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No, CCS does not alleviate harmful air pollutants, and may actually lead to additional emissions at the point of capture. Because of carbon capture’s energy penalty, burning fossil fuels to power the process increases pollutant emissions on site. Moreover, CCS increases the upstream impacts of fossil fuel production and refining in proportion to the additional energy consumed. The use of amine-based chemicals (such as monoethanolamine (MEA)) for CCS can lead to significant releases of ammonia as well. And, because CCS relies on underlying facilities by design, CCS retrofits risk exacerbating pollution and environmental injustice in communities already burdened by existing polluting facilities. This is in part why the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council flagged CCS; carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS); and direct air capture (DAC) as examples of projects that will not benefit a community.

While organizations like the IPCC indicate the need for significant amounts of carbon removal to meet our climate goals, care must be taken to ensure that ramping up DAC does not distract from essential attention and investment in other mitigation measures, especially to reduce fossil fuel use. Scientists indicate we will need both faster emissions reduction and carbon removal, and the amount of carbon removal needed is inversely proportional to how deeply we are able to cut emissions.

Strong policy and private sector guardrails are needed to ensure countries and companies do not over-rely on carbon removal at the expense of emissions reductions. For example, the Science Based Target initiative’s recent net-zero guidance requires companies to meet their climate targets by reducing more than 90% of their own emissions and using carbon removal to compensate for only the remaining 5-10% that they cannot directly mitigate.

We are researchers who study how marine life, chemistry and the climate interact, and after examining the processes by which coastal habitats draw down (and release) planet-warming gases, we’re not convinced. Whether the climate benefits from restoring these habitats – by planting mangrove trees, for example – is far from certain, and there’s a real risk that the scale at which they can mitigate emissions has been massively oversold.

Our new analysis found several reasons why it is extremely difficult to work out a reliable figure for carbon accumulation by coastal ecosystems under current conditions. So we have a very shaky basis for calculating the future carbon offsets that restoration projects might provide over the next 50 to 100 years.

Those promoting the biomass fuel and energy juggernaut suggest that burning wood is “clean energy “and carbon neutral. However, biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable.

For instance, the City of Prineville, Oregon, promotes the construction of a 20 MW biomass burner. In their promotional literature, the city says: “The City and County will utilize the PREP to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, reinvent jobs in the natural resources/forest products industries, diversify energy supplies, reduce CO2 emissions, and reinvigorate the community and local economy, all while offering a clean, renewable energy source.”

Thick dust has been filling the air and settling on homes in Debra David’s neighborhood of Hamlet, North Carolina, ever since a wood pellet plant started operating nearby in 2019.

The 64-year-old said the pollution is badly affecting the health of the population, which has already been hit hard by Covid.

Her reaction is in no small part because Gear knows the public health implications of biomass: Wood pellet processing generates dust that travels to nearby homes, carrying hazardous pollutants that can worsen respiratory and other health issues.

Spectrum plans to start operations on two neighboring polluted properties, including the site of a now defunct sawmill called Del-Cook. Once a big employer in town, Del-Cook looms large in the memory of Adel’s Black and Latino communities. Census data shows the population surrounding the site is 77 percent people of color and they live within one mile of the property, which is so riddled with contaminants, it was designated a toxic brownfield. Cancer has already taken a staggering toll on the neighborhood.

At last year's Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don't yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry's optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius. They rely heavily on technologies that don't yet exist, such as ways to store carbon in the ground safely, permanently and affordably.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Science—that is to say, Euro-American science—has long been held as our model for rationality. Scientists frequently accuse those who reject their findings of being irrational. Yet depending on technologies that do not yet exist is irrational, a kind of magical thinking. That is a developmental stage kids are expected to outgrow. Imagine if I said I planned to build a home with materials that had not yet been invented or build a civilization on Mars without first figuring out how to get even one human being there. You'd likely consider me irrational, perhaps delusional. Yet this kind of thinking pervades plans for future decarbonization.

