Their climate scenarios may not be false, but they certainly are constructed---the settler state continually shapes the perception of crisis to deflect culpability. It is not isolated events or even historical trends that create crisis, but rather structures.

Living through the fires of 2020 confirmed one thing: Emergencies bring people together. But to what end? The fires drew Oregonians together in the common goal of, on the one hand, helping those affected by the fire. On the other hand, however, people set about reestablishing the economic and cultural patterns of settler colonialism. Hence, from a certain perspective, a return to normalcy is also a doubling down on the social structures constitutive of that emergency. Governor Brown’s words of encouragement, “Oregon is strong, and we’ll stand together” (KOIN Channel 6, 2020), can be interpreted as a moment of forced assimilation into settler democracy, where Native people are asked to forget their national sovereign identities and become Oregonians. Emergencies, then, are key moments in how collective histories, futurities, and communities are experienced because they force the question of compliance with specific norms and power structures. Strict management of the framing and outcome of emergencies present crucial moments in the maintenance of settler colonial power because they offer a chance to mark and reestablish the boundaries of social formation and define the forces that pose threats to continued existence.

As historically defining experiences, emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call a process of “inculcation” (2002: 1). Settler perception has a material- political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by economic and normative conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal strategies of dominant society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates collective experience of emergencies always to the advantage of the settler state. The inevitable emergencies of capitalism and settler colonialism, whether intentionally produced or not, are an engine of this social inculcation.

However, the manufactured experiences of emergency cannot reduce them to any one meaning. Many groups are refusing narratives that obfuscate their experiences of local and planetary crises as continuing cycles of colonialist and capitalist destruction. The disruptive or destructive element of emergencies, and hence, what is actually at stake, is always framed by historical consciousnesses that cannot be extrapolated from the material position of social groups. Therefore, it is important to attend to the ways in which emergencies reveal the relationships between us and how these indicate differential and interconnected political and moral responsibilities. Maurice Merleau-Ponty asks the question, “how does one delimit an emergency?” (1969: 82). Non-reductive consideration of emergency that peels back the layers of perceptual distortion is critical at a time when a host of wicked problems are being reproduced by overlapping systems of genocide, exploitation, and displacement.

The infrastructures of settler perception tend to deflect[s] away from fundamental causes and consequences of emergencies. What is perhaps most notable is the refusal to come to terms with emergencies insofar as they are characterized by social formations rather than isolated events. The invisibility of deeper social emergencies is coupled with the exploitation of disasters to further settler colonial capitalist accumulation. In an op-ed for Teen Vogue, Jenn M. Jackson writes “Rather than seeing this pattern [of displacement, houselessness, and criminalization] as an emergency, Whiteness treats ongoing disasters afflicting these communities as economic opportunities” (2020). This tactic of White supremacy is afforded in part by a linear/progressivist perception of time that can only conceive of emergencies as caused by historical events or trends rather than embedded in social structures characterized by cyclical patterns that defy linear causalities. For example, the “climate crisis” is said to be “human caused.” We can point to various historical events that lead us here to the “Anthropocene.” But if there is a switch to thinking of emergencies as social structures, then, for example, we can consider White supremacy an emergency. It is a self-perpetuating social emergency that is both cause and effect of the disasters it produces. For the United States and other settler nations, there is no “environmental crisis” that is not both a cause and effect of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is the environmental crisis. There is no “climate crisis” that is not caused by capitalism. Capitalism is the “climate crisis.” There is no “humanitarian crisis” that is not caused by xenophobic heteropatriarchy. Xenophobic heteropatriarchy is the humanitarian crisis. Hence, emergencies in this structural sense serve precisely to subordinate and control whatever groups stand in the way of White settler colonial capitalist domination. Emergencies are not just events. They are also self- perpetuating material-perceptual infrastructures that create ongoing conditions of death, disease, vulnerability, and servitude. These emergencies are by definition hidden in plain view, but not without resistance.

Settler obfuscations of indigenous experiences

In Red Alert! Daniel Wildcat argues that from Indigenous worldviews the “climate crisis” or “global burning,” as he calls it, is clearly linked to settler colonialism. He writes that global burning is “yet another removal scenario for indigenous peoples” (2009: 8). Consequently, the “climate crisis” is visible to Native peoples in a way that it has not been to White settlers. In the context of removals from homelands, abductions from reservations (to boarding schools), and killing of culture in assimilationist cultural genocide, the fourth removal of climate change is marked by an unmistakable continuity (2–4) that can only be understood, as Sandy Grande emphasizes, “in contingency with the past” (2015: 32). Therefore, it is not merely a crisis of the climate and but also a crisis of settler colonialism.

