1NC K

Western legal norms are violent tools of a constitutive elimination of Indigeneitys spatial
specificity through the affirmatives performative universalization of Western governance
Morgensen 11 prof of Gender Studies @ Queens University
(Scott Luria, The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 1:1, 52-76)

My argument is that such readings are conditional on another that they occlude, and that in turn is conditioned by them. In the sixteenth centuries,
as colonisation took shape in the settler societies of the Americas, a relational position purposefully formed. Countering the overtly genocidal
violence of Sepulvedas contravention of Indigenous humanity, Las Casas argued, for his time, a more compassionate,
inclusive, and I will return to this liberal mode of settler colonial governance. Las Casas affirmed Indigenous humanity
under Gods universal law and the necessity of its defence within a settler society. Yet his claim functioned precisely as a logic
of elimination, in that recognising people of Indigenous heritage as subject racialised populations barred
them from any difference that could trouble settler rule. As the incompletely consanguine children of
Western law, they remained ever on the verge of eviction from it if they troubled the terms of their
protection: amalgamation. Their proximity to exception arose under settler rule precisely by considering the degree to which
Indigenous peoples may be included in the body of the West and its law. Far from being arbitrary,
this concern was requisite to a settler society defining its relation to racialised differences on the lands it
remade. A capacity in Western law to simultaneously incorporate and eliminate, recognise and
except racialised and primitive difference was learned in settler projects of Indigenous elimination that
established Western law on lands beyond the West. To the extent that they succeeded, settler colonialism
made Western law spatially nonspecific and demonstrably universal, long prior to late modern
mechanisms of global governance, and as their genealogical condition. Today, the ongoing
naturalisation of settler colonialism positions settler states as exemplary of liberal governance
universalised within and as Western law. A noted example transpired at the 2009 G20 Summit, when Prime Minister Stephen
Harper found it useful to portray a gentle face for Canadian leadership by pointedly asserting that Canada has no history of colonialism.34 The
significance of his comment was its clarity notable for a leader quite familiar with critiques of Canada bearing a colonial relationship to
Indigenous peoples. Harper obliquely invoked here the baggage of states such as the United Kingdom, France and Japan that negotiate tense
global stage, Harpers Canada separates from
relations with former conquests when governing global economics. On a
colonial legacies in Africa and Asia to assert a moral neutrality that is conveniently consistent with the
universality of international law. The confidence in Harpers statement would be implausible if his audiences broader than we may
care to think truly believed that Canada practices colonisation. From theses of terra nullius, to justifications that guns, germs, and steel made
Indigenous replacement inevitable, to a sense that settler states decolonised after rule devolved to white citizens: settlers readily present as other
than colonists.35 Yet while Harper might believe that as a Canadian he inherits something other than conquest, I suggest that his exoneration
hinges less on such belief, and more on a general appearance that Canada exemplifies the universalisation of liberal modernity on the global
stage. Interestingly, Harpers statement appeared barely a year after his government responded to years of Indigenous activism by issuing a state
apology for the Residential School system. As a primary agent in the genocidal histories Lawrence recounts, Residential Schools
forcibly relocated Indigenous children to sites where they were killed by disease or neglect, or survived to
be assimilated into settler society via enforced separation from and erasure of familial and community ties. As an educative mode of
disciplinary power, Residential Schools situated internees and all Indigenous peoples as children: wards of a state whose paternalism appears not
only in past abuse but in the present apology, which suggests that the state will better manage the Indigenous people over whom it retains a power
of colonial history naturalises settler
to protect or destroy. The apologys consistency with Harpers disavowal
colonialism both at home and abroad. We see here that the ongoing coloniality of settler states conditions
their practice of liberal governance as not only Western, or even originally Western, but as universal
through its instantiation by settler colonialism. I have argued that settler law presents an apotheosis of
Western law by utilising its consanguinal logic to amalgamate and eliminate Indigenous peoples
and thereby enable settler states to performatively universalise the West. To the extent that they succeed,
then global governance precisely continues, naturalises, and globalises settler colonialism in and as our
colonial present.36 The Western law universalised by settler states formed precisely by incorporating and excising Indigenous peoples as
potentially yet incompletely consanguine with the social body. If settler law as Western law is projected as liberal
governance, it follows a principle that it may arrive and settle anywhere, as itself. Such law then
encompasses the provisional humanity of all whom it occupies as racialised and primitive children , whose
capacity for defiance nevertheless invests the West with a paternal authority to act as caretaker or killer of kin under its care. My argument
modifies our interest to read Afghanistan or Iraq as sites of settler colonialism, once the United States gathers its allies for occupation. Settler
colonialism occurs at these sites not, or not only because the U.S. or other states occupy Afghani and Iraqi
peoples. It occurs more importantly because occupation performatively universalises Western
governance through the nominal inclusion of Afghanis and Iraqis within its body of law, only to face
elimination of their racialised primitivity: if not by being summarily placed outside the law, then by being educated and
contained through amalgamation as a potentially ever-endangering difference. Western law attains universality by containing
and eliminating differences in the functional extension of settler colonialism as liberal
governmentality.
Attempts to reform liberalism towards solving ecological problems through governmental
action retrench Western conceptions of man---that sanctions mass colonial violence, anti-
Black environmental dualism, and makes solving warming impossible.
Frazier 16
[2016, Chelsea M. Frazier Ph.D candidate, department of African-American Studies @ Northwestern, Spring 2016,
Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism,
Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol 2:1, pg. 42-46, modified for ableist language]

Delinking geography and power is a significant step toward reconfiguring our earth ethics, particularly as environmental studies
frameworks have traditionally been informed by colonial European notions of the political.8 More
specifically, I mean that environmental studies and activism has traditionally been aligned with mainstream
political discourse in its emphasis on liberal reform as an ideal strategy for addressing its concerns.
Sylvia Wynter reveals a key flaw in this line of reasoning. In her essay Unsettling Coloniality, Wynter opens by asserting [My]
argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of
securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conceptions of the human, Man, which
overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and
behavioral autonomy, of the human species itself/ourselves.9 Wynter argues that Western philosophy has constructed
and continually reinforced the idea of Western Man as the measure of humanity. She also emphasizes
that the securing of Western Man as an ethnoclass is fundamentally at odds with the securing of the
human species itself/ourselves. Elsewhere, Wynter has argued that our present master discipline of economics
discursively functions as a secular priesthood of the U.S. nation-states economic system. As well as, therefore, of the
overall globally incorporated world-systemic capitalist economic order in its now neoliberal and neo-imperial,
homo-oeconomicus bourgeois ruling-class configuration at a world-systemic levelof which the United
States is still its superpower hegemon.10 Here, Wynter explains that the United States and its role as global superpower facilitates
the existence of a world systemic capitalist economic order based on neoliberal and neoimperial ethics.
