Decolonising animal activism: Engaging with Indigenous activist perspectives

Animal rights activism has been criticised in settler-colonial states for overlooking human rights abuses and shielding colonial powers. However, the efforts of animal rights activists to expand their political alliances with subaltern and colonised others are laden with tensions, stemming from the oppression and violence of settler-colonial projects. The steps that progressive non-Indigenous activists can take to support alliances with colonised others are therefore unclear. In this article, we contend that Indigenous activists' perspectives offer critical insights into the development of alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists towards linked human and animal rights in settler-colonial states. Drawing on an ethnography with Indigenous activists in Occupied Palestine (pre-October 7), we show that the conditions for alliance-building exceed the rejection of racialised settler colonialism. They also require commitments by non-Indigenous activists towards Indigenous grassroots movements encompassing the diverse political agendas and heterogeneity of Indigenous societies. Beyond the hegemony of Israeli occupation, Palestinian activists seek alliances that centre community and youth development, and self-determination as key dimensions of linked animal and human rights. These priorities unsettle the Western strictures of animal rights anchored in veganism as the sole political concern of Palestinian activists. Questioning the efficacy of inflexible moral and ethical frameworks as platforms for alliance-building, we instead locate alliances for linked animal and human rights within a politics of listening anchored in settler-colonial discomfort, the labour of yielding to Indigenous priorities and remaining open to contingent, ‘on the ground’ politics. In so doing, we show that activist ethnography can reveal complex postcolonial engagements with the political, and the plural and hybrid human and animal activisms that these geographies give rise to.