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The three examples discussed here explore how individuals and institutions perform race and ownership so as to exploit the legal porosity in intellectual property law, race, citizenship, national identity, and personhood. The first example considers how Prince Rogers Nelson, when he changed his name to the Love Symbol, eroded the music industry’s monopoly over the identities and (intellectual) property rights of artists of color. While Prince explicitly confronted histories of anti-Blackness in the United States in many ways, the symbolic significance of his name change and his fight to own the copyright to his songs continues to influence generations of artists across racial identities, notably by encouraging them to own their music.

The second example considers how, in response to yoga piracy, Indians and Indian Americans produced new vernacular that aided in decolonizing intellectual property law. The Indian government, which took up this new vernacular, built the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a digital infrastructure that literally intervenes in the workings of intellectual property law by preventing the ownership of traditional knowledge through online databasing.

In this article, my aim is to consider the use of law as a political strategy of rupture in colonial and post-colonial nation states. The question of whether and how to use law in order to transform and potentially shatter an existing political-legal order is one that continues to plague legal advocates in a variety of places, from Australia, to India, to Canada to Israel/Palestine. For example, the struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights in the context of colonial settler regimes has often produced pyrrhic victories.21 The question of indigenous sovereignty is ultimately quashed, and aboriginal rights are paradoxically recognised as an interest that derives from the prior occupation of the land by aboriginal communities but is at the same time parasitic on underlying Crown sovereignty; an interest that can be justifiably limited in the interests of settlement.22 Thus, the primary and inescapable question remains: how does one utilise the law without re-inscribing the very colonial legal order that one is attempting to break down?23 I argue that this is an inescapable dilemma; as critical race theorists and indigenous scholars have shown, to not avail ourselves of the law in an effort to ameliorate social ills, and to promote and protect the rights of oppressed minorities is to essentially abrogate one’s political responsibilities. Moreover, the reality of political struggle (particularly of the anti-colonial variety) is that it is of a diffuse and varied nature, engaging multiple different tactics in order to achieve its ends. In relation to the first point, a space of opposition is, in the view of Fanon, missing in certain senses, in the colonial context. A space of opposition in which a genuinely mutual struggle between coloniser and colonised can occur is denied by spatial and legal-political strategies of containment and segregation. While these strategies also exhibit great degrees of plasticity26, the control over such mobility remains to a great degree in the hands of the colonial occupier. The legal strategy of rupture creates a space of political opposition in the courtroom that cannot be absorbed or appropriated by the legal order. In Christodoulidis’ view, this lack of co-option is the crux of the strategy of rupture. This strategy of rupture also points to a path that challenges the limits of a politics of recognition, often one of the key legal and political strategies utilised by indigenous and racial minority communities in their struggles for justice. Claims for recognition in a juridical frame inevitably involve a variety of onto-epistemological closures.27 Whether because of the impossible and irreconciliable relation between the need for universal norms and laws and the specificities of the particular claims that come before the law, or because of the need to fit one’s claims within legalpolitical categories that are already intelligible within the legal order, legal recognition has been critiqued, particularly in regards to colonial settler societies, on the basis that it only allows identities, legal claims, ways of being that are always-already proper to the existing juridical order to be recognised by the law. In the Canadian context, for instance, many scholars have elucidated the ways in which the legal doctrine of aboriginal title to land imports AngloAmerican concepts of ownership into the heart of its definition; and moreover, defines aboriginality on the basis of a fixed, static concept of cultural difference. The strategy of rupture elides the violence of recognition by challenging the legitimacy of the colonial legal order itself.

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

The upsurge of intertwining scholarship in this field illuminates the present historical moment where scholars in multiple disciplines are turning to settler colonial studies in search of relevant conceptual tools. The authors in this volume write from different disciplines in exploring topics of decolonization, settler learning and solidarities. What they share in common is their engagement with the analysis of settler colonialism as the coherent logic of the state. This understanding provides a unified theme to scholarship that draws upon other disciplinary lenses. In addition to interdisciplinarity, the papers also share a concern to move from analysis toward action. Scholars such as Macoun and Strakosch,1 and Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel2 have warned against an abdication of responsibility by settler activists because the structural nature of settler colonialism would seem to defy a transformed future. In assessing the strengths and limitations of settler colonial theory, Macoun and Strakosch challenge those who use settler colonial theory (SCT) to realize its transformative opportunities while acting consciously to counter limitations identified by various critics. They caution against a stance of inevitability of settler colonialism that would risk delegitimizing Indigenous resistance, and they worry about re-inscribing settler academics’ political and intellectual authority to the detriment of Indigenous voices. At the same time, they note the contribution of SCT in providing a theoretical language to understand colonialism as a continuing force in the present, including an analysis of how both conservative and progressive settler movements may detract from Indigenous political challenges to the state, thus problematizing settler efforts at reconciliation and decolonization. They identify as one of its strengths the ability of SCT to provide non-Indigenous people with ‘a better account of ourselves’, 3 and to generate new conversations and alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel warn that SCT’s rapid ascendancy in the academy could overshadow Indigenous Studies and the voices of Indigenous peoples. They argue that: without centering Indigenous peoples’ articulations, without deploying a relational approach to settler colonial power, and without paying attention to the conditions and contingencies of settler colonialism, studies of settler colonialism and practices of solidarity run the risk of reifying (and possibly replicating) settler colonial as well as other modes of domination.4 In their view, Indigenous resistance and resurgence must remain central in discussions of changing relationships: Theorists of Indigenous resurgence, such as Taiaiake Alfred and Leanne Simpson, among others, also express the possibility for settler society listening, learning, and acting […] in accordance with and for what is being articulated [by Indigenous people]; Indigenous resurgence is ultimately about reframing the conversation around decolonization in order to re-center and reinvigorate Indigenous nationhood. Macoun and Strakosch, and Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel gesture towards action by settler society to follow the lead of resurgence theorists in transforming settler colonialism, despite the structural, relational and affective challenges of anti-colonial struggle, in order to ‘reinvigorate Indigenous nationhood’. The authors in this volume examine pathways to settler decolonization, analyzing the uneven terrain of settler efforts and experiences through the lenses of SCT, Indigenous scholars and grassroots communities, and specific disciplinary analyses. While SCT has been criticized for its inability to theorize a decolonial future, this volume interrogates what happens when settlers engage with and seek to transform the system. What does such action look like? What challenges, complexities and barriers are faced? What are the stumbling blocks? And what opportunities and possibilities emerge? The articles in this volume all note the need for settlers to transform our/their relations with the land and with Indigenous peoples, while recognizing the structural and psychological challenges of applying these principles in practice. It is one thing to care about the environment, and quite another to reorient one’s lifestyle around sustainable practices and the health of local ecosystems. It is one thing to feel a connection to a place, and another to accept the notion of ‘non-human agency. Likewise, it is easier for settlers to advocate for the return of land to Indigenous peoples ‘over there’ rather than right where settlers and settler states and corporations (claim to) own property.7 Transforming social relations is not just a matter of befriending Indigenous people; it means developing long-term relations of accountability, engaging in meaningful dialogue, and respecting Indigenous laws and jurisdiction. Learning to transform relationships in these ways – and to transform self-understandings and thinking and feeling patterns or ‘settler common sense’ 8 – is an ongoing process; it is not linear, but rather iterative, occurring in what Hiller in this volume calls ‘upward and downward spirals’. Moreover, settlers’ anti-colonial learning (and unlearning) does not simply precede action; it occurs through action, through meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples and with other engaged settlers, and through experimentation with activism of various sorts. The Nehiyawak (Cree) refer to this relational and iterative social justice-focused process as kisāhkīwewin: love in action. Several papers in this volume also address the role of emotions in settler decolonization. While critical self-reflection is essential to this process, and while emotions such as guilt, shame and indignation can help motivate settlers to change their ways and support Indigenous resurgence (as Bacon shows in one of the articles collected here), it is equally important not to treat ‘unsettling the settler within’ 9 as an end in itself; rather than dwelling in discomfort, the point of unsettlement is to be a springboard to action that benefits Indigenous peoples. A related point of tension (or contention) is whether decolonization is in the interests of settlers. Boudreau (in this volume) argues that deep decolonizing solidarities must not be based on self-interest; decolonization for settlers entails sacrifice, or giving up power and privilege. This may be true and, therefore, if it is believed that there is nothing in it for settlers, why would they ever pursue it? Although decolonization may not be in settlers’ short-term economic or political interests, it may fulfill a humanistic, ethical and moral commitment. Moreover, decolonization may be in virtually everyone’s long-term interest, particularly if Indigenous resurgence assists in combatting climate change, ever-growing economic inequality, and other political and social problems. As Tuck and Yang make clear, decolonization is not a metaphor for other social justice projects.10 Nevertheless, settler colonialism does intersect with other systems of oppression, and decolonization would be incomplete without also tackling racism, capitalism and heterosexism. Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous knowledges and place-based relationships may be key to human survival; yet, this only reiterates the question: Where is the place of settlers in discussions of decolonization? What is our/their role? From whence do we/they speak? In ‘Complicated Pathways’, Davis, Hiller, James, Lloyd, Nasca and Taylor note the growing number of educational initiatives organized by NGOs, activist groups, Indigenous Nations and organizations, governments, and educational institutions and businesses, all designed to change participants’ consciousness through curricula, workshops, seminars, webinars, special events, experiential learning and courses. The authors describe the ‘Transforming Relations’ website where more than 200 such initiatives in the Canadian context have been documented. Despite the proliferation of such events, particularly those directed at ‘reconciliation’, many educational initiatives appear to be silent on issues of Indigenous sovereignty, land rights and treaties. The authors worry that despite the current groundswell of expressed desire among many Canadians to change the relationship with Indigenous peoples, the supporting narratives remain limited to small, liberal goals that leave the status quo intact. Chris Hiller’s ‘Tracing the Spirals of Unsettlement’ proposes to unsettle settler pedagogies, taking spatial unsettling as fundamental to disrupting the reproduction of colonial narratives. Framed upon Willie Ermine’s ‘ethical space of engagement’, Hiller’s analysis describes two spirals of learning and unlearning among settler activists. Her research study is grounded in interviews with 22 Euro-Canadians who are committed to supporting Indigenous struggles over land, sovereignty and rights. Hiller learns about their journeys, their critical moments of insight into settler colonial relations, and their complex processes of decolonization which are marked by discrepancies, contradictions and reversions, as individuals grapple with issues of settler identity, implication and responsibility. These are not simple trajectories but complex layered learning pathways, requiring growing understanding of the deep structures of settler colonial society while digging deeply into one’s own privilege even while turning back to seek comfort in more stable points of orientation as one’s complicity in the status quo becomes evident. J.M. Bacon, in ‘A Lot of Catching Up’, explores the terrain of emotions in social justice work in settler colonial contexts. Using a case study of the Winnemem Wintu’s defense of their ancestral waters, Bacon looks at the experiences of non-Indigenous students who came to participate in river blockades. Drawing upon theories of emotion in social movement organizing, the article examines the application of ‘moral shock’ and ‘blame’ as mobilizers of collective identity in the river blockade context. It is suggested that ‘moral shock’ was experienced by the students as they came to realize the large gaps in their knowledge, and the need to acquire basic information related to colonial relations and cultural protocols. ‘Blame’ and ‘demonization’, which often arouse emotions that unite activists in a cause, were not strong mobilizers of common identity because non-Indigenous settlers were themselves implicated in colonialism. Bacon questions the often-repeated admonition in social justice work to leave behind ‘guilt’; rather, ‘Guilt’ is seen ‘guilt’ as an important motivator of mobilization in response to the perceived breaking of moral standards by oneself and colonial society. Bacon suggests a more nuanced analysis of ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ in social activism. Katie Boudreau Morris writes ‘Decolonizing Solidarity’ from a complex location comprising Acadian-Métis, Irish and Lebanese identities. As an anti-colonial feminist and activist, she draws upon the work of Mohanty and other international feminists to contemplate what it means to engage in decolonizing solidarity in the contexts of both Turtle Island (North America) and Palestine/Israel. She argues that settlers must interrogate their own relationships to the lands they occupy, listen to Indigenous peoples’ stories, and act accordingly. Her conclusion is that it is possible to define decolonizing relationships that are not (primarily) constructed around settler selfinterest, which give time for relationality and power relationships, and which accept the discomfort that comes with navigating the conflicting identities that are raised in the settler colonial context. In ‘Imagining Autonomy on Stolen Land’, Adam Lewis speaks directly to the left, radical and anarchist communities in which he has located his own praxis. He notes that despite the strengths of anarchist theory and practice, anarchists need to confront the reality of settler colonialism and their participation in reproducing it. He advocates close attention to the work of Indigenous resurgence theorists such as Leanne Simpson, Taiaiake Alfred and Glen Coulthard who not only challenge settler colonialism and the politics of recognition but also advocate prefigurative practices based on Traditional Indigenous values, leadership and land-based practices. He evokes Alfred’s writing on anarcho-Indigenism as a way of finding affinities and solidarities between Indigenous peoples and anarchists who share a politics grounded in anti-statism, anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. Using the example of Occupy, he demonstrates how anarchist prefigurative practices can replicate settler colonialism, when ignoring the occupation and theft of Indigenous lands as the foundation for settlers’ home base, including that of anarchists. He challenges anarchists to construct a new practice that adopts anti-colonialism and decolonizing as fundamental and that follows the lead of Indigenous resurgence theorists. Liz Carlson’s ‘Anti-Colonial Methodologies’ examines the question of what an anti-colonial methodology would look like in taking seriously the responsibility for settler scholars to support Indigenous resurgence, land recovery and sovereignty. Taking the lead from Indigenous scholars who have written about Indigenous research approaches, and drawing upon critical and feminist methodologies, she outlines a set of research principles that she proposes can be used by settler researchers, while recognizing the limits of knowing by settler scholars. She also identifies opportunities for those situated in the academy to challenge hegemonic practices in the everyday routines of colonial institutions. Using her doctoral research, she offers an example of how anti-colonial research can be conducted with the guidance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous mentors. Carlson advocates for those working in settler colonial studies to practice ‘relational accountability’ and to recognize Indigenous leadership in critiques of colonialism which they have been offering from lived experience and analysis for centuries. Taken together, these articles contend with the messiness of tackling settler colonialism in practice. While some pieces explore theoretical dimensions of SCT, there is more emphasis on understanding how SCT can inform the concrete conditions of, and barriers to, transforming settler consciousness and actions as they arise in different contexts. The convergence of SCT with diverse disciplinary theories and perspectives is evident in the articles. As these words are being written, the manoomin (wild rice) is ripening on the Kawartha Lakes and Mississauga harvesters are gathering and preparing this sacred food for the year ahead. Over the past few years, cottagers on Pigeon Lake have been protesting the growing of manoomin because they say it restricts recreational use of the lake (swimming, boating, fishing) and affects property values.12 Settler expectations come into direct conflict with the Williams Treaty and Treaty 20 Nations who have harvested manoomin in their traditional territories since time immemorial. Struggles over Indigenous sovereignty and land manifest in place-based conflicts. Here, settler colonial theory is a framework for analyzing not only the dynamics of settler colonialism but also decolonization, roles and responsibilities, settler learning, incommensurability, accountability and ethics. At this moment, settler colonial theory’s potential contributions are still becoming known and evaluated. Important conversations are happening about SCT’s relationship with Indigenous Studies and Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous critical theory and resurgence theories. Macoun and Strakosch assert that ‘the fact that settler colonialism struggles to narrate its own ending does not mean it cannot end’. 13 This returns us to the central role that Indigenous leaders, scholars, activists and other grassroots communities must play in visioning how settler allies can respectfully and ethically engage in solidarities that they see as appropriate, in the diverse contingent contexts where they assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. At the same time, settlers cannot expect Indigenous people to teach them everything they need to know and do.14 That is a heavy burden. But settlers can start by showing interest and commitment, supporting Indigenous-led initiatives, and being prepared to take risks and learn from mistakes. The articles in this volume are offered in this spirit.

