The occupation of indigenous land recruits Native bodies on which to write colonial onto-epistemologies, making the annihilation of Native forms of life the aim of colonial world-making through excessive, death-driven violence.

What this chapter has sought to establish is the embodied archive of violence that subtends the post/colonial nation-state. This violence indicates a shift Foucault’s identifies as being from ‘territory’ to ‘population’ in the emergence of biopolitics, and the biopolitical imperative that sees sexuality as the potential for a population’s growth and regulation. As Indigenous lands were annexed and occupied, Indigenous bodies—the bodies of children in particular—were recruited as available substratum upon which colonial onto-epistemologies could be authored. In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, the annihilation of Indigenous forms of life indicates the aim of colonial world-making. The goal of this world-making is the stabilization of civil Canadian society. In terms of this goal, the continual re-presenting of Indigeneity is, in fact, useful, necessary. In the lexicon of the death drive, which props itself or surfs upon existing vital life forces (instincts), the reiteration over and over to “kill the Indian” creates the archive of an impossible telos (Kill the Indian in the Child). The circling around the obstacles that arise on the path to achieving this telos is a function of the death drive, whose mechanism is to double-down around sites of failure with an enjoyment that exceeds pleasure. Unable to master the unruly sexuality of the Indigenous child—an unruliness which we now understand to be so diffused throughout everyday life (remember Freud’s response to the charge of ‘pansexuality’ was the rejoinder that although not everything is sexual, sexuality can be found/can arise in anything) that it only ever eluded attempts to regulate and tamp it down. Frustrated at failure, yet intensely enjoying it—enjoying in the psychoanalytic sense rather than simply the colloquial sense, though they are in many instance imbricated—the drive to mastery satisfies itself with intensifying violence. This is the structure of Fort-da, the child’s game that Freud assures us, is in no way the domain of the gifted, the wise, or the precocious. This is the genocidal logic that, after all, 69 underwrites and helps make logical the affective daily labor of killing an un-killable foe to save and hold sanctified the sovereign innocence of the life that shelters it.