ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and mainstream animal activists have generally failed to center an analysis of settler colonialism and therefore operate within “the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state.” Our disappearance from this discipline matters because it emblazons a conceptual terrain that mimics the logics of settler colonialism. Perhaps in an effort to repair this analytic absence, a number of CAS scholars have made use of a framework of “total liberation,” framing decolonization, for example, as a “responsibility for all who fight for social justice”; this is done, however, in a way that neither attends to the large body of writing in Indigenous studies about other-than-human life nor calls for both the abolition of the settler state and a repatriation of land to Indigenous communities. A theory of decolonization that is not accountable to Indigenous politics erases the referent—Indigenous peoples—that vitalizes the concept to begin with. To do this is to whitewash decolonization and thus to place settlers at the core of a social justice project that is against the position of the settler as the a priori subject of the world. What is negated then is that settler-colonial life-ways are already Indigenous death-ways.
