Table of Contents - stlouisurbandebate.org · Web viewSettler Colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with

National Association for Urban Debate LeaguesSettler Colonialism K

Table of Contents

ContentsTable of Contents.....................................................................................................................1Notes........................................................................................................................................ 3Glossary.................................................................................................................................... 4Thesis – Rifkin.......................................................................................................................... 5Thesis – Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez...............................................................................6Thesis – Paperson.....................................................................................................................7Thesis – Trump......................................................................................................................... 9Link – Immigration/Refugees.................................................................................................11Link – Immigration................................................................................................................. 12Link – Immigration................................................................................................................. 14Link – USFG........................................................................................................................... 16Link – Reformism...................................................................................................................17Link – Settler Education.........................................................................................................19Imp – Antiblackness/Settler Colonialism................................................................................20Imp – Environment Destruction.............................................................................................22Imp – Gender/Heteropatriarchy.............................................................................................23Imp – Laundry List.................................................................................................................24Imp – War............................................................................................................................... 26Impact Framing – Byrd..........................................................................................................29Impact Framing – Dalley........................................................................................................31Alt – GBTL.............................................................................................................................. 33Alt – Place Based Education...................................................................................................34Alt – Ethic of Incommensurability..........................................................................................37Alt – Refusal (Tuck and Yang)................................................................................................38Alt – Refusal (Simpson)..........................................................................................................39Alt – State Rejection...............................................................................................................42Alt – Scyborgs......................................................................................................................... 43Framework............................................................................................................................. 45AT Perm – Byrd...................................................................................................................... 46AT Perm – Woan.....................................................................................................................47AT Andrea Smith....................................................................................................................48

Aff................................................................................................................................................. 501


AT Rifkin................................................................................................................................. 51Reformism Good – Connolly...................................................................................................52Reformism Good – NoiseCat..................................................................................................54Reformism Good – NoiseCat..................................................................................................57Perm....................................................................................................................................... 60AT Epistemology Alt...............................................................................................................61AT Reject State Alt.................................................................................................................62

Alt DA - Gender......................................................................................................................... 63Alt DA - Essentialism.................................................................................................................67Alt DA - Linear Time.................................................................................................................. 68

2


Notes Settler Colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty.

This is distinct from a colonial society or a postcolonial society in one major way. In a settler society, the Settler never leaves and strives to BECOME the Native.

A colonial territory or nation is one in which the settler is still there, but there remains a clear demarcation between the settlers and the Natives that make up the populace.

A post-colonial nation is one that used to be colonial, but the settler has since left. That includes most of the world thanks to the British. But for real, India and South Africa are great examples of post-colonial nations.

So we are going to start with the top level structuring frame, which is drawn from the history that we just discussed. One of the best framing cards ever written for the K is Rifkin 14, where he borrows from Patrick Wolfe's claim that Settler Colonialism is a structure, not an event.

This is just a reflection of the idea that Settlerism is something that effects Native people EVERY DAY. It didn’t end at some previous point, but every day the US exists and flex's its sovereignty against Native nations settlerism is instantiated.

The nature of links The nature of the links is pretty simple. The plan does some stuff and it is bad for Native

Communities. The most Basic form of link is a critique of reformism writ large.

o The idea that the United States has the power to dictate law over Turtle Island is derived from the United States’ assertion of sovereignty. Sovereignty, in effect is a zero-sum game. Native sovereignty and US sovereignty cannot exist at the same time.

Audra Simpson calls this Nested Sovereignty. But the US' assertions to Power over Native nations comes from the Marshall Trilogy, three Supreme Court Cases issued by John Marshall in the early 1800s that basically still control US-Native relations today.

The Alternatives There are various alternatives for you to choose from. Some alternatives are easier

executed if you are Native, while others are more structural nature and accessible to all debaters.

3


Glossary Subjectivity – one’s identity or the characteristics that constitute one’s identity. Colonialism - the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. However, their remains a clear distinction between the Colonial and Native population.Settler Colonialism - is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty. Post-Colonialism - a theoretical approach in various disciplines that is concerned with the lasting impact of colonization in former colonies. The settler has already retreated to their home country. Biopolitics - examines the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivationObfuscation - the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.Praxis - practice, as distinguished from theory. Nationalist - a person who advocates political independence for a countryco-constituitive – to be intimately related to or dependent on another. Imperialism - a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force.systemic violence - a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.anti-dialectical – As opposed to the strict division of characteristics. Ontology – Study of being. Heteropatricarchical - The combination of male - patriarchal - and heterosexual dominance essentially describing the severe sex and gender bias prevalent among the elite ruling classes of nation-states. Heteronormativity - denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.Indigeneity – Characteristic of being Indigenous. Derived from "indigenous".

4


Thesis – Rifkin Settlement is not an event, but a structuring ontological logic of elimination that constantly manifests in everyday reiterations of our spatial inhabitance and subjective being.Rifkin 14 (Mark is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance,’ pp. 7-10 JM

If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and associations they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and sociality , describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that “elimination is an organizing principle of settler- colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded) occurrence ” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial society ” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness functions as the central way of understanding the domination and displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and maintain its investment in the nation as a white possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “At an ontological level the structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity ” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated ,” in ways that “tend to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as Indianness, casting place-based political collectivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and management: “the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix).

5


Thesis – Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez Settler Colonialism strives to eliminate and replace Native communities. Through the western project of enlightenment, Colonialism seeks to reproduce itself and cover its tracks with forms of education that operate as neutral but neglect the perpetual violence that constitutes a Settler State.Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 2013 (Eve is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at University of Toronto and Ruben is Associate Professor Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at University of Toronto “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity”, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Volume 29, Number 1 JM

Settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay , making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing. Patrick Wolfe (2006) argues that settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” (p. 338) operating with a logic of elimination. “Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say,” Wolfe observes, “the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory” (ibid., parentheses original). The logic of elimination is embedded into every aspect of the settler colonial structures and its disciplines—it is in their DNA, in a manner of speaking. Indeed invasion is a structure, not an event (p. 402). The violence of invasion is not contained to first contact or the unfortunate birthpangs of a new nation, but is reasserted each day of occupation . Thus, when we write about settler colonialism in this article, we are writing about it as both an historical and contemporary matrix of relations and conditions that define life in the settler colonial nation-state, such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, South Africa, Chinese Tibet, and others. In North America, settler colonialism operates through a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel slaves who are removed from their homelands to work stolen land. At the crux of these relationships is land , highly valued and disputed. For settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical, epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land. Land, in being settled, becomes property. Settlers must also import chattel slaves , who must be kept landless, and who also become property , to be used, abused, and managed. Several belief systems need to be in place to justify the destruction of Indigenous life and the enslavement of life from other lands, in particular the continent of Africa. These belief systems are constituted through “what Michel Foucault identifies as the ‘invention of Man’: that is, by the Renaissance humanists’ epochal redescription of the human outside the terms of the then theocentric, ‘sinful by nature’ conception/‘descriptive statement’ of the human” (Wynter, 2003, p. 263). These include what was termed in the 19th century “manifest destiny”–or the expansion of the settler state as afforded by God; heteropaternalism–the assumption that heteropatriarchal nuclear domestic arrangements are the building block of the state and institutions; and most of all, white supremacy. Settler colonialism requires the construction of non-white peoples as less than or not-quite civilized, an earlier expression of human civilization, and makes whiteness and white subjectivity both superior and normal (Wynter, 2003). In doing so, whiteness and settler status are made invisible, only seen when threatened (see also Tuck & Yang, 2012). Settler colonialism is typified by its practiced epistemological refusal to recognize the latent relations of the settler colonial triad; the covering of its tracks. One of the ways the settlercolonial state manages this covering is through the circulation of its creation story. These stories involve signs-turned mythologies that conceal the teleology of violence and domination that characterize settlement (Donald, 2012a, 2012b). For example, Dwayne Donald examines the centrality of the “Fort on Frontier” as a signifier for the myth of civilization and modernity in the creation story of the Canadian nation-state. The image of the fort works as “a mythic sign that initiates, substantiates and, through its density, hides the teleological story of the development of the nation” (2012a, p. 43): Fort pedagogy works according to an insistence that everyone must be brought inside and become like the insiders, or they will be eliminated. The fort teaches us that outsiders must be either incorporated, or excluded, in order for development to occur in the desired ways. (2012a, p. 44) The fort is not simply about the process of colonization–of the exogenous conquering of land and people, but more importantly, about a process of colonial settlement—of imposing a hegemonic logic from the inside, “premised on the domination of a majority that has become indigenous” (Veracini, 2010, p. 5, emphasis added). As Donald (2012b) explains, “transplanting a four-cornered version of European development into the heart of the wilderness” (p. 95), the fort stands as a signifier “of the process by which wild and underutilized lands were civilized through European exploration, takeover, and settlement” (p. 99). Scholars like John Willinsky (1998) have offered ample evidence of the ways in which schooling has served the purpose of promoting an imperialist view of the world that justifies colonization premised on European epistemological supremacy. While he provides a powerful critique of the colonizing force of the North American curriculum, such analyses stop short of examining how the project of curriculum is

6


implied in the ongoing project of colonial settlement, assuming that settler colonies are a thing of the past. Recognizing that colonization is an ongoing process, there have been many postcolonial conceptualizations of curriculum and curriculum history (e.g. Asher, 2005; Coloma; 2009; McCarthy, 1998). Yet such conceptualizations typically ignore important differences in the various kinds of colonial processes occurring in the contemporary world . Because it is different from other forms of colonialism in ways that matter, settler colonialism requires more than a postcolonial theory of decolonization. Indeed, “decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7). In this light, the specific contours of settler colonialism in curriculum studies are as yet undertheorized, particularly its continued role in ensuring what we describe later in this article as settler futurity. This essay takes part in this conversation by theorizing what we call the curriculum project of replacement.

7


Thesis – Paperson Settler colonialism is a system of technologies operating in the present to render land and life open for biopolitical disposal. This enables genocide and ecological destruction.Paperson 17 (La Paperson, or K. Wayne Yang is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. A Third University is Possible. (2017). Pg. 21-4 JM

Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism, contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not only to seize and exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism thus complicates the center–periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein an imperial center, the “metropole,” dominates distant colonies, the “periphery.” Typically, one thinks of European colonization of Africa, India, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and human beings are recast as natural resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt, seeds, genetic material, chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006.[2] However, the analysis of settler colonialism is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire.[3] The critical literatures of the colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in global arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized for its diagnoses of anti/colonial violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and Indigenous relations.[4] Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to Indigenous people. This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler colonialism, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were a past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler colonialism is something that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of why directs us to think of land tenancy laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder and disappearance. Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies , they evolve and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This separation, what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/ land” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal : who will be moved where, who will be murdered how, who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom.[5] In the alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness. Moreover, it is not just human beings who are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a move that first alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies required to create and maintain these separations , these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from nonhuman, land from life.[6] “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonization. Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you might consider settler colonialism as a set of technologies —a frame that could help you to forecast colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. This chapter proceeds with the following insights. (1) The settler–native– slave triad does not describe identities. The triad—an analytic mainstay of settler colonial studies—digs a pitfall of identity that not only chills collaborations but also implies that the racial will be the solution. (2) Technologies are trafficked. Technologies generate patterns of social relations to land. Technologies mutate, and so do these relationships. Colonial technologies travel. In tracing technologies’ past and future trajectories, we can connect how settler colonial and antiblack technologies circulate in transnational arenas. (3) Land — not just people—is the biopolitical target. [7] The examples are many: fracking, biopiracy, damming of rivers and flooding of valleys, the carcasses of pigs that die from the feed additive ractopamine and are allowable for harvest by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support “human” life is a “biopolitics” well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, “human” subject. (4) (Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master, that (y)our theory has a Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Othered studies have already made their breaks with

8


Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation). (5) Even when they are dangerous, understanding technologies provides us some pathways for decolonizing work. We can identify projects of collaboration on decolonial technologies. Colonizing mechanisms are evolving into new forms, and they might be subverted toward decolonizing operations. The Settler–Native–Slave Triad Does Not Describe Identities One of the main interventions of settler colonial studies has been to insist that the patterning of social relations is shaped by colonialism’s thirst for land and thus is shaped to fit modes of empire. Because colonialism is a perverted affair, our relationships are also warped into complicitous arrangements of violation, trespass, and collusion with its mechanisms. For Fanon, the psychosis of colonialism arises from the patterning of violence into the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the impugned humanity of the native. For Fanon, the supremacist “right” to create settler space that is immune from violence, and the “right” to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism. Furthermore, the “humanity” of the settler is constructed upon his agency over the land and nature. As MaldonadoTorres explains, “I think, therefore I am” is actually an articulation of “ I conquer, therefore I am,” a sense of identity posited upon the harnessing of nature and its “natural” people.[8] This creates a host of post+colonial problems that have come to define modernity. Because the humanity of the settler is predicated on his ability to “write the world,” to make history upon and over the natural world, the colonized is instructed to make her claim to humanity by similarly acting on the world or, more precisely, acting in his. Indeed, for Fanon, it is the perverse ontology of settler becomings—becoming landowner or becoming property, becoming killable or becoming a killer—and the mutual implication of tortured and torturer that mark the psychosis of colonialism. This problem of modernity and colonial psychosis is echoed in Jack Forbes’s writings: Columbus was a wétiko. He was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. . . . The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko.[9] Under Western modernity, becoming “free” means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, “the central contradiction of modernity is freedom.”[10] Critiques of settler colonialism, therefore, do not offer just another “type” of colonialism to add to the literature but a mode of analysis that has repercussions for any diagnosis of coloniality and for understanding the modern conditions of freedom. By modern conditions of freedom, I mean that Western freedom is a product of colonial modernity, and I mean that such freedom comes with conditions, with strings attached, most manifest as terms of unfreedom for nonhumans. As Cindi Mayweather says, “your freedom’s in a bind.”[11]

9


Thesis – TrumpThe election of Trump serves as proof that settler suspicion of Native existence remains strong, continuing the executive’s violent history against Native communities. Patel 17 (Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. Her work addresses the narratives that facilitate societal structures. With a background in sociology, she researches and teaches about education as a site of social reproduction and as a potential site for transformation and liberation, 1/21/17, Trump and Settler Colonialism JMThe caricature of Donald J. Trump, sketched through bellicose gestures, is mesmerizing in its shock value. While this political turn holds and has meant immediate danger to already vulnerabilized populations, it is insufficient to see Trump’s rise as a one-off celebrity rupture of an otherwise democratic society. It is also insufficient to attempt to determine if Trump, his cabinet nominees, and/or those who voted for him are individually racist, misogynist, ableist, and on. Trump is reflective and refractive of a long-standing structure of heteropatriarchal and racial violence in this nation. The fact that he has handily gained traction with large swaths of the population demands an analysis that transgresses a single individual’s psychology. Trump’s popularity can be apprehended through the lens of settler colonialism, which relies on various technologies, including racism and heteropatriarchy , to accomplish its aims. In the shortest-term memory, the political rise of Donald Trump began with the election of Barack Hussein Obama. Undeniably, Trump’s political assertion of himself began with his claims that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen. This started the birther movement that gained great momentum outside of any single individual, including Trump, precisely because it leveraged a long-standing settler suspicion of Black bodies being able to be fully human, within a Westernized idea of developed man.[1] To understand the logics that Trump is animated by and why they have such traction, one must have a longer view of settler colonialism as history and structure, as well as disavowing the romanticized idea that it is only with Trump that white settler anxieties have surfaced. This is not to diminish the unique damage that this political turn brings, but rather situates it within a trajectory of colonial violence. Settler colonialism, as Patrick Wolfe has defined it, is a structure, not an event. Settler migrants invade a land to occupy it, claim it, and turn it into property. The settler structure depends, simultaneously, on the attempt to convert land into property, the need for Indigenous people to disappear, and to create chattel labor that both works the land and is property itself.[2] The occupation of land is never finished, Indigenous people must always be disappearing, and there can never be enough property, land and chattel, in the hands of a few. Since contact invasion, the structure of settler colonialism has been maintained by eradicating and punishing Indigenous, Black and brown peoples. The constant running fear of those peoples transgressing their labor and property functions within the settler structure is animated through many lurid attacks conducted in the name of the United States. Donald Trump’s political rise and traction is one stanza in how these fears and practices have been bundled together by a settler colonial logic. Before his assertion and creation of the birther conspiracy theory about President Obama, Trump had leveraged settler fear of Black male bodies in pushing for a state execution of the Central Park Five. In 1989, after five Black teenagers were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park in New York City, Trump spent $85,000 to place full-page ads in four daily newspapers, calling for a re-instantiation of the death penalty in order to execute the five youths. The advertisements ran before a single testimony or piece of evidence had been lodged. In 2016, 14 years after DNA evidence had exonerated all five of the defendants, Trump publicly maintained their guilt, as have others along the years, citing confessions as evidentiary truth of their guilt. While many have rightfully critiqued his misunderstanding of the nature of forced confessions and contradictory recall in jurisprudence,[3] Trump’s loud stance echoes an even louder and long-standing criminalization of Black and brown people. When he insisted that “these young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” and added that they “must have done something,” Trump tapped into a perpetual collapsing of Blackness into criminal and the hinged need for a smaller number to contain those criminal bodies, either through incarceration or execution. The creation of excess bodies is a contemporary manifestation of the settler need for property and its oversight. Questioning the obvious fact of President Obama’s citizenship and the persistent criminalization of the exonerated Central Park Five tap into long-standing settler anxieties about political and physical uprisings by those cast on the underside of wellness. The allegations, in and of themselves, about President Obama and the Central Park Five, invoke and create a criminality while also invoking and creating the stratified power to determine and oversee those who need to be contained. This is what manifest destiny sounds like in 2017. As in earlier moments, the structure of settler colonialism has been deeply gendered and raced. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were marched to their deaths, in the largest mass hanging ever to take place. An estimated 4,000 spectators gathered to line the street as the men were marched to the specially constructed

10


hanging platform. The 38 were part of a larger initial group of 303 sentenced to death for having participated in an uprising in Mankato Territory. The Dakota people had resisted being put on the brink of starvation, due to both the U.S. government having broken treaties, and settlers flooding the land and foodways of the once-sparsely populated area. The uprising of the Dakota took place within a large-scale, armed settler encroachment. President Abraham Lincoln , the Great Emancipator, made the decision to hold the largest mass hanging to date to quell the uprising and, implicitly, calm settler anxieties . He reduced the number of Dakota men to be executed from 303 to 38.[4] Lincoln explained the decision in front of the U.S. Senate: “Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I ordered a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females.” However, before the hangings took place, Lincoln’s own examination of the transcripts and trials showed that only two men were convicted of rape. Lincoln then expanded his criteria of having participated in “massacres,” rather than the original language of “battles” and then charges of rape, to fit the purpose of strategically containing a rightful backlash to settler encroachment. As with Trump’s crusades against President Obama and the Central Park Five, the facts, which crime, where, committed against whom, are sampled and stretched to fit the purpose of calming settler anxiety and affirming settler entitlement. And as with Trump’s rise and actions, it is insufficient to annotate this mass hanging as an aberration of Lincoln’s leadership. The executions and corresponding rationales serve the structure of settler colonialism. The settler logics of invoking criminality , protecting perceived threats to (white) women, and containment all exist for the interests of white property ownership, and they are by no means new . As Kim Tallbear noted in her plenary address given to the National Women’s Studies Association the week after the 2016 presidential election, “Past is present. America is that horror. If you thought different, I am truly, truly sorry for what you must feel now. In grief, I hope that people will turn to love and building good relations, sustain one another, and resist a redeemable U.S. state as the object of our affection.”[5]

11


Link – Immigration/Refugees The acceptance of refugees is driven by the popular liberal slogan, “We are all immigrants.” This rhetoric obfuscates the differences between Native communities and settler populations, erasing the former’s existence prior to colonization while sanitizing the genocidal history carried out by the latter. Kanji 17 (Azeezah is a legal analyst. The Star. “We are not all immigrants here.” February 9, 2017 https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/02/09/we-are-not-all-immigrants-here-kanji.html JM

“We are all immigrants.” The phrase has become a popular slogan of opposition to the closing of borders in Canada and the United States. It has been written on protest signs held high against Donald Trump’s ban on nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries, and echoed by Canadian politicians proclaiming their acceptance of refugees from countries like Syria. “We understand that as Canadians we are almost all immigrants, and that no one should be excluded on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality,” said Toronto mayor John Tory, for instance, in response to Trump’s “Muslim ban.” The claim that we are a country of immigrants is meant to be a statement of open arms to those outside the borders, but it closes our eyes to the hierarchies that exist within them. “We are all immigrants” hides the violence of settler colonialism by calling it immigration. “Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the ‘official story’ of a mostly benign and benevolent U.S.A., and to mask the fact that the pre-U.S. independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India,” acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out. Settlers, unlike most immigrants, do not seek to join a society as it exists, but to create a new one by destroying what was already there. “Immigration” is a gross euphemism for an exercise that has entailed the genocide of indigenous peoples, committed in Canada using means such as smallpox blankets and forced sterilizations and sexual violence and residential schools. “We are all immigrants” deletes the fact that black people who were enslaved did not travel here voluntarily, but were transported forcibly — not only to the United States, but to Canada as well, where slavery was legal until 1834. The assertion that Canada is a nation of immigrants excises the thousands of black people enslaved in Canada from our history. It expunges from our self-representation people such as Olivier Le Jeune, the first enslaved African in Canada, who was brought to New France from Madagascar as a six-year-old boy in 1628 by British commander Sir David Kirke. And like Marie-Joseph Angelique, an enslaved black woman who was brutally tortured and hanged in 1734 in Montreal, for allegedly setting fire to her mistress’s home after she threatened to sell her. “ Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for the indigenous peoples of North America? No. Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No. Is ‘immigrants’ the appropriate designation for the original European settlers? No,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz. “We are all immigrants” also obscures the reality of deep inequalities between different groups of people that have migrated to Canada. The slogan covers over the truth that some move here and live here on far more privileged terms than others; that we may inhabit the same piece of land but we are not all in the same boat. “Not all immigrants are equal,” Carleton University Professors Frances Abele and Daiva Stasiulis remind us. “Throughout the history of this country, many different peoples have come, often in flight from poverty or persecution at home, only to find themselves exploited here.” This was true for the 17,000 Chinese men brought in as cheap and expendable railway workers in the 1880s; they were paid a fraction of the wage earned by white workers, and many hundreds of them died doing the most perilous jobs. And it continues to be true today. For example, certain “highly skilled” immigrants and business entrepreneurs are given preferential access to permanent residence. But the temporary migrant workers that Canada uses to perform essential labour — such as farming the food we eat and making the clothes we wear and disposing of the waste we produce — are denied secure status, often trapped in abusive and dangerous working conditions with low pay. “Racialized workers are overrepresented in the latter cohort, perpetuating the historical racial inequalities in immigration selection,” according to the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. As a Muslim, I have been deeply moved by recent displays of solidarity against efforts to keep Muslims out of the United States. But we cannot build a more just world by perpetuating unjust myths, including the fairy-tale that we are all immigrants here.

12

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/02/09/we-are-not-all-immigrants-here-kanji.html


Link – Immigration Discussions of immigration policy absent accounts of settler colonialism absolve immigration of its role in Native genocide. Fur 14 (Gunlog is a professor in the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linneaus University and holds a a Ph.D. in history from University of Oklahoma. Indians and Immigrants- Entangled Histories. Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 55-76 JMFROM THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century until the end of the 1920s, almost 2.5 million people from the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden migrated to North America.1 Fredrika Bremer, on her visit to America in 1849–1851, wrote about Minnesota that it was “rightly a country for Nordic emigrants, rightly a country for a New Scandinavia.”2 But for centuries this country had been home to several different Indian nations, and in the mid-nineteenth century, they dominated this territory. Very rarely does this fact enter into descriptions of Scandinavian emigration to, and settlement in, North America. Countless books and articles have been written on the topic of Scandinavian emigration, yet not even a handful deal with interactions—voluntary or not—between Scandinavian immigrants and American Indians. Instead, the history of the “peopling of America” by immigrants coming from across the oceans, and the history of indigenous peoples of America have been, and largely remain, discussed in two different fields: immigration and migration history, and American Indian history. This article examines the theme of concurrent Indian and immigrant histories in the American Midwest, to argue that a separation of the two is detrimental to an understanding of the processes of migration, ethnicity, and colonialism. It suggests possible reasons for this lack of convergence, identifies consequences of such separate histories, and discusses ways in which these histories may be brought together. With the aim of inspiring new research, this article alludes both to early colonial encounters and to the more sustained interaction in the regions of heavy Scandinavian immigration from the second half of the nineteenth century. When Scandinavians arrived from across the ocean, Indians were forced to vacate lands that became conveniently empty for occupation. Beginning in the 1840s and at least continuing until the 1930s, Scandinavian immigrants settled on Indian land or near Indian reservations.3 That Scandinavian immigrants and American Indians met and that Scandinavian settlement in America depended upon appropriation of Indian land is obvious, but settlement and removal are rarely discussed in the same context, and in most immigration history, these processes remain unconnected.4 Most often when the question is raised, the response is that by the time Scandinavians settled in the Midwest, the Indians had already left. However, a cursory glance at the existing research on American Indian history demonstrates clearly that this was not the case. It is not just immigrants who seemed oblivious to the existence of some of their neighbors—histories written concerning different American Indian peoples perform a similar feat of excision. Immigrants are rarely part of accounts of Indian experiences, whether they are tribal histories or interpretations of relations with colonists. Instead, in histories of American Indians, the preferred counterpart is the representatives of American or Canadian governments, even though immigrant settlers constituted the vehicle for colonial westward expansion. When immigrants enter into the picture, they are most often lumped together as “white settlers.”5 For good reasons, specialization has been necessary, yet the two fields often concern themselves with the same territory at the same time, but move in unconnected categories, each field with its own sources, methods, theoretical and ideological underpinnings, and traditions. The separation of American Indian and immigrant histories depends on their relation to the dominant construction of national history and on the fictive notion that indigenous Americans and newcomers inhabited different times and different places. Paul Spickard suggests that American Indians have been treated as an issue apart from all other ethnic relations, obscuring that “immigration (by Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans) to the newly colonized territories was partly a colonial story as well as a migrant story. Immigration and ethnic identity in U.S. history have been intimately tied to race and slavery, on the one hand, and to colonial expansion across the continent on the other.” He argues that the colonial period has not ended and that this has profound consequences for the fields of migration and ethnic studies. “ The first fact of the history of American immigration is genocide: the displacement and destruction of the Native peoples of North America. That is part of the story of immigration; it is not some other, parallel history.”6 American Indian history was long dominated by the history of “Indian policy,” and this led to a predominant focus on Indian-U.S. (or Indian-colonist) relations. Much more rarely, and recently, have studies emerged on Indianimmigrant, Indian-African, or Indian-Hispanic interaction.7 As a historian working outside the United States with colonial cultural encounters and gender, I have noticed at least two recent trends in American Indian history. The first is a move toward indigenous perspectives on distinct ethnic communities, and toward more modern, even contemporary, history. The second trend is toward internationalization of indigenous histories.8 While breaking away from the clutches of an earlier focus on colonial and federal “Indian policy,” these moves still neglect encounters between indigenous peoples and nonAnglo American settlers. Instead of studying contacts

13


between Indians and immigrants, the histories of both go through the federal government and its authorized bodies, naturalizing Anglo-normativity, as Spickard suggests.9 American Indian, immigration, and ethnic history are all fields that grew out of the movement toward “history from below.” They are, to some extent, marginalized and often seen as subfields of social history. They also serve as an important means of contemporary identification. They are important for people’s sense of belonging. From a decolonizing perspective, writing American Indian histories from within, privileging Indian sources and worldviews, is a necessary challenge to Western academic hegemony. Nonetheless, there are reasons why the entanglement between these subfields should be explored. I believe the separation is not only untruthful, but it is also detrimental. It denies the entanglements that are and always have been between people—whether they or their descendants wish to see it or not. It conceals and confounds any understanding of the power imbalance and the consequences of the process of massive transfer of land from American Indians to settlers, it ignores the significance of hybrid lives and culture, and it produces histories that confirm conventional national narratives of exceptionalism and progress, in America as well as in the Nordic countries. While this article argues for the need to bridge the gulf between immigration history and American Indian history, it is written primarily from the perspective of Swedish, and Scandinavian, immigration history. It is done so for two reasons. Firstly, in order to dispel the notion that Scandinavians arrived in a country devoid of previous owners, I have begun to investigate immigrant sources. Secondly, I do not have sufficient knowledge of Dakota or Ojibwa history or language to enter the entanglement from those perspectives. Indeed, a primary observation is that this proposed bridge between perspectives requires active collaboration among historians with different skills and backgrounds. The history and historiography of Scandinavians in America provide an illustrative case study for the arguments of this article. It is not unique to the Midwest, or to the relationship between Scandinavian immigrants and Native peoples, but it is useful as a starting point to discussing parallel but concurrent histories. In this article, an investigation of the concurrent claims of different Indian nations and primarily Swedish settlers on land in the Midwest and their continued co-presence in the region provide a good test case for a study of what Betty A. Bergland aptly calls “the temporal and spatial continuity and simultaneity of immigration and removal.”10

