Decolonization by Extraction

Indigenous Knowledge, Non-Indigenous Authority, and the Academic “We”

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Academia has been learning the same lesson since the advent of modernity: the world is larger, more alive, and less containable than its prevailing methods allow.

Again and again, scholars announce that human beings are not sovereign subjects; that knowledge exceeds the human; that matter is lively; that animals, plants, land, ancestors, spirits, and other-than-human beings participate in worlds that cannot be captured in their entirety. Each intellectual generation discovers, with renewed astonishment, that its methods are limited. Each promises greater humility. Each declares its willingness to listen.

And then academia remains remarkably unchanged.

The problem is not that these realizations are false. It is that the living world is repeatedly encountered as something outside scholarship: an alterity “out there” that the scholar observes, cites, and approaches without allowing it to reorganize the conditions of scholarship itself.

Scholars describe these encounters as personally transformative. I do not necessarily doubt their sincerity. But what does transformation mean when the source of that transformation remains structurally outside? How transformative can a method be when scholarship continues to present itself as a humble gesture toward one small, secure discovery of an otherwise still-unknown world?

The scholar returns from an encounter with alterity changed, enlightened, and newly modest. The alterity remains where it was: outside, inexhaustible, and available for the next scholar’s revelation.

This repetition serves a disciplinary desire. Critical humanities want to imagine themselves moving toward a more ethical future: beyond the sovereign human, beyond mastery and extraction, toward relation, entanglement, humility, and more-than-human life. The larger world becomes the horizon against which academia narrates its own progress.

And so the protagonist remains the same.

The protagonist is the one who learned from a larger world.

The one who experienced the revelation.

The one who discovered human limitation.

The one whose methods became more humble.

The one subsequently circulated as standing at the progressive edge of the discipline.

Not the larger world itself. Not the scholars who have already been thinking, writing, teaching, and living within relations that the newly enlightened academic has only just encountered.

This structure should sound familiar.

I felt this frustration again during a recent plenary by a renowned and respected queer/decolonial scholar. The speaker clarified from the outset that the project was not an attempt to produce a sensorial, spiritual, or relational mode of scholarship, and I take that distinction seriously. My concern is not that an individual scholar failed to perform a different kind of work from the one they intended, nor is it a dismissal of the political and analytical value of that work.

The more pressing question concerns the disciplinary and institutional desire that gathers around such scholarship. What do queer theory, decolonial studies, critical race studies, and the broader academy seek to accomplish by circulating adjacent political analyses as evidence that scholarship has approached a living, entangled, more-than-human world? What image of its own ethical progress and intellectual futurity does academia produce by elevating such work as the progressive frontline of the field?

The problem lies not simply in what a plenary claims, but in the larger academic scene it is made to serve: an address invokes Indigenous thought as a source from which “we” must learn, yet Indigenous scholarship remains positioned as a voice arriving from elsewhere.

The plenary speaks to a “we.”

But who is this “we”?

In academic addresses about decolonization, the collective subject is often treated as self-evident. We must become more humble. We must listen to Indigenous voices. We must learn from Indigenous epistemologies. We must recognize the limits of Western thought.

These gestures come from scholars publicly recognized as queer, decolonial, critical, and politically progressive—scholars consequently presumed to care deeply about Indigenous stakes. Yet progressive identification does not resolve the grammatical problem. It can, in fact, make that problem more difficult to name, because the ethical standing of the speaker is treated as evidence that the structure of the address must already be just.

But the grammar reveals otherwise.

Indigenous scholars are not fully included within the collective subject being addressed. They appear as those from whom “we” should learn, not as constitutive participants in the “we” that defines the problem, establishes its terms, occupies the stage, and speaks in the name of the field.

It is especially striking because Indigenous studies does not exist somewhere outside academia waiting to be discovered. Indigenous studies already exists within academic institutions, and it exists with enormous intellectual, methodological, and political force. It has its own histories, debates, genealogies, modes of accountability, and institutional struggles.

Why, then, does the broader academy continue to address Indigenous thought as though it were an external ethical resource rather than a field already capable of speaking from and transforming the center?