In a much-anticipated report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world will need to take dramatic and drastic steps to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Featured prominently in the report is a discussion of a range of techniques for removing carbon dioxide from the air, called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies or negative emissions technologies (NETs). The IPCC said (PDF) the world would need to rely significantly on these techniques to avoid increasing Earth’s temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.

These are changes that also begin within families by embracing the practice of digadatsele’i. As Alfred (2011, personal communication) points out, “Our children should have the opportunity to live more Indigenous lives than we do.” By understanding the overlapping and simultaneous processes of decolonization and resurgence, we begin to better understand how to implement meaningful and substantive community decolonization practices. Future generations will map their own pathways to community resurgence, ideally on their own terms. Through our everyday acts of resurgence, our ancestors along with future generations will recognize us as Indigenous to the land. And this is how our homelands will recognize us as being Indigenous to that place.

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

“when you take away the punctuation

As human beings, we can always look on the past, examine the present, and prepare for the future of humanity by sharing our cultural stories. In public school I was taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Later, I found out that the man was totally lost on his voyage and named the Indigenous Peoples he "discovered" Indios because he was looking for the country of India. Throughout my entire public school education, I was led to believe by my teachers that this was a true story. The year 1492 seems to have triggered the "Western world" mythology that has come to dominate the entire globe's economics, politics, and academics, imposing itself as the natural, unquestionable norm of human existence. "This illusion of Western world superiority has functioned implicitly, and at times brutally explicitly, to facilitate the conquest and enslavement of native peoples, the exploitation of their labor and the natural resources, and the genocidal destruction of whole cultures and peoples" (Tinker 1993, p. vii). It is not simply that Columbus is identified as the one who started it all, but rather that he has come to represent a huge legacy of suffering and destruction (Smith 1999). He sets this modern framework of 500 years of colonization of the Indigenous Peoples of North America and defines the outer limits of that legacy, which is the total destruction of Indigenous culture. Lasting awareness—that in-depth understanding which penetrates the superficial differences or similarities between fact, theory, and practice, that level of consciousness which allows you to see the truth no matter how bitter, horrible, or controversial—often comes about gradually. Given my introduction to the 1492 Columbus story, I look back on elementary school, junior high, high school, and university classes that were designed to help me become a knowledgeable student, teacher, counselor, and principal. I see now that the American educational system promotes a system-maintaining curriculum. By that, I mean it virtually designs hegemonic class structures, which just about guarantees that the oppressed remain oppressed and the oppressors remain oppressors (Freire 1993). Some colleagues will say to me that school is what you make of it—that students have choices. I say that the American system of education is charged to make something distinct of us. Therefore, the title of this paper "Renaming Ourselves on Our Own Terms" is like counting coup1 on the text.

<In this respect at least, Fanon’s position might be better described as neo-Jacobin than as neo-Bolshevik: for Fanon, compared with Lenin, the exercise of political will is more fully independent of an ‘objective’ historical development, of the so-called laws or stages of economic development. Yes, says Fanon, ‘decolonisation is proceeding, but it is rigorously false to pretend and to believe that this decolonisation is the fruit of an objective dialectic which more or less rapidly assumes the appearance of an absolutely inevitable mechanism’. Revolutionary optimism here is not a response to an objective assessment of the situation: rather, ‘optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the African masses’ (AR, 170-171), pure and simple. Ultimately, there is nothing ‘beneath’ the will of the people that might guide its course. There are no historical or economic laws to which it must conform. Fanon offers no excuse or alibi: ‘sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves’ (WE, 198). Everything depends on us, and on ‘the firmness of our commitment’ (AR, 172). This means, furthermore, that the self-determination of the will is itself a sufficient guide to action and the consequences of action. Considered in isolation and on its own terms, to will involves a ‘total’ and ‘sincere’ commitment to one’s experience, without reserve, without second-guessing, without reflection upon unconscious or ulterior motives, mitigating circumstances, etc. This is the real reason for Fanon’s famous objection, in Black Skin, to Sartre’s interpretation of negritude as a merely transitional moment in a dialectic that subsumes it. Fanon is no less convinced than Sartre himself, of course, of the essential freedom and autonomy of consciousness. But in his critique of negritude as a form of consciousness determined by its place in a logic of development, Sartre forgets that ‘a consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being’, at least if the latter are to be understood as providing a rationale for that experience which is supposedly ‘deeper’ than its own conscious self-determination.[36] On either the individual or the collective level, such ‘wilful ignorance’ is indeed an irreducible aspect of the practical primacy of the will. On either level, ‘nothing is more unwelcome than the commonplace: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young... you’ll see, it will all pass.” The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself’ (BS, 103), just as submission to the logic of historical or economic ‘development’ drives the newly liberated nation back into the coils of necessity. Rather than submit to what is feasible, to what circumstances permit, the first duty of revolutionary activists is to commit to their vision and their will to achieve it—in Fanon’s case, ‘to turn the absurd and the impossible inside out and hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power’ (AR, 181).>

