Mobile relations and temporal politics: Navigating the case for Indigenous nationhood and the ethos of the open society
Little, Adrian, and Nakata, Sana (2025) Mobile relations and temporal politics: Navigating the case for Indigenous nationhood and the ethos of the open society. Migration Studies, 13 (4). mnaf049.
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Abstract
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in Indigenous philosophies focused on deep ontological and epistemological relationships between Indigenous peoples and their lands, seas, and environments. These relationships transcend traditional temporal orderings—linear sequencing of past, present and future—and challenge possessive notions of ownership that characterize the logic of the modern state. Such statist assumptions of fixity and possession are reflected powerfully in the ways in which states have used bordering as a mechanism for migration control. This article interrogates the compatibility between advocacy for greater international mobility and migration on one hand and strengthening Indigenous nationhood on the other from the perspective of political theory, including Indigenous theories. The concept of relational ontology provides a pathway to mitigate potential tensions between a position that is grounded in openness and mobility in one domain and one which focuses more on deep connectedness to particular territories and the claims they engender. Against prominent arguments in the migration literature suggesting that place-based perspectives are inherently part of a problematic ‘sedentarist metaphysic’, we draw on both Indigenous relational theory and Bergson’s ethos of the ‘open society’ to articulate an approach in which relations are understood as deep but radically incomplete. Rather than seeing advocacy for Indigenous nationhood and arguments for more open international borders as a contradiction in terms, an approach to mobility which builds upon openness, relational ontologies, and radical incompletion derived from Indigenous temporalities contains the possibility of a new politics of migration. Keywords: indigenous, relations, mobility, temporality, open society. Recent years have witnessed growing interest in Indigenous philosophies focused on deep ontological and epistemological relationships between Indigenous peoples and their lands, seas, and environments. These relationships transcend traditional temporal orderings—linear sequencing of past, present and future—and challenge possessive notions of ownership that characterize the logic of the modern state. Such statist assumptions of fixity and possession are reflected powerfully in the ways in which states have used bordering as a mechanism for migration control. This article interrogates the compatibility between advocacy for greater international mobility and migration on one hand and strengthening Indigenous nationhood on the other from the perspective of political theory, including Indigenous theories. The concept of relational ontology provides a pathway to mitigate potential tensions between a position that is grounded in openness and mobility in one domain and one which focuses more on deep connectedness to particular territories and the claims they engender. Against prominent arguments in the migration literature suggesting that place-based perspectives are inherently part of a problematic ‘sedentarist metaphysic’, we draw on both Indigenous relational theory and Bergson’s ethos of the ‘open society’ to articulate an approach in which relations are understood as deep but radically incomplete. Rather than seeing advocacy for Indigenous nationhood and arguments for more open international borders as a contradiction in terms, an approach to mobility which builds upon openness, relational ontologies, and radical incompletion derived from Indigenous temporalities contains the possibility of a new politics of migration. Keywords: indigenous, relations, mobility, temporality, open society.
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