Even When They Are Dangerous Everywhere land resists and refuses—whales that destroy ships, bees that refuse to work, bombed islands that reconstitute themselves. The land also resists in the form of people; Indigenous peoples’ resistance is the land’s resistance. Indigenous people continue to subvert legal and capitalist technologies as part of that resistance. And technologies and technological beings resist too. Patent law is patently designed to favor corporations, a legal technology whose colonizing functions are particularly evident when considering how Monsanto and other GMO producing giants are patenting seeds and genes they “find” throughout the world. Yet Indigenous communities are fighting this biopiracy by refusing the systems that permit corporations to patent life and that document knowledge for expropriation in the first place, by creating digital libraries of traditional knowledges, and sometimes by subverting patent law to claim rights to their own life worlds and knowledges.[35] Treaties are technologies of colonial coercion and yet also of Indigenous survivance. As Scott Lyon says, an x-mark that signs the treaty “is a sign of consent in a context of coercion. . . . And yet there is always the possibility of slippage, indeterminacy, unforeseen consequences, or unintended results; it is always possible, that is, that an x-mark could result in something good. Why else, we must ask, would someone bother to make it?”[36] Since 1948, the Oneida Indian Nation has pursued restoration of sovereignty over historical reservation lands via a complex set of avenues involving treaty law, U.S. courts, casinos, and excise taxes, resulting in a landmark 13,004 acres of land taken into trust by the Department of the Interior in 2014.[37] Sometimes settlers return land to Indigenous tribes and nations. Hopefully, they/we might do so without conditions. As I write, the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians are getting back 688 acres of coastal lands in California.[38] I am not saying wealthy settlers who return land are decolonizing. I am saying that some colonizing technology has been hotwired; something scyborg is happening. The truth is that any return of land is not just due to the good graces and benevolence of wealthy settlers; it is a scyborg possibility foretold by an x-mark. About Hollywood star Johnny Depp’s purported promise to buy land for Comanche, Sonny Skyhawk, a Sicangu Lakota actor and founder of American Indians in Film and Television, said, “If it’s from the heart, we accept it. If it’s not from the heart, we’ll accept it anyways.”[39] Developed as weapons of surveillance and assassination, drones are hard to imagine as decolonizing instruments; yet these machines we hate may serve a function before we discard them. Originally a wind-powered device similar to the childhood wind toys of its Afghani creator Massoud Hassani, the Mine Kafon drone “can autonomously map, detect, and detonate land mines” and could contribute to demilitarizing mine-filled lands within a generation.[40] Dynamite, which left Alfred Nobel rich and many dead, and which abetted in U.S. westward imperial expansion, blew up the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams and restored the Elwha River.[41] A giant, autonomous artificial coastline could assist the ocean to clean herself of the great Pacific Garbage Patch.[42] Oysters made “plantable” by farming technologies detoxify the Hudson and so become too poisonous to eat, but because of them, the frogs will return.[43] Wind-powered strandbeests—originally devised to restore Dutch beaches—now roam almost autonomous, almost free.[44] Toxic and explosive and wind-willed machine animals, you, scyborg, might read about and feel some odd sense of recognition. Figure out how technologies operate. Use a wrench. Technologies can be disrupted and reorganized—at least for a machine cycle. Rather than thinking of ourselves as just subjects of those technologies, think about how we are the drones, the explosives, the toxified, the operative parts of those technologies—and ideally, how we might operate on ourselves and other technologies and turn these gears into decolonizing operations. If this sounds easy and obvious, then my writing has failed you. Listen: you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction. Attach a pacemaker to the heart of those machines you hate; make it pump for your decolonizing enterprise; let it tick its own countdown. Ask how, and how otherwise, of the colonizing machines. Even when they are dangerous.

The prescription for decolonisation—that is, a normative project committed to the liberation of the colonised and the overturning of colonial relationships of power (Kohn & McBride, 2011: 3)—is indeed one of the most counterhegemonic implications of the settler colonial paradigm as applied to IsraelPalestine, potentially shifting it from a diagnostic frame to a prognostic one which offers a ‘proposed solution to the problem, or at least a plan of attack’ (Benford & Snow, 2000: 616). What, however, does the settler colonial paradigm offer by way of envisioning decolonisation? As Veracini (2007) notes, while settler colonial studies scholars have sought to address the lack of attention paid to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in conventional historiographical accounts of decolonisation (which have mostly focused on settler independence and the loosening of ties to the ‘motherland’), there is nevertheless a ‘narrative deficit’ when it comes to imagining settler decolonisation. While Veracini (2007) relates this deficit to a matter of conceptualisation, it is apparent that the structural perspective of the paradigm in many ways closes down possibilities of imagining the type of social and political transformation to which the notion of decolonisation aspires. In this regard, there is a worrying tendency (if not tautological discrepancy) in settler colonial studies, where the only solution to settler colonialism is decolonisation—which a faithful adherence to the paradigm renders largely unachievable, if not impossible. To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to return to Wolfe’s (2013a: 257) account of settler colonialism as guided by a ‘zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives’. The structuralism of this account has immense power as a means of mapping forms of injustice and indignity as well as strategies of resistance and refusal, and Wolfe is careful to show how transmutations of the logic of elimination are complex, variable, discontinuous and uneven. Yet, in seeking to elucidate the logic of elimination as the overarching historical force guiding settler-native relations there is an operational weakness in the theory, whereby such a logic is simply there, omnipresent and manifest even when (and perhaps especially when) it appears not to be; the settler colonial studies scholar need only read it into a situation or context. It thus hurtles from the past to the present into the future, never to be fully extinguished until the native is, or until history itself ends. There is thus a powerful ontological (if not metaphysical) dimension to Wolfe’s account, where there is such thing as a ‘settler will’ that inherently desires the elimination of the native and the distinction between the settler and native can only ever be categorical, founded as it is on the ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ (2013a: 258). It is here that the differences between earlier settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and the recent settler colonial turn come into clearest view. While Jamal Hilal’s (1976) Marxist account of the conflict, for instance, engaged Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in terms of their relations to the means of production, Wolfe’s account brings its own ontology: the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction becomes that of settler/native, and the class struggle the struggle between settler, who seeks to destroy and replace the native, and native, who can only ever push back. Indeed, if the settler colonial paradigm views history in similar teleological terms to the Marxist framework, it does not offer the same hopeful vision of a liberated future. After all, settler colonialism has only one story to tell—‘either total victory or total failure’ (Veracini, 2007). Veracini’s attempt to disaggregate different forms of settler decolonisation is revealing of the difficulties that come along with this zero-sum perspective. It is significant to note that beyond settler evacuation (which may decolonise territory, he cautions, but not necessarily relationships) the picture he paints is a relatively bleak one. For Veracini (2011: 5), claims for decolonisation from Indigenous peoples in settler societies can take two broad forms: an ‘anticolonial rhetoric expressing a demand for indigenous sovereign independence and self-determination… and an “ultra”-colonial one that seeks a reconstituted partnership with the [settler state] and advocates a return to a relatively more respectful middle ground and “treaty” conditions’. While both, he suggests, are tempting strategies in the struggle for change, though ‘ultimately ineffective against settler colonial structures of domination’ (2011: 5), it is the latter strategy that invites Veracini’s most scathing assessment. As he writes, under settler colonial conditions the independent polity is the settler polity and sanctioning the equal rights of indigenous peoples has historically been used as a powerful weapon in the denial of indigenous entitlement and in the enactment of various forms of coercive assimilation. This decolonisation actually enhances the subjection of indigenous peoples… it is at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental to indigenous peoples in settler societies (2011: 6-7). The ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ plays a particularly ambivalent role in Veracini’s (2011: 6) formulation, where the categorical distinction between settler and native obstructs the ‘possibility of a genuinely decolonised relationship’ (by virtue of its lopsidedness) yet is a necessary political strategy to guard against the absorption of Indigenous people into the settler fold, which would represent settler colonialism’s final victory. The battle here is between a ‘settler colonialism [that] is designed to produce a fundamental discontinuity as its “logic of elimination” runs its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation’ and an anti-colonial struggle that ‘must aim to keep the settler-indigenous relationship going’ (2011: 7). In other words, the categorical distinction produced by the frontier must be maintained in order to struggle against its effects. Given the lack of options presented to Indigenous peoples by Veracini (2014: 315), his conclusion that settler decolonisation demands a ‘radical, post-settler colonial passage’ is perhaps not surprising – although he has ‘no suggestion as to how this may be achieved and [is] pessimistic about its feasibility’. Scholars have long reckoned with the ambivalence of the settler colonial situation, which is simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonising and decolonising (Curthoys, 1999: 288). Given the generally dreadful Fourth World circumstances facing many Indigenous peoples in settler societies, it could be argued that there is good reason for such pessimism. The settler colonial paradigm, in this sense, offers an important caution against celebratory narratives of progress. Wolfe (1994), it must be recalled, wrote the original articulation of his thesis precisely against the idea of ‘historical rupture’ that dominated in Australia post-Mabo, and was thus as much a scholarly intervention as it was a political challenge to the idea of Australia having broken with its colonial past. Nonetheless, the fatalism of the settler colonial paradigm—whereby decolonisation is by and large put beyond the realms of possibility—has seen it come under considerable critique for reifying settler colonialism as a transhistorical meta-structure where colonial relations of domination are inevitable (Macoun & Strakosch, 2013: 435; Snelgrove et al., 2014: 9). Not only does Wolfe’s ontology erase contingency, heterogeneity and (crucially) agency (Merlan, 1997; Rowse, 2014), but its polarised framework effectively ‘puts politics to death’ (Svirsky, 2014: 327). In response to such critiques, Wolfe (2013a: 213) suggests that ‘the repudiation of binarism’ may just represent a ‘settler perspective’. However, as Elizabeth Povinelli (1997: 22) has astutely shown, it is in this regard that the totalising logic of Wolfe’s structure of invasion rests on a disciplinary gesture where ‘any discussion which does not insist on the polarity of the [settler] colonial project’ is assimilationist, worse still, genocidal in effect if not intent. Any attempt to ‘explore the dialogical or hybrid nature of colonial subjectivity’—which would entail working beyond the bounds of absolute polarity—is disciplined as complicit in the settler colonial project itself, leaving ‘the only nonassimilationist position one that adheres strictly and solely to a critique of [settler] state discourse’. This gesture not only disallows the possibility of counter-publics and strategic alliances (even limited ones), but also comes dangerously close to ‘resistance as acquiescence’ insofar as the settler colonial studies scholar may malign the structures set in play by settler colonialism, but only from a safe distance unsullied by the messiness of ambivalences and contradictions of settler and Native subjectivities and relations. Opposition is thus left as our only option, but, as we know from critical anti-colonial and postcolonial scholarship, opposition in itself is not decolonisation.

Rita: Corey, your question is helpful, and Jeff’s response also helps me think through the movement between time-situated and place-based practices of ‘solidarity’ and ways of thinking about these situated practices in terms of an ethos of ‘unsettled solidarities’ that moves across time and space, that is a way of being in the world, a set of ongoing relations. Where I, where we, are never outside of struggle, everyone is ‘structurally implicated’ in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Everyone is differentially structurally implicated, where the ideology of presumed consent underlies settler colonialism. Jeff: I would add that living on another Indigenous nation’s territory also carries an obligation to support those defending their homelands. Cheryl Bryce from Songhees First Nation started the “Community Tool Shed” in 2009 to generate support for the restoration of Lekwungen food systems. The Community Tool Shed in Victoria, British Columbia, is where settlers and Indigenous peoples can come together to rid the land of invasive species, such as Scottish Broom, and to revitalize traditional plants such as kwetlal or camas. Cheryl’s focus for this informal group is on reclaiming traditional place names, educating people about the destructiveness of invasive species, and reinstating Lekwungen food systems. The tool shed meets once per month to pull invasive species on places that have been managed by Cheryl’s family for generations, such as Meegan (aka, Beacon Hill Park), and Sitchamalth (Willows Beach). To a ‘resident’ of Lekwungen homelands, the above-mentioned places are public lands. This demonstrates the urgency of reclaiming Indigenous place names in tandem with the restoration of Indigenous foodscapes and landscapes. The May 22, 2013 reclamation of the name PKOLS (formerly known as Mount Douglas) is one of many examples where communities can come together to demand representation on their own terms. These are everyday acts of resurgence that highlight the terrain of Indigenous struggles to restore and reconnect a place-based existence. Corey: And both examples you highlighted Jeff do not foreclose a wide-range of participants. The PKOLS reclamation led by the W̱ SÁNEĆ peoples, involved participation from Indigenous peoples across Vancouver Island and across Turtle Island, it involved the university through the Indigenous Governance program, and it involved local, non-Indigenous, activist groups, most notably Social Coast. The Community Tool Shed, a project that I’ve also been involved in for the past two years, does something similar. What I find really interesting in this work is that settlers and Indigenous peoples challenge our environmentally degraded and colonial present simultaneously. Yet, there is still attention paid to the different roles and responsibilities in this work. For instance, non-Lekwungen people in removing invasive species, and Lekwungen people in managing these lands and in harvesting plants such as camas. So unlike other stewardship groups around Victoria, those participating are not seeking to depoliticize this work, nor do they argue that this work erases their complicity or their potential complicity in colonization. In supporting Cheryl’s assertion of her roles and responsibilities, they aren’t seeking to restore land in order to claim it for themselves. They aren’t Locke redux. And, given the nature and extent of Broom here – you find it pretty much everywhere around Southern Vancouver Island, something like 18,000 seeds are produced in a single plant, and those seeds can lie dormant for up to thirty years – pulling broom one time really does not mean much. So there is a demand for long- term work, which itself can help build accountability through such place-based relationships. And since land is the irreducible element of settler colonialism, and that environmental degradation has often proceeded through and in support of settler colonialism, it provides an example of non-Indigenous practices with the land that aren’t necessarily colonial. Now I’m not saying that this is an example of decolonization or that those involved are somehow not settlers. After all, decolonization and the transformation of settlers requires subjective and objective transformations. Rather it’s a practice that does not reify colonization, and thus challenges settler colonial studies construction of settler colonialism as inevitable and transhistorical.

