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<the idea of a transition period for newly independent states is something that imperial powers always use to extend (indefinitely) their occupation. but instead, it is an occupation-lite. there may be less troops, but the relationship between colonizer and colonized nations remain. the occupation of Iraq is said to be over, but troops remain as “advisers” and “peace-keepers”. the argument against this external political relationship, is the same that Fanon held against Sartre, and it is also at the same time a statement on the internal consciousness of the colonized. this new consciousness — no longer “the colonized” — is immediate. Fanon describes it as a tabula rasa; something completely new and completely separate from the old. the absolute of the new self/consciousness is dialectically related to the fact that the colonized demand the complete and immediate raising of the old society. this complete break is the “minimum” demands of the colonized… again, no transition, no partial payments. but he ends here by saying that just as the possibility for this new consciousness exists as a possibility — a possibility only until it emerges — “in the lives and consciousness of the men and women who are colonized” it is also externalized as “a terrifying future in the consciousness of… the colonizers.” understanding consciousness and activity as an “immediacy” connects to Fanon’s conception of violence in another way. the term immediacy doesn’t just mean instantaneous in the temporal sense, it also means without mediation, and the issue of mediation is key to Fanon’s conception of alienation.>

Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire - utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces. Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires7 .

Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets: genocide, desecration, poxed- blankets, rape, humiliation. Settler colonialism, then, because it is a structure and not just the nefarious way nations are born (Wolfe, 1999), is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence—the snake in the flooded basement. Settler colonial relations are comprised by a triad, including a) the Indigenous inhabitant, present only because of her erasure; b) the chattel slave, whose body is property and murderable; and c) the inventive settler, whose memory becomes history, and whose ideology becomes reason. Settler colonialism is the management of those who have been made killable, once and future ghosts—those that had been destroyed, but also those that are generated in every generation. “In the United States, the Indian is the original enemy combatant who cannot be grieved” (Byrd, 2011, p. xviii). Settler horror, then, comes about as part of this management, of the anxiety, the looming but never arriving guilt, the impossibility of forgiveness, the inescapability of retribution. Haunting, by contrast, is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation. Haunting is both acute and general; individuals are haunted, but so are societies. The United States is permanently haunted by the slavery, genocide, and violence entwined in its first, present and future days. Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. Alien (to settlers) and generative for (ghosts), this refusal to stop is its own form of resolving. For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved. Haunting aims to wrong the wrongs, a confrontation that settler horror hopes to evade. Avery Gordon observes, Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production. (1997, p. 7) Social life, settler colonialism, and haunting are inextricably bound; each ensures there are always more ghosts to return.

This decolonizing framework prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty and futurity, making it “incommensurable” with human and civil rights social justice projects as some elements of these processes cannot be aligned. Thus, a decolonizing project requires an “ethic of incommensurability,” which evokes a complex process of affective labor—the formation of “contingent coalitions” that may “feel very unfriendly” (, p. 35). Contingency and incommensurability mark the tricky affective terrain of building coalitions and doing cultural studies work that centers questions of Indigeneity and landedness—in ways that both align with and radically break from the work in affect studies. Affect studies has been inspired by interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and the sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralism, political theory, and queer theorizations of melancholy and trauma, inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. So while the affective turn has inspired many culture critics and queer theorists to productively interrogate the social, cultural, and psychoanalytic terrain of the seemingly individualized experience of feeling, sensation, and trauma, work in this field often presumes a universalized subject of emotion, unmarked by geography or even social location—and “innocent” of any complicity to settlement. What kinds of knowledges might scholars of affect studies develop if they centered questions of land, landedness, and Native dispossession? In On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, maps emotions about, for, and from the land in contestations over the settlement of North America. Her work “excavates the land as an active participant in and literal and figurative landscape for, contestations over stewardship, territory and sovereignty” to “hold in view the displacements that constitute North America as a place” (). Foregrounding affect and geography, Greyser decenters a universal, ungrounded affective subject that often circulates within affect studies, instead attending to indigenous and settler relationships to native homelands, and the affective labor through which settlement and decolonization are mobilized. Her work challenges new materialists and affect theorists to account for a long and diverse history of tribal philosophies and practices in their thinking about matter and spirit, affect and animacy, as she attends to the uneven distribution of agency across bodies, surfaces, and substances. Affect studies draws on psychoanalytic treatments of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, with wholeness and lack, with memory, displacement, and haunting, to frame trauma in ways that produce “multiple subjectivities and multiple modernities expressed in new forms of history, often presented at first in autobiographical experimental writings by diasporic subjects” (, p. 6). While these writings productively interrogate conditions of knowability, representation, and memory, in the absence of a framework that foregrounds geography and the relationship between experiences of trauma and the land, they have no necessary relationship to decolonization. Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) defines trauma as “suppos[ing] a violence that overwhelms, wounding individual (and collective) psyche, sometimes suspending access to memory” (Million, 2013, p. 2). Her definition resonates with and draw upon the work in affect studies, but Million leverages Indigenous accounts of trauma to “explode the measured ‘objective’ accounts of Canadian (and US) colonial histories” (Million, 2013, p. 31). For Million (2013), Indigenous women’s narratives are productively understood as felt knowledges that expose a “limit and boundary where white academia designated them incomprehensible,” which is inextricably linked to “the self-determination Indigenous peoples” as they “affectively work out . . . painful political, social, and personal conundrums with the state” (p. 2). So even as affect studies provides a point of entry for powerfully interrogating the conditions of trauma that resonate with Indigenous experiences as subjects of assimilation and objects of genocide and ongoing dispossession (as Million analyzes) and can be powerfully leveraged to expose processes of dispossession (in Greyser’s work), the field of affect studies remains wedded to an ungrounded, unbounded universal subject. Such land- and Indigenous-centered frameworks invite culture critics to examine how social, material, and rhetorical practices are shaped through settlement and the formation of the White subject as a settler subject. And in doing so would also entail an attention to the uneven distribution of affects and affective processes—the very constitution of some subjects as always-already affecting, while “others” are slotted as “affectable.” In her concept of ethnographic entrapment, ) articulation of the construction of the human as formed through a form of self-determination mobilized through the Western subject’s power over and distinction from “affectable others.” Building on Ferreira Da Silva’s work, argues this quality of affectability is a condition of self-determination, settlement, and racialization as the “Western subject differentiates itself from conditions of ‘affectability’ by separating from affectable others” (p. 42). Similar to cultural studies treatments of the production of Whiteness and racial difference, the racialized subject awaits humanity through a movement toward universality, yet distinct is Ferreira Da Silva and Smith’s attention to self-determination as defined by the capacity to “affect” and not be affected by others. This “humanizing” project is grounded in the notion of the sovereign subject as structured by the privatization of land that, in turn, define landed subjects through the erasure of the land theft through which the sovereignty of the settler subject is experienced, organized, and imagined. argues that Although U.S. Indian policy formally circulates the topos of self-determination, portraying the federal government as engaging with tribes’ lived sense of landedness and representations of themselves, it continues to foreclose forms of indigeneity, as a residual geopolitics predicated on principles other than those of the liberal state and as the collective memory of an ongoing history of violence. (Locations 109-110) Reading Ferreira da Silva in conversation with Rifkin underscores the structures of settler colonialism through which the sovereign subject is imagined: through his or her ability to move, affect, displace, or remove first nations people and through the ongoing erasure of various “forms of indigeneity” that belie the myth of manifest destiny.

