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A second issue central to discussion of revolution today is that of the historic legacy of revolutions. Writers on revolution like to invoke Marx's observation about the weight of past generations lying on the minds of the present; it has been often stated that all revolutions invoke symbols and claims derived from the past, real or imagined. The revolutionaries of the twentieth century all looked, in some degree, backwards: Lenin and Trotsky to 1789, Mao and Ho to I9I7, Castro to the 1890s, Khomeini to the seventh century. The present discussion of revolution seems, at first sight, not to do this. Political sociologists do look at earlier revolutions, but this is without practical import. Discussion of the possibility of change, particularly that linked to the anti-globalization movement, seems to be curiously ahistorical. The price of this is, however, that not only is inspiration from the past muted but, equally, lessons are not learnt. Here something curious seems to have happened since the collapse of communism: the amnesia of neoliberal discussion, which consigns all that was associated with the communist experiment to the dustbin, seems to be replicated in the case of the radical movements of today. But to do this is questionable. In this latter respect, there are dangers, of an amnesia that is long on enthusiasm but short on responsibility and realism. For the fact is that the history of revolution in modern times is one not only of resistance, heroism and idealism, but also of terrible suffering and human disaster, of chaos and incompetence under the guise of revolutionary transformation, of the distortion of the finest ideals by corrupt and murderous leaders, and of the creation of societies that are far more oppressive and inefficient than those they seek to overthrow. The anti-globalization movement makes much of revolutionary internationalism: tills is not some benign panacea, but a complex, often abused, transnational practice (Halliday I999). All of this entails confronting something that revolutionaries have always assumed but too often failed to discuss: the ethics of revolution. Denunciation of the given and invocations of an ideal other are not enough (Geras 1989). To grasp this involves a shift beyond the political sociology of revolutions, an academic pursuit that focuses in large measure on the incidence of revolutions, to an analysis of the consequences and longerterm records of revolutionary states. In the course of recent years, in writing my own work on revolutions, I have had reason to visit a number of cities that had served as the centers of world revolution and, if not revolution, anti-imperialist radicalism: Beijing, Havana, Tripoli, Tehran. These were the culminations of upheavals that had produced revolutionary regimes by some strange numerical consistency in, respectively, I949, I959, I969, I979· In every case, one could still discern the outlines of the original revolutionary project: a rejection of exploitation, foreign and domestic, a comnlitment to the transformation of society, internationalist support in rhetoric and deed for those resisting oppression elsewhere. But in the 1990S this had all faded: these were not the wave of the future. Whatever else, it could not be said that the initial revolutionary project was in good shape: few in these countries now believed in the ideological project that had initiated the revolution; corruption and inefficiency were widespread; there was a pervasive desire for change, towards a more open, liberal, society; the initial internationalist appeals had faded. Revolution had, in effect, become tired. It was indeed capitalism, not revolutionary socialism and third-worldism, which in the 1990S formed the global vision of the future. This haphazard and impressionistic response has, however, to be compounded by a reflection on the overall legacy of the century of revolutions: neither form of amnesia - counterrevolutionary or revolutionary - is acceptable. Indeed, amnesia invites the repetition of another common saying with regard to revolutions, that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Here perhaps is one of the most worrying aspects of the contemporary radical movement, be it in its national or internationalist forms: the failure to reflect, critically, on the past record of revolutionary movements. This pertains to models of alternative political and social orders. It pertains to the dangers inherent in any utopian, radicalized, mass movement that lacks clear forms of authority and decision-making. It also involves the espousal, spirited but onlinous, of alternative social orders that could work only if imposed by an authoritarian state. A pertinent contemporary example is that of radical environmentalism: the program of de-industrialization, and restricted consumption and travel, entailed by such ideas could only be established, and maintained, by a coercive state. In the international sphere, the simple invocation of solidarity may too often conceal interests of power, and manipulation. In the days of authoritarian Communist Parties, but equally in that of national and communal movements today, unconditional solidarity with repressive organizations may be at odds with any commitment to emancipatory values. Such a critical reflection has to apply, too, to the individuals often invoked for contemporary purposes: Lenin was a visionary, but also a cruel, pompous bigot; Che was a man of heroism and solidarity, but his econonlic programs were a disaster and his austere romanticism at times led to cruelty; Mao freed a quarter of mankind from imperialism, but also repeatedly plunged his society into barbarous conflict and socialexperimentation; Khomeini overthrew the Shah, but his social and political program was reactionary and repressive. A similar pause in romanticization might be applicable to some of the supposed components of the anti-globalization front today: few might defend Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or Ayatollah Khamenei, but there is perhaps too little questioning of the commitment to emancipatory values of the PKK in Turkey, Sendero Luminoso, the FARC in Colombia, the Chechen rebels, to name but some. The Zapatista movement has become for many an icon of hope: but, as contributors to this volume make clear, it is not always itself a model of democratic practice. More importantly, one has to ask if this is the most important experience in the Latin America of the I990S to study: it is part of, but only one part of, a broader crisis of the authoritarian PRI regime that beset Mexico and resulted in the rise on the one hand of the PRD and on the other of the election of Fox in 2000. An open assessment of challenges to authoritarian, and neoliberal, policies in Latin America in the I990S would also examine democratization in Brazil and Chile, and the experience of social movements, be they of women, workers or indigenous peoples, who engaged with reformist states. This need for a critical retrospective on the historical legacy of revolutions is, however, linked to another, perhaps even more pressing, issue, one that pervades the pages of this book, namely the relation of revolution to liberal democracy as a whole. Several contributors point out that where liberal democracy is established revolution is off the agenda. But this reflection may be taken further to ask the question of whether, faced with the alternative, one or other outcome is preferable. The implication of much 'revolutionary' writing over the past century has been that liberal democracy is to be denounced, and those who engage with and in it are reformists, dupes, or, in older language, 'class traitors'. Such a view lives on, in some of the contributions to this book, as in parts of the left. Yet this contrast of reform with revolution is not some eternal polarity. It too needs to be set in historical context, and seen for what it is, a product of the particular context of the twentieth century, starting with the split between the moderate and revolutionary factions of the socialist movement in I9I4. The costs of this division are evident enough, and it would be desirable, in the aftermath of the collapse of the revolutionary socialist models, to re-examine it (Therborn I989). Part of this re-examination would involve a questioning of the automatic antinomy of reform and revolution present in much contemporary and recent writing, and of the assumed contradictory relation of revolutionary ideas to those of another critical, and internationalist, trend produced by modernity: liberalism. This has immediate implications for the discussion in this book. In particular, it relates to an issue that is widely present in contemporary academic and political discussion, but that writers on revolution tend to avoid, namely the question of rights. The language of rights was long denounced by the left, and its revolutionary part, as a bourgeois myth, except where it was for tactical reasons deemed pertinent to use it, as with regard to workers' rights, or the right of nations to selfdetermination. The record of the revolutionary tradition, once it came to power, is a very mixed one: a strong commitment to certain social and economic rights, whose abolition by neoliberal policies many in the former Communist states regret; and a sustained, cruel and dogmatic denial of political rights, collective and individual. Yet the program of rights embodied in national, regional and international codes is, as much as any flamboyant radicalism, both a critique and a program that confronts the contemporary world. Faced with the record of the Communist tradition on rights on the one hand, and the aspirations of liberalism on the other, this disdain for rights, and the related adherence to a denunciation of reformism and liberalism, should be questioned. Invocations of a romanticized I968, of the nicer cases of armed struggle, or of Seattle may be fine for mobilization: they are not a serious answer to the problems of the contemporary world.

