Who is ‘the Settler’? What does this category animate and what does it bely? Despite the vast scholarship on histories of settler colonisation, the complex figure of the settler remains largely taken for granted. This lends itself to a banal decolonial politics that urgently requires critique.

With so much focus in recent headlines about Palestine put on the visuality of dis-placement and the excesses of conflict, can turning attention to counter-hegemonic emplacement chip away at Zionist settler colonial organizations of space?

In this essay, I position the logics of settler colonialism and the logics of space exploration dominion over both space on earth, and interplanetary space at the expense of Indigenous peoples. I then look to Indigenous conceptions of space as a potential foil to these colonial logics.

This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the interconnected goals of indigenous politics. Thus, it is not possible to address it solely as a health emergency. It is connected to indigenous autonomy and self-determination. It is connected to the exploitation of land and the territory. It is connected to the rights of indigenous peoples to continue to exist and exercise their cultures.

Together, this piece contends that racial capitalist and settler colonial logics are (re)produced through digital mediations of the internet, such that digital geographies are ontologically and epistemologically always oriented around racial capitalism and settler colonialism.