Search the archive.

Discussion A brief critical synthesis of the words ‘land’, ‘wealth’ and ‘economics’ suggests that although all the conceptions are actually tightly and materially connected, the authors of economics textbooks have effectively decoupled the terms from each other. Therefore, the hypothesis and worldview describes an implicit erasure of Settler colonialism and of Indigenous people in economics; mainstream economics, in this case. The definition of land, derived from the economics textbooks, does not point to the historical reality of how land was owned by early (and contemporary) Settlers. For the surveyed authors, wealth is not explicitly derived from land, since it is assumed that accumulation and distribution is given. The definition of economics did at least focus on wealth (and economic growth) in the classical century of economic thought (Backhouse & Medema, 2009b), but the North American economics’ attention on wealth started to be delinked in Samuelson’s text in 1948 (Backhouse & Medema, 2009a). Based on the surveyed textbooks, the authors do not define economics as a study of wealth. Rather, the definition of economics mainly attracts questions around unlimited needs, scarce means, and the utilitarian choice-making character of the individualistic economic actor. Thus, there are layers of erasure between each term that ‘logically’ delink the whole study of economics in Canada from the land dispossessions. Settler Colonial Land Story For Barker and Lowman (2015, p. 33) the Settler narratives “are the means through which violent colonization is transformed into the story of heroic struggle and the inevitable establishment of an exceptionally successful, just, and distinct society”. The concepts of land used in Canadian economics textbooks are stories that invade and displace not just Indigenous stories, but Settler as well. The most common narrated story in the textbooks is that nature gave land to the early Settlers for free. Moreover, the textbook’s narrative explains that only the Settlers’ improvement of the land gave it any economic worth. This myth makes White European Settlers as subjects with agency, and nature (or the ‘wild’) as an object with no agency. This positivist perspective then implies that Indigenous people are ‘wild’, as part of the natural background. In other words, since the textbooks do not mention Indigenous people living on or using the land, they are then imagined as ‘savages’ without agency, or even life. In fact, we can infer that life and value can only be transferred through White Settler ownership. The belief that nature gave land to Settlers “obscures” the fact “that many settlers only survived because of the generosity, knowledge and skills of Indigenous communities” (Barker & Lowman, 2015, p. 34). The story given by the economics textbooks closely resembles the Terra Nullius ideology: the “notion of empty land and a dualism between uncivilized people and ‘unworked’/unimproved land” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 124). The land is therefore believed to be empty and unimproved if there is no human agency, which is only formed by economic agents guided by market mechanisms. As a consequence, these stories then influence actual state policies. For instance, there are examples of early paper bills of credit backed by colonial arrogations over Indigenous lands, and how its continuous circulation in the form of money reproduced the colonial expropriation of Native land and labor (Vimalassery, 2013). Additionally, based on the critical geographer Dawn Hoogeveen (2015), the mineral claim-staking regime in Northern Canada parallels the Settler colonial structure of dispossession of mineral staking across North American, and the world. In fact, mineral staking is due to the free-staking principle. Basically, the principle gives full right to mining prospectors and companies to claim a piece of land (whether private or Crown land) without informing the people who own or live on the land (Hoogeveen, 2015). As Hoogeven (2015, p. 123) claims, present “mineral tenure regimes are not innocent or neutral but premised on an erasure of Indigenous claims to land”—legitimized by the textbooks’ narrative on land. Finally, this illustration of land and property also follows John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690). Briefly, John Locke’s theory of property (‘law of nature’) goes as follows: at first, land was God’s gift equally given to the heirs of Adam as a common. Subsequently, land becomes the private property of the individuals who improve it. In other words, nature is privatized when humans add value to it through labour. “His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself” (Locke, 1690, Sect. 29). Additionally, Locke saw the ‘art of government’ as the provider of land for those who wish to properly improve it and produce surplus. Thus, since mainstream political economics regards Indigenous people as pertaining to a lower level of economic development, Locke’s idea of improvement and labour absolutely favours the European philosophy of property exclusivity. Unsurprisingly, as argued by several scholars (Tully, 1995; Hsueh, 2006), the Lockean perspective in political philosophy invalidates the discipline’s capacity to study aboriginal self-government and ecology. The interesting research of political scientist Vicki Hsueh (2006), interrogating the credibility of Locke’s thesis, suggests that John Locke’s direct financial stake in American slavery and Indigenous dispossession depicts a vested interest in his political ideas. In other words, for Hsueh (2006), there was a clear conflict of interest. As such, and by extension that all Settler economists benefit from similar conflicts of interest, I argue that mainstream economics cannot generate epistemologies to evaluate any Indigenous economic relations to land. The discipline devaluates their political economies and superimposes (European) Settler stories and structures over those of Indigenous nations. Settler Colonial Wealth Story: Canadian economics textbooks forgo the important relation between land and wealth, although wealth is clearly an original feature of land. The textbooks’ view on land only permits the market as the provider of improvement and economic value to land, generating surplus, and amounting to wealth accumulation. Moreover, since this wealth is extracted through a structure of white settler ownership of land, as I argued earlier, we can also ascertain that the wealth is therefore what history scholar Patrick Wolfe (American University of Beirut, 2013) calls “white man’s property”. In the Settler colonial context, Indigenous bodies obstruct the settlers’ access to land, and therefore access to wealth accumulation (Wolfe, 2006). Hence, the textbook’s disconnection erases the persistent land dispossession and appropriation, and wealth accumulation of Settler colonialism, in Canada. This post-accumulation/dispossession narrative is therefore a second layer in Canadian economics pedagogy that removes all Indigenous entitlement and sovereignty over wealth. With unceded/stolen land occupied and extracted by Settlers, all accumulated wealth is also unceded/stolen. In fact, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012, p. 24) logically infer, “[i]f we took away land, there would be little wealth left to redistribute”—gain, “wealth is land, Native land” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 23). The free-entry regime is an example of how wealth is accumulated in Canada, and how the textbook’s story about wealth also informs Settler “systems”. The regime in question allows mining to supersede all private property interests, especially all aboriginal land rights. It also favours mining operations as “the best and highest use of Crown lands” and the “mineral tenures are appropriately granted on a first come first serve basis” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 128). Furthermore, mineral potential is considered as the most valuable resource, rendering any other resource interests as much less important (Campbell, 2004, cited in Hoogeveen, 2015, p.128). In terms of mineral staking in Canada, the free-entry system divides property into surface and sub-surface legal categories (where sub-surface rights supplants surface rights). It “is strictly for the purposes of any potential resource extraction or to raise money for capitalist mining interests” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 136). To increase wealth, the land and its sub-surface have to be expropriated by displacing Indigenous peoples. This is legitimized by classical economics axioms protecting property rights. The economist’s definition of wealth is thus not innocent or neutral as it propagates a Settler colonial story (ideology) of wealth in its pedagogy, and in praxis as well. Settler Colonial Economics Story Following the preceding layers of erasure of Settler colonialism in Canadian economics textbooks, I argue that the definition of economics is a third layer of erasure. The physiocrats of the 18th century were the first classical economists to consider land as the source of wealth. With respect to physiocracy, economic processes operate through the objective “Natural Law”, which is independent of human free will (Cleveland, 1999). Moreover, the classical physiocratic model regarded agriculture as the “supreme occupation” and “economic rent as derived from uncompensated work done by Nature” (Cleveland, 1999, p. 129). While this early perspective of classical economics viewed Nature (land) as the source of wealth, it could not consider the uncompensated labour of Indigenous people on the land. Later on, post-Physiocratic definitions of economics still considered wealth as the object of analysis, up until the 20th century. After the 1940s, the popular Robbinsonian definition of economics—losing the attention on wealth, and rather focusing on the individual economic actor and scarcity—took hold of the mainstream discipline, especially in North America (Backhouse & Medema, 2009a). Therefore, the movement away from an economics informed by land and by wealth, and ultimately informed by the ‘theory of choice’, can be interpreted as overlapping layers deepening and obfuscating a Settler colonial analysis. Beyond any doubt, these mainstream definitions of economics inform the management of land and wealth in Canada, without considering the ingrained Settler colonial power structures. In other words, I argue that the current definition of economics supersedes and invades any non-colonial relation to the land. Economics imperialism provides another valuable description of the invasive characteristics of neoclassical economics in the academic realm (Mäki, 2009; Allais, 2012; Fine & Milonakis, 2009) and within other public matters (Perry-Kessaris, 2011; Rushton, 1999). More specifically, I argue that the Robbinsonian definition of economics legitimizes the academic and social reach of economics imperialism. As such, the story of the profit maximizing and rational economic actor derived from the neoclassical definition creates legal institutions (or ‘systems’) in Canada that dispossess Indigenous people (e.g. the mineral claims-staking regime) and eliminate them as well (e.g. the Indian Act). Finally, the narrative in Canadian economics pedagogy is a complicit supplier of legitimacy and persistence for Settler colonial invasions that erase stories of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. The preceding conclusion is a logical derivative of the latter-elaborated three layers of definitions in economics: land, wealth, and economics. Actually, within the context of economics, I perceive the three words as stratified layers that work to erase the complexities and contradictions of Settler colonialism from mainstream economics analysis and State policies.