But recall that Fanon does not raise the issue of violence only as a means of expelling the rule of an outsider. He attributes to violence a therapeutic and creative value: It liberates the colonized from inferiority complex and turns them into active makers of his- tory. My purpose is to question the alleged therapeutic and creative value of violence. Let me begin by saying that Fanon's rejection of the rehabilitation of the past sounds excessive. His position would have been correct if, instead of characterizing the rehabilitation of the past as a useless and detrimental attempt, he had implied that it was not enough to obtain liberation. What makes his argument against the rehabilitation of the past even less receivable is that more than any- body else, Fanon has studied the profound and devastating effects of inferiority complex on the colonized peoples. His study suggests that this sense of inferiority has been inculcated by a deliberately disparaging discourse on the history of these peoples. If so, it is not clear why the attempt to refute the colonial discourse would be without effect. The discredit of the legacy of the colonized peoples having induced the inferiority complex, its rehabilitation should act as an antidote. This is to say that Fanon's resolution to convince the colonized that they have no other option than recourse to violence is at best exaggerated and highly restrictive. True, the method of ethnophilosophy, notably the claim to Otherness and the subsequent endorsement of the notion of race, can be debilitating. Still, other ways than racial classification exist to defend pluralism. Such is the case, for instance, of cultural pluralism, which draws diversity from cultural rather than biological inheritances. This position is all the more consistent the more identities are ascribed to inventions, a case in point being Fanon himself. To say that the nigger does not exist any more than the White man is to hold that what distinguishes people is less their biological determinants than the way they choose to define themselves. This fact of identities being constructs allows the cultural approach to pluralism. Sure enough, human beings can define themselves in a beneficial or detrimental way. Fanon was quite within his rights when he maintained that rehabilitation cannot come from songs and poems or when he charged racial classification with detrimental outcomes. But it is one thing to say that cultural rehabilitation is not enough or misguided and quite another to suggest that the refutation of the colonial discourse is useless. At any rate, Fanon's opposition to cultural rehabilitation does not yet indicate why violence should take the lead. His argument that the rehabilitation drawn from the past is an illusory wealth that distracts the colonized from fully identifying with their wretchedness and hence from growing into a real revolutionary force can be seriously contested. More yet, the question of whether violence is an efficient and relevant response to the challenge posed by Western hegemony must be posed against the back- ground of economic power being the major driving force of the modern world. No response is really defiant of the West if it does not pave the way to economic power. This issue of economic power is how Hegel took his revenge on Fanon. Does it not point out that the mastery of nature is the only dialectical, progressive way to liberation? Unlike the dialectics of Hegel in which the slave submits and turns his attention to work, Fanon wanted the colonized to rebel. Without the episode of violent confrontation, Fanon maintained, the colonized will never gain freedom and self-respect. Freedom remains a mere grant of the col- onizers so long as it is not wrenched from them. Galvanizing and fulfilling however the snatching of freedom may appear to be, in the context of colonial and neocolonial domination, it overlooks one important aspect of the question: The colonized are yet to understand the real reason for their subordination. They will understand the real reason if they ascribe their inferiority to their inability to dominate nature. But then, the issue is not so much the violent expulsion of the colonizer as the resolution to rise to the economic challenge. So long as the economic handicap persists, independence remains illusory. Fanon was right when he stated that independence is not enough but wrong when he stipulated that regeneration cannot occur without the moment of violent confrontation If anything, the idealization of rebellious attitude has led a generation of Third World scholars and leaders to assert their freedom through the rejection of Western values. This defiant attitude refuses the patience of learning; it identifies it with submission. It goes without saying that the depiction of the problems of the Third World in terms of bravado has been detrimental to its real interest. It has caused the devalorization of bourgeois virtues as well as impatience with expectations. Most of all, it has served as a justification for those numerous regimes that presented dictatorship as the only appropriate defense against imperialism. Antagonism toward imperialism became a much-praised virtue, the mark of a progressive regime, even though the defiance was empty talk. We hear an echo of this orientation coming from Fanon (1982) himself when, speaking of African bourgeoisie, he stated, "The combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly con- scious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class" (p. 175). Yet, without economic power, the violence that the colonized brandish against the West is anything but frightening. It remains the violence of arrows and spears against missiles and jet fighters. So long as violence is not backed by science and technology, the whole idea of considering the Third World as a rising revolutionary force intent on toppling the developed world is nothing but laughable. Insofar as the poor world is granted with a power of violence that it does not yet possess, Fanon can be justifiably accused of putting the cart before the horse. In being technologically insignificant, the violence of the Third World will be countered by real violence, to paraphrase Fanon. If violence thus resolves nothing because it cannot even be real violence without the power of technology, the narrowing of the technological gap emerges as the only remedy for Western hegemony and, hence, the only dissolvent of the inferiority complex. Let alone curing the disease, the prescription of bravado retards the administration of the real remedy. But there is more to the matter than this. Fanon denounced Negritude and ethnophilosophy as an internalization of the colonial world. The whole question is to know whether the valorization of violence and the vision of human relationships in terms of violent confrontations are not themselves a projection of the violent colonial world.The question makes sense in view of the fact that Fanon endowed violence with a curative mission. If violence is an outcome of colonial rule, it is not clear how it can possess curative virtues. The attempt to decontaminate one's soul from such a perversion would be the right attitude. The point, one may object, is that the decontamination requires the phase of violent response, there being no doubt that for Fanon, the colonial neurosis will not dissipate unless the accumulated frustration is provided with an outlet. But then, this therapy of violence needs to explain how capitulation to an impulse amounts to a victory over that impulse. All ethical thinking teaches that resistance to impulses is the manner the will and the good triumph. Even those theories that resent resistance admit that the best way to deal with uncontrolled impulses is to sublimate them, that is, to channel them into superior and creative works. Fanon rightly took note of the accumulated anger of the colonized people but never shows how this immense anger could be transformed into a creative work. His proposal was not to sublimate anger; it was rather to let it explode. But is capitulation to anger likely to have a positive outcome when it is but providing an outlet to destructive impulses? What the Third World needs is to give in to its anger less and to channel it into con- structive works. The sublimation of violence, and that alone, would be the right therapy. Alluding to the curative and creative role of sublimation, the apostle of nonviolence, namely, Mahatma Gandhi, had the following words: I have learned by bitter experience, through a period of close upon thirty years, the one supreme lesson, namely, to conserve my anger, to control it, and just as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, so also our anger, conserved and controlled, can result in a power that becomes irresistible throughout the world. (Green, 1993, p. 230) When instead of being conserved and controlled, anger is given full vent, the outcome is rarely positive. History has repeatedly confirmed the sticking mania of violence. Guerilla movements interiorize violence so deeply that despite their often-generous goal, they end up by instituting violent regimes for the simple reason that they have lost the sense of true human relationships. In this regard, the Algerian case is instructive. As an active participant in the Algerian war of liberation, Fanon believed that the ideals of the war will preside over the emergence of a modem and peaceful Algerian society. That independent Algeria is still torn by violent conflicts and little engaged in a resolute process of modernization invalidates the alleged creative role of violence. This is the time to reflect on the theory of nonviolence as developed by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The main lesson is that no matter the degree of oppression, the best human response is never to imitate oppressors; it is rather to refuse their world, to decontaminate one's soul by the affirmation of positive human values. Opposition to oppression becomes redeeming only when it understands that as one Gandhi's commentator puts it, "To resist it violently would be to yield to the conquerors's ideology" (Green, 1993, p. 195). To tell the truth, the association of violence with the affirmation of humaneness sounds strange. Violence has more to do with animality than humanity. The affirmation of the human by way of violence, which is the value of the colonizer, is what the colonized should strongly reject. Because colonizers are acting like beasts, there is no reason to aspire after their values. Instead, one must refuse to become beasts like them. Once violence is internalized, it will sully all the behavior of the colonized, who would then behave in the same violent way vis-a- vis each other. This violent disposition has a hand in the failure of most Third World countries to institute democratic societies. Grant violence with the power to provide solutions, and no reason exists to assume that the problems of postcolonial societies do not fall under the same treatment. Viewed from this necessity of cleansing the colonized soul of the accumulated anger, Negritude's appeal to the particular essence of the Black soul appears as a protection against colonial contaminations, as an attempt to preserve a mea- sure of human countenance in a world disfigured by violence. The crux of the matter is that Fanon mistakes the refusal of contamination for submission. Yet, Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is far from implying any attitude of submission. First, nonviolence implies courage, commitment, and willingness to risk one's life, in short, all the positive elements that make up the seduction of the violent option. It even reproduces them in a higher form because it urges for active disobedience and noncooperation in the face of injustice. The practice of such activism requires greater control on one's fear. To show that nonviolence squarely asserts what the violent option wants to assert-namely, dignity, courage, readiness to sacrifice one's life, and so on-a Gandhi's follower has this to say: For the majority of mankind, the heroic virtues of disdain of personal comforts, constant alertness, readiness to lose one's life for a cause transcending one's self, are forged on the anvil of the battle- field. But the believer in non-violent resistance can forge these same heroic virtues for himself on the anvil of a moral equivalent of war ... the substitution of non-violent non-cooperation or civil dis- obedience for violent warfare. (Muzumdar, 1952, p. 21) But in addition to proving courage and dignity, nonviolent resistance has the clear impact of denouncing the barbarism of the colonizer, thereby drawing a clear demarcation line between the values of the oppressor and the ideals of liberation. Most of all, in demystifying and rejecting violence, it graciously prepares a bright and democratic future, the very one where force will have no say. Whereas the myth of violence ends up by valorizing violence as a legitimate resource, Gandhi's nonviolent option banishes forever the use of force from human society. Not even against the colonizer was violence used: Such is the norm that it establishes.

