Expressive Insurgency: Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols

On the front cover of Theft is Property! is a remarkable work of ledger art created by Oglala Lakota artist Donald Montileaux (Yellowbird). Six Lakota warriors on horseback can be seen riding towards each other in vivid reds, yellows, blues and black, over a landscape that has been imprinted with the accounting of a colonial debt collector. To be clear, in this tradition of ledger art the sheets of paper that constitute the "landscape," or background context of the picture, are not merely representational. These sheets were integral to the colonial apparatus that took the land from beneath the feet of Indigenous peoples, and sought to reconstitute them as subjects of the colonial order, having once been stapled into the account books that balanced the colonial sales of land and the law books that authorized the transactions. In large part this is what is so powerful about this form of artwork: the way it takes the very thing that has been used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of land and personhood, and reworks it into a landscape for the self-expression of Indigenous subjectivity. The result is, as Robert Nichols writes, an act of "expressive insurgency" that both represents (as an artistic image) and instantiates (as an artistic practice) how the dynamic structures of colonization can be resisted and reworked (160).

This is also Nichols' major achievement. In its own way, Theft is Property! is an act of expressive insurgency, directed at a broad European tradition of critical theory that works to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their experiences and understandings of capitalism, along with their modes of resistance to it. If, as Nichols argues, capitalism was never simply extended to North America or the Pacific with European colonization, and has been generated in important ways in these contexts through the dispossessive processes of settler colonialism, then the conceptual tools used for analyzing capitalism in Europe are, at best, ineffectual in these colonial capitalist contexts. At worst, framing the struggle against capitalism in these contexts using a European experience of it (as a proletarian, class-based one, with exploitation as the driving force) reconstitutes the Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism in a way that denies their particular relation to it (as a racialized struggle against dispossession, above all). What is at stake here is more than just theoretical blindness, or even epistemic violence, however. At its boldest, the suggestion is that it is the Indigenous struggles against dispossession, rather than a class-based struggle against exploitation, that might—in Frantz Fanon's words—"facilitate the more general emancipation of humanity from the alienating conditions of white supremacist, imperial capitalism" (99). In this, Theft is Property! is nothing short of an attempt to knock the Hegelian-Marxist tradition off its European axis, to reorient its critique of capitalism to settler-colonial contexts, on the understanding that these Indigenous struggles are of concern not only to the dispossessed, or colonized, but to the world "in general" (99). This is what makes the book an act of "insurgency": its effort to reconstruct a concept of dispossession from within European critical theory, in a way that foregrounds Indigenous peoples' experiences, thoughts and practices. What makes it "expressive" is that the book not only presents an argument for this reworking, but actually demonstrates what such a critical theory can look like (for Nichols, "political action is expressive if the mode of articulation already models the substantive content of its claims and ends" (147)). Theft is Property! does this by listening to and learning from two centuries of Indigenous as well as Black scholarship and praxis, and making these voices the contemporary standpoint for the reworked critical theory.

But then, why is European critical theory a part of this picture at all? Given that, as Nichols emphasizes, Indigenous thinkers have "over the centuries" theorized dispossession in a way that is "superior" to accounts offered by the likes of Rousseau, Paine, Proudhon, Kropotkin, or indeed Marx (77), why hold onto...