Grounded normativity names the ethical frameworks and political orders emerging from Indigenous peoples’ reciprocal relationships with land. Canadian Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard developed this concept to articulate Indigenous alternatives to state-centred recognition politics and capitalist social relations.
Land-based ethics
Grounded normativity operates through Indigenous peoples’ sustained engagement with specific territories. These relationships generate normative orders, ethical frameworks and political systems grounded in particular places rather than abstract universal principles.
Coulthard distinguishes grounded normativity from Western political philosophy’s universalist claims. Liberal theory presents justice principles as applicable regardless of context. Indigenous ethical frameworks emerge from and remain accountable to specific lands, waters and more-than-human relations.
The concept challenges both liberal multiculturalism and socialist universalism. Multiculturalism offers cultural recognition within settler state frameworks. Socialism promises universal emancipation through class struggle. Grounded normativity asserts Indigenous political orders operating outside and against these frameworks.
Land relationships prove central rather than peripheral. Western political theory treats territory as space where politics occurs. Grounded normativity understands land as active participant in generating political and ethical orders. Relationships with land constitute politics rather than merely providing setting.
Beyond recognition
Coulthard developed grounded normativity through critique of recognition politics. Canadian state multiculturalism offers Indigenous peoples cultural recognition whilst maintaining control over territories and resources. This accommodation reproduces rather than challenges colonial dispossession.
Recognition paradigms position settler states as granters of Indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples must prove authenticity according to settler criteria to receive recognition. This creates incentives to perform static indigeneity rather than assert dynamic sovereignty.
Grounded normativity offers alternative to recognition seeking. Rather than demanding settler states recognise Indigenous cultures, Indigenous peoples can practice their political systems and ethical frameworks regardless of state permission. This shifts focus from external recognition to internal resurgence.
The contrast proves crucial. Recognition politics operates within settler frameworks. Grounded normativity operates from Indigenous frameworks. Recognition seeks accommodation. Grounded normativity asserts alternatives. Recognition accepts settler sovereignty as given. Grounded normativity challenges it.
Relationship to resurgence
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s resurgence theory connects closely with grounded normativity. Simpson articulates how Indigenous peoples regenerate nations and cultures through land-based practices outside settler frameworks. Resurgence centres Indigenous life-making rather than merely resisting settler power.
Grounded normativity provides ethical foundation for resurgence practice. When Indigenous peoples engage in ceremonies, speak languages, practice traditional governance or protect lands, they enact normative orders grounded in relationships. These practices assert Indigenous political systems as living realities.
Simpson emphasises how grounded normativity operates through embodied practices rather than abstract theory. Learning to harvest, participating in ceremonies, speaking languages and caring for territories transmit normative orders intergenerationally. Knowledge lives in practice.
This distinguishes Indigenous resurgence from nationalist movements seeking state recognition. Indigenous nations existed before and persist despite settler states. Resurgence involves recovering and strengthening these existing nations rather than creating new ones modelled on European states.
Challenging capitalism
Grounded normativity offers alternatives to capitalist social relations. Coulthard analyses how recognition politics serves to incorporate Indigenous peoples into capitalist economies without addressing dispossession. Economic development models frame Indigenous advancement through market participation.
Capitalist relations treat land as commodity and labour as alienable. Grounded normativity understands land through reciprocal relationships and labour as gift exchange. These prove incommensurable with capitalism rather than simply different economic approaches.
Indigenous economies grounded in reciprocity, redistribution and relationships with land existed across North America. Colonisation violently displaced these systems. Resurgence involves recovering these economic practices as alternatives to capitalism rather than merely seeking Indigenous participation in capitalist markets.
The concept also challenges Marxist orthodoxy positioning capitalism as necessary development stage. Grounded normativity articulates how Indigenous peoples can refuse capitalist development rather than waiting for it to exhaust itself. Indigenous economies offer practiced alternatives.
Gender and normativity
Indigenous feminists extend grounded normativity to address gender and sexuality. Many Indigenous traditions featured women’s political authority and gender diversity. Colonisation imposed heteropatriarchy to restructure Indigenous societies and facilitate dispossession.
Simpson and others demonstrate how grounded normativity includes gender-egalitarian and gender-diverse practices. Recovering Indigenous political systems means recovering women’s authority and gender diversity as integral features rather than later additions.
This differs from liberal feminism seeking equal recognition within existing systems. Indigenous feminisms grounded in land relationships challenge both settler patriarchy and Indigenous patriarchy emerging from colonial impositions. They assert Indigenous women’s and gender-diverse peoples’ authority as inherent in grounded normativity.
