Against Prevailing Currents: The History of Them Days Magazine in Labrador

Political ontology, the intellectual project that frames the book, is presented along with an overview of the conceptual architecture of the work. The concepts of grounding infrastructures and of emplacement and displacement are elaborated in the process of explaining the rationale of the book. It is argued that it is important to avoid the mistake that the book is about “indigeneity” because it is interested in a politics of how rather than a politics of who. Finally, the structure of the book is presented as a theatrical rehearsal that includes two acts preceded and followed by three extended commentaries (i.e., prelude, interlude, and postlude). These commentaries advance the larger arguments by exemplifying them through and drawing from the ethnographically grounded acts.

Introduction

2025

Prelude

2025

The chapter draws largely on the work of intellectuals (often identified as Indigenous) closely associated with emplaced collectives to present life projects. The term emplaced collective denotes the situation in which people cannot be separated from the places they are with; they are one and the same. It is argued that emplaced collectives are the most intense expression of life projects, stories of the good life that are oriented toward nurturing the specificity of place. Both emplaced collectives and life projects are presented as key references for a politics of emplacement. In the process, we learn that emplaced collectives have produced a cosmopolitics avant la lettre that serves as a counterpoint to both modern politics and more recent notions of cosmopolitics that have emerged within the academy.

Act I

2025

The chapter focuses on the Yshir people’s struggle to regain control over the yrmo, understood variously as an emplaced collective, as “traditional territory,” and as the forest. Ethnographic material is used to show how the imperative of displacement, embedded in visions of the greater common good promoted by modernizing agents, constantly encroaches on the infrastructures that make the yrmo an emplaced collective and seeks to disentangle its components as ontologically distinct entities ( i.e., people and resources) that can participate in a (big) common modern world. Through the enactment of life projects, the yrmo nonetheless (r)exists as a “small common” by exploiting the gaps created by the lack of coherence between infrastructures of displacement. The analysis shows that a politics of emplacement requires fidelity to the pluriverse.