Introduction to the special issue: mobilizing Indigeneity and race within and against settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough introduce the concepts of ‘settler anchoring’ and ‘mobility sovereignty.’ They argue that settler colonial spaces are structures of mobility injustice, and that securing Indigenous mobility must account for the ability of Indigenous peoples to choose when, where, how, and for what purposes to engage in movement (or not). They illustrate how the practice of mobility underlies the fiction of ‘settling,’ offer examples for understanding Indigenous mobility principles and practices, and examine the potential incommensurabilities between mobility justice and mobility sovereignties that reject settler colonialism. The authors argue for the urgency of integrating the ‘mobilities paradigm’ with Indigenous studies and ethnic studies analyses of settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and race. The article also serves as introduction to the special issue of Mobilities, ‘Mobilizing Indigeneity and Race Within and Against Settler Colonialism.’ The authors preview how the special issue offers new insights into settler colonialism’s mobile architectures, competing technologies of maritime mobility, decolonial forms of landscape conservation on travel corridors, how ‘voluntourism’ enables the crafting of White settler subjectivity, the roles of digital media for displaced peoples, and what it means to move as a sovereign Indigenous nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• Indigeneity
• decolonial
• race
• sovereignty
• ethnic studies

...what [might it] mean to think of Native peoples as becoming and belonging in movement rather than as stable and unchanging identities.

—Mishuana Goeman (2017, 105)

Settler colonial societies are, after all, stridently mobile formations.

—Georgine Clarsen (2017, 521)

We begin this introduction with a pair of quotes – one from Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, sexuality, and space and place in Native American literature and culture; the other from Georgine Clarsen, an Australian historian who has worked diligently to integrate mobilities scholarship with studies of settler colonialism. Both compelling quotes, and the larger texts from which they are drawn, argue for the significance of movement and mobility in relation to the contradictions and tensions of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, yet they emerge from conversations happening in separate fields, among separate groups of scholars. With this special issue, we aim to bring these scholarly communities and their insights into more deliberate and sustained conversation. We, and the contributors, offer rich and multi-sited considerations of the movements and flows, as well as relations and containments, through which both settler colonialism and Indigeneity are produced. Mindful of the political stakes of this scholarship, we hope this conversation identifies points of vulnerability and strength that might push forward decolonization and incite Indigenous possibilities.

As a robust and rapidly growing scholarship on settler colonialism in diverse global contexts demonstrates, settler colonialism is a distinctive form of colonialism wherein settlers move to and seek to remain on occupied land, continually transforming it (and themselves) and sustaining Indigenous dispossession through intertwined legal, economic, cultural, and other means (Barnd 2017; Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Kauanui 2016; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). Settler colonialism has only recently emerged as a growing theme in the new mobilities conversations. However, mobilities scholars have provided important insights into topics of great interest to scholars of settler colonialism, particularly via colonial histories of managing mobilities and postcolonial perspectives (Benson 2013; Clarsen 2015; Edensor and Kothari 2018; Lagji 2019). Of particular note is Mimi Sheller’s (2018) important work on mobility justice, especially ‘colonial regimes of movement' (41). As Sheller notes and we concur, Indigenous epistemologies and a reckoning with historical legacies of colonialism must inform notions of mobility justice across multiple scales towards the goal of transformative systemic change.

Settler colonial spaces are structures of mobility injustice. They are created via assertions of power over movements and attached directly to claims or projections of ownership and belonging. Settlement and creation of wealth through land thus serves as the required and primary origin of collective settler mobility. In the Western hemisphere, practices of enslavement further extended and defined these new (im)mobilities that connected and implicated every continent. All subsequent mobility justice and injustice within settler colonial space rests upon this base. So, while mobility justice must attend to uneven motility (or, potential for movement) caused by the dilemmas of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, it must also consider the inherent failures of any justice mobilized in ways that reproduce occupations of Indigenous lands and constrain Indigenous mobilities. This pushes us to more fully consider when and where we find the inevitable incommensurabilities that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) warn will emerge whenever we try to enact genuine practices of decolonization.

To probe these relations and tensions, the papers in this special issue build upon prior mobilities scholarship concerned with Indigeneity and settler colonialism in three ways. First, they expand the places under consideration. Across the scholarship on these themes published in Mobilities since its founding, much has focused on Australia and to a lesser extent Canada. In 2015, a special section of Transfers devoted to settler colonial mobilities focused on Australasia with an invitation by editor Georgine Clarsen encouraging

further scholarship from other locations—the United States, Canada, South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East—indeed all other contexts where a critical mobilities perspective can provide new understandings of the past, present, and future of those colonial formations that were created through the movement and stasis of nomads who convinced themselves and the world they should be called settlers. (47)

Heeding Clarsen’s call, the papers in this special issue focus on the particularly violent settler states of the United States, Canada, and Israel, in addition to diverse Indigenous nations that refuse the militarized rigidity of settler state borders and, through their mobile practices and enactments of mobile sovereignty, generate new spatial formations. Beyond the geographic focus on nation-states, the papers also offer new clarity on the embodied, local, and regional geographies of non-human actors that must be considered – such as bison, honeysuckle, and canoes, to name just a few – as we attend to these braided, embattled, and often resurgent mobilities.

Second, this special issue foregrounds Indigenous histories and perspectives on, as well as the ongoing production of Indigeneity within, structures of settler colonialism. In doing so, we align ourselves with the interdisciplinary field of critical Indigenous studies, which critically interrogates the productions and politics of Indigeneity, particularly though not exclusively under conditions of colonialism, including settler colonialism. This approach is distinct from the study of Indigenous peoples per se, including past studies of Indigenous peoples within some veins of mobilities scholarship that have sought to incorporate settler colonial studies. This is because, although now organized as a specialized and relatively coherent field of study, settler colonial studies grew out of and remains indebted to critical analysis developed by generations of Indigenous scholars who have offered incisive commentary about how settler colonial societies function, and to what ends. For that reason, as J. Kehaulani Kauanui (2016), one of the founders of Critical Indigenous Studies, has observed: ‘to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful engagement with the indigenous … can (re)produce another form of the “elimination of the native”’ (n.p.; see also Alfred and Corntassel 2005). While ‘settler colonial studies does not, should not, and cannot replace Indigenous studies’ (Kauanui 2016, n.p.), settler colonial studies must remain accountable to Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous homelands, histories, and struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization (Khatun 2015).

