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Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of “strategy” changed its nature and became deregulated/ dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of “nuclear testing” since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 199L 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). 29 The primary targets of warfare (“test site” to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xiryian Province, China) (36 times). So Moreover, although I focus primarily on “nuclear tests” in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of “intensive exploitation,” “low intensity intervention,” or the “nullification of the sovereignty” in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the “unthinkable” single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the “real” of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be obseIVed even in Stewart Firth’s Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of “nuclear testing” in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere … were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself.

Internalized peoples are presented within U.S. legal discourses as always- already having accepted their place within national space, a process that involves constructing subjectivities for them that confirm the obviousness of U.S. administrative mappings. Examples in the antebellum period include the discourse of domestic dependent nationhood applied to native peoples and of citizenship for former Mexican nationals in the wake of both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. More than merely designating these groups’ relation to the U.S. government, these identities do important ideological work. They enact the extension of state authority by enfolding groups within existing administrative terminologies and topologies, giving them an institutionally recognized voice that reinforces the organizing framework of U.S. jurisdiction. This process of imperial interpellation both reorganizes existing political-economies and naturalizes U.S. control over the terms of debate. As Gerald Vizenor notes in his discussion of dominant representations of American Indians, “The simu- lations of manifest manners...become the real without a referent to an actual tribal remembrance” (8). The simulation and regulation of voice is crucial to the erasure of competing political geographies. Looking back to the language of Sherill v. Oneida, we can see again the absolute interde- pendence of the doctrines of acquiescence and impossibility, the bureau- cratic invention of consent effacing the United States’

On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by a vote of 143 in favor to 4 against with 11 abstentions. Thirty years of coalition building and lobbying by the International Indian Treaty Council and indigenous groups worldwide and more than two decades of negotiation within the UN preceded the vote.1 The groundwork for the declaration arguably goes as far back as September 1923, when Cayuga chief Deskaheh traveled to Geneva on behalf of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy) to petition the League of Nations about violations of international law by the United States and Canada. Conspicuous as the four dissenting votes in 2007 were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Strident opposition by these countries suggests the substantial threat that indigenous rights claims continue to pose to the fictive coherence of settler nation-states, which have historically sought to render the persistence of “nations within” as a domestic concern without international implication. Indeed, settler colonialism in the United States has insinuated itself over time in such a way as to obscure the persistence of colonialism as anything other than a historical trace, as well as to ostensibly naturalize settlers by habitation and descent. In the United States, the vote against formalizing the rights of indigenous peoples has of course direct relevance for U.S.–American Indian relations and should be considered in the context of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York. In March 2005, the Court ruled against the Oneida, concluding that two centuries of non-Indian land tenure in effect annulled the tribe’s outstanding territorial claims. Although the decision directly affected only taxation, its legal implications further undermined tribal self-determination in the United States and quickly served as precedent in a number of prominent court cases. That jurisprudence has so thoroughly defined and determined the legacies of the colonial encounter not only constrains the terms of redress but, inasmuch as law promises to be a correlate of justice, also promises future resolution. This perpetually deferred resolution compels liberal juridical subjectivity and contract as requisite points of departure. The role of legal reason in the making of the modern rights-bearing possessive individual and in animating the conflict of private interests on which legal regulation is premised has been essential for the notions of self and property in liberal societies generally and in settler societies in particular. Moreover, Jacques Derrida argues, “Law is always an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself, even if this justification may be judged from elsewhere to be unjust or unjustifiable. Applicability, ‘enforceability,’ is not an exterior or secondary possibility that may or may not be added as a supplement to law.”2 The U.S. vote against the UN declaration and the Sherrill ruling are especially interesting for the ways in which they apply equality in law and authorize the force of law in order to safeguard inequality outside of law. This essay focuses on what this U.S. posture conveys about the colonial present in North America, as well as the ways in which white settler colonialism in the United States is articulated with the present-day constellation of neoliberal antistatism and post–civil rights “color-blind” discourse. I examine the statement issued by Robert Hagen, U.S. advisor to the UN, against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and analyze his remarks in relation to both the Sherrill decision and the reactionary populist discourse of antisovereignty groups more broadly. Non-Indian “citizen” groups lobbying and litigating against American Indian sovereignty are an important part of this conjuncture, not only because their rhetoric shares Hagen’s emphasis on equality and rights claims detached from historical inequities, but also because of the ways in which these groups in fact envision themselves in opposition to the state and their actions as a more pure and authentic embodiment of American principles. In this essay, I am primarily concerned with the relationships among three elements of U.S. colonialism: the role of settler claims historically and in the present; how colonial projects advanced in part by legal disputes over the distribution of political authority; and the assertion of historical dispossession as a means to preempt American Indian self-determination and restitution. Settler colonialism in North America is not a relic of the past but a historical condition remade at particular moments of conflict in the service of securing certain privileges and often to symbolically negotiate inequalities among white people. The postconquest history of North America and the making of the U.S. nation-state have been overdetermined by competing colonial regimes, settler claims, circuits of slavery, and the negotiation of seemingly incommensurable borders and cosmologies.3 Understanding this context as more than a bygone historical era whose significance was eliminated with the overthrow of British rule demands addressing the peculiarities of settler colonialism and the ways in which “settlement” compromises and complicates colonialism as a relationship to a geographically distant ruling authority. As historian Ian Tyrell argues, “Settler societies represented a particularly complex and resilient form of European colonial expansion often not recognized as imperial conquest by its own agents precisely because they claimed to do more than extract wealth and then return to the metropolitan space.” Similarly, anthropologist Patrick Wolfe notes, “Settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labor. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes (or replacing them) on the land.”4 Accordingly, settler colonialism is not so much an “event” or a static relationship as a condition of possibility that remains formative while also changing over time.