(Waziyatawin, Waziyatawin is a Dakota professor, author, and activist from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe in southwestern Minnesota , 1-2-2011, "Colonialism on the Ground," Unsettling America, , accessed 7/26/15) CH

Ah, but some might argue that Indigenous Peoples in the United States are sovereign nations and are already self-determined. By what standards? Every system and institution that we bump up against on a daily basis is not of our making, but has been imposed under colonial rule. The economic system, land tenure system, educational system, social welfare system, governmental structure, religious institutions are all colonial institutions that continue to oppress Indigenous Peoples and deny Indigenous liberation. Even freedoms that theoretically apply to all American citizens, such as religious freedom, are routinely denied to Indigenous Peoples. We do not even have control over the protection of our ancestors’ remains. Certainly, the fundamental freedoms that are necessary for Indigenous ways of being, such as access to homeland, clean air and water, are not part of our reality. What, in our lives, do we have complete control over? While we, along with other anti-statist communities, occasionally experience what Hakim Bey identifies as Temporary Autonomous Zones (created as an alternative to the existing hegemonic order), we have yet to produce lasting Indigenous communities in the U.S. that operate fully outside of a colonial existence. Instead, we create spaces where our ways of being are practiced and nurtured, where we attempt to liberate ourselves from the oppression that surrounds our daily existence, where it is good to be Indigenous. We make them last as long as we can, but because they, as of yet, cannot be sustained, we are forced to return to the “real world” that smothers with an oppressive weight not all of us can bear to carry. Self-determination is an impossibility under colonial rule. Meaningful change will require dramatic action on our part that can move us beyond colonial interference. If we as Indigenous Peoples in the United States ever want a liberated future for our future generations or ourselves, we have to work toward decolonization. Decolonization is “the intelligent, calculated, and active resistance to the forces of colonialism that perpetuate the subjugation and/or exploitation of our minds, bodies, and lands, and it is engaged for the ultimate purpose of overturning the colonial structure and realizing Indigenous liberation.”1 A growing awareness of colonialism inexorably leads to a simultaneous dissatisfaction with the situation and a growing unrest. This, in turn, has the potential to lead to revolutionary praxis. Thus, recognition of this colonial reality is the first step toward our liberation. We cannot resist what we cannot identify and name. Then we need to begin to imagine an alternative reality. Our colonizers have told us that we must accept the way things are because we cannot change them. That is, we must accept our own subjugation and their domination as a natural and inevitable state. Decolonization is a rejection of that logic. It therefore requires opening up the mind to new visions of what is possible. If we were not subject to the authority or presence of the United States government and its citizens what would we want our lives to look like? The struggle for decolonization requires us to identify clearly our objectives as Indigenous Peoples and to critically question whether those objectives are constrained by the parameters of thought set by colonialism, or whether they traverse those parameters and reflect our desires as free, Indigenous Peoples of the land. If this critical interrogation of our own vision does not occur, even upon overturning colonialism we would run the risk of replicating colonial institutions and systems among our own populations.

Indigenous scholars have suggested that moving toward educational self-determination3 requires the reclaiming, uncovering, and reinventing of our theoretical understandings and pedagogical best practices (e.g. Battiste 2002; Smith et al. 1999; Tippeconnic 1999). Trying to work within a methodological paradigm of decolonization (Smith 1999) we used several methodological tools to develop both theory and practice that empowered our community. We collectively worked to center Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying our relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always, Indigenous lands-whether we are in currently ceded urban territory or not. A critical dimension of the work was making visible the impacts of settler colonial constructions of urban lands as ceded and no longer Indigenous and concomitant views of naturalized settler futures (Tuck and Yang 2012) on our community and especially our youth. In this paper we will argue that the constructions of land, implicitly or explicitly as no longer Indigenous, are foundationally implicated in teaching and learning about the natural world, whether that be in science education, place-based education or environmental education. Learning about the natural world is a critical necessity given the socio-scientific realities (e.g. climate change) that are currently and will continue to, shape the lands and life that land supports, more specifically for present purposes the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. For us science education, place-based education, and environmental education are critical sites of struggle because they typically reify the epistemic, ontological, and axiological issues that have shaped Indigenous histories (Brayboy and Castagno 2008). From a more hopeful perspective, we also see them as sites of potential transformings – forming a nexus between epistemologies and ontologies of land and Indigenous futurity. In our view, realizing this transformative potential will require engaging with land-based perspectives and desettling (Bang et al. 2012) dynamics of settler colonialism that remain quietly buried in educational environments that engage learning about, with and in the land and all of its dwellers. In our experience, explicitly reengaging land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a place-based science learning environment, what we call an emergent form of urban Indigenous land-based pedagogies, enabled epistemological and ontological balancing that significantly impacted learning for urban Indigenous youth and families (Bang and Medin 2010; Bang et al. 2010). In the remainder of this paper, we aim to contribute to uncovering the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments. To do this, we provide a critical reading of educational environments that position place and nature as central to their approaches and learning objectives (e.g. place-based, environmental, and science education broadly construed). We include these three broad areas of scholarship because the learning environments that we developed were informed by and make contact with each in various ways. Further, while we do not intend to equate these three forms of education, we suggest that each, to some degree, utilize knowledge about the natural world derived from western scientific systems and settler-colonial relations to land and Indigenous peoples. Our critique is at a grain size that we believe either holds across these bodies of work and does not require the flattening or equating of them or that there are commonalities across them we hope makes visible the still entrenched settler-colonial dynamics that are endemic to education more broadly. Settler-colonial informed readings of place in education Both place-based education and critical pedagogy have been bounded by dichotomous and some might say competing discourses. On the one hand, place- based education seems to focus on the environments and ecologies of outdoor rural spaces, and on the other, critical pedagogies often focus on the urban, multicultural context (Gruenewald 2008). To broadly elevate the importance of place and to bridge these two approaches, Gruenewald (2003) proposed a critical pedagogy of place. Critical place-based education and eco-justice work have amplified voices resisting destructive forms of globalization and neo-liberalism and have helped to create an intellectual space connected to Indigenous realities as well (Sutherland and Swayze 2012). However, we continue to wonder about the liberatory possibilities for Indigenous people in current forms of place-based education. As Bowers (2003) argues, there are reifications of western intellectual traditions in place-based pedagogies that further silence some cultural communities. The reification of western intellectual traditions is often made possible by the denial or erasure of ‘Indigenous points of reference,’ which, as Marker (2006) points out, is a form of epistemic violence. While the denial or erasure of Indigenous points of reference may not be intentional, educational environments that uncritically mobilize them and leave settler-colonial interpretations silenced are complicit in this erasure. In order to understand the effects of settler colonialism on place focused learning environments, we trace the ontology of settler colonialism and its subsequent impacts. Just as colonialism employs a grammar of race and inferiority; settler colonialism employs this grammar of race and inferiority but toward a logic of elimination (Veracini 2011). In settler-colonial societies, settler normativity is constructed through a set of dialectic relationships based upon circles of inclusion and exclusion in which the settler constructs himself as normative and superior vis-à-vis Indigenous and non-Indigenous others. This positioning of settlers is structurally maintained by employing a set of rules that are situated in and reify the circles of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. hypodescent and blood quantum). The core of the settler-Indigenous dialectical structure is defined by the desire to erase or assimilate Indigenous people alongside a continued symbolic Indigenous presence (Wolfe 2006). Scholars of settler colonialism have argued that the conceptual construction of uninhabited land, a form of Indigenous absence, opens the space for settler majorities to establish their ways of knowing, doing and being as normative and morally superior and begin attempts to indigenize settler majority identities (Veracini 2011). In short, settler majorities simultaneously develop identities defined by manifest destiny and genesis amnesia (Bourdieu 1977). The process of erasure and sustained symbolic presence codifies a binary logic often taking the form of ‘virtuous settler’ and ‘dysfunctional native’ (Wolfe 2006) or the historicized ‘Ecological Indian’ (Friedel 2011) which underpins the structure of settler identity and is often encoded in learning environments. In our view, pathways and pedagogies that make explicit and resist the epistemic and ontological consequences of settler colonialism (i.e. suppression and denial of Indigenous peoples’ lifeways or encoding settler identities in learning environments) will be necessary for viable, just, and sustainable change. Land education does just that, and, in our view, at minimum, demands attention to two critical and oscillating issues born of settler colonialism: (1) the reification of what Mignolo calls the ‘zero point epistemology’ (2007), upon which western knowledge of the natural world is predicated, its anthropocentric consequences, and its continued devaluing and/or attacks on Indigenous ways of knowing (e.g. Semali and Kincheloe 1999) and (2) the absence or presence of indigeneity and the subsequent effects.