To those who experience what Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, and Lemyra M DeBruyn call the “historical unresolved grief” of settler colonialism, global burning is manifestly part of a continuous cycle of events related to the same root crisis (1998: 57). Historical unresolved grief is not historical in the sense that it relates only to the past; it also pervades the present and is projected into the future in a manner that forms a circle (72). The “fourth removal” of the climate crisis functions as a cyclical reappearance of cultural and physical genocide as Native nations and communities are torn from the possibility of continuing their relationships with the plants, animals, and places that form ceremonial and traditional life (Norgaard et al., 2018).

In Whitestream imagination, the climate crisis is not caused by settler colonialism. Rather, it is “man-made.” Created in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the “Doomsday Clock” was originally intended to signal the probability of impending nuclear catastrophe. In 2007, global warming was added as a consideration in calibrating the clock. The managers write, “Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers— nuclear war and climate change... We gather the most informed and influential voices tracking man-made threats and bring their innovative thinking to a global audience” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d.). The clock was set to 100 seconds to midnight on 23 January 2020, in response to the demise of nuclear treaties and the worsening of climate change. I do not want to disagree that both these factors pose a threat to human existence. However, with this universalizing language, the Bulletin plays at being neutral while invoking a horizon of experiences unique to White settler society.

The settler strategy of universalization is a form of perceptual distraction or obfuscation. Expanding on the work of Maori scholar Graham Hingangaroa Smith (2000), Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee) argues that a “politics of distraction” functions as one of “the tools of shape-shifting colonial entities to separate us from our homelands, cultures, and communities” (2012: 91). The politics of distractions works by ceaselessly co-opting the experiences of Indigenous communities and repackaging them in “state-centric” terms (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005: 600). By framing the nuclear and climate crises as the result of “technology that humans create,” the Bulletin imposes the constructions of the settler state on the lives of Indigenous people as if they too are somehow directly responsible.2 However, to return to Wildcat, these are “catastrophic and deadly situations in which, strictly speaking. . . indigenous cultures had no part” (2009: 8). Settler frames of reference obfuscate these aspects of environmental and political crises to deflect responsibility and move to innocence (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with planetary ecological collapse. Furthermore, many of these same people have actively resisted or stood in the way of White settler colonial capitalist expansion and in so doing, their own lives have been devastated in the march to “human” world domination.

This same universal framing is used when emergencies are spoken of in terms of causes and effects. It is said that we have a “climate crisis” and a “humanitarian crisis” although the climate and the humans affected are not themselves responsible. These crises can be thought of as “effects.” It is often said that there is a “population crisis,” an “energy crisis,” a “crisis of overconsumption,” or a “crisis of governance.” These crises can be thought of as causes. However, sophisticated causal models should develop complex associations in ways that link dynamic variables in nonlinear systems (van Nes et al., 2015). Given the complexity of emergencies, relationships between causal forces can easily be manipulated, skewed, or obfuscated. Furthermore, it is possible to obfuscate the fact of an emergency entirely if certain factors are overblown or designated as sole causes. Hence, infrastructures of perception effectuate inculcations at all these sites of experience: the connections between cause and effect, the relations between emergencies, and the things that appear as emergencies whatsoever.

The “state-centric” framework shifts focus from the experiences of Native people, casting settler experience of crisis as the “given” experience of “all humans.” Colonial science often plays a role here by publicly interpreting data only insofar as it applies to all humanity. The idea that scientific observations are raw, “data” are traceable to early modern British empiricists such as John Locke who, as is well known, was also a zealous colonialist. In his Principles of Psychology, Euro-American philosopher William James berates such theories for failing to notice that perception does not work as the intake of pure sensorial information. Rather, perception works as a sort of “selective attention” that fixes upon certain elements of the world while other elements move to the fringe or margin of experience (1950: 402). Some factors of experience can become so dominant, so imposing, that we reach a state of total “absorption” in which we “banish ordinary sensations” that would otherwise be apparent (419). This selective attention is not random, but is, as Manulani Aluli Meyer (Kanaka Maoli) argues, related to “the fact and logic of our bodies” that arises from the culturally sedimented tendencies of our senses to interpret the world in various ways (2001: 130). The settler colonial infrastructures of perception work to absorb and inculcate perception into attentive modes and sensible habits in which the settler state is always at the center of experience, reality, designation, interpretation, and orientation. Such are the selective attentions of White supremacy. As the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz writes, the “scheme of interpretation” and “scheme of orientation” for members of an in-group determine systems of experiential relevance (1970: 120–121). Experiences are named and understood in terms of pre-experienced horizons of feeling and meaning that occur at the commonsense level (117–120). It is at this “communal” everyday under- standing of events that the “politics of distraction” attempts to dominate the perception of emergencies.

