Indigenising International Relations: Insights from Centring Indigeneity in Canada and Iraq

Abstract

This article responds to recent calls to decolonise International Relations. Despite the urgency of this task, much of this work remains at the margins or worse, bound to colonial world views and commitments. Against this backdrop, we first argue that centring Indigeneity demands scholarship that unravels the current configurations of the field and moves away from merely adding Indigeneity as a category within neoliberal, colonial, Westernised frameworks. Second, we assert that Critical Indigenous Studies offers a theoretically generative framework to begin examining international issues in new ways. To illustrate, we re-read sovereignty debates in Québec (Canada) and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) through a critical Indigenous lens to disrupt the discourse and taken-for-granted understandings of self-determination struggles for secession in these two sites. Along with highlighting a path towards Indigenising the discipline, our work also reveals how distinct, yet intertwined colonialisms function across the globe.

Introduction

There are widespread calls to decolonise International Relations (IR). However, the bulk of this work, even if inadvertently, is woven into a colonial way of being in and seeing the world that is completely unable to reimagine or transform IR. For instance, territorial disputes within state borders are conventionally studied and perceived as a domestic, rather than an IR issue. However, we argue that territorial integrity is situated within colonial modernity and international state and nation-building. ¹ Additionally, much of this work depoliticises decolonisation by using the term metaphorically, which obscures the issue of land repatriation. ² We support the call for a discipline that engages Indigeneity, but we maintain that cautions are in order. Brendan Hokowhitu (Māori, Ngāti Pūkenga) contends that to move beyond tokenism, Indigeneity must transcend Western academic thought. ³ Put another way, Indigeneity cannot simply be added or applied in a one-size-fits-all manner to our research. Extending this line of thought to IR, we argue that centring Indigeneity demands the unravelling of the current configurations of the field and moving away from merely adding Indigeneity as a category within neoliberal, colonial, Westernised frameworks. By consequence, we can revisit and rethink core concepts, namely colonialism and sovereignty. Importantly, centring Indigeneity highlights the colonial construction of borders while positioning Indigenous nations as sovereign, and not simply a minority group within a state. ⁴ Centring Indigeneity then, allows for an examination of territorial disputes between nations within a state as an IR issue.

Secondly, we further insist that as a methodological approach, Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) offers a useful theoretical framework for which to examine international issues in a new way. Importantly, CIS’s critiques of colonialism from an Indigenous perspective, the centring of Indigenous experiences and stories, and the role of gender and sexuality in the modern racial state would be very useful in the context of international studies. CIS is also compatible with a variety of qualitative methods that IR scholars may choose, such as discourse analysis, ethnography, or visual analysis to name a few.

We explore Indigeneity in two divergent contexts, specifically the province of Québec in Canada and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) to illustrate how CIS allows us to re-examine sovereignty and international state-building to reveal different yet entangled colonialisms. ⁵ Canada’s settler-colonial history, (a distinct form of colonialism aimed at replacing the Indigenous populations to control land and resources while repopulating with settlers to create a new nation) is well documented. ⁶ Less is known about Canada’s ongoing legacy of colonialism, especially in relation to conversations about sovereignty, which is always a hot-button issue in Québec. ⁷ The role of imperialism (territorially creating and expanding empire) is well known in the story of Mesopotamia. Relatedly, British colonialism (drawing of borders and creating states) is also well known in the creation of the modern state of Iraq. While Iraq is studied within the parameters of British and American colonialism, it is overlooked as a site of Indigeneity. Due to this oversight, when Assyrians are included in the literature, they are constructed as a marginalised religious minority rather than an Indigenous nation that has been dispossessed from their homeland in the makings of various empires and states. ⁸ However, centring Assyrian Indigeneity reveals a lesser-known legacy of entangled colonialisms. We do not suggest that Canada and Iraq share parallel experiences of coloniality and Indigeneity. Drawing on Muslim feminist scholar Shaista Patel’s ideas on the multiplicities of coloniality, ⁹ we use settler colonial Canada and the overlooked site of Iraq to demonstrate how colonial empire has functioned across multiple frontiers. CIS helps us challenge and re-read sovereignty and international state-building while maintaining the specificity of Indigenous peoples, their goals, and their unique but intertwined experiences with colonialisms. Indigeneity is most often studied within the constraints of settler colonialism and geographically bounded to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Scandinavia. Our work geographically liberates Indigenous Studies from these current boundaries and challenges what we think we know about global politics, Indigeneity, and colonialism.

After situating ourselves in the research, we first centre Indigeneity in the literature on nation and state-building by bringing in Indigenous understandings of sovereignty and nationhood. We apply these insights to Canada and Iraq as examples to show how a critical Indigenous approach allows us to rethink the notions of sovereignty and colonialism in IR. We analyse these two sites to disrupt and retell stories of Canadian (Québec) and Iraqi (KRI) desires for sovereignty. Our work makes two key interventions into the IR literature on state and nation-building, sovereignty, and colonialism. First, our CIS approach allows us to engage Indigeneity in IR in ways that move beyond essentialism and using decolonisation in a metaphorical sense. Second, we expand the geographical boundaries of Indigeneity by placing Canada and Iraq together to disrupt the discourse and taken-for-granted understandings of KRI and Québec self-determination struggles for secession. Instead, we challenge the unilinear understanding of colonialism by examining the ways in which distinct yet intertwined colonialisms have functioned across the globe.

A commitment to Indigenising IR is inextricably tied to a drive to counter hegemonic ways of knowing, both ourselves, our place in the world, and the other. Engaging Indigeneity in a meaningful way that follows the tenets of Critical Indigenous Studies, detailed below, requires research that empowers Indigenous peoples to speak about their concerns for themselves as experts, rather than others speaking about them as research subjects. ¹⁰ We are both Indigenous, but our perspectives are particular and fragmented along multiple locations, histories, and languages. We draw on Gloria Anzaldua’s conception of borderlands consciousness to think about how our identities are developed across multiple and contradictory social and physical spaces, reflecting both dominant and subordinate social and political positions. ¹¹ That is, our research and knowledge are produced and shaped by our suppressed identities and colonial experiences as Indigenous women from what is today known as Iraq (Mariam Georgis and Canada (Nicole V.T. Lugosi-Schimpf, our locations growing up within the poor working class, Georgis’s arrival and settlement on stolen Indigenous land due to imperial and colonial violence dispossessing her from her homeland, Lugosi-Schimpf’s lived experiences in an urban space in her homeland, and both holding PhDs from academic institutions in the global North.