Finally, some of the works in this special issue present relational considerations not only of settlers and Indigenous peoples (if we may simplify for the moment) but also of racialized labor migrants, refugees, and enslaved peoples – those that Chickasaw literary scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) has called ‘arrivants.’ Enslaved peoples and racialized labor migrants have always been essential, if often unwilling, participants in the settler colonial project. They have been conscripted through violence and coercion to labor on Indigenous lands claimed by settlers and to participate in extractive economies that materially benefit settlers across generations through the accumulation of property-based wealth. The enduring presence of arrivants in settler colonial societies – indeed, the structural necessity of their labor to dispossession and the accumulation of settler wealth – lifts up a fundamental contradiction: while racialized populations have been essential to settler economies, they have also been perceived as threats to settler political orders founded on White supremacy (Day 2016; Harris 1993). This racial contradiction has been managed in multiple ways, such as restricting citizenship or possibilities for land ownership to White settlers or their descendants, but also, crucially, through the regulation of racialized laborers’ and enslaved peoples’ mobilities (e.g. Carpio 2019; Commander 2021). Ample scholarship from ethnic studies has documented these laws, policies, and practices historically; some of the papers in this collection investigate their endurance into the present, while also pointing to the need for future research in this area.

Emergent conversations: intersections of mobilities studies with Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies

We recognize Mobilities as a leading voice in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ for its rich contributions to theorizations, empirical examinations, and methodologies in the field (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). In recent years, the journal has published scholarship engaging frameworks that center Indigeneity and settler colonialism (Cidro, Bach, and Frohlick 2020; Clarsen 2015, 2017; Suliman et al. 2019; Whyte, Talley, and Gibson 2019), with complementary work also being published in Transfers. A particularly notable contribution is ‘Settler-Colonial Mobilities,’ a special section of Transfers published in December 2015. With an introduction by Georgine Clarsen and commentary by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, it includes four articles authored by historians, all of which focus on the late nineteenth century as a key moment for the mobile production of British empire and settler colonial formations in Australasia (Transfers 2015; see also Clarsen 2015, 2017), as well as what Mavhunga (2015) refers to as ‘counterrepresentations’ mounted by Indigenous people in response.

Whereas critical mobilities scholarship that engages Indigeneity and settler colonialism is currently emerging in Mobilities, the journal has a longer and more robust record of scholarship about Indigenous peoples. As of this writing, a keyword review of ‘Indigenous’ shows consistent use, with at least one article employing the term each year since the journal’s founding in 2006. A noticeable upswing occurs after 2015, with a peak in 2020 when the journal published 14 articles using the term. Publications in Transfers echo these trends. The journal’s scholarship on Indigenous peoples is relatively plentiful, with over 30 articles and book reviews including mention of ‘Indigenous’ since the journal’s founding in 2011. The vast majority of these publications cluster from 2016 to 2018 and again in 2020, partly reflecting the response to special issues around relevant thematics. Yet a deeper dive into this literature shows that much of the engagement with this term is minimal, often folding Indigeneity among other markers of difference (race, gender, class, and more), appearing only in a citation, or otherwise noted mostly in passing. Nevertheless, multiple articles in both journals have engaged Indigenous studies scholarship, Indigenous ontologies, and Indigenous theoretical approaches in more substantive ways. Particularly notable among these contributions is a 2019 special issue of Mobilities on Anthropocene mobilities (Nail 2019; Suliman et al. 2019; Whyte, Talley, and Gibson 2019).

With this special issue, ‘Mobilizing Indigeneity and Race within and against Settler Colonialism,’ we build on these prior conversations and extend their insights to new places, new time periods, and new social, political, economic, and ecological processes. Collectively, we and the contributors ask: What are the relationships between mobility, race, and Indigeneity in settler colonial societies? How are the movements of people, animals, commodities, ideas, and practices related to the ongoing, dialectical making and unmaking of settler and Indigenous societies? How are these various movements narrated and contested in the cultural products and practices of settler states? What possibilities for decolonization and the full exercise of sovereignty, the rematriation of land, cultural revitalization, and racial justice might exist if we take into consideration past, present, and future mobilities together? As partial answers to these questions, the papers gathered here offer new insights into settler colonialism’s mobile architectures, competing technologies of maritime mobility, decolonial forms of landscape conservation on travel corridors, how ‘voluntourism’ enables the crafting of White settler subjectivity, the roles of digital and new media for displaced peoples, and the question of what it means to move as a sovereign Indigenous nation, among other important themes.

Several of the contributors (Katz, Fraga, and Brown) consider essential materials, technologies, and processes of mobility through which settler colonialism has been structurally produced, both historically and in the present. These authors analyze the ways that settler colonialism is constituted not only on land, which has dominated studies of settler colonialism, but also across and through waters. They take up the structures and infrastructures – tents, steamboats, oil pipelines, and more – that have facilitated the differential movements and containments of people, things, and ideas, thereby making the establishment of certain elements of settler states and settler economies possible, though never fully realized and always fiercely resisted. Indeed, these papers also illustrate the diverse ways that settlers, Natives, and racialized labor migrants have navigated settler colonial structures through both hegemonic and resistant mobile practices. These include the use of canoes to exercise Indigenous geographical knowledge (Fraga), commemorative walks through historic paths of Native removal that lead to generative encounters with ‘invasive species’ (Hughes), and Indigenous-led modes of ecological conservation practice that consider the habitat needs of non-human animals in protected movement corridors alongside the human political and cultural rights of the Flathead Nation (Brown).

