Decolonizing Freedom

Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, the freedom of some has typically been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of others. These exclusions are not secondary to a prior concept of freedom but are constitutive exclusions that have shaped the ways in which western theorists define what freedom is. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political philosophies and practices of decolonization grounded in conceptions of relationality and resurgence, in dialogue with western philosophies, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world. Through the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, John Borrows, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Rauna Kuokkanen, Joan