Over the past 12 months, Native American politicians, artists and academics have made uncommon gains. Indeed, Native American women helped to make 2018 the Year of the Woman. In November, New Mexican and Kansan voters elected Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) to Congress, while voters in Minnesota elected Peggy Flanagan (Ojibwe) their lieutenant governor. In October, the sociologist Rebecca Sandefur (Chickasaw) and the poet Natalie Diaz (Mojave) won MacArthur Foundation Awards, while throughout the spring and summer, the playwrights Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), Larissa FastHorse (Lakota) and DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) had historic openings at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Ore., and Portland Center Stage, respectively. From the cover of American Theater magazine in April to CNN on election night, the work of these eight dynamic Native women garnered national acclaim. Such achievements represent more than added texture to the mosaic of modern America. They underscore the rising power of American Indians over the past two generations. During an era known as “Self-Determination,” Indian tribes and their citizens have changed not only their particular nations but also the larger nation around them. Though still poorly understood, this era emerged from urban and reservation activism in the 1960s and ’70s, when community leaders, students and veterans, among others, challenged onerous policies that had aimed to assimilate tribal communities. The Self-Determination Era has now grown in prodigious ways and yielded countless examples of achievement across Native North America, including the elections of Haaland and Davids as the first American Indian women ever elected to Congress. “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,” by David Treuer (Ojibwe), examines these recent generations of American Indian history. Through memoir, interviews and extensive reading, Treuer counters the familiar narratives of invisibility that have so readily frozen America’s indigenous peoples. Interweaving stories from family members, the voices of policymakers and assessments of contemporary youth culture, the book introduces alternative visions of American history. The result is an informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait of “Indian survival, resilience, adaptability, pride and place in modern life.” Rarely has a single volume in Native American history attempted such comprehensiveness. A noted novelist, Treuer takes his title from the celebrated work “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown. Published in 1970 at the height of the activist movements, Brown’s reassessment of the 19th-century wars between Indians and the federal government resonated with a generation of Americans. Achieving its narrative crescendo with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, when the Seventh Cavalry was said to have exacted revenge for Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn, Brown’s text fueled growing outrage against injustices perpetuated by the federal government. It was a history that reached beyond its subject and helped to define an era. It has remained in print ever since. To many, Brown’s history inverted accounts of the American West. It substituted Euro-American quests for frontier freedom with those of American Indians “who already had it.” The problem was that in place of Indian vilification Brown offered victimization. Despite their nobility and fortitude, he suggested, Indians were still defeated. In his telling, Native history became a slow, inexorable decline toward disappearance. Twentieth-century “poverty, hopelessness and squalor,” he wrote, were the outcomes for peoples who had lost and who remained lost. White Americans have long defined the past through narratives of frontier freedoms. Recently, however, historians have moved away from such self-justifying accounts, and a growing field has made the experiences of indigenous displacement, survival and resurgence a new pathway for understanding the nation’s history. Celebratory accounts of European settlement and expansion have increasingly passed into an antiquarian realm, succeeded by studies of settler colonialism that approach the past more comparatively as well as more cautiously. Treuer adeptly synthesizes these recent studies and fashions them with personal, familial and biographic vignettes. He works hard to connect the past with those who live with its ongoing legacies. An extended account of his cousin’s history of reservation cage-fighting on their home at Leech Lake, Minn., for example, effectively introduces Part 3 of the book, “Fighting Life: 1914-1945,” which chronicles the astonishing rates of Indian service in World Wars I and II. Here, Treuer recalls heroes less familiar than the Indians of traditional histories. Joseph Oklahombi of the Choctaw Nation received both the American Silver Star and the French Croix de Guerre during World War I for capturing a German machine-gun nest and “killing 79 before taking another 171 captive.” He was, however, never “recommended for the Medal of Honor” — which, as Treuer notes cuttingly, had been awarded to “20 of the troopers who opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee.” Even before the United States joined the war in 1917, some Indian men had migrated into Canada and joined other Native Americans, like Francis Pegahmagabow (Ojibwe) from Wasauksing First Nation, whose service at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele included “378 confirmed kills and the capture of 300 Germans.” These achievements made him “the most decorated soldier (and certainly the most effective) in the Canadian Army.” The portraits of such early-20th-century individuals follow Treuer’s survey of colonial and 19th-century history, where regional overviews of Native North America are combined with the complex, multi-imperial histories that forged colonial America and the young Republic. Readers will find familiar analyses of the unrelenting, violent cupidity of European explorers and, at times, subtle suggestions about the equally relentless capacity of Indian communities adapting within the maelstrom of early America. Through the book’s second half, recounting developments since World War II, Treuer’s counternarrative to Brown takes its fullest form. In particular, his detailed assessments of what he calls “becoming Indian” highlight the resiliency and dynamism of contemporary tribal communities. Interrelated processes rooted in family and culture, he suggests, undergird the continuing sovereignty of modern Indian tribes. Such processes, he shows, are in fact ubiquitous. They are also deeply personal. For instance, as he concludes about his mother’s adjuration to maintain his family’s methods of ricing, hunting, sugaring and berry harvesting, “sovereignty isn’t only a legal attitude or a political reality.” Sovereignty is lived. It is inhabited, performed and enacted, often on a daily basis. It can also become as empowering as it is cherished: “To believe in sovereignty,” Treuer writes, “to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: It is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously.” As the political theorist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) similarly suggests, culturally specific, place-based relationships root Native peoples not only with their homelands but also with ethical obligations and a moral worldview that he terms “grounded normativity.” Family, relationships and place-based sovereignty are a major feature of contemporary Native America, whose collective “heartbeat” has grown stronger throughout the Self-Determination Era. The legacies of conquest, however, continue, and Indian communities still endure beleaguering disparities. They also continue to confront legal and political challenges, as well as threats of violence. Treuer writes that in recent years the United States Supreme Court has been “shaped by the questions of community and obligation between the government and several Indian nations.” But he might have noted as well that since 1978 the court has fashioned a “common law colonialism” that chips away at the ability of tribal courts to enforce criminal and civil laws against non-Indians, while environmental degradation and the extraction of resources plague Indian communities disproportionately. Increasingly, colonial battles have moved from Wounded Knee to Congress, where Native communities have, at times, been victorious. “In 2013, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),” Treuer writes, “was reauthorized and significantly revised. Among the new provisions was the empowerment of tribal courts to charge and prosecute non-Natives who raped or assaulted Native women on Native land.” Such statutory reforms offer tribal communities opportunities to reform misguided court rulings, and political advocacy has become an effective mechanism for protecting community members, enforcing environmental regulations and further institutionalizing sovereign authority within tribal communities. Indeed, working with Congress has become a common feature of contemporary American Indian politics. Treuer speaks of “a slew of laws” passed in the 1990s and 2000s that have empowered Native peoples. Threats to tribal sovereignty, however, loom. Shortly after the VAWA reauthorization, Dollar General Corporation took a case to the Supreme Court contesting tribal authority over civil affairs. In 2016 it nearly won with a court that divided 4 to 4. Legal challenges like this one have become among the 21st century’s primary landscapes of confrontation. Ultimately, Treuer’s powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation’s past. There is an urgency to fashion new national narratives. Treuer’s suggestion, for example, that Indian peoples have been infected by colonialism with a disease “of powerlessness … more potent than most people imagine” could be extended to include the subordination experienced by other gendered, racialized and historically disempowered communities. This disease also has the potential to spread even further, because it cannot simply be up to America’s indigenous people to ward it off. As Treuer explains, “This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves.” C---Rejecting the state and emphasizing structure is a pessimism trap that stifles indigenous agency and activism. Sheryl Lightfoot 20, associate professor in Indigenous Studies at University of British Columbia, “The Pessimism Traps of Indigenous Resurgence,” Chapter 10 in Pessimism in International Relations, pp 162-170, , pacc Pessimism Trap 2: The State is Unified, Deliberate and Unchanging in Its Desire to Dispossess Indigenous Peoples and Gain Unfettered Access to Indigenous Lands and Resources In other words, colonialism by settler states is a constant, not a variable, in both outcome and intent. Further, the state is not only intentionally colonial, but it is also unified in its desire to co-opt Indigenous peoples as a method and means of control. In 2005's Wasase, Alfred presents the state as unitary, intentional and unchanging in its desire to colonise and oppress Indigenous peoples noting, 'I think that the only thing that has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have lost heart'.22 Referring to current state policies as a 'self-termination movement', Alfred states, 'It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our deep attachments to land'.23 Alfred's Peace, Power, Righteousness (2009) also argues that the state is deliberate and unchanging, stating quite plainly that 'it is still the objective of the Canadian and US governments to remove Indians, or, failing that, to prevent them from benefitting, from their ancestral territories'.24 Contemporary states do this, he argues, not through outright violent control but 'by insidiously promoting a form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal mainstream'.25 According to Alfred, the state 'relegates indigenous peoples' rights to the past, and constrains the development of their societies by allowing only those activities that support its own necessary illusion: that indigenous peoples today do not present a serious challenge to its legitimacy'.26 Linking back to the aim of co-option, Alfred argues that while the state's desire to control Indigenous peoples and lands has never changed, the techniques for doing so have become subtler over time. 'Recognizing the power of the indigenous challenge and unable to deny it a voice', due to successful Indigenous resistance over the years, 'the state has (now) attempted to pull indigenous people closer to it'.27 According to Alfred, the state has outwitted Indigenous leaders and 'encouraged them to reframe and moderate their nationhood demands to accept the fait accompli of colonization, (and) to collaborate in the development of a "solution" that does not challenge the fundamental imperial lie'.28 In a similar vein, Coulthard's central argument is centred on his understanding of the dual structure of colonialism. Drawing directly from Fanon, Coulthard finds that colonialism relies on both objective and subjective elements. The objective components involve domination through the political, economic and legal structures of the colonial state. The subjective elements of colonialism involve the creation of 'colonized subjects', including a process of internalisation by which colonised subjects come to not only accept the limited forms of 'misrecog-nition' granted through the state but can even come to identify with it.29 Through this dual structure, colonial power now works through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, actively shaping their perspectives in line with state discourses, rather than merely excluding them, as in years past. Therefore, any attempt to seek 'the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority'.30 Concerning the state in relation to Indigenous peoples on the international level, Corntassel argues that states and global organisations, for years, have been consistently framing Indigenous peoples' self-determination claims in ways that 'jeopardize the futures of indigenous communities'.31 He claims that states first compartmentalise Indigenous self-determination by separating lands and resources from political and legal recognition of a limited autonomy. Second, he notes, states sometimes deny the existence of Indigenous peoples living within their borders. Thirdly, a political and legal entitlement framing by states deem-phasises other responsibilities. Finally, he claims that states, through the rights discourse, limit the frameworks through which Indigenous peoples can seek self-determination. Like Alfred and Coulthard, Corntassel has concluded that states are deliberate and never changing in their behaviour. With this move, Corntassel limits and actually demeans Indigenous agency, overlooking the reality that Indigenous organisations themselves chose the human rights framework and rights discourse as a target sphere of action precisely because, as was evident in earlier struggles like slavery, civil rights or women's rights, these were tools available to them that had a proven track record of opening up new possibilities and shifting previous state positions and behaviour. Indigenous advocates also cleverly realised, by the 1970s, that the anti-discrimination and decolonisation frames could be used together against states. States did, in no way, nefariously impose a rights framework on Indigenous peoples. Rather, Indigenous organisations and savvy Indigenous political actors deliberately chose to frame their self-determination struggles within the human rights framework in order to bring states into a double bind where they could not credibly claim to adhere to human rights and claim that they uphold equality while simultaneously denying Indigenous peoples' human rights and leaving them with a diminished and unequal right of self-determination. But, because he is caught in the pessimism trap of seeing the state only as unified, deliberate and unchanging, Corntassel overlooks and diminishes the clear story of Indigenous agency and the potential for positive change in advancing self-determination in a multitude of ways. Pessimism Trap 3: Engagement with the Settler State is Futile, if Not Counter-Productive Since the state always intends to maintain, if not expand, colonial control, and is seeking to co-opt as many Indigenous peoples as possible in order to maintain or expand its dispossession and control, it is therefore futile, at best, and actually dangerous to Indigenous existence to engage with the state. Furthermore, all patterns of engagement will lead to co-optation as the state is cunning and unrelenting in its desire to co-opt Indigenous leaders, academics and professionals in order to gain or maintain control of Indigenous peoples. Alfred argues, in both his 2005 and 2009 books, that any Indigenous engagement with the state, including agreements and negotiations, is not only futile but fundamentally dangerous, as such pathways do not directly challenge the existing colonial structure and 'to argue on behalf of indigenous nationhood within the dominant Western paradigm is self-defeating'.32 Alfred states that a 'notion of nationhood or self-government rooted in state institutions and framed within the context of state sovereignty can never satisfy the imperatives of Native American political traditions'33 because the possibility for a true expression of Indigenous self-determination is 'precluded by the state's insistence on dominion and its exclusionary notion of sovereignty'.34 Worst of all, according to Alfred, when Indigenous communities frame their struggles in terms of asserting Aboriginal rights and title, but do so within a state framework, rather than resisting the state itself, it 'represents the culmination of white society's efforts to assimilate indigenous peoples'.35 Because it is impossible to advance Indigenous self-determination through any sort of engagement with the state, Coulthard also advocates for an Indigenous resurgence paradigm that follows both his mentor Taiaiake Alfred but also Anishinaabe feminist theorist Leanne Simpson.36 As Coulthard writes, 'both Alfred and Simpson start from a position that calls on Indigenous peoples and communities to "turn away" from the assimilative reformism of the liberal recognition approach and to instead build our national liberation efforts on the revitalization of "traditional" political values and practices'.37 Drawing upon the prescriptive approach of these theorists, Coulthard proposes, in his concluding chapter, five theses from his analysis that are intended to build and solidify Indigenous resurgence into the future: 1. On the necessity of direct action, meaning that physical forms of Indigenous resistance, like protest and blockades, are very important not only as a reaction to the state but also as a means of protecting the lands that are central to Indigenous peoples' existence; 2. Capitalism, No More!, meaning the rejection of capitalist forms of economic development in Indigenous communities in favour of land-based Indigenous political-economic alternative approaches; 3. Dispossession and Indigenous Sovereignty in the City, meaning the need for Indigenous resurgence movements 'to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples' experiences in both urban and land-based settings'38; 4. Gender Justice and Decolonisation, meaning that decolonisation must also include a shift away from patriarchy and an embrace of gender relations that are non-violent and reflective of the centrality of women in traditional forms of Indigenous governance and society; and 5. Beyond the Nation-State. While Coulthard denies that he advocates complete rejection of engagement with the state's political and legal system, he does assert that 'our efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed, but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political configurations of power that we initially sought.to challenge'.39 He therefore advocates expressly for 'critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution' in a 'resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non-exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions'.40 Corntassel also demonstrates the third pessimism trap, that all engagement with the state is ultimately futile. For the most part, however, Corntassel's observation is that the UN system operates like a reverse Keck and Sikkink 'boomerang model' and 'channels the energies of transnational Indigenous networks into the institutional fiefdoms of member countries', by which an 'illusion of inclusion' is created.41 He argues that, in order to be included or their views listened to, Indigenous delegates at the UN must mimic the strategies, language, norms and modes of behaviour of member states and international institutions. Corntassel finds that 'what results is a cadre of professionalized Indigenous delegates who demonstrate more allegiance to the UN system than to their own communities'.42 In his final analysis, he charges that the co-optation of international Indigenous political actors is highly 'effective in challenging the unity of the global Indigenous rights movement and hindering genuine dialogue regarding Indigenous self-determination and justice'.43 Finding that states deliberately co-opt and provide 'illusions of inclusion' to Indigenous political actors in UN settings, Corntassel comes to the same conclusion as Alfred concerning the futility of engagement, arguing that because transnational Indigenous networks are 'channeled' and 'blunted' by colonial state actors, 'it is a critical time for Indigenous peoples to rethink their approaches to bringing Indigenous rights concerns to global forums'.44 Imagining a Post-Colonial Future: Pessimistic 'Resurgence' Versus the Optimism and Tenacity of Indigenous Movements on the Ground All of these writers advocate Indigenous resurgence, through a combination of rejecting the current reconciliation politics of settler colonial states, coupled with a return to land-based Indigenous expressions of governance as the only viable, 'authentic' and legitimate path to a better future for Indigenous peoples, which they refer to as decolonisation. While inherently critical in their orientation, these three approaches do make some positive and productive contributions to Indigenous movements. They help shed light on the various and subtle ways that Indigenous leaders and communities can become co-opted into a colonial system. They help us to hold leadership accountable. They also help us keep a strong focus on our traditional, cultural and spiritual values as well as our traditional forms of governance which then also helps us imagine future possibilities. As I have pointed out here, however, all three theorists are also caught in the same three pessimism traps: authenticity versus co-option; a vision of the state as unified, deliberate and never changing in its desire to colonise and control; and a view of engagement with the state as futile, if not dangerous, to Indigenous sovereignty and existence. When combined, these three pessimism traps aim to inhibit Indigenous peoples' engagement with the state in any process that could potentially re-imagine and re-formulate their current relationship into one that could be transformative and post-colonial, as envisioned by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The pessimism traps together work to foreclose any possibility that there could be credible openings of opportunity to negotiate a fairer and just relationship of co-existence with even the most progressive state government. This pessimistic approach is not innocuous. By overemphasising structure and granting the state an enormous degree of agency as a unitary actor, this pessimistic approach does a remarkable disservice to Indigenous resistance movements by proscribing, from academia, an extremely narrow view of what Indigenous self-determination can and should mean in practice. By overlooking and/or discounting Indigenous agency and not even considering the possibility that Indigenous peoples could themselves be calculating, strategic political actors in their own right, and vis-a-vis states, the pessimistic lens of the resurgence school unnecessarily, unproductively and unjustly limits the field of possibility for Indigenous peoples' decision-making, thus actually countering and inhibiting expressions of Indigenous self-determination. By condemning—writ large—all Indigenous peoples and organisations that wish to seek peaceful co-existence with the state, negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with the state, and/or who have advocated on the international level for a set of standards that can provide a positive guiding framework for Indigenous-state relations, the pessimistic lens of resurgence forecloses much potential for new and improved relations, in any form, and is very likely to lead to deeper conflicts between states and Indigenous peoples, and potentially, even violent action, which Fanon indicated was the necessary outcome. The pessimism traps of the resurgence school are therefore, likely self-defeating for all but the most remote and isolated Indigenous communities. Further, this approach is quite out of step with the actions and vision of many Indigenous resistance movements on the ground who have been working for decades to advance Indigenous self-determination, both domestically and globally, in ways that transform the colonial state into something more just and may eventually present creative alternatives to the Westphalian state form in ways that could respect and accommodate Indigenous nations. Rather, it aims to shame and blame those who wish to explore creative and innovative post-colonial resolutions to the colonial condition. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Declaration or UN Declaration) was adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 after 25 years of development. The Declaration is ground-breaking, given the key leadership roles Indigenous peoples played in negotiating and achieving this agreement.45 Additionally, for the first time in UN history, the rights holders, Indigenous peoples, worked with states to develop an instrument that would serve to promote, protect and affirm Indigenous rights, both globally and in individual domestic contexts.46 Many Indigenous organisations and movements, from dozens of countries around the world, were involved in drafting and negotiating the UN Declaration and are now advocating for its full implementation, both internationally and in domestic and regional contexts. In Canada, some of the key organisational players—the Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee), the Assembly of First Nations, and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, or their predecessor organisations—were involved in the drafting and lengthy negotiations of the UN Declaration during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, organisations like the American Indian Law Alliance and the Native American Rights Fund have been involved as well as the Navajo Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who represent themselves as Indigenous peoples' governing institutions. From Scandinavia, the Saami Council and the Sami Parliaments all play a key role in advancing Indigenous rights. In Latin America, organisations like the Confederation de Nationalidades Indfgenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Consejo Indio de Sud America (CISA) advocate for implementation of the UN Declaration. The three, major transnational Indigenous organisations— the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the International Indian Treaty Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Council—were all key members of the drafting and negotiating team for the UN Declaration, and the latter two, which are still in existence, continue their strong advocacy for its full implementation. Implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires fundamental and significant change, on both the international and domestic levels. Because implementation of Indigenous rights essentially calls for a complete and fundamental restructuring of Indigenous-state relationships, it expects states to enact and implement a significant body of legal, constitutional, legislative and policy changes that can accommodate such things as Indigenous land rights, free, prior and informed consent, redress and a variety of self-government, autonomy and other such arrangements. States are not going to implement this multifaceted and complex set of changes on their own, however. They will require significant political and moral pressure to hold them accountable to the rhetorical commitments they have made to support this level of change. They will also require ongoing conversation and negotiation with Indigenous peoples along the way, lest the process becomes problematically one-sided. Such processes ultimately require sustained political will, commitment and engagement over the long term, to reach the end result of radical systemic change and Indigenous state relationships grounded in mutual respect, co-existence and reciprocity. This type of fundamental change requires creative thinking, careful diplomacy, tenacity, and above all, optimistic vision, on the part of Indigenous peoples. The pessimistic approaches of the resurgence school are ultimately of little use in these efforts, other than as a cautionary tale against state power, of which the organisational players are already keenly aware. Further, by dismissing and discouraging all efforts at engagement with states, and especially with the blanket accusations that all who engage in such efforts are 'co-opted' and not 'authentically' Indigenous, the resurgence school actually creates unnecessary negative feelings and divisions amongst Indigenous movements who should be pooling limited resources and working together towards better futures.

Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars, Wolfe described the invasion of indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument was that settler colonialism — a form of colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands — requires the elimination of Native people and societies to access and occupy their land. As Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged out of the ongoing “History Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of Aborigines should be considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights, reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to win the History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus from determining the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and around the world. Settler colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires, colonies, states, and territories of ongoing settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how do we explain the survival, resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the global emergence of policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various forms? Are these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing Rock? Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys over Indians — a reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us demands more. Explaining Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser, the Cowboy is a winner. At Standing Rock, generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put it in the Guardian, the Standing Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a moment when the Left is struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as both a surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful movements of late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various voices have risen to offer answers. Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial coalition united against neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the world a template for resistance,” Erdrich concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective explanations for the Standing Rock victory are insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not explain what made this movement and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and episodic victory, these writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods, social welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over these same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At the same time workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous rights. Credit for these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous movements that unswervingly pushed for similar goals across decades and even centuries: return of indigenous lands, restoration of indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous peoples. From the time their lands were seized in the nineteenth century and even before, indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal, regional, and national coalitions and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands taken from them to recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive governments determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the laboring class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. In moments of global political and economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the 1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of 1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s, termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further devastated indigenous communities. Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced from their homelands and dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were subjected to sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called “Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and restored a measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the Red Power movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to adopt policies based on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori Renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won similar gains. These movements often found unlikely allies in neoconservatives, neoliberals, and their predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-determination. He outlined his commitment to the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential inherent in the restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a facade to restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming, Alaska Native Corporations, corporate iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous people have coopted conservative forces as agents of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while other Left and progressive movements gained little and often lost ground, indigenous people moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their interests. Self-determination is now the established framework for indigenous policy in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the dispossession, marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable victories. At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have been forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a prior age they would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not anticipate that indigenous people would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to common sense, could never win. The future that is now our present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for indigenous people precisely because they had been underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people emerge as cunning, courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto their lands and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by simultaneously pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting concessions bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver devastating blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism, which threaten the future of indigenous communities, lands, and waters and all who share these with them. This dynamic revealed itself most vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in 2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Help us stop this pipeline. Stick true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a moving message to the president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar dynamic is unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in the forces aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral suasion. They also identified pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable target. Trenches cannot be dug where people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians, controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives and their supporters are pushing investors to divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a massive banner at an NFL game, even as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve Dakota Access, divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL, delivering a crippling blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be completed is to again underestimate the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled old scores. They danced inside and outside the lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when and where the networks and infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and global systems. It shows that movements must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take decades to achieve. Politics is a long game. Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that effective resistance is strategic. And strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle and cunning forms of persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so must out-strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other indigenous struggles as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and thinking about indigenous issues alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark times lie ahead for the first people of this land and all who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor, has threatened to approve the pipeline and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation, devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination” policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is turning. In an unforeseen and previously unimaginable twist, it is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their right hand, they clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many chapters is the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience against capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.

Any critique is a false-choice that doesn’t recognize the complexity of indigenous politics. Negotiating the use of the USFG is a key element in indigenous activism. Their colonialism impacts don’t link.

Pessimism Trap 2: The State is Unified, Deliberate and Unchanging in Its Desire to Dispossess Indigenous Peoples and Gain Unfettered Access to Indigenous Lands and Resources

In other words, colonialism by settler states is a constant, not a variable, in both outcome and intent. Further, the state is not only intentionally colonial, but it is also unified in its desire to co-opt Indigenous peoples as a method and means of control.

(Billy-Ray, Driftpile Cree Nation, Humanities Division, University of Oxford (2017): Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste of non-sovereignty, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2017.1279830, JKS)

The main argument of this paper is that the feeling of indigeneity is the miserable feeling of not properly being of this world, and that a disease like diabetes mellitus is a key manifestation of this sort of exhausted existence. To do this, I pursue the secondary claims that indigeneity is a zone of biological struggle and that the reserve is something of a non-place calibrated by affects I want to group under the sign of misery. Yes, misery is a bad word. Harsh, even. But I think it is big enough to conceptualize the cramped con- ditions under which life is haphazardly improvised on the reserve. Misery wears you down, effecting both a corporeal fragility and an intellectual fatigue that double as sociality’s background noise. I am recruiting misery here because it does not rest on the event- ful. Instead, it blends into ordinary time. It is possible to make joy or to feel enlivened within a miserable context. But, misery circumscribes the body’s potentialities. If misery is a part of slow death’s arsenal, if it hangs ‘in the air like a rumor’, then there is no easy way out. Existence is what taxes.7 If the reserve is a geography of misery, then it is where being in life feels like falling out of it. There, negative affect bubbles just below a collective ‘threshold of awareness’, but nonetheless fills out a confined area, mutating over time into the bodies that people it. Misery flattens subjectivity and makes us submit to its tempos, operating here as both a pesky obstacle to radical worldings and as an affective atmosphere that ‘hover[s] around daily practices of survival’.9 Unlike the cruel optimist about which Lauren Berlant writes,10 the band member is not oblivious to the cruelties of her object attach- ments. She knows or is repeatedly told they are damaging, but cannot easily forge new ones, if only because the reserve absents the possibility of making life unhinged by the rote of premature death. She is stuck in a rut that was dug in the name of a colonial ethos bent on disappearing Indians from the future, a rut whose chronic episodes of bio- political tragedy are somehow still bearable by those who endure them. The goal is not to be better at life, but simply to keep at it, even if ‘it’ taxes and eschews happiness without becoming too conspicuous. The reserve is thus where we should go to think about what happens when surplus populations get stowed away from the ‘what’ of what makes life worth living, if we describe ‘life’ as a mix of reckless capitalist worldings and racist histories of uneven precarity and safety. Here, I want to ask the tricky question: might biosocial trauma partly make up indigeneity’s racial terrain? For me, the biosocial is where biology’s politics are thinkable, where bodily production and statecraft meet, where sickness coheres as a racialized symptom of a world that is not good for most of us. The biosocial is where disease’s raciality takes shape. As I see them, indigeneity and sickness are co-constitutive categories in a day and age where health is the biopolitical measure of a subject’s ability to adjust to structural pressures endemic to the affective life of setter colonialism. This is thus also a story about the politics of interpretation, about how we take stock of the horrors of Indigenous embodiment and how we might do it differently. If indigeneity is where the fantasy of self-sovereignty is especially weak (none of us are self-sovereign), then colonial publics hone in on and amplify this weakness to show that the world is not ours to freely inhabit. Again, in what follows, I take diabetes mellitus as a case study in the quiet forms of non-sovereignty that proliferate on the reserve, a place where living, dying, and failed flourishing always hang in the balance.11 Dying and misery are affective bedfellows. ‘Dying’ is an adjective used to describe a noun ‘on the point of death’. To be ‘on the point of death’ is to exhibit a mode of being in the world that leaves loose ends untied. This is to say (1) that death’s origin story amasses small and big culprits as time passes such that it becomes laborious to track its long political history. Scapegoats like genes, for example, dilute the recent past’s lethal ecologies. And (2) that there is an indeterminacy with which subjects and objects die: slowly or quickly, suspiciously or predictably – or a cacophonous mix of all of these. There is always something left to be said at the funeral. One of the conditions of Indigenous life today is manslaughter hidden under the ruse of botched ways of populating the world. ‘Dying’ is a present participle too: it describes the affective energies of an inchoate hap- pening, or time’s rupture between life as we knew it and death. It is a process of becoming- liminal that is phenomenologically promiscuous. Its affects range from shock to agony to a kind of cold sobriety. Death’s grammar is telling: to die is to have been dying, and ‘has been’ takes a subject and the ‘of’ or the ‘from’ of ‘dying’ piece together a causal relation that looks like a crime scene. Is dying worth zeroing in on if it could be said that we are all dying, that to be human or to be in life is in fact to be dying? Of course, though, death is not fairly apportioned when empire’s worlds are wrangled together by the unli- vability of toxic pockets of minoritarian life. And, dying unevenly stands in for ordinary life’s sociability in a big world whose public feelings circulate in the build up before and in the aftermath of racial crisis. Perhaps dying is the racialized state of not properly ‘having’ or ‘being in’ a body.12 Perhaps it is where the advance of life eventually gets quasi-melodramatic via a biopolitical drive to palliate racial surplus until an assailant (the state) gets acquitted by time’s shoddy memory work and all you are left with is a body beside itself. The reserve, however, is a site of augured disappearance propped up in the wake of insidiously lawful world-breaking events,13 ones whose delayed traumas fester beneath the skin. For Donna Haraway, the Anthropocene – the current geological era in which the social is animated by human-made ecological catastrophe and the anxieties produced by it – pressures us to strategize about what she calls ‘the arts of living on a damaged planet’.14 Indigenous worlds, however, have been sutured by this sort of apocalypticism for quite some time now.15 The arts of living on a damaged reserve have little do with building pleasurable collectivities, as Haraway sees it globally. Rather, we have to figure out how to ward off an impoverished social life that our cells know is coming. What does it mean to politically commit to a place that wears you down in order to maintain an allegiance to indigeneity’s visible cultural forms? Is this all some of us have left? Here is the historical aporia: in a twenty-first-century Canada manned by a liberal prime minister dedicated to politically diluted forms of reconciliation, Indigenous peoples are nonetheless still feeling the affective wrath of the long-twentieth century’s colonial state- craft.16 Justin Trudeau’s is a national culture of sentiment that buries his and previous Canadas’ complicities in decades-long biological warfare against Indigenous life. Speaking to an audience of residential school survivors during the launch of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in December 2015, Trudeau said: To the former Indian residential school students who came forward and shared your painful stories, I say: thank you for your extraordinary bravery and for your willingness to help Canadians understand what happened to you ... The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long. The burden is properly ours as a government, and as a country ... This is a time of real and positive change.17 Note how Trudeau’s authoritative speech acts fail also to be performative, if performative speech aims to bring about that which it names.18 His tears are epistemological hallucino- gens,19 luring us into an era of settler governance he vows is attuned to Indigenous grie- vances, one that pledges to stop hurting us. That is, he lauded Indigenous elders for opening themselves up to a nation-state that broke open their worlds, assuring them that the past’s injustices would not live again in the present. Alas, bad feelings do not go away because a head of state asks them to, especially if the conditions under which they germinate are left intact. The affect of the now and the near future is sickness, and this is a structural diagnosis. The reserve, then, is where life is lived at the edge of the world, a bio-necropolitical gulag of sorts where slow death stunts indigeneity’s future-bearing potentiality. Put differently, it is an incubator of deadened life, where the plasticity of the life-death binary is worked up so as to harvest bodies that are stripped of vitality and sensation. For Jasbir Puar, the ‘bio-necro collaboration’ is where the sovereign thirst for blood and the manage- ment of biological life operate harmoniously – an addendum to Foucault’s biopower, which Puar argues overlooks ‘biopower’s direct activity in death’ in a so-called age of terror.20 As Scott Morgensen pointed out in 2012, settler colonialism too churns out its own type of biopower, one that aggressively seeks to eliminate and then replace Indigen- ous peoples, and coterminously to extend the ‘West’s’ juridical reach across the globe. Indeed, to make everywhere its colony.21 My claim, then, is that the reserve worlds death-worlds, to use Achille Mbembe’s term,22 whose poisonousnesses flatten into indi- geneity’s hardened arenas of life. It is a coral whose biopower is characterized by the mis- management of biological life, where disease control has been avoided as a method of ethico-political abandonment. Sometimes negligence is the form that state power takes. Which is to say that ongoingness on the reserve is an aspirational deadlock stymied by negative affects like hunger, nausea, and dizziness. For Sara Ahmed, this style of getting by produces a racial fatalism of sorts. She writes, ‘some are assumed to be inherently broken as if their fate is to break’.23 If we die, things go on as if nothing happened. Indeed, some die so that ‘the nothing’ can happen. Those that do not neatly or properly enflesh the human as such occupy the social as if they were always-already missing something, as if they were broken beyond repair. We might ask: what does it mean to be with feelings of loss in a world in which losing things is a condition of political becoming, a world in which maintaining one’s attachments to life routinely becomes too tiring to keep up with? What does dying’s repetition do to the ordinary’s promise to keep us a part of some- thing durable? These questions point to the plight of those doomed to shoulder health’s discontents. Put differently, disease cathects indigeneity within a present that is not only not enough, but also deadly – a present which generates forms of non-sovereignty that are tasted. According to Berlant and Lee Edelman, non-sovereignty is ‘the notion of a subject’s constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of our- selves’.24 For Berlant, love launches something of a becoming-non-sovereign, as it compels us to submit to its potentialities while rendering unpredictable the substance of the future. It is one of the few times we admit we need to change.25 But, in my assessment, this kind of control loss is not cut and dry: perhaps non-sovereignty schematizes the condition of possibility for settler colonialism’s race-making practices, ones that produce bad types of not knowing that fray Indigenous worlds and bodies and produce seemingly normal forms of precarity. For Anna Tsing, precarity is not the exception to democracy’s march of progress. It is the ‘condition of our time’.26 But, unlike her, I am not solely drawn to pre- carity’s unlikely life-building energies, but rather to its re-workings of science’s epistem- ology such that bad political life becomes genetically predictable. Non-sovereignty can be a bad affect when scenes of living through that are tethered to settler colonialism’s re-worldings speed up the material and symbolic decaying of indigeneity. What does it mean that our cells can anticipate our collective undoing? Perhaps the reserve is bound by an affective atmosphere within which toxic sensations and viruses proliferate, ones that alter the biochemistries of the bodies therein, consigning them to a kind of cellular frailty. As I see it, the food that does and does not make its way into this geography of slowed immiseration renders calculable the biosocial toll of colonial world-building. What follows is thus a phenomenological account of one of the ways Indigenous bodies are biopolitically generated to slowly destroy themselves from the inside.27

Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contemporary literary representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending – the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present. For settlers, of all people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so notwithstanding the sustained resistance trading as that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of futurity offers a useful foil to traditional analyses of settler colonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’ attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins. Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential – has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface.1 Settler-colonial narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and repression.3 Indeed, the frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time. The settler colonial situation is thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few social formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable. Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to imagine their demise – but they do so in a way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology, with the result that the radical potentiality of decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the end of settler colonialism unspools – the quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they consider and then disavow the violence of their origins. This article traces the importance of the trope of extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of settlercolonial studies toward futurity and the ambivalence of settler paranoia, while highlighting a potential point of cross-fertilization between settler-colonial and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature. That ‘extinction’ should be a key word in the settler-colonial lexicon is no surprise. In Patrick Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well. The idea appears repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made these. […] Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. […] And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’ ‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates other late nineteenthcentury novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 3 which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’ highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’. 11 The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that narratives of settler extinction are acts of ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial extinction narratives than bad faith. I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of how they encode a specifically settler-colonial framework for imagining the future, one that has implications for how we understand contemporary literatures from settler societies, and which allows us to see extinction as a genuine, if flawed, attempt to envisage social change. In the remainder of this paper I consider extinction’s function as a metaphor of decolonization. I use this phrase to invoke, without completely endorsing, Tuck and Yang’s argument that to treat decolonization figuratively, as I argue extinction narratives do, is necessarily to preclude radical change, creating opportunities for settler ‘moves to innocence’ that re-legitimate racial inequality.13 The counterview to this pessimistic perspective is offered by Veracini, who suggests that progressive change to settler-colonial relationships will only happen if narratives can be found that make decolonization thinkable.14 This article enters the debate between these two perspectives by asking what it means for settler writers to imagine the future via the trope of extinction. Does extinction offer a meaningful way to think about ending settler colonialism, or does it re-activate settler-colonial patterns of thought that allow exclusionary social structures to persist? I explore this question with reference to examples of contemporary literary treatments of extinction from select English-speaking settler-colonial contexts: South Africa, Australia, and Canada.15 The next section of this article traces key elements of extinction narrative in a range of settler-colonial texts, while the section that follows offers a detailed reading of one of the best examples of a sustained literary exploration of human finitude, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003–2013). I advance four specific arguments. First, extinction narratives take at least two forms depending on whether the ‘end’ of settler society is framed primarily in historical-civilizational terms or in a stronger, biological sense; the key question is whether the ‘thing’ that is going extinct is a society or a species. Second, biologically oriented extinction narratives rely on a more or less conscious slippage between ‘the settler’ and ‘the human’. Third, this slippage is ideologically ambivalent: on the one hand, it contains a radical charge that invokes environmentalist discourse and climate-change anxiety to imagine social forms that re-write settler-colonial dynamics; on the other, it replicates a core aspect of imperialist ideology by normalizing whiteness as equivalent to humanity. Fourth, these ideological effects are mediated by gender, insofar as extinction narratives invoke issues of biological reproduction, community protection, and violence that function to differentiate and reify masculine and feminine roles in the putative de-colonial future. Overall, my central claim is that extinction is a core trope through which settler futurity emerges, one with crucial narrative and ideological effects that shape much of the contemporary literature emerging from white colonial settings.

(Audra, August 2016, Kahnawake Mohawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Consent’s Revenge." Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 326–333. , JKS)

What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? By “easy answer” one might think of a diagnostic, a characteristic of action, a statement of effect, rather than analysis that may course to the unthinkable. Recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, revolution—all diagnostics, all characterological, all containers for describing the political. And in this, for grasping at intent and at outcomes. The political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a re-sort, but also for a push on what should be. For anthropologists this is a record of the observed and of the political, rendered objectlike. And this rendering of complexity is far from new. The early Africanists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) took structure and function to constrain action, and even Americanists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1851) saw governance and hierarchy converge into stages of civilization that one could sort people into, seamlessly, in a global project of naming and sorting. Morgan’s gaze on material culture operated as an anthropological and political magic wand of sorting, ordering, and ranking. The context for both was the colonial and imperial project, and the very occasion of their anthropology owed itself to Indigenous dispossession (Morgan) or imperial governance (Evans-Pritchard). The paradigmatic work in political anthropology was itself inherently political, and yet what was defined as “political” in these texts was presented as an order outside of the ordering context itself. The people; the place; their culture—all orderable, ranked, discernible, and ultimately (it was thought) governable. Meanwhile, these colonial encounters were and still are a mess of disorder, of so-called transformation, of dispossession of people from land and culture. The easy answers for the emergent field were the ethnological grid; the kinship chart; the orderly, predictable clan unit1—categories that contained difference and controlled for the nightmare many Indigenous people were thrust into as they came into anthropological purview. When I first conceived of the project that would become my book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Simpson 2014), my plan was a study of nationhood and citizenship among an Indigenous people in North America who are resolutely committed to jurisdiction over territories of various forms. Their own object was and is territory in a material sense, their land—but also ideas, the past, the present, the future, their membership within the polity itself. They make all of this effort as they travel across various borders and boundaries on their inherited and their claimed territories. They assert their histories in the face of the bordered contestation of those claims by liberal, democratic, and still-settling states. Because these are my own people, I had a very strong, a priori ethnographic sense of what was going on. However, I was paying attention differently for years before my formal fieldwork began. Our band council (tribal council) was evicting non-Native people from the community, the evictions were of a piece with a 50 percent blood-quantum requirement for membership that was vigorously debated, contested, embraced, defended. These processes were symptoms of something more than intolerance or liberal subject failure, and I wanted to know why. I looked for linkages between land, law, and governance within and beyond the reserve. The project turned into something else when I got into the archive and when I conducted interviews—when supposed observations and materials from the community took form in dense, identifiable lines of argument, of stances, of theories themselves. Suddenly I had something else, and that something was no easy answer. In fact, before me was a study in difficulty, a study of constraint, of contradictions, and I had no way to describe or theorize what was crucial. What was crucial were the very deliberate, willful, intentional actions that people were making in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people, that they consent to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them. Refusal was a stance but also a theory of the political that was being pronounced over and over again. It emerged in my own writing through observation of Kahnawà:ke action, but also through their words. I would hear “enough is enough,” “it’s not us, it’s them,” “the white man put that there, not us”—on the international border. The people of Kahnawà:ke used every opportunity to remind non-Native people that this is not their land, that there are other political orders and possibilities. This meant longer waits at borders, awkward (to say the least) interactions with cashiers, as well as difficult personal decisions. I also saw that these matters of moral and political habit were articulated quite perfectly to larger actions by the Iroquois Confederacy through time, to broader efforts to demand recognition of existing agreements, as well as refusals to play various games. Among these games is citizenship: voting, paying taxes—actions that would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty into settler citizenship and into the promise of whiteness.3 All of this pointed analytically to the deeply unequal scene of articulation that people were thrown into and remaking through the quotidian and the grand. This deeply unequal scene of articulation that I am describing may be understood as the settler-colonial present.4 How, then, do those who are targeted for elimination, those who have had their land stolen from them, their bodies and their cultures worked on to be made into something else articulate their politics? How can one articulate political projects if one has been offered a half-life of civilization in exchange for land? These people have preexisting political traditions to draw from—so how do they, then, do things? They refuse to consent to the apparatuses of the state. And in time with that, I refused then, and still do now, to tell the internal story of their struggle. But I consent to telling the story of their constraint. This relationship between refusal and consent became the point to needle through and then stitch with. Part of the context for this argument is “let’s not pretend that there is an even playing field for interpretation, let’s not pretend that the Iroquois are not already prefigured, that their actions are going to be interpreted fairly or that we do not push on all of these processes in a full-court press.” So I refused to be that thick description prosemaster who would reveal in florid detail the ways in which these things were being sorted out. As such, my ethnographic refusal operated at the level of the text: it was deliberate, it was willful, it was—like the people I was working with and the process I was documenting—very aware of its context of articulation. That context includes a settler suspicion of Indigenous peoples, and at times, as we saw during the so-called Oka Crisis of 1990, a deep hatred for Mohawks.5 How then to describe or theorize that which is cognizant of its own space of articulation? The history that governs apprehension? This was also a way of listening that opened up a theoretical possibility for imagining and writing the political ethnographically.6 Here was a writing strategy and an analytic that stood outside the repetitive stance of resistance, which again overinscribed the state with its power to determine what mattered (Abu-Lughod 1990), which treated domination as an all-encompassing frame for action and treated engagements with it as one-up events, or concealed acts of sly, double-meaning subterfuge (Scott 1990). Here refusal offers its own structure of apprehension that maintains and produces sociality through time, manifest in a political posture of acute awareness of the conditions of this production. Settler colonialism is not eventful; it is enduring, it has its own structure and logic and refusal as well, operating like a grammar and posture that sits through time. It is a politics deeply cognizant of its own production, of the never-ending nature of inequity and the need to stay the course. So refusal availed itself through the research and helped as well in thinking beyond what counted through the channel of recognition (Coulthard 2014; Povinelli 2002; Simpson 2014) while pointing to the overly determined, effective capacity of the state. The people I worked with and belong to know all this, and of course they know this in stratified ways. The condition of Indigeneity globally is to know this. Indigenous peoples are grappling with the fiction of justice while pushing for justice. So this is not particular to Kahnawà:ke or to Haudenosaunee peoples (McCarthy 2016) and can be found in Indigenous ethnography and cultural criticism elsewhere. In her book The White Possessive, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) revisits the interpretive debate between Gananath Obesekeyere and Marshall Sahlins on the right way to think about Captain Cook’s interpretation by Kanaka Maoli—was he a god, was he an invader? How did “the Natives” think about him? This was a tired exchange that met on the terrain of questions of structure. Moreton-Robinson revisits it with those that saw Cook and their stories of his arrival on another Indigenous coast. Her presentation and analysis of the narratives offer a gorgeous triangulation between accounts and a variance in interpretation. She centers the Bubu Gujin elder Hobles’s version, as told to Deborah Bird Rose: “I know you been stealing country belong to mefellow. Australia. What we call Australia, that’s for Aboriginal people. But him been take it away. You been take the land, you been take the mineral, take the gold, everything. Take it up this big England” (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 117). Suddenly “how ‘Natives’ think” (Sahlins 1995) is not a presumptive claim of interpretive ownership; it is a statement of theft, in raw form. What does one do with this sort of knowledge? If such histories animate the consciousness of your people, do you then consent to notions of just law, of just governance? Of the lawful theft of your land? It is just this sort of cognizance of differing social and historical facts that make for the posture of refusal. Refusal holds on to a truth, structures this truth as stance through time, as its own structure and comingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance and operates as the revenge of consent—the consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with. When I deploy the term revenge, I am hailing historical consciousness. As such it is a manifestation of deep awareness of the past, of, for example, theft, in raw form. We see this with Hobles, who asserts this knowledge against the grain of presumed fairness, of justice, of settled affairs. As such this consciousness avenges the prior—the deep inequities of interpretation that structure the sense of settlement, of matters that are done. Revenge does not mean individuated harm inflicted on a perpetrator in a transaction that renders justice. In my usage here, I mean avenging a prior of injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present.7 This refusal to let go, to roll over, to play this game, points to its presumptive falsity of contractual thinking. With this, the notion of two parties knowingly abstracting themselves out of their own context to contract into an agreement.8 So-called treaties are the paradigmatic imagination of the social contract in the New World (North American variant) and are in many cases the foundational document of colonial recognition, the mechanism by which Indigenous nationhood is first recognized and affirmed. The matter of postcolonial frankly eludes the North American case: “They” never left; the Native never disappeared. Treaties are central to contractual thinking in Native history and politics, regardless of the fact that most treaties were for land cessions, and many were signed under duress. These conditions were sometimes so forceful that if they were actually conditions of equal standing, they probably still would not have been signed in the first place.9 Yet they represent legal forms of incontrovertible rights to land, to resources, to jurisdiction. Regardless of intent, regardless of interpretation, they represent agreement and recognition; they are forms of covenant-making that bind. And that is where consent is bound with recognition and its refusal, symptomatic of truth itself and a mechanism for other possibilities. I want to turn now to a different anthropological case to define and theorize refusal further. In Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier, Gilberto Rosas (2012) takes on the structuring role of neoliberalism and capitalism in the production of criminals. His interlocutors are Mexican youth who are pushed and moved through borders not of their making. They move through sewers, through filth, in passages that are dangerous, and which hold nothing for them, it seems, but uncertainty on the other side. Yet they move, and their posture is one of nonconsent, as well as, at times, flagrant and ostentatious cruelty. They call themselves Barrio Libre, denizens of the free neighborhood. This is a space without constraint under conditions of “neo-liberal sovereignty-making” (Rosas 2012, 100), a sovereignty-making that is incomplete, that in its commitment to free trade and not people, cooks people in the desert. This militarization and violent precarity of life’s passage (and possible death, horrible death, body-slicing death through or beyond the border) is what Rosas (2012, 105) names neoliberal sovereignty’s incomplete but “violent affirmation.” In spite of the precarity of life through the border, the youth with whom Rosas worked feel freedom—deeply, linguistically, behaviorally. Their own force on others is a manifestation of this unvanquished and internal script of refusal. Here Rosas (2012, 109) describes their geopolitics, their mapping, and their stance: “Barrio Libre was more than a free-floating geography, superimposed over a dominant one . . . to belong to it was an expansive, furious refusal of normativity, an enraged subversion of the respective sovereignties of the U.S. and Mexico that seeped from under the new frontier.” What of these politics? Is this an agreed-upon resistance? Is this resilience, with lives and bodies contorting to withstand and accommodate pain and structures of injustice? They inflict pain. They walk through shit to get to where they are going. They get arrested. They get deported. They run and climb and get killed, fleeing from officers. Their refusal to see this condition as anything other than a state of freedom is a refusal for us of the easy answer, of a structure of consent, of ease. There is nothing easy in what I have charted out in this brief thesis on refusal. Rosas’s interlocutors smash these categorical imperatives—what I want to call “the easy answers.” The people I work with refuse the eliminatory efforts of the state. They operate as nationals in a scene of wardship and dispossession. They differ from Rosas’s interlocutors, but they operate from a similar and flagrantly self-assured position, and from an impossible-to-record, or to-analyze, easy answer. My ethnographic prerogative is to make the practice of ethnography itself a refusal in time with theirs.