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

<First of all, of course, political will is practiced through struggle against an enemy, a difficulty or an injustice. By definition, there is no will in the absence of constraint or resistance. Like it or not, Fanon discovers, I find myself thrown into a world structured in dominance and oppression, ‘in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph’ (BS, 178). A decision to participate in the struggle against colonial oppression already marks a critical stage in the process that ‘expels the fear, the trembling, the inferiority complex, from the flesh of the colonised’ (AR, 151).[30] Commitment to the struggle allows Fanon to conform to a basic Leninist prescription—wherever possible, ‘to go on the offensive’ (AR, 179tm). Willingness to fight the ‘superior’ or ‘master race’ is already an immediate assertion of equality that evacuates the older value system. In combat, ‘the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner. All the new, revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it. For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone’ (WE, 45). For those engaged in armed struggle the only pertinent imperative, as Sartre puts it, is ‘to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power’ (Sartre, Preface, WE, 21). Once it begins, the priority is simply to ‘intensify the armed struggle’ until justice prevails. ‘All attempts at diversion by the adversary must be quelled’ (AR, 162). Confronted by a colonial power, ‘we must cut off all her avenues of escape, asphyxiate her without pity, kill in her every attempt at domination’ (AR, 130). In such a situation, appeals to ‘peaceful negotiation’ and ‘international mediation’ are only so many attempts to confuse the issue. More importantly, participation in struggle unites its participants and thus constitutes them as a people. The goal of anti-colonial struggle is not reformation or improvement of colonial situation but its elimination through ‘the grandiose effort of a people, which had been mummified, to rediscover its own genius, to reassume its history and assert its sovereignty’ (AR, 83-84).>

Since the abolition of slavery, this principle of colonial humanitarianism has been making an advance, but the imperial powers must now realize that Europeans (and American imperialists for that matter) are not the racial superiors of any other race, and unless this bugaboo of race superiority is renounced, there can be no sincere progress or inter-racial and international peace and good will.28 Dr. George Dorsey of the University of Chicago, recently criticized this idea of race superiority and inferiority, when in his famous treatise he said that too many abstract formulae about humanity and too little common sense for solving concrete social problems make human association and fellowship increasingly tense; "But," he states, "the 'racial purity' and 'racial inferiority' behind such books as McDougall's Is America Safe for Democracy? Chamberlain's Foundations of Nineteenth Century Civilization; Grant's The Passing of the Great Race; Wiggam's The New Decalogue of Science; Gould's America a Family Matter; and East's Mankind at the Crossroads, are pure bunk and simple. If the United States wish to restrict immigration to 'Nordics' or to this or that political group why not say so and be done with it? To bolster up racial prejudice or a Nordic or a Puritan complex by false and misleading inferences drawn from 'intelligence tests' or from pseudo-biology and ethnology is to throw away science and fall back on the mentality of primitive savagery. Evolution produced a human brain, our only remarkable inheritance. Nothing else counts. Body is simply brain's servant. Treat the body right, of course; no brain can function well without good service. But why worry more about the looks, color, and clothes of the servant than the service it performs? "2 Weyl holds that the social goal of democracy is advancement of the people through a democratization of advantages and opportunities of life.30 Even Edmund Burke, the fore-sighted statesman of England, warned the British regarding its policy under the complex of race superiority in the colonies thus: "Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government; they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood, that your government may be one thing, and your privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution ....” Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the Empire."'" Thus the dual mandate principle entails more than trusteeship, it entails social progress and social progress entails a liberality of attitude and equal opportunities so that these adolescents will reap the benefit of a realistic and not a fictitious mandates principle. This is a challenge to international morality and particularly the League of Nations.

Those who do fight are labeled as "too harsh" in our criticism; our words are deemed "not saleable" for Eurocentrics. We are told that, while "they agree" with our points, they won't be acceptable to others; we risk losing "credibility." Our strong Indigenous voices are not intending to make Eurocentrics comfortable or to court their approval but rather to defend our people and to celebrate our own cultures, practices, and traditions. Even so, when we make waves and stand our ground in opposing colonialism, we risk being marginalized by being excluded altogether. These waves represent "another day in the life of colonial oppression;" and they are some of the roughest, the ones that can wear us down the most. But we are not without help. Most fundamentally, as Indigenous peoples, we can call on the deep, abiding currents of our traditions, cultures, and communities. Some Indigenous peoples feel these currents more strongly than others, depending on the access we have to elders, traditional family structures, and culturally rooted communities. These currents align us to who we are as Indigenous peoples and help us respond in good, sustainable ways to the colonial onslaughts. Our culture, traditions, and communities give us energy, hope, and direction as we do our best to negotiate rough waters. Indeed, this is our challenge as we rethink justice—namely, to respond in an Indigenous way to whatever arises, including harms. If we are disconnected from who we are as Indigenous peoples, we will be out of balance in our lives and communities. Instead of turning to our Indigenous ways when troubles arise, we will resort to remedies that were designed by and for our colonizers. Yet because these are not our remedies, they will not address the underlying causes of harm. The "solutions" they bring will be superficial and symptom oriented at best and will extend the damage of colonization, residential schools, and assimilation at worst. The more we resort to them and use them, even to fight colonization, the more we depend on them instead of on our own ways. In the name of fighting colonization, we risk finding ourselves being gradually molded in the colonizers' image since using colonizer methods has a way of leaving its mark on us.

