Decolonial reflexive modernism

Indigenous leaders argue that reflexivity about modernism needs to go further in pluriversal responses to the Anthropocene, and that decolonial action needs to accompany this work. Pluriversal responses risk re-enacting colonial and imperial violence toward Indigenous peoples through exclusion, erasure, and appropriation (Todd 2016). Discrimination is perpetuated through certain modernist world naming and knowing practices that continue to position Indigenous peoples’ authority as illegitimate and fanciful (Cusicanqui 2012; Moreton-Roberts 2021). There needs to be greater attention to the influence of ontology (the study of being) and its attendant epistemology (the study of knowledge) to understand what Indigenous leaders are saying about the relationality of life (Rigney et al. 2015; Watson 2016). At the same time, such conceptual work must also support material action to work against the influential forces that undermine Indigenous peoples and all our relationships.