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In Canada, the terms Indigeneity and urbanity have been configured by colonialism and are often understood as antithetical. Given the baggage these terms carry, conceptualizing Indigenous urbanism in a manner that does not replicate the same problems these categories suggest is an important intellectual task for both urban and Indigenous studies. In this essay, I propose that Indigenous urbanism might be best understood as an analytic that highlights a dialectical relationship between Indigeneity and urbanism, marking both concepts as constantly in flux and open to contestation. Indigenous urbanism marks urban space as potentially both liberatory and oppressive, and as the basis for a liberatory research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is planning without property? This question was recently posed to me following a conference presentation. In this paper, I argue that taking this question seriously reveals unchallenged assumptions about the relationship between planning and property. Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I respond to this question by looking at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar's conceptualization of "racial regimes of property" as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced. I then look to the practices reflected in the creation of Nadia Myre's artwork Indian Act to show how Indigenous epistemologies can aid in the conceptualization of planning without property. I argue that planning without property would be an approach to planning that would be focused on identifying, making, and strengthening the human and more-than-human relationships the flourishing of life requires. Thus, planning without property would support practices of being and belonging rather than practices of exclusion and domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After centuries of ignoring and discounting Indigenous epistemologies, geographers and other scholars rooted in Western intellectual traditions have recently displayed a new curiosity about the insights offered by Indigenous intellectual traditions. In this article, we reflect on the ethical challenges that accompany reading Indigenous philosophy as scholars trained primarily in the Western tradition. Reading a set of texts by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we argue that reading practices can serve as either enactments or refusals of colonial relationships, and provide an account of the development of reading practices that seek to find meaning in the in/commensurablity of these texts, rather than by seeking only similarities or differences. Thus, we advocate for a political approach to reading Indigenous philosophy that respects the sovereignty of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]