Their appeals to biological death ignore settler colonialism’s investment in the destruction of indigenous life and health. The aff maintains the affective atmosphere that breathes life into settlerism and genocide.

(Billy-Ray, Driftpile Cree Nation, Humanities Division, University of Oxford (2017): Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste of non-sovereignty, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2017.1279830, JKS)

The main argument of this paper is that the feeling of indigeneity is the miserable feeling of not properly being of this world, and that a disease like diabetes mellitus is a key manifestation of this sort of exhausted existence. To do this, I pursue the secondary claims that indigeneity is a zone of biological struggle and that the reserve is something of a non-place calibrated by affects I want to group under the sign of misery. Yes, misery is a bad word. Harsh, even. But I think it is big enough to conceptualize the cramped con- ditions under which life is haphazardly improvised on the reserve. Misery wears you down, effecting both a corporeal fragility and an intellectual fatigue that double as sociality’s background noise. I am recruiting misery here because it does not rest on the event- ful. Instead, it blends into ordinary time. It is possible to make joy or to feel enlivened within a miserable context. But, misery circumscribes the body’s potentialities. If misery is a part of slow death’s arsenal, if it hangs ‘in the air like a rumor’, then there is no easy way out. Existence is what taxes.7 If the reserve is a geography of misery, then it is where being in life feels like falling out of it. There, negative affect bubbles just below a collective ‘threshold of awareness’, but nonetheless fills out a confined area, mutating over time into the bodies that people it. Misery flattens subjectivity and makes us submit to its tempos, operating here as both a pesky obstacle to radical worldings and as an affective atmosphere that ‘hover[s] around daily practices of survival’.9 Unlike the cruel optimist about which Lauren Berlant writes,10 the band member is not oblivious to the cruelties of her object attach- ments. She knows or is repeatedly told they are damaging, but cannot easily forge new ones, if only because the reserve absents the possibility of making life unhinged by the rote of premature death. She is stuck in a rut that was dug in the name of a colonial ethos bent on disappearing Indians from the future, a rut whose chronic episodes of bio- political tragedy are somehow still bearable by those who endure them. The goal is not to be better at life, but simply to keep at it, even if ‘it’ taxes and eschews happiness without becoming too conspicuous. The reserve is thus where we should go to think about what happens when surplus populations get stowed away from the ‘what’ of what makes life worth living, if we describe ‘life’ as a mix of reckless capitalist worldings and racist histories of uneven precarity and safety. Here, I want to ask the tricky question: might biosocial trauma partly make up indigeneity’s racial terrain? For me, the biosocial is where biology’s politics are thinkable, where bodily production and statecraft meet, where sickness coheres as a racialized symptom of a world that is not good for most of us. The biosocial is where disease’s raciality takes shape. As I see them, indigeneity and sickness are co-constitutive categories in a day and age where health is the biopolitical measure of a subject’s ability to adjust to structural pressures endemic to the affective life of setter colonialism. This is thus also a story about the politics of interpretation, about how we take stock of the horrors of Indigenous embodiment and how we might do it differently. If indigeneity is where the fantasy of self-sovereignty is especially weak (none of us are self-sovereign), then colonial publics hone in on and amplify this weakness to show that the world is not ours to freely inhabit. Again, in what follows, I take diabetes mellitus as a case study in the quiet forms of non-sovereignty that proliferate on the reserve, a place where living, dying, and failed flourishing always hang in the balance.11 Dying and misery are affective bedfellows. ‘Dying’ is an adjective used to describe a noun ‘on the point of death’. To be ‘on the point of death’ is to exhibit a mode of being in the world that leaves loose ends untied. This is to say (1) that death’s origin story amasses small and big culprits as time passes such that it becomes laborious to track its long political history. Scapegoats like genes, for example, dilute the recent past’s lethal ecologies. And (2) that there is an indeterminacy with which subjects and objects die: slowly or quickly, suspiciously or predictably – or a cacophonous mix of all of these. There is always something left to be said at the funeral. One of the conditions of Indigenous life today is manslaughter hidden under the ruse of botched ways of populating the world. ‘Dying’ is a present participle too: it describes the affective energies of an inchoate hap- pening, or time’s rupture between life as we knew it and death. It is a process of becoming- liminal that is phenomenologically promiscuous. Its affects range from shock to agony to a kind of cold sobriety. Death’s grammar is telling: to die is to have been dying, and ‘has been’ takes a subject and the ‘of’ or the ‘from’ of ‘dying’ piece together a causal relation that looks like a crime scene. Is dying worth zeroing in on if it could be said that we are all dying, that to be human or to be in life is in fact to be dying? Of course, though, death is not fairly apportioned when empire’s worlds are wrangled together by the unli- vability of toxic pockets of minoritarian life. And, dying unevenly stands in for ordinary life’s sociability in a big world whose public feelings circulate in the build up before and in the aftermath of racial crisis. Perhaps dying is the racialized state of not properly ‘having’ or ‘being in’ a body.12 Perhaps it is where the advance of life eventually gets quasi-melodramatic via a biopolitical drive to palliate racial surplus until an assailant (the state) gets acquitted by time’s shoddy memory work and all you are left with is a body beside itself. The reserve, however, is a site of augured disappearance propped up in the wake of insidiously lawful world-breaking events,13 ones whose delayed traumas fester beneath the skin. For Donna Haraway, the Anthropocene – the current geological era in which the social is animated by human-made ecological catastrophe and the anxieties produced by it – pressures