These ethics are rooted in and inextricably linked to the notion of Western Man as human. The kind of
environmental studies or activism that tethers itself to a neoliberal, neoimperial ethics that sustains our
present world systemic capitalist economic order can never retard or alleviate our struggles
rooted in environmental degradation. If anything, by uncritically relying on traditional approaches to
environmental rehabilitation and conservation via legislative reform, for example, many environmentalist
activists and scholars reinforce the very system they claim to be fighting. Wynter outlines this conflict quite clearly as
she argues: The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply
unequal distribution of the earths resources (20 percent of the worlds peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds
of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of earths peoples
living relatively affluent lives while four billion still on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of
overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that overpopulation on the part of the
dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South)these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs.
Human struggle.11 Following Wynter, I insist that the West itselfits divisions of space and its rigid
notions of the human subjectare insufficient frameworks through which global warming,
severe climate change, and the sharply unequal distribution of the earths resources can be effectively
addressed. We must consider these issues while concurrently addressing a central conflict from which these issues
emerge: a fraught and delimited understanding of human subjectivity. In her effort to connect environmental
struggles with a delimited understanding of human subjectivity, Jane Bennett questions the very necessity of an
environmentalist stance entirely. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett ponders
whether environmentalism remains the best way to frame the problems, whether it is the most persuasive
rubric for challenging the American equation of prosperity with wanton consumption, or for inducing more
generally, the political will to create more sustainable political economies in or adjacent to global
capitalism.12 Bennetts questions about the persuasiveness of environmentalism, coupled with Wynters critiques, implore me to consider
Bennetts alternative for framing these problems: vital materialism. According to Bennett, traditional environmental ethics are
reliant on an abstraction of human bodies from their passive environments and leave little
room for animals, vegetables, or minerals to be considered fully acknowledged political subjects.
Furthermore, according to Bennett, a vital materialist stance is more useful than an environmental one because it (1) makes human
and nonhuman relationality horizontal as opposed to vertical/hierarchical, and (2) insists on the vitality or
aliveness of all matterdrawing out the ways in which humanity in its bacterial and mineral makeup is not as distinct
from everything else as we would like to believe. Bennetts vital materialism not only includes a far more nuanced understanding of
our relationships to other forms of materiality but also aims at drawing out horizontalized connections to othershuman and nonhuman. Given
the history of racialized exclusion in mainstream environmental discourse, a horizontalized vital
materialism seems to speak back to those inherent hierarchies that not only abstract human bodies from their passive
environments but also agitate political structures and hierarchies that have served repeatedly to relegate black subjects to the
status of western modernitys nonhuman other.13 While Bennetts interventions are incredibly useful, at second glance,
her proposition does have problems that she herself anticipates. There are dangers in an approach that seeks to lessen the distinctness between
humanity and the rest of matter. Despite her attempt to democratize all forms of materiality, Bennetts vital materialist stance retains the
potential of opening the floodgates for even more ruthless forms of instrumentalizing human beings. Bennett tries to address these dangers,
emphasizing the idea that if matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the
shared materiality of all things is elevated.14 Additionally, Bennett aims to demonstrate that vital
materialism relies on an
understanding that all bodies become more than mere object, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are
brought into sharper relief.15 Given the extensive colonial and Middle Passage histories of the violent
instrumentalization of black subjects who have struggled for centuries to be recognized as human, a
restructuring of ecological ethics that retains the readied potential for further objectification is worrying at best
and preposterous at worst. At the same time, given the messy (non) distinctions between so many different forms of materiality that
new environmental
Bennett highlights, it becomes difficult to completely dismiss her logic. Both Wynter and Bennett signal that a
politics can not come as a result of liberal reform or black inclusivity within extant mainstream
political discourse but only after understandings of relational human subjectivity are deeply
scrutinized and restructured. Moreover, because of the roots of all the isms that Wynter coherently reports for us, a truly
new environmental politics would render our present world unrecognizable. This article is concerned with
the work of imagining this other world and other relationalities between material forms. In the pages that follow, I examine the ways Octavia
Butler and Wangechi Mutu effectively trouble ecology as they lead us away from the limitations of traditional
environmental studies while offering transgressive visions that center black female subjectivity, challenge
the (dis)connections between human and nonhuman entities, and initiate alternative notions of
environmental/ecological ethics.
The figure of extinction secures settler subjectivity.
Dalley 16 professor of English at Daemen College
(Hamish, The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler
literature. Settler Colonial Studies)

Analyses of settler-colonial narrative have focused on how settlers imagine the past, identifying a problem of origins
that makes history an object of anxiety. The meaning settlers attribute to the future has been, less thoroughly
examined. This article addresses that gap by analysing literary texts from South Africa, Australia, and Canada that
posit an end to settler colonialism, imagining futures beyond the settler-colonial present. It argues that a key
metaphor of the settler future is extinction. This concept allows the death of the settler
subject to be constructed as comparable, to the elimination of indigenous peoples,
superseded societies, maladapted species, or even through the invocation of climate
change to the end of humanity itself. The article analyses the implications of settler extinction,
arguing that the works in question rely on a slippage between the settler subject and the human that
replicates features of settler-colonial and patriarchal ideology. The article suggests that while extinction
does offer a path for settlers to contemplate futures without them, it also operates as a mechanism of
disavowal. Extinction is thus a metaphor of ending that enables survival, allowing settlers
to avoid, a true reckoning with the disestablishment of settler- colonial power structures.
Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contem- porary
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 colonialisms 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 excep- tions (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 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 Turners formulation, the settler subject is by defi- nition
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 settlers difference, superior- ity, and hence
claim to the land) inscribes the settlers 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 contradic- tion, 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
Freuds 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
jux- taposed 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 narratives
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 for- mations 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 narra- tological 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 poten- tiality of
decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracinis 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 litera- ture, 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 his- torio-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 invo-
cation 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 settler- colonial 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 Wolfes 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 Coopers 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 contrib- ute to the notion that settler
colonialism is a kind of ecological process9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior
races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinc- tion 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 affirmatives generalized theorization of colonialism mystifies the operation of settler
colonialism
Tuck and Yang, 12 PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations, and
Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York AND Assistant Professor of Ethnic
Studies (Eve and K.W., Decolonization is not a metaphor Eve Tuck, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40)

Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of
colonialism. External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments
of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed
the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought historic examples such as opium, spices, tea,
sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of
contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium
and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset of
activities properly called military colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be
conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military operations. In external
colonialism, all things Native become recast as natural resources - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel. The

other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is
internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna
within the domestic borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes
of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of
a nation and its white elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their
Strategies of internal
policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery.
colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization, are both structural and
interpersonal. Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a)
decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts - though they can overlap -
and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of colonialism which
operates in the United States or other nation-states in which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler
colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial
separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples
have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state
custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of
control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US
military still nicknames all enemy territory Indian Country). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and
require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of
profit-producing fragments. Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers
come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their
new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler
colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts.
Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for
shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers
make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of
Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This
violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.
This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler
colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship
of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are
interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage. In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must
destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories,
about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies,
ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time
and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased,
must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree, forthcoming). At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5, whose
bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is
extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slaves person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own
land, the slaves very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is
imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are
reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razors edge of safety and terror. The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding
dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species.
The settler is making a new "home" and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild
land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the
land produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the
"natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor,
which he cannot provide himself. The chattel slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment would have to be in the form of property
(land). The settler's wealth is land, or a fungible version of it, and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The
settler positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous
inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural. Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants
are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the
law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations
(See also A.J. Barker, 2009). Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire -
utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project.
This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous
land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-
wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn
by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are
displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal
colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of
white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts.
This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially
complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial
forces. Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by
the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to
settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing
a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated third-world wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is
fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features
of settler colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory
decolonial desires. Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these
contradictory decolonial desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to
be filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people in
settler contexts. Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of
land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just
symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of
solidarity. Decolonization never takes place unnoticed (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization
implicates and unsettles everyone. Playing Indian and the erasure of Indigenous peoples Recently in a symposium on the significance of Liberal
Arts education in the United States, Eve presented an argument that Liberal Arts education has historically excluded any attention to or analysis of settler colonialism.
This, Eve posited, makes Liberal Arts education complicit in the project of settler colonialism and, more so, has rendered the truer project of Liberal Arts education
something like trying to make the settler indigenous to the land he occupies. The attendees were titillated by this idea, nodding and murmuring in approval and it was
then that Eve realized that she was trying to say something incommensurable with what they expected her to say. She was completely misunderstood. Many in the
audience heard this observation: that the work of Liberal Arts education is in part to teach settlers to be indigenous, as something admirable, worthwhile, something
wholesome, not as a problematic point of evidence about the reach of the settler colonial erasure. Philip Deloria (1998) explores how and why the settler wants to be
made indigenous, even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian. Playing Indian is a powerful U.S. pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to fraternal
organizations, to new age trends, to even those aforementioned Native print underwear. Deloria maintains that, From the colonial period to the present, the Indian has
skulked in and out of the most important stories various Americans have told about themselves (p. 5). The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from
the nations inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such
aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants. (Deloria, 1998, p.5) L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of
Oz) famously asserted in 1890 that the safety of white settlers was only guaranteed by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians (as quoted in Hastings,
2007). D.H. Lawrence, reading James Fenimore Cooper (discussed at length later in this article), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Henry David
Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and others for his Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), describes Americans fascination with Indigeneity as one
of simultaneous desire and repulsion (Deloria, 1998). No place, Lawrence observed, exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or
absorbed. Lawrence argued that in order to meet the demon of the continent head on and this finalize the unexpressed spirit of America, white Americans needed
either to destroy Indians of assimilate them into a white American world...both aimed at making Indians vanish from the landscape. (Lawrence, as quoted in Deloria,
1998, p. 4). Everything
within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to
disappear them from the land - this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and conflicting
messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that
contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all Americans are a
little bit Indian. These desires to erase - to let time do its thing and wait for the older form of living to
die out, or to even help speed things along (euthanize) because the death of pre-modern ways of life is thought
to be inevitable - these are all desires for another kind of resolve to the colonial situation, resolved
through the absolute and total destruction or assimilation of original inhabitants. Numerous scholars have observed that
Indigeneity prompts multiple forms of settler anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous peoples - who make a priori claims to land and ways of being -
The easy adoption
is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete (Fanon, 1963; Vine Deloria, 1988; Grande, 2004; Bruyneel, 2007).
of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of this anxiety, because it is a premature attempt at
reconciliation. The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the
settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of
complicity, of having harmed others just by being ones self. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as
the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.
The affirmatives politics invest in space as Terra Sacer, desecrated and in need of
ecological renewal. This is the dream of settler politics and forwards the logics and process
of indigenous genocide
Paperson 2014 [La, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, A ghetto land pedagogy: an
antidote for settler environmentalism, Environmental Education Research 20:1]

Terra sacer is a virulent variation of the setter colonial ideology of terra nullius, the colonial fiction of empty land
or land not legally belonging to anyone.2 Nullius is the justification for the doctrine of discovery: that one can stab a flag into the
earth or a needle into a persons tissue and claim a colony. It is the founding covenant for settler colonial states. The problem is that no land is
empty.3 It must be made empty forcibly and ideologically. The Americas, under sixteenth to eighteenth century colonialism, were made terra
nullius by declaring Indians uncivilized, the land uncultured, and the relationship between Native people/land as primitively unsubscribed to
capitalist exploitation. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, terra nullius was reinvented through frontier violence, military force,
removal, Indian boarding schools, land acts, tribal termination, and citizen/naturalization acts that re-raced Indians into white men and white
women, thereby converting tribal lands into settler commonwealth and private property. The duality of land as desecrated, in pain, in
need of rescue; and land as sacred, wild, and preserve-able; are contemporary discourses that justify re-invasion. They
collapse Native land and black space together, leading once again to re-settlement. In this futuristic settler vision of
land, Land is sacred yet desecrated one could say sacredly injured. Indigeneity is metaphorized into the settlers own adoption
of and by the land. Settlers rewrite them/ourselves as ecological stewards. Re-inhabitation a sustainable (settler)
future is the goal. In this ecological dystopia, Indigenous Americans are largely extinct through regrettable
genocide,4 or survive spectrally through the settlers Indian heart. Indigenous vanishing is essential for the twenty-
first century ecological settler to become the new adoptive native, and thus rightful re-inhabitant of Native land.
Terra sacer is a proxy for settler humanity; like the land, settlers view them/ourselves as traumatized yet healable.
This is the settler adoption fantasy (see Tuck and Yang 2012) that they/we can adopt the land and be adopted by the land
leading Spokane/Coeur dAlene poet, Alexie (1996) to sardonically observe: In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all
of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
Public trust doctrine is rooted in a violent, settlerist ecological ethics that ensures the
epistemic erasure of indigenous people.
