Abstract
As many have argued, the Western political theory tradition tends to justify settler colonialism and erase its ongoing effects. However, this chapter suggests that we can draw on resources from within that tradition to challenge problematic settler colonial dynamics, which can prevent us as settlers from engaging in genuine political dialogue with Indigenous peoples. As an example, I show how Arendt helps us rethink traditional settler visions of ‘decolonisation’, which are deeply entwined with the drive to colonial completion and the erasure of Indigenous political independence. While her overall body of work has a complex relationship to settler colonialism, she offers an important critique of political projects that paradoxically seek to end politics once and for all. Most importantly, she reinstates political action as a positive enduring condition, and offers an account of politics as the good life rather than as pathway to the good life. This allow us to move the political task facing Indigenous and settler relations from ‘fixing the problem’ Indigenous people pose for us and for the dominant state towards fostering a productive but uncomfortable political coexistence. However, she can only help us to see the need for deep encounter with Indigenous people and worlds. At this point a different and more deeply dialogic conversation must begin.
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Notes
- 1.
In the popular settler understanding, for example, the instant Captain James Cook claimed sovereignty and radical land title in 1788 all Aboriginal sovereignty was immediately extinguished (Reynolds 1992). Recent scholarship has shown that the actual legal and political assertion of sovereignty was much slower and more fragmented, following more closely the actual extension of settlement and the ability to enforce settler criminal jurisdiction (Ford 2011).
- 2.
While in the contemporary Anglophone world, the logic of elimination is less focused on the possession of land as physical resource, this dimension of the settler colonial encounter continues to manifest itself in the present, especially around struggles over land that was previously economically marginal (such as the ‘northern regions’ attached to many settler colonies—Alaska, the Australian Northern Territory, and Nunavut). Such land may not have previously been the object of comprehensive settler attempts at dispossession, but if new technologies or economies lead to it becoming more economically desirable then new strategies of economic and physical dispossession are mobilised. Such changing settler valuations of land can therefore create Indigenous estates recognised by the settler legal and political system that this system later seeks to dissolve. The settler colonial project may not necessarily seek to possess all land in this sense, although it may eventually calculate this to be in its interests and do so. But, once it takes the form of the contemporary liberal nation-state, the settler project will necessarily seek to dissolve substantive Indigenous political difference.
- 3.
That is, we as settlers may be involved in these struggles, but we cannot use this to ground our political identities or ‘opt out’ of our own political history and status. All too easily, this goal of transforming our own political identities becomes the most important part of our collaborations with Indigenous people.
- 4.
In fact, settler colonialism itself is a politically impossible condition on its own terms, to the extent that it is the period of overlap of two political societies in one place, and therefore must dissolve itself to bring reality into line with liberal political logic. See discussion on fantasy and colonial completion above.
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Strakosch, E. (2016). Beyond Colonial Completion: Arendt, Settler Colonialism and the End of Politics. In: Maddison, S., Clark, T., de Costa, R. (eds) The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2654-6_2
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