Whose Circularity, Whose Land? Yurok Forestry, Indigenous Economies, and the Politics of Regeneration

The circular economy (CE) has emerged as a dominant paradigm of ecological governance, mobilized by corporations, states, and supranational bodies as a corrective to linear models of extraction. While often framed as sustainable, dominant CE discourse remains tethered to growth-oriented, technocratic, and market-rationalist logics that reproduce the very extractive relations they claim to transcend. Nature continues to circulate in its abstract and commodified form while the colonial histories, ongoing land dispossessions, and sovereign territorial claims that make such circulation possible remain analytically invisible. This paper asks: whose circularity is being advanced, and on whose land? Drawing on collaborative, Indigenous-led fieldwork with the Yurok Tribe of northern California, we develop the concept of the Indigenous Circular Economy (IndCE) as a distinct political-economic formation grounded in kin-centric responsibility, sovereign territorial authority, and relational obligations to the more-than-human world. We show that Yurok Good Fire, forest stewardship, food sovereignty, and habitat care constitute an economy of regeneration irreducible to efficiency metrics or lifecycle assessments. Circularity, we argue, is not a technical design problem but a question of political authority, cultural continuity, and epistemic justice. By centering the Yurok IndCE, we deepen existing critiques of CE discourse and chart alternative pathways forward, arguing that CE frameworks must confront the jurisdictional architectures and colonial property regimes that render Indigenous lands available for commodification in the first place, and that resourcing IndCE is not a supplement to just transition but a prerequisite for one.