Reading Time: 7 minutes
This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work, and on nineteen years of teaching.
“A discipline can be used to wound, and a discipline can be turned toward repair. Geography has been both.”
I teach on Secwépemc Territory, and most days I begin a class by saying so. For years, I said the words the way one recites a courtesy, a small formal nod before the real work began. Then I started reading the history of my own adjacent discipline, the history of geographic thought, and the acknowledgement stopped feeling like a courtesy. It started feeling like a reckoning. Because the question underneath those words, the question of who gets to decide what a piece of land means, who lives there, who belongs, what it is for, turns out to be the question geography spent much of its early life answering in the worst possible way. A discipline can be used to wound, and a discipline can be turned toward repair. Geography has been both. I want to tell that story honestly, because it is a human rights story, and because I am standing inside it.
When Geography Ranked the World
There was a long period when geography taught that the land decides. The doctrine was called environmental determinism (the belief that climate and terrain directly shape human character, ability, and the worth of whole peoples). It sounds abstract until you see what it was used to do. Bhagat and Kenis (2026) describe environmental determinism as geography’s contribution to Social Darwinism and the marker of the discipline’s entry into modern science in the late nineteenth century. They trace how its proponents argued that temperate climates produced superior societies, a view, they write, that was used to justify colonial domination and racial hierarchies (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026). The argument ran that Northern European peoples were energetic and provident because of their climate, while peoples of other regions were cast as their lesser opposites, and the supposed science of geography then certified the ranking as a natural fact (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026).
I find this painful to teach, and necessary. The determinist claim was never a neutral error. It was an instrument. It took the brutal arrangements of empire and dressed them as the simple working out of climate, so that conquest could present itself as destiny. Clément (2020), studying early French colonial geography, shows the machinery up close. He demonstrates how colonial geographers used environmental determinism to explain the lives of Indigenous peoples as a heavy dependence on natural conditions, and then classified those peoples according to their supposed ability to overcome the constraints of their environment (Clément, 2020). The result, he argues, was a science of othering, one whose racialised determinants worked to distance, inferiorise, and dispossess Indigenous peoples under the banner of progress (Clément, 2020). Reading him, I understood that deciding what land means and deciding who counts as fully human were, in this history, the very same act.
The Quiet Violence of a Naturalized Map
Here is the part that reaches me most directly, as someone who has lived a precarious working life and written about how systems decide a person’s worth. Determinism’s deepest trick was to make a human arrangement look like a fact of nature. When inequality is presented as the inevitable product of climate or terrain, it stops looking like a choice that someone made and someone benefits from. It starts looking like weather.
I know this move from the inside, in a far smaller key. For nineteen years as a contract academic, I was offered a story in which my insecurity was simply the climate of the profession, the natural order of the academic ecosystem, nobody’s decision and therefore nobody’s responsibility. Determinism in geography did the same thing at the scale of peoples and continents. It turned decisions into destiny. That is why the history matters as a human rights story rather than a dusty disciplinary debate. To refuse the claim that land determines what people are worth is to insist that the arrangements built on that lie can be questioned, named, and changed. The opposite of determinism, in the end, is accountability.
Turning the Discipline Toward Repair
The hopeful half of this story is that geography has spent decades trying to undo its own founding harm. Determinism was discredited within mainstream geography by the middle of the twentieth century, though, as Bhagat and Kenis (2026) carefully note, its reductive habits keep returning in new forms, including in popular bestsellers and in some climate narratives that once again make environment the master variable of human fate (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026). The work of repair, in other words, is ongoing rather than finished. It has a name now: the effort to decolonize geography, to dismantle the colonial assumptions built into the discipline and to centre the knowledge of the peoples it once objectified.
Radcliffe (2017) frames this decolonial turn as an ethical and political project rather than only an intellectual one. Decolonial approaches, she writes, treat Black and Indigenous experiences as rooted in colonial modernity, and they work to make visible the material and epistemic consequences of white supremacy in order to disturb the system that depends on it (Radcliffe, 2017). She is careful, though, and her caution is one I take personally. The enactment of decolonisation, she writes, requires caution, guidance, and humility, and remains always complex and highly contentious (Radcliffe, 2017). This is far from a project a settler scholar gets to declare complete and tidy.
