An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn ontology – just another word for colonialism

When the European academy adopts “ontology” as a trendy lens while ignoring the living Indigenous people whose thought it echoes, it repeats colonialism rather than escaping it.

The essay turns on watching Latour lecture in Edinburgh in 2013 on climate cosmology without once crediting Indigenous thinkers who’d said it for millennia. Her core complaint is citational: posthumanism and the ontological turn “discover” non-human agency and relational worlds that Indigenous scholars articulated long before, yet Europeans cite each other.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed, she treats who you cite as a political act. The deeper point: Indigenous ontologies aren’t a well of ideas but legal orders tied to sovereignty and land, so abstracting them from that struggle is epistemic violence and complicity in ongoing colonialism. Her remedy is reciprocity and a concrete reading list of Indigenous thinkers to cite instead. (AI summary)