Sexual and gender violence against Indigenous peoples targets both bodies and relationships with land. Asserting grounded normativity includes protecting Indigenous women and gender-diverse people as part of protecting territories and political systems.
Practices of grounded normativity
Grounded normativity manifests through diverse practices rather than single form. Ceremonies constitute crucial practices maintaining relationships with lands and transmitting normative orders. When Indigenous peoples conduct ceremonies, they enact political systems and ethical frameworks.
Language revitalisation embodies grounded normativity. Indigenous languages encode relationships with specific territories. Speaking languages maintains connections and transmits knowledge grounded in particular places. Language recovery proves political practice asserting Indigenous normative orders.
Land defence exemplifies grounded normativity in action. When Indigenous peoples block pipelines or protect sacred sites, they assert authority derived from relationships with land. These actions enact Indigenous law rather than merely resisting settler law violations.
Traditional governance practices, whether consensus decision-making, women’s councils, or clan systems, constitute grounded normativity. Practicing these systems regardless of settler recognition asserts Indigenous political orders as living realities.
Critiques and limitations
Some critics argue grounded normativity risks romanticising pre-colonial Indigenous societies. Historical Indigenous nations featured hierarchies and conflicts. Grounded normativity should acknowledge this complexity rather than presenting idealised past.
Others worry the concept might essentialise Indigenous peoples as uniquely connected to land. This reproduces colonial tropes positioning Indigenous peoples as natural whilst settlers are cultural. All peoples have relationships with lands they inhabit.
The focus on land relationships also raises questions about urban Indigenous peoples or those forcibly displaced from territories. How does grounded normativity operate when direct land relationships have been disrupted? The concept requires development addressing these circumstances.
Additionally, grounded normativity might underestimate how thoroughly capitalism has penetrated Indigenous communities. Many Indigenous people depend on wage labour and market participation. Simple opposition between grounded normativity and capitalism proves insufficient.
Relationship to place
Grounded normativity’s emphasis on particular places distinguishes it from universal frameworks. Each Indigenous nation’s normative orders emerge from specific territories with particular plants, animals, waters and geological features. These cannot be abstracted without loss.
This creates challenges for transnational Indigenous solidarity. How can diverse Indigenous nations support each other whilst respecting place-specific differences? The concept requires balancing commonalities from shared colonial experiences with recognition of crucial particularities.
Place-based normativity also challenges Western environmental ethics seeking universal principles. Biocentrism, deep ecology and other frameworks propose ethics applicable anywhere. Grounded normativity insists relationships with specific places generate ethical obligations rather than universal rules.
Contemporary climate crisis creates urgency for place-based ethics. Industrial capitalism’s universal market logic produced planetary crisis. Indigenous place-based practices offer alternatives grounded in sustained relationships with specific ecosystems across generations.
Decolonisation and futurity
Grounded normativity informs decolonisation by articulating what Indigenous futures might involve. Rather than seeking inclusion in settler states or waiting for their collapse, Indigenous peoples can practice their political systems and ethical frameworks now.
This shifts decolonisation from distant goal to present practice. Every ceremony, language lesson, traditional harvest, or assertion of Indigenous law enacts decolonisation. Grounded normativity makes decolonisation concrete rather than abstract.
The concept also addresses what happens after settler states. If decolonisation involves their transformation or dissolution, grounded normativity articulates Indigenous political orders that can structure Indigenous futures. These are not speculative possibilities but existing practiced systems.
Coulthard and Simpson emphasise that grounded normativity does not require complete separation from settlers or wholesale rejection of all Western influences. It requires centring Indigenous relationships, practices and political orders rather than seeking accommodation within settler frameworks.
Contemporary applications
Land defence movements exemplify grounded normativity in practice. Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs asserting authority over territories, Standing Rock water protectors blocking pipelines, and countless other struggles enact Indigenous law derived from land relationships.
Indigenous-led conservation initiatives demonstrate grounded normativity in environmental management. When Indigenous peoples manage protected areas according to traditional knowledge and law, they assert normative orders grounded in relationships rather than state-imposed conservation frameworks.
Cultural resurgence efforts including language revitalisation, ceremony recovery, and traditional governance restoration all embody grounded normativity. These practices regenerate Indigenous nations outside recognition frameworks.
Grounded normativity ultimately provides both critique and alternative. It exposes how recognition politics and capitalist inclusion maintain dispossession. It articulates Indigenous political and ethical orders as practiced alternatives. Understanding grounded normativity proves essential for supporting Indigenous sovereignty and imagining decolonial futures beyond settler state frameworks.