14


Link – Immigration Immigrations lies at the root of the nation’s mythos, sustaining settler occupation of land. A decolonial praxis requires upsetting the very categories of citizenship and nationhood that constitute immigration policy. Patel 15 (Leigh is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. Her work addresses the narratives that facilitate societal structures. With a background in sociology, she researches and teaches about education as a site of social reproduction and as a potential site for transformation and liberation. “Nationalist narratives, Immigration and Coloniality” September 17, 2015https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/nationalist-narratives-immigration-and-coloniality/ JM I am the daughter of immigrants. My family’s mixed history of sanctioned and subjugated migration has indelibly imbued our lives as well as our relationships to cultural practices, home and receiving countries, and to land. I am also a United States citizen and a scholar who studies migration. I have marched for immigrants’ rights and have met with local, state, and national policymakers to speak about the experiences of undocumented youth. I believe that the current push and pull of vulnerablized beings across nation-state borders is a project of dehumanization wrought by the insatiable settler capitalist project. It is because of this mix of experiences that you will never hear me condone the idea that the United States is a nation built by immigrants. Or that it is a melting pot. Or a tapestry. Or any of the other commonplace nationalist narratives of migration that settler colonies fervently need. Decolonial praxis and dreaming require explicit attention to the ways that nationalist narratives of migration collude with and sustain the structures that displace and exploit Indigenous and Black life. These narratives don’t do any durable favors for migrants of various racial backgrounds, either. In this essay, I propose that we must be precise and exacting in locating the effects of these narratives in order to dismantle and dream beyond the structures they sustain. While all narratives can be understood as fictional, they must also be understood as inherently political and therefore laden with the potential to be beneficent or malignant. As Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe wrote, “Belief in superior or inferior races; belief that some people who live across our frontiers or speak a different language from ourselves are the cause of all the trouble in the world, or that our own particular group or class or caste has a right to certain things which are denied to others…all fictions are generated by the imagination. What then makes them different from the beneficent fictions for which I am making rather large claims? What distinguishes beneficent fiction from such malignant cousins as racism is that the first never forgets it is a fiction and the other never knows that it is.” The narratives of a nation are not malignant because they are narratives. Rather, their malignancy resides in their impenetrability and material impact. The imaginary of settler nations being built by immigrants is a malignant fiction deeply needed to sustain systemic structures. First – and perpetually – the settler imaginary needs a story that can obscure its violently consumptive structure (of relegating land and bodies into property for the extraction of resources and labor). Settler colonialism has an insatiable thirst for land as a form of property to be held by a few. These violent material practices always involve harm, pain, suffering, and death – nothing less. This violence is made continually possible through narratives that contort, erase, remix, and re-present these violent realities. The nationalist narratives of immigrants building the nation through folksy determination, grit, and stick-to-it-ive-ness literally erase settler projects from view ; in part, by making the appearance of access to material wealth seem both possible and somehow equally available. The appearance of access to material well-being is helmed by figurations of individualism and meritocracy, both of which work to obscure structures that organization swaths of populations. The individual immigrant in the nationalist narratives is male, revised and whitened over time. He is lauded for being a hero of conquest, manifest destiny, and patient lawfulness. Others are racially minoritized because of their disregard of mythic migration queues and placed in physical holding centers, guilty of their distal location relative to the fictive white settler hero. In fact, it is this white settler hero – the one who has followed manifest destiny and conquered savage lands and people – who is the figurehead for fantasies of equitable social mobility based on lawfulness and hard work. The narratives intertwine with structures that accrue and protect property for white settlers, justifying those inequitable processes as mere outcroppings of meritocratic practices. Little wonder then that the wake of this mythology includes not only structures for white material profit but fertile terrain for vulnerablized Black and brown peoples to be in competition with each other for the façade of available property ownership. The pervasive mythology of nationalist narratives of immigrant determination leaves little room to contend with the acutely distinct, yet intertwined, realities of the erasure of Indigeneity, the afterlife of

15

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/nationalist-narratives-immigration-and-coloniality/

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/nationalist-narratives-immigration-and-coloniality/


slavery, and forced labor across nation-state borders, often subject to similar malignant fictions. For example, respectability politics demand undocumented youth be made liminally acceptable [read: more human] through details of their performances as good students and potential benefit to the national economy. Concurrently, respectability politics filters the violent state policing of Black youth through media evaluations of their innocence [read: humanity]. Both are manifestation of racialized respectability politics but with distinct locations that, cumulatively, support the evaluation of Black and brown bodies through whiteness. These racialized social locations are further blurred through mantras of multiculturalism, diversity, and democracy. Racially minoritized populations are left to decipher their relative social locations of dispossession, while settler privilege thrives. While the settler imaginary may superficially seem to be pro-migrant, it does few actual and durable favors for migrant peoples because it works from a political economy of contingent merit. That contingent worth is hinged to shifting constructs of lawfulness and the state’s coffers. In the 1960s, then United States President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, published the book, “A Nation of immigrants.” While the entire book is homage to the nationalist myth of an immigrant nation, the details in the argument provide necessary windows into the material impact of this fiction. They wrote, “Every ethnic minority, in seeking its own freedom, helped to strengthen the fabric of liberty in American life. Similarly, every aspect of the American economy has profited from the contributions of immigrants.” The first sentence in the quote activates the erasure of Indigeneity and displacement of Black life, while simultaneously making heroes of settlers, making innocent their genocidal and appropriative actions (Tuck & Yang, 2012). The next sentence builds on this malignant fiction to hinge migrants’ worth upon the nation’s wealth. Ironically, despite the pro-migrant platforms that use success stories of entrepreneurship and assimilation in the current push and pull of vulnerabilized human labor from the South to the North, the real prospects of racially minoritized peoples attaining wealth-holding settler status are low. Additionally the proliferation of privatized for-profit incarceration facilities is in part fueled by the creation of stateless, and therefore rights-less, peoples who can be enclosed in these facilities, justifying their creation. Citizenship is always contingent, and undocumented migrants are always already ineligible. Attaching human worth to constructs of lawfulness seems almost satirical within these contradictory discourses and practices, except that these practices are materially deadly. The mythic nationalist narratives of migrant-built nations also facilitate structural racism experienced by migrants, by blurring the historical and ongoing racism fundamental to the nation’s property practices (Harris, 1993). Although not borne out by structural analyses of the cultural, economic, and social capital needed to secure safety and property in stratified societies, the ‘by-the-bootstraps’ mythology of meritocracy perpetuates individualism and deepens the white supremacist impact of colorblind dysconsciousness. The seductive narratives of immigrants who give up everything for a chance in a new nation, seemingly of their own autonomous will, and then succeed by sheer will and commitment obscures racial stratification and other structures of power and privilege. The laws and policies that have historically governed migration into settler nations are a far cry from the romanticized colorblind revision provided by the Kennedy brothers. Policies have shifted over to time to racialize migrants, in direct connection to protecting whiteness as property and providing racialized cheap labor pools across nation-state borders (Ngai, 2005). The United States’ most infamous anti-immigrant voice of the moment, Donald Trump, perfectly embodies the generationally protected white male settler wealth that racializes migration in order to re-instantiate nation-state logics of xenophobia and protectionism for its own material interests. Trump’s rhetoric, a mere stanza in long-standing variations on backlash to migration, is borne of mythologies of lone, independent [read: whiteness as individualization] immigrants. Settler nation locations like the United States, Canada, Israel, and Australia all display racism, specifically white terrorism, and xenophobia, precisely because their official rhetorics speak of frontiers, assimilation, and equitable pathways to citizenship. The material impacts of these nationalist narratives, though, do not mean that they are impenetrable or fixed in how they are used. Social movement groups including the DREAMERs undocumented movement and the Dream Defenders have strategically leveraged nationalist fictions. These two groups, in their very name, invoke the notion of the American Dream to lift up the transgressions that have been enacted on behalf of violent projects of nationhood. The Dream Defenders, for example, have refused to confine the ‘Dream’ to practices within the seized land of the United States, instead citing wars of aggression domestically and abroad as part of what must cease. The youth-led group, We Charge Genocide, samples the legal language of crime and tort to indict the racially violent state. These practices of calling out settler practices and, at times, appealing to the tenets of the nationalist narratives raise important questions about how and what kinds of theories of change (Tuck, 2009) can be practiced by agitating the very premises of these narratives. However, agitation of power structures should not be seen as synonymous with dismantling these same structures. With further, ongoing analysis of the precise contours of a complicated, intertwined set of colonial logics, we stand a much better chance of dreaming beyond those logics and refusing to settle for fleeting inclusion to structures built precisely to stratify and exclude. The answer to xenophobic racism towards racially minoritized

16


immigrants isn’t found in Black and brown peoples assimilating into well-being here and there. The answer to the endless conversion of land to limited resource and property rights isn’t found in securing a mortgage. The answer to contingent citizenship isn’t found in a kinder, gentler ranking of contingency. The answer is the dismantling of citizenship as an enterprise of exclusion. The answer is in something that Robin D. G. Kelley wrote about having learned from his mother: having freedom dreams. Not citizenship dreams. Not ‘being validated as worthy’ dreams. Not dreams of getting yours and shrugging that others don’t. Collective freedom dreams. The quotes at the start of this essay point to the ways that dreams must be both ambitious and connected to histories. Nina Simone speaks of living fear without any qualifiers, caveats or conditions. Arrested Development speaks of wanting to go to another, unknown place, in part, to better know the current place. No movement or quest for liberation works well without both expansiveness and genealogical knowledge. Dreaming of equitable protection, safety, and balance for all living and nonliving beings must necessarily involve reaching beyond our deeply learned ways of seeing ourselves and each other through the eyes of the settler nation-state. The more precise we are with knowing those worn perspectives, the better we may be at dreaming and building on wholly different terms.

17


Link – USFG Evoking the “United States federal government” is part of the genocidal Settler grammar Shapiro 88 (Michael, IR scholar and PPS at the University of Hawaii, The Politics of Representation: Writing practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis, Pub. By University of WI, Madison, p. 95 JMThe international system in general and Guatemala in particular represent, therefore, not innocent sets of objects attracting orderly speech practices; they are parts of a system that has been conjured up in policy-related speech practices over the centuries, practices that have predominated over other possible alternative practices. To say this is to say, among other things, that we could have it otherwise. In evoking the idea of the “United States,” for example, we could refer not to an administrative unit controlled by the federal government but rather to the process by which white Europeans have been consolidating control over the continental domain (now recognized as the United States) in a war with several indigenous (“Indian”) nations. This grammar , within which we could have the “United States” in a different way – as violent process rather than as a static, naturalized reality – would lead us to note that while the armed hostilities have all but ceased, there remains a system of economic exclusion, which has the effect of maintaining a steady attrition rate among native Americans. The war goes on by other means, and the one-sidedness of the battle is still in evidence. For example, in the state of Utah, the life expectancy of the native American is only half that of the European descendant. There is little tendency to evoke this latter kind of grammar to treat what we call the “United States” because it is not an effective grammar with which to do business, as “business” is understood by those who contribute disproportionately to recognized discourses. It does not allow one to negotiate within the dominant discourse which produces “foreign-policy problems” for national leaders, journalists, multinational businesses, or social scientists.

18


Link – Reformism The Doctrine of Discovery justifies the United State’s legal structure. This legitimizes the rule of law, which has been used to perpetuate the ongoing logic of settler colonialism. Each instance in which it is not explicitly rejected is a reaffirmation of its power. Williams 90 (Robert A., teaches at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, serving as the E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and American Indian Studies and Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest, p. 325-328 JM

The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. The history of the American Indian in Western legal thought reveals that a will to empire proceeds most effectively under a rule of law. In the United States, and in the other Western settler-colonized states, that rule begins with the Doctrine of Discovery and its discourse of conquest, which denies fundamental human rights and self-determination to indigenous tribal peoples.1 For the native peoples of the United States, Latin America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, therefore, the end of the history of their colonization begins by denying the legitimacy of and respect for the rule of law maintained by the racist discourse of conquest of the Doctrine of Discovery. This medievally grounded discourse, reaffirmed in Western colonizing law by Chief Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh, vests superior rights of sovereignty over non-Western indigenous peoples and their territories in European- descended governments. The Doctrine of Discovery and its discourse of conquest assert the West’s lawful power to impose its vision of truth on non- Western peoples through a racist, colonizing rule of law. In the United States, the doctrine has proved itself to be a perfect instrument of empire. Under the rules and principles of federal Indian law derived from the doctrine, the United States acquired a continent “in perfect good faith”2 that its wars and acts of genocide directed against Indian people accorded with the rule of law. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the doctrine have extended to the federal government plenary power to control Indian affairs unrestrained by normal constitutional limitations. In case after case, the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply refused to check Congress’s free rein in matters where it was thought that broad discretionary powers were vital to the solution of the immensely difficult “Indian problem.”3 Treaties promising tribes a reserved homeland in perpetuation were wantonly violated; tribes were relocated to distant, barren regions to accommodate white expansion; and tribal lands and resources were repeatedly confiscated to satisfy the needs and destiny of a superior civilization. Besides justifying unquestioned abrogation and unilateral determination of tribal treaty and property rights, the discourse of conquest derived from the Doctrine of Discovery has been interpreted to permit the denial of other fundamental human rights of Indian tribal peoples in the United States.4 Violent suppression ofIndian religious practices and traditional forms of government,5 separation of Indian children from their homes,6 wholesale spoliation of treaty-guaranteed resources,7 forced assimilative programs,8 and involuntary sterilization of Indian women9 represent but a few of the practical extensions of a racist discourse of conquest that at its core regards tribal peoples as normatively deficient and culturally, politically, and morally inferior. And the United States, it is conceded, possesses one of the most “liberal” and “progressive” reputations among the Western nations respecting its treatment of native peoples under the Doctrine of Discovery.10 For other Western colonial states, the history of indigenous peoples’ fate under the West’s rule of law, grounded in the Doctrine of Discovery and its denial of human rights to non-Western tribal peoples, is indeed the stuff of black legend. For half a millennium, whether inscribed in United States Indian law and its central Doctrine of Discovery, in the Spanish jurist Victoria’s Law of Nations, or in Lord Coke’s English common law, Western legal thought has sought to erase the difference presented by the American Indian in order to sustain the privileges of power it accords to Western norms and value structures. Ani- mated by a central orienting vision of its own universalized, hierarchical position among all other discourses, the West’s archaic, medievally derived legal discourse respecting the American Indianis ultimately genocidal in both its practice and its intent . The Doctrine of Discovery was nothing more than the reflection of a set of Eurocentric racist beliefs elevated to the status of a universal principle—one culture’s argument to support its conquest and colonization of a newly discov- ered, alien world. In its form as articulated by Western legal thought and discourse today, however, the peroration of this Eurocentric racist argument is no longer declaimed. Europe during the Discovery era refused to recognize any meaningful legal status or rights for indigenous tribal peoples because “heath- ens” and “infidels” were legally presumed to lack the rational capacity necessary to assume an equal status or to exercise equal rights under the West’s medievally derived colonizing law. Today, principles and rules generated from this Old World discourse of conquest are cited by the West’s domestic and international courts of law to deny

19


indigenous nations the freedom and dignity to govern themselves according to their own vision. Thus as a first step toward the decolonization of the West’s law respecting the American Indian, the Doctrine of Discovery must be rejected. It permits the West to accomplish by law and in good conscience what it accomplished by the sword in earlier eras: the physical and spiritual destruction of indigenous people. The reconstruction of the West’s Indian law so that it would be grounded in a vision rejecting the discourse of conquest contained in the Doctrine of Discovery could begin its search for foundations in New World soil. The principles inherent in the Gus-Wen-Tah, an indigenously articulated New World discourse of peace, suggest the beginnings of a differently oriented vision of a law to govern the relations between the West and non-Western peoples. The principles embodied in the Gus-Wen-Tah, the Two Row Wampum,11 were the basis for all treaties and agreements between the great nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (called the Confederated Iroquois Nations by the European colonial powers) and the great nations of Europe. These basic principles were the covenant chain linking these two different peoples by which each agreed to respect the other's vision. When the Haudenosaunee first came into contact with the European nations, treaties of peace and friendship were made. Each was symbolized by the Gus-Wen-Tan, or Two Row Wampum. There is a bed of white wampum which symbolizes the purity of the agreement. There are two rows of purple, and those two rows have the spirit of your ancestors and mine. There are three beads of wampum separating the two rows and they symbolize two paths or two vessels, travelling down the same river together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian people, their laws, their customs and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people and their laws, their customs and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will try to steer the other's vessel.12 The vision of the Gus-Wen-Tan can be found inscribed throughout the corpora of documents relating the American Indians' legal and political thought and discourse. At the core of this Americanized vision of law is the idea that freedom requires different peoples to respect each other's vision of how their respective vessels should be steered.13 The Doctrine of Discovery, with its denial of territorial and self-determination rights for indigenous peoples equal to the rights of Western peoples, works to deny respect to the Indians' visions in numerous ways. Certainly one of the most threatening is its denial of their right to an equal voice as peoples on the world stage. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, indigenous peoples' complaints of human-rights abuses and demands for territorial protection and self-determination are regarded as matters of exclusive domestic concern within the conqueror's courts and political system. Thus the West's present rule of law denies indigenous peoples an international status in their struggles for survival in the modern world. Such a status could provide indigenous peoples with ready and immediate access to international legal and political forums. Then, indigenous peoples themselves could voice their visions of their rights before the world and seek protection and preservation through means other than those provided by a conqueror's rule of law and its discourses of conquest.14 History records that acts of genocide are most easily concealed in a world atmosphere of complicitous silence; a people is extinguished with a whimper, not a bang. An equal voice would certainly not necessarily guarantee the continued protection and preservation of the centuries-old visions of tribal peoples. Denying that voice , however, would most assuredly assist the efforts of those in power who seek the silent liquidation of colonized tribal peoples. Whether from cupidity or shame, those Western-derived colonial sovereignties that continue to rely on Western-derived legal discourse as a shield against tribal peoples' assertions of abuses of fundamental human rights would conveniently have the world forget that the anachronistic premises at the core of their discursive practices once unquestioningly legitimated the use of the sword against indigenous nations. That tribal nations have not forgotten the history of conquest justified by Western legal thought and discourse explains why indigenous peoples now seek to redefine radically the conceptions of their rights andstatus in international and domestic legal forums. Pushed to the brink of extinction by the premises inherent in the West's vision of the world and the Indians' lack of a place in that world, contemporary tribalism recognizes the compelling necessity of articulating and defining its own vision within the global community. Only then, in the free play by which a shared global discourse may evolve, can tribalism's differently oriented vision be fairly considered as something other than an anachronistic inconvenience to the West's relentless, consumption-oriented world view. But such a discourse, with its potential for broadening perspectives on our human condition, is currently suppressed by a set of medievally derived prior restraints. Discourses of conquest, grounded in archaic, racist ideas that, once revealed, could not be redeemed by those who relied on them, continue to be asserted today by the West to deny respect to the Indians' vision.

20

National Association for Urban Debate LeaguesSettler Colonialism KLink – Settler Education

The aff functions as part of the US settler colonial project of replacement. In academic settings like debate the bodies of non-white scholars are literally replaced by white scholarship Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 (Eve, State University of New York and Ruben A., University of Toronto “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity”, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Volume 29, Number 1, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/557744ffe4b013bae3b7af63/t/557f2fffe4b043c28125cd3e/1434398719056/Tuck+%26+Gaztambide-Fern%C3%A1ndez_Curriculum%2C+replacement%2C+and+settler+futurity.pdf JM

This article does the simultaneously blunt and delicate work of exhuming the ways in which curriculum and its history in the United States has invested in settler colonialism, and the permanence of the settler - colonial nation state . In particular, we will describe the settler

colonial curricular project of replacement , which aims to vanish Indigenous peoples and replace them with settlers, who see themselves as the rightful claimants to land, and indeed, as indigenous . To do this, we employ the story of Natty Bumppo,

as an extended allegory to understand the ways in which the field of curriculum has continued to absorb, silence, and replace the non-white other, perpetuating white supremacy and settlerhood. As we discuss in this article, even as multiple responses have evolved to counter how curriculum continues to enforce colonization and racism, these responses become refracted and adjusted to be absorbed by the

whitestream, like the knowledge gained by Natty Bumppo, only to turn to the source and accuse them of savagery, today through a rhetorical move against identity politics. White curriculum scholars re-occupy the “spaces” opened by responses to racism and colonization in the curriculum, such as multiculturalism and critical race theory, absorbing the knowledge, but once again displacing the bodies out to the margins. Thus, we will discuss how various interventions have tried to dislodge the aims of replacement , including multiculturalism, critical race theory, and browning, but have been sidelined and reappropriated in ways that reinscribe settler colonialism and settler futurity.

21


Imp – Antiblackness/Settler ColonialismSettler-colonial and anti-black subjectivities are co-constitutive, which sustains their systems of power that are exported, fueling imperialist wars and systemic violence.Leroy 16 (Justin, Assistant Professor of History at University of California – Davis, “Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism,” Theory & Event, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2016 JM These black men and women reported being pursued by their former masters and subjected to tremendous violence. What are we to make of the fact that black slaves petitioned a government actively hostile to the interests of their enslavers in pursuit of a form of freedom that indigenous studies scholars might call complicit with the ideology of settlement? How do we make sense of the fact that indigenous people used any means at their disposal, up to and including murder, to prevent black encroachment into lands already under assault by the federal government? As the United S tates used black freedom to justify indigenous displacement, it relegated slavery and its meanings to the past, and produced a myth about modern US nationhood in which both Indians and slaves were absent . It is easy to see the ways that the US government exploited tensions surrounding emancipation in Native nations to set up these encounters between Natives and freedpeople. More difficult is working through the meaning of such encounters without invoking the exceptionalism of either slavery or colonialism to justify the actions of any set of actors. The historical complexities of state colonial power cannot be captured simply by asserting that the freedmen’s status as slaves entitled them to pursue freedom despite strengthening Native dispossession, or that the sovereignty claims of the Chickasaw and Choctaw entitled them to maintain racial slavery to defy the power of the United States. These complexities should, instead, emphasize the fact that freedom articulated through colonialism is not robust freedom, or that sovereignty expressed through racial slavery is not a useful model of sovereignty. In an earlier period, the United States pursued expansion to further racial slavery. After the Civil War, black freedom became a ruse to justify the continued erosion of Native sovereignty. The projects of slavery and colonialism have never been concerned with which came first , or which is more elemental—they have in fact thrived on the slippages and ambiguities of their relationship to one another. Iyko Day has cautioned against “the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism .” 18 The United S tates emerged as a racial capitalist settler state through the simultaneous operation of colonialism and anti-blackness . For all their differences, settler colonialism and slavery are violent justifications for extermination —of bodies, of sovereignty, of self-possession. Suspending claims to exceptionalism allows us to see how such forms of extermination blend into one another. But these blended forms did not exhaust themselves in fraught nineteenth-century encounters between black and Native people. The U nited States has exported the dual logic of colonialism and racism through its own imperial ventures as well as through its political and cultural relationships to other settler states. This export process has been crucial to the overlapping influence of ideas about settlement and blackness even in colonial situations that may lack a clear indigenous population or a history of slavery , as is the case in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US expansion into the Pacific and Middle East . As important as it is to be mindful of the dangers posed by collapsing the distinction between slavery and settler colonialism, any theory that holds the two apart or attempts to establish primacy between them cannot account for the interlocked histories that inform colonialism and its resistance . Suturing indigenous dispossession to US imperial projects writ large, Byrd has argued that “the United S tates has used executive, legislative, and juridical means to make ‘Indian’ those peoples and nations who stand in the way of US military and economic desires.”19 Byrd’s claim is important for understanding not only how settler colonialism is ongoing in the United States itself, but also how its structure travels, fueling ideas behind non-settler forms of colonialism and warfare. Byrd challenges the long-standing historiographical distinction between continental expansion and overseas empire, and allows us to see why, for example, Henry Dawes thought Indian policy would be an apt template for governing the new acquisition of the Philippines . Dawes, who infamously brought about the end of collective tribal land ownership, once opined in the Atlantic Monthly that when it came to the Philippines, “our policy with the Indians becomes an object lesson worthy of careful and candid study.”20 Supreme Court decisions concerning Natives in 1831 (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia)

22


and 1845 (United States v. William Rogers) produced the legal status of “dependent state” without citizenship; imperialists of the late nineteenth century relied on this case law to theorize potential solutions to the problem of how to incorporate non-white races under American control without granting them citizenship rights.21 It is also worth noting that it was precisely the history of emancipation, which culminated in the Equal Protections Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that necessitated these intellectual gymnastics—citizenship with unequal rights based on race could no longer be legally countenanced. When critics of expansion raised the concern that the annexation the Philippines would mean providing citizenship to its inhabitants, imperialists countered that the United States’ history with Indians proved such claims false, paving the way for an empire composed of a white citizenry. A similar pattern followed US imperial wars throughout the twentieth century . For example, in his classic work on frontier mythology, Richard Slotkin described the Vietnam War as the “last great Indian war . ”22 And the metaphor of “Indian Country” as a frontier to be civilized has persisted into the contemporary era of imperial warfare in Afghanistan and Ira q .23 But twentieth-century colonial formations depended too on policing blackness and the legacies of slavery. One of the major consequences of US empire has been the export of anti-black racism . Amy Kaplan argues, “During the era of Jim Crow, white supremacists did battle on two related fronts: the foreign wars against Spain and its colonies aspiring for national independence, and the domestic struggle against African Americans fighting to achieve civil and political rights.” American empire gave white supremacy new life, making it the conduit through which North and South reconciled after the devastation of the Civil War. White supremacy was, in her words, the “definition of modern American nationhood in the global arena.”24 Expansion functioned as a way of conquering darker races abroad at the very moment that the dark race at home was forgetting its proper place in the American racial hierarchy. Many black Americans identified similarities between their own treatment and that of colonial subjects , and adopted an anti-imperial critique . Others, no doubt recalling tales of black soldiers fighting for emancipation three decades earlier, were seduced by the idea of proving their fitness for equal citizenship by becoming foot soldiers for empire.25 Even the most hopeful, however, would soon learn that American imperialism meant bringing American racism abroad .