Centring Indigeneity: Rethinking Sovereignty and Nationhood

We contend that centring Indigeneity is the only way to begin Indigenising IR. We place Patel’s insights on the multiplicities of coloniality in conversation with Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS), to help us reframe how we study these violences. ¹² In her examination of the role of Muslims in aspects of European racist and colonial epistemology in its encounters with the ‘New World’, Patel weaves a compelling argument for ‘a commitment to a relational understanding of transnational workings of colonialism across the continents of Asia, North and South Americas, and Africa while holding onto the multiplicity of coloniality across these seemingly disparate and differently colonized spaces.’ ¹³ Citing Lisa Lowe ¹⁴ , Patel tells us that ‘such a task demands that we disobey the wilful organisation of the colonial archive and its neat boundedness; it asks that we work with archives that defeat the logic of linear progression of time; it demands that we pay urgent attention to the violence that is present everywhere in these archives.’ ¹⁵ Patel’s work analytically reveals the often hidden entanglements of Eastern and Western colonial empires. Examining the entanglements of colonialism informed by CIS helps us to centre Indigeneity in IR.

CIS is an emancipatory framework aimed at uncovering power relations and hierarchies by centring Indigenous communities and their knowledge. In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (Goenpul) words, ‘We understand that knowledge is socially situated. Indigenous lives provide the starting point for asking new and critical questions about Indigenous living and our being, based on presuppositions of relatedness to place, people, and the earth.’ ¹⁶ Because Indigeneity is at the core of CIS, this framework also emphasises the unique experiences of colonialism. ¹⁷ CIS differs from other critical frameworks such as postcolonialism or racialisation, which focus on those respective histories and processes rather than Indigenous peoples and their experiences. Further, because Indigenous knowledge is prioritised, CIS scholars assert that Indigenous peoples are the knowledge experts on their identities, issues, histories, and experiences. Put differently, we can retell history by turning attention to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori) calls ‘the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized.’ ¹⁸ This does not suggest that Indigenous peoples are passive subjects. Rather, centring Indigeneity repositions Indigenous peoples as sovereign agents as opposed to passive recipients of coloniality and violence. ¹⁹ This maneuver allows us to think about history and global politics in ways that move beyond imagining and talking about Indigenous peoples within a ‘deficit model’ or a ‘damage-centred’ frame. ²⁰

Thinking about Indigenous peoples as sovereign agents also removes them from the past and brings their struggles and concerns to the forefront of contemporary times. This is a departure from how Indigeneity is often constructed and theorised in the social sciences, which frames Indigenous peoples as though they are relics of the past and/or metaphorically invisible. ²¹ Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) reminds us that the challenge facing Indigenous Studies in the academy is ‘not just the need to negotiate the Western colonial biases that render indigenous peoples as precolonial ethnographic purveyors of cultural authenticity instead of scholars capable of research and insight, but also the need to respect the local specificities, histories, and geographies that inform the concept of indigeneity.’ ²² With this important insight in mind, we use the provisional definition of Indigenous peoples by Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnawake Mohawk) and Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee):

Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire (emphasis added). It is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world. ²³

We use Alfred and Corntassel’s definition to make three theoretical maneuvers. First, they emphasise the experience of coloniality as it has meant the physical and discursive removal of peoples from lands they inhabit. Second, they acknowledge that there are multiple centres of empire, which have constructed, shaped, and politicised Indigenous identity. Finally, they emphasise how Indigenousness is place-based and oppositional to and in struggle against this experience of coloniality. We contend that these interrelated points can work to remove Indigeneity from its geographical boundaries, thus allowing us to put Canada and Iraq in conversation with each other.

The place-based existence of Indigenous identity that Alfred and Corntassel define is also central to an Indigenous conceptualisation of sovereignty, which cannot be extrapolated from nationhood. It is crucial to note that Indigenous understandings of sovereignty differ from Western ones that are interlocked with internationally recognised state borders, territory, and individual rights. Instead, Indigenous sovereignty is predicated on relationships with human and non-human kin. As Moreton-Robinson puts it, ‘Our sovereignty is embodied, it is ontological (our being) and epistemological (our ways of knowing), and it is grounded within complex relations derived from the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land.’ ²⁴ Thus, Indigenous sovereignty is a way of being and knowing carried by each individual. It is not possible then, to own land in the Western sense, but to live in harmony with it. With this in mind, we argue that CIS opens the space to reimagine sovereignty within the field of IR. Inspired by the work of Jessica Shadian who uses the example of Canada’s Inuit peoples to illustrate how sovereignty can be dynamic and reframed, ²⁵ we contend that Indigenous peoples are the experts on how decolonisation should unfold. Indigenous-led decolonial scholarship foregrounds Indigenous claims and insights and rejects situating these communities as perpetually damaged and powerless. ²⁶ Further, Byrd and Rothberg assert that, ‘In a historical moment when imposed displacements and diasporas, volatile borders, and coerced exiles confuse and obliterate human perspectives, “indigeneity” holds the promise of rearticulating and reframing questions of place, space, movement and belonging.’ ²⁷ Indigenous rearticulation and reframing of sovereignty that positions people and land, along with land-based knowledge, also requires rethinking nationhood, since the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Like sovereignty, the Indigenous concept of nationhood is not bound to territorial borders but is rather understood through kinship. Kinship and family form the basis for identity and autonomy, ²⁸ which ties nationhood in with sovereignty. What is more, Indigenous nationhood is not hierarchical and so is capable of recognising and respecting multiple sovereignties and nations. ²⁹ Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) further explains that recognition does not denote ‘a necessary need to consume, displace or become absorbed by those nations.’ ³⁰ This is an important challenge to current colonial understandings of sovereignty wherein one nation (settlers or colonisers) subsume Indigenous nations to produce one sovereign state based on settler/coloniser supremacy. Rather, Indigenous understandings of sovereignty and nationhood allow for the possibility of multiple sovereignties within multi-nation spaces. In this way, we use Indigenous understandings of sovereignty and nationhood as a basis for critiquing the global, colonial order that is often unquestioned in IR.

