march and the triumph over the Dreyd, as the “Forevergreen Tree.” Similarly, the novel asserts that the precontact world of the “Eld Green,” which became the post-contact “Everland,” was never lost to the Folk but has waited beneath the post-contact structures to be reconnected to them. In this way, the novel also emphasizes that the restoring of land to Indigenous peoples hinges not so much upon a temporal or spatial fixity or stasis, i.e. the return to a specific place or the nostalgia for a specific moment in time (without neglecting the importance of territoriality), but instead upon the restoration and re-centering of a place-based relationality to be freely enacted and practiced, lived and felt. Ultimately, Justice does not only employ strategies of relationality to sketch a vision of Indigenous futurity and decolonial thought, but posits storytelling itself, in its traditional as well as in its re-innovated form such as the Indigenous fantasy novel, as a possible agent of disruptive relationality. Whether through the revisiting and transcending of traumatic histories coinciding with an ultimate triumph over empire, or the restoration of the ancient world by a re-commitment to the new, Justice proposes Native writing as a site to think and imagine relationality as a way to indicate an alternative horizon for politics beyond hierarchization, whose dynamics of collective spatial and temporal connectedness extend into an ever emerging space of present and future potentiality.