23


Imp – Environment DestructionPlace based education is necessary to reverse the trend of ecological devastation wrought by a violent relationship to Land. An understanding of Land and Place must come before any policy that contends with a world defined by settler colonialism.Koushik 2016 (Jada Renee, Ph.D Candidate @ the University of Saskatchewan, “Considerations of place in sustainability education policy: How local contexts inform the engagement of sustainability in education policy enactment and practice”, published in Journal of Sustainability Education Vol. 11, February 2016 JM

As ecological devastation increases, children are less likely to attach to the land. Place-based education reconnects people to the land, helps them become rooted, and promotes the conservation of natural places/resources (Ardoin, 2006). Children must reap the psychological and spiritual benefits from nature in order to experience a long-term connection and commitment to a place, and in turn the environment more generally (Louv, 2005; Semken & Brandt, 2010). Connecting with a place can ignite creativity, wonder, and appreciation for the world (Louv, 2005). This attachment can bind people to a place and give them meaning and a sense of belonging, and an attachment to land is good for the person and good for the land (Louv, 2005). In order to move towards a more emplaced concept of education, there are numerous examples that can be learned from Indigenous worldviews, perspectives, and frameworks . Education is extremely significant in political and economic life, especially in capitalist societies that pair education with the production of knowledge economies (Cook & Hemming, 2011). As opposed to using a process of indoctrination, which is routinely used in the capitalist/Western society, education in the traditional setting occurred by example. Children learned by hunting, trapping, building, fishing, canoeing, foraging, and spending substantial amounts of time with parents, elders, and other children on the land. Indigenous practice and theory understands “land as encompassing all of the earth, including the urban, and as much more than just the material ” (Tuck, McKenzie & McCoy, 2014, p. 8). Thus, connecting students to the land can serve as a catalyst to disrupt dominant discourses surrounding Indigenous sovereignty and settler narratives surrounding land and property. Land education offers an opportunity for educators and students to “question educational practices and theories that justify settler occupation of stolen land” (Tuck, McKenzie & McCoy, 2014, p. 8). Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy (2014) argue: Land education puts Indigenous epistemological and ontological accounts of land at the center, including Indigenous understandings of land, Indigenous language in relation to land, and Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism. It attends to constructions and storying of land and repatriation by Indigenous peoples, documenting and advancing Indigenous agency and land rights (p. 13). Whether referred to as land education or place-based education, the need to indigenize school curriculum appears to be an imperative component of the process. Reyes-Garcia et al. (2010) state that a “major challenge lies in re-shaping the school curriculum so it includes not only the content but also the teaching methods (i.e., field trips, observation, and informal instruction) that societies have put in place for the transmission of local environmental knowledge” (p. 312). This contextualized learning can be viewed as a type of indigenism, which is a body of thought advocating and elaborating diverse cultures (e.g., beliefs, behaviour, values, material products, and symbols) emergent from diverse places. It is purported that “[t]o indigenize an action or object is the act of making something of a place” (Wildcat, 2001a, p. 32). Thus, if we are attentive about processes and relationships when we experience places, we will invariably learn. This type of emplaced learning is further illuminated by Theobald & Siskar (2008): A particular place on earth can be a kind of curricular lens through which all traditional school subjects may be closely examined. The immediacy and relevance of place in the lives of students can be a huge catalyst to develop learning- learning at the level of understanding (p. 216). Appreciating that every place is shaped by various histories, stories, circumstances, and experiences, it is impossible to be prescriptive about place-conscious lessons or units (Theobald & Siskar, 2008). Moreover, individual “[p]laces cannot be bounded but are inexplicably linked to wider scales, with particular interactions and articulations of social relations, through a mixing of local and larger-scale processes” (Cook & Hemming, 2011, p. 4). Cook & Hemming (2001) note that “[e]ducation spaces and places are no exception: they are active and dynamic forums that cannot be understood apart from their wider social, cultural, political and economic contexts” (p. 4). Thus, “a politics of scale is necessary in enabling critique and in rearticulating forms of

24


education policy-making and practice that prioritize interscaler local ‘good sense’ [sic] over neoliberal global ‘common sense’ [sic]” (McKenzie, 2012, p. 165). These politics of scale must be must be brought to educational policy (McKenzie, 2012) and each place (e.g., classroom, school, school district) should collectively determine the sorts of questions that they wish to explore based upon current problems that impact their community.

25


Imp – Gender/Heteropatriarchy Settler Colonialism naturalizes heteropatriarchal norms in order to create an ideal, heteronormative citizenry, normalizing sexual violence Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013 (Maile, assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Eve, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at University of Toronto, Angie, Director of Title VI Indian Education Program for Portland Public Schools, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy, Feminist Formations, Vol. 25 No. 1, Spring JMThe first challenge is to problematize and theorize the intersections of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism. Native feminist theories reveal that a key aspect of the relentlessness of settler colonialism is the consistency and thus naturalization of heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism. The heteropaternal organization of citizens into nuclear families , each expressing a “proper,” modern sexuality, has been a cornerstone in the production of a citizenry that will support and bolster the nation-state . Thus, as settler nations sought to disappear Indigenous peoples’ complex structures of government and kinship, the management of Indigenous peoples’ gender roles and sexuality was also key in remaking Indigenous peoples into settler state citizens. For example, in Canada, the Indian Act of 1876 regulated the marriage of Indigenous peoples to confer lines of descent, property, and landholding to men, even though most societies were matrilineal (Barker 2008; Simpson 2008). Furthermore, across the United States and Canada, boarding schools removed Native children from their families , aiming to both sever their ties with their families and home communities and to destroy the transfer of Indigenous identity, politics, and culture to the next generations. The boarding-school process of “kill the Indian and save the man” attempted to mold Native children into Western gender roles, and often also subjected them to sexual violence.6 The imposition of heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism does much to interrupt Indigenous nations’ very “sense of being a people” (Smith 2005, 3), with serious material consequences for Indigenous nations’ futures. It is important to note that in many cases, the enforcement of “proper” gender roles is entangled in settler nations’ attempts to limit and manage Indigenous peoples’ claims to land. In Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 instituted a system whereby Native Hawaiians of 50 percent “blood” or more would be able to lease (never own) small plots of land called homesteads from the government, in lieu of more substantial land rights.7 Because of this state-authored blood-quantum policy, which remains in effect today with few revisions, some Native Hawaiians have come to defend the 50 percent blood definition as the “traditional” standard to be recognized as Native Hawaiian, despite the fact that Native Hawaiian genealogy has long been inclusive along both patrilineal and matrilineal lines and never been solely defined by blood amounts (Kauanui 2008b). As a consequence, Native Hawaiian women are faced with a particular pressure to partner with certain Native Hawaiian men in order to possibly produce children who can still meet the 50 percent blood quantum, and they are sometimes criticized for failing to “save the race” when they do not (Arvin forthcoming)Yet, Native Hawaiian women, like other Indigenous women, do not need to be “saved” from the ways heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism have taken root within Indigenous communities. They are already, and have long been, working toward decolonization within and beyond their own communities’ boundaries. Many Indigenous women activists have refused the false binary between fighting for “women’s issues” and fighting for “Native issues,” which for Indigenous women are always coiled together. Suggesting that women’s issues should be left out of Native and other radical forms of nationalisms (such as black nationalism) or dealt with only after decolonization is achieved reflects yet another way that heteropatriarchy, heteropaternalism, and settler colonialism have so deeply shaped Indigenous communities. Native feminist theories suggest that actively decolonizing the very process of decolonization is just as important as achieving Indigenous communities’ political end-goals.

26


Imp – Laundry List All contemporary neoliberal violence, from the global war on terror to domestic racialized policing, borrows from a plethora of settler colonial techniques of social control based on the settler’s right to control surplus populaceWolfe & Lloyd 16 (Patrick & David, historian & professor at UC Riverside, ‘Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 6, Issue 2 JMIt is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of capital expansion and accordingly to be formations lodged in the past. This introduction argues that the ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand military occupation and the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation. It also explores the ways in which the formations of the contemporary state, whether military, economic, political, legal or cultural, may remain grounded in apparently peripheral or outmoded modes of domination . Understanding the neoliberal regime of accumulation in terms of its continuing debt to such histories will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of resistance and dissent in the present. We live in an epoch that is witnessing the transformation of the state and its governmental institutions. The so-called global war on terror, which has been used to legitimate an inordinate increase in the development of surveillance technologies and their deployment against the citizenry, has coincided with global regimes of austerity. Increased state expenditure on armaments and security devices produced by private corporations goes along with cuts to, and the privatization of, state-furnished public services, from fundamental utilities such as power and water to schooling, healthcare and social welfare. This new mode of accumulation generates the requirement for a new form of state. In this still-emergent state formation, which we may call neoliberal, the state's role is being redrawn to furnish a conduit for the more rapid distribution of what were once public goods into the hands of corporations. This new mode of accumulation is effectively a renewed movement of enclosure, this time of a ‘second commons’ – that is, of those public goods historically wrested from the state by social movements in compensation for the original loss of commons: social security, public utilities, education and, in the form of both urban and national parklands, even the remnants of public space. These public patrimonies of the modern liberal state that emerged from an earlier moment of enclosure and dispossession represent vast storehouses of capital, resources, services and infrastructure. Held in common for generations, these are now targeted for expropriation and exploitation. The crisis of profitability that confronted capitalism in the early 1970s led to economic restructuring on a vast scale, from the off-shoring of manufacture, enabled by post-Fordist modes of ‘flexible’ production and by containerization, to the sustained assault on the welfare state. In the so-called ‘industrialized world’, such measures took place mostly piecemeal and therefore over an extended period. Elsewhere, the transformation was concerted, violent and totalizing in its ambitions, requiring the establishment of fascist (or, in the State Department's euphemism, ‘authoritarian’) regimes. Famously, Salvador Allende's Chile was the first state to be subjected to the kind of make-over that would furnish the model, sometimes partial, sometimes wholesale, for what was required to impose the emerging neoliberal mode of governance : a violent coup, the disposal of political opponents, the rapid privatization of the economy, the suppression of trades unions and other democratic social movements, and the installation of a severe and permanent regime of policing in the name of public order. Naomi Klein has termed the principles that guide such radical transformations of whole societies ‘the shock doctrine’ and suggested that the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America furnished the ‘laboratories’ for the emerging legal and political institutions that neoliberalism, initially dubbed ‘monetarism’ or ‘Thatcherism’, would seek to install. Later, she argues, such naked interventions as military coups would be less frequently required, economic crisis itself being sufficient pretext for the imposition of capitalist ‘reforms’ that had been tested in the violent laboratories of the global south.1 Even then, however, the necessity for the increasing deployment of intensified policing remains: part of the ‘shock’ that economic crisis administers, like natural disasters and the artificial disasters of war and occupation that have proven peculiarly profitable to capitalist corporations, is the large-scale destruction of older productive forces and the unemployment of large numbers of people, many of whom are consigned to a permanent class of the redundant or under-employed. The increasing reliance on automation in production as well as the extortion of higher rates of productivity from workers faced with precarious employment in deindustrializing economies have made redundant populations seem likely to become a constant feature of neoliberal states . Elsewhere, in the former colonial world, huge subaltern segments of the populace are unlikely ever to be absorbed into the labor market in a meaningful way. Faced with the prospect of disaffected, unincorporable masses , both internationally and domestically, the problem for the neoliberal state – for which this surplus population is a condition of its

27


economic regime – is how to manage and contain the threat it poses. The paramil of the police domestically and the deployment of the actual military in the operations of permanent war redefined as policing have become the norm , lately under the alibi of the war on terror and homeland security. In this asymmetrical warfare of the entitled against the disenfranchised, the deadly if preposterous situation emerges that the most highly armed states in the world assure their populations that they (or their interests) are under a permanent state of siege, diffusely threatened by rag-tag platoons of the dispossessed who, despite the considerable differences between them, uniformly qualify for the indiscriminate designation ‘terrorists’. To note this is neither to endorse the kaleidoscopic variety of ideologies and religious beliefs that motivate such groups, nor to collapse into a single framework of resistance the very diverse phenomena they represent. It is, rather, to problematize a narrative that, for over a decade, has legitimated the violent rise of the neoliberal state, with its multiplying encroachments on the civil liberties that were, at least in name, the hallmark of liberalism; its endless conduct of war in the name of peace and freedom; its inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum seekers internationally; its infliction of austerity, incarceration and police brutality on growing segments of its populations domestically; and its arbitrary and lethal interventions globally in the name of humanitarianism. From the hard right to the liberal center, from the faux frontier bluster of George W. Bush to the moralizing condescension of Barack Obama, the same rhetoric of defensive and pre-emptive action against enemies that externally surround or internally infest the nation reigns. At the same time, anti-immigrant scare-mongering conflates migrants, whether driven by economic or political necessities, with terrorist enemies, militarizing the borders of states in the name of security. Never has Walter Benjamin's aphorism that, from the perspective of the oppressed, ‘the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’2 seemed to express so general a condition. It is highly significant that the distinctive characteristics of this emergent global regime have been locally prefigured in modes of repression developed internally by settler colonial states. As Israeli architect and specialist on urban warfare, Eyal Weizman, has argued, for instance, the West Bank can be seen as an extreme model – perhaps a laboratory – of a territorial and urban conflict that can take place in other places. Globalization takes the periphery straight to the center, the frontier between the First and Third worlds starts running through the middle of world cities.3 Weizmann's phrasing signals a genealogy for contemporary transformations in the longer history of colonialism as a repertoire of both tropes and practices of social control, brought together today in Israel's operations as a settler colonial state, anomalous only in that its project of expansion remains unfinished.4 The notable convergence of Israel and the USA (together with an ever-compliant Australia), expressed as much in their political solidarity as in their military and security collaborations, suggests to us a wider historical affinity between states that share a settler colonial history, one that continues to impress itself on both psychic and institutional formations. In this respect, to Weizmann's invocation of the first and third worlds, we should add the histories of dispossession and resistance through which Indigenous peoples of the ‘fourth world’ have shaped our understanding of the dynamics of settler colonialism and its lessons for the present. We suggest that the fundamental continuity between the historical development of European settler colonialism and the present-day development of the neoliberal world order resides in the exigencies of managing surplus populations. So far as settlers have been concerned, the salient surplus has, of course, been the Native population , whose refractory presence has prompted a range of techniques of elimination – from outright homicide to various forms of removal and/or confinement, and, once their numbers have been appropriately reduced in the post-frontier era, to Natives’ assimilation into settler society – techniques that have met with mixed success in the face of Native modes of resistance which have varied as creatively as the settlers’ own repertoire of strategies. In this overall historical process, the key shift is the ending of the frontier , which generally coincides with the consolidation of the settler state , and which is typically marked by intensified programs of Native assimilation, so many mopping-up exercises for civilization. Thus it is consistent that Israel, which remains bogged down in an incomplete expansion of its frontier, should rigorously eschew any semblance of Native assimilation, insisting instead on the sharpest of distinctions between Palestinians, who may or may not be citizen/residents of the Israeli state, and members of the so-called ‘Jewish nation’ wherever they may live. The exclusion of the Palestinian population is particularly apparent in the ease with which shifting economic and demographic circumstances – especially the large-scale immigration of Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) and Russians – have transformed what was once a reserve Palestinian labor force into a largely unemployed surplus. Bereft of potential productive utility, and with pauperization attenuating its value as a market, the Palestinian population has become subject to policies of removal and confinement that recall those adopted by other settler states while the expansion of their frontiers remained incomplete. Locally, therefore, Israel is straightforwardly settler colonial and bears comparison in important respects to the respective histories of settler societies such as Australia or the USA in the eras before these societies had completed the initial seizure of Native peoples’ land and inheritances. Globally, however, the twenty-first century context in which Israel is seeking to complete the seizure of what remains of Mandate Palestine differs crucially from the nineteenth-century context in which settlers in Australia and North America completed their seizure of the Native estate. Globally, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America took place in the context of (and formatively enabled) the titanic growth of industrial capitalism. As Karl Polanyi observed, doing scant justice to Marx, an unprecedented feature of the emergence of industrial society was the sheer scale of the investment that was involved in factories. Not even shipbuilding had previously come close to the financial input required by the establishment of factories, with their heavy plant and infrastructure. Nor had any previous investment required maintenance for the length of time that it took factories to become profitable. To vouchsafe these investments, and to project factories’ viability forward through generations, required the total reorganization of society, complete with novel forms of surveillance, policing and war-making, that marked industrialization in the nineteenth century.5 This much is hardly novel. For our purposes, the crucial feature of the great nineteenth-century transformation is that it did not necessarily conduce to permanently superfluous populations. Rather, working populations grew dramatically. In addition to providing capital

28


with its labor, the industrial proletariat provided a market for the fruits of its own alienated production. True, temporary labor surpluses were generated in the course of the periodic slumps and depressions that overtook the capitalist economy, especially after the 1870s, but this labor could be re-employed, even if only for warfare, once industrial demand was reinstated. Moreover, throughout this period, colonial settlement provided an outlet for the Malthusian excess, industrial society's surplus poor, who departed their Dickensian slums for Indigenous people's stolen homelands. The present situation is entirely different from the socially expansive context of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. As many have noted, in the phenomenon of automation, capitalism has, as it were, over-succeeded, not only freeing itself from dependence on troublesome human labor but thereby simultaneously generating a population that, in contrast to waged labor, is not even much use as a market. As distinct from resistant Natives, this human surplus is produced within capitalism rather than external to it. In common with Natives, however, it obstructs rather than enables capitalist expansion. It is in relation to this community of redundancy, we believe, that settler colonialism's inventory of local strategies is becoming increasingly congenial to neoliberalism's emergent world order. As we have noted elsewhere, in relation to Black people in the contemporary USA, the blatant racial zoning of large cities and the penal system suggests that, once colonized people outlive their utility , settler societies can fall back on the repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby they have also dealt with the Native surplus.6 In this connection, we might view the phenomenon of warehousing, characterized by Klein, Jeff Halper and, above all, by Mike Davis,7 as prefigured in the late-nineteenth-century Indian reservation. The comparison may also serve to qualify the pessimism that consideration of this topic understandably engenders. Territorial concentration is both confining and enabling. From the settlers’ point of view, Indian reservations may have originated as holding pens for conquered peoples, but they also constitute unsurrendered, albeit diminished, repositories of Native sovereignty, focal points for survival and renewal.

29


Imp – War Settler Colonialism is the root cause of war. The western conception of indigeneity is the foundation for western intervention Rana, 14 (Aziz Rana, Cornell University, Settler wars and the national security state, Settler Colonial Studies, 2014 JM

Frederick Jackson Turner famously stated that “the first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest” and that “the rifle and the ax” were his principal “symbols”. For my remarks, I plan to develop this thought by assessing what settler wars on the American frontier – specifically conflicts with native peoples over land and material resources – tell us about the contemporary national security state. Due to limitations of time, the argument I am going to make is a schematic one, so bear with me in its bluntness and lack of nuance. The basic claim is that we tend to think of frontier wars between settlers and natives as episodes in a distant historical past that say very little about the present. But in actuality, it was precisely through these conflicts that American settlers developed key political and legal scripts concerning which political communities can claim full sovereignty as well as who rightly enjoys meaningful protections during wartime. Today, these scripts continue to influence foreign and domestic policy – not only in the United States and Europe but even in postcolonial states – and mirror current debates (such as over the status of non-state actors or the use of drones in international humanitarian law). For all these reasons, I think it is worth taking a moment to go back to the early nineteenth century and to revisit especially how American jurists in the context of the frontier conceived of the legal rules governing war with native communities. To begin with, a quick word about international humanitarian law (IHL) (or the law of armed conflict) may be useful. IHL has long been thought of – in the nineteenth century as well as today – as providing both a “sword” and a “shield”. In other words, the historic purpose behind IHL was to sanction practices that during peace time would be viewed as criminal. For instance, although in peace time you cannot engage in murder, during warfare certain forms of violence against individuals become legally acceptable. As a result, the laws of war provide a sword to belligerents, justifying their capacity to employ coercive violence. At the same time, these laws are also meant to be a shield to those groups caught up in armed conflicts; they are supposed to establish clear limitations and constraints on the use of force and to ensure that individuals (combatants and civilians) enjoy basic rights. What settler wars raised , in the interaction between the US federal government and American Indian nations, was a central question about whether communities whose forms of political and social organization were not cognizable under traditional ideas of Western statecraft , especially the Westphalian state, would nonetheless be treated as self-determining and rights bearing subjects . After independence, one of the very first responses to this question was presented by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh. As I discuss in my book, The Two Faces of American Freedom, the case concerned whether American courts should respect the validity of revolutionary-era land purchases between white settlers and native peoples. In speaking for a unanimous Court and holding such sales invalid, Marshall argued that private citizens could not buy land directly from American Indians. Rather the US federal government enjoyed ultimate title to the land and alone could extinguish native occupancy. I am not going to go through Marshall’s holding in great detail, but he grounded his argument in what he called the “Doctrine of Discovery”. According to Marshall, this doctrine had long been recognized as part of international law (or the law of nations), and gave to European states in the New World an “exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy either by purchase or conquest.” Such customary imperial authority meant that native peoples did not possess legally recognizable sovereignty, akin to European states, over their own territory. Indeed, if a European state were to stake a claim to territory within the American zone of discovery (but still practically controlled by an Indian nation) this was in fact an act of aggression against the USA, the relevant sovereign power. A far less explored element of this case is how Marshall struggled with the issue of frontier confrontations between settlers and natives, and particularly which laws were supposed to govern these military conflicts. As a normative matter, Marshall was deeply wary of defending indigenous conquest – not to mention frontier violence against native peoples – through arguments about the “superior genius” of Europeans or the “character and religion” of American Indians. He viewed many of these claims as ultimately justifications for the mistreatment of native communities. Nonetheless, Marshall accepted the inevitability of war on the frontier and maintained that the Doctrine of Discovery could be legitimately converted into a right of conquest – one that presumed that local peoples could be removed at will by settlers. The problem as he saw it was that native societies at root could never be made peaceable, a fact tied for Marshall to the very “nobility” of the American Indian. Precisely because the US federal government was engaged in a project of conquering their land, native peoples would refuse to submit. In his view, American Indians were “as brave and as high spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence.” This indigenous bravery meant that in refusing to submit native peoples would use all the available means of

30


violence at their disposal. And as a consequence, they could not be counted on to engage in self limitation or to abide by basic principles of just war, principles that European states supposedly respected. Unless white settlers conquered definitively their indigenous neighbors on the frontier, American colonists would risk “exposing themselves and their families to the perpetual hazard of being massacred”. It is for this reason that Marshall reached a stunning conclusion: both the laws of war and the laws of occupation that applied among Europeans – and ensured that “the conquered shall not be wantonly oppressed”–could not apply with native peoples . For Marshall, “the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war.” Any effort to extend legal protections, ordinarily granted to European publics, to native communities would be fatal to internal security . It would be the equivalent of waging war with one hand tied behind your back. In a sense, Marshall, whatever his qualms with the frontier treatment of indigenous neighbors, nonetheless articulated an initial defense of total war. Such war was acceptable in the context of conflicts with native peoples, precisely because settlers would be trapped in an asymmetrical fight with an opponent that ignored the classic rules of military engagement. Marshall’s arguments have had a remarkably long shelf life in both national security policy and international humanitarian law. First of all, one could well argue that for Americans (perhaps even more so than the Civil War or the World Wars) it was the confrontation with native peoples that helped to define what “war” itself meant. Marshall’s claims about the limited rules that applied in the context of the frontier were directly tied to a view about what actually constitutes a legally cognizable war, complete with a formal declaration. Real wars were those between states where assumptions about reciprocity applied – these were conflicts governed by limitations on coercive force and fought between legitimate sovereigns. But conflicts with native peoples , however violent, were not true “wars”; they were skirmishes at the edges of American power. Since US expansion into territory within its zone of discovery was not invasion (unlike an aggressive act against an actually sovereign state), conflicts on the frontier were simply threats that needed to be pacified for domestic security. And since the ordinarily rules did not apply to these pacification efforts, not surprisingly federal officials persistently refused to formalize these encounters with declarations of war or explicit congressional authorizations. According to this logic, you do not declare war against the Indian communities in the Southwest or on the Great Plains because they do not have a structure that looks like the state, they cannot claim sovereignty, and above all they cannot be expected behave as a rational state would. One of the great ironies of these presumptions about what constitutes “real” war (and so brings with it reciprocal rights protections) is that in historical fact the “real” wars – think only of the two World Wars – produced a degree of unconstrained and organized violence on both sides that dwarfed any danger posed by native peoples fighting to protect their land. If Marshall’s claims have justified a framework for what counts as legitimate war, they also have been integrated into the basic discourses of IHL and underscore the dark side of the laws of war themselves. The classic argument made by public international lawyers as well as by legal historians is that the expansion of IHL across the globe in the twentieth century was really a bumpy but progressive spread of basic rights. But again in historical fact, the very construction and entrenchment of IHL rested in practice on arguments not that different from those made by Marshall. Indeed, as Frédéric Mégret has shown in his essential article, “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’” European lawyers in the late nineteenth century who played a central role in devising IHL norms developed their views against the backdrop of colonial wars in Asia and Africa. In the process, they too employed similar legal and political scripts in making claims about the limited responsibilities owed indigenous peoples (due to the presumed failure of local communities to distinguish non-combatants from combatants, to self-limit, or to respect legal reciprocity). For Mégret, the way that non-Western communities finally got treated as formally sovereign equals and rights-bearing subjects during wartime was by simply adopting the modern Westphalian state after independence, and in particular by replicating the institutions of a standing army and thus the national security state (complete with hierarchy, discipline, and a separate military class of experts to make key decisions about the use of force). Now, there are evident parallels between the American frontier context and the present moment. The first and most obvious is in the title Mégret gives his article and concerns the status today of non-state actors. We see a clear continuity between those presently viewed as unwilling and unable to obey the laws of war (unlawful combatants) and native communities in the historical past. But more tellingly, we also see the continuity of claims about provisional or incomplete sovereignty. Just as expansion into native land was not viewed as invasion because of the limited control exercised by native peoples over their territory, contemporary American policymakers argue that you can use specific kinds of violence, like drone attacks , in places such as Yemen (whether or not they are a hostile nation), because Yemen is fundamentally a failed state. Using a drone attack in Yemen is different than using one in Germany or France given the underlying nature of the political community and existing institutional structures. The very persistence of claims – even in the era of formal sovereign equality – about provisional sovereignty suggests the embeddedness of settler frameworks in our national security narratives . One need look no further than the common security conversation

31


about the dangers of asymmetrical conflict. Now one might think, just as an objective fact, that the relevant asymmetry in our post-9/11 world – not to mention the settler wars that Marshall discussed nearly 200 years ago – is an asymmetry between a state that can organize tremendous resources to engage in large scale forms of violence and its far weaker foe. Moreover, this asymmetry is further compounded by the additional fact that the relevant state claims the sword of IHL (all its coercive legitimacy) but rejects most of the shields that might limit it (those protections guaranteed to rights-bearing subjects). But in point of fact that the argument about asymmetry is the one we have all been conditioned to accept by our national security discourse. This is the claim that the USA finds itself fighting wars at a military disadvantage due to existing rules of engagement. As we have seen, such a claim goes all the way back to the settler conflicts and recurs time and again: in the late nineteenth century colonial wars in Asia and Africa, during independence struggles in the midtwentieth century, throughout the Cold War in the depiction of guerrillas, and of course at the present moment. Perhaps even more pointedly we see the continued power of classic colonial scripts in how the national security state has itself become the universal institutional form governing the connection between statecraft and warfare. One of the remarkable features of the early twenty-first century is the practical elimination of alternative modes of political and social life, modes that proliferated at the time Marshall penned his opinion in Johnson v. M’Intosh. Today, even in postcolonial settings, institutions marked by executive centralization, limited transparency, and a professional military increasingly defines modern decision making in the context of armed conflict or presumed emergency. Indeed, there are tremendous incentives for previously colonized communities to adopt these dominant forms of statecraft; such forms not only help validate claims to territorial sovereignty but also greatly enhance the capacity of governments to mobilize resource, protect citizens, and (more ominously) suppress dissent. Still, at the end of the day one might say, what is the problem with either the dominance of the Westphalian state (particularly in its national security iteration) or an IHL regime that privileges state actors over non-state ones? Certainly belligerents during armed conflicts that refuse to self limit or do not respect reciprocity should be seen as problematic. But it is nonetheless worth noting that the dominance of the national security state – its institutions and legal prerequisites – comes at profound costs (and this is where I will end). To begin with, these structures drawn from the Westphalian model and adopted in colonized societies reinscribe historic conflicts between settlers and natives but only now between what Antony Anghie has called the third and the fourth world (i.e. postcolonial states and local indigenous communities within them). In contemporary struggles over land and resources, precisely due to the logics of statecraft indigenous peoples often still find themselves framed as outsiders without meaningful political legitimacy or full rights-bearing status . This leaves them in the remarkable position of facing threats and coercion in the post-independence period from previous anti-colonial allies. More generally, the global mimicry of a particular mode of statecraft – tied to a colonial past and bound today to national security discourses – has pointedly failed to produce a more peaceful global community , precisely what jurists like Marshall imagined would be the result of an international community of “civilized” Westphalian states. Instead, this form has generated an insulated war-making apparatus , able to organize resources on a vast scale and engage in total war . Such power has been a recipe not only for truly brutal international conflicts but also for the domestic application of violence against suspected internal enemies, often deemed “terrorists”. And in the post-9/11 American context, the persistence of official claims about asymmetry, provisional sovereignty, and threats from failed states and non-state actors has in practice promoted greater not less instability at the present day edges of US power. Not unlike Marshall’s old fears of ineradicable danger from native communities, these official judgments have justified a continual project of expanding the American footprint into the frontier , a footprint that has left in its wake more local insurrections and even greater need for territorial presence. The ultimate result is a vicious cycle of temporary pacification and sustained conflict , one sadly familiar to scholars of the American frontier but seemingly unrecognized by today’s political elites.

