The aff has a future-focus, which delegates the Native the savage and a past instances dooming natives to extinction.

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