David Temin

An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers.

Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. Remapping Sovereignty examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through state sovereignty, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign state supremacy and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as earthmaking. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key thinkers, interweaving history and textual analysis. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today.

In the face of global climate change, Indigenous peoples and other community caretakers enhance biodiversity and sustainability through their ecological practices and political movements. David Myer Temin terms these activities as “earthwork”, writing that these efforts are necessary to ensure the continuance and repair of the web of life. Current environmental governance practices, he argues, sustain deep power imbalances that systematically denigrate the groups that do the work of protecting their lands and waters. Taking earthwork seriously means moving away from mainstream ideas about transition from fossil-fuels in favor of more internationalist and justice-oriented proposals such as the People’s Green New Deal and The Red Deal.

This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as "earthwork." Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose "wages" or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

Proponents of a decolonial “option” or “turn” have developed the concepts of “coloniality of power/being/knowledge” and “decoloniality.” In so doing, many advance the claim that these frameworks improve on, complete, or serve as an alternative “option” to earlier conceptions of decolonization, where the latter is understood as the emancipation of colonized subjects from structures of colonial and imperial domination. In this essay, I critically assess some of this theoretical architecture, by way of a critique of the very specific version of decolonial thought developed under this rubric by the Argentinian (US-based) semiotician and philosopher Walter Mignolo. My contention is that Mignolo’s focus on the epistemic dimensions of decolonization often serves instead to distort or flatten anticolonial material practices and analyses. Mignolo would likely respond that he is seeking to supplement and extend the latter projects of decolonization into a more epistemic register where they have not (sufficiently) gone before. By contrast, I aim to show how Mignolo frequently diminishes and/or displaces some of the more compelling dimensions of anticolonial thought and decolonization that have been traced in recent historiography and in fields such as Indigenous and settler-colonial studies. I call this tendency Mignolo’s “epistemic politics.” As a counterpoint, I briefly propose an alternative for political theorists of decolonization, what I call “worldly anticolonialism.”

In recent years, “decolonization” has exploded onto the scene as a keyword of emancipatory social movements around the globe. Various mobilizations have drawn on and further popularized such an analysis, eliciting both celebration and significant backlash. In so doing, these movements have (re)animated and updated the meanings of the 20th century heritage of anticolonial independence movements that overthrew formal European—and, more generally, western—domination.

In academic disciplines based on a canon of thinkers like my own field of political theory, one important (though by no means exhaustive) mode of decolonization has come through calls to fundamentally reconsider the philosophers and political actors we look to as sources of political insight. My recently published book, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2023) joins other scholars in taking up one small part of this massive task of intellectually confronting these hierarchies that indisputably shape our contemporary world.

Indigenous sovereignty is a norm, one that arises from the experiences Indigenous peoples have had of insisting upon the very practical connections between individual and collective rights in the face of degrading and harmful practices like family policing. In this way, ICWA is a necessary, albeit insufficient, law that stems from a real, ongoing, and pressing set of violations of the well-being of families, children, and communities. Indeed, the real story here is that the well-being, freedom, and care of and for Indigenous children, parents, and families are really secured only insofar as Indigenous communities themselves are able to exercise enough power to prioritize keeping families together and healthy. Stripping away the very flimsy façade of arguments against Indigenous sovereignty shows how parochial, shallow, and opportunistic those arguments are when contrasted with the genuinely existential and emancipatory aspirations that underlie laws like ICWA.

Developmentalism is the idea that progress entails the temporal movement of societies along a universal trajectory. Prevailing accounts conceptualize Eurocentric developmental discourses as ideological weapons of imperial domination, specifically because they defer colonial claims to popular self-rule. Rejecting the idea that these historical entanglements exhaust the meanings of developmental thought, this article sheds light on anticolonial debates over developmentalism. Turning to Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney, it reconstructs what I call “popular anticolonial developmentalism,” as a way of construing popular legitimation in actual contexts of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. From the premise that capitalist-imperialism “deflected” the historical motion of colonized societies, popular anticolonial developmentalism places the agencies of progressive transformation with democratically empowered popular subjects. Shifting the lens of “decolonizing political theory” from epistemic critique to worldly anticolonialism shows how developmentalism became a primary idiom for contesting and reimagining anticolonial futures. In turn, anticolonial practices reshaped developmentalism’s very conceptual parameters.

In recent years, a growing body of political science scholarship has shown how territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession profoundly shaped American democratic ideas and institutions. However, scant attention has been paid to Indigenous thinkers and activists who have reshaped the colonial and imperial facets of democracy. I reconstruct the writings of the Oneida thinker and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880–1947). I contend that Kellogg offers a political theory of “decolonial-democracy,” which challenged settler-imperial domination by bringing together a project of Indigenous self-determination with reimagined democratic narratives, values, and institutions. The first and second sections place Kellogg in pan-Indigenous debates within the Society of American Indians and among non-Indigenous Progressive reformers, in order to show how she brings together a pan-Indigenous and social-democratic critique of American democracy. The third section interprets her landmark 1920 pamphlet Our Democracy and the American Indian as a counter-narrative of the American founding read through the disavowed influence of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, a return to which she casts as a basis for democratic and Indigenous renewal. The final section outlines her vision of Indigenous self-government as “Indian communism” in the form of her “Lolomi Plan.” In sum, I trace a counter-politics envisioning a form of relational self-determination within a confederated, multinational political order, as
well as the difficulty of bringing decolonization together with democracy in practice.

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence.

In recent years, a wide range of political theorists have turned to mourning (" the funeral ") as a response to loss that can further the work of democratic repair within progressive social and political movements. Drawing on the #BlackLivesMatter movement's critique of contemporary white supremacy and the carceral state as a starting point, I argue that the turn to mourning tends to foreground what I call " exceptional mourning, " which has three core pitfalls: 1) It risks pathologizing forms of " antagonistic politics " driven by anger and disruption ("the riot "). 2) It rests on assumptions about white moral psychology that drive unduly optimistic expectations about what mourning can do to transform persistent hierarchies. 3) It inadvertently downplays questions of hierarchy and division confronted through widely varying accounts of anti-racist political action within the Black radical tradition and haunted today by the legacy of respectability politics. To illustrate these three claims, I turn to Martin Luther King's, Jr., whose politics might be read through the lens of mourning if not for his own transformation. While the early King's political rhetoric and practice can be read through a lens of "prophetic mourning " that aims to transform unmerited suffering into democratic repair, I argue that King began to question the underlying assumptions of a politics of mourning around 1963. King's post-1963 rhetoric and practice surprisingly aimed to effect change in dynamic reciprocity with a more openly antagonistic politics embodied in the riot, effectively drawing on the threat that the Black riot represented to Northern liberal elites in order to confront the latter with a choice between the " good " militancy of nonviolence and the " bad " militancy of riots. In closing, I argue that King's shift suggests that the current turn to mourning can be supplemented with more sustained reflections on a) the strategic interplay between different forms of militancy and b) the viability of an antagonistic politics of disruption within movements that refuse respectability politics. I conclude by suggesting that a greater focus on reception as opposed solely to the practices of the marginalized themselves might better inform an engagement between mourning and other registers of anti-racist politics.

While " inclusion " has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward " Termination " in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the " civic inclusion narrative " in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria's work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today's North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

The United States is a democracy. The United States is an empire. How can both be true? Democracy implies government by consent and popular will; empire means the use of conquest and coercion to subordinate people to tyrannical (even genocidal) rule and power.