"[M]ost commentators on American culture," contends Arnold Krupat (1989, p. 3), "generally have managed to proceed as though there were no relation between the two, white and red, Euramerican and Native American, as if absence rather than avoidance defined the New World: as if America was indeed 'virgin land,' empty, uninhabited, silent, dumb until the Europeans brought the plow and the pen to cultivate its wilderness." From the earliest days, however, settlers seeking to carve out a "civilization" in this land confronted the persistent and awkward fact that the New World was anything but empty and silent. And so, as Pearce (1953), among others, has documented amply, this "civilization" came to define itself in opposition to native "savagism."4 At first, driven by the aggressive spirit of Puritan Protestantism, "civilization" articulated a rhetoric of "salvationism," which Krupat (1989, p. 142) describes as "the discursive equivalent of a glass trained on heaven through which all this world must be seen," and which narrowed the native horizon fundamentally to conversion and extermination. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this discourse became secularized, and God's will became an evolutionary law of nature (Krupat, 1989, p. 142). Salvationism became assimilationism. As Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan (cited in Forbes, 1964, p. 114) put it bluntly in 1889, natives were to "conform to the White man's ways, peaceably if they will, forceably if they must. . ." But whether decreed in heaven or on earth, by divine will or history, the fate of the natives was sealed, to be supplanted by the inevitable march of American civilization. As "one who had no right to be heard from" (Frost, 1949, p. 179), the savage Other was, finally and irrevocably, to be silenced. The denouement of this narrative is the familiar theme of the "vanishing red man." The belief that primitive native societies must and would give way before the advancing tide of Euramerican civilization, either to be absorbed or crushed, has a long history. Count Alexis de Tocqueville (cited in McNickle, 1973, p. 3) remarked in 1831: "The Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of sustaining." A century ago, a West Point cadet named Custer (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. x) lamented the passing of the race in a term paper for his ethics class: "The red man is alone in his misery. We behold him now on the verge of extinction, standing on his last foothold . . . and soon he will be talked of as a noble race who once existed but have passed away." In 1911, Boas (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) noted that the proportion of people with Indian blood "is so insignificant that it may well be disregarded," for the race had "vanished comparatively rapidly." Three years later, Moorehead (1914, p. 10) lamented that "we have brought about the extinction of tribal and communistic life among the Indians." The theme of inevitable doom was common "in song and story," and exemplified by James E. Fraser's equestrian statue, "The End of the Trail," first shown at the 1915 San Francisco Exposition (McNickle, 1973, p. 3). Doomsaying continued into the middle of this century. In his 1932 chronicle, The Passing American, Linderman (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) observed that even the Indian had forgotten the Indian: "The young Indians know next to nothing about their people . . . and now it is too late to learn." Journalist John Keats (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) echoed this sentiment in 1964, asking: "But, who speaks for the Indian? Amazingly his cause is almost without rebels to support it." The closing line of Paul Radin's The Story of the American Indian (1927/1937, p. 371) stressed the finality of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee: "The white man had triumphed . . . the Indians were crushed. Their nerve was gone. Broken, disorganized, externally and internally they gave up the fight." In this way, the theme of the vanishing red man voices the evolutionary claim that time, indeed, marches on. Ironically, many of these pronouncements were sounded by observers acutely sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans. To a degree, the theme of the vanishing red man, like its cousin the noble savage, romanticizes native people and martyrs them to Euramerican greed and racism. Yet, the portrayal of their inevitable doom almost absolves whites of culpability, fixing blame instead on the inexorable march of abstract forces like "progress." Unsurprisingly, this theme quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, legitimizing even greater incursions upon the lands and liberties of native people (McNickle, 1973, p. 62). As Native Americans occupied an ever-smaller part of the real world, to the general public they increasingly lived on only in the romantic fictions of literature and Hollywood (Forbes,1964, p. 13; Friar & Friar, 1972), thereby cementing their consignment to history and, thus, irrelevancy. It is important to appreciate that this Euramerican narrative relies for its temporal structure on time's arrow, which itself has come to play a vital part in Euramerican thinking on the subject over the centuries. Nowhere is this better shown than in Toulmin and Goodfield's well-known The Discovery of Time (1965), in which the authors trace the "gradual emergence of a continuing sense of history out of earlier mythological and theological" conceptions of Nature (p. 15), argue that, by the nineteenth century, all natural sciences save physics and chemistry had rejected the a priori categories of Greek thought in favor of an historical consciousness (p. 247); and conclude that even the "laws of nature" may be discovered to be, not immutable, but subject to evolutionary change over time (pp. 263-265). Highly influential in solidifying the position of time's arrow has been Christianity, in which time—one product of the Creation—unfolds unidirectionally the continuous action of God through history, progressing from the past into the future, until the eschatological end of time foretold in Revelation as Christ's second coming (Puech, 1957/1983, p. 40).5 Further, in a process akin to what Burke (1966, pp. 380-409; 1945/1969, pp. 430-440) calls the "temporizing of essences," time's arrow is frequently normative. The history of the idea of "progress" is not coincident with that of "history" itself, and the former is in some respects at odds with the Christian story of the Fall and subsequent degeneration. Nonetheless, "progress" is one ethical extension of the doctrines of history and Darwinism, and, like them, denies alternative conceptions such as time's cycle (Bury, 1932/1960, esp. pp. xi—xxix, 334—349). In linear time, the inexorable march of progress ensures that all events necessarily and certainly must become merely historical, superceded by the superior future (Bury, 1932/1960, p. 109). Thus, anteriority comes to signify inferiority while posteriority implies superiority (Brown, 1982, p. 117), as evidenced by evolution's infamous sociopolitical cousins, Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny (on the latter, see Bass & Cherwitz, 1978). In sum, the story of civilization's triumph over savagism presupposes a linear time in which each present moment becomes the past (or falls into "history") as life proceeds toward a qualitatively different future. This procession is inevitable and irreversible; history never literally repeats itself. And because the unfolding future typically is conceived not only as different, but also as better, "living in the past" is anathema to the "progressive spirit." As one among a host of stories that symbolize human experience in predominately linear terms, the narrative is rooted deeply in Euramerican thought.6 And in consigning Native Americans to the past, it sentenced them to metaphoric and literal death. Pearce's (1953) analysis is telling and merits extended quotation: Westward American progress would, in fact, be understood to be reproducing this historical progression [from a lesser to a greater good, from the simple to the complex, from savagism to civilization]; and the savage would be understood as one who had not and somehow could not progress into the civilized, who would inevitably be destroyed by the civilized . . . For the Indian was the remnant of a savage past away from which civilized men had struggled to grow. To study him was to study the past. To civilize him was to triumph over the past. To kill him was to kill the past. History would thus be the key to the moral worth of cultures; the history of American civilization would thus be conceived as threedimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher, (p.49) This narrative is itself timeless, perennially available as a rhetorical resource. Time's arrow treats past events as irretrievably past, as strictly historical. Argumentatively, even when the vector from past to future is "smooth," "continuous," or "unbroken," the past nonetheless is dissociated from the present which, while perhaps the product of the former, is a qualitatively different stage in evolutionary advance. Thus, time's arrow furnishes a powerful way to cast vestigial traditional Native American life and efforts to sustain that life as anachronistic. Forms of this strategy recur today in Euramerican reactions to contemporary native activism.