32

National Association for Urban Debate LeaguesSettler Colonialism KImpact Framing – Byrd

The central question of this debate is that the exclusion of the indigenous provides the ontological grounding for modern sovereignty - any analysis which fails to foreground these histories is doomed to reproduce the horrors of colonialismByrd 11 (Jodi, Chickasaaw and Asst. Prof of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critics of Colonialism, p. xvii-xxi JM

The Transit of Empire begins with a network of conflicting definitions to reflect upon the cultural and political modes of "Indianness" regulated and produced by U.S. settler imperialism née colonialism. Primarily, this book is essayistic, provisional, and some of its readings and conclusions often defy the expected affective common sense of liberal multiculturalism invested in acknowledgements, recognitions, equality, and equivalences. Transit is slightly provocative, an incomplete point of entry, and its provenance might be more suited to diaspora studies and border-crossings than to a notion such as indigeneity that is often taken as rooted and static, located in a discrete place. Steven Salaita's The Holy Land in Transit denotes transit alternately as the function of an alliance between United States and Israeli settler colonialisms that map old world sacred names onto new world sacred sites, a comparative approach to American Indian and Palestinian literatures, and finally a gesture towards the ways in which peoples have been forced to move and relocate.' Gerald Vizenor's work offers another way to frame modes of indigeneity in his concept of transmotion that he defines as a "sense of native motion and an active presence (that) is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty." Those creases, according to Vizenor, are apprehended in the complementarities of stories, associations, intimacies, and reincarnations that resist absence and possession. 2 The Chickasaws have a migration story that we tell. In search of a new homeland, twin brothers, Chikasah and Chatah, were charged with leading the people as they traveled across the land. Ababinili had given them a sacred pole, the lrohta falaya, that would point the way. After each day of travel, Chikasah would plant the long pole in the earth, and each morning the brothers would rise to find the pole leaning eastward in the directionthey needed to travelled by a white dog and the Milky Way, the brothers and the people traveled for years, always following the direction of the pole. Until one morning. At sunrise, the brothers awoke to find the pole standing almost straight upright. Chatah insisted that the pole confirmed that their travels were done, but Chikasah disagreed and argued that the pole still leaned, that there was still further to go. After continued debate, the question was put to the people-those who agreed with Chatah would stay and make a life there as Choctaws, in the lands that would become central Mississippi and those who sided with Chikasah would travel further east to finally live in what is now northern Mississippi. Chickasaw sovereignty is, according to our national motto, unconquered and unconquerable. It is contrary and stubborn. But the creases of Chickasaw movement demonstrate how sovereignty is found in diplomacy and disagreement, through relation, kinship, and intimacy. And in an act of interpretation. To be in transit is to be active presence in a world of relational move ments and countermovements. To be in transit is to exist relationally, multiply. There is more than one way to frame the concerns of The Transit of Empire and more than one way to enter into the possibilities that transit might allow for comparative studies. On the one hand, I am seeking to join ongoing conversations about sovereignty, power, and indigeneity—and the epistemological debates that each of these terms engender—within and across disparate and at times incommensurable disciplines and geographies. American studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, American Indian studies, and area studies have all attempted to apprehend injury and redress, melancholy and grief that exist in the distances and sutures of state recognitions and belongings. Those distances and sutures of recognitions and belongings, melancholy and grief, take this book from the worlds of Southeastern Indians to Hawai’i. from the Poston War Relocation Center to Jonestown. Guyana, in order to consider how ideas of “Indianness” have created conditions of possibility for U.S. empire to manifest its intent. As liberal multicultural settler colonialism attempts to flex the exceptions and exclusions that first constituted the U nited States to now provisionally indude those people othered and abjected from the nation-state's origins, it instead creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to deflect progressive and transformative activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism that continue to make the United States a desired state formation within which to be included. That cacophony of competing struggles for hegemony within and outside institutions of power, no matter how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race, class, gender, and sexuality, serves to misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the U nited S tates possible as oppressor in the first place. As a result, the cacophony produced through U.S. colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism. This book, on the other hand, is also interested in the quandaries poststructuralism has left us: the traces of indigenous savagery and "Indianness" that stand a priori prior to theorizations of origin, history, freedom, constraint, and difference.' These traces of "Indianness" are vitally important to understanding how power and domination have been articulated and practiced by empire , and yet because they are traces, they have often remained deactivated as a point of critical inquiry as theory has transited across disciplines and schools. Indianness can be felt and intuited

33


as a presence, and yet apprehending it as a process is difficult, if not impossible, precisely because Indianness has served as the field through which structures have always already been produced. Within the matrix of critical theory, lndianness moves not through absence but through reiteration, through meme, as theories circulate and fracture, quote and build. The prior ontological concerns that interpellate Indianness and savagery as ethnographic evidence and example, lamentable and tragic loss, are deferred through repetitions. How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain within the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony and even as its oppressive logics are expanded to contain more and more historical experiences. I hope to show through the juridical, cultural, and literary readings within this book that indigenous critical theory provides alternatives to the entanglements of race and colonialism, intimacy and relationship that continue to preoccupy poststructuralist and postcolonial studies. The stakes could not be greater, given that currently U.S. empire has manifested its face to the world as a war machine that strips life even as it demands racialized and gendered normativities . The post-9/11 national rhetorics of grief, homeland, pain, terrorism, and security have given rise to what Judith Butler describes as a process through which the Other becomes unreal. “The derealization of the ‘Other’ ” Butler writes, “means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral . The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.”4 But this process of derealization that Butler marks in the post-9/11 grief that swept the United States, one could argue, has been functioning in Atlantic and Pacific "New Worlds" since 1492 . As Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, discourses of security are "deployed in response to a perceived threat of invasion and dispossession from Indigenous people; and in the process, paranoid patriarchal white sovereignty manages its anxiety over dispossession and threat through a “pathological relationship to indigenous sovereignty.” In the United States, the Indian is the original enemy combatant who cannot be grieved. Within dominant discourses of postracial identity that depend on the derealization of the Other, desires for amnesty and security from the contradictory and violent occupations of colonialist wars exist in a world where , as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, "metropolitan multiculturalism-the latter phase of dominant postcolonialism-precomprehends U.S. manifest destiny as transformed asylum for the rest of the world."6 As a result, the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself. The Transit of Empire, then, might best be understood as a series of preliminary reflections on how ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself as settler imperialism at this crucial moment in history when everything appears to be headed towards collapse .

34

National Association for Urban Debate LeaguesSettler Colonialism KImpact Framing – Dalley

Extinction is the master settler trope. Invoking the settler trope of 'extinction' enables settler moves to innocence which obscure the history of "anthropogenic climate change" as an intentional process of colonial violence. The impending biological end locks in settler colonialism as the inevitable telos of civilization and forecloses on the only real praxis: DecolonizationDalley, 16 (Hamish “The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature,” Settler Colonial Studies https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1238160 JM

Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contemporary literary representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending – the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present. For settlers , of all people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so notwithstanding the sustained resistance trading as that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of futurity offers a useful foil to traditional analyses of settler colonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’ attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins. Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential – has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface.1 Settler-colonial narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and repression.3 Indeed, the frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time. The settler colonial situation is thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few social formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable . Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to imagine their demise – but they do so in a way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology , with the result that the radical potentiality of

35

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1238160


decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the end of settler colonialism unspools – the quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they consider and then disavow the violence of their origins . This article traces the importance of the trope of extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of settlercolonial studies toward futurity and the ambivalence of settler paranoia, while highlighting a potential point of cross-fertilization between settler-colonial and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature. That ‘extinction’ should be a key word in the settler-colonial lexicon is no surprise. In Patrick Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well. The idea appears repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made these. […] Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. […] And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’ ‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates other late nineteenthcentury novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 3 which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’ highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’. 11 The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that narratives of settler extinction are acts of ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial extinction narratives than bad faith. I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of how they encode a specifically settler-colonial framework for imagining the future, one that has implications for how we understand contemporary literatures from settler societies, and which allows us to see extinction as a genuine, if flawed, attempt to envisage social change. In the remainder of this paper I consider extinction’s function as a metaphor of decolonization. I use this phrase to invoke, without completely endorsing, Tuck and Yang’s argument that to treat decolonization figuratively, as I argue extinction narratives do, is necessarily to preclude radical change, creating opportunities for settler ‘moves to innocence’ that re-legitimate racial inequality.13 The counterview to this pessimistic perspective is offered by Veracini, who suggests that progressive change to settler-colonial relationships will only happen if narratives can be found that make decolonization thinkable.14 This article enters the debate between these two perspectives by asking what it means for settler writers to imagine the future via the trope of extinction. Does extinction offer a meaningful way to think about ending settler colonialism, or does it re-activate settler-colonial patterns of thought that allow exclusionary social structures to persist? I explore this question with reference to examples of contemporary literary treatments of extinction from select English-speaking settler-colonial contexts: South Africa, Australia, and

36


Canada.15 The next section of this article traces key elements of extinction narrative in a range of settler-colonial texts, while the section that follows offers a detailed reading of one of the best examples of a sustained literary exploration of human finitude, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003–2013). I advance four specific arguments. First, extinction narratives take at least two forms depending on whether the ‘end’ of settler society is framed primarily in historical-civilizational terms or in a stronger, biological sense; the key question is whether the ‘thing’ that is going extinct is a society or a species. Second, biologically oriented extinction narratives rely on a more or less conscious slippage between ‘the settler’ and ‘the human’. Third, this slippage is ideologically ambivalent: on the one hand, it contains a radical charge that invokes environmentalist discourse and climate-change anxiety to imagine social forms that re-write settler-colonial dynamics; on the other, it replicates a core aspect of imperialist ideology by normalizing whiteness as equivalent to humanity. Fourth, these ideological effects are mediated by gender, insofar as extinction narratives invoke issues of biological reproduction, community protection, and violence that function to differentiate and reify masculine and feminine roles in the putative de-colonial future. Overall, my central claim is that extinction is a core trope through which settler futurity emerges, one with crucial narrative and ideological effects that shape much of the contemporary literature emerging from white colonial settings.

37


Alt – GBTL The only ethical demand is to prioritize the pedagogy of land and place because only it can spill over to material change. Disregard strategies that don’t combine theory with praxis Ballantyne 14 (Erin Freeland, Dechinta Bush U, Dechinta Bush University: Mobilizing a knowledge economy of reciprocity, resurgence and decolonization, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 3, No. 3, 2014, pgs 67-85, JM

As the conversation of Dechinta grew, the ugly politics of education on a broad political scale quickly surfaced. It became clear that education is a domain of power and privilege that is fiercely protected. Questions relating to control over its content,

production and process were , apparently, not open for discussion. Curricula were deeply homogenized, deterritorialized and standardized. Post-secondary in the territory was overtly geared toward training people for industry and the endless promise of mining, pipeline and oil and gas booms (and busts). People were either emphatically supportive of the notion of ‘Elders as professors’ being recognized as equals and collaborating with university professors, or incensed by its disruption of typical academic power. The creation of Dechinta was polarizing, and reactions were telling of the deeply embedded sense of entitlement and power that the state, and existing institutions, had over determining what did and did not count as ‘education’. Rather than support spaces where academic and Indigenous knowledge would overlap,

Indigenous knowledge was viewed as curriculum that should be relegated to ‘culture camps’. That processes like hunting and moose-hide tanning could draw parallels, or even inform governance, consensus building and self-determination, continue to elude most

mainstream reporters, critics and institutions. Coming back to the land is a battle. ‘Education’ on the land is a direct hit to the exoskeleton of continued colonial power . By specifically disrupting education as a domain of settler colonial control to be deconstructed and re-imagined, Dechinta has challenged the most comprehensive , yet

skilfully cloaked machine of settler colonial capitalism - the prescriptive education process, which produces more settler colonial bodies, thinkers, and believers. Building strong relationships of

reciprocity with the land results in the crumbling of settler capitalism because it fundamentally shifts the relationships people experience and what they believe about who they are, how they are in relation to and with land, and what they believe to be true. Being together on the land, learning with the land, and having a strong relationship with the land is antithetical to settler capitalism

itself. The power of settler colonization relies on the total deterritorialization of people’s relationship with land. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972) work on deterritorialization, ‘the process whereby colonization leads not just to the

loss of territory but also to the destruction of the ontological conditions of the colonized culture’s territoriality ,’ is a fitting philosophical conjecture to Dene expressions of how they are dislocated from their relationships with land due to process of nation-building and

capitalism, and how this deterritorialization separates people from practices with the land that keeps them healthy, even if they still live on the land (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 192; Hipwell, 2004, p. 304). As Said (1993) has stated: land, in the final instance, is what empire is

about. In this way, our relationships with land are central to the great unsettling. Reconnection , and the exchange of skills, knowledge and

practice with land , thus directly threaten the settler colonial project. It removes bodies from the forces designed to encode the body as capital. The foremost space of enclosure , of encoding, is the ‘school ’. The ongoing trend in Indigenous and Northern settler education since its earliest colonial intrusion has been to train Indigenous bodies to serve the needs of industry. Education has happened in Denendeh since time immemorial. It has been the settler prerogative to dismantle Indigenous ways of knowing and being,

of education. Returning learning to an intergenerational exchange, on the land - which has at its very core the fundamental teachings

that, if we take care of the land, the land takes care of us - will shake the foundation of settler colonization by breaking the dependency that has been created on capitalism through deterritorialization . Transformational learning supports intergenerational learners and teachers to think critically and re-imagine what the purpose of learning is. Learning on the land is healing and being in community on the land is challenging, pulling our attention to the hard work of decolonization. The year after our initial gathering, Dechinta launched a pilot semester with three courses nested within an interdisciplinary approach. Student evaluations of the program indicated it was profoundly ‘transformative’, and was for some the first ‘safe space’ of education that they had encountered (Luig et al, 2011). Interdisciplinary and collaborative, the pilot set the stage for the following four years. Dechinta now has 8 original courses, and a two semester-long program growing into a full degree that operates from -50 winters to the steamy height of summer. The challenges have been substantial. Conflict between academics and Indigenous students have made real the tensions of working on decolonization in concert, even with those who identify, or who are identified as allies. Solving conflict and difficulties through shared governance circles, while combating ingrained reactions of lateral violence and other social expressions codified in settler colonization are truly challenging, but deeply rewarding. Through the building of relationships we have a growing

cohort of faculty dedicated to not just teaching but sharing in the creation of safe spaces, where the hard mental work of decolonizing in theory is met with the even harder work of decolonizing as practice. When students and faculty create a community where their relationships are ordered through their relationships with land, the work of decolonization move from a discussion in theory to practice of being and becoming a source of

38


decolonial power. At Dechinta we debate this, and experiment with its meaning in tangible ways. Here, skills categorized as ‘subsistence’ or ‘arts and crafts’ are fundamental in forming and understanding theory. Such practices are themselves theory in action.

39


Alt – Place Based Education Settler pedagogies cultivate this logic of elimination by sanitizing the land and the scholarship of its settlers. Only a place-based education can both disrupt the totalizing epistemology of anthropocentric western determinism and re-center indigenous epistemologies. This combines the theory and praxis of decolonization to forefront a radical break in settler colonialism and create a sustainable relationship with the land and its inhabitants.Banga et al 14 (Megan Banga*, Lawrence Curley(a), Adam Kessel(b), Ananda Marin(c), Eli S. Suzukovich IIIb (c) and George Strack(d) [aLearning Sciences and Human Development, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; bEducation Department, American Indian Center of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; cPsychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; dMiami Tribe of Oklahoma Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land,” Environmental Education Research, 2014 Vol. 20, No. 1, 37–55 JMIndigenous scholars have suggested that moving toward educational self-determination3 requires the reclaiming , uncovering, and reinventing

of our theoretical understandings and pedagogical best practices (e.g. Battiste 2002; Smith et al. 1999; Tippeconnic 1999). Trying to work within a methodological paradigm of decolonization (Smith 1999) we used several methodological tools to develop both theory and practice that empowered our community. We collectively worked to center Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying our relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always,

Indigenous lands-whether we are in currently ceded urban territory or not. A critical dimension of the work was making visible the impacts of settler colonial constructions of urban lands as ceded and no longer Indigenous and concomitant views of naturalized settler futures (Tuck and Yang 2012) on our community and especially our youth. In this

paper we will argue that the constructions of land , implicitly or explicitly as no longer Indigenous, are foundationally implicated in teaching and learning about the natural world, whether that be in science education, place-based education or environmental education. Learning about the natural world is a critical necessity given the socio-scientific realities (e.g. climate change) that are currently and will continue to, shape the lands and life that land supports, more specifically for present purposes the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. For us science education, place-based education, and environmental education are critical sites of struggle because they typically reify the epistemic, ontological, and axiological issues that have shaped Indigenous histories (Brayboy and Castagno 2008). From a more hopeful perspective, we also see them as sites of potential transformings – forming a nexus between epistemologies and ontologies of land and Indigenous futurity. In our view, realizing this transformative potential will require engaging with land-based perspectives and desettling (Bang et al. 2012) dynamics of settler colonialism that remain quietly buried in

educational environments that engage learning about, with and in the land and all of its dwellers. In our experience, explicitly reengaging land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a place-based science learning environment, what we call an emergent form of urban Indigenous land-based

pedagogies, enabled epistemological and ontological balancing that significantly impacted learning for urban Indigenous youth and families (Bang and Medin 2010; Bang et al. 2010). In the remainder of this paper, we aim to contribute to uncovering the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments. To do this, we provide a critical reading of educational environments that position place and nature as central to their approaches and learning objectives (e.g. place-based, environmental, and science education broadly construed). We include these three broad areas of scholarship because the learning environments that we developed were informed by and make contact with each in various ways. Further, while we do not intend to equate these three forms of education, we suggest that each, to some degree, utilize knowledge about the natural world derived from western scientific systems and settler-colonial relations to land and Indigenous peoples. Our critique is at a grain size that we believe either holds across these bodies of work and does not require the flattening or equating of them or that there are commonalities across them we hope makes visible the still entrenched settler-colonial dynamics that are endemic to education more broadly. Settler-colonial informed readings of place in education Both place-based education and critical pedagogy have been bounded by dichotomous and some might say competing discourses. On the one hand, placebased education seems to focus on the environments and ecologies of outdoor rural spaces, and on the other, critical pedagogies often focus on the urban, multicultural context (Gruenewald 2008). To broadly elevate the importance of place and to bridge these two approaches, Gruenewald (2003) proposed a critical pedagogy of place. Critical place-based education and eco-justice work have amplified voices resisting destructive forms of globalization and neo-liberalism and have helped to create an intellectual space connected to Indigenous realities as well (Sutherland and Swayze 2012). However, we continue to wonder about the liberatory possibilities for Indigenous people in current forms of place-based education. As Bowers (2003) argues, there are reifications of western intellectual traditions in place-based pedagogies that

further silence some cultural communities. The reification of western intellectual traditions is often made possible by the denial or erasure of ‘Indigenous points of reference,’ which, as Marker (2006) points out, is a form of epistemic

violence. While the denial or erasure of Indigenous points of reference may not be intentional, educational environments that uncritically mobilize them and leave settler-colonial interpretations silenced are complicit in this erasure . In order to understand the effects of settler colonialism on place focused learning environments, we trace the ontology of settler colonialism and its subsequent impacts. Just as colonialism employs a grammar of race and inferiority; settler colonialism employs this grammar of race and inferiority but toward a logic of elimination (Veracini 2011). In settler-colonial societies, settler normativity is constructed through a set of dialectic relationships based upon circles of

inclusion and exclusion in which the settler constructs himself as normative and superior vis-à-vis Indigenous and non-Indigenous others. This positioning of settlers is structurally maintained by employing a set of rules that are situated in and reify the circles of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. hypodescent and blood quantum). The core of the settler-Indigenous dialectical structure is defined by the

40


desire to erase or assimilate Indigenous people alongside a continued symbolic Indigenous presence (Wolfe 2006). Scholars of settler colonialism have argued that the conceptual construction of uninhabited land, a form of Indigenous absence, opens the space for settler majorities to establish their ways of knowing, doing and being as normative and morally superior and begin attempts to indigenize settler majority identities (Veracini 2011). In short, settler majorities simultaneously develop identities defined by manifest destiny and genesis amnesia (Bourdieu 1977). The process of erasure and sustained symbolic presence codifies a binary logic often taking the form of ‘virtuous settler’ and ‘dysfunctional native’ (Wolfe 2006) or the historicized ‘Ecological Indian’ (Friedel 2011) which underpins the structure of settler identity and is often encoded in

learning environments. In our view, pathways and pedagogies that make explicit and resist the epistemic and ontological consequences of settler colonialism (i.e. suppression and denial of Indigenous peoples’ lifeways or encoding settler identities in learning environments) will be necessary for viable, just, and sustainable change. Land education does just that, and, in our view, at minimum, demands attention to two critical and oscillating issues born of settler colonialism : (1) the reification of what

Mignolo calls the ‘ zero point epistemology’ (2007), upon which western knowledge of the natural world is predicated, its anthropocentric consequences, and its continued devaluing and /or attacks on Indigenous ways of knowing (e.g. Semali and Kincheloe 1999) and (2) the absence or presence of indigeneity and the subsequent effects. Indigenous presence and disruptions of the ‘zero point epistemology’ Some scholars have suggested that the middle ages set

in motion the creation of a ‘zero point of observation and of knowledge,’ or the ‘zero point epistemology’ (ZPE): a perspective that denied all other perspectives defined through forms of theo-politics and ego-politics of knowledge ’ (Castro-Gómez 2002;

Mignolo 2007).The varying forms of absence (complete or partial) and the presence of Indigenous people in place- focused work is an example of the ZPE and teaches conceptions of place in the service of settler colonial legitimacy . This legitimacy rests on the need to ‘disavow Indigenous presence’ and to construct meanings of land as vast, uninhabited spaces ripe for discovery (Deloria et al. 1999; Veracini 2011); typically either fertile for human cultivation or endangered and in need of paternalistic protection. Mignolo (2007) argues that engagement with ‘critical border thinking’ is a necessary condition for change and is grounded in the experience of the colonies and subalterns. Engaging in critical border thinking, according to Mignolo (2007), is a shift to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge and a fracture of ZPE because borders are not just geographic; they are also epistemic and in our view ontogenetic. Many learning environments facilitate engagement with concepts and constructs developed within the ZPE, teaching and knowledge exchange, as well as understandings of human learning itself. For example, an analogous development of place-devoid constructions of knowledge has the been the development of locating learning in the mind as opposed to in or connected to one’s body and to lands. However, there has been increasing work in the understandings of embodied cognition (Hall and Nemorovsky 2012), in theorizing relationships between mind and brain, physical health and mental health, and the relationships between culture and learning (e.g. Nasir et al. 2006). Much of the place-based literature acknowledges the relationship between land and culture (e.g. Greenwood 2009; Gruenewald 2003;

Gruenewald and Smith 2008) and calls for deep consideration of these relations, because, as Gruenewald (2003) points out, ‘when we fail to consider place as products of human decisions, we accept their existence as noncontroversial or inevitable , like the falling of rain or the fact of the sunrise’ (627). If we are to disrupt relationships to land that are constructed from the ZPE, then critical considerations of the ontological and epistemological foundations of much of the content being taken up and normalized in learning environments (see Bang et al. 2012 for concrete

examples) is necessary. The challenge for place conscious educators is to create learning environments for new generations of young people that do not facilitate and cultivate conceptual developments and experiences of land that are aligned with ‘discover(y)/(ing)’ frameworks which elevate settlers’ rationales for their right to land. From a critical settler-colonial reading, place-based education, in which there is an Indigenous absence, even when relational pedagogies are prescribed, enables ‘indigenizing settler majority’ identities (Pearson 2002; Veracini 2011). For example, some place-based work theorizes that in order to counter the ways in which language use and institutions deny

peoples’ connections to place (Bowers 2002; Gruenewald 2003; Sobel 1996), innovative pedagogies that focus on the need to build personal relationships to

place – to specific locals to ‘rejuvenate carnal, sensory empathy with the living land that sustains us’ (Abram 1996, 69) –

must be developed. Gruenewald (2003) notes these types of arguments shift an emphasis from a discourse of change to a discourse of ‘rooted, empathetic experience’ (8). In an attempt to expand what rootedness might mean and opening a space for Indigenous presence, Gruenewald and Smith (2008), suggest that ‘place consciousness must also include consciousness of the historical memory of a place, and the tradition that emerged there, whether these have been disrupted or conserved’ (xxi). Importantly, however, just any form of Indigenous presence does not resist settler colonial paradigms, as many are reflective of the settler-Indigenous dialectical structure previously discussed. Often the Indigenous ‘presence’ in this dialectical relationship that is found in learning environments is shaped and anchored in historicized victory

narratives of conquest and assimilative narratives that place the discourse of indigeneity within colonial realms of race – not in discourses of territory and sovereignty.4 Engagement with historicized and assimilative narratives contributes to the logic of elimination by making the primary issue of land and the continued struggles of Indigenous peoples invisible . Further, even appropriate stories of colonial histories, can be an example of what Tuck and Yang (2012), suggest is a move to white innocence (or the alleviation of white guilt, Simpson 2011) and metaphorization of decolonization because though they may not engage in the erasure of Indigenous past, they presume settler stability and the absence of decolonized sovereign Indigenous futures. Thus, the challenge to place-based work is in articulating the difference between residing and dwelling in a place. The recognition of the difference in kind (residing and dwelling) can easily get applied as a difference in degree5 and thus enables settler majorities indigenizing themselves, or as Deloria and Lytle (1998) calls it ‘playing indian,’ and claiming settler sovereignty as the normative and moral/intellectual authority. Deficit narratives of urban Indigenous communities often claim there are limitations to the living of Indigenous lives in urban places because they are supposedly disconnected to Indigenous homelands and sacred places is intimately intertwined with issues of residing and dwelling. The urban Indian narrative reinscribes the settler- indigenous dialectic by framing Indigenous land (i.e. urban places) through postcontact dispossessions and reemploying a logic of elimination (i.e. urban lands are not Indigenous lands, therefore urban Indians are not Indigenous). Marking urban land as invisible, or not authentic lands, and non-Indigenous, reinscribes the settler-indigenous dialectic that services the logic of elimination for territorial acquisition (Wolfe 2006). This dialectic is complicit in the domestication of decolonization and the denial of repatriation of Indigenous lands (Tuck and Yang 2012), urban and rural; further, it limits imaginative creations of indigenous futurity that are not bound by colonial conceptions of land. Interestingly, there are quiet and loud revolutions within normative disciplines to rupture the concept of the ZPE (e.g. Helmreich 2011; Ingold 2000; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), though it remains to be seen

whether this work can stand in solidarity with settler colonial consciousness. Regardless, these emergent transformations have had little influence on the ways in which learning about the ‘natural world’ across science, place-based, and environmental education are conceptualized broadly. Although we think place-focused education scholarship could provide critical leadership in constructing different trajectories of knowing, being, and becoming, significant work remains to be done. This work involves tracing and transforming the

41


ways that some of the core constructs in education, as well as the fields of cognition and human development, conceptualize culture, and nature (see Bang et al. 2012). The development of liberatory learning environments, we believe, will hinge on the ways in which constructs of culture and land, as well as the epistemic and ontological stances embedded therein , are conceptualized,

encoded and facilitated. Land education requires many things including: critical border thinking and the rupturing of the ZPE through the spatial turn (Kitchens 2009), solidarity with consciousness of land and settler colonialism, constant resistance to land perpetually becoming a resource for global markets and negating presumptions about the absence of sovereign Indigenous futures. In our view, one of the most critical, elusive and perhaps contradictory aspects of learning environments are those that elevate anthropocentric relationships and consequently ‘other’ both place-based and land education. While place-focused work has opened critical spaces of scholarship and taken the laudable stance to explicitly reject anthropocentricism, a central need for land education in relation to anthropocentricism, as distinct from place-based education still remains because it makes visible the ways in which anthropocentricism is destructive to Indigenous cosmologies. Place, nature, culture, and

anthropocentrism Place-based education actively works toward being nonanthropocentric (e.g. for overview see Gruenewald 2003); however, we believe accomplishing this transformative stance in lived practice, requires deeper consideration of the intersections between settler colonialism, the content derived from normative scientific paradigms that has been constructed around the division of nature and culture and is routinely taken up in learning environments (see Bang et al. 2012; Ingold 2011), and theories of learning and development implicitly embedded throughout. Being in the world gives form to children’s learning and development – that is, people are continually coming into being through experiences. Individuals that have experiences or engage in practices in which place is a backdrop tend to reason anthropocentrically and view humans as separate or as different from the rest of the world (Bang, Medin, and Atran 2007; Medin and Bang, forthcoming). Anthropocentricism in reasoning and ‘world as the backdrop to human activity’ has been theorized as a human universal rather than a socially or ideologically constructed phenomenon, particularly in learning and developmental work (e.g. Carey 1985). Increasingly, however, there is work demonstrating that patterns of human thinking and development, which were once thought of as universal in these disciplines, differ across place and culture (e.g. Medin et al. 2010; Herrmann, Medin, and Waxman 2011; Herrmann, Waxman, and Medin 2010). We suggest that taking anthropocentrism as a universal developmental pathway privileges settler colonial relationships to land, reinscribes anthropocentrism by constructing land as an inconsequential or inanimate material backdrop for human privileged activity and enables human dislocation from land. One way that the phenomenon of dislocation occurs is through the construction of places as objects or sites, which Bowers (2001) names as fundamentally a problem of anthropocentricism and Gruenewald (2003) suggests is deeply pedagogical. Corbett (2007) explores the ways in which mobile modernity extends the disembedding of peoples from places, a process that Griffiths (2007) has called ‘the deforestation of the mind’ (25). For Indigenous learners, this conceptual and developmental pathway functions as a form of dispossession and epistemic (and in our view ontological) violence (e.g. Marker 2006; Wildcat 2009). Indigenous scholars have focused much attention on relationships between land, epistemology and, importantly, ontology (e.g. Cajete 2000; Deloria 1979; Meyer 1998). Places produce and teach particular ways of thinking about and being in the world. They tell us the way things are, even when they operate pedagogically beneath a conscious level (Cajete 2000; Kawagley 1995). Richardson (2011) makes the observation that much of contemporary learning theory is object focused and runs ‘roughshod’ over Indigenous theories of learning and development, which we feel at a bare

minimum are focused on the development and maintenance of respectful reciprocal subject-subject relations. The intersection between object focused learning theory and constructions of places as human-shaped objects reifies settler colonial relationship to knowledge and power . As an example, in another study, we looked at the representations of ecosystems in

curricula and human presence or absence. Nearly all of the curricular materials we looked at had no human represented in ecosystems (Bang, Medin, and Atran 2007) – this absence is emblematic of the nature/culture epistemic divide in western ways of knowing. Further, if you go to the internet and search for images of ecosystems you will reproduce this phenomenon (Medin and Bang, forthcoming). Indeed, Casey (1997) (as cited in Gruenewald

2003) suggests ‘that there is a fundamental paradox of place – it is everywhere, yet it recedes from consciousness as we become engrossed in our routines in space and time’(25). In our view, the recession of place from consciousness depends on the ways i n which we understand and routinize our relationships to other beings . The receding of place is only the case if we maintain anthropocentric forms of being in which all other forms of life are

relegated to the backdrops of human existence or as resource (Ingold 2011). The implicit and explicit narratives and representations of human/land relations in learning environments is a specific example of the way in which Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies are denied . Burkhart (2004), in an effort to clearly articulate the difference in ontology between western and Indigenous knowledges, made a revision of the famous Descartes adage ‘I think, therefore I am’ to express something closer to an Indigenous ontology to ‘We are, therefore I am.’ Extending this, we might imagine that the ontology of place-based paradigms is something like ‘I am, therefore place is,’ in

contrast, the ontology of land-based pedagogies might be summarized as ‘Land is, therefore we are .’ This reframing in our view carries considerable weight in relation to the way we think about, study, and live culture, learning and development with land. In the next section we aim to concretize the dimensions we have been exploring and describe the ways in which we worked to live ‘land is, therefore we are’ through specific examples of our project and the subsequent emergent urban land-based pedagogies.

