K - Settler Colonialism - Michigan 7 2023 STARTER

Settler Colonialism --- Michigan Starter Pack 2023
Notes
Thank you to the possibly innumerable people who have produced settler colonialism evidence over the years and the continued production and discussion that I have had over the years but thank you to Josh Jennings and Caleb White for many of the fantastic pieces of evidence that have made it into this file and for their use.
Trigger warning (Sexual violence) – Maldonado-Torres indicates that natives are rendered rapeable please make sure to supply a trigger warning. You may replace the evidence with the Rifkin evidence under “2NC --- Elimination Impact”
Trigger Warning (Suicide) - the Hecht 3 in the Nuclear Terrorism answers discusses suicide bombers, and the Hallward, 11 in the AT: Impossible describes “libidinal suicide” neither is a depiction but for safety concerns I wanted to make sure to warn everyone.
This file primarily argues that the idea of giving cash payments, or work guarantees (economic incentives.) rely on a number of settler colonial understandings but most importantly treat land as a neutral, natural, and without value minus economic interactions. It treats land as agentless and without understanding history or importance. The critique centers around a land-based understanding of ontology, epistemology and wealth which interrelates that the only redistributive practice that can alleviate the harms of settler colonialism is one that gives back the land. The critique also is separatist and argues that inclusion within state apparatus is dangerous and violent towards natives and only helps white guilt while using material needs of natives as a bargaining chip for forgiveness. This acts to render settler colonialism a past event and when we do that, we are ignoring the ongoing and systemic violences that occur now due to settler colonialism towards native peoples.
The critique has two versions the short version simply makes a rejection/education claim about rejecting rights-based frameworks for land based educational and resistance strategies. This is an ethical endorsement of a specific strategy towards decolonization. This can be read with other arguments and possibly even with arguments that might link to it as it works on an ethics level.
The second version (Long) makes a more pervasive and structuring claim that settler colonialism structures every aspect of a statist existence and renders no possibility for an ethical interaction or relation of settlers towards natives. This renders the entire systems of western ontology and epistemology immoral and requires their rejection. This critique makes the claim that the only ethical prioritization we can take is one towards unconditional decolonization. In reality this would mean giving back the land in all or part and unsettling settlers is an act of unsettling and forcing settlers to engage their own violence.
There is the evidence here to do a large structural critique but that is not how I set this particular file up.
Land based education generally always starts with an affirmation of the stolen land we currently reside upon. Ann Arbor resides on the traditional territories of the Anishinabae people of the Three Fires Confederacy – These include the Ojibwe, Ottawa, Potawatomi and Wyandot peoples.
The next step is the recognition of that lands theft making our actions that aren’t toward decolonization are acts of settler flight. Once we’ve done that the advocacy for decolonization is the only possible answer.
Concepts to keep in mind when debating.
Landedness mean constant recognition of the land, the aff won’t do this even if they attempt some form of recognition politics, they will inevitably go back to defending settler colonial understandings.
Futurity – Settler Colonialism is incomplete and the completion of the settler colonial project requires the extinction of natives. This means there is not possibility of a future for native persons within settler colonialism. However, if instead we ignore settler futurity, then we can create forms of decolonization that can make indigenous life possible.
Rights based frameworks – rights-based frameworks try to create inclusions within systems the critique is a rejection of settler colonialism meaning inclusion within and rejection off seems to be at odds.
Land is wealth and money is not land – this is incredibly important because ALL WEALTH GENERATES from LAND not the other way around. The aff might say “natives could buy land” that’s the very nature of settlerism in that it presupposes the giving back of small tracts of land somehow solves the problems of a 500+ year history of genocide and theft. The unsettling reality that the only redistribution that would alleviate the current harms of settlerism is the complete giving back of the land is crucial.
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1NC’s
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Fiscal Redistribution is an assimilative process that requires the integrations into rights frameworks striping indigenous land claims.
Manthripragada, and Mušanović, 2020 (Ashwin, Professor Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Emina, Professor Linfield University, "Accounting for our settler colonialism: Toward an unsettled German Studies in the United States." Diversity and decolonization in German Studies (2020): 23-40.)