Universal basic income programs are meant to broadly distribute wealth so that no one falls below the threshold for a decent standard of living. However, this policy alone cannot address the historical damage of systematic discrimination and cumulative disadvantage that has marginalized many communities in the first place. In addition, efforts to restitute past injustices-such as campaigns for reparations or struggles to maintain the current welfare state -may, paradoxically, be threatened by the implementation of what I term neoliberal universal basic income. This section explains why those living in the wake of historical injustice (Sharpe 2016) should take particular interest in the structure and policy goals of any proposed UBI program to avoid the adoption of a program that could undermine the efficacy of UBI for improving the overall well-being of historically marginalized communities. One of UBI's primary and most discussed advantages as a policy is that it is universal. By giving benefits to every member of society, UBI avoids the stigma that usually comes from receiving welfare. As Van Parijs (2004, 13) puts it, "there is nothing humiliating about benefits given to all as a matter of citizenship." However, a universal policy that distributes equal benefits cannot explicitly recognize or ameliorate disparities in income and generational wealth that have emerged historically along gender and racial lines. Standard UBI proposals are not structurally designed to redress the inequalities produced by centuries of oppression, slavery, exploitation, settler colonialism, and race- and gender-based exploitation. While most UBI proposals would clearly benefit the most marginalized to some extent, they cannot directly address the harm, both in terms of a dearth of material resources as well as the psychic and collective pain of marginalized groups, that centuries of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ity, and have produced. Put simply, a universal basic income may be desirable for a variety of reasons, but it is not a panacea for social problems, nor can it serve as a replacement for reparations for historical injustices inflicted on marginalized groups

A UBI in place of such workfare policies would be a vast improvement on these punitive social security provisions, both in terms of agency, economic security and distribution. However, if such a UBI is framed and understood not simply as an improved welfare or tax and transfer system, but rather as a form of distributive justice, then in this context it does not seem just or rightful that all people in Australia are entitled to claim the same share of collective wealth. A universal share of wealth funded by taxation would help redistribute material privilege, including to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Yet a UBI would not account for or recognize the violence, displacement of nationhood and denial of sovereignty that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples endure within the political economy of settler society. It also would not account for the ongoing attempts at assimilation by the settler state. Not accounting for the dark side of the making and maintenance of the Australian nation in calculations of what is rightful effectively renders settler colonialism as a past event, not an ongoing process. It is therefore important to think about reparations not just in terms of material redistribution, but also as a redistribution of power and control via sovereignty, as well as the unravelling of contemporary and ongoing structures of settler colonialism.

Indigenous development in the East Kimberley Employment and getting First Nations people into ‘real jobs’ has been a key rationality underpinning government attempts of First Nations development. Targeted, are people without formal employment whose behaviour are seen as key sites of improvement. Yet, whilst government logic is about how getting people into formal employment will lead to development, they overlook structural limits in the remote labour market. The Kimberley Development Commission finds that the key cause of unemployment in the East Kimberley is not an issue of behavioural deficiency, but because of the absence of formal jobs. Footnote49 Still, this absence of formal jobs for First Nations peoples provides employment for largely non-First Nations people where services for the poor and unemployed are a major industry in Kununurra. Underpinning these job creation initiatives, are specific norms and rationalities as to how work is defined. While many First Nations people, in and around Kununurra engage in productive work ‘on country’ undertaking customary work for livelihoods, most of this work, unless it can derive a market value such in the case with the ranger programme, is not valued by the state. Such productive work activities outside the market economy have endured over a decade of critique by politicians, business leaders, policy-makers and some Indigenous elite, terming this work as being outside the ‘real economy’, and promoting narratives about Aboriginal passivity, dysfunction and non-participation in work. Footnote50 Also not valued through such discourse is how First Nations people engage in other productive activities such as unpaid care work – according to the 2016 census data, 38% of Indigenous respondents in the East Kimberley provide unpaid childcare, where only 29% of non-Indigenous people did the same. Instead, these types of work are often overlooked and bodies and communities are now passed off as unproductive and unemployed, subsequently forced onto punitive social security and community development policies. Government policies and legislation are important technologies of the Indigenous development assemblage in the East Kimberley. I initially started my research through examining the Cashless Debit Card trial, yet quickly realised how this policy was contingent on other policies operating in the area; the Community Development Program – a punitive work-for-the-dole programme, transitional housing – conditional housing support, and Regional Reform – a WA government initiative redirecting funding away from economically unproductive remote communities. Whilst each is presented, implemented and evaluated by government as discrete polices, what is of interest is how are part of an assemblage with each other as well as interlinking with other actors, discourse and processes to not only territorialise capabilities and possibilities for First Nations people, but also attempt to foreclose others. These different technologies target ‘behaviours’ as sites of improvement in order for development to occur. They are targeted at a cohort of people living in the region often passed off as deficient because they don’t have formal employment. These policy technologies are all situated on the contested Miriuwung Gajerrong landscape, which itself provides a constant reminder of ongoing settler colonialism, but also the continued resistance of people who resist and refuse settler colonial attempts.

As the work of so many water protectors makes clear, Canada (and the US) is still dependent on the land taken from Indigenous nations, land that those nations often still contest. Settler colonialism is about the need to secure those lands at all costs, which means refusing to acknowledge or working to extinguish Indigenous title to those lands. This is one of the trials and tribulations of living and organizing for justice in a settler colonial state. The educator and writer Luam Kidane writes that, “as architects of discourse and builders of movements, it is imperative that we shift our political paradigms and begin to act on alternatives that can provide for our material needs.” So long as projects like BI take for granted settler colonialism, they cannot be tools for social justice. Those of us who are most marginalized by society should and will determine what the movements for change will consist of. We must shift away from what we know all too comfortably and listen to alternatives that have been proposed. So how do we move forward? The history of social movements is clear: we need to build coalitions for deeper distributive transformations if we want to make our societies more just. It’s easy to get caught up in the abstract ideas that we brainstorm onto paper. We cannot build a solid structure on rotten foundations. So yes, the BI pilot project could mean growth in a lot of ways. But if we forget or ignore that the structures were built by and to accommodate those in power, then we risk continuously replicating the injustices that surround us in our everyday lives. But how do build deeper coalitions that could challenge the racist-colonial nation state we call Canada? That is hard and necessary work, with or without a basic income.

