To Forsake Becoming: Indigenous Ontologies, Land Defence, and the Resistance at Standing Rock

In Indigenous studies and elsewhere in academia, ‘grounded normativity’ is proclaimed to not only defy settler and extractive colonialism, but liberate humanity from the violence of modernity, the ways of knowing and being imposed upon the world by the West. Whereas possession – of property, of the self, of one’s will to influence their surroundings – is understood by scholars to replicate the domination of Indigenous peoples, their embeddedness and primordial attachment to the Earth is argued to disrupt colonial power relations. But do Indigenous ontologies offer a way out of a dead-end modernist paradigm? Close examination reveals this conceptualization aligns well with the hegemonic status of neoliberalism today. If Indigenous lifeworlds exist as webs of reciprocal relations, they may in fact inform rather than resist the systems that continue to govern by new and evolving means. As neoliberalism is increasingly premised on posthuman rationalities, the non-possessive disposition of Indigenous peoples is celebrated, putting their acts of protest in a paradoxical bind. In this article I build on the arguments of David Chandler and Julian Reid in their respective works, and join their critique of ‘becoming Indigenous’ – to become one with nature, to become more-than-human, to act out ‘choreographies of becoming’ that affirm, no less, an endless relational entanglement. I instead bring attention to the immediacy of Indigenous land defence, and argue that in the resistance at Standing Rock, another Indigenous subject is visible, one that is possessing, and acts on their political agency commensurate with the human.