Envisioning extinction threat is a form of indigenous future-making whereby indigenous reclaim their sovereignty through their persistent presence in the settler state.

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Duncan Campbell Scott, it was absolutely clear that “Indians” were disappearing because their social worlds were being superseded by more “civilized” ways of living and being, ones that these Native subjects would also, inevitably, in the end, adopt (or failing that, perish outright).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.