The alternative is to fracture the settler psyche - that’s key to centering the discussions around genocidal structures within debate - the alt disrupts the psyche at the site of epistemological formation. Refusing settler ontology is vital to destabilize the stability of a settler psyche that otherwise coheres itself by pushing this violence out of the picture.

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler's offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts'. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’.73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject's arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity topursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance', which historically took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.