Any granting of compensation in Australia is often framed by the state and judiciary as an exceptional event and not linked to redressing the settler colonial process that underpins the compensation award. This is at odds with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ calls for reparations as a means through which the process of settler colonialism can be recognized, unsettled and destabilized (Newfong, 1972/2014). Equally, as demonstrated by the case of the East Kimberley, Aboriginal sovereignty is constantly in danger of being undermined by the settler state, often through punitive, workfarist social security policies. This danger can be partially avoided with more unconditional redistribution and welfare, but can only be fully eschewed via a recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty along with the dismantling of settler colonial structures such as the contemporary social security system. This means that a more just distribution and access to a rightful share of national wealth (for instance, via a UBI for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) would need to be one part of a broader reparations framework that also includes land rights, treaties, self-determination and the truth-telling of past and ongoing contemporary violence. Grants for collective community-led projects are also a way to make up for lost assets and associated inequality (Altman and Klein, 2017). These aspects together could begin to destabilize the structures of settler colonialism while honouring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. A UBI, perhaps in the form of something similar to the U+BI proposed by the Movement for Black Lives, could be a mechanism for just distribution as long as it also provides scope for recognition and the unravelling of ongoing settler colonial structures of repression and dispossession. It would be a way to replace punitive conditionalities on payments such as those attached to the Cashless Debit Card and CDP. But payments to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples need also to be controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples themselves. In paying for the plus in the U+BI formulation, the Australian state would also need to acknowledge not just the past but also the contemporary violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, such as what has been done in the name of ‘welfare’.