Other contributions (Toomey and Vasquez Ruiz) address questions of relational racialization under conditions of settler colonialism, considering specifically the mobilities of racialized peoples who enter and move through settler states in ways that productively trouble the settler–Native binary. These papers highlight the importance of recent ethnic studies scholarship on enslaved peoples, labor migrants, Indigenous migrants, and refugees in the ongoing constitution and refutation of settler societies (e.g. Blackwell, Lopez, and Urrieta Jr 2017; Byrd 2011; Dotson 2018; Karuka 2019; King 2019; Pulido 2018; Saranillio 2013), while centering structures and practices of mobility in their analyses. While Toomey offers a richly theoretical comparative analysis that binds the mobilities of elite travelers such as ‘voluntourists’ to contracted agricultural workers who remain perpetually deportable, Vasquez Ruiz focuses empirically on Indigenous peoples from across the Americas who enter the United States as compelled laborers, living and laboring on the ancestral territories of other Indigenous peoples. For many of these people, immigration policy and practices of detention and deportation foreclose the possibility of return; thus, they turn to mobile postcards like those posted on YouTube as ways to enact Indigeneity while in diaspora. Considering these mobile enactments of racialization and Indigeneity together, in the making of what Toomey deems the ‘nexus of (im)mobility,’ offers new ways to think through the relationships among mobile peoples whose movements are structured by the conditions of settler colonialism and policed by multiple settler nation-states.

In the remainder of this introduction, we explore some of the ways in which settler colonial societies are created and sustained through (im)mobilities, before we consider the diverse ways that Indigenous nations, communities, and individuals mobilize Indigeneity. In our review of the literature, we draw from existing scholarship in mobility studies, while also highlighting scholarship about movement and mobilities emanating from critical Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and transnational American studies. Much of the work in the latter fields has only recently (or has not yet) infiltrated scholarly conversations in mobility studies, and vice versa, reflecting the degree to which important epistemological interventions and critical theory are often immobilized within bounded disciplines through the conventional practices of knowledge production. As part of this discussion, we highlight both the conjunctures and incommensurabilities of a mobilities justice framework when applied to political movements for decolonization.

We also introduce two concepts, ‘settler anchoring’ and ‘mobility sovereignty,’ that we hope offer generative ways for bringing these fields and their insights together. The concept of settler anchoring is meant to disrupt the great lie of settler colonialism – that is, the degree to which its claims to permanence and order actually rest on expansive, persistent, often unruly forms of movement – and to capture more accurately the actually-existing relationships between settlement and mobility under settler colonialism. We define settler anchoring as the temporary points of orientation and grounding that facilitate subsequent mobilities in structured ways that enable the eliminatory logics of settler colonial societies. Like the ship anchor, settlement is not actually an end point, a fait accompli, but rather generates a point of orientation amidst depths and flows beneath, which supports the machine of conveyance, above. Settlement is, in its essence, the practice of movement with the projected intention of incessantly securing, claiming, and occupying lands. Once settled, the secured or anchored space opens up a subsequent opportunity (perhaps even expectation and requirement) of movement for other intentions and purposes. The success of the first suggests qualifications for legitimately engaging in the latter, while also providing a landed root from which to launch and oversee those new mobilizations. Like the anchor, settlement offers only a procedural respite, a symbol of stasis floating upon and sustained by a constant flow.

Alongside settler anchoring, we propose the concept of ‘mobility sovereignty’ – an interdisciplinary analytic referring to the ability to choose when, where, how, and for what purposes to engage in movement. Drawing on influential scholarship on motility, mobility justice, and others (Kaufmann 2002; Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004; Sheller 2018) which underscores attention to uneven mobilities as experienced across diverse actors, it refers equally to the right to move and the right to stay put. In alignment with Indigenous Studies scholarship (e.g. Harjo 2019), we understand mobility sovereignty as practiced at the scale of the body and at the scale of the collective, both of which can function as inherent expressions of being-in-the-world. Along these lines, the work of Critical Latinx Indigeneities, transnational, and hemispheric Indigenous studies provide emerging models for forging analyses that both scale down and scale up, with conceptions of movement that complicate the settler states’ proposed borders (Blackwell, Lopez, and Urrieta Jr 2017; Cruz-Manjarrez 2013; Huang, Deloria, Furlan, and Gambler 2012). In contexts of Indigeneity and settler colonialism, the work of the settler state is to secure mobility sovereignty for the settler citizen while regulating or denying outright the mobility of Indigenous and racialized peoples. Settler societies construct mobility sovereignty around the fiction of the rational, individual human being in ways that not only deny but also disavow ongoing relationships with place, more-than-human kin, ancestors, and the spiritual world. Thus, the struggle to enact mobility sovereignty in ways that accord with widely shared–if also highly distinct, localized, and diverse–Indigenous understandings of place, more-than-human relations, and mutual responsibility is a central element of the ongoing struggle for decolonization. It is, we would argue, a political project as important to the work of decolonization as the rematriation of land.

The mobilities and immobilities of settler colonial societies

The language of settlement in the theorization of settler colonialism is a misnomer, and an ontologically violent one, insofar as it elides and actively disguises the structured mobilities through which settler colonial societies have been and continue to be produced. Historian Tony Ballantyne (2014) has identified this as the ‘great contradiction at the heart of settler colonialism.’ Namely, ‘that “settlers” were typically unsettled and mobility was their defining characteristic’ (27; see also Stoler 2016). The creation and development of settler societies relied, and continues to rely, on a matrix of mobilities and immobilities practiced (or denied) by settlers, Indigenous communities, enslaved peoples, and racialized labor migrants. The keys are the systems of control over mobility that settler societies adopt, and the ways that such systems support the logics of elimination and replacement that are at the structural core of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006). Indeed, as Clarsen (2015) has argued, ‘foundational to settler colonialism are both the potential and actual capacities of settlers to roam as autonomous sovereign subjects around the world and across the territories they claim as their own – and conversely to circumscribe and control the mobilities of Indigenous peoples, to immobilize the former sovereign owners of those territories’ (42), as well as those of enslaved peoples and labor migrants.

