Author: Rebecca Struch.
Journal: Urban Geography.
Bibliometrics: Volume 43, Number 6, pages 848 - 856.
DOI: http:// doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2053427.
Since the publication of this article, the author has discovered the article incorrectly attributed a quotation to Nick Estes alone. The article has been updated to correctly attribute both Nick Estes and Edward Valandra. The corrected paragraph also appears below.
Indigenous scholar Nick Estes makes this position clear when he states, borrowing from Lakota historian Edward Valandra, that private land is “twice stolen” (Valandra qtd. in Estes 2019, p. 27). By this rubric, then, public land is once stolen. By extending beyond familiar claims of segregated and exclusionary public spaces, Valandra and Estes redefine them primarily as sites of theft and dispossession. This poses a direct challenge to those seeking to rescue publics from the pervasive privatizations of neoliberalism. In what follows, I will engage with this critique by asking how artists, activists, and scholars can abandon a recuperative relationship to public space in favor of alternate spatial politics rooted in anticolonial and antiracist praxes.
Estes, N. (2019). Our history is the future: Standing rock versus the dakota access pipeline, and the long tradition of Indigenous resistance. Verso.