42


Alt – Ethic of IncommensurabilityThe alternative is an ethic of incommensurabilityTuck and Yang 12 (Eve, Professor at SUNY New Paltz, K. Wayne, University of California San Diego, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, July 17, 2017JM

An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation , which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not , and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give [decolonization] historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability . when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.

43


Alt – Refusal (Tuck and Yang) Refusal is necessary to resist academic colonial commodification Tuck & Yang 14 (Eve, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education; Wayne Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies, University of California, Berkeley, “R-Words: Refusing Research”, http://outreach.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/r-words.pdf p.237-39 JM

For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative (p. 78), expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive , as indeed a good thing. To explore how refusal and the installation of limits on settler colonial knowledge might be productive, we make a brief detour to the Erased Lynching series (2002–2011) by Los Angeles–based artist Ken Gonzales-Day (see Figure 12.1). Gonzales-Day researched lynching in California and the Southwest and found that the majority of lynch victims were Latinos, American Indians, and Asians. Like lynchings in the South, lynchings in California were events of public spectacle, often attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands of festive onlookers. At the lynchings, professional photographers took hours to set up portable studios similar to those used at carnivals; they sold their images frequently as postcards, mementos of public torture and execution to be circulated by U.S. post throughout the nation and the world. Lynching, we must be reminded, was extralegal, yet nearly always required the complicity of law enforcement—either by marshals or sheriffs in the act itself, or by judges and courts in not bothering to prosecute the lynch mob afterward. The photographs immortalize the murder beyond the time and place of the lynching, and in their proliferation, expand a single murder to the general murderability of the non-White body. In this respect, the image of the hanged, mutilated body itself serves a critical function in the maintenance of White supremacy and the spread of racial terror beyond the lynching. The spectacle of the lynching is the medium of terror. Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series reintroduces the photographs of lynching to a contemporary audience, with one critical intervention: The ropes and the lynch victim have been removed from the images. Per Gonzales-Day’s website (n.d.), the series enacted a conceptual gesture intended to direct the viewer’s attention, not upon the lifeless body of the lynch victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past. The perpetrators, if present, remain fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible visible. The Erased Lynching series yields another context in which we might consider what a social scientist’s refusal stance might comprise. Though indeed centering on the erasure of the former object, refusal need not be thought of as a subtractive methodology. Refusal prompts analysis of the festive spectators regularly backgrounded in favor of wounded bodies, strange fruit, interesting scars. Refusal shifts the gaze from the violated body to the violating instruments—in this case, the lynch mob, which does not disappear when the lynching is over, but continues to live, accumulating land and wealth through the extermination and subordination of the Other. Thus, refusal helps move us from thinking of violence as an event and toward an analysis of it as a structure. Gonzales-Day might have decided to reproduce and redistribute the images as postcards, which, by way of showing up in mundane spaces, might have effectively inspired reflection on the spectacle of violence and media of terror. However, in removing the body and the ropes, he installed limits on what the audience can access, and redirected our gaze to the bodies of those who were there to see a murder take place, and to the empty space beneath the branches. Gonzales-Day introduced a new representational territory, one that refuses to play by the rules of the settler colonial gaze, and one that refuses to satisfy the morbid curiosity derived from settler colonialism’s preoccupation with pain. Refusals are needed for narratives and images arising in social science research that rehumiliate when circulated, but also when, in Simpson’s words, “the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years” (p. 78). As researcher-narrator, Simpson tells us, “I reached my own limit when the data would not contribute to our sovereignty or complicate the deeply simplified, atrophied representations of Iroquois and other Indigenous peoples that they have been mired within anthropologically” (p. 78). Here Simpson makes clear the ways in which research is not the intervention that is needed—that is, the interventions of furthering sovereignty or countering misrepresentations of Native people as anthropological objects. Considering Erased Lynchings dialogically with On Ethnographic Refusal, we can see how refusal is not a prohibition but a generative form. First, refusal turns the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put to work. It makes transparent the metanarrative of knowledge production—its spectatorship for pain and its preoccupation for documenting and ruling over racial difference. Thus, refusal to be made meaningful first and foremost is grounded in a critique of settler colonialism, its construction of Whiteness, and its regimes of representation . Second, refusal generates, expands, champions representational territories that colonial knowledge endeavors to settle, enclose, domesticate. Simpson complicates the portrayals of Iroquois,

44

http://outreach.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/r-words.pdf%20p.237-39

http://outreach.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/r-words.pdf%20p.237-39


without resorting to portrayals of anthropological Indians. Gonzales-Day portrays the violations without reportraying the victimizations. Third, refusal is a critical intervention into research and its circular self-defining ethics. The ethical justification for research is defensive and self-encircling—its apparent self -criticism serves to expand its own rights to know, and to defend its violations in the name of “good science.” Refusal challenges the individualizing discourse of IRB consent and “good science” by highlighting the problems of collective harm, of representational harm, and of knowledge colonization. Fourth, refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory. Simpson presents refusal on the part of the researcher as a type of calculus ethnography. Gonzales-Day deploys refusal as a mode of representation. Simpson theorizes refusal by the Kahnawake Nation as anticolonial, and rooted in the desire for possibilities outside of colonial logics, not as a reactive stance. This final point about refusal connects our conversation back to desire as a counterlogic to settler colonial knowledge.

45

National Association for Urban Debate LeaguesSettler Colonialism KAlt – Refusal (Simpson)

The alt can be understood as a politics of refusal. You should refuse to recognize the authority of the USFG to enact laws and restrict land use. Simpson 14 (Audra, Associate Professor of Anthropology @ Columbia, Mohawk Interruptus, p. 1-11 JM

Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from somewhere else. The story of immigrants in America isn't a story of them. It's a story of us---- For just as we remain a nation of laws, we have to remain a nation of immigrants. —US President Barack Obama, July 4, 2012 We are representing a nation, and we are not going to travel on the passport of a competitor. —Tonya Gonella

Frichner, Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team spokesperson and negotiator. World Lacrosse Championships, July 19, 2010 What does it mean to refuse a passport—what some consider to be a gift or a right , the freedom of mobility and residency? What does it mean to say no to these things, or to wait until your terms have been met for agreement, for a reversal of recognition, or a conferral of rights? What happens when we

refuse what all (presumably) "sensible” people perceive as good things? What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason? When we add Indigenous peoples to this question, the assumptions and the histories that structure

what is perceived to be “good” (and utilitarian goods themselves) shift and stand in stark relief. The positions assumed by people who refuse “gifts” may seem reasoned , sensible, and in fact deeply correct . Indeed, from this perspective,

we see that a good is not a good for everyone . The Mohawks of Kahnawake are nationals of a precontact

Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves.1 In other words, they insist on being and acting as peoples who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada. Their political form predates and survives “conquest"; it is tangible (albeit strangulated by colonial governmentality) and is tied to sovereign practices. This architecture is not fanciful; it is in place because the

Mohawks of Kahnawa:ke share a genealogical kinship relationship with other native peoples in North America and they know this. They refuse to let go of this knowledge . In fact, they enact this knowledge through marriage practices, political engagements, and the way they live their lives . Their genealogical and political connectedness is part of a covenant—the decision-making Iroquois Confederacy called Haudenosaunee—which is made up of clans that spread across territory. As Indigenous peoples they have survived a great, transformative process of settler occupation, and they continue to live under the conditions of this occupation, its disavowal, and its ongoing life, which has required and still requires that they give up their lands and give up themselves. What is the self that I speak of that they will not give up? The course of this book will unpack this for us, but most commonly that self is conflated with the figure of the ironworker and understood, in largely celebratory terms, through this image. Ironworkers are (usually) men who put up the infrastructure for skyscrapers, bridges, and all sorts of other large-scale construction jobs all over the United States and Canada,2 but Kahnawake labor is most associated with cities in the northeastern United States. They are famous for traveling from Kahnawake on Sunday night to get to New York City (or Buffalo, or Ithaca, or as far as Detroit) by Monday morning.3 This is a life of difficult, dangerous labor, and intense travel, and a life that returns, the literature of various sorts tells us, back to the “reserve” as much as the job and drive time can allow. In his very popular New Yorker piece, Joseph Mitchell started his article on ironwork and Kahnawake in the following way: “The most footloose Indians in North America are a band of mixed-blood Mohawks whose home, the Caughnawaga Reservation, is on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec” (1959).4 This popular notion of the ironworking Mohawk, specifically from Kahnawake, will not be lost because it is tied up with capital and the material reproduction of the community as well as postindustrial skylines. But much of this book charts out the other labor that these people have undertaken and still undertake to maintain themselves in the face of a force that is imperial, legislative, ideological, and territorial and that has made them more than men who walk on beams. Their masculinized labor on iron matters to them, and to others, and I suspect will continue to matter as long as there is a market for construction. Yet the community is more than that form of labor can signal. This community is now a reservation, or “reserve," located in what is now southwestern Quebec, a largely Francophone province in Canada. It is a reserved territory of approximately 18.55 miles. However, it belongs to people who have moved through the past four hundred years from the Mohawk Valley in what is now New York State to the northern part of their hunting territory—partially where they are now. Present-day Kahnawa:ke was a seigniorial land grant that became a reserve held in trust for the use and benefit of these “footloose” mixed-blood Mohawks—Mohawks, who, I will demonstrate through the course of this book, are not "mixed blood” In fact, they are Indigenous nationals of a strangulated

political order who do all they can to live a political life robustly, with dignity as Nationals. In holding on to this, they interrupt and fundamentally challenge stories that have been told about them and about others like them, as well as the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to take their land and their selves from them. As with all Indigenous people, they were supposed to have stepped off the beam that they walked on and plummeted to the ground several times through the course of their historical lives. Staying on top of a beam has involved effort and labor that extends beyond even the hard work of putting up steel. Since the time of Lewis Henry

Morgan, this is the labor of living in the face of an expectant and a foretold cultural and political death. As such it is the hard labor of hanging on to territory, defining and fighting for your rights, negotiating and maintaining governmental and gendered forms of power. Much of this labor I am talking about is tied up with a care for and defense of territory—so I will tell you first about this place and its institutions. If one desires a sociological sketch, the community has, as a federally recognized First Nation, accepted transfer funds from the government of Canada to build these institutions; other times they are completely self- funded. There is a Band Council, or “tribal government"; an in-patient hospital; a community services center with an economic development office; a bank with tellers; an atm; a post office. Thus they have their own postal code, a sports arena, an Elders Lodge, a police force with a negotiated power to issue warrants and tickets for arrest (The Kahnaw«t:ke Peacekeepers). They have an aaa junior hockey team (the Condors), online gaming, an adult male lacrosse team (the Kahnawake Mohawks),5 a community court, grocery stores (two with fresh produce and a butcher), gas stations, golf courses, two children's schools, a middle school, a high school (the Kahnaw<t:ke Survival School), a Catholic church, a Protestant church, two Longhouses, between five to ten sit-down restaurants, an Internet provider, a bilingual (Mohawk-English) tv station, a radio station, an offshore gaming host site (Mohawk Internet Technologies), poker houses, smoke shacks, cigarette manufacturing factories, a bingo hall, a tae kwon do gym, poker houses, a fabulous restaurant to get mixed drinks: “The Rail.” There is a funeral home, a bakery shop, an education center, an optometrist with expensive, designer frames. There is a flower shop; antique stores; a

46


shop that sells hypoallergenic and handcrafted soaps and bath salts; craft shops that sell moccasins, blankets, and objects for community members and tourists. In its economic past, there have been chip stands (selling French fries and pickled eggs) lining the highway, a dance hall, pizza parlor, a taco stand, beloved and now closed convenience stores such as Evelyn's, sit-down and takeout restaurants such as Rabaska’s— closed due to fire and mourned as the passing of truly great pizza. There was a great bookstore, Mohawk Nation Books. The one public, coin- operated telephone is defunct but still in front of Rabaska's, on Highway 120, which connects I<ahnawa:ke to Chateauguay, the south shore of Montreal and routes leading to the United States and north into Montreal and beyond, Oka, Quebec City, and so forth. Indeed, there are many ironworkers, along with office workers; teachers; band councilors (called “chiefs” by the Indian Act); scholars;6 three lawyers; one professional, retired hockey player; at least two who were semipro; many lacrosse players; fast-pitch softball players; two Olympians; several journalists (and two award-winning newspapers); musicians; filmmakers (two specifically are documentarians); actors; actresses; two former professional wrestlers, one who has now passed (his son is a conductor). There are people on social assistance and people who refuse social assistance and medical coverage because they do not recognize Canada. There are veterans of every branch of the US armed forces, veterans of every war or conflict the United States has been in, even though this is on the Canadian side of the International Boundary Line. There are also veterans of the Canadian armed forces, members of the traditional Warrior Society who were en pointe during the "Oka Crisis,” clan mothers, traditional people who live according to the precepts of the Kaianere'k6:wa, or Great Law of Peace, only. I have interviewed one person (out of thirty-six) who voted in a Canadian election. The Catholic Church at Kahnawake houses the partial, bodily remains of the "first” Mohawk saint, and second Indigenous saint in church history, Kateri Tekakwitha, who was canonized in 2012. That is the institutional face of the reserve. Its geographical limits are marked by two steel crosses, illuminated at night, that commemorate the passing of thirty-three (out of ninety-six) ironworkers who fell to their deaths when the Victoria bridge collapsed in 1907. There is now another memorial to their passing.7 The riverfront of this community was expropriated by an order in Canadian Parliament in 1954 to construct a seaway that would facilitate commercial transport from the Port of Montreal to Lake Erie through the construction of a “deep draft waterway” through the St. Lawrence River, so it seems today as if ocean liners and freights move through it or in front of it or in back of the reserve, depending on how you see things. There is a train bridge that cuts through the reserve and over it along with the Mercier Bridge. This is a bridge that is perpetually under construction—travel on it is slow, tedious, and feels dangerous as it is decrepit. It connects this reserve to Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and the aforementioned seaway. You can drive to Chateauguay in the opposite direction in five to ten minutes. When traffic is right you can get to LaSalle (Montreal) in 10, downtown Montreal in 15, and Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in 20 minutes to 2s minutes; Vermont in 2 hours; Plattsburgh, New York, in i.§ hours; Oka or Kanehsata:ke, in 2 hours; Ahkwesahsne in 1 hour; Toronto in 4 to 5 hours; New York City in 6 to 8 hours; and Ithaca, New York, as I did regularly for three years, in 6.5 hours. There are people who have walked the train bridge to Lachine, took boats to cross the seaway to Montreal. As with the territorial body that was just described, the content of the corporeal bodies that inhabit and care for the place, are also crossed by markers and other histories of intent. With settler colonialism came "reservationization” and a radical shift in Indigenous diets and their bodies. As a result their blood is excessively “sweet” and has a high prevalence of diabetes—a bodily indicator of these spatial and dietary transitions. Rates in Kahnawake are high,8 and there are people who have had to have their toes and sometimes their feet and legs removed (Montour, Macaulay, and Adelson 1989). There is an aggressive campaign to educate the community on the perils of obesity and the importance of nutrition and exercise in order to prevent and control this condition (Potvin et al. 2003). Nonetheless, “bad carbs” have a great taste and take a traditional turn on Sundays, when it is common to make the savory, filling, sleep-inducing meal “cornbread and steak.” This is cornbread bathed in thick gravy, sometimes served with sausages as well as or in place of steak. Long before the Internet, you could find people reading the New York Post or the New York Daily News in restaurants, on porches. One woman used to ask me to bring her the New York Times from the city, and when I lived in Montreal, I brought it for her from “Multimags"9 whenever I came home. Older women tend to wear their hair in tight, short perms, and speak in Mohawk; ironworkers retire, go home, and amble arthritically and from the looks painfully behind their wives. My earliest memories of Kahnawake were of my own grandmother, the late Margaret K. Diabo (n£e Phillips) fixing people's bones in her kitchen and switching back and forth from English and Mohawk with everyone who came into her home. She spoke this way with the man I call my grandfather, Eddie “Cantor” Diabo,10 who switches back and forth from Mohawk to English to everyone, whether they are Indian or not. Most emphatically, it seems, when there is talk of the Boston Bruins or the border. Ten percent of the community now speaks Mohawk, but there is an aggressive campaign to educate everyone to speak the language. There is an adult immersion program with a graduating class of approximately fifteen to twenty people every year. There is a Catholic cemetery and a Protestant cemetery, and traditional people are buried according to Longhouse custom. There is also a pet cemetery. There are no addresses. For those who are familiar with reserves, this sociological and historical sketch is both familiar and very different. There are no traplines mentioned; nor is there an emphasis or mention even of commodity cheese or of exorbitant poverty. There are institutions, professionals, the righteous.... There is a lot that goes unsaid___There are those who drive “hummers”and gas guzzlers, Cadillacs, and Volkswagens; people who ride bikes or jog; young mothers who walk with strollers; one man who pushes a cart with great purpose every day in warm weather. There are highways, paved roads, train tracks, two bridges

that cut through and connect this community to every place, if you want. There is relentless discussion of how things should be, relentless critique and engagement about what some would call "politics,” of again, how things are, how they should be . There are unprompted, monologic "state of the nation” addresses. All of this exceeds the simplified figure of the ironworker. And yes, there are a lot of ironworkers there and, now, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But the story that I am telling in this book is of a place and people through time and their labor to live a good life and, in this, their imperative to live upon and move through their territory in the teeth of constraint—constraint of various forms but that we may gloss as settler colonialism. Although ironwork is a part of their story, one that we all. seem to like and admire, other things 1

will talk and not talk about are less easy to like, such as refusal. Like many other Iroquois people, the Mohawks of Kahnaw&:ke

refuse to walk on some beams, and through this gesture they refuse to be Canadian or American. They refuse the "gifts” of American and Canadian citizenship ; they insist upon the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance. Moreover, some in this study answer only to that

governmental authority. So the bestowal of settler citizenship has been received with a certain "awkwardness” if not outright refusal — a refusal to vote, to pay taxes , to stop politically being Iroquois. The language that this book uses to tell this story of refusal is the language that people use to talk about themselves. They speak in terms of nationhood, which stages a fundamental difficulty given that "Indigenous” and "nation” are two terms that seem incommensurable.11 "Indigenous” is embedded conceptually in a geographic alterity and a radical past as the Other in the history of the West. Although seemingly unable to be both things at once, the Mohawks of Kahnawarke strive to articulate these modalities as they live and move within a territorial space that is overlaid with settler regimes that regulate or circumscribe their way of life. Their struggle with the state is manifest in their ongoing debate and discussion around a membership law within their community. This registers as a conflict and a crisis, as something eventful rather than structural. My

argument is that it is a sign, also, of colonialisms ongoing existence and simultaneous failure . Colonialism survives in a settler form. In this form, it fails at what it is supposed to do: eliminate Indigenous people; take all their land; absorb them into a white, property-owning body politic. Kahnawake's debates over membership index colonialism's life as well its failure and their own life through their grip on this failure. When I started this work formally in 1996, much of the political energy of Kahnawake was focused on the “question of membership.” The

47


criteria for political membership and formal recognition within their community remained contentious, as did the need and desire to come up with a formal code to define political rights independent of the Canadian state. A reservation, or reserve, consisted of 6,154 (on the band list) and 9,531 (on the Federal Registry list, or “roll”).12 Membership was then and still is considered deeply fundamental; it affords someone “the rights that matter”; to live on the reserve, to vote if you want in band council or tribal elections, and to be buried on the reservation. Yet their diminished land base, the imposition of the Indian Act—colonization—has made this an issue, a divisive, lacerating one, within the community. The terms of this fundamental question are underscored by existential ones: Who are we? Who shall we be for the future? Who belongs here, and why do they belong here? The discussion of "membership”—the formation of a code—was (and still is) something over which nearly every community member agrees to disagree. Conversations are weighted by previous and ongoing miscarriages of justice, lacunae, misrecognitions, and animosities, and the list goes on. Here, summarized, recalled, taken from notes, overheard, engaged in, processed, flipped back to—different moments from research, different moments abstracted from my own life as a part of this community13—are fragments taken from careening and breakneck moments of conversation: “1 know someone who is listed as 48 percent and the sister is 100 percent—they have the same parents...” “What the hell happened there? .. ." “I have no idea...” “How can you be 48 percent Indian?” “I have no idea.” “Why are we not going through the women?” “We should go through the women.” “How is she on this list when she is white?” “They were taken off the list because they are white.” "Who the hell is that?!” "I don't know him—he is not from here!” "I never heard of that person!" "That man is full of shit!" “I don't know him” “Who is your mother?” “I saw your mother yesterday.” Direct, pointed, fast: “Who are you?” There is always an answer with genealogic authority—"I am to you, this way.."this is my family, this is my mother, this is my father”; “thus, I am known to you this way”—which is sorted in those breakneck, fast, summarizing, and deeply important reckoning moments between people. The subtext seems to be “I want to know who you are. Tell me who you are. I will know who you are if you or someone else tells me who you are.” But is there a supratext? Why wouldn’t people know every single person they encounter in a reserve community of six thousand or more members? Because this is a space with entries and exits; it is not hermetic. People come and go and come back again. There have been legal impositions, and historically outsiders have acquired legal rights to reside there. More innocuously, there are visitors, friends from outside, friends from other reserves. Kahnawa'kehr6:non are not always immediately discernible because of this;14 the webs of kinship have to be made material through dialogue and discourse. The authority for this dialogue rests in knowledge of another's family, whether the members are (entirely) from the community or not. “I know who you are.” Pointefinale. We are done; we can proceed. If you require more explanation, or cannot explain yourself, or be explained (or claimed) by others, then there is a problem. “Membership talk” conditions such people as problems—unknowable, illegitimate—and also determines the conditions of belonging, the legitimacy of legal personhood outside of official or state law. Here the axis is in memory, in conversation, in sociality; by talking to other people you understand who someone is, how she is connected, and thus she is socially and affectively legitimized with or without official recognition. This knowledge archive, however, is structured through prior languages and experiences of exclusion and inclusion that are tethered, sometimes with venom, to historical processes: from the movement of Mohawk people in the seventeenth century from what is now New York State into their northern hunting territory, what is now southwestern Quebec (Canada). This moved Mohawks territorially into the first Catholic mission in the Northeast, into an emergent reservation (the oldest in the Northeast), and into new sites of permanence and ongoing mobility.15 The Indian Act of 1876, the overarching "law” of Indians in Canada, legally “made” and “unmade” Indians and their rights in a Western, specifically Victorian, model of patrilineal descent (and rule) that attempted to order their winnowed territories. This foreign authority and government has competed with and continues to compete with the life of Iroquois “tradition”—the ongoing philosophical system and governmental structure that connects them through clan and ceremony to other Haudenosaunee peoples. These seemingly antagonistic processes of “tradition,” “modernity,” and “settlement” are what made forming an agreed-upon membership code in Kahnawake deeply challenging, not to mention vexed, and biting. They open “the problem” of membership to much larger historical and political processes and questions—such as the context for rights, their meanings on the

ground—quite simply, how to be a nation, when much of one’s territory has been taken. These processes also bring into question how to proceed as a nation if the right to determine the terms of legal belonging , a crucial component of

sovereignty, has been dictated by a foreign government . The question emerges of how to do this—procedurally, ethically—if

the certainty of its means are opaque or hidden and you are also viewed not as a people with a governmental system, a

philosophical order, but as a remnant, a “culture,” a minority within an ethnocultural mosaic of differences. This speaks of settler manageability in biopolitical states of care, or abandonment on land reserved for your “use and benefit,” with regulations on how you use that land, who gets to use it, what the terms of that use are. This does not speak of sovereign political orders with authority over land and life. How can you proceed, then, under these conditions as

if you are sovereign, as if you are a nation? Nationhood, one might think, hangs on the brink. But this story starts with a grounded refusal, not a precipice. In this book I make three claims that are drawn from ethnographic research with the Mohawks of Kahnawake. First, sovereignty may exist within sovereignty. One does not entirely negate the other, but they necessarily stand in terrific tension and pose serious jurisdictional and normative

challenges to each other: Whose citizen are you? What authority do you answer to? One challenges the very legitimacy of the other. As Indigenous nations are enframed by settler states that call themselves nations and appear to have a monopoly on institutional and military power, this is a significant assertion. There is more than one political show in town. If a Haudenosaunee person is to travel internationally, for example, on a Confederacy passport, then the very boundaries and lawfulness of the original territorial referent is called into question. The entire United States may then be "international," which, some

would argue, it was prior to contact and still is. Like Indigenous bodies, Indigenous sovereignties and Indigenous political orders prevail within and apart from settler governance . This form of "nested sovereignty” has implications for the sturdiness of nation-

states over all, but especially for formulations of political membership as articulated and fought over within these nested sovereignties. Second, there is a political alternative to "recognition,” the much sought-after and presumed “good" of multicultural politics. This alternative is “refusal,” and it is exercised by people within this book. They deploy it as a political and ethical stance that stands in stark

contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognized. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one's political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so? Those of us writing about these issues can also “refuse”; this is a distinct form of ethnographic refusal and is tied inextricably to my final claim.16 Third, the way that we come to know the politics and culture of “Indigenous" peoples requires an accounting that neither anthropology nor political

48


science has done robustly.17 One field of inquiry—anthropology— has dealt almost exclusively with Indigenous peoples in an ahistorical and depoliticized sense, innocent or dismissive of the strains of colonization and then settler colonialism on their politics, looking instead for pure culture and pure interlocutors of that culture.18 Political science, government, and political theory are relatively new to questions of Indigenous politics and life and deal with them as a "case” that is wholly documentary or an ethical and practical test to the limits of Western norms of acknowledgment. Because of their Western, institutional, and statist focus, none of these disciplines have dealt evenhandedly, robustly, or critically with Indigenous politics and how they challenge what most perceive as settled. By “settled” I mean “done," “finished,” “complete.” This is the presumption that the

colonial project has been realized: land has been dispossessed; its owners have been eliminated or absorbed. This clean-slate settlement is now considered a "nation of immigrants” (except the Indians). But this belief demonstrates a blindness to the structure of settler-colonial nation- statehood—of its labor, its pain, and its agonies—which get glossed and celebrated by the likes of US president Barack Obama as progressive acknowledgment

of the exceptional status of Indigenous people. These three claims force us to an argument about political form, positioning, and strategy. We see that rooted in the Iroquois case broadly— and Kahnawake specifically—under the conditions of settler colonialism, multiple sovereignties cannot proliferate

robustly or equally. The ongoing conditions of settler colonialism have forced Kahnawa'kehr6:non to take an offensive position not just against the settler nation , but in some ways against themselves. This position then manifests in

calculated refusals of the “gifts” of the state, and in vexed determinations of "membership" and belonging in that state. To understand this situation and perhaps move to a more productive place of refusal, we need to look at the history of this community within a larger matrix of relatedness (to territory, to other Iroquois peoples, to the politics that enframe them) and, in making these more robust forms of inquiry, change the ways we study

and write about Indigenous politics. In situations in which sovereignties are nested and embedded, one proliferates at the other’s expense ; the United States and Canada can only come into political being because of Indigenous dispossession . Under these conditions there cannot be two perfectly equal, robust sovereignties. Built into “sovereignty” is a jurisdictional dominion over territory, a notion of singular law, and singular authority (the king, the state, the band council, tribal

council, and even the notion of the People). But this ongoing and structural project to acquire and maintain land, and to eliminate those on it, did not

work completely. There are still Indians, some still know this, and some will defend what they have left. They will persist, robustly. There has been and , we can infer, will continue to be push back on the settler logics of elimination. Those who still live this struggle with different political authorities find themselves in a “nested” form of sovereignty and in politics of refusal. Ethnography in such settings requires a historical and ethnologic accounting of why politics take this form. How is it that Indigenous people, and their politics, have come to be known in particular ways? These are politics that narrow to a point of irrational, unexplainable, seemingly illiberal expulsion and exclusion; “the problem of membership.”

