Prioritise the slow violence and everyday war against disenfranchised populations. You are conditioned to discount structural violence because it occurs outside of traditional risk frames, which normalizes state-sanctioned violence.

“There is a hierarchy to care”: theoretical concerns and applications

In Frames of War (an extension and preoccupation with similar issues she outlines in her text Precarious Life), Judith Butler focuses on the ways in which particular, violent perceptions of everyday life are normalized and propagated as legible or granted “intelligibility” (through numbers, statistics, etc.). According to Butler, Frames of War follows on from Precarious Life ... especially its suggestion that specific lives cannot be apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. (2010: 1) For Butler, then, a primary concern is how these intelligibilities allow “a state to wage its wars without instigating a popular revolt” (xvi). Although Butler is writing within the context of the Iraq War and the “War on Terror,” her insights on precarity and modes of state violence exceed their immediate rele- vance. Indeed, as is clear below, the notions of war and settler-colonialism and the biopolitical rationalities they allow are eminently applicable to a local, Canadian context. The frames of war, Butler argues, are not circumscribed to combat zones with the mobilization of weapons. Instead, to Butler, “perceptual weapons” are acting on populations consistently to naturalize violences and enlist citizens to tacitly consent to (and, in some cases, actively participate in) violent forms that authorize dehumanization: “[w]aging war ... begins with the assault on the senses; the senses are the first target of war” (xvi). These perceptual violences resonate with Rob Nixon’s formulation of “slow violence” as well. To Nixon, slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 3). Further, and “[c]rucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (4). Conditioning the senses or what is intelligible, then, functions as the way in which state violences are legitimized, as the frames of war dictate the “sensuous parameters of reality itself” (ix). According to Butler, the task at hand is not only to “understand ... these frames, where they come from and what kind of action they perform” (2010: 83), but also to find and articulate “those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard” (81). While Butler is exam- ining conditions of precarity, (in)security, and disposability in the context of “the War on Terror,” and Palestine–Israel, her examination of an imperial/ colonial power exerting force and enacting violence on vulnerable and racialized populations (and in the process producing and reproducing these vulnerable populations) can be fruitfully employed in the Canadian context, though not without some alteration. Although we may not perceive the more mundane, i.e. non-military, violences visited upon Indigenous communities as “war” strictly speaking, Sora Han’s oft-cited phrase that we must think of the United States (and settler-colonial nations more broadly) not “at war” but “as war” is useful here (cited in Simpson 2014: 153, emphasis in original). If we view the biopolitical man- agement of Indigenous populations and Indigenous territories as rationalities rooted in the organizing frame of settler-colonialism, then the states of emer- gency putatively thought to be produced through war are “structural, not eventful” – that is to say, war is the very condition of settler-colonialism and not a by-product of it (154). Indeed, the largest ever domestic deployment of military forces in North America took place within Canada, in the context of the so-called “Oka crisis.” As Audra Simpson writes, the “highest number of troops in the history of Indigenous-settler relations in North America was deployed to Kanehsatà:ke, as this was the most unambiguous form of exceptional relations, that of warfare. There were 2,650 soldiers deployed...” (2014: 152). And, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and others have noted, Western imperial powers still refer to “enemy territories” abroad as “Indian Country” and to “wanted terrorists” as “Geronimo” (2014: 56). I follow the lineages of these Indigenous theorists who view settler-colonialism as a kind of permanent war, drawing parallels between the so-called everyday violences (displacement, sexual violence) inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada and the death-delivering reaches of empire embodied by the West more globally. Or, to echo Mink, the transformer/shapeshifter narrating the events in Mara- cle’s Celia’s Song: “This is war” (2014: 9). For Butler, there are varying tactics for distributing “precarity” differently, or what she describes as “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support,” producing a “maximized precariousness for populations ... who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protec- tion” (2010: 26). In the depictions provided in her writing, as well as that of Maracle, violence is deployed not only as “an effort to minimize precarious- ness for some and to maximize it for others,” but also as a mode of shaping the perceptions of citizens in order to make such acts legible, and hence, in a sense justifiable (Butler 2010: 54). Ultimately what Butler is advocating for is a new ethico-political orientation, one with the potential to disrupt the violent regimes of the sensible, as well as the ways in which precarity is currently allocated and distributed. Paraphrasing Jacques Rancière, Jeff Derksen also advocates for political movements that disrupt “regimes of the sensible”: “a politics of the aesthetic could ... redistribute and rethink the possibility of the subject (potentially an isolated figure) within the present and within a com- munity to come” (2009: 73). In sum, Butler’s text illustrates the ways in which State-sanctioned (and induced) precarity “perpetuate[s] a way of dividing lives into those that are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when they are lost, and those that are not quite lives” (2010: 42), as well as the resistive practices that might disrupt the naturalization of “differential distribution[s] of pre- carity” (xxv). The remainder of the chapter considers to what extent Mara- cle’s texts offer such a disruption of the mundane frames of settler-colonial war within the context of an exceptional moment (an epidemic), and asks how her work gestures toward the alternatives that might be offered by Indigenous frames.