Despite Prime Minister Harper’s assertions, that “we” in Canada “have no history of colonialism” (Ljunggren, 2009), contemporary colonialism continues to disrupt Indigenous relationships with their homelands, cultures and communities. One of our biggest enemies is compartmentalization, as shape-shifting colonial entities attempt to sever our relationships to the natural world and define the terrain of struggle. For example, policymakers who frame new government initiatives as “economic development” miss the larger connections embedded within Indigenous economies linking homelands, cultures and communities. By focusing on “everyday” acts of resurgence, one disrupts the colonial physical, social and political boundaries designed to impede our actions to restore our nationhood. In order to live in a responsible way as selfdetermining nations, Indigenous peoples must confront existing colonial institutions, structures, and policies that attempt to displace us from our homelands and relationships, which impact the health and well-being of present generations of Indigenous youth and families. Indigenous resurgence means having the courage and imagination to envision life beyond the state. Decolonization offers different pathways for reconnecting Indigenous nations with their traditional land-based and water-based cultural practices. The decolonization process operates at multiple levels and necessitates moving from an awareness of being in struggle, to actively engaging in everyday practices of resurgence. After all, whether they know it or not (or even want it), every Indigenous person is in a daily struggle for resurgence. It is in these everyday actions where the scope of the struggle for decolonization is reclaimed and re-envisioned by Indigenous peoples. Decolonizing praxis comes from moving beyond political awareness and/or symbolic gestures to everyday practices of resurgence (de Silva, personal communication, 2011)i. This shift means rejecting the performativity of a rights discourse geared toward state affirmation and recognition, and embracing a daily existence conditioned by place-based cultural practices. How one engages in daily processes of truth-telling and resistance to colonial encroachments is just as important as the overall outcome of these struggles to reclaim, restore, and regenerate homeland relationships. While decolonization and resurgence are often treated separately from each other in scholarly analysis, for the purposes of this article they are viewed as interrelated actions and strategies that inform our pathways to resistance and freedom.

<Such self-reliance points to another basic feature of a voluntarist approach: its commitment to the here and now, to decisive action in the present moment, and its consequent rejection of terms that proceed through deferral, ‘reform’ or ‘development’. What is at stake is a claim to that ‘independence which will allow the Algerian people to take its destiny wholly in hand’ (AR, 101), all at once, without waiting for recognition or approval from the colonial master. The goal is not to reform the colonial situation but to abolish it, not to improve a situation of partial dependence but to escape it. The FLN does not seek to incorporate colonial ‘modernisation’ as a difficult but necessary chapter in the development of the nation, but to eliminate it: ‘instead of integrating colonialism, conceived as the birth of a new world, in Algerian history, we have made of it an unhappy, execrable accident’ (AR, 101). For the FLN, then, ‘bargaining of any kind is unthinkable’ (AR, 62), and ‘this refusal of progressive solutions, this contempt for the “stages” that break the revolutionary torrent and cause the people to unlearn the unshakable will to take everything into their hands at once in order that everything may change, constitutes the fundamental characteristic of the struggle of the Algerian people’.[35] In keeping with Fanon’s neo-Jacobin logic, the will of the people, where one exists, not only demands but incarnates an immediate and unconditional sovereignty.>