I couldn’t spare empathy for a white woman whose biggest fear was something that hadn’t happened yet and might not. Meanwhile, my most significant fears were in motion: women and men dying in cells after being wrongly imprisoned, choked out for peddling cigarettes, or shot to death during ‘routine’ traffic stops. I twitch when my partner is late, worried that a cantankerous cop has brutalized or shot him because he wouldn’t prostrate himself. As a woman of color, I am aware of the multiple types of violence that threaten me currently—not theoretically. Street harassment, excessively affecting me as a Black woman, has blindsided me since I was eleven. A premature body meant being catcalled before I’d discussed the birds and the bees. It meant being followed, whistled at, or groped. As an adult, while navigating through neighborhoods with extinguished street lights, I noticed the correlation between women’s safety and street lighting—as well as the fact that Black and brown neighborhoods were never as brightly lit as those with a more significant white population. I move quickly through those unlit spaces, never comforted by the inevitable whirl of red and blue sirens. In fact, it’s always been the contrary. Ever so often, cops approach me in their vehicle’s encouraging me to “Hurry along,” “Stay on the sidewalk,” or “Have a good night.” My spine stiffening, I never believed they endorsed my safety. Instead, I worried that I’d be accused of an unnamed accusation, corned by a cop who preys on Black women, or worse. A majority of my 50-minute bus ride from the southside of Chicago to the north to join these women for the birthday celebration was spent reading articles about citywide shootings. I began with a Chicago Tribute piece titled “33 people shot, seven fatally, in 13 hours,” then toppled into a barrage of RIP posts on Facebook and ended with angry posts about police brutality on Tumblr. You might guess, by the time I arrived to dinner I wasn’t in the mood for the “I can’t believe we’re all going to die because Trump is an idiot” shit. I shook my head, willing the meal to be over, and was grateful when the check arrived just as someone was asking me about my hair. My thinking wasn’t all too different from Michael Harriot’s ‘Why Black America Isn’t Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust.” While the meal was partly pleasant, I departed thinking, “fear of nuclear demolition is just some white shit.” Sadly, that thought would not last long. I still vibe with Harriot’s statement, “Black people have lived under the specter of having our existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped onto the shore at Jamestown Landing.” However, a friend—a Black friend—ignited my nuclear paranoia by sharing theories about when it might happen and who faced the greatest threat. In an attempt to ease my friend’s fear, I leaned in to listen but accidentally toppled down the rabbit hole too. I forked through curated news feeds. I sifted through “fake news,” “actual news,” and foreign news sources. Suddenly, an idea took root: nuclear strike would disproportionately impact Black people, brown people, and low-income individuals. North Korea won’t target the plain sight racists of Portland, Oregon, the violently microaggressive liberals of the rural Northwest, or the white-hooded klansmen of Diamondhead, Mississippi. No, under the instruction of the supreme leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea will likely strike densely populated urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. These locations stand-out as [are] targets for a nuclear strike because they are densely populated U.S. population centers. Attacking the heart of the nation or populous cities would translate to more casualties. With that in mind, it’s not lost on me that the most populous cities in the United States boast sizeable diverse populations, or more plainly put: Black populations. This shit stresses me out! There’s a creeping chill that follows me, a silent alarm that rings each time my Google alert chimes letting me know that Donald Trump has yet again provoked Kim Jong-Un, a man who allegedly killed his very own uncle. I’ve grown so pressed by the idea of nuclear strike holocaust that my partner and I started gathering non-perishables, candlesticks, a hand-crank radio, and other must-buy items that can be banked in a shopping cart. The practice of preparing for a nuclear holocaust strike sometimes feels comical, particularly when acknowledging that there has long been a war on Black people in this country. Blackness is bittersweet in flavor. We are blessed with the melanized skin, the MacGyver-like inventiveness of our foremothers, and our blinding brightness—but the anti-blackness that we experience is also blinding as well as stifling. We are stuck by rigged systems, punished with the prison industrial complex, housing discrimination, pay discrimination, and worse. We get side-eyes from strangers when we’re “loitering,” and the police will pull us over for driving “too fast” in a residential neighborhood. We get murdered for holding cell phones while standing in our grandmother’s backyard. The racism that strung up our ancestors, kept them sequestered to the back of the bus and kept them in separate and unequal schools still lives. It lives, and it’s more palpable than dormant. To me, this means one thing: Trump’s America isn’t an unfortunate circumstance, it’s a homecoming event that’s hundreds of years in the making, no matter how many times my white friends’ say, “He’s not my president.” In light of this homecoming, we now flirt with a new, larger fear of a Black genocide. America has always worked towards Black eradication through a steady stream of life-threatening inequality, but nuclear war on American soil would be swift. And for this reason I’ve grown tired of whiteness being at the center of the nuclear conversation. The race-neutral approach to the dialogue, and a tendency to continue to promote the idea that missiles will land in suburban and rural backyards, instead of inner-city playgrounds, is false. “The Day After,” the iconic, highest-rated television film in history, aired November 20, 1983. More than 100 million people tuned in to watch a film postulating a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film, which would go on to affect President Ronald Reagan and policymakers’ nuclear intentions, shows the “true effects of nuclear war on average American citizens.” The Soviet-targeted areas featured in the film include Higginsville, Kansas City, Sedalia, Missouri, as well as El Dorado Springs, Missouri. They depict the destruction of the central United States, and viewers watch as full-scale nuclear war transforms middle America into a burned wasteland. Yet unsurprisingly, the devastation from the attack is completely white-washed, leaving out the more likely victims which are the more densely populated (Black) areas. Death tolls would be high for white populations, yes, but large-scale losses of Black and brown folks would outpace that number, due to placement and poverty. That number would be pushed higher by limited access to premium health care, wealth, and resources. The effects of radiation sickness, burns, compounded injuries, and malnutrition would throttle Black and brown communities and would mark us for generations. It’s for that reason that we have to do more to foster disaster preparedness among Black people where we can. Black people deserve the space to explore nuclear unease, even if we have competing threats, anxieties, and worries. Jacqui Patterson, Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, once stated: African American communities are disproportionately vulnerable to and impacted by natural (and unnatural) catastrophes. Our socio-economic vulnerability is based on multiple factors including our lack of wealth to cushion us, our disproportionate representation in lower quality housing stock, and our relative lack of mobility, etc.

