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Shared intentionality is a specific form of shared agency where a group can be understood to have an intention. It has been conjectured that humans are better equipped for collaboration than other animals because humans but not other great apes share intentions. However, exporting shared intentionality from a debate about the ontology of mental state attributions like intentions to groups does not seamlessly lend itself to evolutionary science. To explore and de-center the implicit assumptions of Western conceptions of cooperation, I look at Zhuangzi’s philosophy of (in)action. This philosophy treats the actions of individuals as always a form of co-action alongside other agencies to whom one must adapt. Thinking of collaboration as a product of skillful co-action, not shared intention, sidesteps asking about cooperation in “kinds” or levels. Instead, it directs attention to the know-how and behavioral flexibility needed to make our constant coordination adaptive.

I encountered a turtle midway through crossing the road. I stopped the car and waited for her, but she had seized up. I got out and gently lifted her to the side of the road. It was a face-to-face encounter with a wild animal who had unknowingly entered a "human" world. Her action disrupted my naive attitude that a road is a place for me to drive along, a place for cars, and not a place for turtles. But, she just needed to get to the other side; the road cut through her world. My naive attitude that the road is not a place for turtles fails to acknowledge the turtles' jurisdiction over their habitat on both sides of the road. In this article, I explore how Indigenous political ontology, from the First Nations 1 of Canada and the northern United States, allows us to conceive of a world where animals have jurisdiction over their land. On such an account when roads or other interventions cut through their territories without providing accommodations we have done something wrong.Wild animals have their place in the world as part of autonomous communities outside human institutions like industrial agriculture, laboratories, zoos, and our homes. In order to restrain human interventions in the places and practices of autonomous nonhuman animal communities, some have suggested that wild animals be understood as "sovereign" (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011;Goodin et al., 1997). Designating wild animals "sovereign" is one way to establish the jurisdiction of nonhuman animal communities. In line with the norms of international relations, recognizing wild animal communities as sovereign limits foreign