AT: KATO

Joseph J. Z. Weiss 15. Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago. December 2015. “Unsettling Futures: Haida Future-Making, Politics and Mobility in the Settler Colonial Present.” p.216-232,

Conclusion: “What’s next? Just guess.” Signs of the Future One of the more recent additions to the socio-landscape of Old Massett, which I noticed on a return visit in 2014, was a series of blue signs that had appeared in many of the lawns on reserve and a good few uptown. The sign was a good two feet high and emblazoned with capitalized text: UNITED AGAINST ENBRIDGE. Below the text was a picture of a salmon. The salmon and the first word, “UNITED,” were in stark, attention-grabbing white, while the other text was in black. The signs, I later discovered, were distributed for five dollars each by the “Friends of Wild Salmon,” a coalition of northern British Columbia residents – including both First Nations and non-First Nations members – working together to oppose the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline Project.1 Perhaps appropriately, then, I noticed the sign on the lawns of both Haida and non-Haida, in Old Massett, (New) Masset, and out by Towtown. The signs may have been new, but their message is one that should have become familiar to us at this point: The people of Haida Gwaii oppose “Enbridge;” that is, The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Project. The project, first proposed in the mid-2000s, seeks to construct two pipelines to transport crude oil and condensate from northern Alberta to Kitimat on the coast of British Columbia.2 The oil would then be transported via “super-tanker” from the coast, through the Hecate Straight that passes between the west coast and the islands of Haida Gwaii before being exported to other nations (particularly China). Enbridge has received heavy support for the project from Canada’s current Conservative government, headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and in 2013 the Enbridge Joint-Review Panel – despite the words of hippies and Haida alike, alongside fierce opposition from all over the northwest coast - approved the pipelines, albeit with 209 required conditions.3 As a partnership between Canadian federal and corporate interests, the Enbridge Pipelines Project promises a future horizon of economic prosperity, one that unequivocally justifies any environmental risk in the present. On Haida Gwaii, Enbridge presages a rather different future, one in which the unpredictable waters of the Hecade Straight all but guarantee a tanker spill. Such a spill would devastate the waters and lands of the islands and the neighbouring coastline of British Columbia, destroying the fish and poisoning the plants that currently draw on ocean waters and the animals that feed thereon. Neither eagles nor ravens could survive, living as they do on a diet that consists primarily of marine life, a fact which all but guarantees the disappearance of Eagles and Ravens, the Haida people whose lifeways as such are so fundamentally tied to the islands of Haida Gwaii. Haida Gwaii could no longer be home. A song recorded in protest again Enbridge by Aboriginal artist Kinnie Starr and animated as a music video by Haidawood, a team of Haida and non-Haida stop-motion artists and animators, makes this threat explicit, asking in its opening lines “Who will save these waters, save them for our great granddaughters, save them for our great grand-daughter’s sons, […] save them before all is dead and gone?”4 This nightmare future, this future that is no future, is one that looms large over the whole of this dissertation. It is familiar because it is a reiteration of the horror of ecological cataclysm that the CHN formed itself in opposition against, that the “hippies” risk metonymically bringing about by taking from the lands and waters without respect. But it is also familiar because in a broader sense it is the future that settler colonialism attempted to give to Native peoples; indeed, to render as their already given destiny. This is the future of indigenous erasure, of ultimate disappearance, of a closed temporality which can only end in “all dead and gone.” As I have also hopefully shown in each of my chapters, however, the future of “no future” is never taken as inevitable or already determined by Haida people. The work of future-making instead always acts to ward off the nightmare future of Haida erasure, always puts in its place instead multiple possible futures in which Haida people continue. Take the blue signs on the lawns of the Masset(t)s, Old and New, implicitly answering Kinnie Starr’s question with the bold declaration that the islands (will) stand “UNITED” against Enbridge. But the social significances of these futures are never encompassed solely by the ways in which they respond to the threat of nightmare futures. As we saw in Chapter 3, for instance, the production of a future of Haida and non-Haida unity is considerably more complicated than the declaration of shared solidarity, speaking back to a particular history of Haida and settler relations and fantasy schemas, looking forward towards finding productive ways in which non-Haida can be integrated into Haida systems of sociality and responsibility. To speak of a future united against Enbridge is thus necessarily to speak of many other things, just as it is the case when speaking of a future of Haida return, a future of care-full leadership, or a future of traditional