Reconciliation without meaningful restitution merely reinscribes the status quo without holding anyone accountable for ongoing injustices. At its core, reconciliation has a religious connotation premised on restoring one’s relationship with God. In fact, most Indigenous nations don’t have words for reconciliation in their languages, which is the truest test of its lack of relevance to communities. When put into practice, whether through a truth and reconciliation commission or another forum (in Canada, for example, the B.C. Treaty Process as well as in the proposed “New Relationship” legislation utilize this terminology), reconciliation in practice tends “…to relegate 94 J. Corntassel all committed injustices to the past while attempting to legitimate the status quo” (Corntassel, et al, 2009, p. 145). As Taiaiake Alfred (2005) points out, “The logic of reconciliation as justice is clear: without massive restitution, including land, financial transfers and other forms of assistance to compensate for past harms and continuing injustices committed against our peoples, reconciliation would permanently enshrine colonial injustices and is itself a further injustice” (p. 152). The permanence of these injustices becomes more apparent as the language of reconciliation is used to promote “certainty” of land title, which in turn attracts more foreign direct investment opportunities. Given an overwhelming desire to secure a stable land base to promote more corporate investment, the Government of Canada, as well as certain provinces, including British Columbia, have begun to use the language of reconciliation in negotiations with Indigenous peoples (for example, the B.C. Treaty Process) to establish the “certainty” of a land claim in such a way as to facilitate the extinguishment of original Indigenous title to the land (Alfred, 2005; Blackburn, 2005).

Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization means, what it wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice. Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or class. At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet, we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous peoples, our/their1 struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North American lands where many of these conferences take place. Of course, dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as “Navajo print” underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and other appropriations of Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so frequently. Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.

While the Indian Commerce Clause and the Treaty Power comprised the basis of much federal legislation dealing with Indian tribes, the War Powers of Congress served as the technical and theoretical underpinning of much federal regulation of the tribes. 42 As Felix S. Cohen put it: "Although comparatively little has been written about the [W]ar [P]owers of Congress and the Indian, these powers underlay much of the federal power exercised over Indian land and Indians during the early history of the Republic. In international law conquest brings legal power to govern. ' The prevalence of the War Powers as the main basis for Indian regulation is illustrated by the fact that both the Congress of the Confederation and the first Congress of the United States placed Indian affairs under the auspices of the War Department.44 Thus, from 1786 until jurisdiction over Indian affairs was transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1849,41 control over relations with Indian tribes was vested in the War Department, a clear indicator of the true nature of the relationship between the federal government and the tribes. Further evidence of the military mindset in dealing with Indian tribes is the interplay between Congress's exercise of the Treaty Power and its War Power.46 "The early dominance of the Treaty Clause as a source of federal authority illustrates that-at least during the first century of America's national existence-Indian affairs were more an aspect of military and foreign policy than a subject of domestic or municipal law."4' 7 Early reliance on the War Powers as the theoretical basis for regulating Indian tribes has left its mark on subsequent policies and laws affecting Indians." Part of this "heritage of decades of military control"49 is the methodology of the Supreme Court in reviewing Indian law cases.