Creating contemporary utopian narratives appears as a particularly difficult yet vitally necessary endeavor. That is, hopeful proposals are direly needed to inspire the means of transcending a seemingly hopeless present. Yet, to return to Levitas’ notion of an enduringly critically self-reflexive, dialogical, and provisional utopianism, the ways in which previous utopias have naturalized dystopian realities for marginalized groups must be addressed. For instance, the socialist utopias of Bellamy and Morris naturalized, to varying degrees, hetero-patriarchy and racism, in their respective failures to articulate critiques of those forms of oppression. Today, the focus on the threats associated with climate change and global economic stagnation, as well as both ongoing and potential outbreaks of violence, has the potential to obscure the particularities of social inequalities and their respective intersections with ecological crisis. The experiences of Indigenous and other landbased peoples are especially vulnerable in this regard. In fact, one might argue that the critical utopias referenced above by Delany, Le Guin, Piercy, and Russ contribute, in varying degrees, to the naturalization of settler colonialism. As such, the growing body of Indigenous critical theory and allied critiques of settler colonialism ought to be of specific concern. Lorenzo Veracini defines settler colonialism thusly: [W]hereas settler colonialism constitutes a circumstances where the colonising effort is exercised from within the bounds of a settler colonising political entity, colonialism is driven by an expanding metropole that remains permanently distinct from it . . . as settlers, by definition, stay, in specific contradistinction, colonial sojourners—administrators, missionaries, military personnel, entrepreneurs, and adventurers—return.13 This throws open the question of how the utopian traditions of settler societies—including but not limited to the United States and Canada—themselves ought to be understood as part of the project of naturalizing settler colonialism. That is, the utopianism of settler societies must be accountable to anti-colonial critiques. To fail to do so is to undermine the relevance of utopia as a contributor to the project of making a better world or, at the least, it constrains the social dreaming of a better way of being to an exclusive category.