Centring Indigeneity and Indigenous experiences and critiques of colonialism as theory and praxis is the only path towards Indigenising the discipline. CIS reminds us that coloniality is not permanent; Tuck and Yang tell us that ‘the presence of Indigenous peoples – who make a priori claims to land and ways of being – is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete.’ ³¹ Accordingly, decolonisation within CIS centres Indigenous futurity, ³² resurgence, ³³ and refusal ³⁴ as lived, theorised, and known by Indigenous peoples. This is important because it avoids theoretically inserting Indigenous peoples into already existing colonial worlds and ways of being that perpetuate colonial knowledges and worlds predicated on the dead/dying Indian trope often seen in conventional, critical, and postcolonial scholarship.

Tuck and Yang importantly point out that settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Specifically, ‘“Indian Country” was and is the term used in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq by the US military for “enemy territory”.’ ³⁵ As Alfred and Corntassel’s definition emphasises the different centres of colonial empire, Tuck and Yang outline the ways in which the ‘techniques and technologies of the permanent settler war are re-serviced for foreign wars.’ ³⁶ Aligned with Patel’s work on the multiplicity of coloniality, Tuck and Yang enable us to think about the interconnectedness of colonial projects across the globe. They tell us, ‘Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after US seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations.’ ³⁷ Pertinent for our discussion here, Iraq becomes a site – a frontier of American settler colonialism. ³⁸

Nation-building and Drives for Secession in Iraq and Québec: An Indigenous Perspective

CIS demonstrates the ways colonialism is fundamentally a process whereby states are made and maintained. Moreton-Robinson shows how the regulatory mechanisms of colonial states are ‘extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession, ranging from the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty to overregulated piecemeal concessions.’ ³⁹ For her, in the Australian context, the sense of belonging enjoyed by the non-Indigenous subject – the coloniser and the migrant – is based on the dispossession of the original inhabitants of the land and the denial of their rights under international customary law. ⁴⁰ More importantly, state-building involves myth-making, including the myth that ‘our sense of belonging is based on an equal partnership with Indigenous people.’ ⁴¹ However, as Moreton-Robinson shows, it is the denial of original and continuing dispossession that forms the foundation for this myth but that there cannot be an equal partnership while there is illegal dispossession. ⁴² Revealing and unmasking foundational myths of belonging has important consequences for our understandings of belonging and multiple sovereignties within one state.

Byrd tells us that methodologically, an Indigenous-centric approach to critical theory helps to ‘identify the processes that have kept Indigenous peoples as a necessary pre-conditional presence within theories of colonialism and its “posts”.’ ⁴³ Consequently, ‘identifying the competing interpretations of geographical spatialities and historicities that inform racial and decolonial identities depends upon an act of interpretation that decentres the vertical interactions of colonizer and colonized and re-centres the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions.’ ⁴⁴ This methodology opens the possibilities for thinking and theorising about multiple sites of colonialism and Indigeneity. It opens the space for us to put Indigenous peoples in Canada and Iraq and their histories and interactions with colonialism together in conversation, in tension, and as spatial, temporal, and geographical sites of colonial modernity, which has necessitated the removal of these Indigenous inhabitants to make states and nations.

To narrow our focus, we look at Indigenous peoples in Québec and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. We make a theoretical and conceptual intervention into the literature on state and nation-building by disrupting the discourse and taken-for-granted understandings of KRI and Québec self-determination struggles for secession. We complicate the stories of oppressed groups such as the Kurds and French-Canadians in terms of the majority Arab and English Canadians in Iraq and Canada respectively, placing primacy on the competing sovereignty claims by Indigenous groups in both regions. KRI and Québec assumptions of inherent rights to reform the state and state borders is in fact a perpetuation of colonial violence. In other words, the land is not theirs to divide without contending with Indigenous groups as sovereign nations rather than ethnic and religious minorities in their own homelands. First, we argue that the colonisation of the Indigenous inhabitants in present-day Canada and Iraq cannot be studied in isolation; rather, these processes must be studied in conjunction with the modern phenomenon of nationalism and colonial nation and state-building that has required, even necessitated, the removal of those constructed as ‘outsiders.’ ⁴⁵ Second, we demonstrate how separatists in both Québec and the KRI use secession (or threat thereof) as a political mechanism to negotiate their political, economic, and national positions within the Canadian and Iraqi states, respectively. However, little to no mention is given to the Indigenous nations whose sovereignty and nationhood is disregarded or rendered negotiable rather than as absolute. We examine these sites of coloniality to locate these respective drives for secession and nationhood as violent mechanisms of the colonial practice of modern state and nation-building. Studying sites of colonialism within a single bounded nation conceals how colonial modernity has and continues to operate, within and across multiple geographies, temporalities, and spatialities. In this way, we maintain that studying the physical and discursive removal of Indigenous inhabitants in Canada and Iraq in isolation distorts our understanding of global politics. Placing Canada and Iraq in conversation with each other reveals differences. However, an Indigenous lens shows how these two sites are also entangled in important ways that offer new conceptual terrains within IR.

As we are grounded within particular Indigenous traditions, we put Québec and Iraq into conversation to reveal the multiple machinations of empire as well as tensions. Both sites have an ongoing history of British and internal colonialism, and both are governed within federal parliamentary arrangements. While Québec is a province and the KRI is an autonomous region (the only one in Iraq), they are both home to a sizable minority within the larger state – the French in Québec and the Kurds in the KRI – with special provisions to keep them in the larger federal system. In this way, the KRI operates and is governed similarly to a province. Despite both Québec and the KRI’s attempts to homogenise their diverse regions to maintain their nationhood due to perceived threats of assimilation from the majority – English Canada in the case of Québec and Arabs in the case of the KRI – both regions are situated on Indigenous lands and are home to multiple ethnicities. The presence of these ethnic and religious minorities complicates the French and Kurdish nation-building ambitions, giving rise to tensions due to exclusive nationalist policies on the part of both the French and Kurdish governments to maintain the ‘French’ and ‘Kurdish’ character of their regions. We are interested here in Indigenous communities specifically and their sovereignties, which transcend provincial and even state borders. Also, the literature on Canada, if only recently, contends with Indigenous politics while Iraq is still firmly seen as an Arab state with a Kurdish problem. However, centring Indigeneity disrupts assumptions about both states. More importantly, examining Indigeneity through the CIS lens we advocate for, moves away from essentialising Indigenous groups and treating them as passive subjects of the colonial past. Instead, CIS opens the theoretical space to centre Indigenous peoples and their experiences. Further, when Indigenous groups are reinserted into the narratives of Canada and Iraq, a different picture of the multiplicities of ongoing colonialism, alongside continuing practices of Indigenous erasure across the globe emerges. With this in mind, we now look at each site. Our analysis begins with Québec and moves to the KRI. As less is known about coloniality and Indigeneity in the case of Iraq, we spend more time providing necessary context.