Whyte 15
[Kyle Whyte. "How Similar Are Indigenous North American and Leopoldian Environmental Ethics?." Available at SSRN 2022038 (2015).]

The second assumption issue involves the narrative given by Leopold to explain the development of the ethic. Some Leopold readers and
environmentalist ethicists are familiar with this ethical sequence. According to the sequence, the first ethics concerns relations among individuals.
Later ethics concerns the relation between humans and society. Today, humans
are evolving toward a third ethic: a moral
relation to the land. Leopold wrote that The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not
obligationsThe extension of ethics to this third element in the human environment isan evolutionary
possibility and ecological necessity.I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such
an affirmation26 This ethical sequence is more than an explanation of what motivates the conservation
movement of Leopolds time. It is a social theory that only makes sense if we have in mind a
particular interpretation of settler history: a narrative of the progress of society from pre-industrial
periods to industrial/settlercolonial times to the environmental crises brought about by overproduction
and overconsumption. Leopolds ethic seems to offer a vision that will redeem members of
settler society from the historical destruction of the environment that they have caused. Yet
this sequence does not necessarily include many Indigenous peoples within it. Many Indigenous
peoples would view their current ethics as inherited from the practices of their ancestors. Their ancestors were
likely even more dependent on subsistence lifestyles, and lived lives that had ethics fully inclusive of many living and non-living beings and
interdependent collectives. Many Indigenous
people would see the colonialisms of the last 500 years as
introducing ethics that were less inclusive of non-human entities and collectives. Anishinaabe leader Jimmie
Mitchell writes that upon
the arrival of the dominant society, its effects began to negatively tilt the
delicate balance of our worldAs the balance of the environment teetered out of sync, new
concepts like resource management and public trust doctrine were coined to leverage
the needs of the dominant society against those of the Anishinaabek, causing negative
environmental consequences that reverberate into our current landscape. Likewise, with the loss
of leadership, land, and naturally occurring sustenance, the once vibrant cultural kinship between earth,
animal and the Anishinaabek wilted.27 Mitchell, in this passage, is concerned about Indigenous persons having lost touch with the
former webs of relationships they once had. For Indigenous peoples who have narratives similar to Mitchells, it
would be hard for them to see themselves in Leopolds historic sequence because they do not
see the progression of their societies as moving toward a land ethic; rather, the fear is that their
societies are moving away from being societies in which their ethic is fully entrenched in their
perceptions and lifestyles. Not taking this issue seriously silences the fact that Leopolds historical account of the evolution of history is
infused with settler assumptions and entirely implausible from many Indigenous perspectives. Leopolds narrative literally unfolds
in the exact reverse direction of what many contemporary Indigenous peoples would see as the narrative
sequence of their own ethics. It would be hard for people to come together around a common
ethical orientation given the differences in their assumptions about the histories that
engendered the current situations of the ethics in the first place. The third, and final, issue concerns the
extent of participation by Indigenous populations when Leopolds positions are taken as a means for establishing a common ground, as in the
translational view. Robust participation concerns the degree to which reciprocal, dependence in acts of interpretation connecting different ethics
is fully appreciated and accommodated. For example, Callicott develops the point that there are multiple reasons for why
Leopolds ethic should serve to translate other traditional environmental ethics: the integration of science already
within many cultures, its self-critical nature, and its ability to explain the other ethics. The pressing issue here is not actually
whether Callicott is correct about this. Rather, the issue is deeper because it concerns who gets to
decide if he is correct; that is, who will be at the table for determining the criteria for
correctness regarding the proper relationship between Leopolds land ethic and the many
other ethics. As it stands, members of Indigenous peoples look to be epistemically dependent on Leopold,
without a reciprocal epistemic dependence on the contributions of members of Indigenous peoples . As long
as Leopolds positions are preemptively used to create a common orientation without genuine consultation with Indigenous peoples, then the
framework for cooperation does not include Indigenous interpretations and evaluations of how their ethics relate to Leopoldian ethics. This
kind of epistemological framework can effectively silence the populations that it aims to include and this
would ultimately undermine the hopes that Callicott expresses for staving off colonizing Leopold
upon Indigenous and other environmental ethics. Non-Indigenous environmentalists who
have made up their mind about the translational view and approach potential Indigenous
collaborators and friends will have already silenced them before dialogue has even begun.
Callicott is right that Western
science is widely accepted, an implication of which is that sustainable
communities will in some way blend Western scientific expertise and the expertises of other systems of
knowledge production.28 Contemporary Indigenous peoples are selfcritical and have their own ideas about how their own traditions can
guide integration with Western science, as a large literature shows.29 There is no reason why authority over how to blend traditions should be
vested in Leopolds land ethic in advance. It is hard to see what the benefit to members of Indigenous peoples would be if Indigenous leaders
suggested to their constituencies that their systems of ethics and knowledge production must be expressed and legitimized through a foreign land
ethic, especially one arising from a different experience of how land and society are entangled and that has a different historical narrative. Though
Callicott has good intentions, environmentalists
who take his points too seriously will have a hard time avoiding
procedural injustices against Indigenous North Americans. Procedural injustice is not a virtue of bringing people together.
Members of Indigenous peoples simply will not be as captivated as non-Indigenous people might be with
the land ethic as the Rosetta stone for an inclusive environmentalism.
The expansion of settler colonial sovereignty is based in an ontological securing of life as
infinite futurist progression of desire against the shifting signifier of backwards deathly
savages to be eliminated. The result is endless violence.
