Indigenous Perspectives on Dismantling the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Rural Sociology

Rural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler-colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more-than-human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human-environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways.