The aff’s call for US action interpolates natives under their imperial coordinates naturalizing colonial violence and control.
Rifkin 9 (Mark Rifkin, Assistant Professor in the English Department of University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on U.S. imperial and racial formations, particularly in the nineteenth century. Previously, he has taught at Skidmore College, University of Chicago, Fordham University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and his articles have appeared in American Quarterly, American Literature, American Indian Quarterly, boundary 2, GLQ, differences, Arizona Quarterly, and Cultural Critique., “Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space” Copyright a 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016)
Internalized peoples are presented within U.S. legal discourses as always- already having accepted their place within national space, a process that involves constructing subjectivities for them that confirm the obviousness of U.S. administrative mappings. Examples in the antebellum period include the discourse of domestic dependent nationhood applied to native peoples and of citizenship for former Mexican nationals in the wake of both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. More than merely designating these groups’ relation to the U.S. government, these identities do important ideological work. They enact the extension of state authority by enfolding groups within existing administrative terminologies and topologies, giving them an institutionally recognized voice that reinforces the organizing framework of U.S. jurisdiction. This process of imperial interpellation both reorganizes existing political-economies and naturalizes U.S. control over the terms of debate. As Gerald Vizenor notes in his discussion of dominant representations of American Indians, “The simu- lations of manifest manners...become the real without a referent to an actual tribal remembrance” (8). The simulation and regulation of voice is crucial to the erasure of competing political geographies. Looking back to the language of Sherill v. Oneida, we can see again the absolute interde- pendence of the doctrines of acquiescence and impossibility, the bureau- cratic invention of consent effacing the United States’