In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of World War II for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity – on victimhood as identity – since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility – one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

Indigenous resurgence scholars have theorized the concept of grounded normativity as a relational, place-based, and nation-specific framework from which to pursue Indigenous freedom. Though primarily a turn away from settler colonial relations and towards Indigenous forms of subjecthood and agency, grounded normativity can also serve as a turn outward and a basis for diplomacy. This occurs, for example, when Indigenous resurgence movements invite others to stand with and act alongside them. This chapter reflects upon three such engagements with Indigenous resurgence movements, which refuse the sense of permanence and limited political possibilities that settler colonialism produces. This chapter argues that these engagements constitute a politics from below that complements grounded normativity, which generates relational and place-based collectivities that are informed by ethics of responsibility and reciprocity expressed within Indigenous legal orders. These collectivities form networks of democratic movements that, in recognizing Indigenous political authority, offer alternative forms of subjecthood and agency that disrupt the concretization of settler colonial relations.