Having elaborated on settler moves to innocence, we give a synopsis of the imbrication of settler colonialism with transnationalist, abolitionist, and critical pedagogy movements - efforts that are often thought of as exempt from Indigenous decolonizing analyses - as a synthesis of how decolonization as material, not metaphor, unsettles the innocence of these movements. These are interruptions which destabilize, un-balance, and repatriate the very terms and assumptions of some of the most radical efforts to reimagine human power relations. We argue that the opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts. We offer these perspectives on unsettling innocence because they are examples of what we might call an ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct, what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. There are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied. We make these notations to highlight opportunities for what can only ever be strategic and contingent collaborations, and to indicate the reasons that lasting solidarities may be elusive, even undesirable. Below we point to unsettling themes that challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors broadly assembled into three areas: Transnational or Third World decolonizations, Abolition, and Critical Space-Place Pedagogies. For each of these areas, we offer entry points into the literature - beginning a sort of bibliography of incommensurability. Third world decolonizations The anti-colonial turn towards the transnational can sometimes involve ignoring the settler colonial context where one resides and how that inhabitation is implicated in settler colonialism, in order to establish “global” solidarities that presumably suffer fewer complicities and complications. This deliberate not-seeing is morally convenient but avoids an important feature of the aforementioned selective collapsibility of settler colonial-nations states. Expressions such as “the Global South within the Global North” and “the Third World in the First World” neglect the Four Directions via a Flat Earth perspective and ambiguate First Nations with Third World migrants. For people writing on Third World decolonizations, but who do so upon Native land, we invite you to consider the permanent settler war as the theater for all imperial wars: ● the Orientalism of Indigenous Americans (Berger, 2004; Marez, 2007) ● discovery, invasion, occupation, and Commons as the claims of settler sovereignty (Ford, 2010) ● heteropatriarchy as the imposition of settler sexuality (Morgensen, 2011) ● citizenship as coercive and forced assimilation into the white settler normative (Bruyneel, 2004; Somerville, 2010) ● religion as covenant for settler nation-state (A.J. Barker, 2009; Maldonado-Torres, 2008) ● the frontier as the first and always the site of invasion and war (Byrd, 2011), ● U.S. imperialism as the expansion of settler colonialism (ibid) ● Asian settler colonialism (Fujikane, 2012; Fujikane, & Okamura, 2008, Saranillio, 2010a, 2010b) ● the frontier as the language of ‘progress’ and discovery (Maldonado-Torres, 2008) ● rape as settler colonial structure (Deer, 2009; 2010) ● the discourse of terrorism as the terror of Native retribution (Tuck & Ree, forthcoming) ● Native Feminisms as incommensurable with other feminisms (Arvin, Tuck, Morrill, forthcoming; Goeman & Denetdale, 2009). Abolition The abolition of slavery often presumes the expansion of settlers who own Native land and life via inclusion of emancipated slaves and prisoners into the settler nation-state. As we have noted, it is no accident that the U.S. government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery. Likewise, indentured European laborers were often awarded tracts of ‘unsettled’ Indigenous land as payment at the end of their service (McCoy, forthcoming). Communal ownership of land has figured centrally in various movements for autonomous, self-determined communities. “The land belongs to those who work it,” disturbingly parrots Lockean justifications for seizing Native land as property, ‘earned’ through one’s labor in clearing and cultivating ‘virgin’ land. For writers on the prison industrial complex, il/legality, and other forms of slavery, we urge you to consider how enslavement is a twofold procedure: removal from land and the creation of property (land and bodies). Thus, abolition is likewise twofold, requiring the repatriation of land and the abolition of property (land and bodies). Abolition means self-possession but not object-possession, repatriation but not reparation: ● “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men” (Alice Walker, describing the work of Marjorie Spiegel, in the in the preface to Spigel’s 1988 book, The Dreaded Comparison). ● Enslavement/removal of Native Americans (Gallay, 2009) ● Slaves who become slave-owners, savagery as enslavability, chattel slavery as a sign of civilization (Gallay, 2009) ● Black fugitivity, undercommons, and radical dispossession (Moten, 2008; Moten & Harney, 2004; Moten & Harney, 2010) ● Incarceration as a settler colonialism strategy of land dispossession (Ross, 1998; Watson, 2007) ● Native land and Native people as co-constituitive (Meyer, 2008; Kawagley, 2010) Critical pedagogies The many critical pedagogies that engage emancipatory education, place based education, environmental education, critical multiculturalism, and urban education often position land as public Commons or seek commonalities between struggles. Although we believe that “we must be fluent” in each other’s stories and struggles (paraphrasing Alexander, 2002, p.91), we detect precisely this lack of fluency in land and Indigenous sovereignty. Yupiaq scholar, Oscar Kawagley’s assertion, “We know that Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture” (2010, p. xiii), directs us to think through land as “more than a site upon which humans make history or as a location that accumulates history” (Goeman, 2008, p.24). The forthcoming special issue in Environmental Education Research, “Land Education: Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research” might be a good starting point to consider the incommensurability of place-based, environmentalist, urban pedagogies with land education. ● The urban as Indigenous (Bang, 2009; Belin, 1999; Friedel, 2011; Goeman, 2008; Intertribal Friendship House & Lobo, 2002) ● Indigenous storied land as disrupting settler maps (Goeman, 2008) ● Novels, poetry, and essays by Greg Sarris, Craig Womack, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor ● To Remain an Indian (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) ● Shadow Curriculum (Richardson, 2011) ● Red Pedagogy (Grande, 2004) ● Land Education (McCoy, Tuck, McKenzie, forthcoming) More on incommensurability Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world (Fanon, 1963). This is not to say that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round. The goal is to break the relentless structuring of the triad - a break and not a compromise (Memmi, 1991). Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole. Decolonization “here” is intimately connected to anti-imperialism elsewhere. However, decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not shared equally, nor do they bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly not for settlers. Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is incommensurable. 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.

As the example of Prince demonstrates, individual resistance can have considerable structural implications, particularly in terms of the organization of institutions. The Yoga Wars, the ongoing struggle between India and the developed world over the ownership, commodification, and practice of yoga, have for the last two decades been important sites for individual and institutional (neo)colonialism and decolonization of intellectual property rights. The use of the word “piracy” to describe other than the Global South’s use of knowledge produced and protected in the Global North confronts the racial scripts that undergird contemporary understandings of (white) expertise and the “discovery” and “purification” of knowledge. Read vis-à-vis the examples provided here, flipping the script of piracy refuses to accept the notion that people of color can produce only the raw materials that are then transformed into “real” and protectable knowledge. 44 One of the first printed uses of the term “yoga piracy,” in a 2005 Washington Times article, set the terms of the conflict between India and the West over yoga. Vinod K. Gupta, head of an Indian task force on traditional knowledge and intellectual property, used “yoga piracy” to describe the predominantly Western propertization and monetization of yoga, both of which he criticized. “These [asanas] were developed in India long ago and no one can claim them as their own,” he argued. 45 In this context, alternative narratives of intellectual property infringement emerged as discursive mechanisms for inverting the racial scripts of Asians as lazy thieves who lack the intellectual capacity or work ethic to produce knowledge. The struggle to claim yoga manifested in two primary ways: the use of decolonial vernacular by lay Indians and Indian Americans to remake the very language of intellectual property and the creation of a digital database by the Indian government to protect against intellectual property rights claims in knowledge that had already been “discovered” by people of color. These two resistive moves served to decolonize and dewesternize global patent law by making Euro-American biases visible and producing new institutional structures and knowledge categories that confront them. Reframing ownership through decolonial vernacular Vernacular rhetoric—“the rhetoric of the oppressed” 46—offers a counterpoint to the rhetoric of those in power, including around discourses of race and citizenship. Significantly, even though it is the non-expert language of everyday life, vernacular rhetoric can trickle up to influence the language of those in power, changing the very words, concepts, and institutional structures that experts use to describe and manage areas of public concern. 47 For instance, vernacular discourses around yoga piracy helped Indian publics to inadvertently produce new approaches to categorizing and managing traditional knowledge, thus pushing against rhetorics of expertise that justified excluding people of color from circuits of knowledge production and knowledge ownership. 48 In effect, rhetorics of piratical theft of yoga produced new, radical, and accessible vocabularies for discussing intellectual properties that, in turn, influenced government policymakers. The use of language in the context of yoga piracy operated as “decolonial vernacular,” a practice through which quotidian uses of legal language contest (neo)colonial regimes of knowledge production. 49 One of the earliest and most famous rhetorical rescriptings of the infringement narrative came in Vandana Shiva’s articulation of the term “biopiracy” in 1997. Shiva, who was responding to the rise of bioprospecting, sought to critique “the exploitation of biological resources and traditional knowledge without the consent of local people or authorities, and without adequate compensation.” 50 She observes: “At the heart of Columbus’ ‘discovery’ was the treatment of piracy as the natural right of colonizer . . . Patents are still the means to protect this piracy of the wealth of non-Western peoples as a right of Western powers.” 51 The language of biopiracy, then, rewrites the racial scripts that Western discourses of infringement perpetuate, specifically pushing back against the relations of power that they implicate. Taking a cue from Shiva’s successful struggles to invalidate patents for turmeric and neem oil in wound healing, those who contested yoga piracy named the problematic power relations through which yoga is consistently colonized and commodified. The embrace of the concept of yoga piracy, as with biopiracy, was not an end point in the conversation about the protection of traditional knowledge. Rather, it was one outcome of a sustained engagement with questions related to the ownership of yogic knowledge, often in ways that functionally “remixed” the legal definitions in and around intellectual property and cultural property. 52 In a Times of India article titled “Kissa Copyright Ka,” a series of individuals engage with the concept of commodification of traditional knowledge. 53 Supreme Court of India lawyer Ashok Jain said: Copyright is an ambiguous area. Anyone can claim copyright if he has developed or innovated a skill. For instance, Bikram Choudhury can be granted copyright on the 26 asanas developed by him. However, nobody can get a copyright on the “original” yoga asanas as written in ancient texts . . . Legally, Indians don’t have a monopoly over ragas, curry or yogurt . . . we’ve only inherited them. The government of India should be filing for cultural patents . . . The cost of filing patents is nothing. We must take action now. 54 Here Jain uses his legal knowledge and scientific know-how to complicate understandings of intellectual properties and cultural properties, reading copyright as an “ambiguous area” that can be stretched to protect cultural knowledge. He translates his argument into accessible vernacular, framing the claims made by artists in the rest of the article. Notably, he moves fluidly between discussing copyrights and patents, intellectual property, and cultural property. In a maneuver that illustrates the possibilities of vernacular rhetoric, he argues that asanas ought to be protected by copyright law, an area of law intended to protect creative works. He then argues that India should file for “cultural patents.” While interesting, these arguments, like Prince’s name change, are not legally cognizable. Though at the time, a series of asanas might have been considered a chorographic work, administrative clarifications and legal rulings in both the United States and India have concluded otherwise. Moreover, because yoga is not an invention under the terms of the U.S. Patent Act, it cannot be the subject of a “yoga patent.” Nonetheless, the term “cultural patent,” 55 which both the blog SpicyIP and my own research confirm is repeated in Indian popular discourse as a result of “doctrinal confusion” 56 about different types of intellectual property law, creates rhetorical space for imagining the mechanics of the protective public domain that Laura Foster theorizes. 57 Combining international law’s notions of cultural property—as, for instance, articulated by UNESCO—and patent law’s notion of patentable inventions, the term “cultural property” is a productive malapropism, a confusion of related but different legal concepts in the context of intellectual property that helps to envision the legal intersections through which cultural property can be protected. The subsequent embrace of the term “yoga piracy” and the creation of the TKDL are arguably an outgrowth of such productive malapropisms, which gave rise to linguistic play as rhetorical resistance within intellectual property discourses. Such forms of discursive reworking facilitate definitional evolutions that Halbert argues are necessary for resisting intellectual property maximalism. 58 They also confront rhetorical maneuvers that Endres contends use strategic definitions to render minoritarian groups invisible in legal contexts. 59 Misuse prompts redefinition, which implicitly critiques the (neo)colonial processes through which intellectual property law emerged. The eventual affirmation in both the United States and India of the non-copyrightability and nonpatentability of yoga, as well as the embrace of the TKDL as prior art, demonstrates the efficacy of such definitional challenges. Legal misuse, then, is not simply dismissible; it is discursively reconstitutive, a productive rhetorical move that aids in eroding the power of racial capitalism and propertization. “Kissa Copyright Ka” is rife with similar examples of decolonizing vernacular through misuse. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director of the National Mission for Manuscripts, for instance, calls for World Heritage protection by UNESCO. Jiggs Kalra, identified as “gourmet guru,” begins by citing the patenting of neem oil and turmeric and ends with this legally invalid claim: “I patent all my recipes after someone tried to steal them three years ago. But what if tomorrow, some foreigner files a patent for dhokla, tandoori chicken, mutton vindaloo?” 60 Sonal Mansingh, a dancer, analogously notes: “Even Bach and Beethoven never filed for patents. It’s the Americans who are trying to patent everything as their intellectual property.” 61 Ritu Kumar, a fashion designer, notes that she files for copyrights on her garments and that “[w]hile in Europe and the US, [her] distributors file for patents in their respective countries.” 62 Once again, the doctrinal confusion that Shamnad Basheer identifies juxtaposes legally sound and legally unsound arguments about intellectual property and cultural property law. The value of such a move is not that it makes a legally actionable claim for protecting yogic knowledge. Rather, as Gerard Hauser points out, vernacular rhetorics actively create publics and script the conceptual possibilities within which policy is made. 63 The rhetorical significance of intellectual property’s productive malapropisms is that they discursively invent and circulate the radical possibility of delinking decolonially in public culture. In Walter Mignolo’s words, they help us “build knowledge and arguments that supercede the hegemony of Western knowledge.” 64 Decolonizing vernacular around biopiracy gave rise to notions of cultural patents and yoga piracy, both of which were precursors to important structural interventions in intellectual property rights, such as the TKDL. This predecession is no coincidence: decolonizing vernacular in the Yoga Wars shifted the rhetorical culture around intellectual property and traditional knowledge in ways that facilitated new ways of thinking, including about the racial scripts around creatorship. The term “yoga patent” is not a one-time misspeak. The concept pervades Indian and US newspaper articles on yoga piracy over the years. “India to Protest Grant of Yoga Patents by US,” proclaimed the front page of a 2007 issue of the Times of India. “Patenting Yoga: The Issue Steams Up” reads the headline of an article in the Delhi Times. “Yoga Wars: India Blocks Patents on Poses!” announces NPR. “India Patents 1,300 Yoga Moves,” declared RIA Novosti. Yoga patent language became internationally pervasive in the 2000s, intermingled with discussions of copyright, cultural property, and intangible cultural heritage. Though these claims are frustrating to intellectual property experts, they created a rhetorical culture in which the TKDL could easily emerge. The TKDL, created in 2001 and spearheaded by Gupta, made information about multiple types of traditional knowledge available to the public as prior art, a designation that would block patent claims. The database also includes a catalog of asanas, which though now publicly available, do not effectively block any intellectual property claims. 65 Nonetheless, structurally speaking, conversations about yoga patents are both descriptive and proscriptive in the context of the TKDL. They describe the motives for creating a catalog of yoga poses and information that blocks patents on traditional knowledge. They also help make visible the overarching desires among Indian publics, notably to find a legally enforceable way to make yoga patents a reality and thereby protect traditional knowledge. Such productive malapropisms actively refuse the citizen scripts of the hyperracial infringer. The concept of yoga piracy implicitly declares the existence of a creator who exists outside the intellectual property imagined by modernity/coloniality, who made their work in a manner that demands legal and cultural protection. It also asserts the existence of a counternarrative of history, one that makes space for the “illicit” development models of the Global South and creates the possibility of a framework in which infringement is not a moral evil or threat to the developing world but rather the natural consequence of neoliberal racial capitalism. The notion of yoga piracy does not negate the possibility of Indian intellectual property infringement or undo perceptions of India’s noncompliance with TRIPS. It does, however, refute narratives of bad global citizenship in “discursive spaces for the disempowered” 66 and broader public spaces. Liang points out that one of the ways that US anti-piracy operates is through a redemptive narrative of citizenship in which Americans are posited as hardworking innovators, ideal citizens against which Asian infringers are compared. 67 Yet terms such as “yoga piracy” and “yoga patents” suggest not only that Indians make and circulate knowledge that is so valuable as to be worth stealing but also that they are entitled to protection for that information. Indians are not simply lawless intellectual property anti-citizens; they are makers of “pirate politics” 68 who are perhaps unwittingly part of, playing on Martin Fredriksson’s phrase “the multitude of resistance.” 69 Indian publics participate in the project of combating racialized understandings of infringers, particularly by creating conceptual space for so-called illicit economies and building rhetorical and cultural schema for Asians to be read as creators, citizens, and persons. The TKDL serves such a purpose by making Indian knowledge known to the world as prior art. 70 Reframing the public domain through dewesternizing restructuring The language of piracy was effective in the Yoga Wars because it created a shorthand for referring to the racially bankrupt (intellectual) property relations through which Westerners exploited yoga. It also created productive space for protecting yoga. As yoga legend B. K. S. Iyengar stated, “Yoga is an essential part of our heritage, and India has to protect it.” 71 Conceptually, yoga piracy identifies Indian yogis as bona fide creators—not anti-innovative pirates—whose work can and should be protected from commodification that takes it out of the public sphere. The term “yoga piracy” critiques the underlying knowledge production regimes and racial scripts through which Western legal systems create ownership rights in traditional knowledge. Instead of ceding control to intellectual property advocates to identify and racialize agents of infringement, the phrase rejects that framework, positing that Westerners are the thieves who are taking information from the developing world through contrived doctrines around expertise. This view not only claims space for Asian creativity but identifies infringement as a practice of asserting whiteness as (intellectual) property while taking traditional knowledge from racial and colonial Others.