This view of the Constitution is also supported by early post-ratification history. Because scholars have viewed the Declare War Clause as granting Congress the sole authority to begin war, the United States' failure to wage a declared war until 1812 might be seen as something of a puzzle. Certainly the answer does not lay in the existence of an era of good international feelings from 1789-1812. These years saw the French Revolution, a general European war, and a resulting series of challenges for American national security policy. n558 For the Republic's first five years, the Washington administration waged a difficult conflict with Indians in the Ohio River Valley, and the Adams administration fought a naval war, known as the Quasi-War, toward the turn of the century. Neither of these wars were small conflicts. The former witnessed the crushing defeat of the nation's first standing army by the Indians in 1791, in response to which the Washington administration created the nation's first permanent military establishment. n559 Even though no declaration of war had issued against the Indians, [*291] George Washington exclaimed, "But, we are involved in actual war!" n560 The Quasi-War produced not only raids on merchant commerce, but also full-scale battles between American and French ships, and the creation of a huge 10,000-man regular army, with George Washington as its Commander in Chief and Alexander Hamilton as his deputy. n561 In neither 1789 nor 1798 did the President or Congress believe a declaration of war was necessary. In both conflicts, the President managed international relations, and after diplomacy had failed, ultimately decided to use military force. Once he had decided upon combat, the President turned to the Congress for the raising and supply of the necessary troops and sailors. In the context of voting on the President's requests, Congress had ample opportunity - of which it invariably took advantage - to discuss war aims and strategies. Thus, in 1789 President Washington and his Secretary of War decided that the Indians in the Northwest were preventing the peaceful settlement of territory ceded by Great Britain and that a combination of military force and diplomacy was needed. Once the Indian war bogged down, President Washington had to ask Congress for more and more funds: first for a call-out of the militia in 1789 to begin operations; then, for 2,000 regular troops, after the first, inconclusive battle with the Indians in 1790; then, after the stunning defeat of General St. Clair the next year, for a tripling of military expenditures to one million dollars a year and 5,000 more troops. n562 Although Congress agreed to the President's requests, each appropriation was accompanied by a vigorous discussion over the war's merits. n563 For example, Washington's final request for a 5,000-man army, which finally defeated the Indians under General "Mad" Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, provoked a bitter debate in Congress over whether peace efforts would be more effective than force, whether white settlers had provoked the war, whether the state militias should be used rather than army regulars, and whether it would make for better strategy to seek one winning blow rather than "dribbling away" money every year. n564 Congress' approval of the appropriation by a vote of 29-19 in the House and 15-12 in the Senate constituted an explicit authorization of the President's war plans. Congress never considered a declaration of war necessary. n565 [*292] The Quasi-War further supports the conclusion that a declaration of war was not understood as necessary for authorizing combat. The Quasi-War arose out of revolutionary France's efforts to shatter Britain's peace with the United States established by the Jay Treaty of 1794. n566 After a series of French raids on American commerce and the declaration of France's Directory that American ships would be seized if they carried British goods, President Adams sent three diplomatic emissaries to Paris to negotiate a settlement. When this encounter exploded into the "XYZ Affair," Adams sent the country on a course for war by publicly releasing the dispatches of the envoys, by requesting new ships for the navy, and by seeking the buildup of coastal defenses and a new army of up to 50,000 men. In response, Congress approved Adams' designs to wage a naval war against France by supplying the funds for the bulked up military. n567 "We are," Federalists declared, "now in a state of war." n568 Yet Congress never brought to a vote a motion to declare war, even though Federalists controlled both houses and the presidency. Even those High Federalists who wanted a declaration viewed its benefits in a purely domestic light. A declaration, they thought, would "rouse the spirit of the people, facilitate the collection of taxes, quicken the military preparations, and cut off the correspondence of Republicans with France by making such correspondence a crime punishable by law." n569 But in terms of an authorization of combat, there was no need for a declaration because Congress had already played a significant role in raising and funding the military and in setting rules for the capture of French ships. Congress' failure to declare war against France also demonstrates the limited nature of the conflict. Not seeking a declaration was a deliberate decision of President John Adams, who believed that a full-scale war against France would not be in the national interest. His decision fulfilled the hopes of those Framers who wanted the President to play a more significant role than that of a mere super-magistrate. As we have seen, the Framers left the crucial decisions in war to the President because they viewed him as the nation's protector and representative. Today, we may see less need for a national presidency that could counter Congress' regionalist interests. But the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time when the Framers rightfully could fear that a majority in Congress might support a war for sectional, rather than national, advantage. Thus, the Framers looked to the President to lead [*293] America into war when the national interest required, or to discourage war when self-interested factions gained control of Congress. The Framers' design was realized during both the Quasi-War and the 1789 Indian War. In the Indian War, President Washington pursued a limited war that rejected the hopes of both New England Federalists, who opposed the war because of its costs, and Southern Republicans, who sought an aggressive war to secure territorial gain. n570 During the Quasi-War, Adams resisted the demands of his own pro-English party leaders, who wanted a total war against France. n571 Believing that peace was possible without risking the costs of a full-scale war, Adams opted for a limited naval conflict that permitted diplomatic contacts and, eventually, a negotiated reconciliation. n572 In both cases, the President pursued the national interest, while different factions in Congress quarreled over aims and strategies in order to achieve their regional or party objectives. The Quasi-War also supports this study's argument that the Framers did not intend the judiciary to play a role in the decisions on war. Unlike the Indian War, the Quasi-War generated disputes that reached the Supreme Court in a trilogy of cases:Bas v. Tingy, n573 Talbot v. Seeman, n574 and Little v. Barreme. n575 Commentators have placed great store in these opinions, particularly Little, as contemporaneous evidence showing that courts can exercise jurisdiction over war power cases. n576 However, none of these cases called upon the Supreme Court to decide that the President was waging war in violation of the Constitution, or that Congress had failed to declare that a state of war existed, or that courts could step in to adjudicate inter-branch disputes over war. In fact, the precedent set by the trilogy remains quite modest. All three revolved around the question of how much of the value of a ship and its cargo, seized by an American commander during the naval operations against France, flowed to the commander instead of to the ship's owner. Such issues did not involve the power of going to war, but rather the domestic and legal effects of war once it had begun. Further, these cases clearly fell within Congress' power to "make Rules concerning Captures on...Water" n577 and Article III's grant of the jurisdiction over "all [*294] Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction," n578 which from its earliest days, the Supreme Court has read to authorize federal common lawmaking power. n579 Rather than making grand pronouncements on the separation of powers, cases such as Bas, Talbot, and Little underscored Congress' role in deciding on the legal state of relations with a hostile nation. In Bas and Talbot, for example, owners of ships that had been captured by the French, and then recaptured by American warships, challenged the prize rules that would give the American commanders a substantial portion of the ship's proceeds. They argued that the prize rules did not operate because Congress had failed to declare war formally, and that as a result the Court should hold inapplicable any statutes concerning recaptures until a declaration of war had been issued. n580 In both cases the Court held that Congress had the sole power to decide on the legal nature of hostilities: whether they would be "general" or "partial," "public" or "private," "solemn" and "imperfect" or "limited" and "imperfect." According to Justice Chase, "Congress is empowered to declare a general war, or Congress may wage a limited war; limited in its place, in objects, and in time." n581 Chase then emphasized a declaration of war as important primarily in international law:"If a general war is declared, its extent and operations are only restricted and regulated by the jus belli, forming a part of the law of nations; but if a partial war is waged, its extent and operation depend on our municipal laws." n582 In adjudicating cases stemming from a limited war, the courts must defer to Congress' judgment on which laws of war would apply to the conflict, and which would not. Chief Justice Marshall expressed this principle in Talbot:"Congress may authorize general hostilities, in which case the general laws of war apply to our situation; or partial hostilities, in which case the laws of war, so far as they actually apply to our situation, must be noticed." n583 In all three cases, the Court rebuffed arguments that it should determine whether a state of war existed, or whether Congress and the President had acted constitutionally in beginning the conflict with France. n584 Neither Bas, Talbot, nor Little (nor all three added together) constituted the Marbury of foreign relations law. [*295] Conclusions This study has shown that the Framers intended Congress to participate in war-making by controlling appropriations. Although the Constitution gives the President the initiative in war by virtue of his powers over foreign relations and the military, it also forces the President to seek money and support from Congress at every turn. In making decisions whether to raise and support the requested forces, Congress can judge the benefits of a particular war as well as influence its means and ends. Such was the practice under the British Constitution and under the early American governments, elements of which provided models for the drafters of the new federal Constitution. Such was the explanation given by the supporters of the Constitution to its opponents. Contrary to the arguments by today's scholars, the Declare War Clause does not add to Congress' store of war powers at the expense of the President. Rather, the Clause gives Congress a judicial role in declaring that a state of war exists between the United States and another nation, which bears significant legal ramifications concerning the rights and duties of American citizens. Congress' power to declare war also has the additional effect of ousting the courts from war powers disputes, because it deprives the courts of the ability to second-guess Congress' determination of whether a formal state of war exists. [*296] The Framers also may have believed judicial participation unwarranted because of the structure established in the war powers area. The potentially conflicting powers of the President and Congress establishes a system that demanded no constitutionally correct method of waging war, but instead permits flexible decision-making based on each branch's exercise of its powers. Aside perhaps from policing against the most extreme violations of those grants by another branch - such as if Congress attempted to "fire" the President as Commander in Chief - the courts have no constitutional standards to apply to a process the Framers left intentionally undefined. Instead, the Framers understood that the legislature and the executive would use their powers to defend the prerogatives of their departments, as well as to pursue their policy preferences against a recalcitrant coordinate branch. The Framers expected the branches to cooperate to wage a successful war, but also anticipated conflict should the two disagree. They also provided the means for the government to continue to function in war, so long as the legislature acquiesced in the actions of the executive.

<Uranium mining is inextricably linked with indigenous peoples. According to LaDuke, ‘‘some 70 percent of the world’s uranium originates from Native Communities.’’5 Within the US, approximately 66 percent of the known uranium deposits are on reservation land, as much as 80 percent are on treaty-guaranteed land, and up to 90 percent of uranium mining and milling occurs on or adjacent to American Indian land.6 To support the federal government’s desire for nuclear weapons and power production, the Bureau of Indians Affairs (BIA) has worked in collusion with the Atomic Energy Commission and corporations such as Kerr-McGee and United Nuclear to negotiate leases with Navajo, Lakota and other nations for uranium mining and milling on their land between the 1950s to the present.7 BIA negotiated leases are supported by the complex body of Indian Law, which I will demonstrate enables federal intrusion into American Indian lands and governmental affairs. These leases are heavily tilted in favor of the corporations so that American Indian nations received only about 3.4 percent of the market value of the uranium and low paid jobs.8 Uranium mining has also resulted in severe health and environmental legacies for affected American Indian people and their lands. From uranium mining on Navajo land, there have been at least 450 reported cancer deaths among Navajo mining employees.9 Even now, the legacy of over 1000 abandoned mines and uranium tailing piles is radioactive dust that continues to put people living near tailing piles at a high risk for lung cancer.10>