The Occupy movement for many economically marginalized people has been a welcome expression of resistance to the massive disparities in the distribution of wealth; for many Indigenous people, Occupy is another settler re-occupation on stolen land. The rhetoric of the movement relies upon problematic assumptions about social justice and is a prime example of the incommensurability between “re/occupy” and “decolonize” as political agendas. The pursuit of worker rights (and rights to work) and minoritized people’s rights in a settler colonial context can appear to be anti-capitalist, but this pursuit is nonetheless largely pro-colonial. That is, the ideal of “redistribution of wealth” camouflages how much of that wealth is land, Native land. In Occupy, the “99%” is invoked as a deserving supermajority, in contrast to the unearned wealth of the “1%”. It renders Indigenous peoples (a 0.9% ‘super-minority’) completely invisible and absorbed, just an asterisk group to be subsumed into the legion of occupiers. For example, “If U.S. land were divided like U.S. wealth” (figure 1.1) is a popular graphic that was electronically circulated on the Internet in late 2011 in connection with the Occupy movement. The image reveals inherent assumptions about land, including: land is property; land is/belongs to the United States; land should be distributed democratically. The beliefs that land can be owned by people, and that occupation is a right, reflect a profoundly settling, anthropocentric, colonial view of the world. In figure 1.1, the irony of mapping of wealth onto land seems to escape most of those who re-posted the images on their social networking sites and blogs: Land is already wealth; it is already divided; and its distribution is the greatest indicator of racial inequality17. Indeed the current wealth crisis facing the 99% spiraled with the crash in home/land ownership. Land (not money) is actually the basis for U.S. wealth. If we took away land, there would be little wealth left to redistribute. Settler colonization can be visually understood as the unbroken pace of invasion, and settler occupation, into Native lands: the white space in figure 1.2. Decolonization, as a process, would repatriate land to Indigenous peoples, reversing the timeline of these images. As detailed by public intellectuals/bloggers such as Tequila Sovereign (Lenape scholar Joanne Barker), some Occupy sites, including Boston, Denver, Austin, and Albuquerque tried to engage in discussions about the problematic and colonial overtones of occupation (Barker, October 9, 2011). Barker blogs about a firsthand experience in bringing a proposal for a Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples,18 to the General Assembly in Occupy Oakland. The memorandum, signed by Corrina Gould, (Chochenyo Ohlone - the first peoples of Oakland/Ohlone), Barker, and numerous other Indigenous and non-Indigenous activist-scholars, called for the acknowledgement of Oakland as already occupied and on stolen land; of the ongoing defiance by Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and around the globe against imperialism, colonialism, and oppression; the need for genuine and respectful involvement of Indigenous peoples in the Occupy Oakland movement; and the aspiration to “Decolonize Oakland,” rather than re-occupy it. From Barker’s account of the responses from settler individuals to the memorandum, Ultimately, what they [settler participants in Occupy Oakland] were asking is whether or not we were asking them, as non-indigenous people, the impossible? Would their solidarity with us require them to give up their lands, their resources, their ways of life, so that we – who numbered so few, after all – could have more? Could have it all? (Barker, October 30, 2011) These responses, resistances by settler participants to the aspiration of decolonization in Occupy Oakland, illustrate the reluctance of some settlers to engage the prospect of decolonization beyond the metaphorical or figurative level. Further, they reveal the limitations to “solidarity,” without the willingness to acknowledge stolen land and how stolen land benefits settlers. “Genuine solidarity with indigenous peoples,” Barker continues, “assumes a basic understanding of how histories of colonization and imperialism have produced and still produce the legal and economic possibility for Oakland” (ibid., emphasis original). For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization nonmetaphorically, they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of United States. Decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people. There are important parallels between Occupy/Decolonize and the French/Haitian Revolutions of 1789-1799 and 1791-1804, respectively. Haiti has the dubious distinction of being “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” (Central Intelligence Agency, 2012); yet, it was the richest of France’s colonies until the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolution to ever found a state. This paradox can be explained by what/who counts as whose property. Under French colonialism, Haiti was a worth a fortune in enslaved human beings. From the French slave owners’ perspectives, Haitian independence abolished not slavery, but their property and a source of common-wealth. Unfortunately, history provides us with the exact figures on what their property was worth; in 1825, “France recognized Haitian independence by a treaty requiring Haiti to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs payable in 5 years to compensate absentee slaveowners for their losses” (Schuller, 2007, p.149). The magnitude of these reparations not for slavery, but to former slave owners, plunged Haiti into eternal debt. Occupy draws almost directly from the values of the French Revolution: the Commons, the General Assembly, the natural right to property, and the resistance to the decolonization of Indigenous life/land. In 1789, the French Communes (Commons) declared themselves a National Assembly directly “of the People” (the 99%) against the representative assembly of “the Estates” (the 1%) set up by the ruling elite, and adopted the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. Not unlike the heated discussions at the December 4, 2011 General Assembly of Occupy Oakland that ultimately rejected the proposal to change the name to “Decolonize Oakland”, the 1789 National Assembly debated at great length over the language of emancipation in the Declaration. Ultimately, the Declaration abolished slavery but not property, and effectively stipulated that property trumped emancipation. While rhetorically declaring men as forever free and equal (and thus unenslavable), it assured the (revolutionary) colonial proprietors in the assembly that their chattel would be untouched, stating unequivocally: “The right to property being inviolable and sacred, no one ought to be deprived of it...” (Blackburn, 2006, p. 650). Decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless. It is incommensurable with the redistribution of Native land/life as common-wealth. Our critique of Occupation is not just a critique of rhetoric. The call to “occupy everything” has legitimized a set of practices with problematic relationships to land and to Indigenous sovereignty. Urban homesteading, for example, is the practice of re-settling urban land in the fashion of self-styled pioneers in a mythical frontier. Not surprisingly, urban homesteading can also become a form of playing Indian, invoking Indigeneity as ‘tradition’ and claiming Indian-like spirituality while evading Indigenous sovereignty and the modern presence of actual urban Native peoples. More significant examples are Occupiers’ claims to land and their imposition of Western forms of governance within their tent cities/colonies. Claiming land for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government. Occupation is a move towards innocence that hides behind the numerical superiority of the settler nation, the elision of democracy with justice, and the logic that what became property under the 1% rightfully belongs to the other 99%. In contrast to the settler labor of occupying the commons, homesteading, and possession, some scholars have begun to consider the labor of de-occupation in the undercommons, permanent fugitivity, and dispossession as possibilities for a radical black praxis. Such “a labor that is dedicated to the reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension” (Moten & Harney, 2004, p.110), includes both the refusal of acquiring property and of being Property.

(Kevin, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)

I agree with their assessments, but would also add that what we see here, as we can with the many other examples of these forms of identity appropriation, is that the work of settler memory is fundamental to the reproduction and legitimation of settler colonial assemblage through a relationship to the past that is not about forgetting. It is a powerful form of national remembering. In the contemporary era, I would include politics itself as among the facets of existence that settler colonialism colonizes. That is, settler colonial assemblage defines and seeks to bound that which is legitimately subject for debate and contestation as it concerns the distribution and role of power, identity, interest and institutions. Before one can even ask the question of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation, the question may be rendered moot, outside the bounds of legitimate, or realistic, politics. In this light, my suggestion here is that the response to such appropriations as that of Geronimo's name should not be to ask the White House for an apology, and thus concede the status of this statist institution. Instead, the association should be embraced, in one key respect. To embrace the association is not to stand in alliance with Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all or the US military, but rather to re-assert the fact that Geronimo was, indeed, an enemy of American statism and settler colonialism. It is to maintain the political posture of friend versus enemy, and to render as important and necessary the status and actions of what political theorist Joel Olson called the zealot or fanatic as an important political category that holds out the possibility for more radical transformation of the political order.27 It is to say that the use of Geronimo's name is not simply the sign of an absence of respect or sensitivity for Indigenous people, but is more evidence of the active presence of settler colonial assemblage in the specific form of US liberal colonialism. In sum, in critiquing the problem with the Codename Geronimo case, we should seek to avoid either reproducing a politics of recognition and multicultural discourse or diagnosing it as a sign of collective amnesia, as if only people knew all the ‘facts’ of history things would be fine, or better. Rather, in this regard, LaDuke and Harjo get it right I believe in emphasizing the persistent posture of American warfare against Indigenous people. While this is a difficult framework to ponder, it is the appropriate one for a decolonizing, unsettling politics which insists on drawing clear lines for and against settler colonialism. In this sense, the unsettling response here is to put settler memory front and center as an active contemporary practice, in which Geronimo's name is utilized by the US military because the invocation of his legend habitually calls forth – possibly unlike any single figure in US-Indigenous history – the appropriative violence of settler colonial conquest that fundamentally shapes, as an active verb in the twenty-first century, the political development and status of American liberal colonialism.

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

Another possible explanation might be found in the works of Cheris Kramarae (1981). Muted Group Theory maintains that language is literally a man-made construction that reflects male dominance and discounts female participation. When women try to overcome this inequality, the masculine control of communication – in this case, the debate round – places them at a tremendous disadvantage. Women are thus a muted group. Female debaters complain that they are treated as overly emotional, apologetic, wish-washy and/or “talked down to” by male competitors during the round, and male judges after the round or on the ballot. When they object to this treatment, they are told to “lighten up,” or “not to be so bitchy.” African Americans are often told not to be so “preachy,” or to tell quite so many stories, or to work on their diction and grammar. While articulate speech and “good” grammar are certainly excellent communication goals, can we really justify a ballot on these grounds while ignoring a core of the argumentation offered within the round? “In effect,” one discouraged minority competitor confided to the author, “we are being told to debate like white people do. Sometimes, there is a lot wrong with the way I talk, but there is nothing wrong with my brain.” According to Kramerae (1981), this type of male dominance is just one of the many ways that women and minorities are rendered inarticulate in our society. In these examples, the dominant cultural group within CEDA may serve as gatekeepers of the communication act redefining its intent, purpose and the rules for success; and thus, reinforce the concepts of Janis’ groupthink process. In effect, the majority of the coaching/judging pool attempt to reinforce the dominant male model of debate by attending to and treating as significant only what fellow members of the dominant cultural group say or do.

Self-perception is a key component of identity. For some, expression of a Native identity may be little more than a personal belief about heritage expressed on a census form.27 Cultural identity is not static; rather, it progresses through developmental stages during which an individual has a changing sense of who he or she is, perhaps leading to a rediscovered sense of being Native.28 There is some level of choice involved in accepting a Native identity, although the range of choices is limited by factors such as phenotypical appearances.29 Choice may also be influenced by social, economic, and political factors.30 For example, a climate filled with discrimination may lead an individual to reject a Native identity, whereas a climate in which a Native identity is seen as fashionable and perhaps financially profitable may lead an individual to assert an indigenous identity. In some instances, asserting an indigenous cultural identity is related to resisting assimilation. Navajo and Ute youth who grow up off the reservation with limited connections to their cultural past or traditional ceremonies often define their indigenous identity and cultural pride through resistance to the domination of the white community. For example, attending and doing well in school are defined as important and good by the surrounding white community, yet these youth often drop out, not because they are “bad” or incapable of school success but as a way of defying the dominant society. Resistance of “goodness” as framed by whites and insistence on living their lives as indigenous people, in the many different ways in which they define it, are at the core of their actions.31

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

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

<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.>

(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.

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

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.

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

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

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