Settler mobilities have been dependent on and entwined with Indigenous mobilities, a tension that reveals the tenuous nature of settler colonial power as well as the persistent, adaptable quality of Indigenous mobilities in settler colonial contexts. For example, in what is currently Nova Scotia, missionaries and colonial officials were compelled to travel with migrating Mi’kmaq to seasonal camps and sacred sites, despite their strong desires and political imperatives to sedentarize the Mi’kmaq as farmers. Settler colonial agents’ mobile acts of accompaniment persisted, reluctantly, even after colonization was well underway (Lelièvre 2017). Such contradictions also structured the movements of individual White settler citizens. Clarsen, for instance, has examined how White colonists applied cycling and automobility in the Australian settler context to traverse the landscape, advance myths of peaceful settlement, and buttress claims of legitimacy over the continent in the nineteenth century precisely through their documented and performative acts of movement (Clarsen 2015, 2017). In nearly all cases, these settler movements proceeded across existing and well-used Indigenous pathways (e.g. Aporta 2009; Scott 2015; Snead, Erickson, and Andrew Darling 2009), leading to the co-presence of multiple ‘tracks’ across the landscape (Khatun 2015). Indeed, in her work on automobility, Clarsen (2017) writes that the pathways both existed prior to colonization and were subsequently maintained and replenished by Indigenous labor. She tells us, ‘Some of the very tracks motorists used were ancient walking paths, smoothed for pneumatic tires by un-free Aboriginal labor under the command of police officers and government contractors’ (525).

By and large, the original settler colonies were formed in oceanic connection to the imperial metropole and therefore tended to be located along coastlines, where they were produced by and entangled with maritime mobilities, both Native and settler (see Fraga, this issue; Ballantyne 2014; Chang 2016; Lipman 2015; Reid 2015). The territorial extension of coastal settlements into the ‘outback’ or ‘inland territory’ of land claimed by settlers, and the subsequent extraction of terrestrial resources in more sustained (rather than episodic) ways, required the construction of infrastructure in the form of railroad tracks, canals, highways and roads, pipelines, electrical lines, ports, and airports (Clarsen 2017; Cowen 2020; Curley 2021; Estes 2019; Hudson 2010; Karuka 2019; Khatun 2015; Needham 2014; Steel 2015). Infrastructure knit together geographically distinct White settlements, historically enabling either the political confederation of settler communities within a burgeoning settler nation (Clarsen 2017; Cowen 2020) or communication and transportation between separate settler nations (Steel 2015). These same infrastructures moved the enslaved peoples and racialized labor migrants who were compelled to labor on behalf of the settler state’s capitalist economies of extraction (e.g. Commander 2021; Cowen 2020; Karuka 2019). Slave ships forcibly transported millions of enslaved Africans to settler societies in the Americas, where they were forced to build the infrastructures that made settler economies possible, for example by constructing miles and miles of railroad track on dispossessed Indigenous land – track that also enabled the global transportation of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and other plantation goods. Yet these same infrastructures also sometimes provided opportunities for fugitivity and marronage, as well as instances of what Michelle Commander refers to as ‘literal and figurative flight’ toward freedom (2021, xiii). Similarly, Black porters working on the transcontinental railways in Canada and the United States were essential to the functioning of settler colonial infrastructure and economies yet, through their profoundly mobile lives, they also connected the urban Black communities that developed in the working-class, racially segregated districts that surrounded (and still surround) train and bus stations (Cowen 2020,10).

We can interpret the production of such terrestrial and aquatic infrastructure as another part of the ‘positive logic of elimination’ endemic to settler colonialism. Infrastructure enabling mobility materially occupies and then facilitates the transportation of people and goods through Indigenous homelands, as well as across oceans, in ways that enable the production of settler ‘territoriality [as] settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element’ (Wolfe 2006, 388). Over time, such infrastructures become naturalized in landscapes, waterscapes, and legal regimes in ways that augment the unequal political capacities being created between Indigenous nations and settler governments (Curley 2021). Simultaneously, settler infrastructures of transportation and circulation have produced the structures of relational racialization upon which the settler colony is built.

The development of colonial infrastructure was, and remains, an important factor in the location, expansion, and enduring occupation of settler cities, as well. In early stages of colonization, settlers located forts and missions adjacent to Indigenous villages, and then operated these proto-urban sites as nodes of mobility management from which to trade with Indigenous traders, make war on Indigenous populations, convert Indigenous people to Christianity, and compel their labor within burgeoning settler economies. In the nineteenth century, for example, transportation hubs like camel depots or railway stations assembled and circulated settlers as well as laborers, natural resources, and media; in the twentieth century, suburbanization was made possible by the extension of new track and the establishment of railway towns (Carpio 2004; Cowen 2020; Edmonds 2010; Khatun 2015) as well as new miles of road and highway. Urban sites have also served as administrative centers for the distribution of land to settlers, whether as compensation for military service, the granting of a homestead designed to spread agrarian societies across Indigenous homelands recently secured by warfare and/or treaty, or, in later years, the design, building, and financing of suburban homes (Hackel 2005; Lytle-Hernández 2017; Saldaña-Portillo 2016). All of these historical processes persist into the present, though sometimes evolving to take new forms, illustrating the voracious and persistent power of settler anchoring in securing expansive new geographies of settlement.