Indigenous knowledge is local knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society (Warren, 1987). Indigenous knowledge is the systematic body of knowledge acquired by local people through the accumulation of experiences, informal experiments, and intimate understanding of the environment in a given culture (Rajasekaran, 1993). According to Haverkort (1991), indigenous knowledge is the actual knowledge of a given population that reflects the experiences based on traditions and includes more recent experiences with modern technologies. Local people, including farmers, landless laborers, women, rural artisans, and cattle rearers, are the custodians of indigenous knowledge systems. Moreover, these people are well informed about their own situations, their resources, what works and doesn't work, and how one change impacts other parts of their system (Butler and Waud, 1990). 1.2 Value of indigenous knowledge Indigenous knowledge is dynamic, changing through indigenous mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness as well as through contact with other local and international knowledge systems (Warren, 1991). These knowledge systems may appear simple to outsiders but they represent mechanisms to ensure minimal livelihoods for local people. Indigenous knowledge systems often are elaborate, and they are adapted to local cultural and environmental conditions (Warren, 1987). Indigenous knowledge systems are tuned to the needs of local people and the quality and quantity of available resources (Pretty and Sandbrook, 1991). They pertain to various cultural norms, social roles, or physical conditions. Their efficiency lies in the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. According to Norgaard (1984, p. 7): Traditional knowledge has been viewed as part of a romantic past, as the major obstacle to development, as a necessary starting point, and as a critical component of a cultural alternative to modernization. Only very rarely, however, is traditional knowledge treated as knowledge per se in the mainstream of the agricultural and development and environmental management literature, as knowledge that contributes to our understanding of agricultural production and the maintenance and use of environmental systems. 1.3 Diversity of indigenous knowledge Indigenous knowledge systems are: adaptive skills of local people usually derived from many years of experience, that have often been communicated through "oral traditions" and learned through family members over generations (Thrupp, 1989), time-tested agricultural and natural resource management practices, which pave the way for sustainable agriculture (Venkatratnam, 1990), strategies and techniques developed by local people to cope with the changes in the socio-cultural and environmental conditions, practices that are accumulated by farmers due to constant experimentation and innovation, trial-and-error problem-solving approaches by groups of people with an objective to meet the challenges they face in their local environments (Roling and Engel, 1988), decision-making skills of local people that draw upon the resources they have at hand.