Why is Indigenous studies treated as a specialized extension, a marginal supplement, or a localized branch of a supposedly broader critical conversation? Why does the academy repeatedly return to Indigenous scholarship for its most consequential insights while declining to let Indigenous studies define the intellectual “we”?

The paradox is that scholarship most deeply accountable to living relations is made to appear situated, culturally specific, specialized, or not yet sufficiently legible, while work that approaches adjacent questions through the most familiar and distanced disciplinary forms is permitted to travel as universal theory.

This is not simply citation without representation. It is a distribution of intellectual personhood.

One group is allowed to travel as theory: to address the field, reorganize disciplines, and speak in the universal or collective register. The other is repeatedly positioned as voice, testimony, tradition, location, or ethical interruption. Indigenous thinkers may be extensively cited and sincerely admired while still being denied full membership in the academic “we.”

Detachment Becomes Marvel

The same structure becomes especially disturbing in the recent academic fascination with animals, plants, fungi, matter, and other-than-human worlds. Critical race studies and decolonial critique have made it increasingly harder to treat human beings as safely available objects of detached observation. But the observational sovereignty itself did not necessarily disappear. It migrated.

Animals, fungi, plants, and other beings are now described as astonishing, ingenious, mysterious, radically interconnected, or capable of overturning everything previously assumed about individuality and intelligence. The scholar no longer appears to dominate the object but to admire it. This admiration is then offered as proof of respect: How could the relation be colonial when the scholar is so visibly awed?

But marvel still centers the one who marvels. The being becomes significant because it surprises the scholar, expands human thought, disrupts a familiar category, or provides the next theoretical revelation. Its value remains tied to what it can do for the observer’s imagination.

Respect, on the other hand, asks how a scholar must conduct themselves before a being whose existence does not depend on being extraordinary, useful, mysterious, theoretically disruptive, or even intelligible to humans. A fungus does not need to possess a network intelligence that amazes scholars in order to deserve regard. A frog does not need to reveal the limits of human categories in order to possess dignity.

The turn toward the more-than-human does not automatically constitute an ethical turn.

As human subjects became less safely available to the analytic gaze, animals, plants, fungi, and other beings became newly attractive sites of radical alterity. The being under discussion becomes the scene of the scholar’s revelation. Its life demonstrates the inadequacy of human categories. Its strangeness furnishes new concepts. Its silence permits the scholar to determine what the encounter means.

And because animals, plants, and fungi cannot readily appear at a conference, reject their representation, or demand institutional accountability, their presumed inability to answer can be mistaken for usability.

The being may be declared lively while remaining an object on a brightly lit analytic table.

The colonial scene survives with a more flattering vocabulary and a new cast.

It is comforting to imagine that the colonial transformation of racialized and cultural subjects into objects belonged to a more ignorant, brutal, or morally deficient past. But colonial knowledge was never produced only by exceptional villains. Its infrastructures were certainly built and protected by people who profited from domination; they were also normalized by far greater numbers of earnest participants who understood themselves as curious, humane, reformist, or even opposed to the worst excesses of empire.

Nor were their ethical commitments necessarily abstract. Then as now, many intellectual projects emerged from genuine encounters with suffering, estrangement, bodily vulnerability, political violence, or the failure of inherited categories to hold lived experience. The problem begins when these difficult, existentially grounded insights are subsumed into the dominant ethical language of their moment. What began as a demand upon the self and its relations becomes a recognizable moral position; what might have unsettled the structure becomes evidence that its participants are already enlightened.

The point is not to erase historical differences, but to refuse the consoling chronology in which violence steadily recedes as scholarly intentions improve. Colonial relations become ordinary precisely when well-intentioned people mistake the moral vocabulary of their moment for evidence that the underlying structure has changed.

What disturbed me during the plenary was therefore not primarily an argument that could be corrected through a better proposition. It was a comportment toward a living being. The being was invoked as evidence of contact with a larger world, while the manner of observation retained the distance, authority, and lack of reverence (with enough awe toward its structure) through which objects have long been made available to academic knowledge.

At this point, the rhetoric of ethical progress becomes nauseating. Academia appears to have learned that human beings should not be placed on the examination table, only to transfer the same scene of observation onto beings less situated to contest its authority—and then receives ethical credit for having turned toward the more-than-human.