Say what you want about President Obama, his sense of taste and sensitivity is matched by few in public office. Earlier this month in an interview with the Associated Press, President Obama said that if he were the owner of the Washington Redskins and he knew the name was "offending a sizable group of people," then he would "think about changing it." Joining the president's sentiments is NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who had previously shown support for the team's mascot but has lately changed his tune a bit. During halftime of Sunday night's broadcast of the Redskins-Cowboys game, sportscaster Bob Costas also weighed in, calling our capital's team name "an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present-day intent." I have been very critical of President Obama these last few years, but thankfully there is finally something that I can agree with him on! And due to the president's progressive credentials, I hope that he will lead stubborn Redskins owner Dan Snyder by example. For example, it was barely a month ago that President Obama and his cabinet could not wait to get the U.S. into yet another war, this time in Syria. The warships were deployed to the Mediterranean. On Obama's orders, they would have fired Tomahawk missiles into Syria. A Tomahawk axe, derived from Powhatan tamahaac, was a hatchet used by Native Americans all over the continent. In popular culture, it is generally used to portray the supposed savagery of Indians, as a caricature, and to rally Braves at Turner Field in Atlanta (now talk about offensive!). For the rest of the world, the American government's version is an incredibly expensive representation of empire and hegemony, a hatchet from the sky that vaporizes towns on the president's whim. Where is the outrage over this name? If this were the only one, it might be easy to understand. But the list goes on. The U.S. military has named helicopters after Apache, Blackhawk, Chinook, Chamanche, Iroquois, and Kiowa tribes. The "Collateral Murder" video leaked by Chelsea Manning starred the Apache versions, giving a slight glimpse into what these helicopters are used for. And all of these weapons systems are at the president's disposal. If Robert Griffin III's aerial attack needs a new name, then so does the president's. Why there is such silence over the use of Native American names for tools of death, destruction, and conquest when compared to a silly sports team? Since Native Americans themselves seem to be fairly disinterested in the matter, part of it undoubtedly stems from a culture of politically correct hysteria, where mostly white, guilt-ridden liberals pine over how racist and intolerant everyone else is. Bob Costas may shed crocodile tears over the use of the name Redskins, but I am sure he won't think twice about cashing his check for covering their games. But it runs much deeper than that. A society so acquiescent to militarism is not only destructive but also leads to a dangerous ignorance of history. Calling our sports teams Redskins and Indians may spark outrage today, but there is a reason much of our offensive military weaponry is named after Native American tribes: to the victor goes the spoils. After the Civil War, the Union Army immediately looked west and began a military campaign that only can be described as deliberate genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Plains Indians. General Sherman, who boasted about employing "total war" against Southern cities, used the same tactics in his proposed "final solution to the Indian problem." Decades later, it nearly was final, and the rest were gathered into concentration camps. It is also interesting to contrast the violent and genocidal relationship the U.S. government had with Native Americans to the mostly peaceful cooperation regular Americans had with them. The Great Northern Railway, a private railway system running from Minnesota to Seattle, was built without government subsidies by negotiating and purchasing land, not by razing and stealing it. Early Americans, especially Quakers, regarded Native Americans as human beings deserving of respect and traded with them voluntarily in the free market. Native Americans were the first people to be conquered by the U.S. government, and their names that now grace military hardware serve as a type of sick ode to this launching pad for further military adventurism, domination, and empire. A century later, nearly every single country in the world has experienced the wrath of an Apache helicopter or Tomahawk missile to the cheers and patriotic flag-waving of Americans on the home front. But don't you dare call a sports team the Redskins! Can't you see how offensive it is!? Yes, it is outdated and arcane. But so is the mindset behind militarism and an aggressive foreign policy. These are relics from the days of monarchs, not hallmarks of a supposed constitutional republic dedicated to liberty. And if you ask me, given the U.S. government's record of war, debt, and authoritarian laws, the Redskins should be ashamed of Washington, not the other way around.

The American apocalyptic entity is less familiar to us. Even if its urges to power and domination seem historically recognizable, it nonetheless represents a new constellation of forces bound up with what I've come to think of as "superpower syndrome." By that term I mean a national mindset-put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group-that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations. The American superpower status derives from our emergence from World War II as uniquely powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower left standing at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims. That entitlement stems partly from historic claims to special democratic virtue, but has much to do with an embrace of technological power translated into military terms. That is, a superpower the world's only superpower-is entitled to dominate and control precisely because it is a superpower. The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as nothing else could have. Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no superpower can permit. Indeed, at the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpower's victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or even extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated worldflntegral to superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both lived with a godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the cosmos, along with a fear of being annihilated by the enemy power. Now America alone possesses that world-destroying capacity, and post-Soviet Russia no longer looms as a nuclear or superpower adversary. We have yet to grasp the full impact of this exclusive capacity to blow up anyone or everything, but its reverberations are never absent in any part of the world. The confrontation between Islamist and American versions of planetary excess has unfortunately tended to define a world in which the vast majority of people embrace neither. But apocalyptic excess needs no majority to dominate a landscape. All the more so when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American leaders seem to act in concert. That is, each, in its excess, nurtures the apocalypticism of the other, resulting in a malignant synergy. As a psychiatrist concerned with history, I have in my past work explored the destructive excesses of our times-Nazi genocide, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chinese Communist "thought reform," the Vietnam war, and the apocalyptic forays of Aum Shinrikyo and other cults of the late-twentieth century. Each of these expressed a powerful impulse to destroy the existing world so that it might be purified and renewed. The Nazis had a vision of renewing the world biologically by ridding it of "defiling" races and bad genes~n dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, the United States sought not only to end a bloody war but also to display its awesome power and so to alter and reshape the postwar world to come( Chinese thought reform aimed at rooting out bad thoughts and ill-formed minds associated with an old and corrupt regime and way of life in order to purify, politically and ethically, a vast society. In Vietnam, villages, towns, and parts of cities had to be sacrificed and so destroyed in order to be "saved" from Communism. And Shoko Asahara, the guru who formed the Aum Shinrikyo cult, dedicated it to achieving a biblical Armageddon in order to bring on a world of spiritual perfection. /These extreme twentieth-century dreams and expressions of totalistic control and mass killing were bound to reverberate in the twenty-first century. (On September 11, 2001, some of those reverberations became all too cruelly evident. My past work suddenly became current. Indeed, my last book of the twentieth century had been entitled Destroying the World to Save It.)

"Domestic Dependent Nations" in the Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-envisioned, Reinvigorated, and Reempowered; 2005 Utah L. Rev. 443; Lexis; JLS)

<But it is said, that they are averse to society and a social life. Can anything be more inapplicable than this to a people who always live in towns or clans? Or can they be said to have no "republique," who conduct all their affairs in national councils, who pride themselves in their national character, who consider an insult or injury done to an individual by a stranger as done to the whole, and who resent it accordingly. In short, this picture is not applicable to any nation of Indians I have ever known or heard of in North America. n418 [*537] The republican principle of having a place within which to practice the art of being a good citizen is (and always has been) central to tribal society. Indian tribes have always had a concept of territory and boundaries. Most tribes assigned hunting territories to villages or lineages, which other tribes and tribal members knew of and respected. n419 Tribes also recognized (and still recognize) territory through mythical or sacred claims, and the burial sites of lineages and clans marked territory for most, if not all tribes. n420 Today, a tribe's traditional homeland is the "centerpiece of contemporary Indian life." n421 Tribal lands and their resources are not only sustaining for the tribe, but are the tribe's cultural and spiritual base - where ancestors are buried, and spirits live - and the very topography can provide cleansing and rebirth. n422 You cannot understand how the Indian thinks of himself in relation to the world around him unless you understand his conception of what is appropriate; particularly what is morally appropriate within the context of that relationship. The native American ethic with respect to the physical world is a matter of reciprocal appropriation: appropriations in which man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. n423>

<B. Land Theft n65 The relationship between the land and Indian people is fundamental to their physical and cultural survival as distinct, autonomous groups. Indian land is constitutive of the Indian cultural identity n66 and designative of the boundaries of the Indian cultural universe. n67 Long before first contact with European "discoverers," Indians proclaimed a sacred responsibility to preserve and transmit Indian land, and with it identity, religion, and culture, to successive generations. n68 [*14] The discharge of that responsibility has been compromised by U.S. policies of land acquisition ranging from fraud to outright theft.>

When these two historical processes are so enmeshed that racialization in the United States now often evokes colonization as a metonym, such discursive elisions obfuscate the distinctions between the two systems of dominance and the coerced complicities amid both.15 The generally accepted theorizations of racialization in the United States have, in the pursuit of equal rights and enfranchisements, tended to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion as the affective critique of the larger project of liberal multiculturalism. When the remediation of the colonization of American Indians is framed through discourses of racialization that can be redressed by further inclusion into the nation-state, there is a significant failure to grapple with the fact that such discourses further reinscribe the original colonial injury.16 As Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, White Earth Ojibwe scholar Jean M. O’Brien, and other indigenous scholars have noted, the conflation of racialization into colonization and indigeneity into racial categories dependent upon blood logics underwrites the institutions of settler colonialism when they proffer assimilation into the colonizing nation as reparation for genocide and theft of lands and nations.17 But the larger concern is that this conflation masks the territoriality of conquest by assigning colonization to the racialized body, which is then policed in its degrees from whiteness. Under this paradigm, American Indian national assertions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land rights disappear into U.S. terrioriality as indigenous identity becomes a racial identity and citizens of colonized indigenous nations become internal ethnic minorities within the colonizing nation-state. As civil rights, queer rights, and other rights struggles have often cathected liberal democracy as the best possible avenue to redress the historical violences of and exclusions from the state, scholars and activists committed to social justice have been left with impossible choices: to articulate freedom at the expense of another, to seek power and recognition in the hopes that we might avoid the syllogisms of democracy created through colonialism. Lisa Lowe provides a useful caution as she reminds us that “the affirmation of ethical moment before us is to comprehend “the particular loss of the intimacies of four continents, to engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism as a conjunction, as an actively acknowledged loss within the present.”19 In attempting to people the intimacies of four continents, Lowe activates the Chinese indentured laborer in the Caribbean just after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 as the affective entry point into “a range of connections, the global intimacies out of which emerged not only modern humanism but a modern racialized division of labor.”20 Her turn to the colonial racialized labor force in the Americas helps to reveal the degree to which intimacy—here tracked through the spheres of spatial proximity, privacy, and volatility—among Africa, Asia, and Europe in the Americas has served as the forgotten and disavowed constitutive means through which liberal humanism defines freedom, family, equality, and humanity. In fact, liberal humanism, according to Lowe, depends upon the “‘economy of affirmation and forgetting’” not just of particular streams of human history, but of the loss of their geographies, histories, and subjectivities.21 In the indeterminacies between and among freedom, enslavement, indentureship, interior, and exterior, the recovered Asian contract laborer, functioning as historical site for Lowe, can reveal the processes through which liberalism asserts freedom and forgets enslavement as the condition of possibility for what constitutes “the human.” “Freedom was,” Lowe stresses, “constituted through a narrative dialectic that rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or contradiction. The ‘overcoming’ of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas.”22 But what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in Lowe’s important figuration of the history of labor in “the intimacies of four continents,” is the settler colonialism that such labor underwrites. Asia, Africa, and Europe all meet in the Americas to labor took place? Lowe includes “native peoples” in her figurations as an addendum when she writes that she hopes “to evoke the political economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas, who with native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe and North America.”23 By positioning the conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas as coeval contradictions through which Western freedom affirms and resolves itself, and then by collapsing the indigenous Americas into slavery, the fourth continent of settler colonialism through which such intimacy is made to labor is not just forgotten or elided; it becomes the very ground through which the other three continents struggle intimately for freedom, justice, and equality. Within Lowe’s formulation, the native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery; their only role within the disavowed intimacies of racialization is either one equivalent to that of African slaves or their ability to die so imported labor can make use of their lands. Thus, within the “intimacies of four continents,” indigenous peoples in the new world cannot, in this system, give rise to any historical agency or status within the “economy of affirmation and forgetting,” because they are the transit through which the dialectic of subject and object occurs. In many ways, then, this book argues for a critical reevaluation of the elaboration of these historical processes of oppression within postcolonial, critical race, queer, and American studies at the beginning of the twenty first century. By foundationally accepting the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking oppressions of class, gender, and sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through investments in colorblind equality. Simply put, prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. postcolonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous be white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and the assumption of white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and diasporic queer communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved, if not redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars.

<(e) Inability to Transform Racial Attitudes, Alter Legal Structures, or Restore Land Although a claim for Indian reparations would present a potentially transformative national moment wherein to challenge and upset the assumptions and normative judgments of Indian inferiority and United States' infallibility, a lump-sum payment, although it might materially enrich Indian tribes, would be unlikely to advance the progressive perfection of the American social and legal order. Although Indian tribes seeking to obtain a [*133] measured separatism might be less concerned than other social groups about the prospect that reparations would permit the United States to relax enforcement of civil rights laws on their behalf or to withdraw from the more general struggle for fourth-tier democracy, n618 payment of reparations might obviate recognition of any continuing responsibilities under the trust doctrine, including programs to aid tribes in the transition to self-determination. n619 Moreover, Indian reparations would thrust Indians and non-Indians into contending camps and lock them in political and legal combat in which anything goes in the fight over the wealth and power of the state. n620 In so doing, Indian reparations would miss a key opportunity to employ moral argument n621 to creatively restructure attitudes and institutions and reconcile interdependent peoples, processes that are almost certainly necessary conditions precedent to the award of Indian reparations and, even more significantly, to the reinvestiture of legitimacy in the nation. n622 Furthermore, money cannot be directed to the satisfaction of the harms of which Indians complain: most seek to exercise the rights to self-determine and to express their unique cultures and religions upon sacred ancestral lands. n623 Only land restoration and legal restructuring to permit development of separate political identities can potentiate these fundamental human rights and relieve the economic deprivation and emotional pain borne inter-generationally by Indian tribes and individuals. In sum, because reparations are a far-too-costly and - [*134] improbable remedy toward which to commit their resources, n624 because reparations portends more racial strife than reconciliation and fixates on cash rather than justice or healing, n625 many Indian tribes and indigenous rights groups n626 oppose it as a remedy.>

There are two specific policies that, as this article goes to press, together further the ongoing injustices of settler colonialism, particularly in remote regions of the country. The first is the Cashless Debit Card. The Cashless Debit Card is a type of income management that quarantines 80 per cent of state benefits received by working-age people, and is justified on the basis of restricting alcohol and gambling purchases. It limits the amount of cash that can be withdrawn to 20 per cent of the total money recipients receive. A high proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are put on the Card, and have reported that the Card makes the use and management of their meagre social security payments challenging, causing further financial difficulty and stress (Klein and Razi, 2018). Second, and intersecting with the Card, is the remote work-for-the-dole programme called the Community Development Program or CDP. It requires the same cohort of working-age participants, who are almost all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and receive a state payment, to attend manufactured ‘work-like’ initiatives for up to 20 hours a week for a payment well below minimum wage (Altman, 2015; Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). The requirements for CDP are harsher than the government’s non-remote and mainly non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Jobactive workfare programme, because of its rules and because of the remote setting. This has resulted in CDP rates of non-compliance and non-attendance 30 to 40 times higher than in the Jobactive programme (Fowkes, 2016). People who do not attend what some in the programme term ‘make-work’ or ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2019) lose their welfare money, and families go without. Both of these policies further settler colonialism. While the programmes focus on behavioural deficiencies of the unemployed, the key cause of unemployment in the remote and regional areas such as the East Kimberley is the absence of formal jobs (KDC, 2013), and so the programmes are superfluous to their own stated policy objectives. These programmes also support the expansion of private and largely White capital, thus transforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander subjectivities into sites of accumulation by dispossession. For example, the private company which provides the Cashless Debit Card profits from the project. Finally, underpinning these job-creation initiatives are specific (Western) norms as to how work is defined. While many Aboriginal peoples in and around Kununurra engage in productive work ‘on country’, undertaking customary (non-market) work for livelihood, this is not recognized or valued by the state. Such productive work activities have endured over a decade of critique by politicians, business leaders, policy makers and some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elite, who frame this work as being outside the ‘real economy’, and as promoting narratives about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander passivity, dysfunction and non-participation in work (Altman, 2014). Such discourse also ignores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ engagement in other productive and socially reproductive activities such as unpaid care work and care of country. These types of work are overlooked, and bodies passed off as unproductive and unemployed are subsequently compulsorily forced onto punitive and conditional welfare schemes (Altman, 2019). People on these programmes know what they are about. In the East Kimberley, the Cashless Debit Card is called the White card, as it is, in the words of one participant, ‘taking us back to the ration days’ (Klein and Razi, 2017: 7). Patty Gibson has framed this imposition and control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ welfare expenditure by the Australian state as the ‘re-imposition of colonial forms of governance’ when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, prior to the 1970s, ‘were not entitled to handle cash like other citizens and rationing regimes were used to control Aboriginal movement and labour, as well as to try and discipline people out of “Aboriginal” behaviours’ (Gibson, 2012: 63). Klein and Razi (2018) link the polices of the Cashless Debit Card and CDP workfare to broader settler colonial processes in the East Kimberley region. For instance, Kununurra itself is a town created through the damming of the Ord River, which flooded over half of Miriuwung country, including important Miriuwung songlines — significant knowledge networks carried through generations about Miriuwung culture and land. This dramatic dispossession for accumulation has not benefited Aboriginal peoples; the scheme has resulted in only 260 (predominately non-Aboriginal) jobs (Grudnoff and Campbell, 2017). And as documented in the Senate Inquiry into Indigenous Stolen Wages (Parliament of Australia, 2006), indentured and unpaid Aboriginal labour built the pastoral industries of the East Kimberley. Finally, many families suffered through Stolen Generation policies whereby their children were taken from them and used as slave or indentured domestic labour in settler households. In line with this history, people are now put on work for the dole — another form of indentured state labour programmes and income management.

Resistance and refusal are also more subtle. When people don’t turn up to their CDP activities people are breeched and Centrelink withholds their payments. Not turning up has been analysed as refusal where people decline to engage in government make likework. 80 Others moved out of the trial site when they were put on the cashless debitcard. 81First Nations people have also refused to centre government development intheir lives and have continued to pursue their own notions of care on country, undertak-ing activities and work that does not always align to government ideas of development. In response to the occupation, both physical and behavioural, Indigenous people have always resisted in ways that have delegitimised the narrative of settler colonialism.82Responses to the assemblage include ways for people to reclaim power over imposed bureaucratic power.83So, whilst the assemblage does bring hardship to people’s lives, assimilation of behaviours is only an attempt. Following Audra Simpson, settler colonialism is a process, but its flip side are the constant acts of refusal to assimilation. 84Resistance and agency are also shown in other aspects of the assemblage–not always in direct opposition to the state, but can also come from within. Bureaucrats deployed as implementors of policy spoke privately about trying to find ways to divert and lesson impacts of politicians’ ideology. In the example above about the counsellors of Halls Creek Shire voting no to implementation of the Cashless Debit Card, also showed agency and resistance to the will of both State and Federal politicians. Sites of resistance and agency such as First Nations refusal as well as resistance within government itself underline the possibilities of emergence in the process of assemblage. Whilst the Indigen-ous development assemblage may seem enduring and never ending, there are always moments of incoherence, repudiation and rupture.

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

Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of “extinction” as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant: “human extinction whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about.” Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to theologize extinction. Jaeques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence: Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or lets the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a “classical,” conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text. At least today apparently. By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the “real” of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The “real” of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a “rehearsal” (Berrick De Kerkhove) or “preperation” (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe. The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of “extinction.” Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized “in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions of people by the local effects.” Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive “delocalization” of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, “global” catastrophe.

By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkbove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe. The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local effects." Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe. The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction" is configured. Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the "absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic gaze. In other words, the image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."

Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has never been the “unthinkable” single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the “real” of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth’s Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of the “nuclear testing” in the Pacific. Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere…were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the Earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself. Although Firth’s book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of “nuclear testing” in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the “nuclear explosions” and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject (“we”) is located higher than the “real” of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the “real” of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakeable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.

In all three of these thinkers, the rhetoric of sovereignty takes on a decidedly nationalistic cast, but while they all advocate focusing on action at the community level, none of them can adequately be described as purely separatist. Rather, in explicit opposition to this, Warrior calls for Indians to “withdraw without becoming separatists, being willing to reach out for the contradictions within our experience and open ourselves to the pain and the joy of others” (124). Rather than representing an enclave, sovereignty here is the ability to assert oneself renewed—in the presence of others. It is a people’s right to rebuild, its demand to exist and present its gifts to the world. Also key to these thinkers’ rhetorics of sovereignty is an adamant refusal to disassociate culture, identity, and power from the land, and it is precisely this commitment to place that makes the concept of rhetorical sovereignty an empowering device for all forms of community. While most Indians have a special relationship with the land in the form of an actual land base (reservations), this relationship is made truly meaningful by a consistent cultural refusal to interact with that land as private property or purely exploitable resource. Land, culture, and community are inseparable in Indian country, which might explain Native resistance to such policies as the Dawes Allotment Act of a century ago, which tried to transform Indians into bourgeois whites by making them property-holding farmers. This cultural resistance has consistently been made in objection to the way such policies divide Indian communities and disrupt traditional culture with radically individualist ideologies, and whenever I see community activists of whatever stripe—Black, Hmong, working-class, etc.—making arguments on behalf of “our community” in the face of apparently naked economic self-interest, I think those, too, are claims to sovereignty made by different groups. But most important, as voices of the people, scholars like Deloria, Warrior, and Cook-Lynn are asserting themselves as members of sovereign Indian nations, deploying power and seeking recognition at the colonized scene of writing.

Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage. In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource.

