Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today. In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada’s sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call “counter-memory,” a collective effort to recognise “relationships that have always been”—between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land—in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres—essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry—to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country’s vision of Canadian literature.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize 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.

Evolution of the Property Relation defines an approach to economics which is centered around the concept of property and explores the historical evolution of the relationship of the individual, private property, and the state, and the distinctive changes wrought by the emergence of the market.

In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that shaped the American West. This book is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples.

This work builds on indigenous theory as evident in the writing of Willie Ermine, Gregory Cajete, Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, Laurie Anne Whitt, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Voila Cordova, Dennis McPherson, and others. It works towards a criticism that, in accordance with the precepts of such theory, is community-oriented. It argues for a examination of literature in terms of its function for (or against) the community, in the expansive sense of the term.