Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition is both a theoretical and practical investigation into how the recognition by settler states of indigenous populations as cultural bodies, often granted through land rights, has actually served to undermine their political identities and capabilities. Using his own people based in the Northern territories of Canada as an example, Dene-Canadian scholar Glen Sean Coulthard argues that the provision of land rights has come with such stringent conditions to deliberately neuter the possibility of a different political practice on that land, and thus that "recognition" as a goal has actually resulted in indigenous groups becoming identified by and with the settler state—the very thing which is the original source of their dispossession. He calls instead, like Fanon, for a turning away, and warns against recognition as a salve for wounds that can only be healed through self determination and autonomy, both of which are precluded by the deals the Canadian government made.

It's a fascinating read, particularly when he gives the history of how Canada dismantled the possibility of any anti-capitalist economies or self-determining political bodies in exchange for the land his people sought. The very story of the Dene, and Canada's indigenous groups more broadly, warns that "the land" is not some magical portal through which we can step through by some great return into other worlds. The land is identified very clearly by the Dene as a kind of teacher, as a relational practice which informs human political projects, but which must be practiced. My reading of this in Coulthard's text is that the land is as much form as it is place, and that form can lose its shape even if the geographical contours hold. The land cannot save us unless it is permitted to shape us:

"Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of land—struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated form of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way."

This made me think of my interview with regenerative farmer Kara Huntermoon when she dismissed the romanticism of urbanised populations spilling out into the country to recover the land. Kara rightly highlighted that this would likely be disastrous and harmful to the land, for our populations would be completely ignorant as to how to care for the it, let alone produce food from it. At the time I thought about this in a practical sense, about our collective lack of skills and practical knowledge with regards to how the land functions. But reading Coulthard, I began to understand it as an ontological problem, and imagine that great return as a mismatched transplant, like two bodies with incompatible blood groups fused together. All creatures come to learn how to live in the environment they find themselves, and human beings are no different. The knowledge we have lost, along with the skills, has created a global culture which is wildly inappropriate for a land-based society. That culture is also globally applicable, whereas land-based societies are culturally localised, informed, as Coulthard says, by where they are. Modern humans have been dislocated from that sense of place, not only through our disconnection from the land but also the fact that the technologies upon which we depend can be transplanted with us. I have lived in six different countries because I do not depend on the land to live, because my culture is not informed by where it is, but rather informs what it lands upon.

This creates a culture which is unreal, or dissociated, something akin to an extended PTSD attack. I thought about this very phenomenon recently reading CNN's explosive investigation into online "rape academies"—channels in which thousands of men educate one another on how to drug and rape their wives. Many of these men film themselves raping their wives, and sell these videos to other users, or upload them to internet sites willing to host such content. One such site received 62 million visits in the month of February alone. The story has inflamed the internet, as it should, with outpourings of rage, despair and confusion: How could someone do this? When I think about my culture — imperialism, extractivism, capitalism — informing whatever land it lands on, rather than being informed by it, I readily think about how that extends to our own bodies. Particularly women's bodies. This is part of the thesis of my upcoming book. When we abuse the body of the Earth, we create the conditions for the abuse of women. Women become reduced to their female form, a body understood as a vehicle for the fulfilment of desire. In a culture of mass objectification, the deliberate dislocation of body and person—of land and culture—makes every body a slate upon which desire can be projected—even the body of the woman you have vowed to love and cherish. We cannot expect extractivism to only inform how we perceive the body of the Earth. It inflects our relationships with one another, and informs how we behave when we cross the threshold into our homes, the small piece of land that we each rule, as kings.

We know what happens to a people when they are removed from their land. But what happens to their culture? It cannot be maintained without practice, without relationship. It cannot exist separate to those who materialise it, without the soil and the flesh and the imaginations. In the Kimberley, the Aboriginal people we spent time with spoke of how the spirits out on country were dying, now that the people had been moved off. They were not simply dormant myths that could be reawakened if and when the time comes, but beings which need, as much as the next creature, to live with in order to live. Their spirits to them are as real as their elders, as their children. I believe them, for our cultures are as real to us as our own flesh. Their culture, what they call law, is dying without them. The land is weakening without them. They are weakening without both country and law. The three cannot be disentangled, cannot be disassociated, not unless one submits to existing in a fugue state.

This is how I would describe many of the Aboriginal settlements in the Kimberley: off country, law begins to break down, to disintegrate, to become formless under the pressure of that other culture—my culture—which makes no distinction as to where it is. Similar tragedies scar the reservations in the United States and Canada. Land rights have not returned the law, and the elders we spoke with were very firm that this alone cannot heal their communities. They said that their people cannot simply go back to how things were, but neither can they move forward with the current state of Aboriginal-Australian relations. The only way they envisioned moving forward was the combination of spending time on country and keeping law alive off country, a task they were finding incredibly difficult because of the influence of the settler-state. I remember being surprised, when speaking to them, that they did not envision a future in which their people would live on country full-time again. Their wisdom outshone my comprehension at the time. Their law had developed over 50,000 years of being on country. It did not sprout from the land fully formed and, as such, the land cannot guarantee them a cultural renaissance. Their world cannot share a border fence with the settler state. Land, too, is changed by loss.

I wonder what this means for Palestine, for Iran, for the people of Sudan, and West Papua. When fresh borders cut into open wounds, what hope is there of peace? What has to be lost for a people to be let be? Which parts of themselves must they amputate in order to be allowed to live? And how can any negotiation ever be understood as "recognition" or "rights" or "peace talks"? The settler-state is as much cultural as it is material, and it lives in each of us, imprinting upon its environment without a care for the coordinates, for the particularities, for the roots. It refuses to be informed by where it is, and by who lives there. And so, it cannot change, it cannot grow, it cannot become anything other than what it is: a plague, a scourge, a spectre, a missile. This is not a thing with which one can share a border. The world is made of oil and vinegar. It cannot hold its shape if it cannot shape us, too.