Although I stated earlier that there is no “correct” terminology for indigenous people, semantics is certainly an issue that evokes strong feelings. Many people express clear preferences for certain terms (e.g., Native American rather than American Indian or First Nations people rather than more commonly used terms). Indigenous people who attempt to dictate to other indigenous people what they should call themselves replicate the oppression that has been imposed on them. In recent years many Native nations have begun to return to their traditional names rather than use those imposed by external forces. While many people, myself included, view this as a positive step toward cultural revitalization and pride, it would be inappropriate to impose this requirement on others. As a child I was raised referring to myself as Sioux. As I grew older and the political climate changed, I took pride in calling myself Lakota. It is not unusual, however, for some to continue using the term Sioux. This is their right and reflects aspects of their identity. Although the names that indigenous groups were given by others often have a derogatory origin, we only make this worse when indigenous people who consider themselves decolonized mock others who continue to use such terms. While we as indigenous people were busy guarding against cultural appropriation, we may have missed a much bigger threat to indigenous continuity. Indeed, there are some nonnatives who pose as Natives and some Natives who sell traditions and spirituality for a profit, but the self-appointed “identity police,” those who divide communities and accuse others of not being “Indian” enough because they practice the wrong religion, have the wrong politics, use the wrong label for themselves, or do not have the right skin color, should also be an issue of concern. Some indigenous people ask, “Are you Indian, or are you Christian?” as if these are mutually exclusive categories. I have seen caring indigenous people driven to tears at their jobs at a Native community center when they were berated for having some white ancestry. People have been publicly humiliated because someone decided that their tribal affiliations were inappropriate. This harassment and badgering is conducted by indigenous people, against indigenous people. The roots for this type of behavior probably lie deep in the accusers’ own insecurities about identity and racism learned as part of the colonization process.

Indigenous identity is a truly complex and somewhat controversial topic. There is little agreement on precisely what constitutes an indigenous identity, how to measure it, and who truly has it. Indeed, there is not even a consensus on appropriate terms. Are we talking about Indians, American Indians, Natives, Native Americans, indigenous people, or First Nations people? Are we talking about Sioux or Lakota? Navajo or Dine? Chippewa, Ojibway, or Anishnabe? Once we get that sorted out, are we talking about race, ethnicity, cultural identity, tribal identity, acculturation, enculturation, bicultural identity, multicultural identity, or some other form of identity? The topic of indigenous identity opens a Pandora’s box of possibilities, and to try to address them all would mean doing justice to none. This article provides background information on three facets of identity—self-identification, community identification, and external identification—followed by a brief overview of measurement issues and my reflections on how internalized oppression/ colonization is related to identity. The terms Native and indigenous are used interchangeably to refer to the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America. These are not, per se, the “right” terms or the only terms that could have been used. They reflect my preferences.

My project shifts questions of status—such as “Who is the settler?”—to ask instead how subjects are produced by social processes: “Who, under what conditions, inherits the power to represent or enact settler colonialism?” It thus responds to political demands that subjects who inherit the power of settler colonialism challenge their inheritance, which I do by investigating and clarifying the genealogies through which such subjects might arise. For instance, white-supremacist settler colonialism distinguishes “Native” from “settler” so as to naturalize whiteness in teleologies of modernity, civilization, and citizenship that predict Indigenous elimination and settler replacement. White subjects may appear—if their locations by nation, class, gender, sexuality, and disability can be made to match—as the settlers differentiated from the Natives whose lands and histories they inherit. Yet this definition is troubled immediately by the logic of elimination’s having operated precisely via amalgamation. Lawrence and Malinda Maynor Lowery explain that the Native identities of mixed-blood Native people are invalidated by their racialization as white or black through the policing of Native status and the redrawing of the color line. Maria Saldana-Portillo further explains how mixed Indigenous ancestry is produced by national projects of mestizaje to replace specific Indigenous identifications or land claims, and that whether conforming to white supremacy or indigenizing mestizos/as such projects can remain in tension with Native communities that retain a traditional collective identity. In light of these complexities, we cannot assume that all who are forcibly aligned with whiteness, blackness, or mestizaje are “non-Native,” even though their lives may be meaningfully defined by a lived difference from Native nationality and collectivity.

In pipe ceremonies, speeches and leaflets, spearfishing supporters portrayed the violence against Indians on Wisconsin’s lakes as part and parcel of the suppression of human rights everywhere, linking the assaults to other crimes against people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and even on students demonstrating for free speech in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. Treaty supporters portrayed solidarity with their cause as action against injustice everywhere. People active in opposing US military intervention in Central American and in aiding indigenous refugees from those conflicts proved particularly receptive to participation as nonviolent witnesses in northern Wisconsin. Treaty supporters created composite identities for whites as nonviolent witnesses against violence, as environmentalists, as human rights advocates, as anti-racists. These identities allowed individuals many different points of entry (and exit) that proved valuable to the struggle. The nonviolent witnesses became a statewide network exposing the anti-treaty forces as overt racists whose legal claims lacked merit. Environmentalist learned that treaty rights offered a unique legal opportunity for contesting pollution of the region’s waterways, forests, fish and food supply. Anti-war activists discovered that making peace could require them to act close to home as well as in venues overseas and far away. Anti-racists recognized that the new right racial project contained internal contradictions and that some opponents might become allies under the right conditions. The ferocity of white supremacist violence proved to be something of a paper tiger when confronted by disciplined collective responses. For all their talk about walking in the footsteps of Dr. King and the 1960s civil rights movement, the white supremacists leading the attacks on spearfishers had none of Dr. King’s vision, no long-term strategy, no willingness to spend nights in jail in defiance of federal court injunctions as principled acts of civil disobedience, no capacity to seek reconciliation with their enemies, no ability to envision or enact what Dr. King called ‘the beloved community’.

The subject formation and governance inherent to settling also involves processes of ordering, which govern the very notions of belonging. These processes of ordering, such as those based on white supremacy, not only enhance our privileges through exploitation, but also further enable my family and I to feel at home in other’s homeland(s), or as the case may be, to disparage and even flee at the sight of Other(s). Belonging, after all, requires the discursive production and circulation of those who do not belong. “To settle” then remains differentiated in terms of race, national-origin, religion, class, dis/ability, sexuality, and gender. All of these differentiations though are underwritten by the dispossession of Indigenous lands and eschewal of Indigenous governance orders. So while all non-Indigenous peoples residing in settler states may be complicit in settlement, making us all settlers, not all settlers are created equal. Subject- formation in settler colonies works in multiple ways, privileging in multiple ways, and settler colonialism’s conditions of possibility rely on the differentiated forms of subject-formation and privilege. For myself, as a white, class-privileged, temporarily able-bodied, heterosexual, university-educated cis-male, the social world really is crafted in my image... In spite of this worldly reflection, it is not the world that I want to live in. Thus, the term “settler” and the reason for its use, which brings forth the intimate and affective relationships to ancestral, social, cultural, economic, and political histories and presents which shape this world, necessarily leads not to pride, but rather to shame, frustration, alienation, and anger towards myself, other settlers, as well as the structures of settler colonialism. These feelings though also potentially signal an opening, a recognition of an un(der)realized interdependence. However, alone, these feelings are not sufficient. After all, I cannot just critique or declare that this world falls short of my desires and expect it to transform itself. Nor can I ignore the power differentials between settlers, as such willful acts risk stalling the decolonial engine. Instead, if these desires and simultaneous feelings of shame, frustration, alienation, and anger are to be at all transformative, they must be accompanied by thought and practice attentive to their respective sources; they must be guided by accountability and respect, care and renewal, with urgency and insurgency, to address and destroy the parasitical relations that exist between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples, as well as to support those (potentially) good relations that already exist, and those that we wish to establish between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples.