49


Alt – State RejectionA politics of radical self-recognition that sits outside the confines of the settler state is necessary – only a complete refusal of western progression solves and will give students the tools necessary to resist oppressive structures of colonialism Coulthard 14 (Glen Sean Coulthard, Assistant Prof of First Nations Studies, University of British Columbia, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition JM

The argument sketched to this point is bleak in its implications. Indeed, left as is, it would appear that recognition inevitably leads to subjection, and as such much of what Indigenous peoples have sought over the last forty years to secure their freedom has in practice cunningly assured its opposite. Inter- preted this way, my line of argument appears to adhere to an outdated conception of power, one in which postcolonial critics, often reacting against the likes of Fanon and others, have worked so diligently to refute. The implication of this view is that Indigenous subjects are always being interpellated by recognition, being constructed by colonial discourse, or being assimilated by colonial power structures.83 As a result, resistance to this totalizing power is often portrayed as an inherently reactionary , zero-sum project. To the degree that Fanon can be implicated in espousing such a totalizing view of colonial power, it has been suggested that he was unable to escape the Manichean logic so essential in propping up relations of colonial domination to begin with.84 I want to defend Fanon, at least partially, from the charge that he advocated such a devastating view of power. However, in order to assess the degree to which Fanon anticipates and accounts for this general line of criticism, we must unpack his theory of anticolonial agency and empowerment. As argued throughout the preceding pages, Fanon did not attribute much emancipatory potential to Hegel's politics of recognition when applied to colonial situations. Yet this is not to say that he rejected the recognition paradigm entirely. As we have seen, like Hegel and Taylor, Fanon ascribed to the notion that relations of recognition are constitutive of subjectivity and that, when unequal, they can foreclose the realization of human freedom. On the latter point, however, he was deeply skeptical as to whether the mutuality envisioned by Hegel was achievable in the conditions indicative of contemporary colonialism. But if Fanon did not see freedom as naturally emanating from the slave being granted recognition from his or her master,85 where, if at all, did it originate? In effect, Fanon claimed that the pathway to self-determination instead lay in a quasi-Nietzschean form of personal and collective self-affirmation . 86 Rather than remaining dependent on their oppressors for their freedom and self-worth, Fanon recognized that the colonized must instead struggle to work through their alienation/subjection against the objectifying gaze and assimilative lure of colonial recognition . According to Fanon, it is this self-initiated process that "triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonized's psycho-affective equilibrium.”87 According to this view, the colonized must initiate the process of decolonization by first recognizing themselves as free, dignified, and distinct contributors to humanity. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Fanon equated this process of self-recognition with the praxis undertaken by the slave in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which Fanon saw as illustrating the necessity on the part of the oppressed to "turn away" from their other- oriented master-dependency, and to instead struggle for freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values .88 I would also argue that this is why Fanon, although critical of the at times bourgeois and essentialist character of certain works within the negritude tradition, nonetheless saw the project as necessary.89 Fanon was attuned to ways in which the individual and collective revaluation of black culture and identity could serve as a source of pride and empowerment, and if approached critically and directed appropriately, could help jolt the colonized into an "actional" existence, as opposed to a "reactional" one characterized by ressentiment.90 As Robert Young notes in the context of Third World decolonization, it was this initial process of collective self-affirmation that led many colonized populations to develop a "distinctive postcolonial epistemology and ontology" which enabled them to begin to conceive of and construct alternatives to the colonial project itself.91 I would argue that Fanon's call in Black Skin, White Masks for a simultaneous turn inward and away from the master, far from espousing a rigidly binaristic Manichean view of power relations, instead reflects a profound understanding of the complexity involved in contests over recognition in colonial and racialized environments. Unlike Hegel's life-and-death struggle between two opposing forces, Fanon added a multidimensional racial/cultural aspect to the dialectic, thereby underscoring the multifarious web of recognition relations that are at work in constructing identities and establishing (or undermining) the conditions necessary for human freedom and flourishing. Fanon showed that the power dynamics in which identities are formed and deformed were nothing like the hegemon/subaltern binary depicted by Hegel. In an anticipatory way, then, Fanon's insight can also be said to challenge the overly negative and all-subjectifying view of interpellation that would plague Althus- ser's theory of ideology more than a decade later. For Althusser, the process of interpellation always took the form of "a fundamental misrecognition" that served to produce within individuals the "specific characteristics and desires that commit them to the very actions that are required of them by their [sub- ordinate] class

50


position.''92 Fanon's innovation was that he showed how similar recognitive processes worked to "call forth" and empower individuals within communities of resistance.93 This is not to say, of course, that Fanon was able to completely escape the "Manicheism delirium" that he was so astute at diagnosing.94 Those familiar with the legacy of Fanon's later work, for example, know that the "actional" existence that he saw self-recognition initiating in Black Skin, White Masks would in The Wretched of the Earth take the form of a direct and violent engagement with the colonial society and its institutional structure. “At the very moment [the colonized come to] discover their humanity," wrote Fanon, they must "begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory."95 In Fanon's later work, violence would come to serve as a "kind of psychotherapy of the oppressed,” offering "a primary form of agency through which the subject moves from non-being to being, from object to subject.”96 In this sense, the practice of revolutionary violence, rather than the affirmative recognition of the other, offered the most effective means to transform the subjectivities of the colonized, as well as to topple the social structure that produced colonized subjects to begin with.

51


Alt – Scyborgs Scyborgs recognize the technologies of the university and reuse them to hack into the university and use it against itself. The plan is a starting point for using liberal reform to grant indigenous land grants for schools and drive decolonial dreams – our goal is not to solve it all at once, but to start the hard work of using the machine against itself.Paperson 17 (La, also K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. “A Third University Is Possible” June 2017 JM

The scyborg’s medium is assemblage. When we take assemblages seriously as both analytical of power and as the medium for it, then the question becomes, how do you hack assemblages? The scyborg is a sculptor of assemblage—s-he splices one machine to another, de/links apparatuses from / to one another, places machines to work in making new machines, disassembles and reassembles the machine . The scyborg can connect Black radical thought to the paper-producing academic–industrial complex and set the print command to “manifesto.” The scyborg is like R2D2 in the Death Star, opening escape tunnels, lowering and raising doors to new passageways, making the death machine run backward, and ultimately releasing the plans for its destruction. The scyborg is an artist in the un/patterning of relations of power.[19] The scyborg loves dirty work.[20] Scyborgs do not care whether the assemblage they are retooling is first, second, or third world. Categorical thinking is not the point. Nothing is too dirty for scyborg dreaming: MBA programs, transnational capital, D epartment of Defense grants . Scyborgs are ideology-agnostic, which creates possibilities in every direction of the witch’s flight—not just possibilities that we like. This is why some of you are not always decolonial in behavior. Thankfully, your newly assembled machine will break down. Some other scyborgs will reassemble the busted gears to drive decolonial dreams. To dream it is to ride the ruin. Scyborgs are creating the free university. Scyborg desires are connecting the neoliberal motor that drove President Obama’s campaign for tuition-free community college to antipoverty organizing and to critical education. One of the interesting ways this is being done is by connecting free universities to the rhetoric of democracy and citizenship. Democracy is not decolonization. Democratization will expand, at best, the normative class of citizens through reinvestments in settler colonialism and new articulations of antiblackness . However, “democracy” as a discourse was also ready material for assemblage, a gear to attach to build the free university. The dream of universal education is born from the reality of exclusive schooling. This dream may shift as educational expansion creates new imbalances, such as inflated credentials, the devaluing of unschooled knowledge, new gaps between educational training and employment, or gaps between the trained workforce and the available supply of jobs. However, in building the free university assemblage and watching it fall apart, perhaps something unpredictable will come of its ruin. As to what, and whether the free university will be decolonizing, will be answered in scyborg assemblage. To be very clear, I am not advocating for rescuing the university from its own neoliberal desires but rather for assembling decolonizing machines, to plug the university into decolonizing assemblages. Close to my heart, Roses in Concrete Community School opened its doors in 2015 in Ohlone , what some call Oakland, California. This school is part of a larger self-determination project for a mostly Black and Brown community, in which we hope for a pre-K–16 educational institution, community-based economies, and land.[21] Also in 2015, also in what is now called Oakland, longtime Indigenous educators and activists Corrina Gould (Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone) and Johnella LaRose (Shoshone Bannock) created the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust built upon “the belief that land is the foundation ” that can bring all peoples together in “the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands . . . to Indigenous stewardship.” Sogorea Te’ Land Trust also reworks Western concepts of “land tax,” nonprofit status, and inheritance. Decolonizing land relations is the heart that reworks this machinery. Sogorea Te’ not only calls on but indeed provides an avenue for people living in Ohlone lands “to heal from the legacies of colonialism and genocide, to remember different ways of living, and to do the work that our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.”[22] Nearby Roses in Concrete is an abandoned U.S. Navy base the size of a small town. California community colleges are talking expansion, while the tuition-free college movement had nearly found a federal reality under President Obama. A scyborg might connect these pieces—might imagine how the machines of freedom schools and free community colleges could purchase land, land that could become part of an Indigenous land trust . Roses in Concrete has a sister school in Aoteroa that originated from a Māori bilingual program Te Whānau o Tupuranga (Centre for Māori Education) and Fanau

52


Pasifika (Centre for Pasifika Education), which became a school in 2006 and then became Kia Aroha College in 2011. Similar to Roses, Kia Aroha College is built on a holistic “scholar warrior” culture that developed the school over twenty-five years into a “culturally-located, bilingual learning model based in a secure cultural identity, stable positive relationships, and aroha (authentic caring and love).”[23] This craft of creating Indigenous space in an urban colonial context requires a constant rearrangement of settler law, Indigenous rights, state educational ministry systems, built schooling environments, and community systems of Indigenous education. Furthermore, these associations between school makers in Māori/Pasifika and in U.S. ghetto colonial contexts produce new shared scyborg flight plans. These technologies are driven and repurposed by scyborg desires. Where I am now, on Kumeyaay land at UC San Diego, we are at the confluence of the engineering apparatus, the naval and sea industries, the U.S.– Mexican border, the white utopian project of Black exclusion, the settler project of Native disappearance, the transnational project of international (read model Asian) recruitment. Scyborgs might reorganize these technologies into third university organisms with decolonizing programs: a project of water, a project of transnational/Indigenous solidarity, a project of Black assertion, a project of islands. As I write, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (my other I) are supporting a collective of collectives, the Land Relationships Super Collective , that connects different land-based movements across North America with one another to share strategies, resources, learnings, and so on. As Eve and I are both university professors, the university plays into this as an institution that must be refused, and yet also as an organism, an assemblage of machines, that we can make work, make space in, make liquid enough to allow us to contribute to land rematriation projects directly. The third world university will be built by scyborg labor. This is not a revolutionary call for scyborgs of the world to unite. This is a call to gear-in and do the dirty work of desiring machines. Through desires’ dirty work, we might recommission these first world scraps into a third world machine.

53


Framework An anti-colonial framework begins by questioning institutionalized power and privilege. The use of our discursive agency is key to take power from the colonizer and the dominant in society Dei 2 (George, Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, “Rethinking the role of Indigenous Knowledge in the Academy” (http://nall.oise.utoronto.ca/res/58GeorgeDei.pdf JM

An anti-colonial discursive approach begins by questioning institutionalized power and privilege, and the accompanying rationale for dominance in social relations. It acknowledges the role of societal/institutional structures in producing and reproducing inequalities that are based on race, class, sexual and gender location. A key argument is that institutional structures are sanctioned by the state to serve the material, politi cal and ideological interests of the state and economic/social formation. However, power and discourse are not possessed entirely by the colonizer and the dominant. Discursive agency and power to resist also reside in/among colonized groups (see also Bhabha,1995). For example, subordinated/colonized populations had a theoretical and practical conception of the col onizer with which to engage social and political practice and relations. Contact between the ‘imperial order’ and the ‘colonial’ periphery continues to involve complex and creative enc ounters/resistances (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Thiopene, 1995). The myriad resistances help sustain the local human conditionalities of the colonized ‘other’.

54

http://nall.oise.utoronto.ca/res/58GeorgeDei.pdf


AT Perm – Byrd The ethical rejection of Settler control must come before evaluating truth claims of 1AC actionByrd 11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism JMThe Transit of Empire has taken as its point of entry the constellating discourses that juridically, culturally, and constitutionally produce “Indians” as an operational site within U.S. expansionism. “Indianness” circulates within poststructural, postcolonial, critical race, and queer theories as both sign and event; as a process of signification and exception, “Indianness” starts, stops, and reboots the colonialist discourses that spread along lines of flight that repeatedly challenge the multicultural liberal settler state to remediate freedom despite the fact that such colonializing liberalisms established themselves through force, violence, and genocide in order to make freedom available for some and not others . As the liberal state and its supporters and critics struggle over the meaning of pluralism, habitation, inclusion, and enfranchisement, indigenous peoples and nations, who provide the ontological and literal ground for such debates , are continually deferred into a past that never happened and a future that will never come . And as a system dependent upon difference and differentiation to enact the governmentality of biopolitics, the deferred “Indian” that transits U.S. empire over continents and oceans is recycled and reproduced so that empire might cohere and consolidate subject and object, self and other, within those transits. In the process, racialization replaces colonization as the site of critique, and the structuring logics of dispossession are displaced onto settlers and arrivants who substitute for and as indigenous in order to consolidate control and borders at that site of differentiation. Indigenous peoples are rendered unactionable in the present as their colonization is deferred along the transits that seek new lands, resources, and peoples to feed capitalistic consumption. For the Chickasaw, who have negotiated and survived such a system for over four hundred and fifty years, the intersubstantiations of sovereignty and relationship that connect community to ancestral place and belonging arise from the ontologies of reciprocal complementarity, Upper and Lower Worlds, that inflect and shape this world through balance and haksuba. Movement across land and time was tied to the night sky and a deep awareness of the celestial order of spiral galaxies even as that movement traversed rivers and mountain ranges on ceremonial cycles of death and rebirth. Sovereignty, in the context of such philosophies, is an act of interpretation as much as it is a political assertion of power, control, and exception. That interpretation is an act of sovereignty is something well known and practiced by the imperial hegemon that uses juridical, military, and ontological force to police interpretation and interpellate what is and is not seen, what can and cannot be said. Indigenous critical theory stands in the parallax gap created when U.S. empire transits itself in the stretch between perceptions of the real to interpret and will against the signifying systems that render “Indianness” as the radical alterity of the real laid bare.

55


AT Perm – Woan Reform DA - Piecemeal reforms are simply appeased by the racist state with no fundamental change – takes out long term solvency and makes aff harms inevitableWoan 11 (Tansy, “the value of resistance in a permanently white Civil Society”, Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York, ProQuest Dissertations, p. 17-19 JM

One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one policy at a time? Perhaps one could first work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It would not seem entirely implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms within the government could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself. However, simply eliminating discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial institution. Understanding the motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical factor in determining the success of a movement. While one justification for passing the Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of equality and exposing racial injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which is important to the federal government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus, the government often seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating disruptions to preserve order. When those being denied certain rights grow significantly discontent, they rebel and become disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This can take the form of civil disobedience, such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or violently harassing officials to acknowledge the injustices and change policy. All of these measures, however peaceful or violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or blocking frequently-used road paths, and most certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis, those in power may often compromise and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights to individuals through changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the disruption (the protests, demonstrations, etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's argument that these reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than functional. If still operating under the racial state, these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the original racial injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed in establishing a new unstable equilibrium, only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems."8 These new problems will once again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to replicate itself, ensuring the permanence of racism. Omi and Winant term this cycle of continuous disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This trajectory supports the treatment of racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates racial disruption over a particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race will emerge triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics.

56


AT Andrea Smith Reading of Andrea Smith forefronts a prescriptive claim from a person who appropriated Cherokee culture. This is a voting issue. Also implicates their argument because their subjectless K amounts to disembodied settlerismBarker et al 15 (“Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith.” 7/7. Joanne Barker (Lenape [Delaware Tribe of Indians]), Professor of American Indian Studies, San Francisco State University Jodi A. Byrd (Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation), Associate Professor of American Indian Studies, English, and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jill Doerfler (White Earth Ojibwe), Associate Professor, American Indian Studies University of Minnesota-Duluth Lisa Kahaleole Hall (Kanaka Maoli), Associate Professor of Womenʻs and Gender Studies, Wells College LeAnne Howe (Enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature, University of Georgia, Athens J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University Jean OʻBrien (White Earth Ojibwe), Distinguished McKnight University Professor, History, University of Minnesota Kathryn W. Shanley (Nakoda), Professor of Native American Studies, University of Montana Noenoe K. Silva (Kanaka Hawaiʻi), Professor of Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Shannon Speed (Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin Jacki Thompson Rand (Citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Iowa We note tribal and institutional affiliations for informational purposes only. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/07/open-letter-indigenous-women-scholars-regarding-discussions-andrea-smith JMWe write to respond to widespread public discussion of well-known scholar-activist Andrea Smith’s history of contradictory claims to Cherokee identity through both enrollment and lineal descent. While concerns about her claims have been known and discussed within various indigenous women’s circles for years, many people are hearing details about them for the first time. The news has provoked a variety of responses from those committed to antiracist, antisexist, and anticolonial analyses and actions, including shock, incredulity, fear, anger, denial, and great sadness. Thus, differing and sometimes conflicting assumptions about the meanings and intentions of this discussion are circulating on social media. A prominent fear is that the discussion is motivated by a desire to undermine, police or ostracize an individual; another is that the work people find important in developing their understandings of colonization and sexual violence might now have to be jettisoned. We hope to reframe this discussion and to collectively clarify what we believe to be core issues at stake. We are indigenous women scholars from a number of different indigenous nations, communities, academic disciplines, and geographies who are committed to working for gender, sexual, and racial justice in the context of decolonization. We write with the intention to open up discussion. We hope to elicit productive dialogues about deeply fraught and painful issues, and to suggest paths forward for continued and complex analysis of the roles identity plays in the work we do. We do not claim to represent all indigenous women in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) or a monolithic indigenous feminism. There is diverse work within NAIS and Native/Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and also diverse perspectives within Native/Indigenous academic and activist communities about feminism. We respect that diversity. Additionally, we want to acknowledge the kinds of professional vulnerabilities that NAIS scholars are subject to, especially intergenerationally, through the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, we did not invite untenured or adjunct faculty to sign this statement. We call first and foremost for accountability to the communities in which we claim membership. This is not a call for the punitive or the exclusionary. This case evokes people’s fears and vulnerabilities about very real histories of disenfranchisement, expulsion, discrimination, and normative policing in Indian Country and beyond. Thus it bears repeating: our concerns about Andrea Smith do not emerge from statist forms of enrollment or non-enrollment, federal recognition or lack thereof. They are not about blood quantum or other biologically essentialist notions of identity. Nor are they about cultural purity or authenticity, or imposing standards of identification that those who would work for or with indigenous communities must meet. Rather, our concerns are about the profound need for transparency and responsibility in light of the traumatic histories of colonization, slavery, and genocide that shape the present. Andrea Smith has a decades-long history of self-contradictory stories of identity and affiliation testified to by numerous scholars and activists, including her admission to four separate parties that she has no claim to Cherokee ancestry at all. She purportedly promised to no longer identify as Cherokee, and yet in her subsequent appearances and publications she continues to assert herself as a non-specific “Native woman” or a “woman of color” scholar to

57

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/07/open-letter-indigenous-women-scholars-regarding-discussions-andrea-smith

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/07/open-letter-indigenous-women-scholars-regarding-discussions-andrea-smith


antiracist activist communities in ways that we believe have destructive intellectual and political consequences. Presenting herself as generically indigenous, and allowing others to represent her as Cherokee, Andrea Smith allows herself to stand in as the representative of collectivities to which she has demonstrated no accountability, and undermines the integrity and vibrancy of Cherokee cultural and political survival. Her lack of clarity and consistency in her self-presentation adds to the vulnerability of the communities and constituents she purports to represent, including students and activists she mentors and who cite and engage her work. This concerns us as indigenous women committed to opening spaces for scholars and activists with whom we work and who come after us. Asking for accountability to our communities and collectivities is not limited to Andrea Smith. Asking for transparency, self-reflexivity, and honesty about our complex histories and scholarly investments is motivated by the desire to strengthen ethical indigenous scholarship by both indigenous and non-indigenous scholars. This is one of the core guiding values of indigenous feminisms, and we believe that the long history of indigenous feminisms cannot and should not be reduced to Smith’s work as representative or originary, even as we recognize that her work on sexual violence and colonialism has had a profound impact on a wide range of constituencies. Though some express fear that the power of indigenous feminist critique might be undermined by raising these concerns, such fear is a reflection of the urgent need for scholars in and beyond indigenous studies to extend their reading and citational practices to include the length and breadth of indigenous women’s writings and activism over the years. Indigenous women have always been at the forefront of their communities in naming and combatting colonization, genocide, and gendered violence. Looking at the US and Canada alone, work by Paula Gunn Allen, Kim Anderson, Beth Brant, Chrystos, Sarah Deer, Ella Deloria, Jennifer Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman, Joy Harjo, Sarah Hunt, E. Pauline Johnson, Winona LaDuke, Emma LaRoque, Lee Maracle, Bea Medicine, Dian Millon, Deborah Miranda, Dory Nason, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessi*ca Bissett-Perea, Kimberly Robertson, Luana Ross, Priscilla Settee, Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson, Lina Sunseri, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, and Melanie Yazzie to name only some, demonstrates the vitality and richness of indigenous women’s voices that speak against the racial, gendered, and sexualized violences of colonialism. Given the intellectual and emotional labor that Andrea Smith’s silence and lack of accountability has required us all—supporter or critic—to undertake, we would like to also ask for reflection and care in the stories generated to make sense of her contradictions and her silences. The history of Cherokee removal and dispossession is deeply woven into the same southeastern landscapes shaped by slavery and anti-black racism, and the Cherokee Nation’s disenfranchisement of the Freedmen must continue to be ethically addressed and challenged. So too must efforts to expunge the rolls of entire families in indigenous nations across this continent. At the same time, we recognize that histories of “playing Indian” have gone hand in hand with dispossession of land in Indian Territory during allotment. Playing Indian is enabled by and supports the dominant narrative that indigenous peoples are vanishing or already vanished . The material consequences of that narrative includes ongoing claims by the state, by science, and by non-indigenous individuals to indigenous lands, sacred sites, remains, and both individual and group representations of us. Our concerns are grounded in these histories, and we challenge both individual and structural forms of indigenous erasure. Smith’s self-acknowledged false claims and lack of clarity on her own identity perpetuate deeply ingrained notions of race—black, white, and Indian—that run counter to indigenous modes of kinship, family, and community connection. When she and others continue to produce her as Cherokee, indigenous , and/or as a woman of color by default, they reinforce a history in which settlers have sought to appropriate every aspect of indigenous life and absolve themselves of their own complicity with continued dispossession of both indigenous territory and existence . The stories we tell have consequences, and the harm that some stories produce goes beyond their individual context . One of the devastating consequences of Smith having served as the often singular representative of indigeneity in a variety of academic and activist social justice contexts is damage to strategic alliance building, especially between indigenous and non-indigenous women of color. Accountability to communities, kinship networks and multiple histories is part of the difficult work scholars of indigenous and critical race studies must be willing to undertake to ensure that our work combats rather than reinforces or leaves untouched the intricate dynamics of heteropatriarchal racist colonialism. Our desire here is to help move forward productive conversations surrounding the specific case of Andrea Smith and to also contextualize them within larger discussions long held in NAIS, a crucial field of inquiry. We hope that this current moment can provide scholars and activists involved with NAIS, critical ethnic studies, gender, sexuality and queer studies, and multiple activist communities an opportunity to expand their methodologies, citational practices, pedagogies, curriculum, advising/mentoring, and political organizing. We hope to foster collaboration across our fields and communities that builds our solidarity with LGBTQ, women of color, and all progressive anti-racist and decolonial scholars and activists, and that contributes to our ethical, integral, and accountable relations with one another. We do not ask anyone to step back from dialogue and disagreement, only that all proceed thoughtfully, with awareness of the often conflictual histories of dispossession, oppression and loss that underpin these conversations.