A. Québec

Before narrowing the focus to Québec, it is important to understand the wider Canadian context of nation-building as Québec’s provincial politics and discourse are situated against the national backdrop. Canada has two official languages, English and French, based on the British and French as the ‘founding fathers’ of the country. This story is very problematic however, as these lands were already inhabited by Indigenous peoples with complex and sophisticated political, economic, and trading systems long before European contact. This history is largely ignored and instead, the history books dictate that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were wild and primitive as opposed to their civilised and respectable Western European counterparts. The master narrative of the creation of Canada is that the Europeans discovered the Americas as new and uninhabited land and that they helped, indeed saved, the Indigenous tribes there. ⁴⁶ This version of Canada’s history is distorted as the violent acts of colonialism and aggressive assimilation policies are swept under the rug in favour of myth-making and telling a story of discovery and enlightenment. Scholarship across disciplines that takes the Canadian state as a given without questioning the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples perpetuates this silencing.

Joyce Green (English, Ktunaxa, and Cree-Scots Métis) argues that ‘there is a popular mythical history central to Canadian political culture about the emergence and development of the Canadian state (Thobani 2007; Green 1995, Green 2014) yet there is little popular or scholarly work on Canada as an exercise of colonialism.’ ⁴⁷ More importantly, ‘Canada has what Tricia Logan (2014:149) calls a “memory block” about its violent assault on and removal and dispossession of Indigenous people in the course of building the not-so-peaceable dominion.’ ⁴⁸ A key part of nation-building has been treaty-making between the Canadian government and Indigenous groups to legally enshrine the inherent and inalienable rights allotted to Indigenous peoples regarding territory, health care, access to wildlife and resources, etc. Throughout Canada, there are historical and modern treaties outlining the particularities of Indigenous rights. While in theory, it appears that there are strong legislative safeguards to protect Indigenous rights, in practice, government policies have been used to pursue aggressive assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous lands and people. For example, Green also tells us that colonies become settler states through processes such as residential schools, starvation, treaty-making, reserves as concentration camps to control Indigenous peoples, police control of Indians, military dispersal of the Métis, and mechanisms to divest Indigenous communities of their lands. ⁴⁹ The project of settler colonialism is foundationally and irrevocably dependent on the conquest of Indigenous land. ⁵⁰ This is echoed by Glen Coulthard (Dene) who calls settler colonialism ‘territorially acquisitive in perpetuity.’ ⁵¹

Central to the discussion here, in Québec, about 14,770 square kilometers of land is dedicated to Indigenous populations. ⁵² According to 2016 Canadian Census data, Indigenous groups are composed of different First Nations, Métis, and Inuk (Inuit) peoples (FNMI hereafter) that make up approximately 2.3 percent of Québec’s population. ⁵³ The ten First Nations groups include the Abénakis, Algonquins, Atikamekw, Cree, Malecites, Huron-Wendat, Innu, Mi’kmaq, Mohawks, and Naskapis. ⁵⁴ While these nations have their own communities all over the province, and the Inuit are concentrated in the north, many also live in urban areas. There are also many Métis living in Québec, though the traditional Métis homeland spans over the prairie region (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) and parts of Ontario. There is great cultural and linguistic diversity among the FNMI groups. It is also important to note that not all Indigenous peoples identify according to the government created categories. For example, in the James Bay area in the north, many individuals categorised as Cree may in fact identify themselves as Innu in their own languages.

In Canada, ethnic and linguistic tensions in Québec are rooted in the desire for national self-determination and sovereignty from Anglophone rule. But the call for Québec sovereignty transcends Anglo-Franco disputes, namely the unresolved issue of Indigenous sovereignty. While the bulk of the literature positions these disputes as a domestic issue, we contend that Québec nationalism is better situated as an IR problem given that nation-building and Indigenous rights are global in character. When we examine Québec’s nation-building project from an Indigenous perspective, that is through the ‘eyes of the colonized’ to use Tuhiwai Smith’s terms, the Anglo-Franco myth is disrupted by exposing how those entities legitimate their claims to power. This process overlooks Indigenous sovereignty. The 1995 Québec Referendum provides an illustrative example. Leading up to the referendum on Québec sovereignty, the provincial government drew up a draft bill (Bill 1) to declare independence. The province insisted that with separation Indigenous rights as currently outlined would be honoured in ‘ways consistent with the territorial integrity of Québec’ and would allow for Indigenous self-government. ⁵⁵ While the promises of Bill 1 gave the general voting public the impression that Indigenous concerns had been thought out and addressed, the proposal faced serious backlash and opposition from the Indigenous communities, sparking two counter-referenda. In 1995, the Crees voted 96.3 percent in favour of staying in Canada with a 77 percent turnout rate when asked, ‘Do you consent, as a people, that the Government of Québec separate the James Bay Crees and Cree traditional territory from Canada in the event of a Yes vote in the Québec referendum?’ ⁵⁶ In another 1995 referendum, the Inuit were asked, ‘Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign?’ and 96 percent voted no out of a 75 percent turnout rate. ⁵⁷ As Ghislain Picard, Innu and Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, puts it:

We have the right to self-determination and this right is not negotiable. . .Let us be even more clear: Québec can decide what it wants in terms of its culture, its identity and its development, but it cannot claim sovereignty over a territory which is still, fundamentally, First Nation. ⁵⁸

Consequently, Québec does not have the right to unilaterally carve up and renegotiate territory which is not theirs to begin with. Indigenous nationhood further complicates the separation debate since there are Indigenous groups, such as the Haudenosaunee, whose communities and homelands transcend Canadian and American borders. This crucial point is often overlooked in literature that centres Québec over Indigenous communities. The referendum shows one example among many where the Canadian state and its provinces attempt to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land and ignore their inherent rights as spelled out in the treaties. Furthermore, Québec’s claims to sovereignty demonstrate how Indigenous peoples are treated more as a minority on their historical homelands. Picard was not the only Indigenous leader speaking out against Québec separation in this manner. The First Nations Chiefs insisted that not only did they vehemently oppose separation, but that forcing the First Nations into a new state would violate international law. ⁵⁹ Chris Andersen (Métis), points out that while international law recognises the right to self-determination, the notion of ‘people’ gets legally complex. ⁶⁰ A majority vote alone would not provide the legal basis for secession as ‘the people’ of Québec does not inherently encompass Indigenous peoplehood and support.