authority. Larger social worlds unfold out of the constitution of particular futures. This is why, more than anything, I want to make clear in the final, concluding chapter of this dissertation that the political (if not the existential) significance of Haida future-making does not lie simply in the specific ways in which individual futures respond to particular dilemmas of the settler colonial present. Rather, what is most crucial about future-making as a way of thinking out from within the temporal brackets of settler colonialism’s deferred erasure is simply the fact of future-making itself. What matters the most is the capacity to say, as Haida rapper Ja$e ElNino does in a guest appearance in Starr’s song, “Now expect the best from the northwest/ What’s next? Just guess.” ElNino asserts the openness of the future, challenging his listeners to even attempt to predict the field of possibilities still to come. This does not mean, though, that this openness is unmoored. Quite the opposite, ElNino asks us to “expect the best of the northwest,” in response to the threat of Enbridge and, I think, more generally. In this spirit, in what follows I highlight the significance of location to indigenous futurity, exploring how Old Massett, its neighbouring communities along Masset Inlet, and the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii act as locations around which the very openness of Haida futures can be articulated. My discussion will be largely synthetic, reading together my previous chapters to attempt to arrive at a few conclusions for this dissertation at a whole. I begin with a discussion of Haida Gwaii, once again, as “home,” asking what it means to consider the islands as a Haida homeland (and one that requires “care” as such) in the light of the futures I have sketched out. I then draw on this to pose a few suggestions for the political anthropology of indigenous peoples and its abiding contemporary concern with sovereign rights and territoriality. Finally, I conclude by drawing out the multiple meanings of my titular phrase, “unsettling futures,” in the context of Haida futuremaking. Homeland Haida Gwaii is in at least some sense at the center of each of the futures I have discussed in this dissertation. It is the home to which Haida are expected (and expect) to return, the “cornucopia” of off-the-grid fantasy, the ongoing historical space of complex social and material relations that these fantasies elide, the perpetually at risk ecological landscape which demands (and authorizes) the CHN’s care and respect. And, as we have seen, these various futures for the islands are not isolated from one another. Quite the opposite, futures proliferate in response to each other. The potential for non-Haida homing necessitates strategic forms of future-oriented social integration to bring these new arrivals into respectful relations with the Haida world, the nightmare non-future of ecological collapse is warded off by the attempt to constitute care-full futures under Haida control. What all these Haida futures have in common – at least as they relate to the islands - is that they work to preserve Haida Gwaii, and the community of Old Massett in particular, as spaces in which Haida futures remain possible. This fact, as I have already begun to suggest in Chapter 2, might help us to resolve some of James Clifford’s dilemmas in relation to indigenous mobility. As I pointed towards then, the notion that “place” is significant to indigenous peoples – politically, socially, affectively, culturally – has become one of the essential components of how “indigeneity” is understood as a global phenomenon and a strategic identity from which rights claims can be advanced. Take Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard (Assembly 2007:10, emphasis mine). But what precisely does it mean to have a “distinctive, spiritual relationship” to a place, and who determines what might constitute that relationship? Here one of the perils of Povinelli’s “cunning of recognition,” as indigenous rights to territory become conflated with - and evaluated against - essentialized settler notions of Native ecological spirituality and/or emplacedness (cf: Raibmon 2005; Nadasdy 2003). If indigeneity thereby takes on the significance of being “rooted” in a particular place, of having certain identifiably “distinctive” cultural relationships to that place that others might lack, then the fact of indigenous mobility would indeed pose a profound dilemma for the category of indigeneity on the one hand and the capacity to make claims to territorial rights qua one’s indigeneity on the other. But there is a remarkable temporal shallowness to all this. To give a representative example, the Australian state criteria for what constitutes “cultural rights to territory” that Povinelli interrogates function solely in the past and the present, mandating that Aboriginal people show continuity of occupation and of the cultural practices associated with “Aboriginal occupation” in the mind of the court in order to be recognized as possessing a rightful claim to their home territories (Povinelli 2002). Erased in this is the possibility that a territory could be the site of departure and return, that it could have a future horizon that is flexible, subject to transformation alongside the transformations of the people(s) who call it home, without thereby necessarily losing its integrity as a rightful space of indigenous occupation. Such a possibility is not controversial for my Haida interlocutors. Rather, it has the status of an already-given certainty, community common sense - though there is without doubt much social work that goes into the production of that certainty. What makes indigenous mobility fraught, then, might have rather more to do with the constitution of settler polities than it does with the actual practices of indigenous peoples. Consider the various ways in which we have already seen colonial authorities attempt to control Haida movement, from the forced expulsions of 19th century Victoria to the removal of Haida children from the islands for residential schools less than a century later. Consider too the manufacture of the reserves themselves, the fixing of two Haida “Bands” with their own federally determined territories, beyond which Haida people could claim no rights over land, waters, or resources (cf: Harris 2002). This is a logic of containment, of isolation. In leaving their assigned spaces, Native peoples were assumed by colonial authorities to be leaving the space of their Nativeness behind, assimilating into settler society on its terms. Indeed, this was the motivating logic of the residential schools program, which took as its premise the idea that “Indians” could always “backslide” into “savage customs” as long as they remained in their homes and with their families. Aboriginal children thus had to be brought somewhere else to learn how to join “civilized,” that is, white Christian, society (Miller 1996). Reserves could thus be rendered as the last bastions of a “weird and waning race,” to quote Scott, their inhabitants temporally foreclosed and spatially fixed. The notion that indigenous people could move without ceasing to be (or ceasing to fight for their rights to self-determination and Title to their lands) unsettles this narrative, just as does the intertwined possibility of indigenous futurity. The relationship to Haida Gwaii that we’ve seen sketched out by the Haida futures explored in this dissertation does not preclude the possibility of “distinctive spiritual relationships” between Haida and their home territories. Quite the opposite, the ineffable quality of homing alone suggests that many of my interlocutors feel a connection to their home that goes beyond the kinds of practices that are only possible on the islands, their beauty or their history. Indeed, when considered as home, when considered as a site that requires care, there is little doubt that Haida Gwaii can encompass a wide range of phenomenological, affective, social, and cultural ways of relating to its lands and waters by Haida people (and their neighbours, at times for good, at times for ill). But it is not these relations as such that encompass the totality of Haida Gwaii’s significance. Rather, what is of greatest concern to my interlocutors is the continuing future possibility that relations like that could be formed, that people could continue to be called home to Haida Gwaii once they’ve fully explored the world off-island, that the qualities that precisely make Haida Gwaii home could be preserved. This is what it means, I think, to “take care” of Haida Gwaii, to allow it to continue as a homeland for uncounted future generations. Though they certainly emphasize the need for Haida Gwaii to be maintained as a location for Haida futurity, this does not mean that the futures we have seen expend all the possible ways in which such future forms of Haida social, material, ecological, and relational life could be formed. Recall Ja$e ElNino’s challenge of a future so open that its possible contents can only be guessed at. What Haida future-making demonstrates is that there are a set of potentialities which are worth protecting so that Haida people can continue to access them, to come home to them, even as continuing forms of mobility and political processes can also shape and reshape Haida social and cultural life on and off the islands. Homeland is not a regimented place where Haida people must always live in order to be authentically Haida. Rather, it is a location where they should always be able to, in their own (necessarily multiple, often contested, sometimes even contradictory) terms. Sovereignty At the same time, there is an inescapably political dimension to the attempt to render Haida Gwaii as the homeland of a still open Haida future. The assertion of the (located) openness of the future does not necessarily make it so. As I noted in the first part of this dissertation, the flow of Haida departures and returns unfold in the broader context of the settler, capitalist state; indeed, they are made necessary in part by the current absence of economic opportunity on island, just as the arrival of potentially threatening strangers is a result of their privileged position in the very capitalist economy they seek to escape. Constituting futures in which Haida people have the freedom to engage with that economy (and settler society more generally) as they see fit while retaining the capacity to come home (complicated as that process might be) also reiterates the inescapability of some form of engagement with that socio-economy. Likewise, the notion of Haida Gwaii as Haida homeland cannot be separated from current Haida struggles to assert their rights to the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii, the resources found therein, and their sovereign capacity to govern themselves and the islands in the ways they find appropriate. This