From Journal of Political Ecology by Alexander Dunlap
Why has political ecology ignored Indigenous anarchism? While there are a few exceptions, researchers across social science are confronted with an uncomfortable issue. Academia tends towards fetishizing, even instrumentalizing, Indigenous peoples in their projects. Meanwhile university publishers crank out volumes on “decoloniality” and “the geopolitics of knowledge” that essentialize Indigenous peoples (see Dunlap, 2022). All the while, Indigenous anarchism, or anarchists for that matter, gain little-to no acknowledgement within environmental movements. Why? Indigenous anarchy means being on the “frontlines,” engaging in unmediated attack against colonial, statist, extractivist and capitalist structures: as they are often one and the same. “Indigenous anarchism,” Klee Benally writes, “presents the possibility of attack: It is the embodiment of anti-colonial struggle and being” (2022a: 24). It’s safe to say, however, that the last thing Benally (among others) wanted is more academics chattering, objectifying and commodifying of Indigenous anarchism— “it doesn’t and should not exist” to be mapped, controlled and absorbed into the grid of the state (p. 344). Then why write about Indigenous anarchism in general, let alone in academic journals behind paywalls?