There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t be figured, that cannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The same yellow pollen in the water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, is the same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2 flashes. The same yellow pollen that poisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war that took a generation of young Pueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko writes, “Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you saw the witchery ranging as wide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where Silko lives, her books are now banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the settler innocence, ingenuity, and right to America may be taught. 
In “No”, her response to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Mvskoke/Creek poet Joy Harjo (2004) writes, “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.” Don’t Native Americans participate in greater rates in the military? asks the young-ish man from Viet Nam. “Indian Country” was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for ‘enemy territory’. The first Black American President said without blinking, “There was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden.” Elmer Pratt, Black Panther leader, falsely imprisoned for 27 years, was a Vietnam Veteran, was nicknamed ‘Geronimo’. Geronimo is settler nickname for the Bedonkohe Apache warrior who fought Mexican and then U.S. expansion into Apache tribal lands. The Colt .45 was perfected to kill Indigenous people during the ‘liberation’ of what became the Philippines, but it was first invented for the ‘Indian Wars’ in North America alongside The Hotchkiss Canon- a gattling gun that shot canonballs. The technologies of the permanent settler war are reserviced for foreign wars, including boarding schools, colonial schools, urban schools run by military personnel. It is properly called Indian Country. Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native, disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964. The management technologies of North American settler colonialism have provided the tools for internal colonialisms elsewhere. So to with philosophies of state and corporate land-grabbing24. The prominence of “flat world” perspectives asserts that technology has afforded a diminished significance of place and borders. The claim is that U.S. borders have become more flexible, yet simultaneously, the physical border has become more absolute and enforced. The border is no longer just a line suturing two nation-states; the U.S. now polices its borders interior to its territory and exercises sovereignty throughout the globe. Just as sovereignty has expanded, so has settler colonialism in partial forms. New Orleans’ lower ninth ward lies at the confluence of river channels and gulf waters, and at the intersection of land grabbing and human bondage. The collapsing of levies heralded the selective collapsibility of native-slave, again, for the purpose of reinvasion, resettlement, reinhabitation. The naturalized disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters laid the perfect cover for land speculation and the ablution of excess people. What can’t be absorbed, can’t be folded in (because the settlers won't give up THEIR land to advance abolition), translates into bodies stacked on top of one another in public housing and prisons, in cells, kept from the labor market, making labor for others (guards and other corrections personnel) making money for states -human homesteading. It necessitates the manufacturing of crime at rates higher than anywhere in the world. 1 in 6 people in the state of Louisiana are incarcerated, the highest number of caged people per capita, making it the prison capital of United States, and therefore the prison capital of the world. The Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers’ delta flood plain was once land so fertile that it could be squeezed for excess production of cotton, giving rise to exceptionally large-scale plantation slavery. Plantation owners lived in houses like pyramids and chattel slavery took an extreme form here, even for the South, beginning with enslaved Chitimachas, Choctaw, Natchez, Chaoüachas, Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa peoples, then later replaced by enslaved West Africans. Literally, worked to death. This “most Southern on earth”(Cobb, 1992) was a place of ultimate terror for Black people even under slavery (the worst place to be sold off too, the place of no return, the place of premature death). Black and Native people alike were induced to raid and enslave Native tribes, as a bargain for their own freedom or to defer their own enslavibility by the British, French, and then American settlers. Abolition has its incommensurabilities. The Delta is now more segregated than it was during Jim Crow in 1950 (Aiken, 1990). The rising number of impoverished, all black townships is the result of mechanization of agriculture and a fundamental settler covenant that keeps black people landless. When black labor is unlabored, the Black person underneath is the excess. Angola Farm is perhaps the more notorious of the two State Penitentiaries along the Mississippi River. Three hundred miles upriver in the upper Delta region is Parchment Farm. Both State Penitentiaries (Mississippi and Louisana, respectively), both former slave plantations, both turned convict-leasing farms almost immediately after the Civil War by genius land speculators-cum-prison wardens. After the Union victory in the Civil War ‘abolished’ slavery, former Confederate Major, Samuel Lawrence James, obtained the lease to the Louisiana State Penn in 1869, and then bought Angola Farm in 1880 as land to put his chattel to work. Cages on wheels. To mobilize labor on land by landless people whose crime was mobility on land they did not own. The largest human trafficker in the world is the carceral state within the United States, not some secret Thai triad or Russian mafia or Chinese smuggler. The U.S. carceral state is properly called neo-slavery, precisely because it is legal. It is not simply a product of exceptional racism in the U.S.; its racism is a direct function of the settler colonial mandate of land and people as property. Black Codes made vagrancy - i.e. landlessness - illegal in the Antebellum South, making the self-possessed yet dispossessed Black body a crime (similar logic allowed for the seizure, imprisonment and indenture of any Indian by any person in California until 1937, based on the ideology that Indians are simultaneously landless and land-like). Dennis Childs writes “the slave ship and the plantation” and not Bentham’s panopticon as presented by Foucault, “operated as spatial, racial, and economic templates for subsequent models of coerced labor and human warehousing - as America’s original prison industrial complex” (2009, p.288). Geopolitics and biopolitics are completely knotted together in a settler colonial context. Despite the rise of publicly traded prisons, Farms are not fundamentally capitalist ventures; at their core, they are colonial contract institutions much like Spanish Missions, Indian Boarding Schools, and ghetto school systems26. The labor to cage black bodies is paid for by the state and then land is granted, worked by convict labor, to generate additional profits for the prison proprietors. However, it is the management of excess presence on the land, not the forced labor, that is the main object of slavery under settler colonialism. Today, 85% of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.