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

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

(Mark, ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance,’ pp. 7-10)

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

(Patrick & David, ‘Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 6, Issue 2)

It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of capital expansion and accordingly to be formations lodged in the past. This introduction argues that the ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand military occupation and the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation. It also explores the ways in which the formations of the contemporary state, whether military, economic, political, legal or cultural, may remain grounded in apparently peripheral or outmoded modes of domination. Understanding the neoliberal regime of accumulation in terms of its continuing debt to such histories will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of resistance and dissent in the present. We live in an epoch that is witnessing the transformation of the state and its governmental institutions. The so-called global war on terror, which has been used to legitimate an inordinate increase in the development of surveillance technologies and their deployment against the citizenry, has coincided with global regimes of austerity. Increased state expenditure on armaments and security devices produced by private corporations goes along with cuts to, and the privatization of, state-furnished public services, from fundamental utilities such as power and water to schooling, healthcare and social welfare. This new mode of accumulation generates the requirement for a new form of state. In this still-emergent state formation, which we may call neoliberal, the state's role is being redrawn to furnish a conduit for the more rapid distribution of what were once public goods into the hands of corporations. This new mode of accumulation is effectively a renewed movement of enclosure, this time of a ‘second commons’ – that is, of those public goods historically wrested from the state by social movements in compensation for the original loss of commons: social security, public utilities, education and, in the form of both urban and national parklands, even the remnants of public space. These public patrimonies of the modern liberal state that emerged from an earlier moment of enclosure and dispossession represent vast storehouses of capital, resources, services and infrastructure. Held in common for generations, these are now targeted for expropriation and exploitation. The crisis of profitability that confronted capitalism in the early 1970s led to economic restructuring on a vast scale, from the off-shoring of manufacture, enabled by post-Fordist modes of ‘flexible’ production and by containerization, to the sustained assault on the welfare state. In the so-called ‘industrialized world’, such measures took place mostly piecemeal and therefore over an extended period. Elsewhere, the transformation was concerted, violent and totalizing in its ambitions, requiring the establishment of fascist (or, in the State Department's euphemism, ‘authoritarian’) regimes. Famously, Salvador Allende's Chile was the first state to be subjected to the kind of make-over that would furnish the model, sometimes partial, sometimes wholesale, for what was required to impose the emerging neoliberal mode of governance: a violent coup, the disposal of political opponents, the rapid privatization of the economy, the suppression of trades unions and other democratic social movements, and the installation of a severe and permanent regime of policing in the name of public order. Naomi Klein has termed the principles that guide such radical transformations of whole societies ‘the shock doctrine’ and suggested that the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America furnished the ‘laboratories’ for the emerging legal and political institutions that neoliberalism, initially dubbed ‘monetarism’ or ‘Thatcherism’, would seek to install. Later, she argues, such naked interventions as military coups would be less frequently required, economic crisis itself being sufficient pretext for the imposition of capitalist ‘reforms’ that had been tested in the violent laboratories of the global south.1 Even then, however, the necessity for the increasing deployment of intensified policing remains: part of the ‘shock’ that economic crisis administers, like natural disasters and the artificial disasters of war and occupation that have proven peculiarly profitable to capitalist corporations, is the large-scale destruction of older productive forces and the unemployment of large numbers of people, many of whom are consigned to a permanent class of the redundant or under-employed. The increasing reliance on automation in production as well as the extortion of higher rates of productivity from workers faced with precarious employment in deindustrializing economies have made redundant populations seem likely to become a constant feature of neoliberal states. Elsewhere, in the former colonial world, huge subaltern segments of the populace are unlikely ever to be absorbed into the labor market in a meaningful way. Faced with the prospect of disaffected, unincorporable masses, both internationally and domestically, the problem for the neoliberal state – for which this surplus population is a condition of its economic regime – is how to manage and contain the threat it poses. The paramilitarization of the police domestically and the deployment of the actual military in the operations of permanent war redefined as policing have become the norm, lately under the alibi of the war on terror and homeland security. In this asymmetrical warfare of the entitled against the disenfranchised, the deadly if preposterous situation emerges that the most highly armed states in the world assure their populations that they (or their interests) are under a permanent state of siege, diffusely threatened by rag-tag platoons of the dispossessed who, despite the considerable differences between them, uniformly qualify for the indiscriminate designation ‘terrorists’. To note this is neither to endorse the kaleidoscopic variety of ideologies and religious beliefs that motivate such groups, nor to collapse into a single framework of resistance the very diverse phenomena they represent. It is, rather, to problematize a narrative that, for over a decade, has legitimated the violent rise of the neoliberal state, with its multiplying encroachments on the civil liberties that were, at least in name, the hallmark of liberalism; its endless conduct of war in the name of peace and freedom; its inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum seekers internationally; its infliction of austerity, incarceration and police brutality on growing segments of its populations domestically; and its arbitrary and lethal interventions globally in the name of humanitarianism. From the hard right to the liberal center, from the faux frontier bluster of George W. Bush to the moralizing condescension of Barack Obama, the same rhetoric of defensive and pre-emptive action against enemies that externally surround or internally infest the nation reigns. At the same time, anti-immigrant scare-mongering conflates migrants, whether driven by economic or political necessities, with terrorist enemies, militarizing the borders of states in the name of security. Never has Walter Benjamin's aphorism that, from the perspective of the oppressed, ‘the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’2 seemed to express so general a condition. It is highly significant that the distinctive characteristics of this emergent global regime have been locally prefigured in modes of repression developed internally by settler colonial states. As Israeli architect and specialist on urban warfare, Eyal Weizman, has argued, for instance, the West Bank can be seen as an extreme model – perhaps a laboratory – of a territorial and urban conflict that can take place in other places. Globalization takes the periphery straight to the center, the frontier between the First and Third worlds starts running through the middle of world cities.3 Weizmann's phrasing signals a genealogy for contemporary transformations in the longer history of colonialism as a repertoire of both tropes and practices of social control, brought together today in Israel's operations as a settler colonial state, anomalous only in that its project of expansion remains unfinished.4 The notable convergence of Israel and the USA (together with an ever-compliant Australia), expressed as much in their political solidarity as in their military and security collaborations, suggests to us a wider historical affinity between states that share a settler colonial history, one that continues to impress itself on both psychic and institutional formations. In this respect, to Weizmann's invocation of the first and third worlds, we should add the histories of dispossession and resistance through which Indigenous peoples of the ‘fourth world’ have shaped our understanding of the dynamics of settler colonialism and its lessons for the present. We suggest that the fundamental continuity between the historical development of European settler colonialism and the present-day development of the neoliberal world order resides in the exigencies of managing surplus populations. So far as settlers have been concerned, the salient surplus has, of course, been the Native population, whose refractory presence has prompted a range of techniques of elimination – from outright homicide to various forms of removal and/or confinement, and, once their numbers have been appropriately reduced in the post-frontier era, to Natives’ assimilation into settler society – techniques that have met with mixed success in the face of Native modes of resistance which have varied as creatively as the settlers’ own repertoire of strategies. In this overall historical process, the key shift is the ending of the frontier, which generally coincides with the consolidation of the settler state, and which is typically marked by intensified programs of Native assimilation, so many mopping-up exercises for civilization. Thus it is consistent that Israel, which remains bogged down in an incomplete expansion of its frontier, should rigorously eschew any semblance of Native assimilation, insisting instead on the sharpest of distinctions between Palestinians, who may or may not be citizen/residents of the Israeli state, and members of the so-called ‘Jewish nation’ wherever they may live. The exclusion of the Palestinian population is particularly apparent in the ease with which shifting economic and demographic circumstances – especially the large-scale immigration of Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) and Russians – have transformed what was once a reserve Palestinian labor force into a largely unemployed surplus. Bereft of potential productive utility, and with pauperization attenuating its value as a market, the Palestinian population has become subject to policies of removal and confinement that recall those adopted by other settler states while the expansion of their frontiers remained incomplete. Locally, therefore, Israel is straightforwardly settler colonial and bears comparison in important respects to the respective histories of settler societies such as Australia or the USA in the eras before these societies had completed the initial seizure of Native peoples’ land and inheritances. Globally, however, the twenty-first century context in which Israel is seeking to complete the seizure of what remains of Mandate Palestine differs crucially from the nineteenth-century context in which settlers in Australia and North America completed their seizure of the Native estate. Globally, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America took place in the context of (and formatively enabled) the titanic growth of industrial capitalism. As Karl Polanyi observed, doing scant justice to Marx, an unprecedented feature of the emergence of industrial society was the sheer scale of the investment that was involved in factories. Not even shipbuilding had previously come close to the financial input required by the establishment of factories, with their heavy plant and infrastructure. Nor had any previous investment required maintenance for the length of time that it took factories to become profitable. To vouchsafe these investments, and to project factories’ viability forward through generations, required the total reorganization of society, complete with novel forms of surveillance, policing and war-making, that marked industrialization in the nineteenth century.5 This much is hardly novel. For our purposes, the crucial feature of the great nineteenth-century transformation is that it did not necessarily conduce to permanently superfluous populations. Rather, working populations grew dramatically. In addition to providing capital with its labor, the industrial proletariat provided a market for the fruits of its own alienated production. True, temporary labor surpluses were generated in the course of the periodic slumps and depressions that overtook the capitalist economy, especially after the 1870s, but this labor could be re-employed, even if only for warfare, once industrial demand was reinstated. Moreover, throughout this period, colonial settlement provided an outlet for the Malthusian excess, industrial society's surplus poor, who departed their Dickensian slums for Indigenous people's stolen homelands. The present situation is entirely different from the socially expansive context of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. As many have noted, in the phenomenon of automation, capitalism has, as it were, over-succeeded, not only freeing itself from dependence on troublesome human labor but thereby simultaneously generating a population that, in contrast to waged labor, is not even much use as a market. As distinct from resistant Natives, this human surplus is produced within capitalism rather than external to it. In common with Natives, however, it obstructs rather than enables capitalist expansion. It is in relation to this community of redundancy, we believe, that settler colonialism's inventory of local strategies is becoming increasingly congenial to neoliberalism's emergent world order. As we have noted elsewhere, in relation to Black people in the contemporary USA, the blatant racial zoning of large cities and the penal system suggests that, once colonized people outlive their utility, settler societies can fall back on the repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby they have also dealt with the Native surplus.6 In this connection, we might view the phenomenon of warehousing, characterized by Klein, Jeff Halper and, above all, by Mike Davis,7 as prefigured in the late-nineteenth-century Indian reservation. The comparison may also serve to qualify the pessimism that consideration of this topic understandably engenders. Territorial concentration is both confining and enabling. From the settlers’ point of view, Indian reservations may have originated as holding pens for conquered peoples, but they also constitute unsurrendered, albeit diminished, repositories of Native sovereignty, focal points for survival and renewal.