Why Would Indigenous Scholars Participate?

This is especially paradoxical because the living, relational, more-than-human worlds toward which academia claims to be moving have already been explicated by Indigenous scholarship with more than sufficient intellectual, methodological, ethical, and political force. Indigenous scholars have written extensively about land, relation, sovereignty, nonhuman personhood, obligation, refusal, ancestry, and forms of life that do not begin from the isolated liberal subject. Their work is often cited abundantly in the very talks and publications that receive central academic recognition.

The broader academy therefore does not lack access to this knowledge. What it withholds is the authority of that knowledge to determine the form of the conversation, the conditions of listening, and the constitution of the academic stage itself.

Indigenous scholarship often sounds and looks different. Knowledge arriving from living, relational worlds should not be expected to become immediately intelligible within the languages that prevailing disciplines have already authorized as scholarship.

Within contemporary academic training that increasingly minimizes the labor of listening, knowledge that requires a listener to remain longer is consequently judged inaccessible, insufficiently theorized, or not yet ready for the stage. Another scholar is then authorized to make it legible: to detach an argument from the relations that sustain it, convert obligations into insights, and return living knowledge to the academy in an easier form.

But when listening becomes easy, it is necessary to ask what has already been removed. The ease with which academia claims to “hear” Indigenous knowledge may testify not to successful listening but to the prior excision of that knowledge’s transformative force. What travels most smoothly is often what no longer requires the listener to acquire a new capacity, enter a relation, accept an obligation, or become otherwise.

When academic institutions repeatedly delegate the labor of listening to translators, curators, and theorists who return unfamiliar worlds to familiar conceptual form, the academic capacity for listening atrophies. The academy imagines that it is waiting for the knowledge to become sufficiently rigorous, refined, and intelligible. In reality, the institution may be losing the very faculties required to encounter knowledge that has not already been reduced to its own terms. 

The absence of Indigenous scholars from decolonial initiatives is repeatedly interpreted as a problem of inclusion, perhaps because inclusion is the only solution the institution knows how to offer.

Why are Indigenous scholars not participating?

How might institutions better invite Indigenous voices?

What barriers prevent their presence?

But perhaps academia should ask a more difficult question.

• Why would Indigenous scholars wish to participate in a project whose structure has already assigned them the role of external moral resource?

• Why enter a space in which they are invited to provide the epistemological and ethical substance of decolonization while others retain the authority to curate, translate, synthesize, and publicly embody it?

• Why lend one’s presence to an initiative whose central “we” has been formed through one’s prior exclusion?

Academia frequently understands Indigenous nonparticipation as an unfortunate absence from an otherwise desirable conversation. It rarely considers that nonparticipation may be an assessment of the conversation itself.

To ask why Indigenous scholars are not present requires more than improving outreach. It requires examining the political grammar of invitation.

Who conceived the initiative? Who determined its questions? Who receives institutional visibility for articulating the need to listen? Who is compensated for translating Indigenous thought into a language recognizable to the academy? Who appears as the intellectually mobile theorist, and who remains fixed as the bearer of situated knowledge?

Under these conditions, the plenary risks becoming a peculiar ritual of moral alleviation: a largely non-Indigenous clique gathers to acknowledge the limits of its knowledge, invokes Indigenous voices that have been safely precluded from determining the event, and experiences its recognition of those limits as evidence of ethical progress—sometimes under an explicit branding of being “against extraction.”

The exclusion is converted into humility.

The distance between academia and Indigenous thought becomes the very material through which academia stages its desire to close that distance.

The recurring division is difficult to ignore.

From Within a Living World

This is not a conclusion I have reached from one plenary alone. I am deliberately not recounting the many occasions, institutions, classrooms, and individuals involved, because open accusations carry professional ramifications that are not distributed equally. But the pattern has repeated too consistently to dismiss.

Not a single graduate seminar I took on animism, transspecies relations, or other-than-human worlds moved decisively beyond the same refrain: there is a bigger world out there.