For example, in response to the threat of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en land protectors set up Unist’ot’en Camp to obstruct the path of the proposed project in 2010. Between 2018 and 2020, the conflict escalated, and courts issued injunctions against the land protectors, empowering the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to make arrests. In acts of solidarity, allies of the Wet’suwet’en including the Mohawk and other groups blocked rail lines and ports across the country. Covering these events, Canada’s Global News announced that the disagreement was “again disrupting trade and travel in this country” (Global News, 2020). This manner of speaking names or typifies the situation with a structure of intention built around a horizon of relevance that refers back to the settler state. It is not the homelands of the Wet’suwet’en that are being disrupted by the pipeline. Rather it is the trade and travel of Canada that are being disrupted. Furthermore, Global News emphasized supposedly internal disagreements between certain Hereditary Chiefs and the Band Councils, stating, “Who speaks for the Wet’suwet’en people and who has authority over the 22,000 square kilometers of land in northern B.C. is not straightforward. There is confusion and misunderstanding” (Global News, 2020). But the Band Councils themselves were created under the Indian Act and structured specifically by the Canadian government to deal with negotiations for natural resources. So, the conflict was produced by Canadian interventions in traditional governance structures that were seen as unconducive to resource extraction. The Hereditary Chiefs who, as the anchor puts it, “believe they have authority over the territory,” never ceded that authority. Furthermore, the land upon which the original camp was made does not belong to the Wet’suwet’en as a whole or any of the neighboring Band Councils or tribal nations. It is on Unist’ot’en Clan territory that has never been ceded. As their website states, “The Unist’ot’en homestead is not a protest or demonstration. Our clan is occupying and using our traditional territory as it has for centuries” (Unist’ot’en, n.d.). Settler media distorts this view, arguing that it is not Canada but rather the Wet’suwet’en who are con- fused and divided.

In response to being blocked from her office, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, “It is very important for all people of Canada including government officials to be able to go about their rightful and legitimate business even as other Canadians are expressing their right to peaceful protest” (Global News, 2020). In this moment, Freeland co-opts the experience of the Wet’suwet’en into Whitestream perceptual infrastructures by disregarding the fact that they are not simply “Canadians.” Corntassel wrote of the UN position on Indigenous relations, “an Indigenous political agenda is shifted and altered to fit the dominant norms of existing institutional structures” (2007: 140). Political marginaliza- tion, therefore, will not be solved by “inclusion” that does not somehow fundamentally allow the “included” to set their own terms on the manner of that inclusion and allow for decolonized forms of governance to take first precedence over laws, land, and life. The Wet’suwet’en are a sovereign nation. Freeland’s language subsumes Native political action into a nationalistic multicultural framework of forced democratic inclusion (Grande, 2015: 33).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said of the land protectors, “We recognize the important democratic right...of peaceful protest. This is an important part of our democracy in Canada. But we are also a country of the rule of law and we need to make sure those laws are respected” (Global News, 2020). But this statement is not actually intended to emphasize a politically neutral “rule of law.” It is meant to assert the rule of Canada’s laws and dominion over the unceded Wet’suwet’en land so that it can be used for the transport of natural gas. Molly Wickham, Chief and Matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan, said “It’s also a bigger issue around Indigenous right and title and the sovereignty of our nation...Our traditional governance system is in place and this is a conflict between that governance system and colonization and the imposition of Indian Act band systems” (Democracy Now!, 2020). The colonialist desires undermining these sovereign governance systems are embodied by Trudeau’s comments, posing assimilationist projects of democratization and cultural genocide as a politics of inclusion in Canadian citizenship and manufacturing an emergency in state-centric terms.