Although formal referenda are not part of the current political agenda, discussion of sovereignty and separation persist and FNMI in Québec continue resisting the colonial order and Québec-centric nationalism. For example, in 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a renewed commitment to repair Canada’s tarnished relations with Indigenous peoples. While the news is welcome, it is also met with a great deal of scepticism. For example, Picard points out that self-government negotiations deal with land and resources, which is a provincial matter, so this does not leave a lot of room for optimism. ‘“We were always faced with a (provincial) government that does as little as it can to advance this whole notion of Indigenous rights and Indigenous title”, he said, adding that some Indigenous groups in Québec have been at the negotiating table for up to 40 years.’ ⁶¹ Picard’s points highlight why many Indigenous peoples reject the politics of rights and recognition. ⁶² Within the parameters of the settler colonial state, recognition, rights, and even negotiation cannot result in Indigenous futurity because the Franco settler is centred in these processes.

Indigenous resistance against and rejections of colonial processes in Québec are understandable given that the province has always placed primacy over Franco-Anglo tensions, with the Indigenous peoples living there as an afterthought whose sovereignty and nationhood are negotiable within a new constitutional framework. This approach by the province completely bypasses the fact that Indigenous peoples have enshrined and inherent rights to sovereignty as clearly spelled out in Section 35 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is a key difference between Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in Canada. While constitutionally enshrined rights are not inherently negative, this legal framework relegates Indigenous peoples as claimants needing to prove their case in the courts, placing the burden of proof on the communities, thus privileging the federal and provincial governments. ⁶³ Further, negotiating and renegotiating rights does nothing to dismantle the colonial systems that subordinate the role of women, which is in fundamental opposition to Indigenous laws and ways of knowing. ⁶⁴ Respectful relations should not mean placing the onus of exercising their inherent rights on Indigenous peoples, especially within a foreign hierarchical system that was imposed and by some, such as Simpson, are outright rejected. ⁶⁵ Lastly, Indigenous peoples are sovereign and not wards of the state whose sovereignty and nationhood are negotiable.

Québec’s aspirations and attempts to separate are problematically contextualised as a dispute between the Federal Government of Canada in Ottawa and the province of Québec. An Indigenous-focused interpretation of these nation-building goals points out that Québec is located on contested territory, a land that is historically claimed by the FNMI peoples who are Indigenous to this land. Their treatment as a monolithic minority rather than as sovereign peoples and nations must be historically contextualised, namely through historical and ongoing processes of violent colonialism, cultural genocide, aggressive assimilation, racism, and wilful ignorance. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands has profoundly impacted their identity and resulted in social, political, and economic marginalisation. This is exemplified through the struggle to control the territory for the development of hydro-electric power, particularly in the resource rich (water) James Bay area in the north. ⁶⁶

Green argues that decolonisation along with the Indigenisation of the state are ‘aspects of the same liberatory process and that both are essential components of reconciliation.’ ⁶⁷ For Green, reconciliation must involve the issue of stolen land because ‘unless and until the colonial state returns at least some of the land, negotiates shared jurisdiction over resources and tax room, and makes other amends, there will be no reconciliation.’ ⁶⁸ Reconciliation, according to Green, must be understood in reference to the relationship between Indigenous nations and communities and the settler state, not between individual Canadians and Indigenous people. Taking Green’s arguments into account delegitimises Québec’s claims (as an individual province) to sovereignty and even the province’s right to negotiate that land in the first place. While Green is discussing Canada specifically, her insights hold for thinking about decolonial and Indigenous futures elsewhere. Acknowledging multiplicities of coloniality means that disparate sites of empire can be woven into understandings of colonialisms and global order, as we do here. Frantz Fanon reminds us that decolonisation will require a change in the order of the world. ⁶⁹ Actual decolonisation demands the return of land. In this way, we cannot decolonise IR, but we can aspire to liberate the discipline from its Western-centric boundaries using CIS as a corrective. Having looked at Québec in present-day Canada, we now shift to present-day Iraq to analyse how coloniality has operated in the global South.

B. Iraq

Knowledge production is part and parcel of the multiple and ongoing processes of colonialism. The Assyrian identity has been distorted, fragmented, and erased by scholars of Southwest Asia (colonially labelled as the Middle East) both from Southwest Asia or the West who have studied this community but are either not from this community or have not worked in partnership with this community. ⁷⁰ Assyrian historian Alda Benjamen tells us ‘the absence of the Assyrians from scholarly discussion reflects not only their omission from national archives and libraries, but also a lack of language training among scholars.’ ⁷¹ She also importantly reminds us that much of the Assyrian archives and cultural heritage have been destroyed, relocated, looted, or closed in certain nation-states. ⁷² Assyrian historian Sargon Donabed cites the role of Western Christian missionaries in triggering and instigating the fragmentation of Assyrian identity and its connectedness to place. ⁷³ This is important because ‘almost all nineteenth-century information on the Assyrians that is studied or reproduced is based on sources by Western travelogues.’ ⁷⁴ Government categories of identity, much like scholarship not produced by or in partnership with Indigenous communities, do not always reflect how Indigenous groups define themselves. Identities that are not established by communities themselves continue to be contested all over the world, including by Assyrians. We maintain that Indigenous communities must define themselves and decide on their membership because imposing definitions or identities on Indigenous communities is also an assault on their sovereignty.