The phrase appeared to represent the highest and almost impossibly difficult level of learning toward which students should perpetually strive. Again and again, we were asked to discover that the world exceeded us. Again and again, this discovery was treated as sacred, difficult, and personally transformative.

At some point, I gently suggested that perhaps we might try, for once, to have a conversation from within that larger world. We had already announced its existence many times. Could we begin somewhere else? Could we ask what thinking, method, and responsibility might look like when living world was not positioned as the distant object of our humility?

The response was a collective disciplining. I was reminded to humble myself further. I had not yet learned sufficiently that I did not know. Others narrated their own moments of extraordinary revelation, moments whose sacredness seemed to depend upon the assumption that the realization must be equally difficult for everyone.

But it was not equally difficult for everyone.

I think from and live in a shamanic world. I did not arrive in those classrooms from the same epistemic location. The possibility that the world was alive, relational, agentive, and incompletely available to human comprehension was not the final lesson waiting at the end of an arduous intellectual journey. It was closer to a starting condition.

What those rooms enforced was a shared developmental narrative: every intellectual must begin from disenchantment, struggle toward the recognition of a living world, and understand that struggle as the proper basis of humility. Those who came from elsewhere were required to reenact the same discovery.

To speak as though one already inhabited a living world was interpreted not as a different epistemic location but as insufficient humility. The academy’s inability to recognize that difference was then returned to the differently situated person as a personal failure to learn.

This helps explain why the same revelations must be announced repeatedly.

If Indigenous scholarship were allowed to alter the institutional and methodological center, the lesson would not need to return eternally as discovery. It would become structure. It would change who convenes the conversation, what questions are worth asking, how knowledge is produced, what forms of relation create obligations, and when refusal or nonparticipation constitutes an intellectual act.

Instead, academia repeatedly encounters animacy as news.

It learns that matter lives. It learns that land is not property. It learns that knowledge is relational. It learns that the human is not the only agent. It learns that not everything should be made transparent. It learns that its categories cannot hold the world.

Then it publishes the realization, rewards the individual who has articulated it, positions that individual at the progressive frontline of the field, and waits to learn it again.

Perhaps I should stop here and note: I am not North American Indigenous, and therefore I have repeatedly been told, in effect, to stop speaking—or asked whether Indigenous scholars have authorized me to say any of this. So let me answer openly: no, I have not received such authorization, and I neither claim nor wish to speak as Indigenous. Resonance is not equivalence, and it does not confer authority. But I do know, from within a shamanic world repeatedly rendered unintelligible by the same academy, the exhaustion of being treated as an epistemic source, an object of fascination, or an ethical outside while others retain the authority to theorize. I cannot claim an Indigenous position. I can, however, feel with painful clarity why Indigenous scholars might find these invitations intolerable, why they might refuse to participate, and why their absence may constitute not a failure of outreach but an act of discernment.

What would it mean to stop treating the living world as academia’s external lesson?

First and foremost, it would mean ceasing to use recognition of the animate world as evidence of academia's own progress.

It would require allowing relations with living beings to make demands upon method. A life cannot merely become evidence for an argument about life. A relation cannot be cited without incurring obligations. Knowledge cannot be separated indefinitely from the conditions under which it was entrusted, practiced, or refused.

It would also require abandoning the assumption that every intellectual must travel the same road from disenchantment to humility. There are scholars for whom the life of the world is not an astonishing theoretical discovery. There are scholars whose work begins from relations that dominant academic methods are still congratulating themselves for noticing.

Such scholars do not exist to guide the academy through its recurring revelation.

Indigenous scholarship does not exist to furnish non-Indigenous academics with a more ethical intellectual self-image.

Nor do animals, plants, fungi, and other beings exist to provide scholars with a morally safer theater of discovery. Marvel does not absolve observation of its violence. A more-than-human object does not, by itself, make a method less colonial.

Most of all, academia would have to relinquish the fantasy that acknowledging its limits is equivalent to surrendering its authority.

The question is whether academia is willing to become answerable to worlds it does not own—and to scholars whose work does not exist to redeem academic decolonization.

Until then, the repeated call to listen will remain strangely self-enclosed: an institution speaking to itself about the voices it has placed outside, congratulating itself for hearing their echo.