is, recall, the very crux of the CHN’s own commitment to the assurance of futurity, as it is only by positioning itself as the rightful, sovereign government of the Haida Nation and its homeland of Haida Gwaii that it can adequately care for the islands and protect them from external threat. And the continuing advance of the Enbridge project despite fierce opposition from CHN, the Old Massett Village Council, their Haida constituents, and the non-Haida actors with whom they are “united against Enbridge” (and this alongside protest all over the northwest coast) gives the nightmare futures of environmental collapse – pushed through by corporate interests and Canadian politicians - a frightening immanence. The assertion of the openness of the future is made, in short, in (and against) a context in which closures remain endemic. And yet, something has changed in this landscape from the initial erasures of Native futurity we drew out in the first chapter. In the narratives of colonial actors like Duncan Campbell Scott, it was absolutely clear that “Indians” were disappearing because their social worlds were being superseded by more “civilized” ways of living and being, ones that these Native subjects would also, inevitably, in the end, adopt (or failing that, perish outright). There was a future. It was simply a settler one. But the nightmare futures of that my Haida interlocutors ward against in their own future-making reach beyond Haida life alone. Environmental collapse, most dramatically, threatens the sustainability of all life; toxins in the land and the waters threaten human lives regardless of their relative indigeneity, race, or gender (e.g. Choy 2011; Crate 2011). Put another way, the impetus for non-Haida (and non-First Nations subjects more generally) to be “united against Enbridge” with their indigenous neighbours comes in no small part because an oil spill also profoundly threatens the lives and livelihoods of non-Aboriginal coastal residents, a fact which Masa Takei, among others, made clear in Chapter 3. Nor is the anxiety that young people might abandon their small town to pursue economic and educational advantage in an urban context limited to reserve communities. Instead, the compulsions of capitalist economic life compel such migrations throughout the globe. The nightmare futures that Haida people constitute alternative futures to ward against are not just future of indigenous erasure under settler colonialism. They are erasures of settler society itself. There is thus an extraordinary political claim embedded in Haida future-making, a claim which gains its power precisely because Haida future-making as we have seen it does not (perhaps cannot) escape from the larger field of settler-colonial determination. Instead, in Haida future-making we find the implicit assertion that Haida people can make futures that address the dilemmas of Haida and settler life alike, ones that can at least “navigate,” to borrow Appadurai’s phrasing, towards possible futures that do not end in absolute erasure. If Povinelli and Byrd are correct and settler liberal governance makes itself possible and legitimate through a perpetual deferral of the problems of the present, then part of the power of Haida future-making is to expose the threatening non-futures that might emerge out of this bracketed present, to expose as lie the liberal promise of a good life always yet to come and to attempt to constitute alternatives. It is no coincidence that we find this in the midst of a struggle over sovereignty. And this not just in the sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s ongoing assertion of its sovereign right to govern the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii on behalf of all Haida people, as we saw in Chapter 5. Rather, as Joanne Barker has argued, over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century sovereignty has emerged as a: particularly valued term within indigenous scholarship and social movements and through the media of cultural production. It [is] a term around which analyses of indigenous histories and cultures were organized and whereby indigenous activists articulate their agendas for social change (Barker 2005:18). Through the assertion of sovereignty, indigenous political leaders, activists and scholars refute “the dominant notion that indigenous people [are] merely one among many ‘minority groups’ under the administration of state social service and welfare programs.” Instead, “sovereignty defines indigenous people with concrete rights to self-government, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy under international law” (18). The trouble is, of course, that indigenous claims to sovereignty are always made within the context of colonial nation-states, ones whose own legitimacy is put at considerably risk both by the prospect of self-determining indigenous Nations (re)-emerging within their boundaries and the troubling of their own historical narratives of sovereign rights (cf: Comaroff and Comaroff 2003b). (One of these narratives, which reinterpreted indigenous lands as terra nullius and thus open to occupation, we’ve encountered already in Chapter 3). Thus, while sovereignty might indeed “define” indigenous peoples with concrete rights to territorial Title and self-determination, in theory equal under international law to the states who also lay claim to their territories, that definition does not in and of itself make possible the practice of this sovereignty. In this regard settler states such as Canada have shifted in their response to First Peoples’ sovereignty claims from outright rejection to a set of policies of selective recognition,5 but even the latter still positions Native nations as being subject to the authority and oversight (if not the structural forms) of the state. This means, as we have seen in Chapter 5, that indigenous governments such as the Council of the Haida Nation are in a precarious position, attempting to constitute their own sovereign authority without access to many of the conventional means of sovereignty in Western political thought – e.g., the monopoly on legitimate violence (Weber 1946), decisive authority to make and enact law (Schmitt 2005), or exclusive territorial control (Brown 2010; cf: Hobbes 1994). Alongside this precarity is the equally anxious question of whether or not sovereignty is even an appropriate analytical to center indigenous rights around precisely because it is historically a Western concept, one that had been drawn on to dispossess indigenous peoples over the course of settler colonial history (Barker 2005:18–19). (Indeed, the very next essay in Barker’s edited volume, by Mohawk scholar Taiake Alfred, categorically rejects sovereignty as an inappropriate tool for indigenous political assertions for these reasons and, also, because it draws attention away from developing and furthering “genuinely” Aboriginal political modes of thought (Alfred 2005; cf: Alfred 2009). The fact that sovereignty remains such a preeminent concept in the struggle for indigenous rights even though it is both epistemologically problematic and politically constrained has meant that there has been a recent push in both anthropology and indigenous studies to “widen” the definition of sovereignty, so that it might encompass multiple forms of indigenous social, political and legal practice outside of the conventional purview of “sovereign power” (e.g. Cattelino 2008; Richland 2011; Simpson 2000; Simpson 2014). Or, as Joanne Barker puts it: There is no fixed meaning for what sovereignty is – what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, nation, or indigenous law. Sovereignty – and its related histories, perspectives, and identities – is embedded within the specific social relations in which it is invoked and given meaning. How and when it emerges and functions are determined by the “located” political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation. It is no more possible to stabilize what sovereignty means and how it matters to those who invoke it than it is to forget the historical and cultural embeddedness of indigenous peoples’ multiple and contradictory political perspectives and agendas for empowerment, decolonization, and social justice (Barker 2005:21, emphasis original). The opening up of sovereignty as flexible, multiple, and subject to all manner of diverse rearticulations carries particular weight (and, perhaps, ambiguity) since, as a historical concept in Western political theory, sovereignty was overwhelmingly concerned with closure. As Wendy Brown argues in her Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, the classic vision of sovereign power rests in the capacity to divide the inside from the outside, to make borders around a people – a “nation” – and separate that people from those outside it. Thus Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction, for instance, or even John Locke’s consistent preoccupation with fences as a way of marking the existence of territory (Brown 2010; cf: Schmitt 1996; Locke 1988). The historical conditions of indigenous sovereignty claims in the context of settler colonialism make such absolute closures impossible for indigenous peoples. We might add, though, that their persistent presence also challenges the closure of the settler nation-state. Indeed, this is part of Brown’s point. The very fact that we see ever more spectacular performances of sovereign power on the part of contemporary nation-states – e.g., the titular “walls” that are being constructed along the borders of an increasing number of states - is a sign of the very insecurity of their political authority (Brown 2010).6 The conditions of settler colonial sovereignty, in other words, may be rather more “open,” and thus closer to those of indigenous “nation-within-nations,” then they may at first appear. If this means, in turn, that the future of settler political life is becoming as uncertain as the future for indigenous life has always been since the advent of settlement, then this means only what we have already begun to see: the dilemmas that Haida people confront in their future-making practices are also the dilemmas facing settler society. Take Chapter 4, in which the absence of any “one” definitive governing entity compels the constitution of an aspirational framework of accountability which could, were it realized, render navigable Haida relations to the many governments that claim their loyalties. As I hinted at there, such dilemmas are not restricted to the Haida sociopolitical world; rather, they may in fact be endemic to contemporary democratic societies and the multiple forms of governance (licit and otherwise) that emerge therein. In suggesting that there are Haida ways of refiguring a shared Haida-settler set of contemporary problematics, we might think of Haida future-making as simultaneously an instantiation of the multiple, flexible and always contingently located practices of sovereignty to which Barker points and a different way of thinking about indigenous political potentiality. In the former sense, Haida future-making is without doubt concerned with carving out spaces in which Haida existence can continue, expand, and change without losing the capacity to reproduce itself as, precisely, Haida existence. Thus the processes of homecoming we explored in Chapter 2, or Chapter 5’s explicitly political attempts to establish control over the islands for future generations. If the absence of indigenous sovereignty is the absence of the capacity of an indigenous people to (self)-determine their own futures, then the constitution of Haida futures can be seen exactly as sovereign work, whether in the overt sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s assertions or the somewhat more implicit mode of Alice Stevens’ proposed mass adoptions. Significant here, though, is the fact that these acts of future-making carry meanings beyond their status as “responses” to the social and political dilemmas of contemporary Haida life. Thus Alice Stevens’ adoptions bring “hippie” children into the framework of Haida kinship relations, in one sense neutralizing their potential threat, but also constituting a complex new network of social relations between Haida and non-Haida whose potential significances go well beyond the protection of Haida territory and resources; thus the Council of the Haida Nation emerges as a “state-like” governing entity through its authorizing promise to “take care” of the islands, but in so doing takes on a series of new roles in Haida political life whose full consequences remain to be seen. If it is a sovereign action to envision an opening of possible futures for Haida people, then this very openness might also exceed the boundaries of sovereignty as a problematic for indigenous people even as it responds to them. Which is also, perhaps, why Haida futures seem so consistently to sketch out social, ecological, and political fields that encompass non-Haida; more, that are futures for Canada as well as for the Haida people living within the nation-state’s borders. Or, at least, futures that have the capacity to be so. What would it mean to figure an indigenous sovereignty that speaks beyond itself, one that promises to invert the order of settler domination through reconfiguring the shared futures of indigenous and settler peoples? This would not be a sovereignty premised on territorial closure, or even absolute political autonomy. It would, however, decisively overturn any settler colonial anticipations of the inevitable erasure of Native peoples. Quite the opposite, it would position indigenous practices of anticipation, aspiration, certainty, and anxiety at the forefront of contemporary modes of political imagination. Unsettling Futures A question remains, however. Could such a refiguring of the temporal and political horizon of settler and indigenous relationships remain possible even if the futures that indigenous people work to constitute remain unrealized in the settler colonial present? Or, put another way, we must always be careful not to conflate a capacity to form new futures for settler nation-states with the actual materializations of these futures. The Haida futures that I have discussed, even as they promise possible ways of navigating – of restructuring, even – the settler-Haida present, remain firmly bound by the colonial constraints of this present. But perhaps the stakes here have never been about overthrowing the Canadian colonial order outright. Rather, what I hope this dissertation has shown is that Haida future-making has the capacity to unsettle the settler colonial present, to challenge its received categories and demonstrate how, slowly, gradually, Haida people are reconfiguring its terms through the work of producing the future. Certainly, the sheer fact of Haida futurity should put to the lie any further notion that Haida people exist only to replicate their past or live only in the deferral of their eventual disappearance. The future is alive and well in Old Massett, although this does not meant that it is not also a site of profound anxieties. In working to ward off those anxieties through the juxtaposition of nightmare futures against their more desirable alternatives, then, Haida people unsettle the epistemological foundations of the forms of settler colonialism and liberalism against which Byrd and Povinelli write. At the same time (if you’ll pardon the pun), I think we can see the social work that futuremaking does iteratively, as a gradual reshaping of the actual conditions of Canadian society. Here I borrow Judith Butler’s suggestion, following Foucault, that the regulatory norms of society function only through their consistent and unstable reiteration (and materialization) in everyday social life.7 From this perspective, the ways in which Haida people work within and even reiterate the constraints and demands of Canadian settler mainstream society can also slowly and strategically shift those very constraints and demands, materializing a HaidaCanadian future that might in fact be quite different from the present even as it does not ever fully “escape” from its dilemmas. Perhaps the most unsettling potential of all here lies simply in the ways in which Haida people incorporate the conditions of the settler colonial present as being paths towards Haida futures. Not vanished, or vanquished. Ongoing.

Extinction is biggest impact

Seth D. Baum & Anthony M. Barrett 18. Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. 2018. “Global Catastrophes: The Most Extreme Risks.” Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing, edited by Vicki Bier, Routledge, pp. 174–184.

2. What Is GCR And Why Is It Important? Taken literally, a global catastrophe can be any event that is in some way catastrophic across the globe. This suggests a rather low threshold for what counts as a global catastrophe. An event causing just one death on each continent (say, from a jet-setting assassin) could rate as a global catastrophe, because surely these deaths would be catastrophic for the deceased and their loved ones. However, in common usage, a global catastrophe would be catastrophic for a significant portion of the globe. Minimum thresholds have variously been set around ten thousand to ten million deaths or $10 billion to $10 trillion in damages (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008), or death of one quarter of the human population (Atkinson 1999; Hempsell 2004). Others have emphasized catastrophes that cause long-term declines in the trajectory of human civilization (Beckstead 2013), that human civilization does not recover from (Maher and Baum 2013), that drastically reduce humanity’s potential for future achievements (Bostrom 2002, using the term “existential risk”), or that result in human extinction (Matheny 2007; Posner 2004). A common theme across all these treatments of GCR is that some catastrophes are vastly more important than others. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear winter (Sagan 1983). Without nuclear winter, a global nuclear war might kill several hundred million people. This is obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would presumably carry on. However, with nuclear winter, per Sagan, humanity could go extinct. The loss would be not just an additional four billion or so deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan, the loss would be billions and billions of lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming humanity would continue for ten million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful species. Sagan’s 500 trillion number may even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous turn, hinging on the evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of contemporary humans may no longer be recognizably “human”. The issue then is whether the descendants are still worth caring about, whatever they are. If they are, then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe, Earth will remain habitable for about one billion more years 2 until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists) the multiverse will remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin 1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there. An open question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the descendants of humanity to continue living for an infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length of time (see e.g. Ćirković 2002; Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger than the loss of 500 trillion lives. Debates about the infinite vs. the merely astronomical are of theoretical interest (Ng 1991; Bossert et al. 2007), but they have limited practical significance. This can be seen when evaluating GCRs from a standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives estimate, it follows that reducing the probability of global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion chance is of the same significance as saving one human life. Phrased differently, society should try 500 trillion times harder to prevent a global catastrophe than it should to save a person’s life. Or, preventing one million deaths is equivalent to a one-in500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. This suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR reduction, at the expense of virtually all other objectives. Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner 2004). Posner used $50,000 as the value of a statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world population); he describes both figures as significant underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of preventing global catastrophe. For comparison, the United States government typically uses a VSL of around one to ten million dollars (Robinson 2007). Multiplying a $10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5x1021 as the value of preventing global catastrophe. But even using “just" $600 trillion, society should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global catastrophe, which converts to being willing to spend at least $1 million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. Thus while reasonable disagreement exists on how large of a VSL to use and how much to count future generations, even low-end positions suggest vast resource allocations should be redirected to reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the astronomical size of the stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of the standard riskequals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny GCR reductions merit significant effort. This point holds especially strongly for risks of catastrophes that would cause permanent harm to global human civilization. The discussion thus far has assumed that all human lives are valued equally. This assumption is not universally held. People often value some people more than others, favoring themselves, their family and friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others whom they identify with. Great debates rage on across moral philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people should value others who are distant in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This debate is crucial for all valuations of risk, including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global catastrophes may not be especially important, and we probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them. While everyone has the right to their own views and feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely held position that all human lives should be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United States Declaration of Independence, updated in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and 3 women are created equal”. Philosophers speak of an agent-neutral, objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in which each person considers what is best for society irrespective of which member of society they happen to be. Such a perspective suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless of who they are or where or when they live. This in turn suggests a very high value for reducing GCR, or a high degree of priority for GCR reduction efforts.