Assyrian here is used to refer to those who self-identify as Assyrian, who have always and continue to inhabit Beth-Nahrain (the land between two rivers, often referred to as Mesopotamia by Western scholars). ⁷⁵ Donabed writes, ‘their language and material culture constitutes the oldest continuous tradition in Iraq. From ancient Arba’ilū to Arbela during the Christian period in the ecclesiastical province of Adiabene between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries, the presence and culture of the people of upper Mesopotamia endured. Adiabene itself included Mosul, Nineveh, Karkā d-Beth Slōkh (ancient Arraph ̆a and today’s Kirkuk), Beth Nuhadra (today’s Dohuk) and beyond, but as part of the central authority of the so-called Nestorian Church or Assyrian Church of the East.’ ⁷⁶ Predominantly Christian, they speak Assyrian, sometimes referred to as a modern form of Neo-Mesopotamian Aramaic (commonly referred to as Neo-Aramaic and Neo-Syriac in scholarly work) with a heavy Akkadian influence as well as using classical Syriac as an ecclesiastical tongue. ⁷⁷ Benjamen tells us the Akkadian and Sumerian influences in their language are indicative of their long presence in Mesopotamia or modern-day Iraq and neighbouring countries. ⁷⁸ Those Assyrians who speak a derivative of this language today self-identify as ‘Sūrōyō/Sūrāyā derived directly from the Neo-Assyrian word Assūrāyu.’ ⁷⁹ The English word Assyrian is used to refer to this community today in the English speaking world.

To reiterate, Critical Indigenous Studies largely focuses on the colonisation of the ‘New World’ such as North America, Latin America, New Zealand, and Australia by Western colonial powers. We want to remember here Patel’s ontological and methodological intervention of a commitment to ‘a relational understanding of the transnational workings of colonialisms across Asia, North and South America and Africa to hold onto the multiplicity of coloniality across these seemingly disparate and differently colonized spaces.’ ⁸⁰ We argue that by expanding the geographical boundaries of CIS to look at the processes through which Indigenous peoples in the global South have experienced different, yet entangled forms of colonialism, including dispossession, conquest, and the settlement of their land, we can further understand how colonial modernity has operated across the globe. This also means thinking about non-Western empires and conquerors; specifically, the various conquests of Mesopotamia, including Arab, Persian, Turko-Kurdish invasions and settlement of Assyrian territories. ⁸¹ These empires have admittedly not had the extensive global reach as Western powers and themselves have been conquered and been subject to Western colonialism and neo-colonial processes. We argue that it is important to complicate these conceptualisations of colonialism and Indigeneity because it renders visible the colonial experiences of Indigenous groups in the global South. It also shows the extent to which the colonial global order influenced and shaped the making and building of states in the global South, even if these states were made by Western as well as non-Western powers.

An Indigenous framework locates nation and state-building as an international manifestation of colonial modernity. That is, while it is western European powers that colonised the ‘New World’ and most Indigenous scholars from these places have theorised the concept of colonialism from this perspective, our research makes a critical intervention here. Specifically, in the process of colonising and settling these places, western Europeans legally, politically, and socially set up the international system in a fundamentally Eurocentric way underpinned by the logic of the Doctrine of Discovery and conquest. ⁸² This has not only occurred in the New World but the rules of this international game of making states has dictated the behaviour of both Western powers as well as states in the global South. Iraq is understood as a postcolonial state; most literature on Iraq tells us it was carved out of three Ottoman provinces by Western colonial powers, much like the rest of the region known today as the Middle East, through a series of agreements such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Treaty of Sevres, and the Treaty of Lausanne. ⁸³ This neatly told story makes a critical omission. Centring Indigeneity highlights the myriad levels of ongoing coloniality at play in the state of Iraq. Relatedly, the state of Iraq and prior to that, the Ottoman provinces, are taken-for-granted in the literature when they are configured on the Indigenous lands of Assyrians, who were later divided across the artificial state borders of modern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran during the making of the Middle East by Western colonial powers. ⁸⁴

The modern state of Iraq was ‘created’ at the end of the 1920s when colonial Britain ‘gave’ the land, which had already been inhabited continuously by Assyrians for thousands of years, to the Arabs who they viewed as best suited to serve their political and economic interests. In other words, the modern state of Iraq was created under the British Mandate to be an Arab state. A connection between postcolonial Iraq and postcolonial India can be made here to think about forms of colonialism, imperialism, and occupation by the postcolonial nation-state. Goldie Osuri importantly argues that the ‘theorization of the postcolonial nation-state as engaging in expansionary colonial projects’ remains unaccounted for in postcolonial studies that focus on a West/non-West divide. ⁸⁵ Specifically, she argues that Indian independence also meant the use of imperial and colonial techniques of power exercised by Indian nationalist sovereignty. ⁸⁶ The occupation of Kashmir is unseen in this story because a much easier discourse of Western colonialism and Indian anti-colonialism is deployed by both left progressive and right-wing fascist narratives. ⁸⁷ Osuri’s work makes visible the colonial strategies used in facilitating the Indian nation-state while occupying the territory of Kashmir.

Osuri’s insights from Kashmir are important here for our analysis of Iraq and the KRI. She tells us, ‘If we understand the moment of the emergence/independence of postcolonial nation-states as also the expansion of sovereignty over territories not properly ceded’ then we can begin to open up space for rethinking what we mean by colonialism and imperialism in the contemporary era. ⁸⁸ Further, we assert that this insight also opens space to think about the entangled forms of colonialism that have shaped and continue to shape the global world order. The post-Mandate or postcolonial Iraqi nation-state has been governed by Arabs, who in exercising Iraqi nationalist sovereignty, founded on an exclusive Arab nationalist model of nation-building, have used colonial techniques of power against both Kurdish and Assyrian sovereignty struggles. ⁸⁹ Consequently, since the inception of the Iraqi state, the Arab majority has had to contend with the next sizable majority within its artificially created borders, the Kurds, who have also understood that the way to govern their affairs in this international arrangement is through statehood. This has meant that both Arab and Kurdish sovereignty has materialised at the expense of Assyrian sovereignty on their traditional homeland. In other words, these rules of international state-building have also shaped ongoing patterns of dispossession, elimination, and assimilation of Indigenous inhabitants by other powers and/or groups.