<Now, with over 60 years of uranium mining, nuclear weapons production and nuclear power, we face a high-level nuclear waste crisis. Once again, power brokers have looked to exploit American Indian lands, resources and peoples. In the twenty year process of researching and authorizing a federal high-level nuclear waste repository site, only sites on American Indian land were seriously considered. In addition to the Yucca Mountain site, American Indian nations were also targeted for temporary waste storage through the now-defunct Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) program.17 And recently, a proposal by Private Fuel Storage (PFS) and the Skull Valley Goshutes to temporarily store nuclear waste at Skull Valley Goshute reservation was defeated by Skull Valley activists working with the State of Utah against the Skull Valley government and PFS.18 The struggle over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site is, as Kuletz pointed out, a continuation of struggles against nuclear colonialism: ‘‘Indian protests over the use of Yucca Mountain as a high-level nuclear waste dump cannot be seen as an anomaly. Rather, they are a part of a persistent pattern of resistance to military occupation and nuclear activity.’’19 Although we do not yet know the health and environmental effects of permanent nuclear waste storage, nuclear colonialism is not just about health and environmental devastation. It also intersects with sovereignty, nuclearism and colonialism, to which I now turn.>

<The main theme in the various public comments submitted by American Indian people is the value of land, specifically the spiritual rights to Yucca Mountain. The US claims that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site is located on federally controlled land (NTS, Nellis Air force Base, and BLM), but this is contested by Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute nations who claim treaty-based and spiritual rights to the land. The Western Shoshone lay claim to Yucca Mountain under the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty of Peace and Friendship.56 At a public hearing in Pahrump, Nevada, Corbin Harney indicates that, ‘‘the land that you guys are talking about, the DOE, we still haven’t heard from the federal government or the state that they own the land. Under the Treaty of 1863, we still own it under your federal law.’’57 Yucca Mountain is just one site of an ongoing struggle by the Western Shoshone for their land rights. Based on Supreme Court rulings and laws that argue that the Western Shoshone lost their treaty rights due to the gradual encroachment of westward settlers, the federal government disputes the Western Shoshone claim to the land.58 Employing the discourse of colonialism, the US claims that the Western Shoshone lost their treaty rights through an International Claims Commission (ICC) ruling. However, the Western Shoshone contest the government’s interpretation, citing their treaty and a technical loophole that Congress never actually filed a finality clause for the ICC ruling.59 The Western Shoshone case for land ownership is bolstered by two U.N. commission rulings that conclude that the US claim to Western Shoshone lands violates international human rights law.60 In addition to claims of land ownership, members of the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute nations argue that Yucca Mountain is part of their traditional homeland that holds cultural, spiritual, and resource value. Members of the Las Vegas Paiute, the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone, the Big Pine Paiute, the Western Shoshone National Council, Western Shoshone, and the Utah Paiute all comment that Yucca Mountain has been part of their homeland since ‘‘time immemorial.’’61 At a public hearing in Las Vegas, Southern Paiute Edward Smith suggests the following about the sacredness of Yucca Mountain: Unfortunately, the laws of the United States overlook that our own landscape is dotted with equally important American Indian religious sites that have served as cornerstones for indigenous religion since time immemorial. The Forest Service, the Park Service, and private interests have been allowed repeatedly to destroy irreplaceable Native sacred sites.65 Therefore, American Indian spiritual claims to land are often overlooked in favor of competing corporate or national interests.>

At various moments, Western nuclear powers have censured India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, and Israel for their efforts to acquire nuclear weaponry. Bush’s "axis of evil" phrase is only the most recent version of a longstanding discourse in which nuclearity was defined as appropriate for some nations but not for others. In return, these inappropriately nuclear nations have condemned the NPT and IAEA safeguards as neo- colonial. Thus the nuclear and the post-colonial both confront and depend on each other repeatedly in a battle for geopolitical legitimacy. The regimes of discourse produced in these confrontations shape the possibilities for action, insistence on the illegitimacy of "third" or "second" world nuclear aspirations means, in effect, that attempts to persuade these nations not to develop nuclear weapons are decried as neo-colonial, and are therefore themselves illegitimate. Because the dichotomies of nuclear rupture-talk tend to erase national or regional political complexities and insist on a rupture from colonial relations, they have become – somewhat paradoxically – worse than useless in non-proliferation efforts. On another front, consider the US's latest anti-ballistic missile defense fantasies. These descend directly from unrequited Cold War lusts embodied in systems such as SAGE and SDI. These systems never worked to fulfill their stated purpose of automatically tracking and shooting down incoming bombers (in the case of SAGE) or missiles from space (in the case of SDI)-though they did work in other, political and economic ways. There’s ample evidence that the latest version of a protective shield won't work either: its detection systems can’t tell the most basic differences between a decoy and a warhead. There's also good reason to think it won't work politically, These problems don't seem to bother most lawmakers in Capitol Hill or the White House, however. Insisting on the "post-ness" of the post-Cold War world, ABM proponents argue that these systems will defend America from "rogue states," despite bloody evidence that "states" aren't necessarily our worst enemy, and that you don't in fact need a nuclear missile (or even biological or chemical weaponry) to terrify a superpower. No matter: the fantasists have apparently persuaded the nation to cling bravely to the conviction that technopolitical power can be circumscribed and fully specified; that despite the "diabolical" clevemess of turning box-cutters and airplanes into extra- ordinarily effective weapons, the true threat comes from those good old Cold War technologies: missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Here the "axis of evil" slogan helps the fantasist cause mightily, since it defines states that could-if they were stupid and insane enough-manage to lob a missile over to US territory. Of course, since even the fantasists must admit that missile defense doesn't currently work, Bush and his Dr Strangeloves have several new plans allegedly aimed at foiling such scenarios. Plan A: attack Iraq. The justifications for such an attack oscillate. Some days Iraq's potential possession of nuclear weapons gets trotted out. When the imminence of Iraqi nuclearity is contested, the need for a "regime change" is invoked, At this writing, the fate of Plan A is very much up in the air, And debates about it have deflected attention from Plan B, which is in some ways bigger, more sweeping, and likely to keep the military-industrial complex happy for years to come: the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). In this latest manifestation of nuclear rupture-talk, the US would develop tactical nuclear weapons to burrow into underground bunkers in which the "axis of evil" might be confectioning nuclear. chemical. or biological weapons. (This is not the only aim of the NPR, but I`lI limit myself to this for this paper.) Plan B seemed to surprise observers, but as recently as October 2001 congressman Steven Buyer eerily presaged elements of the NPR when he advocated plugging up Afghan caves with tactical nuclear weapons-an idea also favored by several other Republican representatives. Plan B has been both decried and praised as a post (or post-post-?) Cold War plan: either way. observers view the NPR as technopolitical mpture. Its opponents claim that this is the first time the US has contemplated using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear States; they forget Korea and Vietnam. Proponents claim that September ll signaled the death-knell of traditional nuclear deterrence; in the era of suicide bombers, nuclear retaliation is no longer a protective threat. They funher insist that such mini-nukes (a cutesy designation to soften the blow?), aimed at burrowing deep underground, wouldn`t cause widespread radioactive devastation»- this in the face of clear evidence that such weapons could never go deep enough to be significantly contained. Like its predecessors, this latest manifestation of nuclear rupture-talk is aimed at soothing and/or terrifying its audience. And like its predecessors, what it decidedly does not do is leave room for complexities. The portion of the NPR aimed at "rogue states" leapfrogs over the deterrent posed by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction because these states don 't have arsenals the size of Russia’s. In initial public discussions of the NPR there was- weirdly, given September 11-no sense that other forms of retaliation might be possible. No sense that states subjected to nuclear attack might have angry friends. Certainly no admission of the ways in which imperial power regimes remain embedded in our own technopolitical systems. And ongoing total incomprehension of why and how former empires might want to Strike back. Just as the stark dichotomies posited by the Cold War world got fuzzier the closer you examined them, so too for today's dichotomies. Consider my personal favorite: the line between nuclear and non-nuclear. I’ve argued that even during the Cold War it was not in fact all that clear what was nuclear diplomacy and what wasn't. But in those good old days, you knew what nuclear weapons were (or at least you thought you did). Now, it's not so apparent. Do munitions loaded up with depleted uranium count as "nuclear"? Not if you're NATO or the U.S. using them in the Balkans or the Gulf War. But if you’re a terrorist contemplating packing a bomb with radioactive material purchased on the black market, you’ve violated a fundamental taboo. By crossing the nuclear/non-nuclear divide, you`ve committed an act of pollution: you’ve made a "dirty bomb." (One does wonder which bombs are the clean ones.) What qualities such bombs as "dirty" is not so much the technical infraction of mixing the "nuclear" with the "conventional" but rather the technopolitics of who’s doing the mixing. how, and to what ends. The stubborn persistence of global technopolitical hierarchies figures here in important ways, most interestingly in the "how" part: calling these bombs "dirty" signals not just moral outrage at technological pollution, but also disdain for the inability of the bomb builders to produce a "real" nuclear weapon. My point, of course, is not that it should be acceptable for terrorists to make radioactive weapons of any kind, or that Saddam Hussein should be allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it’s that the current shape of global technopolitics has deep roots in the dialectics between nuclear and post-colonial rupture-talk, between nuclear and post-colonial technopolitics. These dialectics have defined the parameters for global power relations, and shaped geopolitical subjectivities in multiple registers and in ways whose significance we have barely begun to grasp, lf we are indeed in a "post" or a "post-post-" Cold War world. then it’s the same kind of "post-ness" that we find in the "post-colonial." The infrastructures and discourses of Cold War technopolitics continue to shape the parameters of global and local action, just as the infrastructures and discourses of colonialism do, We ignore those roots-and the contradictions they produce-at our peril.

