Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols (review)

What needs to be said is that removals and relocations as federal policies in both countries allow whites to steal aboriginal land and push native people about the countryside. Although it is accurate, I have to concede that if theft is legally sanctioned it is no longer theft, so I should apologize for using the verb "to steal."

(THOMAS KING, AN INCONVENIENT INDIAN, 2012, 97)

thomas king addresses the absurdity of naming one of the most important features of colonialism (land theft) not because of linguistic ambiguity but because of a legal and legalistic paradox that self-justifies: if there is no theft, then it follows that there is neither an illegal act, nor a wronged party, nor a wrong-doer. Robert Nichols's Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory precisely addresses this contradiction. I should note that I review this contribution through a lens of contemporary Maya literary and cultural studies and, more broadly, Indigenous cultural studies.

In Theft Is Property! Nichols looks at the dispossession of land as a zero-sum game for Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island. Specifically, the foundation of the Anglo-settler world was based on a "market in land" that required the denial of Indigenous ways of relating to the land (35). Thus, much of the process of dispossession left Indigenous people without recourse by design, because to claim dispossession meant presupposing possession, and this was countered with the understanding that Indigenous peoples did not "own" the land in the first place.

At the core of the book is the idea of "recursive dispossession," a notion that is successful in changing the terms of analysis and introducing a new paradigm. Here, possession does not presuppose theft, but theft gives rise to the possession. In chapter 1, Nichols traces the use of the concept of dispossession, first in analyzing Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism and then in colonialist expansion. He discusses the legal arguments employed to talk about land and property and to dispossess Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and Aotearoa, respectively, which is key to understanding the reach of system tied to a "market of land." In chapter 2, the author notes an important distinction: the systems that were implemented to control land (and its inhabitants) emerge from different conditions. In other words, the colonial world is not an example of a European model of territorial organization; rather, it developed according to its specific context and conditions (i.e., Indigenous peoples with markedly different relationships to and practices around land). Here, Nichols looks closely at Marx and Marxism, particularly the notion of primitive accumulation, which he puts into dialogue with the work of contemporary conceptual theorists in critical race theory and feminism to highlight the importance of thinking through historical processes.

Chapter 3 turns to the work of Indigenous thinkers and their structural critiques of dispossession. One of the salient ideas is the construction of the category "Indigenous" in order to dispossess Indigenous peoples while at the same time serving Indigenous people to organize and counter dispossession. In the last chapter, Nichols turns to Black radical thought to look at critiques of dispossession in relation to the body, the self, and the person, drawing a connection between Indigenous and Black intellectual traditions. Finally, the conclusion offers a glimpse of other ways of relating to the land and the ways in which Indigenous activists in Aotearoa deploy the notion of legal personhood unto the land, thereby changing the relations of ownership that were imposed by European settlers and that continue being enforced today. Nichols points out that similar strategies have been employed in Bolivia and Canada in the past decade.

For those of us outside of the field of political/critical theory, Nichols's Theft Is Property! is an important reminder of the instability of core critical concepts and the advantages of putting them into dialogue with the conditions of their specific contexts. More importantly, Nichols reformulates a category of analysis that permits us to move beyond borders while...