Schotten 16 associate professor of political science @ UMass
(C. Heike, Queering Sovereignty, Decolonizing Desire. Mills College. Carnegie Hall, Oakland, California. 4
March 2016. Spatializing Sovereignty organized by The Society for Radical Geography, Spatial Theory, and
Everyday Life. Conference Presentation. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/84081898. 8:07 - 19:56 Transcribed by
Tabatha R. at rev.com)
Okay so in the state of nature, which Hobbes defines as a place where there's no security, there is, in Edelman's terms, no
future. This is true not only because we are responsible solely for our own survival, an endeavor we cannot possibly succeed at on our own,
but it is also because given this radical insecurity, we are incapable of imagining any other moment or time than
now. Hobbes himself acknowledges there is no "accounting of time" in the state of nature, which of course makes sense; in a condition of
perpetual war, the future is unimaginable because it is so tenuous. As well, the past becomes effectively irrelevant,
hence the institution of sovereignty in Hobbes' version secures our physical preservation and Im arguing that it does so
by bringing temporality itself into existence and producing a future. Okay, so that's the first point. The
second point is that, in this act, the sovereign establishes the very meaning and content of life itself . For
understood temporally, there is a way in which there is no distinction between life and death in the state of nature, in so far as there is no way to
tell present from future. The state of nature's enduring present entails that life there is a kind of limbo-like existence,
a suspension of living or perpetual near-death experience wherein we can never be certain of anything. This
may be why it is so important to Hobbes to establish the commonwealth in the first place: Not simply to preserve life, as he
explicitly suggests, but actually more primarily to definitively demarcate life as life and differentiate it
from death. I mean, there's a normative enterprise going on here, right? Indeed, although the sovereign is the beacon of
peace, war and death are just as must a byproduct of the institution of sovereignty as life and peace are. So what I
take from this is that sovereignty, in short, is the definitive bio-political regime, in so far as it constitutes and determines life as
such, distinguishing it from what only becomes subsequently recognizable as death. The third point is that
sovereignty institutes this life-death distinction via a moralized logic that relegates life to the domain of
civilization and value, and death to the domain of savagery and nihilism. This becomes clear in the conflicted
and confusing ways Hobbes characterizes the state of nature as simultaneously a time, a place, and a condition. Now as I just argued that the state
of nature is a time like if it is an era or an epoch it's a time with no time, a moment that is completely timeless, an era lacking any
dynamism or principle of change. If the state of nature is instead a condition, which he also claims, he is clear that it is one of savagery, writing
"It may peradventure be thought there never was such a time nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so over all the
world, but there are many places where they live so now," and he cites as an example, "the savage people in many places of America." Bolstering
the view that the state of nature is a story about humanity's pre-history, Hobbes here rehearses the enlightenment trope of indigenous peoples as
European humanity's ancestors and/or pre-modern childhood. Savagery
is, therefore, associated with solid temporality,
timelessness, and the failure of forward movement or progress. Conclusively, when referencing a geographical location,
the state of nature is America, and the 17th-century European notion of the new world, an empty land ripe for exploration and conquest. These
specifications of the state of nature in Hobbes make clear that establishment of sovereignty imposes a clear distinction not
simply between peace and war, life and death, but also between modernity and backwardness, civilization
and savagery. Each of these categorical pairs functions as a surrogate for the others. Taken together, they suggest the deep
implications of the categories of life and death with colonization and conquest for European
politics and political theory. The fourth point is that the commonwealth, or sovereign or sovereignty, can't actually
solve the problem Hobbes says it does. So if there's no state and we're all going to murder each other, the solution is
obviously a really big bad, coercive state, right? And that's going to solve the problem? It can't solve the problem, and
that's because it can't solve the problem of desire, which has futurism built into its very
structure. Hobbes actually gets short shrift as a psychologist. He actually talks quite a bit about desire and affect. So desire, according to
Hobbes, is a voluntary motion of the body, whose aim, regardless of object, is attainment possession, consumption,
enjoyment. Yet this attainment poses a dilemma, for as he says, the aim of desire is "not to enjoy once only and for one
instant of time, but to assure forever the way of one's future desire." According to Hobbes, in other words, desire
seeks perpetuity of enjoyment. It aims at a consumption that can never fully completed. The fifth
point we're almost done is that Hobbes asserts, therefore, that human beings are perpetual power-seekers, not because
we want more and more, but because we want to preserve what we have now forever. His claim is that
mere maintenance of the present requires accumulation, undertaking a perpetual reference to
an unknown future. Thus, even despite the security from physical violence the sovereign provides, he
cannot alleviate the anxiety that runs apace with desire. Everything we do today is undertaken for the sake of a future, which,
if we're successful, will be no different from the present. But the sovereign can't guarantee that, right? Sixth then, and finally, this means that
Hobbes' colonial story of the emergence of life and death from the state of nature is based on an
underlying logic of desire that
explains why settler colonial societies transform into expansionist security states. Hobbes' understanding of
desire and its dilemmas elaborates George W. Bush's doctrine of preemptive warfare, the logic of
Israeli self-defense in the face of so-called "existential threats," and the rationale behind stand-
your-ground laws that exonerated the murderer of Trayvon Martin. The fact of this logic's
hegemony in economics and political science as rational-choice theory or in international relations as
Big R Realism make clear that futurist temporality is the unquestioned philosophical
foundation of the U.S. economic and political order, as well as the obviously imperial investments of these
economic disciplines. In short, it is the
temporalization of desire itself that explains both the settler colonial
foundations of survival, life and the value of life, as well as its transformation into an expansionist
imperial project. Okay, that was part one. Part two: settlement and the global war on terror. So how does this reading of Hobbes
through Edelman help us understand the emergence of empire? Lorenzo Veracini has argued that settler colonialism is distinct from other types
of colonialism in so far as it seeks to erase itself as settler colonialism. Following Patrick Wolf's argument that settler colonialism pursues a logic
of elimination, whereby settlers seek to replace the native and indigenize themselves post-facto, Veracini argues that
because it aims at the elimination of the native, settler
colonization necessarily aims at its own elimination. The truly
successful settler colonial project, then, would therefore efface the native entirely, whether through genocide or
assimilation or some other form of disappearance, the politics of recognition as Glen Coulthard has recently argued. Unless and until
elimination is accomplished, settler states will engage in all sort of contortions, both political and
ideological, to obscure the native in order to naturalize the conquest. Veracini represents this future of
settler colonialism as either conceptually embedded its definition or else as a kind of bad faith on settlers' part, potentially implying that a guilty
conscience somehow seeks to ward off complicity with conquest. I think that Edelman's understanding of futurism, however,
helps explicate just how and why this anxious, reiterative, and reactionary veiling impulse is
definitive of bio-political sovereignty. Hobbes' narratization of the drive of the state of nature is, like any other narratization of the
drive, an imposition and thus an explicitly ideological move that serves a particular political agenda. It is the specifically futurist
character of this imposition that destines it for failure and thus explains its anxious and recursive structure.