58


Aff

59


AT Rifkin Rifkin is wrong - Their brand of settler colonial theory over-invests in the guilt and voice of the settlers rather than empowering indigenous resistance. And their view of settler colonialism as everyday structures makes it fatalistic and unable to be transcended despite their calls for resistance. Snelgrove et al 14( Corey is a MA Candidate, Indigenous Governance & Grad Student Fellow, Univ of British Columbia), Rita Kaur Dhamoon (Assist Prof of Pol Sci, Univ of Victoria), Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee Professor in Indigenous Governance Masters Program @ Univ of Victoria) May 26, 2014, “Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol 3, No 2, pp. 1-32, decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/21166/17970, KELThe bourgeoning field of settler colonial studies has made several important contributions, both theoretically and politically. First, settler colonialism is conceptually distinct from other kinds of colonialism, in that it is rooted in the elimination of Indigenous peoples, polities and relationships from and with the land (Wolfe, 2006). Building on this, the distinctiveness of settler colonialism works to highlight the incommensurability between Indigenous struggles and, for instance, civil rights projects (see Byrd, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). This has led Grande (2013), Macoun and Strakosch (2013), and Morgensen (2011c) to note the convergence of conservative and progressive goals by revealing settler investments in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Second, conceptualizations of settler colonialism have provided ways to articulate its operations and effects. For instance, settler colonialism is being conceptualized in terms of its everyday modalities, what Rifkin (2013) calls ‘settler colonial common sense’. Adam Barker (2012) draws on Wolfe and Veracini’s definitions but also identifies settler colonialism as “a distinct method of colonizing” that involves “ the creation and consumption of a whole array of spaces by settler collectives that claim and transform places through the exercise of their sovereign capacity” (p. 1). Settlement, then, is not led by elites alone (Barker, 2012, p. 1). Third, critics of settler colonialism have sharpened critiques of dominant power. Moreton-Robinson (2007, 2008), for instance, situates patriarchal white sovereignty as a constitutive feature of settler colonialism and the premise of settler logics of property; Byrd (2011) centres the deployment of Indianness as a constitutive feature of settler colonialism; Morgensen (2011b) centres settler colonialism in theories of biopower, state(s) of exception, and global governance; while Jackson (2014), King (2014), and Smith (2014) discuss the complex relationship between anti-blackness and settler colonialism. Fourth, studies of settler colonialism have also generated intellectual and political synergies between queer and feminist theories, Indigenous studies, and critiques of settler colonialism (Driskill et al., 2011; Morgensen, 2010, 2011a, 2012; Smith, 2010; Tuck et al., 2013), illuminating intersections and interactions, while simultaneously acknowledging the incommensurability of forces of colonial, gendered, and heteronormative power that Indigenous feminists (Green, 2007; Barker, 2008; Simpson, 2014) and postcolonial feminists have long emphasized. In the tradition of critical approaches, scholars of (or engaging with) settler colonialism have also identified several challenges or weaknesses of this burgeoning field of study . Joanne Barker (2011), on the blog Tequila Sovereign, questioned the specificity of settler colonialism. Drawing on the etymological origins of “settle” as ‘to reconcile’, as well as in light of settler state apologies, Barker warns that settler colonialism may signal a nation-state that has moved “beyond its own tragically imperial and colonial history to be something else, still albeit colonial, but not quite entirely colonial.” Second, Macoun and Strakosch (2013) note that settler colonial theory “ is primarily a settler framework ” that is largely about settler intentions to think through colonial relations (p. 427). This in itself may not be a problem, but as Macoun and Strakosch warn, settler colonial studies can re-empower non-Indigenous academic voices while marginalizing Indigenous resistance (2013, p. 436). Third, while settler colonialism is posited as both a condition of possibility (Rifkin, 2013) and a site of potential hope (Barker, 2012), there is an underlying “ colonial fatalism ” (Macoun and Strakosch, 2013, p. 435) that posits a structural inevitability to settler colonial relations . Macoun and Strakosch (2013) in particular note that settler colonialism is unable to transcend itself precisely because it is conceptualized as a structure, where the only polarizing choices available to Indigenous peoples are either to be coopted or hold a position of resistance/sovereign, while anti-colonial action by settlers is foreclosed. Fourth, the framework of settler colonialism has fostered over-characterizations of binary positions. Saranillio (2013), for instance, notes two common charges against settler colonial studies: that it affirms a binary of Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and that it leads to a neo-racist form of politics that requires non-Natives leave Indigenous territories (arguments that Sarinillo rejects). Moreover, we note that this binary , at times, has the effect of treating settler colonialism as a meta-structure , thus erasing both its contingency and the dynamics that coconstitute racist, patriarchal, homonationalist, ablest, and capitalist settler colonialism.

60


Reformism Good – Connolly Engaging multiple sites of resistance and interim reforms is necessary to foster an ethos critical to overcome right-wing oppression – their rejection of the state cedes the terrain of politics to neoliberalsConnolly ’13 (William, Professor of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, The Fragility of Things, pp. 36-42 JMA philosophy attending to the acceleration, expansion, irrationalities, interdependencies, and fragilities of late capitalism suggests that we do not know with confidence, in advance of experimental action, just how far or fast changes in the systemic character of neoliberal capitalism can be made. The structures often seem solid and intractable, and indeed such a semblance may turn out to be true. Some may seem solid, infinitely absorptive, and intractable when they’re in fact punctuated by hidden vulnerabilities, soft spots, uncertainties, and potential lines of flight that become apparent when they are subjected to experimental action, upheaval, testing, and strain. Indeed no ecology of late capitalism, given the variety of forces to which it is connected by a thousand pulleys, vibrations, impingements, de- pendencies, shocks, and threads, can specify with supreme confidence the solidity or potential flexibility of the structures it seeks to change.¶ The strength of structural theory, at its best, was in identifying, institutional intersections that hold a system together; its conceit, at its worst, was the claim to know in advance how resistant such intersections are to potential change. Without adopting the opposite conceit, it seems important to pursue possible sites of strategic action that might open up room for productive change . Today it seems important to attend to the relation between the need for structural change and identification of multiple sites of potential action. You do not know precisely what you are doing when you participate in such a venture. You combine an experimental temper with the appreciation that living and acting into the future inevitably contain a shifting quotient of uncertainty. The following tentative judgments and sites of action may be pertinent.¶ 1) Neither neoliberal theory, nor socialist productivism, nor deep ecology, nor social democracy in its classic form seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. This is so in part because the powers of market self-regulation are both real and limited in relation to a larger multitude of heterogeneous force fields beyond the human estate with differential powers of self-regulation and metamorphosis. A first task is to challenge neoliberal ideology through critique and by elaborating and publicizing positive alternatives that acknowledge the disparate relations between market processes, other cultural systems, and nonhuman systems. Doing so to render the fragility of things more visible and palpable. Doing so, too, to set the stage for a series of interceded shifts in citizen role performances, social movements, and state action. ¶ 2) Those who seek to reshape the ecology of late capitalism might set an interim agenda of radical reform and then recoil back on the initiatives to see how they work. An interim agenda is the best thing to focus on because in a world of becoming the more distant future is too cloudy to engage . We must , for instance, become involved in experimental micropolitics on a variety of fronts, as we participate in role experimentations, social movements, artistic displaces, erotic-political shows, electoral campaigns, and creative interventions on the new media to help recode the ethos that now occupies investment practices, consumption desires, family savings, state priorities, church assemblies, university curricula, and media reporting. It is important to bear in mind how extant ideologies, established role performances, social movements, and commitments to state action intersect. To shift some of our own role performances in the zones of travel, church participation, home energy use, investment, and consumption, for instance, that now implicate us deeply in foreign oil dependence and the huge military expenditures that secure it, could make a minor difference on its own and also lift some of the burdens of institutional implications from us to support participation in more adventurous interpretations, political strategies, demands upon the state, and cross-state citizen actions. ¶ 3) Today perhaps the initial target, should be on reconstituting established patterns of consumption by a combination of direct citizen actions in consumption choices, publicity of such actions, the organization of local collectives to modify consumption practices, and social movements to reconstitute the current state- and market-supported infrastructure of consumption. By the infrastructure of consumption I mean publicly supported and subsidized market subsystems such as a national highway system, a system of airports, medical care through private insurance, agribusiness pouring high sugar, salt, and fat content into foods, corporate ownership of the public media, the prominence of corporate 403 accounts over retirement pensions, and so forth that enable some modes of consumption in the zones of travel, education, diet, retirement, medical care, energy use, health, and education and render others much more difficult or expensive to procure.22 To change the infrastructure is also to shift the types of work and investment available. Social movements that work upon the infrastructure and ethos of consumption in tandem can thus make a real difference directly, encourage more people to heighten their critical perspectives, and thereby open more people to a more militant politics if and as the next disruptive event emerges. Perhaps a cross-state citizen goal should construct a pluralist assemblage by moving back and forth between experiments in role performances, the refinement of sensitive modes of perception, revisions in political ideology, and adjustments in political sensibility; doing so to mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future. The aim of such an event would be to reverse the deadly future created by established patterns of climate change by fomenting significant shifts in patterns of consumption, corporate policies, state law, and the priorities of interstate organizations. Again, the dilemma of today is that the

61


fragility of things demands shifting and slowing down intrusions into several aspects of nature as we speed up shifts in identity; role performance, cultural ethos, market regulation, and state policy.¶ 4) The existential forces of hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs) and of ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of consumption practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven senses of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism. For that reason activism inside churches, schools, street life, and the media must become increasingly skilled and sensitive. As we proceed, some of us may present the themes of a world of becoming to larger audiences, challenging thereby the complementary notions of a providential world and secular mastery that now infuse too many role performances, market practices, and state priorities in capitalist life. For existential dispositions do infuse the role priorities of late capitalism. Today it is both difficult for people to perform the same roles with the same old innocence and difficult to challenge those performances amid our own implication in them. Drives by evangelists, the media, neoconservatives, and the neoliberal right to draw a veil of innocence across the priorities of contemporary life make the situation much worse.¶ 5) The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these pressures encourage them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because so many in America insist upon retaining the special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos now folded into the institutional life of capitalism. Indeed the danger is that those constituencies now most disinclined to give close attention to public issues could oscillate between attraction to the mythic promises of neoliberal automaticity and attraction to a neofascist movement when the next crisis unfolds. It has happened before. I am not saying that neoliberalism is itself a form of fascism, but that the failures and meltdowns it periodically promotes could once again foment fascist or neofascist responses, as happened in several countries after the onset of the Great Depression. ¶ 6) The democratic state, while it certainly cannot alone tame capital or reconstitute the ethos and infrastructure of consumption, must play a significant role in reconstituting our lived relations to climate, weather, resource use, ocean currents, bee survival, tectonic instability, glacier flows, species diversity, work, local life, consumption, and investment, as it also responds favorably to the public pressures we must generate to forge a new ethos. A new , new left will thus experimentally enact new intersections between role performance and political activity, outgrow its old disgust with the very idea of the state, and remain alert to the dangers states can pose . It will do- so because, as already suggested, the fragile ecology of late capital requires state interventions of several sorts. A refusal to participate in the state today cedes too much hegemony to neoliberal markets , either explicitly or by implication. Drives to fascism, remember , rose the last time in capitalist states after market meltdown. Most of those movements failed. But a couple became consolidated through a series of resonances (vibrations) back and forth between industrialists, the state, and vigilante groups in neighborhoods, clubs, churches, the police, the media, and pubs. You do not fight the danger of a new kind of neofascism by withdrawing from either micropolitics or state politics. You do so through a multisited politics designed to •infuse a new ethos into the fabric of everyday life. Changes in ethos can in turn open doors to new possibilities of state and interstate action, so that an advance in one domain seeds that in the other. And vice versa. A positive dynamic of mutual amplification might be generated here. Could a series of significant shifts in the routines of state and global capitalism even press the fractured system to a point where it hovers on the edge of capitalism itself? We don’t know. That is one reason it is important to focus on interim goals. Another is that in a world of becoming, replete with periodic and surprising shifts in the course of events, you cannot project far beyond an interim period. Another yet is that activism needs to project concrete, interim possibilities to gain support and propel itself forward. That being said, it does seem unlikely to me, at least, that a positive interim future includes either socialist productivism or the world projected by proponents of deep ecology. ¶ 7) To advance such an agenda it is also imperative to negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious traditions who fold positive spiritualities into their creedal practices. The new, multifaceted movement needed today, if it emerges, will take the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states, rather than either a centered movement with a series of fellow travelers attached to it or a mere electoral constellation. Electoral victories are important, but they work best when they touch priorities already embedded in churches, universities, film, music, consumption practices, media reporting, investment priorities, and the like. A related thing to keep in mind is that the capitalist modes of acceleration, expansion, and intensification that heighten the fragility of things today also generate pressures to minoritize the world along multiple dimensions at a more rapid pace than heretofore. A new pluralist constellation will build upon the latter developments as it works to reduce the former effects.¶ I am sure that the forgoing comments will appear to some as "optimistic" or "utopian." But optimism and pessimism are both primarily spectatorial views. Neither seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. Indeed pessimism, if you dwell on it long, easily slides into cynicism , and cynicism often plays into the hands of a right wing that applies exclusively to any set of state activities not designed to protect or coddle the corporate estate. That is one reason that "dysfunctional politics" redounds so readily to the advantage of cynics on the right who work to promote it. They want to promote cynicism with respect to the state and innocence with respect to the market. Pure critique as already suggested, does not suffice either. Pure critique too readily carries critics and their followers to the edge of cynicism . ¶ It is also true that the above critique concentrates on neoliberal capitalism, not capitalism writ large. That is because it seems to me that we need to specify the terms of critique as closely as possible and think first of all about interim responses. If we lived under, say, Keynesian capitalism, a

62


somewhat different set of issues would be defined and other strategies identified.25 Capitalism writ large—while it sets a general context that neoliberalism inflects in specific ways—sets too large and generic a target. It can assume multiple forms, as the differences between Swedish and American capitalism suggest; the times demand a set of interim agendas targeting the hegemonic form of today, pursued with heightened militancy at several sites. The point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The "system," as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.

63


Reformism Good – NoiseCat Specifically targeted demands against institutions have been empirically successful. Even though native successes have been reversed, every victory has been consistent, and only the aff’s politics can entrench changes that allow for native survival in the present NoiseCat 16 (Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Oxford. “The Indigenous Revolution.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/ JMMany Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders believe that indigenous people are long gone and defeated. Inheritors of the imperial myth of “Manifest Destiny,” they presume the colonizers’ victory was inevitable and even predetermined. This racist myth has led empires and states to underestimate indigenous power. Global histories of indigenous resistance, survival, and resurgence tell another story. On these Oceti Sakowin plains in 1876, a cocksure General Custer rushed into the Battle of the Little Bighorn only to be soundly defeated by allied Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces. Dalrymple appears poised to repeat Custer’s mistake. Countless indigenous communities, nations, and confederacies from the Americas to Australasia, and South Africa to Siberia, including Aboriginal Australians, Apache, Arapaho, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chukchi, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Diné, Hawaiian, Haudenosaunee, Kiowa, Maori, Modoc, Nez Perce, Pueblo, Salish, Sauk, Seminole, Shawnee, Tasmans, Tlingit, Ute, Xhosa, Yakima, Zulu, and others have resisted imperial powers and industrial states and prevailed. Before defeating Custer, the Oceti Sakowin had a long history of settler handling. In 1862, the Dakota pushed thousands of settlers off the Minnesota frontier. Six years later, the Lakota defeated the United States Army in Red Cloud’s War. Retribution followed many indigenous victories. In California, entire communities were hunted like animals. After taking dozens of Dakota men as prisoners of war following the uprising of 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed an order to execute thirty-eight of them — the largest mass execution in American history. Later in 1890, the United States Army gunned down three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee. This history continues to devastate. Indigenous people remain the poorest of the poor and the most likely to be killed by law enforcement. Four of the fifteen most impoverished counties in the United States include Lakota reservations in South Dakota. The two poorest, Oglala Lakota and Todd County, lie entirely within the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, where half of all residents live in poverty. In Ziebach County, which includes parts of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations, 45 percent of the population lives at or below the poverty line. Elsewhere in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, indigenous people are among the poorest, most oppressed, and least visible. They are overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in universities. Their economic realities are bleak. Their pain is intergenerational. In short, colonialism endures. Yet these same communities are uniquely positioned to resist unjust systems and force them to retreat. We must hold these two seemingly contradictory realities of devastation and resilience in our minds at the same time. The Fourth World lives in devastation. The Fourth World is unconquered and on the rise. Since the 1970s, indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have danced impressive victories. They have compelled states to forego assimilationist policies like the involuntary removal of indigenous children to abusive residential schools and the relocation of indigenous workers to cities. Overtly coercive policies have been slowly and steadily replaced with policies that recognize indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. Gains are limited, but they are still gains. At certain times over the past thirty years, indigenous claims have prevented corporations from exploiting natural resources. In New Zealand in the 1980s, Maori claims under the Treaty of Waitangi stopped a state drive to privatize fisheries and hydroelectric power. In Canada and Australia, from the 1990s to the present, aboriginal claims have increased risk for prospective investors in extractive industries. But the dance with the state can be perilous. In recent decades, some indigenous groups mistook neoliberals who denounced “big government” for allies. They accepted land claims settlements, treaty agreements, and business deals that enabled states to slash social services for the most vulnerable while restructuring indigenous communities as junior corporate partners in the global economy. As Trump prepares to take power in the US and Brexit changes the economic calculus in Britain and across the world, it is clear that the dance with the state is entering a new age. The New Colonialism The new age has precedents. Any Howard Zinn reader knows that the United States is built on stolen land with stolen labor. However, this is an observation too imprecise to help us understand and predict the trajectory of a global political economy steered and shaped by the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage. If you squint hard enough, Jack Dalrymple might look like a young George Custer, but that does not make him so. To prevail, indigenous people and the Left must fully understand the precise ways that emerging systems will dispossess indigenous communities. In the nineteenth century, the United States Army incarcerated indigenous people on reservations, claimed land

64

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/


for homesteaders, protected prospectors, and cleared the way for railroad barons. In the 1960s, a different set of historical, political, and economic forces erected the Lake Oahe Dam on the Missouri River, flooding two hundred thousand acres of the Standing Rock reservation to provide power to suburban homeowners. Today, the drive for independence from OPEC sees a solution in hydraulic fracturing technology. North American oil fields and infrastructure are funded by a financial system that encourages speculation, drives massive inequality, and fails to account for costs associated with human and environmental risks — passing these very real risks and consequences on to communities, workers, and indigenous nations. Inherently unaccountable capitalists are paid big money for being even more unaccountable, and indigenous dispossession continues on new frontiers. Preliminary post-election forecasts indicate that Trump’s victory and Brexit will redirect capital back toward the American West and the British Commonwealth. In particular, Trump — a DAPL investor himself — will expedite completion of DAPL and similar projects. He will push to reopen and complete the Keystone XL Pipeline. If he keeps his campaign promises, he will support infrastructure projects and extractive industries, including coal and fracking, in indigenous homelands across the American hinterlands. At the same time, a conservative Supreme Court, an Interior Department led by Sarah Palin or oil baron Lucas Forrest, and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions means limited but hard-won Native rights will be rolled back. If this gang of reactionary appointees can’t figure out how to dismantle complex legal precedents, they can just cut funding to essential services like housing, schools, and health care that are already woefully underfunded, putting tribes in a stranglehold of austerity. Native resistance will be policed by Orwellian surveillance systems finely tuned by the Obama administration. Militarized law enforcement will find reinforcements in the booming private security and prison industries. Surveillance, state law enforcement, and private security will drive mass arrests, as we’re seeing at Standing Rock. Law enforcement will have more power than ever to quash protesters and silence dissent. In the former British Wests of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the right-wing populist revolution has yet to take hold in the same way, suppression of indigenous resistance may be less visibly coercive — perhaps with the exception of skyrocketing policing, incarceration, and deaths-in-custody of indigenous people, particularly Aboriginal Australians (the “most imprisoned people in the world”). Politicians in the Commonwealth will look to roll back or restructure indigenous rights won over the last three decades in ways that are favorable to capital. Governments, like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada, are already abandoning campaign promises to indigenous people, opting instead to grab land and resources (as seen in the ham-fisted effort to force through the Site C Dam against indigenous opposition). Trudeau’s minister of natural resources has already stated that Canada will no longer ask First Nations for consent before going forward with lucrative natural resource projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion project and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipelines. In Australia, the government is steamrolling the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ Native Title claims in order to move forward with the massive Carmichael Coalmine in Queensland. With the Commonwealth clamoring to cash in on opportunities created by Brexit, new free trade deals with the United Kingdom will be struck, resuscitating and rebuilding the capital networks of the former British Empire, previously weakened by globalization and the European Single Market. The Tory dream of a revived Anglosphere, long derided as fanciful, nostalgic, and bad business by Liberals, may even emerge as a legitimate principle and framework of international relations and trade. It will compete with increasingly powerful Chinese and Indian capital throughout the Commonwealth, as already witnessed in the Canadian tar sands, Australian coalmines, and New Zealand real estate and dairy. Combined with the rise of China and India, this will bring new waves of exploitive capital into indigenous homelands, along with increased policing and the dismantling of indigenous rights. Renewed colonial and capitalist pressure on indigenous people means that the Fourth World’s adversarial relationship with the state will become more central to the struggle to transform political and economic systems for all. If the history of the indigenous dance with the state is any indication, the Fourth World will suffer tremendously while at the same time standing athwart the forces of capitalism and exploitation. The Left must stand with the Fourth World in our collective struggle. The Fourth World and a Fourth Way On November 14, the Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted DAPL’s progress, stating that “the history of the Great Sioux Nation’s dispossessions of lands” and the United States’ “government-to-government” relationship with indigenous nations demanded that the route of the proposed pipeline be reassessed. The Army told Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building DAPL, that construction beneath the Missouri River required explicit approval, and asked the Standing Rock Sioux to negotiate conditions for the pipeline to cross tribal territory. Faced with a momentary victory for Standing Rock, Kelcy Warren, Dallas billionaire and CEO of ETP, denounced the decision as “motivated purely by politics at the expense of a company that has done nothing but play by the rules.” Warren was right. Had it not been for thousands of people mobilizing behind an indigenous-led coalition, DAPL would have been business as usual. ETP would have desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors unimpeded. Workers, lured by relatively high wages, would have taken on toxic and insecure work. The tribe’s hunting and fishing grounds would have been jeopardized, and if the pipeline leaked, Standing Rock and its downstream communities would have been poisoned. Environmental degradation and runaway climate change would have pressed ahead unabated. Carbon dependency would have become even more deeply engrained in our political economy. Eventually, ETP and their investors would have cashed out, and future generations would have been robbed. And all of this still will happen if President Obama doesn’t heed the water protectors and instead sides with ETP. ETP spent $1.2 million over the last five years paying politicians to legislate in its favor. Warren personally donated $103,000 to the Trump campaign. But when indigenous people organized, turning to direct action and the law to pressure elected officials and government systems, they wrested power from ETP’s hands . DAPL is just one chapter in a much longer story of indigenous

65


resistance to, and victories against, pipelines across North America. In 2015, the Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, yielding to pressure from the Cowboy Indian Alliance. In Minnesota, Enbridge shelved plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, after encountering tribal opposition. The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has held out against numerous proposed pipelines through their territory, building a space where indigenous sovereignty stands tall on lands defined by industry as an “energy corridor.” The American and Canadian oil industries are more vulnerable than we realize . Fracked oil from the Bakken and Tar Sands is expensive to extract and refine. Meanwhile, OPEC is pumping at breakneck speed, driving down global oil prices. Oil infrastructure is costly, not only for indigenous people, workers, and the environment, but for investors too. Canadian oil producers have sold crude at a loss. The North Dakota and Tar Sands oil booms have busted. Indigenous opposition to pipelines through their territories has made investors uneasy. ETP was concerned that their $3.7 billion pipeline would be cancelled. Just this week, Warren used another one of his companies, Sunoco, to buy ETP for $20 billion in order to cut his losses. The move will lower profits for shareholders of ETP in order to protect profits for Energy Transfer Equities (ETE), the DAPL umbrella company in which Warren owns more than 10 percent of shares. Simply put, in the face of massive opposition, the Dallas billionaire reshuffled his companies at shareholders’ expense in order to safeguard and grow his own vast fortune. The show of force against indigenous protesters, however brutal, is an act of desperation to protect his infinitely deep pockets. If DAPL is not moving oil by the New Year, shipping contractors can cancel their transportation agreements. Warren’s time is running out. Standing Rock, on the other hand, is the future. Populism is killing the “Third Way” politics advocated by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and their equivalents around the world. This is the Fourth Way. The Fourth Way will harness the power and strategic location of indigenous people, exploiting pressure points beyond the workplace to oppose and transform unjust, unequal, and undemocratic systems. Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy, financial systems, policing, and work will be of particular importance to indigenous people. Fossil fuel divestment and the “Keep It in the Ground” movement can weaken and even undermine companies seeking to exploit fossil fuels on indigenous lands. Regulations that dismantle financial instruments and policies that profit from natural resource speculation could divert and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition of mass incarceration would loosen the death grip of prisons and police on indigenous communities. Unions can turn individual workers into collective forces of resistance, helping drive up costs for developers and protect laborers from unsafe working conditions. Long-term efforts to reimagine work through full automation and a universal basic income could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous work in the first place. As Standing Rock has shown, indigenous nations that use their unique standing to advocate for viable alternatives to unjust systems will gain supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and forests that capital exploits with abandon. Our resistance — to the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that cut through our lands and communities — has greater potential than yet realized. Ours is a powerful voice envisioning a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the natural world rooted in the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty. As long as indigenous people continue to make this argument, we are positioned to win policies, court decisions, and international agreements that protect and enlarge our sovereignty and jurisdiction . As our jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will have more power to stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist, and colonial infrastructure. When the Justice Department halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they would begin looking into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. This is a minimal first step, and we must hold them to it. Longstanding alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to our success. In the United States, Native people have worked with Democratic elected officials like Bernie Sanders and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills like the Save Oak Flat Act, which aimed to stop an international mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache sacred site in Arizona. In Canada, First Nations have supported the New Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance with the Labour Party that stretches back to the 1930s. Some indigenous leaders, such as outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a Labour senator for Western Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties. This does not mean, of course, that we should pay deference to elected officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he travelled to Standing Rock. His visit was historically symbolic and emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop DAPL, indigenous people should renounce him. Politicians are helpful when they change policies and outcomes. We cannot and should not settle for symbolic victories. If there is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition, the Left must support indigenous demands for land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. At their core, these demands undermine the imperial cut-and-paste model of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the present, which insists that there is room for just one sovereign entity in the state apparatus. Thomas Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax implies an international governance structure to levy such a tax. He pushes us to think beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous demands for lands, jurisdiction, and sovereignty imply that we must think beneath it. As the Fourth World continues to push states to recognize our inherent, constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot remain neutral. To remain neutral is to perpetuate a long history of colonization. To remain neutral is to lose a valuable, organized, and powerful ally. Struggle Without End On November 15, more than 1,500 protesters gathered in Foley Square in Manhattan. With songs and chants of “Water is life,” we expressed our solidarity with Standing Rock, and sent a strong message to Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers, whose offices lie just across the street: rescind DAPL. We were just a fraction of the thousands who came together in cities across the country that day. Marching into the

66


street, a few dozen of us locked arms, sat down and stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience. We refused to move. We became the bodies blocking the behemoth. Police corralled us. An automated announcement warned us that we faced imminent arrest if we refused to move. The machine blared louder and louder: “you are unlawfully in the roadway and blocking vehicular traffic . . .” We responded with even louder chants and songs to drown out the machine. The officers tightened their ranks and arrested us one by one. In jail, I was surprised to learn that I was just one of two indigenous arrestees. The radical potential of July’s canoe journey had spread farther and wider than anything we’d imagined just a few months earlier. We can still stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The police may turn water cannons on us, assault and maim us, and lock us up, but we own the momentum. And even if we fail to defeat this pipeline, we will have prevailed in many battles along the way, and we can still win the long war. As we seek a way forward amid an ascendant right, the Fourth World has opened up a new window of political possibility. The Left must stand with them and start stitching their successful formula for resistance and transformation together with movements for economic, racial, environmental, gender, and sexual justice into a winning coalition.