De Leeuw and Hunt (2018) press exactly on that danger, and their warning has reshaped how I understand my own land acknowledgement. They argue that efforts to decolonize geography are inherently limited as long as colonization continues to structure the discipline and the academy, and they caution that decolonization too often proceeds by re-centring settler voices, engaging concepts of Indigeneity rather than Indigenous peoples themselves, their scholarship, and their lived knowledge (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018). They ask a question I now sit with before every class: what does it mean to teach about decolonization on Indigenous land, through citational practices that still centre settler scholars over Indigenous ones (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018)? They urge settler academics to politicize their own situated position on colonized land rather than to perform a reflexivity that changes nothing (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018). That is a far harder and more honest instruction than the courtesy I once recited.
The Limit I Have to Name
There is a boundary I must mark clearly, because the whole integrity of this post depends on it. It would be a quiet act of appropriation to take this human rights story and fold it smoothly into my own narrative of healing, as though my recovery from precarity and fear sat on the same plane as Indigenous peoples’ struggle against dispossession. It sits at a different scale entirely, and the scholarship I am leaning on insists on the difference.
Tuck and Yang (2012) named this with a precision that has stayed with me for years. Decolonization, they argue, is beyond a metaphor; it means the repatriation of Indigenous land and life, and it resists being turned into a comfortable figure of speech for everyone else’s liberation (Tuck & Yang, 2012). They warn against what they call settler moves to innocence, the small manoeuvres by which settlers reach for the feeling of absolution while the material facts of land stay exactly as they were (Tuck & Yang, 2012). I cite them here as a brake on my own writing. This post can advance a human rights understanding of geographic thought. It earns nothing if it lets me feel absolved. The meaning of the land I teach on remains a matter for the Secwépemc people, beyond my gift to confer.
The Acknowledgement, Remade
So I still begin my classes by naming the territory. The words are the same. What has changed is everything underneath them. I understand now that I am standing in the long aftermath of a discipline that once decided, with the full authority of science, what land meant and who its peoples were permitted to be. I understand that the deciding was a weapon, that the weapon was disguised as fact, and that the work of taking the disguise off is unfinished and partly mine to carry.
Who gets to decide what land means? For too long the answer was whoever held the surveying instruments and the textbooks and the power to call their own ranking natural. The better answer, the one geography is still struggling toward, returns that authority to the peoples whose relationships with these lands long precede mine and will long outlast my tenure. I get to stand here as a guest and a witness. I get to teach the history honestly, including the parts that implicate the very ground I teach upon. And I get to say the territory’s name each morning as what it truly is: beyond a courtesy, a reckoning, and a small daily refusal of the old lie that land decides what people are worth.
References
Bhagat, A., & Kenis, A. (2026). The modern slavery-climate change nexus: Resurrecting environmental determinism, reinforcing saviourism and absolving the West. Antipode, 58(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70125
Clément, V. (2020). Geographical knowledge, Empire, and the Indigenous Other: Engaging a decolonising introspection into early French colonial geography. Area, 52(4), 741-749. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12617
de Leeuw, S., & Hunt, S. (2018). Unsettling decolonizing geographies. Geography Compass, 12(7), Article e12376. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376
Radcliffe, S. A. (2017). Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 329-333. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12195
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.
Academic Lens
This post narrates the history of geographic thought as a human rights story, grounded in peer-reviewed journal scholarship. Bhagat and Kenis (2026) supply the historical arc and the crucial argument that environmental determinism functioned as a justification for colonial domination and racial hierarchy, while also documenting its persistent return in contemporary climate and development narratives. Clément (2020) provides the close historical case, demonstrating how colonial geographers deployed determinism to classify, dehumanize, and dispossess Indigenous peoples under the rhetoric of progress. The post’s pivot from diagnosis to repair draws on the decolonial turn in the discipline: Radcliffe (2017) frames decolonization as an ethico-political project requiring humility, and de Leeuw and Hunt (2018) supply the essential settler-accountability caution, warning that decolonial work too easily re-centres settler voices and engages concepts of Indigeneity rather than Indigenous peoples themselves. Tuck and Yang (2012) anchor the ethical limit through their concept of incommensurability and their critique of settler moves to innocence, which disciplines the writer’s positionality and prevents the appropriation of Indigenous struggle into a settler narrative of healing. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts an accountable settler pedagogy: it uses the land acknowledgement as both frame and subject, modelling the move from recited courtesy to situated reckoning that de Leeuw and Hunt call for, while refusing the absolution that Tuck and Yang foreclose. The brief analogy to academic precarity is deliberately subordinated and explicitly marked as incommensurable, illustrating determinism’s core mechanism, the naturalization of human arrangements, without equating the two scales of harm.