Settler Colonialism and Antiblackness In the United States and other slave estates, the remaking of land into property was/is accompanied by the remaking of (African) persons into property, into chattel (Spillers, 2003; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wilderson, 2010; see also King, 2014 on Black life as fungible). To attend to the specificity of antiblackness and its fusing to Indigenous erasure through settler colonialism is to set aside the catchall term racism. It is to recognize that, as Holland (2012) observes, (W)hen we see and say “race,” regardless of how much we intend to understand race as being had by everyone, our examples of racial being and racist targets are often grounded in black matter(s) In this instance, the black body is the quintessential sign for subjection, for a particular experience that it must inhabit and own all by itself. (p. 4, emphasis in original) The remaking of land and bodies into property is necessary for settlement onto other people’s land. Discourses and practices of property and dispossession are central to the hegemonic relations of settler colonialism and slavery in the United States. Implications Thus, in our view, analyses of settler colonial dispossessions are incomplete when they do not connect Indigenous erasure and antiblackness. Logics of settler colonialism insist that Indigenous peoples disappear at the same time that they require Black life to be kept landless. Settler colonialism is a network of structures, narratives, and justifications which promote the ascendancy of settler ontologies, especially of property and state violence against Indigenous peoples and Black peoples. Frank Wilderson (2010) points to the antagonisms built into the ways that Indigenous peoples can access humanity and the ways that Black peoples are blocked from accessing humanity because of the ways that their relationships to land are differently structured in settler colonialism. By attending to settler colonial dispossessions rather than theories of dispossession related to colorism or capital accumulation (alone), it is possible to see dispossession as not just material but always also connected to possible relations to place and land. In theorizing and using a settler colonial construction of race, we bring together the otherwise seemingly disconnected phenomena of Indigenous erasure and Black life as ungeographic (McKittrick, 2006; see also Tuck et al., 2014).