Edelman regards this narrative movement toward a viable political future as fundamentally fantasmatic,
not to mention conservative and ideological. Futurism, in other words and these are his words "perpetuates
the fantasy of meaning's eventual realization," a realization that is by definition impossible, in so far as it
is always only ever to come. Right? That's what the future is: It's beyond our grasp, it's always
just out of reach. Built into Hobbes' understanding of desire, in other words, is the failed tautology of futurism, which as Edelman
instructs, is fundamentally and futilely political. My contention is that thisconstitutive failure of futurism can be understood
as the dynamic content of conquest in settler societies, as the original civilizationist
imposition of temporality, an act that explains their subsequent transmogrification into expansionist
security states. So, rather than face the violence that brought peace and life itself into being,
Hobbes instead naturalizes this founding act by declaring it to be a "general inclination of all mankind" to engage in what he calls
a "perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death." In other words, he both institutes life and pushes it
forward via a futurist narrativization of the drive into an insatiable, cumulative desire. Yet while desire
may push us ever forward, ever beyond the initial moment of settlement, it cannot erase that
settlement or relieve settlers' sovereignty of conquest. This is neither because of settler colonialist theoretical definition nor because
settlers secretly feel guilty, but rather because the impossibility of fulfilling futurism's fantastical promises
requires some other way of meeting the needs it manufactures if settler sovereignty is to maintain
itself and it polity in tact. Settler societies resort to any number of destructive forms of managing futurism's
failing, from transfer and removal to outright extermination through war, massacre, starvation,
and disease. Yet this anxious reiterative activity is wholly predicable from an Edelmanian
perspective and ineliminable from the structure of settler sovereignty because the futurist narrativization
of the drive has rendered settlers beholden to an unsustainable temporality that must produce
queerness or death in order to continue to produce meaning, survival, and civilization for itself.
Settler sovereignty, thus, cannot do without the death native it brings into being. The
native as death must exist in order to
purchase life and survival for the settler. And yet, as Veracini and Wolf argue, the native cannot exist if the
settler is to indigenize herself as native to the land she has expropriated, hence the production of new enemies,
new queers, new deathly threats to settlement and its civilization and its way of life. The settler
colonial foundation of bio-political sovereignty gives way to an expansionist imperial security state that finds
new enemies abroad and new obstacles to its endless expansion, thereby solving, albeit only
ever partially and temporarily, the problem of futurist failure that constituted settlement to begin with.
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 settlers right to control surplus populace
Wolfe & Lloyd 16 historian & professor @ UC Riverside
(Patrick & David, Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 6, Issue 2)
It 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 economic regime is
how to manage and contain the threat it poses.
The paramilitarization 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 rule2 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.
 To vouchsafe
Nor had any previous investment required maintenance for the length of time that it took factories to become profitable.
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 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.

Genocidal settlement is not a one-off event, but a structuring ontological logic of

elimination constantly manifested in the everyday reiteration of the very modes of spatial
inhabitance and subjective modes of being that define settler identity
Rifkin 14 Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, pp.
7-10)
If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and
attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its
associa- tions they bear, recent
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 stayinvasion
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-Robinsons work, whiteness func- tions 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 main- tain 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 ones 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 (8384). 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 collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S.
jurisdiction and manage- ment: 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).
Vote negative to endorse a cartography of refusal
Day 15 Iyko, Associate Professor of English. Chair, Critical Social Thought. Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity,
Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 102-121

And so the potential relations that Wilderson sets up through a critique of sovereignty are at best irrelevant or at worse false in Sextons absolute
claim that slavery stands alone as the threshold of the political world.45 I suggest that this wavering relation/nonrelation of antiblackness and
Indigeneity exhibited in Wildersons and Sextons work reveal the problem in any totalizing approach to the heterogeneous constitution of racial
difference in settler colonies. Beyond this inconsistency, the liberal multiculturalist agenda that Wilderson and Sexton project into Indigenous
sovereignty willfully evacuates any Indigenous refusal of a colonial politics of recognition. Among other broad strokes, Sexton states, as a rule,
Native Studies reproduces the dominant liberal political narrative of emancipation and enfranchisement.46 This provides a basis for Wildersons
assertion that Indigenous sovereignty engages in a liberal politics of state legitimation through recognition because treaties are forms of
articulation that buttress the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit genocidal) idea.47 But such a depoliticized liberal project is
frankly incompatible with Indigenous activism and scholarship that emerges from Native studies in North America. The main argument in Glen
Sean Coulthards book Red Skin, White Masks is to categorically reject the liberal recognition-based approach to Indigenous
selfdetermination.48 This is not a politics of legitimizing Indigenous nations through state recognition but
rather one of refusal, a refusal to be recognized and thus interpellated by the settler
colonial nation-state. Drawing on Fanon, Coulthard describes 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.49 It is also difficult to reconcile the depoliticized
narrative of resurgence and recovery that Wilderson and Sexton attribute to Indigenous sovereignty in
the face of Idle No More, the anticapitalist Indigenous sovereignty movement in Canada
whose national railway and highway blockades have seriously destabilized the
expropriation of natural resources for the global market. These are examples that Coulthard
describes as direct action rather than negotiationin other words, antagonism, not conflict
resolution: The [blockades] are a crucial act of negation insofar as they seek to impede or block the flow
of resources currently being transported to international markets from oil and gas fields, refineries, lumber
mills, mining operations, and hydroelectric facilities located on the dispossessed lands of Indigenous
nations. These modes of direct action . . . seek to have a negative impact on the economic
infrastructure that is core to the colonial accumulation of capital in settler-political
economies like Canadas.50 These tactics are part of what Audra Simpson calls a
cartography of refusal that negates the authority of the others gaze.51 It is impossible to
frame the blockade movement, which has become the greatest threat to Canadas resource
agenda,52 as a struggle for enfranchisement. Idle No More is not in conflict with the
Canadian nation-state; it is in a struggle against the very premise of settler colonial
capitalism that requires the elimination of Indigenous peoples. As Coulthard states unambiguously, For
Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die.
Environmental education creates colonial violence the focus on particular unjust acts
produces a limited understanding of racialization that precludes understanding a broader
set of relationships
McLean 2013. Sheelah, Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan The
Canadian Geographer. The whiteness of green: Racialization and environmental education.

Kahn (2008) and Gonzalez-Guadiano (2005) argue that, across North America, environmental
education programs are primarily
experiential and lack a connection to social and political issues. Critical scholars also acknowledge that
environmental education lacks a critical race analysis and generally does not include a history of
colonial violence or a political analysis of the destruction of the environment. The theories,
policies, and discursive themes in environmental education are drawn from a western
framework and often disregard Indigenous issues globally (GonzalezGuadiano 2005). Many critical scholars
contend that these
western theories essentialize nature and create binary views of nature and wilderness
(Baldwin 2009a, 2009b; Erickson 2010). According to Kahn (2008), this
can be traced to the history of environmental
education and the foundational role that forest conservation played in its inception. The first two waves of
environmental education were led by middle-class white male scholars, and have proved harmful in
promoting strategies that could work across historically produced differences such as gender, race, class, and sexuality (Kahn 2008). Numerous
environmental education programs position their curriculum within a post-racial context,
where sustainability is proposed as a panacea for industrialism, while silencing industrys
relationship to colonization. This problematic positioning was commonly identified by many outdoor education student-
participants: Even in [outdoor education] that was more environmentally focused and the environmental movement, as critical as it is about a lot
of things it isnt critical about race or privilege or any of those types of issues (Xochitl). As Churchill (2003) contends, the
destructive
elements of contemporary globalization insatiable greed for resources, genocidal
disregard for life, militarism, and racismall trace their lineage in North America back to
the invasion by Europeans in the 16th century. The colonial relationship between white-settler
society and Indigenous Peoples is foundational to land-based struggles. The construction of whiteness as a
form of individual accumulation relies on the consumption of land and resources. Canadian whiteness was
not simply imported from Europe but forged through the colonial encounter (Milligan and McCreary 2011).