Due to their transnational character, we narrow the focus to the Assyrians within the territorial borders of the Iraqi state. This work situates the Assyrians and their resistances against and rejections of Iraqi sovereignty and Kurdish bids to independence within the area solidified as a de facto, Kurdish quasi-state since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, ⁹⁰ as an IR problem. That is, rather than a matter of domestic contentious politics, we argue that the case of Assyrians, like Québec, is better understood as a problem of colonial modernity and international state-building. More than occupation is the drive for independence and secession on these lands by the Kurds in their struggle for national self-determination and what they see as encroachment of their national sovereignty by their Arab counterparts. In other words, Kurds also use Arab colonialism and Kurdish anticolonial discourse in their struggles for sovereignty in the KRI while politically wielding imperial and colonial techniques of power against Assyrian struggles for sovereignty. ⁹¹

Demographic statistics in Iraq and in the KRI are either unavailable or unreliable. ⁹² Among the available data, one recent demographic survey by the KRI uses figures from a survey by the Central Statistical Office and the Kurdistan Regional Statistics Office in 2014 and estimates the population of the KRI at approximately 5.122 million. ⁹³ However, this survey is problematic because first, this number is in dispute ⁹⁴ and second, there is no demographic data in this survey related to the ethnic make-up of the KRI. This is arguably a mechanism of the political erasure of Assyrians in this contested region due to the highly politicised nature of demographic data in post-2003 Iraq. Specifically, this is one mechanism by the KRI to disenfranchise and dispossess Assyrians to build a Kurdish KRI. For this reason, we rely on numbers estimated by the Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq, a grassroots non-profit humanitarian organisation registered with the United Nations. Across the KRI, as of 2019, the Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq estimates that Assyrians number approximately 150, 000. ⁹⁵ From a CIS perspective, the ability to identify and count themselves is an act of sovereignty by Indigenous peoples.

Iraq’s foundational mythologies of the entity of Iraq are based on the erasure of Assyrian Indigeneity and the formation of the state as an Arab state whose official language is Arabic, sometimes making linguistic concessions to sizable minorities such as the Kurds where they make up a majority. The ethnonational policies of the KRI are a result of a desire for national self-determination and sovereignty from Arab (Iraqi) rule. Kurdish foundational mythologies of Kurdistan are also premised on the necessary erasure and appropriation of Assyrian Indigeneity, even more so than their Arab counterparts, as the map of Kurdistan directly correlates to a map of Assyria. However, both Arab and Kurdish stories of Iraq and Kurdistan are problematic; Assyrians, even after the fall of their empire in the seventh century BC, continued to inhabit their traditional homeland as autonomous peoples albeit, under the rule of others. ⁹⁶ The story that Iraq is Arab or that the KRI is Kurdish because those nations comprise the majority today within these artificially created borders is problematic and distorted as it renders invisible the processes of genocide, dispossession, assimilation and appropriation by which Assyrians came to be minoritised in their own homeland. ⁹⁷ Focusing on the KRI, the latest manifestation of wilfully ignoring Assyrian Indigeneity is the referendum for independence in 2017.

In September of 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) held a referendum regarding independence from the state of Iraq. The narrative characterising the KRI and this referendum has predominantly coalesced around two related myths, highlighted here. The first is that this region demanding secession from Arab Iraq is Kurdish. An Indigenous lens politicises the renaming of spaces and the drawing of borders, which must be understood as a form of violence inflicted on those communities living in those spaces. Moreover, the drawing of borders, the history that shapes them, and the power relations embedded within this process are political. This happens for Assyrians within the context of a state twice: the birth of Iraq in the 1920s governed by Arab regimes and the post-1991 no-fly zone in the north, which was a precursor to the establishment of the KRI after 2003. Scholars of the region use the geographical categories to study these states and regions such as Iraq or Kurdistan without considering the colonial processes that constructed these categories. The naming of a space is subsequently related to nation-building and the creation of the nation and who belongs. For example, when a space is named Kurdistan, translated to ‘region of Kurds,’ the people bound within this territory must also be Kurdish. This is evident in policies that are often designed to ensure ‘Kurdification’ of the region by the KRG, the most profound of which is the labelling of Assyrians and other minorities as ‘Christian Kurds.’ ⁹⁸ Of note here are the parallels between Kurdification and Arabisation policies; labelling Assyrians ‘Christian Kurds’ is akin to Arab regimes labelling Assyrians as ‘Christian Arabs.’ ⁹⁹ These labels erase Assyrian Indigeneity and their ties to their historical homeland, relegating the entire nation to a religious minority. While the Kurdish government cites ‘equality’ as the impetus for this policy, equality in this context has meant assimilation in practice.

Secondly and relatedly, the KRG and this referendum are mainly viewed as being ‘in dispute’ with the state of Iraq or the Arab central government in Baghdad. This absence of Assyrians can be contextualised within the general political and social character of both Iraq and the KRI. Post-2003 Iraq’s federal system is based on a sectarian logic imposed by the neo-colonial Anglo-American invasion and occupation in 2003. Moreover, post-2003 Iraq and the KRI both constitutionally enshrine Assyrians as ‘minorities’ or ‘components’ ¹⁰⁰ as opposed to an Indigenous sovereign nation. This is political because labelling Assyrians as Indigenous would effectively unravel the state-building projects in both Iraq and in the KRI. While this is not unique to Iraq, the conceptual framework of Indigeneity calls into question the formation of states, sovereignty, and land. For example, this power sharing model not only ignores Indigeneity, but it uses a quota system in its attempt at inclusion of Iraq’s various ‘ethno-religious components.’ This quota system is problematic for a number of reasons but in relation to Assyrians, it does not contextualise their dwindling numbers in post-War Iraq or even prior as they have often fled Iraq in disproportionate numbers to the rest of the Iraqi population due to targeted persecution. ¹⁰¹ In other words, their status as a minority needs to be historically contextualised; genocides, ethnic cleansing campaigns, Arabisation policies, and now Kurdification policies, are undoubtedly a result of state and nation-building efforts by the Arabs and Kurds. But the building of these nations has deliberately resulted in the conquest, dispossession, and settlement of Assyrian ancestral homeland, as well as cultural denigration and erasure through assimilation policies and the appropriation of Assyrian history and heritage. ¹⁰²

Furthermore, what is constitutionally allotted to Assyrians is often meaningless in practice. For example, Article 35 of the working draft Constitution gives Assyrians the right to autonomy ‘wherever they are a majority of the population.’ ¹⁰³ But today, this designation is irrelevant because targeted persecution and ensuing demographic change have resulted in Assyrians no longer comprising a majority in any governorate. More importantly, for Assyrians, their numbers are irrelevant because their Indigeneity to this land supersedes any of these governing models. The label ‘controversial’ that is used when discussing this referendum refers to this dispute between the central government of Iraq in Baghdad and the KRI. It does not refer to the fact that the KRI is located on contested territory, a land that is historically claimed by Assyrians who are Indigenous to this territory. As an Indigenous group, Assyrian sovereignty and nationhood means they should have decision-making powers over their home territories, regardless of ‘numbers’ as the minority rights framework privileges.

