SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter argues for a consideration of global environmental harm from the position of the world's internal frontiers in both settler colonial and former franchise colonial countries. Indigenous survivors of colonial genocide have endured and resisted in large part because of the preservation of their knowledge systems that have been grounded to land in ways that are ontologically distinct from the Western tradition. Western understandings of land, whether liberal or socialist, maintain an ontological starting point in which land and humanity are separate, and that land must be worked upon in order to extract value from it. The chapter demonstrates protective ontologies in action through examples of Indigenous resurgence, from the settler colonial context of Turtle Island, to the franchise colonial context of Nusantara. Law, diplomacy, and international relations have a much deeper history on Turtle Island than in Europe.