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, leading Decolonial scholars, argue against applying decolonization as a metaphor, that is, using “an approximation of other experiences of oppression [as] a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 3). To decolonize, for Tuck and Yang, unambiguously means to “[bring] about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 21). In their influential essay, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” (2012), Tuck and Yang include among their list of settler colonialists: immigrants, descendants of slaves, refugees, migrant laborers; in short, anyone who arrives with and after the first settler colonialists. However, the communities that make up this list, along with Indigenous populations, constitute, as it is commonly understood, the diversity of contemporary North America. Critical approaches to diversity, the other prominent task of this edited volume, seek to address the uneven distribution of power. But, according to Tuck and Yang, this critical approach to diversity, based on “the promise of integration and civil rights is [itself] predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 7). Critical approaches to diversity seek to disrupt the uneven distribution of power, but do so by “[redistributing] Native land/life as common-wealth,” where decolonization means that “all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 27). In the following, we critically engage with the premises sketched above and ask how to accept the charge of decolonization: unsettle ourselves, unsettle German Studies as practiced in the United States, and, by extension, unsettle the institutions that house it. It means concurrently contributing to two—for many Decolonial scholars—diametrically opposed or rather incommensurable projects: the “decolonizing framework [that] prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” and “human and civil rights social justice projects” (Rowe and Tuck 2017, p. 8). This eventually unworkable dichotomy does not emerge from recourse to a “hierarchy of oppression,” to evoke Audre Lorde, but from diverging paths to liberation and different understandings of migration and its relation to colonialism. Namely, for Indigenous populations, according to Tuck and Yang, oppression would not end even in some utopia in which equality and equity have been unambiguously and irrevocably secured; it can only end with the recovery of Indigenous sovereignty and the coeval termination of settler sovereignty and settler property rights. To decolonize social justice/diversity frameworks, one must commit “to social change with a specific material politics of Indigenous sovereignty, land, and relationships” (Tuhiwai et al. 2019, p. xv). Without such a commitment, the work of decolonization is thus necessarily one of limited collaboration and inevitable antagonisms—of “contingent coalitions” (Rowe and Tuck 2017, p. 8). It demands, in the least, the recognition of how one’s positionality may inform one’s limits in the investment in decolonization. That is, at some point, if not immediately, settler colonialists must divest themselves from futurist visions in which they remain settler colonialists and in which the relation to land continues to be determined via property rights. Equity utopias that figure liberation in terms of equal access to existing resources or via the equitable redistribution of colonial (settler) wealth are incompatible with decolonization. The decolonization of German Studies as it exists in the United States must confront these limits even if it ultimately cannot overcome them. Our cautious entry into this essay is predicated on the weighty recognition that, although, as Sium et al. (2012) write, “there is no escaping complicity within a settler colonial state, especially for those of us who have settled here,” we must nonetheless engage in some form of action and/or resistance to the colonial, oppressive structuring of being (p. iii). But what form can and should decolonial action take from within the very “institution that helped draw up the first blueprints of colonization, both here and abroad? […] Is it possible to decolonize institutions of colonial power (such as the academy, government, etc.), but, further, is it possible to decolonize through them?” (Sium et al. 2012, p. iii). We engage with specific discourses of decolonization in this chapter because they pose an unanswered challenge to decolonization as a diversity framework in German Studies. This is certainly not the only decolonization discourse in Decolonial/Indigenous Studies, but it is one that has not, to our knowledge, been broadly taken up in endeavors to decolonize German Studies. Finally, we ask ourselves what contribution we— two scholars of immigrant background, a former refugee and a person of color, both born outside of the United States, both generally skeptical of border policing, (ethno)nationalisms, and hostility toward migration— can make to this critical conversation.
Coloniality generates a permanent state of exception that is the root cause of the death ethics of war and underwrites a hellish existence where death, murder, war, rape, and racism are ordinary.
Maldonado-Toress 8 Nelson Maldonado-Torres is an associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21. 2008.
Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racialization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.” The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times. Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences-

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