67


Reformism Good – NoiseCat Their theory can’t explain decades of indigenous progress – politics is a long game – strategic engagement with the state is key to extract concessions even in a world of Trump NoiseCat 17 (Julian Brave - enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia where he was nominated to run for Chief in 2014 AND a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Oxford, “When the Indians Defeat the Cowboys,” 1/15/17, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/standing-rock-indigenous-american-progress/)Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars, Wolfe described the invasion of indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument was that settler colonialism — a form of colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands — requires the elimination of Native people and societies to access and occupy their land. As Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged out of the ongoing “History Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of Aborigines should be considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights, reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to win the History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus from determining the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and around the world. Settler colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires, colonies, states, and territories of ongoing settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how do we explain the survival, resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the global emergence of policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various forms? Are these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing Rock? Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys over Indians — a reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us demands more. Explaining Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser, the Cowboy is a winner. At Standing Rock, generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put it in the Guardian, the Standing Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a moment when the Left is struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as both a surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful movements of late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various voices have risen to offer answers. Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial coalition united against neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the world a template for resistance,” Erdrich concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective explanations for the Standing Rock victory are insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not explain what made this movement and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and episodic victory, these writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods, social welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over these same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At the same time workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous rights. Credit for these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous movements that unswervingly pushed for similar goals

68


across decades and even centuries: return of indigenous lands, restoration of indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous peoples. From the time their lands were seized in the nineteenth century and even before, indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal, regional, and national coalitions and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands taken from them to recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive governments determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the laboring class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. In moments of global political and economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the 1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of 1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s, termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further devastated indigenous communities. Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced from their homelands and dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were subjected to sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called “Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and restored a measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the Red Power movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to adopt policies based on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori Renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won similar gains. These movements often found unlikely allies in neoconservatives, neoliberals, and their predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-determination. He outlined his commitment to the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential inherent in the restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a facade to restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming, Alaska Native Corporations, corporate iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous people have coopted conservative forces as agents of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while other Left and progressive movements gained little and often lost ground, indigenous people moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their interests. Self-determination is now the established framework for indigenous policy in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the dispossession, marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable victories . At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have been forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a prior age they would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not anticipate that indigenous people would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to common sense, could never win. The future that is now our present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for indigenous people precisely because they had been underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people emerge as cunning, courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto their lands and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by simultaneously pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting concessions bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver devastating blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism , which threaten the future of indigenous communities, lands, and waters

69


and all who share these with them. This dynamic revealed itself most vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in 2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Help us stop this pipeline. Stick true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a moving message to the president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar dynamic is unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in the forces aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral suasion. They also identified pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable target. Trenches cannot be dug where people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians, controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives and their supporters are pushing investors to divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a massive banner at an NFL game, even as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve Dakota Access, divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL, delivering a crippling blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be completed is to again underestimate the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled old scores. They danced inside and outside the lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when and where the networks and infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and global systems. It shows that movements must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take decades to achieve. Politics is a long game. Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that effective resistance is strategic. And strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle and cunning forms of persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so must out-strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other indigenous struggles as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and thinking about indigenous issues alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark times lie ahead for the first people of this land and all who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor, has threatened to approve the pipeline and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation, devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination” policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is turning. In an unforeseen and previously unimaginable twist, it is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their right hand, they clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many chapters is the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience against capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.

70


Perm Militant opposition and compromise with the settler state are both important for indigenous resistance. WEAVER 7 Jace Director of the Inst. of Native American Studies Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and Religion @ Georgia ‘7 “More Light Than Heat The Current State of Native American Studies” American Indian Quarterly 31 (2) p.248-251 JM

***NAS = Native American Studies

In our histories, we know numerous warriors who took up arms to defend their people. Yet we also have ample and equal examples of diplomacy. For every Red Cloud there is a Red Jacket . For every Geronimo there is a Deskaheh. The two are not mutually exclusive; sometimes an individual is warrior at one moment and diplomat at another. As Daniel Justice reminds us, the

Chickamauga consciousness is counterbalanced by the Beloved Path. Dragging Canoe and Nancy Ward are two sides of the same coin.35 nas must involve a commitment to Native community. This does not necessarily mean , however, that every scholar must be a “bomb-thrower.” In nas, for every Vine Deloria Jr. there is a Robert Warrior. For every Harold Cardinal there is a Phil Deloria. For every Taiaiake Alfred, there is a Sid Larson. As Larson writes in his provocatively titled monograph Captured in the Middle, I have American Indian academic colleagues and nonacademic friends who are cultural nationalists, which means they are oftentimes militant and

confrontational. Certainly there is much cause for such activism in the American Indian world, and I am grateful there are those willing to do the necessary work of demanding redress of the theft and cultural genocide committed against American Indians. In fact, their good work allows me to emphasize the things different cultural peoples can have in common36 Both warrior and diplomat are necessary for the survival of the People. Both exist, bound together in a choreography that is not a minuet in which partners separate and come back together but a stomp dance in which everyone is always an integral part of the circle. During the last academic year at the University of Georgia, we organized a speakers’ series on the topic “A Traditional Future.” The four speakers were Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma Chad Smith, distinguished Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds, Choctaw historian Homer Noley, and Andy Smith, each of whom addressed the theme from their varying fields of achievement. What exactly is a traditional future? While we were the first to organize a program on this important topic, we did not coin the phrase. It derives from “Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples: Threat or Empowerment?” by Smith, Burke, and Ward, the introduction to Smith and Ward’s Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. In turn, their introduction draws, in particular, upon the essay “History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective” by native Tasmanian artist Julie Gough in the same volume. In her piece, Gough writes, “We were written out of the future in an act of manageable closure by the writers, artists and poets of the nineteenth century.” While most of our peoples were not deemed extinct, as were Gough’s, most Indigenes of the Western hemisphere can nonetheless relate to her words.37 Native peoples do not want to “conjure up a past and crawl into it.” They live in the present and want to move into the future while maintaining what is best in their traditions. What does it mean to live out tradition in the modern world? Smith, Burke, and Ward note, Globalisation constitutes an unprecedented threat to the autonomy of Indigenous cultures as well as an unprecedented opportunity for Indigenous empowerment. [We] highlight not only the new possibilities for Indigenous peoples that are emerging from the development of global communication networks but also the strategies they are using to deal with the pressures of globalisation.38 In discussing the Navajo Nation’s effort to bring wireless Internet to the Navajo reservation, President Joe Shirley invokes the Diné creation story of the sacred twins who, in ancient times, slew the monsters threatening the People. He then declares, Today there are still monstrosities among us. Hunger, thirst, poverty, greed, ignorance, apathy, and all manner of diseases that are blind to race, color, and age. Today’s indigenous peoples must use the arrows of zeros and ones and satellites. Information is a way to overcome today’s monsters.39 Our problems today are wider and greater than globalization, as Shirley’s remarks illustrate. And though technology will be an essential tool, it is not a self-sufficient solution to the problems that Shirley outlines or to others like language loss or the cultural Alzheimer’s that strikes in our communities not the aged but the young. The Native American Studies Program at the University of Georgia, as do other programs across the United States and Canada, sees itself as a place where cutting-edge ideas in nas are discussed first. Of course, only in the academy would the concept of a “traditional future” be considered cutting-edge. In Indian Country—on the ground—it is simply a reality. Native peoples have been living out an ever-changing traditional present and future in this hemisphere for countless generations. Smith, Burke, and Ward conclude their ruminations: As Indigenous peoples reposition themselves in their struggle for recognition and self-determination, so too must others in an

interconnected world. The players in the struggles are Indigenous peoples on the one hand and the embedded social and political constructs of colonialism on the other. Researchers (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) are often the scribes and intermediaries, but the audience is global. The Indigenous Ainu people of Japan have a word, ureshipamoshiri, to describe the world as an interrelated community of all living things. Changes in any part of this community cause ripples and adjustments throughout. Moreover, as [Bruce]

Trigger has commented, change is not a violation of culture but a realization of a potential.40 If we in nas are committed to Native community, if we want to be relevant to Native peoples on the ground, if we want to understand and explain the world as it really is, we must deal with these realities. Only then will we stand a chance of consistently generating more light than heat .

71


AT Epistemology Alt Using the classroom as a site to decolonize thought oversimplifies the Western-Indigenous relationship and history, is counter-productive, and creates a close minded dichotomy between primitivism and modernity which turns their project.Nakata et al 2012 (N. Martin Nakata, Victoria Nakata, Sarah Keech & Reuben Bolt Nura Gili Centre for Indigenous Programs, University of New South Wales, Australia, “Decolonial goals and pedagogies for Indigenous studies,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18629 JMA number of points are threaded through our argument. We agree that anti-colonial critique is a fundamental beginning point for unsettling entry-level students’ presuppositions about Indigenous-Western relations. However we argue that the end-point of instating regenerated Indigenous ‘ways’ or ‘traditions’ as the counter-solution to overcoming colonial legacies occurs too hurriedly in some scholarly analysis and in lecture settings. In this process, explorations in lecture rooms skip the more complex theoretical dilemmas students need to engage with to understand the conceptual limits of their own thinking, as well as the discipline’s, and to critically engage propositions from within Indigenous Studies scholarship. Our stance also leads us away from approaches that focus on decolonising students. Approaches that focus on changing students’ thinking through constant engagement with or reflection on their complicity with colonialism, its knowledge , and its privileges personalises a deep political and knowledge contest in ways that can be counter-productive for both students and their educational goals . Our argument is that the complex grounds of this ‘Indigenous-Western’ contest make it a difficult task to resolve what is colonial and what is Indigenous, or what ultimately serves Indigenous interests in contemporary knowledge practice. Furthermore, the quest to resolve this contest in lecture rooms relies on engaging students in an oversimplification of the way colonial, Western, and Indigenous meanings are produced and operate in contemporary lifeworlds. We propose that students might be more disposed to understanding the limits of their own thinking by engaging in open, exploratory, and creative inquiry in these difficult intersections, while building language and tools for describing and analysing what they engage with. This approach engages the politics of knowledge production and builds critical skills — students’ less certain positions require the development of less certain, more complex analytical arguments and more intricate language to express these arguments. Pedagogically, we propose this as a way to also prevent slippage into forms of thinking and critical analysis that are confined within dichotomies between primitivism and modernity ; and as a way to avoid the closed-mindedness of intellectual conformity, whether this be expressed in Indigenous, decolonial, or Western theorising.

72


AT Reject State Alt In order to effectuate change Native communities must engage the state, using its own structures to force concessions. Abandoning the state is doomed to fail. Coulthard 14 (Glen Sean Coulthard, Assistant Prof of First Nations Studies, University of British Columbia, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition JM TURNING OUR BACKS ON COLONIAL POWER? Before concluding this chapter, I want to briefly address an important coun- terargument to the position I am advocating here, especially regarding the call to selectively "turn away" from engaging the discourses and structures of settler-colonial power with the aim of transforming these sites from within. Dale Turner offers such an argument in his book This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, in which he advances the claim that if Indigenous peoples want the relationship between themselves and the Cana- dian state to be informed by their distinct worldviews, then " they will have to engage the state's legal and political discourses in more effective ways.” 97 Underlying Turner's theoretical intervention is the assumption that colonial relations of power operate primarily by excluding the perspectives of Indige- nous peoples from the discursive and institutional sites that give their rights content. Assuming this is true, then it would indeed appear that "critically undermining colonialism" requires that Indigenous peoples find more effective ways of "participating in the Canadian legal and political practices that determine the meaning of Aboriginal rights. ” 98 For Turner, one of the preconditions for establishing a "postcolonial" relationship is the development of an intellectual community of Indigenous "word warriors" capable of engaging the legal and political discourses of the state. According to Turner, because it is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that the rights of lndigenous peoples will for the foreseeable future be largely interpreted by non-Indigenous judges and policy makers within non-Indigenous institutions, it is imperative that Indigenous communities develop the capacity to effectively interject our unique perspectives into the conceptual spaces where our rights are framed. It is on this last point that Turner claims to distinguish his approach from the work of lndigenous intellectuals like Patricia Mon- ture and Taiaiake Alfred. Turner claims that the problem with the decolonial strategies developed by these scholars is that they fail to propose a means of effecting positive change within the very legal and political structures that currently hold a monopoly on the power to determine the scope and content of our rights. According to Turner, by focusing too heavily on tactics that would see us "turn our backs" on the institutions of colonial power, these Indigenous scholars do not provide the tools required to protect us against the unilateral construction of our rights by settler-state institutions. For Turner, it is through an ethics of participation that Indigenous peoples can better hope to "shape the legal and political relationship so that it respects Indigenous world views."

73


Alt DA - Gender Any attempt to decolonize without an analysis of gender is just a new type of colonization.Ladner 8 (Kiera L. – Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Politics and Governance in the Department of Political Science @ the University of Manitoba, “Gendering Decolonization, Decolonizing Gender”, draft of a paper presented at the 80th Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/ladner.pdf, shae)The process of decolonizing, and in turn creating ‘post-colonial’ thinkers and societies, must be grounded in Indigenous thought, traditions and language but in so doing, the decolonization project must also be protected from would be dominators and oppressors. Decolonization must, therefore, be a gendered project. It must be a project that is grounded in Indigenous understandings of gender - understandings that often speak of multiple genders and understandings that often reify strict understandings of gender roles and responsibilities but do so within a context of respect and gender neutrality (or even one which is gender positive as was the case among the Blackfoot). These understandings may have to be rediscovered or they may simply need to dusted off which ever the case, they must be grounded in language and tradition; language and tradition that will have to be understood from within and disentangled from the penetrating forces of colonialism (a process which began with contact as traders and missionaries began the process of transforming Indigenous understandings of gender when they refused to accept Indigenous women as their equal in negotiations or in every day life). This will be an onerous task, but as Henderson reminds, it is one that is absolutely necessary. Decolonization must also be a project protected from constructions of the past or ideas of today that are used to dominate and oppress women. Facilitating this process may take great leadership, leaders that ‘construct models to help them take their bearings’ (Henderson, 2000:254) as there will be pressure to recreate gender as it is within western-eurocentric thought or how it has become imbedded in colonial institutions and Indigenous societies. Indigenous languages and histories (oral traditions which speak to creation and tell of a people’s life within a territory both prior to and post-colonization) will assist in this process as they will serve as a guide and will enable leaders to take their bearings as Indigenous languages and histories speak of an entirely different understanding of the world and can be used to begin the process of destabilizing, disentangling and decolonizing gender. Such would be the case among Nehiyaw (Plains Cree) where language is not gendered (it is next to impossible to speak of gender without speaking in terms of ones roles or responsibilities which in turn allows for multiple genders) and histories speak about respecting diversity and inclusion (Innes, 2007). While Henderson’s work speaks to the need to decolonize gender as part of the post-colonial ghost-dance (his vision of decolonization), it is in fact necessary to both gender decolonization and decolonize gender. The works of scholars such as Smith, Turpel-Lafond, Green, Monture, and Voyager highlight the need for decolonizing gender, and to some extent have begun the process of constructing those models necessary to gain bearings and journey forward. A tremendous amount of work is still needed to effectively decolonize gender in a manner that both holds true to Henderson’s vision and Indigenous language and heritage. In doing this work, scholars must not simply focus on women for predominant constructions of masculinity also have to be decolonized and constructions of masculinity grounded in language and heritage must be part of the gendering of decolonization. It is necessary to both decolonize gender and gender decolonization as these two projects are, or at very least should be, a unified project of decolonization culminating in tHenderson’s post-colonial ghost dance (see Henderson 2000a and 2000b). As it stands, it is absolutely necessary to reframe decolonization as a gendered project. That is to say, to challenge the masculinist ideas that now dominate organizations such as band councils and the corresponding discourses of sovereignty and nationalism, and to reframe with gender as a central consideration. This will not be easy, but gender cannot and should not be separated from considerations of sovereignty and nationhood – to do so is to perpetuate colonization . Is not the purpose to end colonization? The truth of the matter is, you cannot do one without the other, and it will be too late to rectify the situation once Indigenous sovereignty is (re)affirmed and (re)established, as this process may only serve to solidify and institutionalize colonial understandings of gender.

74


Decolonization strategies must begin with gender- any attempt to just add it on after the fact wrecks the possibility for true gender decolonization. Smith 12 (Linda Tuhiwai (Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou), Professor of Education and Maori Development and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Maori at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples second edition pg(s): 152-153 DH)Gendering indigenous debates , whether they are related to the politics of self-determination or the politics of the family, is concerned with issues related to the relations between indigenous men and women. Colonization is recognized as having had a destructive effect on indigenous gender relations which reached out across all spheres of indigenous society . Family organization, child rearing, political and spiritual life, work and social activities were all disordered by a colonial system which positioned its own women as the property of men with roles which were primarily domestic. Indigenous women across many different indigenous societies claim an entirely different relationship, one embedded in beliefs about the land and the universe, about the spiritual significance of women and about the collective endeavours that were required in the organization of society. Indigenous women would argue that their traditional roles included full participation in many aspects of political decision making and marked gender separations which were complementary in order to maintain harmony and stability. Gendering contemporary indigenous debates occurs inside indigenous communities and while it is debated in other contexts, such as in Western feminist debates, indigenous women hold .an analysis of colonialism as a central tenet of an indigenous feminism. A key issue for indigenous women in any challenge of contemporary indigenous politics is the restoration to women of what are seen as their traditional roles, rights and responsibilities. Aroha Mead gives an account of a statement delivered by two Maori women to the Twelfth Session (1994), of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples which addressed the way colonialism has influenced indigenous men and had a detrimental affect on indigenous gender relations. She says that never before have I witnessed what occurred while the full statement was being read out. Indigenous women sitting within their delegations were visibly moved - some looked around to see who was talking about their pain - some gave victory signals and physical signs of agreement, and many, perhaps even the majority, sat stoically, with tears swelling in their eyes. The words broke through the barriers of language and regionalism. A raw wound was clearly touched. 18

75


Their gender neutral approach to decolonization maintains the male privilege which sustains colonialism.Snyder, 2014 (Emily – received a PhD from the Department of Sociology @ the University of Alberta, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory”, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 26.2, shae)

Decolonization or self-governance politics that do not acknowledge gender overlook serious, lived, gendered specificities. Gender “neutral” can translate into an assumed and invisible norm of maleness (as whiteness also exists as an invisible norm in Western societies).68 Accordingly, concerns exist that Indigenous politics work to reinforce male privilege (intentionally or not) and exclude the context of Indigenous women’s lives.69 For example, land claims often focus on that which gets deemed to be traditionally male activities such as hunting, trapping, and fishing.70 While these are represented as “Aboriginal practices,” they are actually focused on men’s practices and erase women’s traditional practices, such as berry picking,71 as well as fluidity and variation with gendered labour. Smith explains that when gender is made “visible” in decolonization strategies, it is often focused on men and on concerns that they

have been displaced from their traditional economies. The economic focus on survival is problematic, as is the assumption

that what men do is most important and most at risk.72 Furthermore, this focus on men is not perceived as divisive to the nation (land claims are “for” the nation), whereas when women put forth gendered concerns they are accused of dividing the collective in favour of individual rights.73 Many Indigenous feminists call into question the common assertion that Indigenous societies did not have gender problems prior to contact and that, therefore, gender does not need to be talked about since the achievement of self-government would solve the problem.74 Whether Indigenous societies had gender-based oppression prior to contact is a contentious issue.75 There are many Indigenous women— feminist and non-feminist—who maintain that pre-contact societies were respectful and had balanced gender roles,76 but, as Verna St. Denis, Joyce Green, and others insist, the reality is that colonialism (which

includes patriarchy) has had an impact, and sexism in settler society and in Indigenous communities is rampant today.77 Ladner maintains that “[i]t is necessary to both decolonise gender and gender decolonisation.”78 Indigenous feminisms can be advantageous for all genders, as the focus is on empowering communities and fighting for the dignity that all citizens deserve.79 For Indigenous

feminists, decolonization must be explicitly gendered in order to target the sexism that presently exists internally (and externally) as well as the patriarchal, heteronormative violence that helps to sustain and propel colonialism.80 So too must notions of self-governance,81 self-determination, nationhood,82 and, as this article argues, Indigenous law be approached as gendered in order to take up anti-oppressive politics.

76


Colonization is an inherently gendered process – Indigenous feminism is necessary for any act of decolonization.Smith et al, 2014 (Courtney – First Nations Studies @ the University of British Columbia, Laura Mars – Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice & First Nations Studies @ the University of British Columbia, Bára Hladíková – Literature @ the University of British Columbia, Jess Marlow – Theatre and English Literature @ the University of British Columbia, “Dialogue”, http://blogs.ubc.ca/canfemlit/dialogues/, shae)

“Colonialism is an extreme expression of heteropatriarchy, and so a feminist approach may be one of the most profound ways to undermine and dismantle the ongoing forces of colonialism that continue to exploit and destroy natural resources and the lives of so many Indigenous people across the world.” Laura Mars also touches on this, “In attempting to decolonize academic discourse around Indigenous orality, I am always asking myself to deconstruct the Euroamerican academic model of objective truths and knowledges, the separation of mind from body – to think about the discourses that we are taught to acknowledge and the ones that we are taught to disavow.” Through these revelations, it becomes clear that in order to fully deconstruct/decolonize our work as academics, we must listen to the voices of Indigenous scholars and writers who have experienced colonization and are mobilized to write about it truthfully and free of colonial paradigms. It is the wisdom of these people that must be shared in order to facilitate change, it is these voices that have been excluded from the literary canon, and it is these voices that must be included and elevated. Indigenous feminisms offer a foundational roadmap to weed out the seemingly “hidden” roots of gendered colonialism as discussed in Courtney’s Lisa Jackson’s, “Savage” annotation. Here it is important to remember that although this piece at first glance does not appear to be speaking to “Feminism” in the Western sense of the word, as being something which only concerns issues regarding women, it does speak to Indigenous feminisms, in terms of adding different narratives to Residential School experiences. It is then through the dismantling and adding to these narratives, that we can begin to see the gendered hegemony on which all violent acts of colonization are founded within.

Focusing on race and land maintains gender privilege.Ramirez, 2008 (Renya K. – Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology @ UC Santa Cruz, “Learning Across Differences: Native and Ethnic Studies Feminisms”, American Quarterly 60.2, shae)Rather than assuming that a Native feminist consciousness is a white construct or that it automatically creates internal conflict, it should be viewed as advancing a critical and essential goal for indigenous scholars and communities to confront sexism. Moreover, Native scholars' prioritizing of race and tribal nation over gender is a mistake, since sexism and racism oppress indigenous women at the same time.9 Sexism, therefore, becomes too frequently ignored in indigenous communities and scholarship . In fact, my engagement with path-breaking work by and about U.S. women of color and Third World women has taught me the importance of emphasizing the intersectional relationship between race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation.10 These scholars' critique of universalistic notions of womanhood and their discussion of the interlocking nature of various axes of exclusion have provided me with some of the most important scholarly insights in many years. Bringing intersectionality into my own work has helped me avoid the mistake of privileging one kind of exclusion over another, ultimately contributing to my theorizing of Native feminisms.

77


Alt DA - Essentialism Their representation of Natives as rooted in place and tied to the land is part and parcel of Western essentialism of indigenous peopleGrande 4 [Sandy, Associate Professor of Education at Connecticut College, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, p 101-103] // myost

Indeed, various critical scholars have revealed "essentialism" as an integral part of the overall project of domination working to hold American Indians (and other subaltern peoples) to the "polemical and creative needs of whites " (Berkhofer 1978; Deloria 1970; P. Deloria 1999; Mihesuah 1996). With respect to Native peoples, Deloria (1970) argues that the predominant image of the American Indian - the nature-loving, noble savage - persists to serve the whitestream need to escape the deadening effects of modernity. He writes: "[Whites] are discontented with their society, their government, their religion, and everything around them and nothing is more appealing than to cast aside all inhibitions and stride back into the wilderness, or at least a wilderness theme park, seeking the nobility of the wily savage who once physically fought civilization and now, symbolically at least, is prepared to do

it again" (1970, 34). Deloria's somewhat cynical reference to the "wilderness theme park" describes the propensity of whitestream America to satisfy its need for "authenticity" via climate-controlled, voyeuristic tours through the lives and experiences of "authentic" peoples . In this instance, "discontented" whites maintain psychological control over the

overconsumption of modern society by requiring Indians to remain nature-loving primitives . The parasitic relationship between whitestream desire, capitalist imperatives, and American Indians does not end here. Indeed, while the American Indian intellectual community has managed to wrest a degree of control over the question of "who is Indian," it has yet to muster the capability to fetter the powers of capitalism. Thus the impact of capitalist desire on the intellectual sovereignty of indigenous peoples remains significant, particularly in the academy. For example, indigenous scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lyn (1998, 121) questions why the same editors and agents who solicit her "life story" also routinely reject her scholarly work. She writes: "[W]hile I may have a reasonable understanding why a state-run university press would not want to publish research that has little good to say about America's relationship to tribes . . . I am at a loss as to explain why anyone would be more interested in my

life story (which for one thing is quite unremarkable)." The explanation, of course, is that the marketable narrative is that which subscribes to the whitestream notion of Indian as romantic figure, not Indian as scholar and social critic - a predisposition that works to favor cultural literary forms of indigenous writing over critical forms . As Warrior (1995, xx) observes, the current discourse is more interested in "the Charles Eastman [Sioux] who grew up in a traditional Sioux home than in the Charles Eastman who attended Mark Twain's seventieth birthday party or who read a paper at the First Universal Races Conference with W.E.B.

Dubois." Indeed, the marketplace is flooded with the tragic stories of American Indians as lost cultures and lost peoples. Moreover, such stories are told and retold as history, as part of America's dark and distant past. Within the contexts of whitestream history the consequence of genocide is typically depicted as an egregious but perhaps unavoidable consequence of the country's belief in manifest destiny. While I would never argue that stories depicting the tragedy of genocide (e.g., Indian boarding schools, the Trail of Tears) are not centrally important in the telling of American history, their prominence in the discourse becomes problematic when considered in the wider context of whitestream consumption. In other words, why are these stories upheld as the prime-time programs in the commodified network of Indian history?

What is gained from the proliferation of essentialist portrayals of whitestream domination and Indian subjugation? Such stories, in fact,

serve several purposes, none of which contribute to the emancipatory project of American Indians. First, by propagating romanticized images of American Indians as perpetual victims while simultaneously marginalizing the work of indigenous intellectuals and social critics, whitestream publishers maintain control over the epistemic frames of the discourse and thus over the fund of available knowledge on American Indians . The desire for such control is underwritten by the understanding that critical scholarship threatens the myth of the ever-evolving democratization of Indian-white relations. Second, essentialist accounts of Indian history (framed in good- vs. bad-guy terms) allow the consumer to fault rogue groups of dogmatic missionaries and wayward military officers for the slow but steady erosion of indigenous life , thereby distancing themselves and mainstream government from the ongoing project of cultural genocide. Third, the virtually exclusive focus on Indian history allows the whitestream to ignore contemporary issues facing American Indian communities . As a result, Indians as a modern people remain invisible, allowing a wide array of distorted myths to flourish as contemporary reality: that all the "real" Indians are extinct, that all surviving Indians are either alcoholics or gaming entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, as these images are circulated, the intensive, ongoing court battles over land , natural resources, and federal recognition are relegated to the margins of the discourse, fueling the great lie of the twenty-first century - that America's "Indian problem" has long been solved .

78


Alt DA - Linear Time Their description of a decolonial future which will emerge from the demand binds them to a logic of linear time which turns the affStrakosch & Macoun 12 [Elizabeth, Faculty Member of the School of Political Science & International Studies at the University of Queensland in Australia, and Alissa, Indigenous Studies Research Network at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, “The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism,” Arena Journal 37/38 (2012): 40-62] // myost

Firstly, Australian settler colonialism holds on to the post-colonial image of a single, transformative moment of a radical political break marking decolonization. While its exact nature is not specified, this change will somehow draw a line under the problematic colonial relationships of the past and mark the nation’s movement into a newly certain future. Settler colonialism circles around this moment , variously locating it in the past, the present and the future. And yet, in settler-colonial formations, no such radical break ever seems to come — ‘invasion is a structure not an event’. The vanishing endpoint that is continually pursued is, in effect, the moment of colonial completion. That is when the settler society will have fully replaced Indigenous societies on their land, and naturalized this replacement. Secondly, the more widely known temporal narrative of post-colonialism is deployed within settler colonialism in ways that assist this project of full colonization. The settler-colonial project identifies its own endpoint with the moment of decolonization. However, decolonization and settler-colonial completion have very different political effects. The linear narrative of colonization–decolonization–post-colonialism reflects the very specific histories of sub-continental Asia and Africa. Applying this post-colonial story of linear progress to the settler-colonial project is not only inaccurate, it actually assists the settler-colonial project by obscuring the very different transformative moment to which it aspires. Merging the moment of decolonization and the moment of colonial completion, these narratives can mobilize conservative and progressive settler voices towards colonial goals. Overall, we seek to open up discussion of temporal and teleological narratives within settler-colonial policy-making, and suggest that we need to contest our currently unacknowledged stories of the colonial future. By seeking resolution through extinguishment, these narratives tend to foreclose more productive debates about how settler and Indigenous people might live together differently across time.

79

Table of Contents - stlouisurbandebate.org · Web viewSettler Colonialism is a distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with

Documents