Many environmental education programs problematically centre ecology in a frame that
focuses on the effects of environmental destruction, which depoliticizes and silences
primary causes such as colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. As a result, the socially
acceptable solutions students are invited to engage in are often individualistic, and celebrate white
middleclass subjectivities through activities such as recycling, biking, or buying from organic Farmers Marketssuch solutions
do not challenge racialized systems of inequality. Sarah: I felt like [outdoor education] actually was more like environmentally
based and I feel like I had a really good handle on that but then I wanted more of the human rights side of things like colonization, things going
on with the government, and all that kind of stuff. Sheelah: What did the [outdoor education] program focus on when you were there? Sarah: It
was totally environmentally based, conservation based but it wasnt really the systems that make the environmental situations the way they are.
Its more focusing on your personal ways to change things, like riding your bike everywhere, recycling, all that kind of stuff. Sheelah: Like our
own footprint...? Sarah: Exactly. Instead of looking at the government that passes legislature [sic] that allows big companies to do whatever to the
environment. Student-participants indicated that their environmental education curricula did not allow for the type of power analysis that might
evoke crucial questions such as who benefits from environmental destruction? This absence of a race analysis encourages a failure to
acknowledge The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe canadien 2013, 57(3): 354362 358 Sheelah McLean white supremacy as a
system of ongoing colonial privilege and consumption. Where there may be discussion of
environmental racism in environmental education, this type of analysis focuses on the effects of
particular discriminatory acts on communities of color (Pulido 2000). Pulido (2000) argues that this frame
conveys a limited understanding of racialization, failing to analyze how environmental
injustice has been coconstructed through a set of relationships between spaces that have
been racialized. Without an analysis of the unequal consequences of environmental destruction on all
racialized communities, environmental education can become a place where good white people
can maintain superiority by saving both the environment and people of color, which includes
Indigenous communities devastated by environmental destruction.
 1NR Link
Holtgren 14
[2014, Marty Holtgren, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians Stephanie Ogren, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians
Kyle Whyte, Michigan State University, "Renewing Relatives: Nm Stewardship in a Shared Watershed", Tales of
Hope and Caution in Environmental Justice,
s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/35321033/Renewing_Relatives_10-29-
14.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1483927875&Signature=%2Fp3861HV7j4Ib
XuFIxzim4eJhBo%3D&response-content-
disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRenewing_Relatives_Nme_Sturgeon_Stewards.pdf]

The relationship among Anishinaabek and Nm was part of a symbiotic cultural, political and ecological
system. However, settler colonialism in the Great Lakes region threatened the stability of Nm populations and the
Anishinaabe system through over-harvesting, dams, stocking rivers with non-native fish species for sport
fishing, and environmental change. During the late 19th century the Nm was considered a nuisance that held no value to settlers,
resulting in the steep decline in Nm populations. By the early 2000s, less than 40-50 fish per year came to spawn in the Manistee River and
many historic Nm rivers lost their populations completely. In many ways, especially to settler Americans, it was a forgotten fish. Kenny
Pheasant, a First Nation elder, says Decline of the sturgeon has corresponded with decline in sturgeon clan families. Only a few sturgeon clan
families are known around here (Holtgren 2011). After the U.S. reaffirmed its recognition of the LRBOI as a
sovereign nation, the Tribe used its recognized government authority to formalize natural
resources stewardship and environmental protection programs. Restoring relatives such as Nm is an
important part of that. Yet restoring Nm with the Indigenous conception of stewardship was not easy. Some
people in the Manistee area believed that Anishinaabek did not desire to live sustainably,
and they believed that treaty rights were unfair to settler Americans. The state fought
Tribal efforts for Nm restoration, claiming the LRBOI did not have the legal authority to engage in
restoration. Many local residents thought it was a waste of time and money to restore a fish that might take 100 years to recover fully. In
short, settler Americans did not understand Anishinaabe culture. Politically, the Michigan Department of
Natural Resources did not initially invest in sturgeon restoration in Lake Michigan as part of its view of
sustainability, which was based on how it interpreted the public trust doctrine. This public trust
doctrine promises access to the resource largely as a commodity that provides financial and
recreational services and subsequently is often in conflict with the Tribes views on
sustainability. The states public trust doctrine often translates into, More fish, more
available, to more people. For LRBOI, the importance of Nm restoration rested on a different
conception of sustainability. Following Anishinaabe culture, the Tribe needed to maintain the same genetic
make-up of the sturgeon population while increasing their abundance, because those are the Nm which Anishinaabek
have related to since time immemorial. The fish are ancestors; restoration is about bringing them back to the river and restoring the relationships
with Nm. The fact that populations would not reach harvestable levels for 100 years was considered a positive, because the value of the fish is
the relationship between Nm and Anishinaabe as a source of spirituwellness. Sustainability
was understood as a spiritual
relationship. As one elder put it, Yes, subsistence [is important], but then you have the traditional piece that
comes in. When you do that you also tie in spiritual, because spiritual will tie in with the traditional
aspects of it, so that is really hard to separate those many times because it is part of what I call the circle
of life, how it all ties together in some way (Holtgren 2011)
Terra Sacer directly undergirds their particular ecological education and political
orientation, which is an intensified form of white supremacist genocide lodged in the
cosmopolitan dreams of settler environmentalism.
Paperson 2014 [La, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, A ghetto land pedagogy: an
antidote for settler environmentalism, Environmental Education Research 20:1]
Urban educators have few tools for engaging settler colonialism because terra sacer often under-girds environmental education in
urban schools. Environmental education offers three limited social justice frameworks: environmental racism a framework that focuses on pain;
green curriculum a framework that focuses on rescue; and place-based curriculum a framework that focuses on inclusion, and thus, the
replacement of Native land/people with a multicultural immigrant nation. Despite their social justice intentions, and their
ecological truths, when strung together, such pedagogies concerning US ghettos contain a settler colonial teleology.
