Glen Coulthard

Glen Sean Coulthard is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, a political theorist, and Associate Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. His work develops a sustained critique of the politics of recognition as a settler-colonial governance technology, drawing on Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, and the Indigenous resurgence tradition to articulate a constructive alternative grounded in land-based practice.

¶Core ideas

• Critique of the politics of recognition. Liberal-multicultural recognition operates as a technology of settler-colonial governance. By offering recognition on the settler-state’s terms, it requires the colonized subject to internalize the categories of the colonizer to be intelligible — reproducing the colonial relation in the very form of acknowledgment that purports to redress it.
• Grounded normativity. Indigenous ethical-political life rooted in land-based practices — the obligations and orientations that arise from relations to specific territories and the nonhuman beings who inhabit them. Distinguished from abstract normativity that floats free of place.
• Indigenous resurgence over recognition. The constructive alternative to recognition-based politics: turn away from the settler state’s recognition apparatus and toward the practices, languages, and land-based relations that constitute Indigenous political life on its own terms. Refusal as productive, not merely negative.
• Settler colonialism as a structure of accumulation. Following Patrick Wolfe and developing the analysis: settler colonialism is not just a historical event of land theft but an ongoing structure of accumulation that requires continuous dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land, language, and political form.

¶Key works

• Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014)
• Articles in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society and American Quarterly
• Co-edited with Audra Simpson and others: continuing work on Indigenous resurgence, settler-colonial studies, and decolonial politics

¶Where his work figures in this library

Coulthard is foundational for settlerism, temporal-middle, and the settlerism-and-the-cybernetic-subject text in cybernetic postliberalism. His work is upstream of the school’s reading of the settler-colonial register the contemporary apparatus runs on.