(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 associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that “elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded) occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness 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 one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as Indianness, casting place-based political 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).

Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racialization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.” The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times. Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as a dispensable population. Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery, murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to darkness. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death ethics of war. Sub-ontological difference is the result of such naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation’ (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic. Introduction The Crown-First Nations Gathering held on 24 January 2012 was organized to create a dialogue between First Nations and the settler state. The participants made a commitment to develop equitable Indigenous–settler relationships to renew those marred by the subjugation and dispossession legislated by the Indian Act, 1876. The Assembly of First Nations publicly stated that the event would ‘directly build’ upon official reconciliatory initiatives such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.1 At the event, Prime Minister Stephen Harper emphasized the concrete action taken to reconcile Indigenous– settler relationships such as ‘accelerating specific and comprehensive claims’, ‘secur[ing] water-system accountability’ and ‘rout[ing] more than a billion dollars of Economic Action Plan funding to investments for Aboriginal and northern communities’.2 He goes on to state that, ‘these things we have done, Ladies and Gentlemen, as a down payment on what we wish to achieve. For our goal is self-sufficient citizens and self-governing communities. Our goal is to promote improved governance. Our goal is much increased aboriginal participation in the economy and in the country’s prosperity’.3 In outlining these policy and programme actions, Prime Minister Harper demonstrates a commitment to improving the lives of Indigenous peoples; yet, embedded in this statement is a form of capitalist logic that resembles the practice of investment whereby the nation-state seeks a financial return on these designated monies. This article is animated by the following question: how does investment rationale shape Indigenous–settler reconciliation processes in Canada? This article employs a problematization approach that is used to ‘question what appears to be well-ordered, rational, responsible, self-evident, universal or natural in order to show the selective format of these practices and the power effects inscribed in them’.4 By using this approach, I interrogate the presumed neutrality of investment discourse and the accounting techniques that are used to normalize this economic practice. To support my claims, I analyse public documents, speeches and policies that ‘represent key sites of hegemonic struggle over the principles and values’ of Indigenous–settler reconciliation. The history presented here is partial and selective because I only examine instances where Indigenous leaders and settler state representatives enter into official dialogue. While the reconciliation process may inspire knowledge transfer and cultural sharing, I am reminded of Jennifer Henderson’s caveat that, ‘[l]ike monetary exchanges, discursive exchanges in the field of redress function to standardize—to convert incommensurabilities into a shared form’.6 This article argues that the settler state deploys investment logic to determine specific reconciliatory exchanges that ensure the containment of Indigenous claims to restitution and the creation of mutual economic beneficiaries. These demands may retrench the social debt owed to Indigenous peoples by the settler state and undercut the spirit of restitution and justice. Stated more clearly, investment rationale is used to bypass Indigenous peoples’ assertions of self-determination and to ensure the economic success of the settler state. Therefore, this article argues that the settler state must be rendered ‘incomprehensible’ so ‘Eurocentric epistemologies and judicial doctrines no longer hold unquestioned authority’.7 In this article, I examine how Indigenous peoples routinely advocate for holistic social investments and a suitable land base to economically develop by using the language of investment and the extension of jurisdiction. In response, settler governments reframe these requests for social investment as opportunities for economic investment. In the following sections, I document how grievance and redress become financialized to contain claims to Indigenous self-determination and to establish a profit or return for the settler state. In doing so, this article contributes to fields of Indigenous–state relations and transitional justice by examining how market relations are introduced to seemingly politically progressive and affective practices such as Indigenous–settler reconciliation. Firstly, I outline the concomitant projects of genocide, neoliberalism and settler colonialism in Canada. Secondly, I explore how investment rationale reframes holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation advocated by Indigenous peoples. Lastly, I examine how three ‘eras of reconciliation’ that I identify as Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and reparations for Indian residential school (IRS) Survivors coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.Genocide, neoliberalism and the settler state in Canada The question of genocide in Canada is complicated because the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians, rather contrarily, is defined by the political and economic subjugation of an entire people existing alongside a spectacle of cultural diversity and reconciliation.8 The limits of cultural appreciation are reached when grassroots movements and Indigenous organizations publicly challenge capitalist accumulation.9 Any resistance demonstrated by Indigenous peoples is linked to settler assumptions that Indigenous peoples are economically ‘privileged’ through Indian Act legislation, despite numerous scholarly accounts that demonstrate that this legislation actually has created economic dependency that is profitable only to the nation-state.10 For these reasons, the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Canada’s capitalist system is assumed by settler Canadians to be an acceptable goal because it supposedly ensures equitable access to prosperity. Taking these contradictions into account, the Canadian settler state should not be understood as a monolithic institution but as ‘an ideological project’ that ‘confers legitimacy upon the complex constellation of government institutions and processes that have many different (and often contradictory) agendas and interests’.11 I employ Joyce Green’s concept ‘Project Canada’ that refers ‘to the state constructed from the colonies by colonial and then settler elites, evolving but firmly grounded on the original and continuing appropriation of indigenous land and resources, and built on racist and sexist practices’.12 A central goal of this project is to eliminate Indian Act legislation and thereby reduce Indigenous difference to an ethnicity that can be subsumed into the Canadian cultural mosaic. The complicity of reconciliation in maintaining Project Canada is a recurring question in scholarly examinations of this process.13 Indigeneity, however, can be particularly useful in imagining a reconciled Canada because it prescribes ‘a principled framework for [Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians] “living together differently”’14 that includes ‘an innovative, if unorthodox, pattern of belonging that endorses the notion of nation-states as sites of multiple yet interlocking jurisdictions, each autonomous and self-determining yet sharing in governance of the whole’.15 Jurisdiction over territory and services is tantamount to an extension of decision-making powers that would also require significant land and capital transfer to bolster autonomous communities. An emphasis on self-government (and self-management), as noted in the statement made by Stephen Harper in the introduction, has frequently replaced the language of selfdetermination in government speeches and documents over the last thirty years. This discursive shift gestures to a convergence of the settler colonial and neoliberal projects. Self-determining Indigenous communities are viewed by the settler state as disruptive to practices of accumulation by dispossession that have reached ascendancy in an era of neoliberalism. This practice ‘involves the dispossession of people from their wealth’ whether this is in the form of natural resources or land or access to government finances.17 Neoliberalism functions genocidically through a process of regime replacement where ‘the federal government pursued economic policies amounting to genocide by limiting the ability of Indigenous peoples to pursue their traditional livelihoods, sustain their own economic systems, and participate in the management or use of their resources within their territories’.18 Regime replacement serves as an organizing principle of the settler society’s political economy and as a tactic it is deployed to integrate Indigenous territories into national and global economies. For instance, neoliberal economic policies have initiated resource extraction projects that have over time resulted in the destruction of Indigenous territory, culture and identity.19 Despite documented genocidal outcomes related to the neoliberalization of the settler state, this rationale has become further entrenched in Indigenous–state relationships. This article is primarily concerned with the role neoliberalism plays in the economization of the social whereby the accumulation of capital is situated as the ultimate goal of not only businesses or states but also individuals and communities. As a consequence of neoliberal logic, ‘regimes of public investment and finance increasingly come to mimic these marketized conditions’20 because they are assumed to engender efficiency and profit (although historically the beneficiaries of this system are relatively few). Under neoliberalism, social welfare is increasingly subjected to cutbacks as service provision is privatized by encouraging ‘people to see themselves as individualized and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own well-being’.21 As a result, those who advocate for redress or social change increasingly articulate their claims through an economic frame that increases the potential for imposition of capitalist ‘solutions’ on those peoples already deeply exploited by that system.22 Moreover, the state interprets grievance through the lens of well-being. For instance, a 2003 document released by the federal government entitled Resolving Aboriginal claims: a practical guide to Canadian experiences states that, ‘together with Aboriginal peoples, the Government of Canada is transforming the approach to indigenous issues from an earlier focus on “rights” and “grievances”; into an integrated approach to quality of life, encompassing economic development, human capital, community infrastructure and governance’.23A focus on mutual wellbeing for Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians delegitimizes grievance and legitimizes the emancipatory capacities of capital. Building on this rationale, the following sections document how under neoliberalism, investment rationale is formed to undermine the possibility for the decolonization of Indigenous– settler relationships.