us to strategize about what she calls ‘the arts of living on a damaged planet’.14 Indigenous worlds, however, have been sutured by this sort of apocalypticism for quite some time now.15 The arts of living on a damaged reserve have little do with building pleasurable collectivities, as Haraway sees it globally. Rather, we have to figure out how to ward off an impoverished social life that our cells know is coming. What does it mean to politically commit to a place that wears you down in order to maintain an allegiance to indigeneity’s visible cultural forms? Is this all some of us have left? Here is the historical aporia: in a twenty-first-century Canada manned by a liberal prime minister dedicated to politically diluted forms of reconciliation, Indigenous peoples are nonetheless still feeling the affective wrath of the long-twentieth century’s colonial state- craft.16 Justin Trudeau’s is a national culture of sentiment that buries his and previous Canadas’ complicities in decades-long biological warfare against Indigenous life. Speaking to an audience of residential school survivors during the launch of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in December 2015, Trudeau said: To the former Indian residential school students who came forward and shared your painful stories, I say: thank you for your extraordinary bravery and for your willingness to help Canadians understand what happened to you ... The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long. The burden is properly ours as a government, and as a country ... This is a time of real and positive change.17 Note how Trudeau’s authoritative speech acts fail also to be performative, if performative speech aims to bring about that which it names.18 His tears are epistemological hallucino- gens,19 luring us into an era of settler governance he vows is attuned to Indigenous grie- vances, one that pledges to stop hurting us. That is, he lauded Indigenous elders for opening themselves up to a nation-state that broke open their worlds, assuring them that the past’s injustices would not live again in the present. Alas, bad feelings do not go away because a head of state asks them to, especially if the conditions under which they germinate are left intact. The affect of the now and the near future is sickness, and this is a structural diagnosis. The reserve, then, is where life is lived at the edge of the world, a bio-necropolitical gulag of sorts where slow death stunts indigeneity’s future-bearing potentiality. Put differently, it is an incubator of deadened life, where the plasticity of the life-death binary is worked up so as to harvest bodies that are stripped of vitality and sensation. For Jasbir Puar, the ‘bio-necro collaboration’ is where the sovereign thirst for blood and the manage- ment of biological life operate harmoniously – an addendum to Foucault’s biopower, which Puar argues overlooks ‘biopower’s direct activity in death’ in a so-called age of terror.20 As Scott Morgensen pointed out in 2012, settler colonialism too churns out its own type of biopower, one that aggressively seeks to eliminate and then replace Indigen- ous peoples, and coterminously to extend the ‘West’s’ juridical reach across the globe. Indeed, to make everywhere its colony.21 My claim, then, is that the reserve worlds death-worlds, to use Achille Mbembe’s term,22 whose poisonousnesses flatten into indi- geneity’s hardened arenas of life. It is a coral whose biopower is characterized by the mis- management of biological life, where disease control has been avoided as a method of ethico-political abandonment. Sometimes negligence is the form that state power takes. Which is to say that ongoingness on the reserve is an aspirational deadlock stymied by negative affects like hunger, nausea, and dizziness. For Sara Ahmed, this style of getting by produces a racial fatalism of sorts. She writes, ‘some are assumed to be inherently broken as if their fate is to break’.23 If we die, things go on as if nothing happened. Indeed, some die so that ‘the nothing’ can happen. Those that do not neatly or properly enflesh the human as such occupy the social as if they were always-already missing something, as if they were broken beyond repair. We might ask: what does it mean to be with feelings of loss in a world in which losing things is a condition of political becoming, a world in which maintaining one’s attachments to life routinely becomes too tiring to keep up with? What does dying’s repetition do to the ordinary’s promise to keep us a part of some- thing durable? These questions point to the plight of those doomed to shoulder health’s discontents. Put differently, disease cathects indigeneity within a present that is not only not enough, but also deadly – a present which generates forms of non-sovereignty that are tasted. According to Berlant and Lee Edelman, non-sovereignty is ‘the notion of a subject’s constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of our- selves’.24 For Berlant, love launches something of a becoming-non-sovereign, as it compels us to submit to its potentialities while rendering unpredictable the substance of the future. It is one of the few times we admit we need to change.25 But, in my assessment, this kind of control loss is not cut and dry: perhaps non-sovereignty schematizes the condition of possibility for settler colonialism’s race-making practices, ones that produce bad types of not knowing that fray Indigenous worlds and bodies and produce seemingly normal forms of precarity. For Anna Tsing, precarity is not the exception to democracy’s march of progress. It is the ‘condition of our time’.26 But, unlike her, I am not solely drawn to pre- carity’s unlikely life-building energies, but rather to its re-workings of science’s epistem- ology such that bad political life becomes genetically predictable. Non-sovereignty can be a bad affect when scenes of living through that are tethered to settler colonialism’s re-worldings speed up the material and symbolic decaying of indigeneity. What does it mean that our cells can anticipate our collective undoing? Perhaps the reserve is bound by an affective atmosphere within which toxic sensations and viruses proliferate, ones that alter the biochemistries of the bodies therein, consigning them to a kind of cellular frailty. As I see it, the food that does and does not make its way into this geography of slowed immiseration renders calculable the biosocial toll of colonial world-building. What follows is thus a phenomenological account of one of the ways Indigenous bodies are biopolitically generated to slowly destroy themselves from the inside.27