The question, then arises, what are we to do with the fact that, as Native scholar Luana Ross notes, genocide has never been against the law in the United States?7 On the contrary, Native genocide has been expressly sanctioned as the law. And, as legal scholar Sora Han points out, none of these post-9/11 practices is actually extraconstitutional or extralegal. In fact, the U.S. Constitution confers on the State the right to maintain itself over and above the rights of its citizenry.8 Butler may be arguing that post-9/11 rule of law through sovereignty (seemingly displaced, in Foucault’s analysis, during the rise of capitalism) has made a comeback as a legitimizing notion that works to extend state power. But this argument, as the work of Joy James and Rey Chow demonstrates, fails to consider how the state has always operated through sovereign power exacted through racial and colonial violence.9 Thus the argument that we are currently under a resurgence of sovereignty itself normalizes the history of U.S. sovereign power exacted against the bodies of indigenous peoples and peoples of color. In fact, a Native feminist analysis could be used to read Butler’s Gender Trouble against her analysis of sovereignty. In Gender Trouble, she critiques theorists such as Lacan, Irigaray, and Wittig, who posit a naturalized, prediscursive, gendered body as the foundation by which to critique contemporary heteropatriarchal practices. She argues that the very process of theorizing a prediscursive body demonstrates that the body cannot be prediscursive and hence it cannot be represented outside of prevailing power relations. But positing the body as prediscursive, according to Butler, allows the theorist to disavow her or his political investments because the theorist is supposedly rendering an account of the body prior to power relations. Butler’s critique could then be more broadly applied to a critique of “origin stories.” That is, when we critique a contemporary context through an appeal to a prior state before “the fall,” we are necessarily masking power relations through the evocation of lost origins. In even radical critiques of Bush’s war on terror, the U.S. Constitution serves as an origin story—it is the prior condition of “democracy” preceding our fall into Bush’s “lawlessness.” The Constitution’s status as an origin story then masks the genocide of indigenous peoples that is its foundation. Thus reading Butler against Butler, a Native feminist analysis might suggest that her analysis of Bush’s policies is predicated on what David Kazanjian refers to as the “colonizing trick”—the liberal myth that the United States is founded on democratic principles rather than being built on the pillars of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.10 In this way, even scholars such as Butler and Kaplan, who make radical critiques of the United States as an empire, still unwittingly or implicitly take the U.S. Constitution as their origin story, presuming the U.S. nation-state even as they critique it. Consequently, the project of imagining alternative forms of governance outside of the United States remains impoverished within the field of American studies. Certainly, Native feminism should provide a critical resource for this project because the United States could not exist without the genocide of Native peoples—genocide is not a mistake or aberration of U.S. democracy; it is foundational to it.11 As Sandy Grande states: The United States is a nation defined by its original sin: the genocide of American Indians . . . American Indian tribes are viewed as an inherent threat to the nation, poised to expose the great lies of U.S. democracy: that we are a nation of laws and not random power; that we are guided by reason and not faith; that we are governed by representation and not executive order; and finally, that we stand as a self-determined citizenry and not a kingdom of blood or aristocracy . . . From the perspective of American Indians, “democracy” has been wielded with impunity as the first and most virulent weapon of mass destruction.12 From this perspective, the Bush regime does not represent a departure from U.S. democratic ideals but rather the fulfillment of a constitutional democracy based on theft and violence.

