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Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term "recognition" shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment

In the following article Glen Coulthard responds to four critical engagements with his bookRed Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). The article responds to critiques by George Ciccariello-Maher, Peter Kulchyski, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Geoff Mann.

"Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term 'recognition' shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics--one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a 'place-based' modification of Karl Marx's theory of 'primitive accumulation' throws light on Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization"--Publisher's description

This Special Issue of Global Environmental Politics, on water governance, focuses on the disruptive and transformative potential of Indigenous politics for revealing the multiplicity of political economies and enhancing the theory and practice of global environmental politics. In this issue, we unsettle the assumptions of dominant colonial systems of production and exchange (often the starting point for global environmental politics scholars), using water to bring to light the conflicting approaches of settler colonial and Indigenous political economies. With a focus on the settler colonial states of the Global North—specifically, Canada and the United States—the contributing authors interrogate the ways in which different forms of water relations are positioned at the center of conflicting understandings of land, law, and development trajectories. Through analyses of varying forms of water infrastructure, water law, and waterways, and with careful attention to spatial and temporal distances in production and trade systems, the articles curated here examine conflicting legal forms and traditions, upstream and downstream relations, and opportunities for and limits to resistance by affected communities. In a dominant global political economy with increasing distance between sites of extraction, production, consumption, and discard—and even further removed from the financing that underpins these commodity chains—our Special Issue suggests that the acknowledgment and visibility of multiple forms of water relations contribute to reshaping both economies and environmental outcomes.

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: Recognition and Self-Determination -- 1 Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the History of Mexican Indigenous Politics -- 2 Recognition and Self-Determination -- 3 Two Faces of State Power -- Part 2: The Practice of Recognition and Misrecognition, Self-Determination, and Imposition -- 4 A Farewell to Rhetorical Arms? -- 5 The Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition and the Case of Muslim Canadians -- 6 Place against Empire -- 7 The Rights of Indigenous Peoples to Self-Determination and the Struggle against Cultural Appropriation -- 8 Inter-Indigenous Recognition and the Cultural Production of Indigeneity in the Western Settler States -- Part 3: Possible Ways of Reframing the Issues -- 9 Recognition, Politics of Difference, and the Institutional Identity of Peoples -- 10 Custom and Indigenous Self-Determination -- 11 The Generosity of Toleration -- 12 Self-Determination versus Recognition -- Contributors -- Index.