Pain curriculum8 highlights, legitimately, the disproportionate toxification of air, soil and water in poor, urban,
communities of color. However, reducing ghettos to pain-filled sites of environmental toxicity in need of salvation,
echo the settler colonial logics of terra sacer wasteland whose inhabitants lack the liberal capitalist
insights and technological know-how to properly occupy a city. Rescue curriculum follows
logically from pain curriculum. It presents green solutions in the form of urban gardens, recycling,
clean fuels, etc. It leans explicitly on green technologies and implicitly on the technologies of
government. The hidden curriculum of rescue naturalizes city planning, urban
redevelopment, and de-ghetto-fication as inevitable remedies for pain. It positions ghettoized
communities as wards under settler colonial sovereignty. Rescue curriculum promotes green cities, a wealth of green
consumption through which the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen earns his/her/our right to be the nouveau settler.
Enter place-based curriculum. Place-based curriculum helps write the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies. Often
inclusive, multicultural, and celebratory, such curriculum highlights the urban as a place of diversity, flavored by communities of color. (And
wouldnt you like to live here too?) Claiming the urban as a contact zone or multicultural home whether by people of color, or by white people
violently erases Indigenous understandings of that land and place. If Native people are mentioned at all, they are almost always only as a
premodern population who were pleasantly one with nature, or ecological Indians so few in number that the ecological settler becomes a good
neighbor or benevolent reinhabitant. Such a representation inscribes settler colonialism as a done deal, renders urban Native youth as inauthentic
Indians, and denies contemporary Native relationships to urban land and place (Friedel 2011). The hidden curriculum of place-based
pedagogy lies in its teleology. Native people used to live here. White people settled here; they fled. People of color
replaced white people; they suffer. Coming up, the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace
people of color. When the Great American City is finally built, all the white people will be
colorful, and all the colored people will be gone.
The affirmative equivocates multiple different forms of colonialism and oppression under
the broad title of a single colonialism which enables a politics of innocence.
Tuck and Yang, 12 PhD in Urban Education, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations, and
Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York AND Assistant Professor of Ethnic
Studies (Eve and K.W., Decolonization is not a metaphor Eve Tuck, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40)//eek
Moves to innocence III: Colonial equivocation A
more nuanced move to innocence is the homogenizing of various
experiences of oppression as colonization. Calling different groups colonized without describing their
relationship to settler colonialism is an equivocation, the fallacy of using a word in different senses at
different stages of the reasoning" (Etymonline, 2001). In particular, describing all struggles against
imperialism as decolonizing creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and
social justice work, especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler nation-state. We
are all colonized, may be a true statement but is deceptively embracive and vague, its
inference: None of us are settlers. Equivocation, or calling everything by the same name, is a move
towards innocence that is especially vogue in coalition politics among people of color. People of color who
enter/are brought into the settler colonial nation-state also enter the triad of relations between settler-native-slave. We are referring here to the
colonial pathways that are usually described as immigration and how the refugee/immigrant/migrant is invited to be a settler in some scenarios,
given the appropriate investments in whiteness, or is made an illegal, criminal presence in other scenarios. Ghetto colonialism, prisons, and under
resourced compulsory schooling are specializations of settler colonialism in North America; they are produced by the collapsing of internal,
external, and settler colonialisms, into new blended categories. This
triad of settler-native-slave and its selective
collapsibility seems to be unique to settler colonial nations. For example, all Aleut people on the Aleutian
Islands were collected and placed in internment camps for four years after the bombing of Dutch Harbor;
the stated rationale was the protection of the people but another likely reason was that the U.S.
Government feared the Aleuts would become allies with the Japanese and/or be difficult to differentiate
from potential Japanese spies. White people who lived on the Aleutian Islands at that same time were not
interned. Internment in abandoned warehouses and canneries in Southeast Alaska was the cause of
significant numbers of death of children and elders, physical injury, and illness among Aleut people.
Aleut internment during WWII is largely ignored as part of U.S. history. The shuffling of Indigenous
people between Native, enslavable Other, and Orientalized Other shows how settler colonialism
constructs and collapses its triad of categories. This colonizing trick explains why certain minorities can at times become model
and quasi-assimilable (as exemplified by Asian settler colonialism, civil rights, model minority discourse, and the use of hispanic as an ethnic
category to mean both white and non-white) yet, in times of crisis, revert to the status of foreign contagions (as exemplified by Japanese
Internment, Islamophobia, Chinese Exclusion, Red Scare, anti-Irish nativism, WWII anti- semitism, and anti-Mexican-immigration). This is why
labor or workers as an agential political class fails to activate the decolonizing project. [S]hifting lines of the international division of labor
(Spivak, 1985, p. 84) bisect the very category of labor into caste-like bodies built for work on one hand and rewardable citizen-workers on the
other. Some labor becomes settler, while excess labor becomes enslavable, criminal, murderable. The
impossibility of fully
becoming a white settler - in this case, white referring to an exceptionalized position with assumed rights
to invulnerability and legal supremacy - as articulated by minority literature preoccupied with glass
ceilings and forever foreign status and myth of the model minority, offers a strong critique of the
myth of the democratic nation- state. However, its logical endpoint, the attainment of equal legal and
cultural entitlements, is actually an investment in settler colonialism. Indeed, even the ability to be a
minority citizen in the settler nation means an option to become a brown settler. For many people of
color, becoming a subordinate settler is an option even when becoming white is not. Following stolen resources
is a phrase that Wayne has encountered, used to describe Filipino overseas labor (over 10% of the population of the Philippines is working
abroad) and other migrations from colony to metropole. This
phrase is an important anti-colonial framing of a colonial
situation. However an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework; anti-colonial
critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the
metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesnt strive to undo colonialism but rather to
remake it and subvert it. Seeking stolen resources is entangled with settler colonialism because those resources were nature/Native
first, then enlisted into the service of settlement and thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land. Furthermore, the
postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become
postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject. Equivocation is the vague equating of
colonialisms that erases the sweeping scope of land as the basis of wealth, power, law in settler nation-
states. Vocalizing a muliticultural approach to oppressions, or remaining silent on settler colonialism
while talking about colonialisms, or tacking on a gesture towards Indigenous people without addressing Indigenous sovereignty or
rights, or forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to unsettling/deoccupying land, are equivocations. That is, they
ambiguously avoid engaging with settler colonialism; they are ambivalent about minority / people of
color / colonized Others as settlers; they are cryptic about Indigenous land rights in spaces inhabited by
people of color.