K – Settlerism – 2021 DDI



K – Settlerism – 2021 DDI1NC1NC K – SettlerismWater as “resource” is a settler ontology – engenders violence.Wilson 18 (Nicole Wilson, PhD in Resource Management from University of British Columbia, Jody Inkster, Professor at University of Alberta/Yukon College, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground," 2018, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, )Water is widely referred to as a ‘‘resource’’ (e.g. Yukon Water Strategy and Action Plan (Environment Yukon, Water Resources Branch), 2014). Also, according to the Yukon Waters Act (Yukon Legislative Counsel, 2003: 3) ‘‘Water belongs to Government.’’ While the idea that the Yukon Government ‘‘owns’’ the water is problematic from the perspective of Indigenous rights and jurisdiction, it also reveals the pervasiveness of settler colonialism and its buttressing ontologies – as ‘‘land [synonymous with water] is remade into property and human relationships to [water],’’ restricting all views ‘‘to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are [thus] interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage’’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5). In the same vein, the ‘‘water rights of Yukon First Nations,’’ referred to in the UFA frames the relationship to water in relation to property rights, absenting all reference to water as an ethic of respect. It thus also undermines any charge to First Nations to recognize and enact their ethic of responsibility, to take care of water – a living entity to which they have kinship ties (Anderson et al., 2013; McGregor, 2014). Water is thus rendered a resource. Or, as Anishinaabe scholar Deborah McGregor states: Water, in the dominant Western Euro-Canadian context, is conceptualized as a resource, a commodity to be bought and sold. Federal and provincial governments therefore make decisions about water based on a worldview, philosophy and set of values which stands in direct contrast to the views of First Nations people. (2014: 496). Although not necessarily intentional, following Kim Tallbear (2011), engaging settler understandings of water in water governance ‘‘engenders a lot of violence’’ due to the constant impulse to separate humans from non-humanSettler colonialism necessitates genocide and symbolic death as war becomes a permanent relationHarting 6 – Associate Professor of English at the University of Montreal (Heike, “Global Civil War and Post-colonial Studies,” from the Globalization and Autonomy Online Compendium, globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Xml2pdf?fn=RA_Harting_GlobalCivilWar)The Necropolitics of Global Civil War As with other civil wars, global civil war affects society as a whole. It "tends," as Hardt and Negri argue, "towards the absolute" (2004, 18) in that it polices civil society through elaborate security and surveillance systems, negates the rule of law, militarizes quotidian space, diminishes civil rights to the degree in which it increases torture, illegal incarceration, disappearances, and emergency regulations, and fosters a culture of fear, intolerance, and violent discrimination. Hardt and Negri, therefore, rightly argue that war itself has become "a permanent social relation" and thereby the "primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises" (ibid., 12). What Hardt and Negri suggest is new about today's global civil war is its biopolitical agenda. "War," they write, "has become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life" (ibid., 13). For example, the biopolitics of war entails the production of particular economic and cultural subjectivities, "creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of interaction" (ibid., 81). The ambiguity of Hardt and Negri's notion of biopower subtly resides in their adaptation of the language of social and political revolution, for it seems to be the regime of biopower, rather than the multitude, that absorbs and transvalues the revolutionary, that is, anti-colonial, spirit inscribed in the rhetoric of "new hearts and minds." At the same time, they argue, that a biopolitical definition of war "changes war's entire legal framework" (ibid., 21-22), for "whereas war previously was regulated through legal structures, war has become regulating by constructing and imposing its own legal framework" (ibid. 22). If none of this, at least in my mind, is marked by a particular originality of thought, then this may have to do with Hardt and Negri's reluctance to address the historical continuities between earlier wars of decolonization and contemporary global wars, the legacies of imperialism, and the imperative of race in orchestrating imperial, neo-colonial, and today's global civil wars. In fact, while biopolitical global warfare might be a new phenomenon on the sovereign territory of the United States of America, specifically after 11 September 2001, it is hardly news to "people in the former colonies, who," as Crystal Bartolovich points out, "have long lived at the 'crossroads' of global forces" (2000, 136), violence, and wars. For example, in Sri Lanka global civil war has been a permanent, everyday reality since the country's Sinhala Only Movement in 1956, and become manifest in the normalization of racialized violence as a means of politics since President Jayawardene's election campaign for a referendum in 1982, which led to the state-endorsed anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983. Similarly, according to Achille Mbembe, biopolitical warfare was intrinsic to the European imperial project in "Africa," where "war machines emerged" as early as "the last quarter of