Geography and Indigeneity I: Indigeneity, coloniality and knowledge

Why talk of indigeneity rather than of Indigenous peoples? This report examines the critical purchase on questions of inequality, subjectivity and power offered by critical geographies of indigeneity. In comparison with accounts that treat indigeneity as relational with nature and the more-than-human, the report highlights literature that examines indigeneity as relational with deeply historical, institutionalised and power-inflected ontologies. To think about settler colonialism as an ongoing effect not a singular event recognizes how patterns of engagement with and oppression of indigeneity pervade the colonial present and its geographies beyond the specific locales associated with Indigenous peoples. Finally the report examines how indigeneity figures in the geography discipline’s knowledge production, and argues that worldly Indigenous ontologies are theorising the world precisely because they are forced to apprehend, appraise and then rethink ‘universals.’This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030913251561295