The following quotes are taken from:
Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press 2014. Pp. 51-78.
“In drawing our attention to the distinction between Indigenous place-based and Western time-oriented understandings of the world, Deloria does not simply intend to reiterate the rather obvious observation that most Indigenous societies hold a strong attachment to their homelands, but is instead attempting to explicate the position that land occupies as an ontological framework for understanding relationships. Seen in this light, it is a profound misunderstanding to think of land or place as simply some material object of profound importance to Indigenous cultures (although it is this too); instead, it ought to be understood as a field of ‘relationships of things to each other.’ Place is a way of knowing, of experiencing and relating to the world and others; and sometimes these relational practices and forms of knowledge guide forms of resistance against other rationalizations if the world that threaten to erase our senses of place. This, I argue, is precisely the understanding of land that grounded our critique of colonialism and capitalism in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib (which is my community’s language), for example, ‘land’ (or dé) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time.” 60-6
“In the decades leading up to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, it became apparent to many people within our communities that the organizational imperatives of capital accumulation signified an affront to our normative understanding of what constituted proper relationships—relationships between people, relationships between humans and their environment, and relationships between individuals and institutions of authority (whether economic or political). Even though by the mid-1970s this grounded normative framework had been worn by decades of colonial displacement, it was still functioning enough to frame both our critique of capitalist development and our ways of thinking about how we might establish political and economic relations both within our own communities and with Canada based on principles of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Not coincidentally, Peter Kulchyski highlights this spatial feature of Indigenous struggle well in his excellent book, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nuavut, when he writes: ‘It is possible to argue that precisely what distinguishes anticolonial struggles from the classic Marxist accounts of the working class is that oppression for the colonized is registered in the spatial dimension—as dispossession—whereas for workers, oppression is measured as exploitation, as the theft of time.’ I would simply add here that Indigenous ways of thinking about nonoppressive relations are often expressed with this spatial referent in mind as well.” 62