Neoliberalism and settler colonialism Epistemology, economic strategy, and moral code rolled into one, neoliberalism refers to the reliance on market-based relationships to explain how the world works, or how it should work. It treasures both individual self-responsibility and social efficiency, aligning the purposes of public institutions to the primacy of the market. Though many scholars position neoliberalism as recent or emergent paradigm, Indigenous and anti-colonial scholars recognize neoliberalism as only the latest configuration of colonial imperialism. Indeed, neoliberalism is an extension of/ the most recent iteration of (settler) colonialism (Bargh, 2007; See also Postero & Zamosc, 2006; Bhavani, Foran, Kurian & Munshi, 2009). Often overlooked by non-Indigenous scholars, indigenous decolonizing theory is a rich resource for theorizing neoliberalism and dispossession (Tuck, 2012). In settler colonial societies such as the United States, rights of property and occupation rely upon discovery narratives. Settler colonies were/are not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labor, but from land, which required/requires displacing Indigenous peoples from their homelands (Wolfe, 1999, p. 1). Settler colonization is not a fixed event in time, but a structure that continues to contour the lives of Indigenous people, settlers, and all other subjects of the settler colonial nation-state. Because settler colonialism has not only shaped how the US nation-state has managed Indigenous people, but all peoples on presumably valuable land (recast as “property”), indigenous theories of settler colonialism and contestations of that structure are especially relevant to the theorizing of urban space and urban schooling. Settler colonialism is the context of the dispossession and erasure of poor youth and youth of color in urban public schools, and Indigenous responses to settler colonialism provide salient insights for urban school reform. My empirical work has been on how neoliberal logic produces the conditions of school pushout, but an important recurrent theme is how neoliberalization (the insertion of market values into non-market sectors of human activity) has worked defund the public sphere and increase the size and influence of private sectors. Neoliberal restructuring has focused on building a seamless global market, at the same time diminishing the public sphere in ways that make everyday people more politically and economically vulnerable, more fully exposed to the dips and turns of the speculative market, and ultimately, more poor. Maori scholar Maria Bargh notes the ways in which neoliberalism is balanced upon “assumptions about the individual and the market as having particular natural identities,” (2007, p. 12) assumptions which prop up neoliberal arguments as objective (thus scientific) and humanistic (thus progressive). Neoliberalism represents a Translation of many older colonial beliefs, once expressed explicitly, now expressed implicitly, into language and practices which are far more covert about their civilizing mission… A key feature of neoliberal policies is this conflict between not wanting to be or appear paternalistic, wanting to be seen to allow people the ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment to govern themselves, but at the same time distrusting the abilities of some peoples, particularly indigenous peoples, to do so. (p. 13 & 14) Indigenous theories engage neoliberal logic and neoliberalization as part of a very particular trajectory of human thinking (not inevitable) and as reflective of shared aims with logics of settler colonialism and manifest destiny.

Smith’s critique is meant to be a generative one, insisting on making real connections between Native and queer studies for the future of both fields and all of the peoples these fields engage. She further argues that “while both ‘tradition’ and ‘the future’ must be critically engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed” (ibid.). We also place importance on ideas of Indigenous futures, which are always also interlaced with Indigenous traditions, histories, and even ghosts, in our own theories of decolonization. Eve Tuck (2009) has written about desire-based research as a key counterpoint to damage-centered research frameworks, which too often present Indigenous peoples as broken, arguing that “[d]esire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. . . . Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future” (417). Angie Morrill (forthcoming) further writes that “[g]hosts haunt the future with expectations,” noting that we share desires with ghosts, therefore Native desire is a kind of time machine. For Maile Arvin (forthcoming), decolonization involves regeneration, which she defines as “desires and practices oriented by transforming settler colonial dispossession and recreating a people-possessed (rather than an individually self-possessed) Indigenous future.” In each of our approaches toward decolonization, we do not intend to recommend to our readers one proper set of decolonial practices, but rather create spaces in which decolonization can be deeply considered and experimented with in the specific contexts of different places. Overall, with this challenge to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing, we insist that it is most important to acknowledge Indigenous concepts and epistemologies as complex, knowledgeable, and full of both history and desire. Engaging Indigenous epistemologies, without appropriating them or viewing them merely as a mystical metaphor, is a method of decolonization that could play a significant role in creating a future for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing.

<Conquest alone allows colonialism to begin.[6] Colonialism can only continue, however, through colonisation of the mind and the consolidation of a far-reaching ‘inferiority complex’. Colonialism ‘holds a people in its grip’ by controlling its future and by distorting and destroying its past, and by ‘emptying the native’s brain of all form and content’ (WE, 210). Once established in its position of military superiority, the colonial culture produces, through a whole range of media, an unending ‘series of propositions that slowly and subtly—with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio—work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs’ (BS, 118). Successful colonisation leads the oppressed to identify with the world view of the oppressor. Since the colonial cultural machine leads one to believe that ‘one is a Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual’, so then, encouraged on all sides to identify with what is white, I come to ‘distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being’. ‘Voluntary’ internalisation of this distrust completes the colonial project, and re-establishes a form of slavery on a more robust footing. ‘The black Antillean is the slave of this cultural imposition. After having been the slave of the white man, he enslaves himself’.[7] Colonialism thus takes hold of a territory to the degree that it encourages ‘passivity’ and ‘despair’, if not ‘resignation’ or ‘fatalism’ among its indigenous inhabitants (DC, 82, 84). ‘A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God’, and the oppressed person is led to accept ‘the disintegration ordained by God’ and ‘bows down before the settler and his lot’ (WE, 54-55). In this way, ‘French colonialism has settled in the very centre of the Algerian individual’ and systematically pursued a programme of ‘expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation’ (DC, 50). Carried to its successful completion, colonial mind-control removes even the fantasy of emancipation. ‘The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native’ (WE, 93). Even to desire an end to colonialism, in this context, would involve the libidinal equivalent of ‘suicide’.[8]>

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

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

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

“when you take away the punctuation