In the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States would jointly forge an identity geopolitics of the “higher races.” Today it has reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the greatest modern empire. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” President Trump said last year in a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about “large-scale killing” of white farmers in South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert Murdoch’s media, of white supremacists around the world. To understand the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking liberal democracies today, we must examine the experience of unprecedented global migration and racial mixing in the Anglosphere in the late 19th century: countries such as the United States and Australia where, as Roosevelt wrote admiringly in 1897, “democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien.” It is in the motherlands of democracy rather than in fascist Europe that racial hierarchies first defined the modern world. It is also where a last-ditch and potentially calamitous battle to preserve them is being fought today. This “race selfishness” was sharpened in the late 19th century, as the elites of the “higher races” struggled to contain mass disaffection generated by the traumatic change of globalization: loss of jobs and livelihoods amid rapid economic growth and intensified movements of capital, goods and labor. For fearful ruling classes, political order depended on their ability to forge an alliance between, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “capital and mob,” between rich and powerful whites and those rendered superfluous by industrial capitalism. Exclusion or degradation of nonwhite peoples seemed one way of securing dignity for those marginalized by economic and technological shifts. The political climate was prepared by intellectuals with clear-cut racial theories, such as Brooks Adams, a Boston Brahmin friend of Roosevelt, and Charles B. Davenport, the leading American exponent of eugenics. In Australia, Pearson’s social Darwinism was amplified by media barons like Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert and a stalwart of the eugenics movement) and institutionalized in a “White Australia” policy that restricted “colored” migration for most of the 20th century. Anti-minority passions in the United States peaked with the 1924 immigration law (much admired by Hitler and, more recently, by Jeff Sessions), which impeded Jewish immigrants and barred Asians entirely. By the early 20th century, violence against indigenous peoples, immigrants and African-Americans reached a new ferocity, and nativist and racist demagogues entrenched a politics of dispossession, segregation and disenfranchisement. Seeking to maintain white power globally, Roosevelt helped transform the United States into a major imperialist power. Woodrow Wilson, too, worked to preserve, as he put it, “white civilization and its domination of the planet” even as he patented the emollient rhetoric of liberal internationalism that many in the American political and media establishment still parrot. At the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, which Wilson supervised, the leaders of Britain, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada not only humiliated the many Asians and Africans demanding self-determination; they also jointly defeated an attempt by Japan, their wartime ally, to have a racial equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The exposure of Nazi crimes, followed by decolonization and civil rights movements, generally discredited quasi-scientific racism and stigmatized overt expressions of white supremacism. In our own time, global capitalism has promised to build a colorblind world through economic integration. But as revolts erupt against globalization in its latest, more disruptive phase, politicians and pundits in the Anglosphere are again scrambling to rebuild political communities around what W. E.B. Du Bois in 1910 identified as “the new religion of whiteness.” The intellectual white web originally woven in late-19th-century Australia vibrates once more with what the historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds termed “racial knowledge and technologies that animated white men’s countries and their strategies of exclusion, deportation and segregation.” Mr. Trump, for instance, has chosen Australia’s brutal but popular immigration policies as a model: “That is a good idea. We should do that too,” he said in January 2017 to Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister at the time, as he explained his tactic of locking up refugees on remote islands. “You are worse than I am,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Turnbull. If right-wing Australian politicians were among the first to mainstream a belligerent white nationalism, the periodicals and television channels of Rupert Murdoch have worked overtime to preserve the alliance between capital and mob in the Anglosphere. Indulged by Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers, writers like Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Roberts repeatedly urged American neoconservatives after the Sept. 11 attacks to take up the aging white man’s burden and quell mutinous natives. A broad range of figures in the Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition and extermination of black and brown brutes. Not surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors who build platforms where political correctness, Islam and feminism are excoriated, the facts of injustice and inequality denied, chests thumped about a superior but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active settler-colonialist project. Emotional incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of white power. For the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today. Whiteness denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth find themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe increasingly challenged. Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him to vote for Mr. Trump. Other panicky white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience, remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce. The low comedy of charlatanry, however, should not distract us from the lethal dangers of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial knowledge, according to which the swarthy enemy was subhuman, inviting extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair. A century ago, the mere suspicion of being thrust aside by black and yellow peoples sparked apocalyptic visions of “race suicide.” Today, the “preponderance of China” that Pearson predicted is becoming a reality, and the religion of whiteness increasingly resembles a suicide cult. Mr. Trump’s trade wars, sanctions, border walls, deportations, denaturalizations and other 11th-hour battles seem to push us all closer to the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the rulers of the “higher races,” “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

The process of converting time into space is part of the modern (geo)poloitical imaginary. Not only is the slicing up of the globe into various blocks of space part of the writing of colonial politics, so too is the organization of these blocks into “primitive,” “backward,” “modern,” and “advanced” temporal zones. This in fact is not converting time into space, but making both and ordering of political power. Time can be linearized, but only at a loss. Accordingly, the writing of the colonial other, from its roots in Western anthropology, has historically placed the native other in a time different than the present, which is occupied by the writing subject. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) calls this the denial of coevalness—a term that becomes the gloss for a situation where the non-European other’s hierarchically 87 distancing localization suppresses the simultaneity and contemporaneity of contact/the ethnographic encounter. The temporal structures so constituted in this way place anthropologists and their readers in a privileged timeframe, banishing the non-European other to a stage of lesser development. This situation is ultimately exemplified by the deployment of such essentially temporal categories as “primitive” to establish and demarcate anthropology’s traditional object. The discipline’s neo-Darwinist evolutionary doctrine—constituted at the intersection of scientism and Enlightenment belief in progress, as well as colonial ethnocentrism—in turn codified anthropology’s temporal orientation. As readers of Darwin know, none of this if found in Darwin’s original writing, but rather is a colloquial interpretation. In this way, contemporaneous ‘scientific’ categories like “savage,” “barbaric,” and “civilized” signified stages of historical development. This approach to time and the other not only illustrates how geopolitical discourse and the forms of colonialism that it has helped legitimate continue to be aided by a notion of universal human progress, but also draws attention to the temporalities that are erased under the continuing expansion of Western modernity. Flat, linear, teleological perspectives on time and development leave no space for divergent temporalities, ways of viewing the past, or alternative ways of imagining the future. This is a problem Mark Rifkin (2017) addresses in his book, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, arguing the need for “not just a more expansive or inclusive version of ‘history’ or the ‘present’ but an examination of the principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality” (emph. added ii). As both Rifkin and Fabian emphasize, political space and political time are ideologically construed instruments of power. For Fabian, many/most critics of imperialism are prepared to admit this with regard to space, as it has long been recognized that the imperialist claim to occupy ‘empty’, undeveloped, underused space for ‘the common good of mankind’ should be taken for what it really is: “a monstrous lie perpetuated for the benefit of one part of humanity” (144). He argues, however, that with respect to the uses of time as political instrument of ideology and domination, most critics remain oblivious. He writes, “we remain under the spell of an equally mendacious fiction: that interpersonal, 88 intergroup, indeed, international Time is ‘public time’—there to be occupied, measured, and allotted by the powers that be” (ibid). In the epigraph with which this chapter commences, Fabian comments on the cannibalistic nature of colonial time, arguing that colonial-imperialist expansion fuels, and is fueled by, a “relentless appetite for the Time of the Other” (104). He argues: “the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” (emph. in original 144) and tells us less about time and space than it does their occupation and use, their experience and structured position. For Fabian, the mechanisms of Western epistemology delineate processes by which the primacy afforded to a series of first order principles that are true everywhere are elided with the laws of nature, becoming one and the same. Science is the language of this epistemology, and the Western subject its executor. In a closed loop, this system is repeated over and over (all over the colonial world), a repetition that performatively re-produces the Western scientific man as the world’s interpreter. The time of the other, of the observed, meanwhile, is a time of which the Western writer/scientist—by virtue of his access to the first order principles through language (e.g., science, ethnography, statistics)—is able to stand outside; the subject of his study, meanwhile, the other/object to his self/subject, is relegated to a time that is not the now of the writer, or his reader that is, itself, an other time. In making this point, about the impossible demands placed by Western scientistic ethos on its other(s), Fabian activates the story of the Western anthropologist, a figure that stands in for any taxonomic scientist whose object is the other. In this narrative, the scientist emerges already placed in a diagram of what Fabian calls “relations of order” such that he is “upstream, up the temporal slope” (103). Yet, Fabian continues, his posture is to accuse, by questioning, the other who is accordingly positioned “downstream.” His posture is to act as if the two were engaged in a game allowing moves in both directions. Fabian writes: “He acts as if there were a give and take; as if what is valid in the time of the other (there and then) could be made visible in the time of the scientist (here and now)” (103). As it is, the avowed aim of taxonomic discourse to 89 establish relations that are always and everywhere valid: the story must end with the scientist absorbing historical time into his own. For Fabian, this story illustrates an ideology of relations, a game that defines its own rules. A crucial strategy in this game is to place the players on a temporal slope before the game even begins. What this element of the allegory usefully points out is that the premise by which the time of the other is not the same as the time of the scientist is not demonstrated. Rather it is simply postulated, assumed to be true from the outset, and then transcribed in such a way as to affirm/validate the assumption. In other words, for Fabian, an evolutionary view of relations between self/subject and other/object is anthropology’s point of departure, codified into its formal structure, mode of analysis, and style of writing and corresponding practices of reading, not its result. Fabian concludes this lesson in Western orthodoxy by stating that a taxonomic approach inserts itself effortlessly into anthropology’s evolutionary perspective, whose ostensibly achronic stance turns out instead to be what he calls a “flagrant example of allochronic discourse” (104)—allochronism understood here as a discourse that places the other in a time other than the present of the writing subject with the implication that they are what we used to be like. Of singular importance to my argument here is the emphasis Fabian places on the consumptive ethos of the western taxonomist, what Fabian calls “his relentless appetite for the Time of the Other, a Time to be ingested and transformed into his own” (104). This drive is impelled, for Fabian, by the search for logics that establish relations and rules that are universal, applicable everywhere, like laws. The time of the other must be consumable by the logics and rules that govern the world of the colonialist. Indigeneity was, and in many respects is, conscripted to a “downstream” location on a timeline along which Western epistemologies and corresponding aggregates of politics and sociality continue to advance. Indigeneity, meanwhile, by continuing to exist at all, is only allowed the option of repeating itself. Additionally, the temporality of colonialism necessitated a forward moving economistic mobilization of everything as resource. A central component of Canada’s so-called “Indian problem,” especially as it was addressed by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932—which, not coincidentally, was the height of the Indian 90 Residential Schools in Canada—was economic non-viability. “Indians” were seen as a drain on resources through medical expenditure government subsidization, rather than contributive members of the economy and, by extension, the body politic. As Scott viewed the “Indian problem,” it was not the proper act of governance to “continuously protect a class of people who are unable to stand alone” (Scott). The metaphor of ‘standing alone’ is as chronopolitically charged as it was/is spatial, designating a temporality of the Indian that, as long as Indians remain Indian together as a population or, in his terms, “class”— which is a legal term of segmentation tied to rights—relegates them to a position outside of the body politic. Certainly, however, the ‘body politic’ is not an entity that stands alone or is even asked to do so. Convoking the body politic takes energy, resources, constant bolstering, and involves the ongoing disciplining of all manner of different bodies. Scott’s objective, through the aggressive policies of assimilation he advocated, was to continue the IRS’s violent assimilative processes until, as he stated to the Special Parliamentary Committee of the House of Commons (which was convened to examine his proposal to amend the sections of the Indian Act that focused on enfranchisement52), “there is not a single Indian that has not been absorbed by the body politic” (55). Differently stated, Scott’s stance on the problem that the Indian posed to the political was to consume until ingested the time of the other. By eradicating the other/the Indian, the time of the other/the Indian could be subsumed within the body politic, transformed into the political time of the (rising) nation. I am reminded here of the refrain with 52 Enfranchisement is a legal process for terminating a person’s Indian status. Voluntary enfranchisement was a key feature of Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and assumed that Indigenous people would be willing to surrender their legal and ancestral identities in exchange for Canadian citizenship. If a man with a family enfranchised, his wife and children would automatically be enfranchised. In the 1850’s the government shifted a policy aimed at creating separate ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ self-sustained Aboriginal communities on reserves to policies of aggressive assimilation. The new policy sought to assimilate Aboriginal people into Eruo-Canadian society and gradually eliminate the reserves. This was to be done through a process called “enfranchisement”. Under the provisions of the Act for the Gradual Civilization, an Indian male who could read and write in either English or French, was free of debt, and was of good character could receive all the rights of a British subject, fifty acres of reserve land, and a share of funds. Between 1857 and 1876, only one man was voluntarily enfranchised. The government did not interpret this lack of response as an indication of the strength of Aboriginal attachment to Aboriginal identity. Rather the government blamed the failure on Aboriginal people to seek enfranchisement on the influence of their leaders. This increased government hostility to Aboriginal government. 91 which the chapter begins, the children’s song that counts up and down between one and ten little Indians. Never does the song arrive at zero or no little Indians. Rather it repeats until it wears out, and the singing dies away. On the level of language, Scott’s use of the word “class” is a suggestive synonym, standing in for the term we might today expect to hear: race. By invoking class rather than race, Scott signals a dynamic and powerful element of the form and function of race in biopolitics, as well as signaling the dominant metaphorics and imperatives of the market and capitalist market (e)valuations. Biopolitically, the features of race and racism operate strategically, as much an invention of these forms of politics as a technique of stratification and control. In Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, the concept of race initially describes a specific historical-political division, and does not designate biological signification. In this way, it aligns more closely with what we today might call class (though it is also race, gender, ability, etc.). As Foucault explains, in place of the historical-political thematic of war, the modern biopolitical era introduces the evolutionary-biological model of the struggle for life. Based on pop-Darwinian descriptions of natural selection along the lines of morphological similarities and traits, emerging dynamics of racism furnish a technology that secures the function of unilateral killing in the name of life. Biopolitical governance aims toward a horizon of futurity in which life is sublimated, in which there is no state-sanctioned killing, no need for punishment. Indeed, modern biopolitical formations of power can only authorize killing as that which makes life in general better. What this means is that politics’ is a knowledge, not of the norm, but of the range of its variations. The center point is much less interesting for power than a population’s range and variations. In relation to the norm, life, understood as “society,” must be defended by exposing to death those who are deviant, those who are other. On the topic of this somewhat abstract and contradictory logic, Foucault (History of Sexuality 1980) writes: “How can a power kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? …It is … at this point that racism intervenes” (254). In other words, the arrangement into higher, lower, ascending and descending races makes it possible to establish a line between who must live and who must die. 92 Foucault explains the emergence of this logic by tracing it back to the nineteenth-century in which there emerged an idea of a society that is biologically monist. Scott makes visible this ideology in his recruitment of what he calls the “body politic”—a single body operating in unity, towards the same ends. In this notion of racial difference, society is understood not as a plurality of races competing for survival, but as a single race (or body politic) that is no longer threatened from without, from external threat, but from within. The result is what Foucault calls, “an internal racism of permanent purification” (62): a racist platform that renews itself constantly by making racially marked otherness—such as indigeneity—re-produce itself, over and over, outside of the forward moving progress of history, society, and politics. The second function of racism in Foucault’s biopolitical model goes even further. It does not limit itself to establishing a dividing line between those worthy of life and those worthy of death; rather it searches for the establishment of a positive dynamic between the death of the bad race and the lives of the good race, situating the health of one person in direct relation to the disappearance of another. This positive dynamic furnishes the ideological foundation for identifying, excluding, combating, even murdering others, all in the name of improving life. “The fact that the other dies,” writes Foucault, “does not simply mean that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the bad race, the inferior race, is something that will make life in general healthier” (255). It is perhaps obvious, but bears underscoring, that Scott’s rhetoric, the image he projects of an Indian “class” that must/should “stand alone” outside the body politic could only fail. By the time the “Indian class” was asked to “stand alone” outside the purview of the federal government, traditional hunting grounds and herds had been decimated. Disease and malnourishment were already rampant. Aboriginal leadership had been severely and strategically weakened by the federal government, and generations of Indigenous children had already been taken from their communities of origin and reduced to the barest shadow of bare life. The outsider status of the Indigenous class was worked out spatially in the sense that residential schools and reservations were deliberately built apart from white settlement. As Scott demonstrates, to the extent that Indigenous life could not seem to “stand on its own” without 93 government support—support which the federal government had promised to give in exchange for land acquisition when it signed treaties with Aboriginal governments, treaties it has consistently refused to honor—Indigenous life was understood to be doomed. Scott’s logic seems to be: because Indigenous life is already (and always) doomed, it must therefore be assimilated. This move to assimilation manifests as a kind of forceful ‘help’ in the face of undue protection, and class is thus erased in all its valences except as caste—a signifier that brings together race and class along with a historical sense of inevitable tautology (the Indian cannot “stand alone” because he is Indian) into a stabilized hierarchy by which the marked body of the non-European native other is always constituted against the body politic. This racist ideology disguised as Darwinism id driven to a homeostasis that contains difference within it is, to a very large extent, a more viable state project than the attempt to holistically eradicate the difference of the other. In nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada—an epoch shaped by colonial politics and emerging forms of nation-building centered on a collective futurity—the chronopolitical we/other opposition was fundamentally racialized: we indicated whiteness, while other indicated racial difference. Racial difference is here understood as “a class of people” (Scott 55) unified through their morphological similarities and perceived shared traits, and who, together, presumably were unable to stand “outside the body politic” (ibid, emph. added). The metaphor of standing “outside” the body politic is, I point out, as inherently temporal as it is spatial. The temporality of the body politic here convoked is a temporality of the here/now that also claims linear progress towards the future. The temporality of the Indian—whose position is distinctly outside the here/now—is a circular time that, in the colonial imagination, repeats itself in a closed loop. Not only is Indigenous time perceived to be circular and outside the body politic, it is outside of history. The interpellative call to die with which the Canadian Indian Residential School System legitimizes its objectives and ethos, therefore, recapitulates a subjectivity that has been trapped, already, temporally, within the field of signification, and the dense network of intersubjective relations these ideological structures suture and render legible. As a way of elaborating upon this, perhaps abstract, argument, pointing both to the materializing force of language, as well as the structural mechanism(s) whose circularity produces the effect of subject as ideological misrecognition, I offer the following story: 94 In 1942 government researchers visiting a number of remote reserve communities in northern Manitoba, found people who were hungry, “beggared by a combination of the collapsing fur trade and declining government support” (Mosby 147). They also found a demoralized population marked by, in the words of the researchers, “shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia” (ibid). In a potentially paradigm shifting moment that must have come close to epiphany, the researchers suggested those problems—“so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race” (ibid, emph. added)—were in fact the results of malnutrition.”53 Importantly, and vividly illustrative of my argument in this chapter, and the project overall, instead of recommending an immediate increase in support, the researchers determined that isolated, dependent, already malnourished people would be ideal subjects for tests on the effects of different diets and nutritional interventions. Plans were developed for a longitudinal study to be conducted “on a limited number of Indians” (ibid) including Aboriginal children in residential schools in British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Alberta—tests which, through large-scale and coordinated efforts, greatly exacerbated already existing conditions of starvation and malnourishment by further withholding much-needed nutrition. Thus, “hereditary traits” in the “Indian race” were, through mechanisms of biopolitics, further inscribed in both bodily and discursive practices—concretized more immutably into Indian-ness with every rotation of the circular reasoning that characterizes ideological misrecognition. This kind of strategic, repeated exposure to prolonged conditions of near or actual physical death marks the indigenous body for inevitable decline and erasure. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant describes this as a condition of “slow death,” which she defines as, “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (754). Thus, through material and signifying practices, Indianness is laminated more concretely onto death and finality. Correspondingly, the Indigenous body is marked as 53 “Furthermore,” continues the report, “it is highly probable that their great susceptibility to many diseases paramount amongst which is tuberculosis, may be directly attributable to their high degree of malnutrition arising from lack of proper foods.” See Mosby, Ian. “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952.” Histoire Sociale/Social History. 46.91 (May, 2003): 145-172. 95 anachronistic, a relic, an embodiment out of time whose configuration of experience is slow death. Simultaneously, Indianness is renewed continually in the field of signification, performatively reproduced as “shiftless”, “indolent”, and “inert.” Through biopolitical techniques of control and regulation, the socalled Indian race was trapped simultaneously in two temporalities: slow death and circularity, neither of which afforded it a future—through a strategy of control that is fundamentally chronopolitical. Whiteness, the Child, and the Logics of Futurity Against the politicized topographies and temporalities of indigeneity and race, I now move into a consideration of the contributions of psychoanalytic theory to the questions of politics and time presented thus far. The kinds of questions psychoanalysis is interested in asking, the registers upon which it performs analysis, and its unique emphasis on temporality, language, and difference provide an excellent conceptual apparatus through which we might begin to trouble/problematize stable, taken-for-granted oppositions between psychic and social, personal and political, self and other.