To secure some semblance of legitimacy amid these processes, settler societies must constantly narrate and justify their continued occupations of Indigenous land, and it is here that cultural representations of settlement and its purportedly contradictory logic – movement – play a vitally important role. Political philosopher Laura Brace (2004) advances the concept of ‘imperial transition narratives,’ which seek to explain and justify the settler presence, excuse settlers for the genocide of Indigenous people and the exploitation of enslaved peoples and racialized labor migrants, and interpret perpetual settler movements in ways that do not expose the illegitimacy and the fragility of settlement, nor the apparently contradictory logic – ongoing movement – at its core. Nostalgia for tropes of ‘overlanding’ in Australia (Clarsen 2015) is a powerful example of such narratives, as is the romance of ‘rushes’ associated with episodic moments in the history of mineral and resource extraction. During California’s Gold Rush (1848–1850), for example, White emigrants to the gold fields expelled Indigenous communities through forced marches, incarceration, and mass murders with the full support of local, state, and federal armed forces as well as the emerging California legislature, which subsequently pursued treaties and the creation of reserves for some (not all) Indigenous nations in California (Madley 2016). The violence of rushes like these, and its relationship to Indigenous genocide, was brushed aside by apologists such as American historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1893), whose ‘frontier thesis’ – which remained influential among scholars and the White American public for decades – posited that miners’ genocidal episodes were simply one important stage in the necessary progress of territorial expansion, leading to the establishment of more sedentary and ‘civilized’ forms of settlement such as agriculture and the production of a quintessentially (White settler) American character. The ongoing romance of the ‘family farm’ – another transition narrative – celebrates this process, reliant as it was (and is) on Indigenous dispossession as well as the construction of dams and irrigation infrastructure – mobility infrastructures par excellence, forcing and restricting the movement of water across the earth in particular ways – and the violently imposed monopolies of corporate seeds and agricultural production techniques (Barraclough 2011; Knobloch 1996; Wolfe 2006). In a similar way, enduring attachments to the value of the suburban home and the relations of private property, heteropatriarchy, and upward and outward mobility with which it is embedded, and which it simultaneously then helps to reproduce (Carpio 2021; Veracini 2012), both celebrate and disguise the long historical reach of Indigenous dispossession and continuous practices of settler anchoring. Many tourist and educational practices that rely on mobility – such as historic trains (Shaffer 2001), tours of massive dams that have disrupted Indigenous fishing practices (Barber 2005), road trips on romanticized automobile highways such as the historic US Route 66 (Carpio 2019), or mandated field trips by primary school students to Spanish colonial missions in California (Miranda 2013) – actively re-frame the roles of these infrastructures of mobility in Indigenous dispossession and the making of racialized economic inequality, situating them instead as romantic representations of national origins (O’Brien 2010). In these multiple ways, the cultural products and practices of settler colonial societies suture Whiteness, citizenship, and the national histories of settler nation-states through interpretation and romanticization of White settler mobilities (Blee and O’Brien 2019; Delucia 2018; Hugill 2016; Miranda 2013). Despite the obfuscations, it bears noting that these kinds of touristic and commemorative projects are always subject to disruption and repurposing (see Carpio 2019; Cowen 2020; Estes 2019).

Over time, these historic patterns of settler mobility, the material and legal infrastructures that enable them, and the cultural practices that valorize them all generate settler expectations to continued unencumbered movement as well as a powerful, racialized sense of entitlement to control, critique, and criminalize the movements of others. Settler mobility is made to stand as existing a priori and thus a matter of ‘settler common sense’ (Rifkin 2014), even as it informs a powerful, often violent articulation of White supremacist settler politics. Indeed, when settler expectations for enhanced mobility are exhausted or unavailable, or when Indigenous and racialized populations challenge them, we witness rather spectacular political, legal, and cultural backlash. Settler backlash may take the form of right-wing White nationalist movements, including those that express resentment at public agencies’ regulation of settlers’ abilities to graze livestock across public lands (Bonds and Inwood 2016); colorblind legal framings that equate remedies to systemic oppression with discrimination or violation of an unspoken ‘white possessive’ (Gratz v. Bollinger 2003; Lipsitz 1998; Moreton-Robinson 2015); and/or resistance to the exercise of Indigenous rights beyond the boundaries of the reservation/reserve.

Such resentments and backlashes also enact settler defense of anchoring processes that implicate more-than-human social relations. Consider the late 2020 backlash against the Sipekne’katik (Mi’kmaq) First Nations lobster fishers in Nova Scotia, where non-Native fishers assaulted people, vandalized and destroyed property, and poisoned Indigenous lobster catches. In the 1960s and 70s, Indigenous ‘fish-in’ protests along rivers in the US Pacific Northwest were likewise met with escalating violence, equipment confiscation, and/or arrest (Smith 1996; Wilkins 2005). In those examples, the complaints against Indigenous fishing are predictably couched in rhetorics of concern for conservation as well as citizenship. They are fundamentally rooted in conserving the flow of animals as potential-expected capital for non-Indigenous commerce. The Indigenous mobilities inherent within treaties, or the reserved resource rights in ‘all usual and accustomed places,’ are instead denied and denigrated as having harmful impacts on the economic, legal, and moral expectations of non-Indigenous peoples seeking greater and often exclusive access and exploitation (Ballantyne 2014, 31; see also Wilkins 2005). In these ways, the mobility of non-humans continues a legacy of ‘intricate biological exchanges set in train by empire, which saw animals (alive and dead), plants, seeds and pathogens moving along the pathways and sea-lanes of empire’ in addition to the flow of the very paper used to generate legal documentation and bind signatories to agreements (Ballantyne 2014, 22). Alongside this latter point, consider Sheller’s early work on the Caribbean, which applies a mobilities framework to underscore the ways 18th century colonists leveraged the visual and physical mobility of botanics. Through the circulation of idyllic images of fruit, colonists normalized the Caribbean’s cultivation in ways that equated colonization with stimulus, centered trade, and normalized European ease of movement through land and sea–all while rendering an assumption of local and enslaved peoples as fixed in prescribed roles within the landscape (Sheller 2003).