The dispossession of Indigenous Assyrians from their ancestral lands has profoundly impacted their identity. It has also resulted in their social, political, and economic marginalisation. This is most evident through the struggle to control oil, Iraq’s most important resource for both Baghdad and the KRG. Access to territory and resources is also the underlying logic of the race to Arabise or Kurdify areas such as today’s oil-rich Kirkuk, which is historically Assyrian and historically known as Arapha. ¹⁰⁴ This is also one of the largest factors in the opposition to contending with Assyrians’ Indigeneity, which would mean returning resource-rich land. Land repatriation, an important aspect of decolonisation, does not mean expulsion of non-Indigenous populations entirely and removing access to resources. It means returning some land, sharing land and resources, and respecting Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood. It is important to recall that Indigenous conceptualisations of nationhood free the concept of nation from the state, opening up the space for configurations of multiple sovereignties in one place. This challenges the colonial state-centric understanding of sovereignty, which we argue, inevitably builds one nation at the expense of others.

Québec and Iraq: Challenging Global Colonial Modernity

Our calls for centring Indigeneity in IR challenge the logic and operations of colonial modernity on three grounds. First, it disrupts the process of myth-making involved in building a ‘nation.’ In Canada, the official story of the nation is rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery that posits European settlers, namely British and French, ‘discovered’ the Americas as a new and uncivilised land inhabited by wild and primitive tribes. ¹⁰⁵ This version of history provides the logic and justification for European settlers to conquer the lands and civilise Indigenous peoples. Centring Indigeneity dismantles this myth by focusing on Indigenous resistance to colonialism both historically and in contemporary times. Along with resistance, Indigeneity focuses on the resurgence of Indigenous identity, culture, and ways of being in the world by centring Indigenous futurity rather than the permanence of the settler-colonial state. Similarly, the division and reformulation of Assyrian land into four modern states by major European powers was a pivotal moment in the division of Assyrians across arbitrarily constructed borders that shape their identity as well as political, economic, and social positions in each newly founded state, including the KRI. Despite the conquest of their homeland by various empires and peoples, before the First World War, Assyrians lived as largely autonomous within more fluid rather than static and concrete borders of nation-states. Except for a few Assyrian voices, Arab or Kurdish politics and nationalism dominate the conventional narratives of Iraq and the KRI. In contrast, centring Assyrians means emphasising Assyrian identity as understood by Assyrians and focusing on Assyrian resistance and rejections of colonial powers and politics - both Western and non-Western. Rejection in this way, for example, can be seen as everyday resistance to labels of ‘Christian Arab’ or ‘Christian Kurd.’

Second, Indigeneity reveals the fundamental logic of nation and state-building as colonial because it requires the removal and assimilation of Indigenous peoples as a racialised, threatening other. In practice, this logic often reduces them to an ethnic or religious minority rather than sovereign nations on their own homelands. Drawing on Patel’s important intervention on the multiplicity of coloniality, we suggest that while this process has functioned differently in Québec and the KRI, a relational understanding of coloniality across the globe reveals the entangled processes of colonising Indigenous peoples. While in Québec, Indigeneity is not in question, their sovereignty and nationhood are often discounted. Both Arabs and Kurds oppose assertions of Assyrian Indigeneity because it requires contending with the issue of contested resource-rich land. Centring Indigeneity means FNMI and Assyrians decide their political futures, including how to govern their territories, and how resources are shared between sovereign nations.

Third, Indigeneity allows us to trace the constructive and deconstructive logic and workings of colonial modernity, revealing the ways in which nation-states have been constructed as natural, inevitable, and modern. Instead, our work sheds light on how the processes of international state and nation-building are deliberate and inherently violent. Predominantly, the French in Québec and the Kurds in the KRI are viewed as historically oppressed minorities whose right to self-determination drives their quests for statehood in the form of independence or self-government rights in Canada and Iraq, respectively. In both cases, albeit much more starkly in the KRI, this desire for independence is not surprising; it is the symptom of the inherent violence of nationalist state-building in Canada and Iraq. However, in both Québec and the KRI, their national state-building has manifested in very similar practices as their English and Arab counterparts. Here, we can begin to theorise the ways in which Québec and KRI expansions of sovereignty over unceded Indigenous land is a continuation of expansionary colonial projects.

Concluding Remarks

The main goal of this article was to respond to the call for an IR discipline that seriously engages Indigeneity. We argued that centring Indigeneity means an unravelling of the current configurations of IR and moving beyond adding Indigeneity as a category within neoliberal, colonial, Westernised frameworks. Moreover, we posited that Critical Indigenous Studies as a methodological approach offers a generative theoretical framework to re-examine international issues such as colonialism and sovereignty. To do this, we put two geographically, spatially, and temporally disparate sites of coloniality in conversation with each other to reveal the entangled ways in which colonialism has operated across global contexts. We use Patel’s call for a relational understanding of the transnational workings of colonialisms across continents to hold onto the multiplicities of coloniality across seemingly disparate and differently colonised spaces. We further argued that centring Indigeneity is crucial for revealing important insights that conventional and even critical theories like postcolonialism miss. To think through the multiplicities of coloniality, we focus on Canada and Iraq – Québec and the KRI in particular – to situate territorial disputes over Indigenous lands as an IR issue, rather than a matter of domestic politics. Our work reveals how contemporary state and nation-building is inextricably tied to colonial modernity. For this reason, we contend that rather than study the removal and assimilation of Indigenous inhabitants in Canada and Iraq as separate or unrelated events, there is much to learn by contextualising these processes within the intertwined operations of colonial modernity globally. This colonial modernity has inherently required the elimination and invisibility of Indigenous inhabitants in the making of modern nation-states, despite different trajectories.

Centring Indigeneity allows us to undo the separation between sovereignty and nationhood by conventional IR. Our intervention frees the concept of Indigeneity from the boundaries of white settler-colonialism within a small set of countries to think about Indigeneity globally. In this way, placing Canada and Iraq in conversation demonstrates how colonial empire has functioned across multiple frontiers. This is not to undermine the work of Indigenous scholars that write about settler-colonial contexts; rather, we call for opening up the space to think about the interrelated and entangled colonialisms across seemingly disparate geography, time, and space. In this way, we can begin the urgent task of Indigenising the discipline.