Abstract:
Despite a preoccupation with the concepts of land and rent during initial historical cycles of colonization and capital expansion, today’s Western philosophers neglect the importance of land, preferring the generic ontologies offered by the ostensibly analogous affordances of space, place, earth, and world. At the same time, Native philosophers provide substantial and robust philosophies of land both as anticolonial strategies and as expressions of the self-determined legitimacy of Native worlds. This dissertation seeks to redress the failure of Western philosophers to engage in meaningful dialogue with Native philosophers by taking anticolonial criticism to the heart of settler environmental philosophies, especially ecological phenomenology and Marxism.
