Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene [Paperback]

Representations of indigenous peoples, while never static, have always served the interests of settler-colonialism. Historically, the dominant framing marginalised indigenous practices as legacies of the distant past. Today indigenous approaches are demanded in order for settler-colonialism itself to have a future. Becoming indigenous, we are told, is a necessity if humanity is to survive and cope with the catastrophic changes wrought by modernist excess in the Anthropocene.

Becoming Indigenous provides an agenda-setting critique, analysing how and why indigeneity has been reduced to instrumental imaginaries of perseverance and resilience. Indigenous alternatives are today central to a range of governing discourses, which promise empowerment but are highly disciplinary. Critical theorists often endorse these framings, happy to instrumentalise indigenous peoples as caretakers of the environment or as teaching the moderns about their more-than-human responsibilities.

Chandler and Reid argue that these discourses have little to do with indigenous struggles or with challenging settler-colonial power. In fact, instrumentalising indigeneity in these ways merely reinforces neoliberal hegemony, marginalising critical alternatives for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, UK.

Julian Reid is Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland.

Written by two of the most important political theorists writing on the Anthropocene, Becoming Indigenous is an agenda-setting critique. It deftly indicts and exposes the shocking ways in which indigenous peoples are being framed and saturated with meaning by others; reduced to tropes of mere adaptation and resilience or to sites of speculation: reducing meaningful resistance and politics. Jonathan Pugh, Senior Academic Fellow in Territorial Governance, UniversitlÃh