Unsettling Movements: Decolonizing Non-Indigenous Radical Struggles in Settler Colonial States

Recent decades have seen a rise in Indigenous resistance to dispossession by the settler colonial state and resurgence in culture, traditions, languages and forms of governance. These processes have had a profound effect on the politics and principles of a growing current of non-Indigenous and settler activists in Canada and the United States. Coming out of Black and women of colour anti-racist feminism, migrant justice, anti-capitalist, queer/trans*, anarchist, abolitionist and other anti-authoritarian political movements, this emerging decolonial politics has had a profound impact on the strategies, tactics, and goals of social movements. Based on fifty-one in-depth interviews with organizers in nine cities within the Canadian and U.S. settler states as well as ethnographic and historical research, this dissertation grapples with the fluid and transformative principles of decolonization that are re-structuring social movement politics and practice. It also explores the historical trajectories that help align anti-authoritarian movements towards a politics of decolonization. Decolonization, I argue must be foundational to liberation in settler states, although ones positionality shifts or changes ones responsibilities to this process. This is particularly important considering how nationalism, sovereignty, and indigeneity are understood within a settler politics of decolonial solidarity. Finally, I challenge the settler colonial logics that underlie the desire to reclaim the commons in hopes of putting forward new pre-figurative possibilities that might help us in achieving decolonial futures