Settler Ecologies and Their Decolonization

This chapter urges scholars who work at the intersection of environmental, multispecies, and racial justice to reflect more closely on the entanglements of human and other-than-human lives and the legal regimes that shape those entanglements in various settler colonial contexts. The chapter draws on and further develops the term “settler ecologies,” defining it as the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized populations. Contemplating the intersection of nature and settler colonialism and the manifestation of their coproductions in myriad sites, this chapter inquires how various settler ecologies correspond with one another, illuminate each other, and are similar to or diverge from each other as well as how they relate to the accelerated impacts of climate change. While it exposes the continued legacies and violence of settler colonialism, this chapter, at the same time, considers how we can bring about decolonial futures. It offers three vignettes, each documenting Indigenous ruination through nature conservation schemes while also moving beyond critical documentation to envision ways of decolonizing conservation. It refers to such offerings as “en-visions.”