The decision to treat life forms, and knowledge or information, as if they were “transactions and products” has far-reaching consequences.44 The manner in which the introduction of an intellectual property system alters communal relationships provides additional grounds for opposing biocolonialism. Legal theorists have begun to examine the potential political, economic, and social effects of the expansion of the proprietary control over information. Shelley Wright contends that designating something as private property and a valuable commodity involves a decision about how human relationships are recognized and regulated by law. How the law characterizes information has implications for how people are perceived to, and do, interact. When relationships are characterized in terms of property, and information is regarded as a product, “Human interaction becomes closed, exclusionary, coerced and hierarchical . . . Other human actors are seen as either potential trespassers or potentially useful partners to relationships that are largely seen as forms of transaction or exchange.”45 To treat human relationships as constituting property is to regard individuals as atomized entities, whose communicative and relational connection is determined by power, i.e., competition over control, or . . . rights . . . Property is about control . . . control over other human beings through categorization and exclusion . . . and control over the World.46 The exclusionary nature of property rights was emphasized by Blackstone himself, in the Commentaries, where he grounds English law on the right to property: “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises . . . in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”47 It is because property rights are exclusionary that they can be characterized as “private”; the public domain is whatever remains after private rights are exhausted. Wright observes that, although patents require that the protected information be made public in the sense of being accessible, use of that information remains the private right of the patent holder or licensee. As a commodity, information is treated “as if it were an object that can be separated and dealt with quite apart from the relationships within which it is created.”48 The public/private distinction becomes “a polarized division in which relationships are juxtaposed and granted legal attributes that fix them within regimes of power, rights and obligations . . . It is always an ideological structure, even where it has real effects.”49 The way the ideological distinction between private rights and the public domain is invoked in biocolonialism illustrates its effectiveness as a process of imperialism. We saw earlier how, just as the concept of terra nullius at one time provided legal and moral cover for the imperial powers’ treatment of indigenous peoples, the concept of public domain plays a comparable role in late capitalism. Declaring that the land belonged to no one prepared the way for its conversion into private property. Similarly, maintaining that the intellectual, cultural, and genetic resources are in the public domain, that they belong to everyone as part of the common heritage, now prepares the way equally effectively for their conversion into private property. The notions of property that belongs to no one and of property that belongs to everyone are functionally similar, as we argued earlier, enabling a conversion process which leads to the privatization of property. Wright’s discussion is particularly valuable for what it suggests about the aftermath of this process. Because exploitation rights are temporally limited for both copyrights and patents, at some point the protected property ceases to be private and falls into the public domain. When this happens, the information contained, for example, in a patent specification, may be used by anyone. However, Wright contends, this does not guarantee subsequent free and equal competition in the marketplace as the ideological justification for intellectual property would have it. The original patent holder will still benefit from the “private rights of property within which the information was in fact created and used.”50 [These] will still govern its continuing existence even after the rights themselves come to an end. The effect of the continuing influence of property rights is to exclude those who cannot replicate or create an adequate context of relationships in which the information can be used and exploited.51 Thus, Wright explains, although the patent holder’s exclusive use monopoly may end with the expiration of the patent, the benefits secured by it are not immediately severed. They continue to accrue to the patent holder or to anyone else able to reproduce a relational setting conducive to use of the information. Information cannot readily be divorced from the context of the relationships in which it was created. If information is the product of private rights, as western intellectual property law maintains, it will carry its history with it when rights to its use pass from the individual patent holder to everyone as it enters the public domain. What Wright emphasizes is how this alters the nature of the public domain. When information is construed in terms of private proprietary rights, it limits our understanding of the public domain to a diminishing zone of undefined space, in which information can never be free because it has been created as a product of private rights. What remains of the public domain cannot be visualized as a single unitary entity: rather it is seen as fragmented into overlapping concepts of expression, accessibility, and exploitation. The public realm . . . is riven and distorted by the shadows of pre-existing private rights of property.52 These types of consideration reinforce the need for indigenous communities to continue their efforts to develop alternatives to the intellectual property rights which have been formulated to advance the interests of high-tech corporations and the initiatives of western science.53 With such a great deal at stake, arguably with everything at stake, a growing number of alternatives are currently being investigated.54 First, community intellectual property rights are being proposed to replace individualized western intellectual property rights. Criteria for such communal rights have been developed. Because future generations are unable “to consent to transactions that threaten their existence as a group,”55 some of these require recognition of the inalienability of cultural property. Second, a Model Community Intellectual Rights Act (“MCIRA”) has been drafted. The concept of community intellectual rights moves away from the concept of property which is problematic for many indigenous peoples and focuses on preventing the “privatization and usurpation of community rights and knowledge through existing definitions of innovations.”56 The act recognizes indigenous peoples as innovators because their knowledge is unknown to the outside world. One possibility is a community register, which allows people to document all known plant and animal species with details of their uses and to determine the conditions of access, if any, to this information. Such a register may also be of value in supporting land claims because it provides evidence of intimate knowledge of the local environment. Third, model provisions have also been proposed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization for extending conventional copyright so that intangible expressions, as well as fixed works, are protected. Arguably, these could include traditional genetic resources. An additional development, which recognizes the importance of political as well as economic considerations, is the emerging concept of traditional resource rights. This is an integrated rights concept which articulates the many “bundles of rights” that can be used for protection, compensation, and conservation and that may form the basis for a sui generis system. These include intellectual property rights, but also included are major legally binding international agreements (the Convention on Biological Diversity; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; etc.) as well as various soft law instruments and mechanisms (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Agenda 21, and the Rio Declaration). The concept of traditional resource rights emphasizes that control over knowledge and biogenetic resources is central in indigenous struggles for self-determination and covers a very broad range of rights.57 However, there are at least two problems with such an approach. The Four Directions Council, a Canadian-based indigenous peoples organization, contends that no single international sui generis model can be imposed on all, given the wide variation in indigenous jurisprudential systems: Indigenous peoples possess their own locally-specific systems of jurisprudence with respect to the classification of different types of knowledge, proper procedures for acquiring and sharing knowledge, and the rights and responsibilities which attach to possessing knowledge, all of which are embedded uniquely in each culture and its language . . . Any attempt to devise uniform guidelines for the recognition and protection of indigenous peoples’ knowledge runs the risk of collapsing this rich jurisprudential diversity into a single “model” that will not fit the values, conceptions or laws of any indigenous society.58 Also, traditional resource rights clearly embrace and reflect a western conception of rights, a fact which may render them problematic for various indigenous nations. Addressing the protection of indigenous cultural property, United Nations Special Rapporteur Erica-Irene Daes comments that “possessing a song, story or medicinal knowledge carries with it certain responsibilities to show respect to and maintain a reciprocal relationship with the human beings, animals, plants and places with which the song, story or medicine is connected.”59 Consequently, it may be more appropriate to speak in terms of “a bundle of relationships, rather than a bundle of economic rights.”60 Despite this, there are strong convictions, if not a consensus, about the value and efficacy of human rights discourse as an essential tool in the struggles of historically oppressed peoples.61 Central among these are calls for the recognition of group rights in intangible property.62

Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars, Wolfe described the invasion of indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument was that settler colonialism — a form of colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands — requires the elimination of Native people and societies to access and occupy their land. As Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged out of the ongoing “History Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of Aborigines should be considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights, reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to win the History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus from determining the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and around the world. Settler colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires, colonies, states, and territories of ongoing settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how do we explain the survival, resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the global emergence of policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various forms? Are these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing Rock? Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys over Indians — a reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us demands more. Explaining Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser, the Cowboy is a winner. At Standing Rock, generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put it in the Guardian, the Standing Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a moment when the Left is struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as both a surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful movements of late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various voices have risen to offer answers. Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial coalition united against neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the world a template for resistance,” Erdrich concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective explanations for the Standing Rock victory are insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not explain what made this movement and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and episodic victory, these writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods, social welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over these same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At the same time workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous rights. Credit for these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous movements that unswervingly pushed for similar goals across decades and even centuries: return of indigenous lands, restoration of indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous peoples. From the time their lands were seized in the nineteenth century and even before, indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal, regional, and national coalitions and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands taken from them to recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive governments determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the laboring class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. In moments of global political and economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the 1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of 1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s, termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further devastated indigenous communities. Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced from their homelands and dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were subjected to sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called “Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and restored a measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the Red Power movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to adopt policies based on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori Renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won similar gains. These movements often found unlikely allies in neoconservatives, neoliberals, and their predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-determination. He outlined his commitment to the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential inherent in the restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a facade to restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming, Alaska Native Corporations, corporate iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous people have coopted conservative forces as agents of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while other Left and progressive movements gained little and often lost ground, indigenous people moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their interests. Self-determination is now the established framework for indigenous policy in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the dispossession, marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable victories. At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have been forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a prior age they would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not anticipate that indigenous people would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to common sense, could never win. The future that is now our present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for indigenous people precisely because they had been underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people emerge as cunning, courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto their lands and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by simultaneously pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting concessions bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver devastating blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism, which threaten the future of indigenous communities, lands, and waters and all who share these with them. This dynamic revealed itself most vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in 2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Help us stop this pipeline. Stick true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a moving message to the president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar dynamic is unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in the forces aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral suasion. They also identified pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable target. Trenches cannot be dug where people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians, controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives and their supporters are pushing investors to divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a massive banner at an NFL game, even as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve Dakota Access, divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL, delivering a crippling blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be completed is to again underestimate the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled old scores. They danced inside and outside the lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when and where the networks and infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and global systems. It shows that movements must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take decades to achieve. Politics is a long game. Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that effective resistance is strategic. And strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle and cunning forms of persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so must out-strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other indigenous struggles as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and thinking about indigenous issues alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark times lie ahead for the first people of this land and all who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor, has threatened to approve the pipeline and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation, devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination” policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is turning. In an unforeseen and previously unimaginable twist, it is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their right hand, they clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many chapters is the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience against capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.

Any critique is a false-choice that doesn’t recognize the complexity of indigenous politics. Negotiating the use of the USFG is a key element in indigenous activism. Their colonialism impacts don’t link.

Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contemporary literary representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending – the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present. For settlers, of all people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so notwithstanding the sustained resistance that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of futurity offers a useful foil to traditional analyses of settler colonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’ attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins. Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential – has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface. Settler-colonial narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and repression.3 Indeed, the frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time. The settler colonial situation is thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few social formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable. Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to imagine their demise – but they do so in a way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology, with the result that the radical potentiality of decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the end of settler colonialism unspools – the quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they consider and then disavow the violence of their origins. This article traces the importance of the trope of extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of 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 Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well. The idea appears repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made these. […] Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. […] And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’ ‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates other late nineteenth century novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’ highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’. 11 The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that narratives of settler extinction are acts of ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial extinction narratives than bad faith. I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of how they encode a specifically settler-colonial framework for imagining the future, one that has implications for how we understand contemporary literatures from settler societies, and which allows us to see extinction as a genuine, if flawed, attempt to envisage social change. In the remainder of this paper I consider extinction’s function as a metaphor of decolonization. I use this phrase to invoke, without completely endorsing, Tuck and Yang’s argument that to treat decolonization figuratively, as I argue extinction narratives do, is necessarily to preclude radical change, creating opportunities for settler ‘moves to innocence’ that re-legitimate racial inequality.13 The counterview to this pessimistic perspective is offered by Veracini, who suggests that progressive change to settler-colonial relationships will only happen if narratives can be found that make decolonization thinkable.14 This article enters the debate between these two perspectives by asking what it means for settler writers to imagine the future via the trope of extinction. Does extinction offer a meaningful way to think about ending settler colonialism, or does it re-activate settler-colonial patterns of thought that allow exclusionary social structures to persist? I explore this question with reference to examples of contemporary literary treatments of extinction from select English-speaking settler-colonial contexts: South Africa, Australia, and Canada.15 The next section of this article traces key elements of extinction narrative in a range of settler-colonial texts, while the section that follows offers a detailed reading of one of the best examples of a sustained literary exploration of human finitude, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003–2013). I advance four specific arguments. First, extinction narratives take at least two forms depending on whether the ‘end’ of settler society is framed primarily in historical-civilizational terms or in a stronger, biological sense; the key question is whether the ‘thing’ that is going extinct is a society or a species. Second, biologically oriented extinction narratives rely on a more or less conscious slippage between ‘the settler’ and ‘the human’. Third, this slippage is ideologically ambivalent: on the one hand, it contains a radical charge that invokes environmentalist discourse and climate-change anxiety to imagine social forms that re-write settler-colonial dynamics; on the other, it replicates a core aspect of imperialist ideology by normalizing whiteness as equivalent to humanity. Fourth, these ideological effects are mediated by gender, insofar as extinction narratives invoke issues of biological reproduction, community protection, and violence that function to differentiate and reify masculine and feminine roles in the putative de-colonial future. Overall, my central claim is that extinction is a core trope through which settler futurity emerges, one with crucial narrative and ideological effects that shape much of the contemporary literature emerging from white colonial settings.