Migrants and indigenous nationalism

Over the last decade, at least two discourses concerning the relationship between people variously constituted as either “migrants” or as “indigenous” have intensified (and in some places emerged anew). One presents this relationship as one of potential and fruitful solidarity. Not only have many of those constituted as either “indigenous” or as “migrants” experienced both the linked processes of expropriation and exploitation under processes of colonial (and postcolonial) rule, hostility towards “migrants” and the “indigenous” are understood to be interlocking sets of ideological practices for the maintenance of contemporary injustices. In this vein, solidarity between these two groupings is not only desirable, it is necessary to end practices of domination. The other increasingly dominant discourse sees the relationship between “migrants” and the

“indigenous” as one of colonialism. That is, “migrants” and their movements into places identified as “indigenous” are seen as a part of the process of colonialism. In this discourse migrants are colonizers. From this perspective, decolonization becomes the assertion of “indigenous” sovereignty over place. These amount to be quite different understandings of colonialism and present starkly different

strategies for achieving decolonization. The belief that “migrants” and the “indigenous” share experiences of colonialism is one that situates migration as one of the outcomes of people’s experience of colonization. Such a view also sees processes of colonialism as not fully contained within any particular place but as traversing and effecting a broad and deep network of connected sites. Colonialism is recognized as a process occurring across space and as drawing people into a shared field of power. The anti-colonial project, from this perspective, is a global one, one that focuses on ending the practices that led to people dispossession, displacement, and subsequent exploitation. Seeing migration as an act of colonialism, on the other hand, relies on the assumption of a

strong, essential relationship between particular groups of people and particular lands. This is what I call a territorialized understanding of colonization and imperialism. Land, a key means of production and bases of life, becomes territorialized when ideas of membership or “belonging” are understood as inherently limited to a select group of people, usually based on ideas of “blood” and “soil.” Land often also becomes racialized or ethnicized through such ideas. Such a

perspective understands colonialism to be ultimately about the expropriation of specific territories and the dispossession of people constituted as “indigenous” to it. The anti-colonial project, in this case, comes to be about reclaiming particular lands for particular groups. Colonialism is understood to be a set of isolated and unrelated events. This is the nationalist anti-colonial project. It sees decolonization as bringing about the rule of the “natives.” Evaluating both of these sets of arguments should clarify our understanding of processes of

colonialism as well as the politics of decolonization. By bringing the experiences of “migrants” and the “indigenous” together into one analytic field, we can better see that the problem of colonialism is not fundamentally the problem of the imposition of “foreign” rule over “natives.” Instead, if we understand colonialism not inherently as a process of “foreign” control but, rather, as a process of expropriation and exploitation full stop, our temporal as well as spatial understanding of colonialism changes-as do our strategies for decolonization. This change, I believe, strengthens movements working to end people’s oppression and exploitation. Such a change requires an ontological shift regarding who we think we are and how we imagine our connections to one another. The theories developed under the rubric of postcolonialism, especially those incorporating

the insights of the scholarship on transnationalism, are useful in this regard, for they allow us to see the historical as well as contemporary connectivity people have with each other. These connections have been forged across the places claimed by colonial empires and within any given colonial administrative space. In making these connections, other crossings have had to be made: people have had to connect across and against different spatial imaginaries of “race” or “nation”. These connections have and continue to exist at economic, political, and social levels as well as affective ones. Postcolonial theories are further useful in revealing the development of territorialized notions of space and place that both “migrants” and “indigenous” people encounter, indeed, in the very constitution of people into these supposedly separate, distinct, and, for some, antagonistic, groups. I begin this chapter with a discussion of the arguments made by those advancing an auto-

chthonous discourse in which all places are presented as being “native” to certain identifiable people and where the “indigenous” are said to have inherent rights of sovereignty over and against those imagined as “non-native.” It is within such autochthonous discourses that the argument that all “migrants” are colonizers is asserted. I maintain that these arguments can best be understood as part of the development and expansion of neo-racist praxis and, indeed, that neo-racist ideologies rationalize the absolute conflation between migration and colonialism. I conclude by offering an alternative to autochthonous discourses, one rooted in a deep

opposition to nationalisms. Instead of having a territorialized understanding of colonialism-and decolonization-I argue for viewing the commons as the object of colonial possession and the commoners as the subjects of colonial rule and as the agents of decolonization. In this, the political and intellectual project for decolonization is the gaining of our commons and our effective assertion of common rights. A focus on the commons and commoners allows us to more fully address the contemporary relationships of capitalism as well as offering us a route away from the quagmire of territorial and imaginative colonial states shaped through ideologies of nationalism and the (neo)racist turn.