Through these historic and ongoing processes, both material and cultural, and through the simultaneous refusal of cross-racial class solidarities, Whiteness has emerged as an embodied passport for selective mobility enhancements. White citizens’ disproportionate capacity to exercise mobility sovereignty in ways that are protected by settler states and upheld by systems of law and the constant threat of violence has become an essential expression of Whiteness as property (Harris 1993), wherein property is conceived not as a thing that is owned, but rather a bundle of relationships (Blomley 2004) – in this case, a racially and politically structured relationship of entitlement to self-determined freedom of movement. As others have underscored, mobilities operate unevenly in their flows, frictions, interrelations, and relations to power across diverse striations (Cresswell; Massey 1994; Sheller 2018). Thus, in many ways Whiteness is, fundamentally, differential access to mobilities. This remains true even as White masculinity ultimately depends on a parallel of genderedrelations to moving/anchoring and exploring/home-making (Clarsen 2015; Simpson 2016). As corollary, permission for broad forms of mobility was thereby denied those without the proper bodily documentation or its successful forgery, perhaps best exemplified through the fungibility of passing as White. These distinctions between differing racial formations also teetered upon a withering notion of Indigenous racial existence along with the corresponding land claims, and the bolstering of Black racial existence as laboring bodies and the capacity to construct national infrastructure and generate wealth.

Yet, the force of what we call settler anchoring, and the exercise of mobility sovereignty in gendered and racially exclusive ways bound to the dispossessing power of the settler state, disguises the tensions and contradictions that settler colonialism has long produced for Indigeneity, Indigenous communities, and Indigenous futurities, some of which we consider now.

Mobilizing Indigeneity relationally within and against settler colonialism

Settler colonialism requires malleable notions of Indigenous mobility: sometimes lauded as freedom, often denigrated as lacking historical agency, regularly enforced to enable and justify territorial thefts, and eventually used to weaken and misrecognize Indigenous land relations. Responding to Westphalian logics and settler colonial legal frameworks, Native peoples have sometimes worked to assert a level of legibility, and thus constrained or contiguous mobility, within these parameters. Despite the needs for legibility, however, Native peoples have always balanced desires to hold onto traditional practices, knowledges, and relationships to land, even as these ‘holdings’ were achieved precisely by intentional movement and change, via an ongoing and critical engagement with the world (Warrior 1994). Natchee Blu Barnd (2017), one of the co-editors of the special issue, notes the ongoing, persistent ‘connections between mobility and place in Native epistemologies, identities, and ontologies’ (105), while Goeman (2017) similarly observes that Indigenous mobility is necessarily rooted in ‘becoming and belonging’ (105) and thus a means for both reconciling the past and for navigating toward decolonial futurities.

The notion of Indigenous futurities has become an important shorthand for visions and practices of Indigenous agency that are implicitly rooted in revitalization or decolonization, sometimes both, with an eye toward securing specific and desired future outcomes (Dillon 2016; Harjo 2019; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013). As several of the authors in this special issue suggest, futurities are being expressed in complex and unique ways that are enacting and enabling the future now, in choosing the mobilities most desired and beneficial. They imagine and practice possibilities before and/or outside the frames of settler colonialism with the foresight of maintaining and renovating more complete forms of Indigenous mobility. As a fluid set of forward-looking principles, then, Indigenous futurities are always precisely bound to enhancing and expanding mobility, and specifically the project of exercising mobility sovereignty on Indigenous terms. Out of the constrained conditions settler colonialism creates for Indigenous peoples, these futurities manifest the possibility of greater Indigenous thrivance after colonization and invite reconfigurations by settlers and arrivants that can ethically respond to relationships with and responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and lands (Deloria et al. 2018, King 2019).

Indigenous, anticolonial futurities have been practiced for as long as settler colonial societies have been imposed. In nearly all historical contexts, Indigenous peoples have found creative, sometimes subversive ways to sustain ancestral mobilities and to create new networks and connections amid settler colonial constraints (e.g. Epeli 1994; Chang 2019; Peteet 2017). In the Southeastern United States, for example, even as colonial governments worked to build a postal road across Creek homelands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Creeks drew on their long-standing traditions of mobility, as well as evolving understandings and practices of sovereignty, to define their territory and attempt to control who could travel through it (Hudson 2010). Twentieth-century Aboriginal peoples in settler Australia adopted automobiles into their lives for pleasure, to maintain cultural practices, and to expand their spheres of movement, although always operating in asymmetrical ways, and at higher risk of violence and police harassment (Clarsen 2017; see also Deloria 2004; Peteet 2017). As a more contemporary example, the resurgence of doulas or culturally-based birth workers underscores pregnant Indigenous women’s efforts to assert their bodily sovereignty and challenge ongoing forms of heteropatriarchal settler colonialism through their insistence on staying home, in deliberate violation of Canada’s mandatory birth travel policies, which require women living in rural and remote areas to travel to metropolitan hospitals to give birth (Cidro, Bach, and Frohlick 2020). Across these examples, as special issue contributor Bethany Hughes indicates, ‘Indigeneity belies settler colonial expectations of and desire for stasis and consistency’ in part through the ongoing practice of movement (in her case through collective walking as a way of enacting and sustaining Choctaw sovereignty and nationhood), and conversely, through staying put – both of which are exercises of mobility sovereignty on Indigenous terms.