A particular tragedy and contradiction in mainstream economics is its manufactured background story. The presuppositions underlying the narrative of the discipline generally mirror a biased worldview; in general, that of an isolated individual performing rational (optimizing) decisions within a closed system (Pratten, 2007; 2004). Feminist economists argue that this model individual is also white, colonial, male11 (Grappard, 1995). The story of individuals constantly taking selfish and rational decisions within a closed world informs the methodology used by economists. With a narrow experience of life, the constructed nature of existence (ontology) inscribed within mainstream economics generates unreliable knowledge production tools (epistemology) about the economy—a complex system in which collectives of individuals live and exchange with each other. Furthermore, mainstream economics epistemology employs mathematical and deductivist tools. Critical realism12 argues that economics’ deductivist methodology is only appropriate to study a ‘small-closed-world’ system (Pratten, 1996; Spash, 2012). All in all, economic event regularities are deduced from an unreasonable and unrealistic ontology. For the Cambridge Journal of Economics co-editor Stephen Pratten (2007), the only path beyond mainstream economics is through the abandonment of the deductivist framework. This is a call for a complete epistemological revolution! I believe that to delegitimize institutions, their stories have to be delegitimized. If mathematical-deduction uses prior beliefs/stories to explain the past and predict the future, then a critical reformulation of economics ontology is absolutely required as well, but not sufficient. My ontological investigation of the discipline is inspired and drawn from revolutionary Indigenous feminist theorists. For instance, in I am Woman, Lee Maracle (1996) of the Sto:Loh nation pointedly argues that (mainstream) economics and mathematics are products of white (European) settler male worldviews. As a matter of fact, the latter character’s beliefs and experiences of the world are also at the root of mainstream economics ontology, and a catalyst for its form of knowledge production. My analytical focus is also informed by my Settler space of birth occupying Kanien’kehá:ka territory. It is also informed by my present space and (white settler male) character occupying the land protected by and shared between the Anishinaabe, Mississauga, and Haudenosaunee people, as per the Dish With One Spoon treaty. In this paper, I argue that the definitions of land13, wealth and economics in Canadian mainstream economics textbooks depict a Settler colonial ontology. Thesis Land. Wealth. Economics. These three interdependent words connect how we see and act in the world. In my opinion, land is loving, abundant, intelligent, and always remembers. Land encompasses a long list of wealth; life, resources, knowledge, stories. Land is wealth. Logically and ethically, an appropriate system of wealth exchange (an economy) can only be prosperous if it respectfully relies on land. An appropriate study of economics interlaces our material relationships with each other, with more-than-humans and with life all together. Yet, it is not sufficient to build a better economic way to relate to the land, while Settler institutions occupy Indigenous land and territories. Different forces of power are at play within the Settler colonial complex. In general, there are three ‘structures of invasion’: spaces, systems and stories. In Settler Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada, Barker and Lowman (2015) refer to these structures as they delve into the construction of Settlers in Canada. They elaborate on the types of Settler colonial invasions performed in Canada, which reinforce Settler power and authority over the land. In all instances, the spaces we take, the systems we build, and the stories we tell “are [ultimately] focused on the land” (Barker & Lowman, 2015, p. 31). First of all, ‘spaces’ as a structure of invasion is defined as the Settler colonial spaces that displace and replace Indigenous places (Barker et al., 2015). For example, the city of Toronto is a Settler colonial space since it intentionally covers and displaces Anishnaabe spaces. Second of all, ‘systems’ are constructed so that Settler colonialism can assert and develop itself (Barker & Lowman, 2015). The Indian Residential School system was a system that severed the ties of young Indigenous children from the land. Thirdly, the ‘stories’ created by Settlers to legitimize occupation, such as the ‘Peacemaker Myth’ and ‘Terra Nullius’, displaces Indigenous stories of land connection (Barker & Lowman, 2015). In the case of mainstream economics, the most relevant structures of invasion are the stories and systems it creates. Economic stories and systems that dismiss and replace Indigenous relations to land thus intentionally participate in the displacement and erasure of Indigenous spaces, systems and stories. Canadian economics textbooks regard land as given for free by nature (to Settlers) and (initially) without any agency to generate wealth, until Settlers improve and value the land. In other words, economics students assume that before the European arrival on (what is now commonly known as) North America, nature gave the land to the European Settlers—metaphorically understood, of course. All of nature’s contents was devoid of agency, and thus free for the new visitors (Settlers) to claim, to own. Completely ignoring wealth accumulation from land, the theoretical framework in Canadian economics textbooks does not question wealth distribution and mostly focuses on wealth production (see Green, 2013). Of course, wealth distribution and production occurs on land. Canadian economists nonetheless assume that all economic activities—in this case, production and distribution of wealth—begin on free and unoccupied land, transforming their respective spaces/locations (land) into improvable and privatized assets, ready for the (free) market. A Canadian definition of economics that does not encompass its socio-political (colonial) context is a structure that legitimizes Settler colonial invasion, against Indigenous peoples and their land. As such, young students who read, learn and interpret the world from Canadian economics textbooks do not face their complicity within Settler colonialism. Rather, they confidently reproduce their economic knowledge on unceded/stolen land. All in all, the underlying thesis of this chapter is that the constructed paradigm within Canadian standard economics textbooks derives from the imagination of a privileged and ahistorical Settler position of ‘objectivism’ and ‘authority’, camouflaged by Whiteness, by an empty ontology, and by storytelling derived from the dominant White Settler Male view.