Abstract
In settler-colonial Canada, the state does not receive Indigenous testimony as credible evidence. While the state often accepts Indigenous testimony in formal hearings, the state fundamentally rejects Indigenous evidence as a description of the world as it is, as an onto-epistemology. In other words, the Indigenous worldview formation, while it functions as a knowledge system that knows and predicts life, is not admitted to regulatory discussions about effects of resource extraction projects on life. Particularly in such resource-extraction review hearings, partly for obvious reasons of ecological ethics, there is no space for Indigenous relational-ontology. I theorize that beyond racism, white supremacy, and greed, settler-colonial onto-epistemological structures are structured to systematically eliminate the potential for relational-ontologies. This exclusion is complementary to resource-extractivist and legal positivist procedures and is biased against Indigenous knowledge and knowledge-sharing procedures; it is a crisis of state integrity and is philosophically unsound. In my analysis of Canadian National Energy Board documents, I ferret out some of these structures that de facto discredit Indigenous onto-epistemologies; I propose this fundamental problem of the Canadian settler-colonial state must be recognized and changed if the calls of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission are to be met.
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Notes
British Columbia is the westernmost province of Canada.
In settler colonialism, settlers come to stay. Unlike outpost colonialism (India, for example), in settler colonialism even once connections to the metropole (England, France) have been severed, the settler society is meant to dominate indigenous culture and society. The ultimate goal is to replace indigenous culture and people entirely with the settler society.
“Indigenous People” refers to the diversity of Inuit, First Nations, and Métis peoples living in what is now Canada (Younging 2018). In this essay Indigenous Peoples is used when I critique Canadian settler-colonial operations. In specific examples of individuals and of nation to nation communications I refer to the particular First Nation, such as the Secwepemc or Tsilhqot’in Nations. The terms“native” and “Indian” while often used in discussions about the colonial United States of America, are not accurate terms for Inuit, First Nations and Métis people living in what is now Canada.
The doctrine Terra nullius (nobody’s land) allowed that any land unoccupied by Christians was unoccupied, could be colonized without legal repercussions, and the inhabitants therein considered non-human. This doctrine was first exercised in the Americas in 1492.
Currently, I am interviewing state, NGO and corporate decision makers, and BC provincial statutory decision makers about their onto-epistemologies. The questions include“How do you know something is true?;”“Do you believe a river can be a person?;” and “Do you think dreams contain knowledge?” Wendt suggests that people think and behave in manners that resemble quantum mechanics; I suggest that quantum thinking contradicts state mechanistic models, and thus allows for greater worldview enrichment and the possibility of decolonizing settler-colonial state onto-epistemologies.
Caddell Last, Ph.D. candidate at VUB, asked Wendt how his work was any different from post-structuralist theories that replace determinism with relativism. Wendt describes Heisenberg’s model as a kind of relativism as it avoids ontological interpretation of quantum effects. Quantum Mind theory, and Wendt’s application of QM theory that proposes no decoherence, that proposes wave/particle superposition all the way up and the way down, is radically ontological and anything but relativistic. The critique of post-structuralism as lacking ontological ground does not apply to Wendt’s theory, as Wendt allows for atomic structure, location, and time as quantum actants.
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Bowman, N. Here/There/Everywhere: Quantum Models for Decolonizing Canadian State Onto-Epistemology. Found Sci 26, 171–186 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09610-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09610-x