Emergent work on Indigenous (im)mobilities in the anthropocene suggests the political, ecological, and epistemological-ontological stakes of Indigenous mobilities that enact Indigenous futurities, in ways that specifically account for the more-than-human relations caught in settler colonialism’s web. Suliman et al. (2019) highlight Pacific peoples’ efforts to mobilize culture and Indigeneity in a context wherein they are particularly vulnerable to climate-related displacement. This work emphasizes a context in which Indigenous movement and stasis were ‘colonised along with their lands’ and where ‘choosing to stay and die is a powerful assertion of indigeneity and an acknowledgement of the limits of nation-state solutions [to climate crises]’ (Suliman et al. 2019, 304–6). Whyte, Talley, and Gibson (2019) contextualize the anthropocene within long traditions of environmental mobility among Indigenous peoples, with particular emphasis on Anishinaabe traditions. Departing from the case study approach, their work centers Indigenous intellectual traditions of mobility which remain rarely cited in mobilities studies. This scholarship destabilizes the very idea of periodization and highlights the past as characterized by consistent transformation, motion, and mobility. Their engagement with settler colonialism is substantive, focusing on ‘how settler colonialism is itself a structure of domination that arranges institutions to undermine Indigenous motion, mobility, and adaptation’ (325). In this formulation, colonialism and containment are intimately tied to one another and resistance to settler colonialism necessitates resisting containment. Here we might also consider the revitalizing movement of the Polynesian Voyaging Society which returned to, and has for the last half-century even expanded (globally), Pacific Islander practices of ancestral canoe-making and open-ocean navigation (Finney 1992; Furuto 2019).

Across these diverse examples of Indigenous mobilities enacting Indigenous futurities, the constraints of colonial constructions of spatial scale, and the need to transgress them, rise consistently to the fore. Drawing on the fiction of Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, Goeman (2017) highlights the need for attention across interconnected spatial scales, in this case moving from body to nation, in order to subvert colonial structures that intentionally segment via practices of containment and disaggregation. Centering the bodies of Native women who are literally overwritten with what Hogan references as ‘signatures of terrorism,’ Goeman suggests that by ‘ thinking of the body as a geography connected to other geographies under the structures of settler colonialism, we can uproot it from narrowly defined colonial scales’ (102). Here, mobility is both Indigenous and anti-colonial. Colonial containments work to separate and differentiate human and non-human bodies, to define these as discrete scales, and thus to exert force over the movements and relations between and across them (although always incompletely). But ‘Indigenous scales of spatial justice include a consideration of all bodies: the human, the land, the water’ (Goeman 2017, 107). It is precisely these understandings of scale, relationality, and sovereignty that must be considered carefully as we weigh the intersections and incommensurabilities among movements for mobility justice and movements for decolonization.

Decolonizing mobility justice? Intersections and incommensurabilities

In her important work on mobility justice, Sheller (2018) argues, ‘mobility is deeply connected to ideas of freedom, individualism, and liberalism; ideas that have historically shaped and structured uneven spatial relations within a mobile ontology.’ In turn, Sheller posits that ‘we need a kinopolitical lens on the interdependent production of mobility spaces and (im)mobile subjects’ (28). In this final section, we want to consider where such a kinopolitical lens might be stationed, and whether its placement or movement during the process of lensing matters in struggles for Indigenous self-determination and decolonization.

Any notion of decolonizing mobility requires more than an additive maneuver of incorporating Indigenous knowledge or practices. As Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández (2013)state succinctly in relation to knowledge production, ‘anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity’ at the expense of an Indigenous futurity (80). Put differently, the expansion of mobility justice to reckon with settler colonialism and its impacts on Indigenous peoples and homelands cannot simply mean that Indigenous peoples are allowed to move in the same ways or on the same terms as settlers – that is, via practices of anchoring that enable extraction, disposability, and other ways of severing relations. It requires something else: the enactment of mobility sovereignty in ways that accord with specifically Indigenous understandings of mobility and place. Diverse Indigenous interests coalesce around the recovery and meaningful reassertion of self-determination as an inherent and independent reality, and the (re)connection of self-determination to land, place, and environment as well as the bundles of kinship relations with human and non-human relatives that such connections support. This position on Indigenous futurity is not simply another erasure or counter-violence, however, as it ‘does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies’ (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013, 80).

Centering decolonization in a discussion of mobility justice thus reveals complicated entanglements and ‘incommensurabilities’ (Tuck and Yang 2012) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous forms of mobility justice. As Sheller predicted, ‘A mobility justice perspective … leads one to ask how some people’s freedom of mobility impacts and depends on others’ coerced mobilities, slowed mobilities, uprootings, and re-routings’ (96). We should rightly be distrustful of mobilities that exist in tension with what Goeman (2017) suggests are the deeply rooted other-than-human notions of mobility within many Indigenous ontologies (see also Fishel 2019; Scott 2020). And yet, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) reflects, given the immobilities shaping and populating colonized lands, how can Indigenous peoples operate any other way except relationally, and thus toward kinship-based futurities with other peoples on these lands?

One of the key incommensurabilities that emerges when attempting to conceive social-political movements for decolonization and for mobility justice together is tension over the utility of race as organizing principle. The positionality of Indigenous peoples is fundamentally rooted in land, both in a cultural sense and in the political-legal frameworks that have governed relations with most nation-states; this is different from identity-based models of race that rest in the body and in the community, even while they tend to the construction of social systems and structures on the basis of those identities. Thus, Indigenous studies has long resisted the imposition of racial categories and processes of racialization as core analytics for the experiences of Native peoples, particularly in the context of the United States. Scholars and community leaders have been specifically and rightly concerned with the conflation of differently racialized group experiences and its implications for Indigenous communities (see Moreton-Robinson 2015). Majority-centered political willpower usually offers little leverage for those consisting of a small overall percent of the total population – numbers that are in part, for Indigenous communities, the reflection of centuries of attempted and actualized genocide (Wolfe 2006).