The articulation of a series of carceral and genocidal caesurae predicated on biopolitically separating out the human/culture from the animal/vestibule must be tracked back to those foundational moments of colonial violence that continue to shape and inform the US nation. Spillers' concept of the vestibule works to articulate a defining feature of colonial violence; specifically, a seriality of power that survives by being flexible and adaptive to different geopolitical sites and bodies. Moreover, this colonial violence must be seen, in the context of the US's ongoing war on terror, as operating at once intra- and internationally; the two categories conjoined through the concept of 'relational geographies.' 'Relational geographies' is a term coined by Trevor Paglen in his detailed identification and mapping of 'black sites,' that is, secret government and military sites that are beyond public scrutiny and accountability. 56 One of the black sites that Paglen discusses is Nellis Range, Nevada, occupying Western Shoshone land. Created in 1940, Nellis Range has been described as 'the single largest gunnery range in the world' and 'the single largest "peacetime militarized zone on earth." '57 The Western Shoshone peoples, the traditional owners of this land, call the Western Shoshone nation 'the most bombed nation on earth.' In his analysis of Nellis Range, which houses one of the ground control centres for the international operation of drones, Paglen insistently draws attention to the past history of white colonial invasion and violent displacement of the Native Americans of the region and the contemporary relations of violence exercised by the US state in their ongoing persecution of Indigenous Americans attempting to claim back lands sequestered by the US government in their establishment of black sites and areas for nuclear weapons testing. He describes being welcomed into a trailer in Crescent Valley, Nevada, that was home to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, and from this remote location, an elderly Native American woman named Carrie Dann and her staff of two full-timers and two part-timers take on the military, the Bureau of Land Management, mining and defense contractors, and the US government itself. Dann says that the United States has been illegally occupying Western Shoshone land for 150 years and that she has the paperwork to prove it. Paglen documents the repeated violent raids that Dann and her people are compelled to endure. The US state has repeatedly attempted to charge Dann and her people with trespassing on government land. This a charge that Dann derisively rejects, arguing that she cannot be accused of trespassing 'land she saw as rightly belonging to her people' precisely because 'the Shoshone NEVER gave, ceded, or sold their land to the United States government, by treaty or otherwise.' In the face of this defiance, the US government has attempted to crush Western Shoshone resistance by deploying the full arsenal of state terror, including federal agents, helicopters, a plane and a fleet of All-Terrain Vehicles: ' "I could not help but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry coming. So many of my people were killed on this land and now it's happening again." The Feels rounded up Dann's cattle and loaded them into trucks to be sold at auction. The ranch was devastated.'62 Paglen connects this national exercise of contemporary colonialism and state-violence to the larger, transnational picture he has been delineating in order to underscore the system of continuities that hold between the two: 'For the collection of [Native American] activists sitting in an unmarked trailer in the recesses of Nevada's vast valleys, the black world is much more than an array of sites connected through black aircraft, encrypted communications, and classified careers. It is the power to create geographies, to create places where anything can happen, and to do it with impunity.'63 The enormity of this power to create geographies while simultaneously obliterating others is perhaps best exemplified by the Pentagon's ambitious proposal to create a virtual 'drone state' that will further expropriate large tracts of Native American land, creating 'the largest Joint Forces Future Combat Systems training site in the world':61 'Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southwest corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying machines. '65 Paglen's concept of 'relational geographies' can be productively amplified by conjoining it with the concept of 'relational temporalities,' that is, diachronic relations that establish critical connections across historical time and diverse geographies. Relational temporalities draw lines of connection between seemingly disparate temporal events: for example, the US state's genocidal history against Native Americans and the killing of civilians in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. In her tracking of the violent history of attempted genocide against Native Americans, Andrea Smith writes: 'the US is built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and racism. '66 Situated in this context, what becomes apparent in the scripting of the 9/11 attacks as the worst acts of terrorism perpetrated on US soil is the effective erasure of this foundational history of state-sponsored terrorism against Native Americans. This historicidal act of whitewashing effectively clears the ground for contemporary acts of violence against the United States to be chronologically positioned as the 'first' or hierarchically ranked as the 'worst' in the nation's history. The colonial nation-state deploys, in the process, a type of Nietzschean 'active forgetting' that ensures the obliteration of prior histories of massacre and terror such as the catastrophic Trail of Tears that resulted from the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This Act enabled the forced removal of a number of Native American nations and their relocation to Oklahoma; in the process, at least four thousand Native Americans died. The Trail of Tears has been described as 'the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in American history.'67 This example of state terror is what must be occluded in order to preserve the 'innocence' of the nation so that it can subsequently claim, post 9/11, to have lost the very thing it had betrayed long ago. Jimmie Durham remarks on the repetition of this national ruse: 'The US, because of its actual guilt ... has had a nostalgia for itself since its beginnings. Even now one may read editorials almost daily about America's "loss of innocence" at some point or other, and about some time in the past when America was truly good. That self-righteousness and insistence upon innocence began, as the US began, with invasion and murder Such acts of white historicide are constituted by a double logic of taken-for-grantedness and obsessive repetition. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, in their forensic analysis of the operations of white supremacy, articulate the seemingly contradictory dimensions of this double logic: It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively forgets that it owes its existence to the killing and terrorising of those it racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as 'what goes without saying' the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since 'what goes without saying' is empty and can be held as a 'truth' only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform.1"l The it 'goes without saying' is the moment in which the very ideology of white supremacy is so naturalized as to become invisible: it is the given order of the world. Yet, in order to maintain this position of supremacy, a logic of tireless iteration must be deployed in order to secure the very everyday banality, and thus transparency, of white supremacy's daily acts of violence. For those in a position to exercise these daily rounds of state violence, their performative acts are banal because of their very quotidian repetition; yet, because their racialized targets continue to exercise, in turn, acts of resistance and outright contestation, these daily acts of state violence must be obsessively reiterated. Underpinning such acts of white supremacist violence and historicidal erasures is the official - government, media and academic - positioning of Native Americans as a 'permanent "present absence" 'that, in Smith's words, 'reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified.'70 Precisely what gets erased in the process are the contemporary Indian wars that are being fought across the body of the US nation. These are wars that fail to register as 'wars' because the triumphant non-indigenous polity controls the ensemble of institutions - legal, military, media and so on - that fundamentally determines what will count as a 'war' in the context of the nation. In her work, Smith establishes critical points of connection between the war on terror being waged in Afghanistan or Pakistan and the issue of Indigenous sovereignty within the context of the US nation: 'it is important to understand that the war against "terror" is really an attack against Native sovereignty, and that consolidating US empire abroad is predicated on consolidating US empire within US borders. For example, the Bush administration continues to use the war on terror as an excuse to support anti-immigration policies and the militarization of the US/Mexico border. The exercise of the war on terror becomes, in other words, another way of entrenching and legitimating the usurpation of Native American sovereignty in the name of the colonial nation-state. The militarization of the US's borders has seen the Department of Homeland Security oversee the domestic transposition of military technologies such as drones- that have been used to fight the war on terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa- to the borders of both Mexico and Canada. Ted Poe, Congressman, 2nd District of Texas, has introduced legislation that 'mandates the Secretary of Defense transfer 10% of eligible returning equipment from Iraq to state and local law enforcement agencies for border security purposes. Operative here is what Roberto Lovato has termed 'ICE's [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] AI Qaeda-ization of immigrants and immigration policy: building a domestic security apparatus, one made possible by multi-billion contracts to military-industrial companies like Boeing, General Electric, and Halliburton. The massive scale of this militarization of US borders becomes evident in the context of a recent US government report on border security that states that 'The Department of Homeland security (DHS) has the largest enforcement air force in the world ... As of September 2011, OAM [Office of Air and Marine] had approximately 267 aircraft, 301 marine vessels, and 1,843 personnel in 70 locations primarily on the southwest, northern and southeast borders.'74 The deployment of such militarized border technologies creates a virtual fence that effectively amplifies the securitizing effects of the concrete and steel fence that is already in place in many sections of the US--Mexico border. Understood in Smith's terms, the militarization of the US border and the repulsion of attendant 'aliens' constitute a re-assertion of colonial sovereignty.