From rights to relations with the rural: Lessons from Indigenous studies

Abstract

This commentary responds to Van Sant and Fairbairn's invitation to consider the meanings, potentials, and pitfalls of land access struggles in settler colonial contexts. Drawing on teachings from the field of critical Indigenous studies, I suggest that the developing idea of a right to the rural may be incommensurable with movements for Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization. I chart three sources of potential incommensurability between these projects: the colonial blind spots of Lefebvre's rights to the city, which risk being imported into a right to the rural; the limits of rights for Indigenous peoples living under settler colonialism; and the coloniality of urban and rural scalar divisions. I propose we move away from a nascent right to the rural in favor of an Indigenous-led commitment to nurturing and sustaining relations with the rural. A focus on relations, rather than rights alone, has potential to build more meaningful solidarities between settler movements for rural social justice and Indigenous nations and to heal relations between people, more-than-humans, and the Land.