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, leading Decolonial scholars, argue against applying decolonization as a metaphor, that is, using “an approximation of other experiences of oppression [as] a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 3). To decolonize, for Tuck and Yang, unambiguously means to “[bring] about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 21). In their influential essay, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” (2012), Tuck and Yang include among their list of settler colonialists: immigrants, descendants of slaves, refugees, migrant laborers; in short, anyone who arrives with and after the first settler colonialists. However, the communities that make up this list, along with Indigenous populations, constitute, as it is commonly understood, the diversity of contemporary North America. Critical approaches to diversity, the other prominent task of this edited volume, seek to address the uneven distribution of power. But, according to Tuck and Yang, this critical approach to diversity, based on “the promise of integration and civil rights is [itself] predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 7). Critical approaches to diversity seek to disrupt the uneven distribution of power, but do so by “[redistributing] Native land/life as common-wealth,” where decolonization means that “all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 27). In the following, we critically engage with the premises sketched above and ask how to accept the charge of decolonization: unsettle ourselves, unsettle German Studies as practiced in the United States, and, by extension, unsettle the institutions that house it. It means concurrently contributing to two—for many Decolonial scholars—diametrically opposed or rather incommensurable projects: the “decolonizing framework [that] prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” and “human and civil rights social justice projects” (Rowe and Tuck 2017, p. 8). This eventually unworkable dichotomy does not emerge from recourse to a “hierarchy of oppression,” to evoke Audre Lorde, but from diverging paths to liberation and different understandings of migration and its relation to colonialism. Namely, for Indigenous populations, according to Tuck and Yang, oppression would not end even in some utopia in which equality and equity have been unambiguously and irrevocably secured; it can only end with the recovery of Indigenous sovereignty and the coeval termination of settler sovereignty and settler property rights. To decolonize social justice/diversity frameworks, one must commit “to social change with a specific material politics of Indigenous sovereignty, land, and relationships” (Tuhiwai et al. 2019, p. xv). Without such a commitment, the work of decolonization is thus necessarily one of limited collaboration and inevitable antagonisms—of “contingent coalitions” (Rowe and Tuck 2017, p. 8). It demands, in the least, the recognition of how one’s positionality may inform one’s limits in the investment in decolonization. That is, at some point, if not immediately, settler colonialists must divest themselves from futurist visions in which they remain settler colonialists and in which the relation to land continues to be determined via property rights. Equity utopias that figure liberation in terms of equal access to existing resources or via the equitable redistribution of colonial (settler) wealth are incompatible with decolonization. The decolonization of German Studies as it exists in the United States must confront these limits even if it ultimately cannot overcome them. Our cautious entry into this essay is predicated on the weighty recognition that, although, as Sium et al. (2012) write, “there is no escaping complicity within a settler colonial state, especially for those of us who have settled here,” we must nonetheless engage in some form of action and/or resistance to the colonial, oppressive structuring of being (p. iii). But what form can and should decolonial action take from within the very “institution that helped draw up the first blueprints of colonization, both here and abroad? […] Is it possible to decolonize institutions of colonial power (such as the academy, government, etc.), but, further, is it possible to decolonize through them?” (Sium et al. 2012, p. iii). We engage with specific discourses of decolonization in this chapter because they pose an unanswered challenge to decolonization as a diversity framework in German Studies. This is certainly not the only decolonization discourse in Decolonial/Indigenous Studies, but it is one that has not, to our knowledge, been broadly taken up in endeavors to decolonize German Studies. Finally, we ask ourselves what contribution we— two scholars of immigrant background, a former refugee and a person of color, both born outside of the United States, both generally skeptical of border policing, (ethno)nationalisms, and hostility toward migration— can make to this critical conversation.