A related conundrum emerges around categories of citizenship, which in most settler societies has been historically limited to Whites, as well as the political movements led by people of color, racialized migrants, and arrivants that have demanded rights and redress from settler nation-states by expanding the racial boundaries of citizenship. The agenda of civil rights activism, for example, which largely targets equitable inclusions and remedies for unequal citizenship and the exercise of individual rights, actually stands at odds with interests in Indigenous sovereignty, which exists outside of and prior to the purview of settler colonial legal structures. To be sure, many individuals and Native communities participated in civil rights movements in a variety of ways. In addition, settler colonial conditions have long led Indigenous leaders to leverage the nation-state model of sovereignty and its collective force, even while they worked to differentiate it from models of multi-ethnic/multiracial liberal democracy that seek individualized incorporation as abstracted citizens and political subjects (Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2014). Still, Indigenous people have not experienced citizenship or its limitations and expansions in ways comparable to other racialized groups, but are politically constrained and defined by the settler state, and outside of the formal consent of the social contract qua Constitution (Deloria and Wilkins 2011).

Nevertheless, race, racialization, and citizenship are tightly interwoven with Indigenous self-determination in many ways. Systems of racial categorization and individualized citizenship have been persistently imposed on Indigenous peoples and nations as conditions for limited settler-state recognition of their sovereignty and their land. We see this in the blood quantum requirements for (most) US tribal enrollment processes, and in anti-Blackness within structures of both enrollment and recognition (Miles 2005; Naylor 2008; Snyder 2010). We see it in numerous policies, from the ‘merciless Indian savages’ in the US Declaration of Independence to the establishment of reserve/reservation geographies and laws governing them, from the extension/retraction of citizenship within racialized territories to the legislative logics of the Termination Act, and in the management of treaty resource rights. And, in the current era, Indigenous peoples are conditionally welcomed to movement as individual citizen-subjects and consumers in ways that reproduce the political and spatial structures of the settler nation-state. Surging urban Indigenous populations reflect this facilitated mobility, premised on individualized enactments of settler-state citizenship delinked from the collective landholdings of reservations or reserves (though they also signal a return to and reclamation of ancestral geographies violently reshaped by the establishment of settler cities and Indigenous expulsions). These histories of racial and citizenship imposition, and their subsequent imbrication in many aspects of tribal governance and economies as well as urban Indigenous communities, eliminate the ability for Indigenous communities to simply avoid or ignore those enforcements, and their intended consequences, altogether.

Scholarship on relational racialization within settler colonial societies (and elsewhere) productively troubles the settler–Native binary and allows us to address some of the incommensurabilities suggested above. Rejecting the assumptions of shared racial experiences that often underlie ‘people of color’ organizing and some ethnic studies scholarship, for example, scholars have convincingly shown that White supremacy is constituted through three distinct but overlapping logics: the logic of genocide, which anchors colonialism; the logic of enslaveability and anti-Black racism, which anchors capitalism; and the logic of orientalism, which anchors war (Smith 2012). Like all structural logics, these intertwined logics are produced in and through (im)mobilities in ways that we have begun to identify above and which the papers in this special issue also consider. Thus, to move toward decolonization in a way that also incorporates aspects of mobility justice requires attending to the relational production of the (im)mobilities of Natives, settlers, and various groups of arrivants, as well as their complex relationships to Indigenous homelands, in ways that honor both distinct and shared histories and the contradictions among them (Byrd 2011; Carpio 2019; Dotson 2018; Karuka 2019; Pulido 2018; Saranillio 2013).

Finally, to consider decolonization alongside mobility justice requires us to engage race and political belonging in a different way – that is, through strategic attention to the often-muted presence of Whiteness in all processes of racialization and (im)mobilities. This means, on the one hand, rejecting the exclusions of national formations, including citizenship, that are rooted in conditions of White supremacy and settler colonialism. Equally important, it requires the dismantling of the forces of settler anchoring, as well as the multitude of other ways in which White settler supremacy is produced through (im)mobilities. Active, engaged work to identify – and then to disrupt – the ongoing production of White settler mobilities via processes of settler anchoring will make greater way for the Indigenous relationalities and mobility sovereignties, already in practice and in motion, that point toward an ‘after-colonial future’ (Barnd 2017: 3).

At bottom, the centerpiece of decolonization is the rematriation of land, expressed through the shorthand of #landback. A critical mobilities studies perspective – informed by scholarship from critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and relational studies of race – adds to this refrain and deepens awareness of how and where mobilities fit into the structural dismantling of settler colonialism and the creation of anticolonial, antiracist futures, in ways both spectacular and mundane (Barnd 2017; Harjo 2019). Thus, in addition to the rematriation of land to Indigenous nations, meaningful decolonization must involve the enactment and protection of mobility sovereignty on distinctly Indigenous terms – that is, the sovereign abilities of Indigenous peoples to control their own mobility, not in the interests of becoming capitalists or exclusionary property owners in their own right (thus replacing the colonizer), but to fulfill obligations to homelands and homewaters as well as human and nonhuman kin.

Consequently, we characterize our attention to settler colonial and Indigenous mobilities in this special issue as a project that seeks to determine where mobility justice allows us direct disassembly of settler colonial violences, or how mobility justice might be productively pursued in ways that share (or facilitate) path-clearing acts of Indigenous mobilities that move us toward decolonization. The papers in this special issue do not resolve these questions definitively. However, they do work through some of the tensions and contradictions raised by the mobility justice framework as well as other possibilities rooted in Indigenous studies, Indigenous life, and the relational exercise of Indigenous mobility sovereignty.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Briceida Hernandez, who served as a graduate researcher, and Jordan Gonzales, who offered his writing expertise on several of the articles in this special issue. We are especially indebted to Mimi Sheller, who has offered invaluable feedback since the inception of the issue, and Pennie Drinkall, who has seen it through every stage of submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.