the twentieth century" (2003, 33). In other words, although Hardt and Negri argue convincingly that it is the ubiquity of global war that restructures social relationships on the global and local level, their concept tends to dehistoricize different genealogies and effects of global civil war. Indeed, not only do Hardt and Negri refrain from reading wars of decolonization as central to the construction of what David Harvey sees as the uneven "spatial exchange relations" (2003, 31) necessary for the expansion of capital accumulation and of which global war is an intrinsic feature, but they also dissociate global civil wars from the nation-state's still thriving ability to implement and exercise rigorous regimes of violence and surveillance. As for the term's epistemological formation, global civil war has been sanitized and no longer evokes the conventional association of civil war with "insurrection and resistance" (Agamben 2005, 2). Instead, it has become the effect of a diffuse new sovereignty (i.e., Hardt and Negri's Empire), a sovereignty that no longer decides over but has itself become a disembodied, that is, denationalized and normalized, state of exception. Yet, to talk about the disembodiment of global war not only reinforces media-supported ideologies of high-tech precision wars without casualties, but it also represses narratives about the ways in which the modi operandi of global war come to be embodied differently in different sites of war. In her short story "Man Without a Mask" (1995), the Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam describes the global dimensions of a war that is usually considered an ethnic civil war restricted to internally competing claims to territorial, cultural, and national sovereignty between the country's Sinhalese and Tamil population. Told by an elite mercenary who clandestinely works for the ruling members of the government and leads a group of highly trained assassins, the story follows the thoughts of its narrator and contemplates the politicization of violence and death. As a mercenary and possibly an ex-SAS (British Special Air Service) veteran the Sri Lankan Government hired after the failure of the Indo-Lankan Accord, the narrator signifies the "privatization of [Sri Lanka's] war" (Tambiah 1996, 6) and, thus, the reign of a global free market economy through which the state hands over its institutions and services to private corporations, including its army, and profits from the unrestricted global and illegal trade in war technologies. Like a craftsman, the mercenary finds satisfaction in the precision and methodical cleanliness of his work, in being, as he says, "a hunter. Not a predator" in his ability to leave "morality" out of "this business" (Arasanayagam 1995, 98). He is an extreme and perverted version of what Martin Shaw describes as the " 'soldier-scholar,'???the archetype of the new [global] officer" (1999, 60). As a self-proclaimed "scholar or scribe" (ibid., 100), the mercenary plots maps of death. Shortly before he reaches his victim, a politician who underestimated the political ambition of his enemy, he comments that bullet holes in a human body comprise a new kind of language: "The machine gun splutters. The body is pitted, pricked out with an indecipherable message. They are the braille marks of the new fictions. People are still so slow to comprehend their meaning" (ibid., 100). These new maps or fictions of global war, I suggest, describe what Etienne Balibar calls ultra-objective and ultra-subjective violence and characterize how global civil war both generates bare life and manages and instrumentalizes death. According to Balibar, ultra-objective violence suggests the systematic "naturalization of asymmetrical relations of power" (2001, 27) brought about, for instance, by the Sri Lankan government's prolonged abuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which, in the past plunged the country into a permanent state of emergency, facilitated the random arrest of and almost absolute rule over citizens, and thus created a culture of fear and a reversal of moral and social values. As the story clarifies, under conditions of systematic or ultra-objective violence, "corruption" becomes "virtue" and "the most vile" man wears the mask of the sage and "innocent householder" (Arasanayagam 1995, 102). In this milieu, the mercenary has no need for a mask, because he bears a face of ordinary violence that is "perfectly safe" (ibid., 102) in a society structured by habitual and systemic violence. But the logic of the "new fictions" of political violence is also ultra-subjective because it is "intentional" and has a "determinate goal" (Balibar 2001, 25), namely the making and elimination of what Balibar calls "disposable people" in order to generate and maintain a profitable global economy of violence. The logic of ultra-subjective violence presents itself through the fictions of ethnicity and identity as they are advanced and instrumentalized in the name of national sovereignty. The mercenary perfectly symbolizes what Balibar means when he writes that "we have entered a world of the banality of objective cruelty" (ibid.). For if the fictions of global violence are scratched into the tortured bodies of war victims, the mercenary's detached behavior dramatizes a "will to 'de-corporation'," that is, to force disaffiliation from the other and from oneself ??? not just from belonging to the community and the political unity, but from the human condition" (ibid.). In other words, while global civil war becomes embodied in those whom it negates as social beings and thereby reduces to mere "flesh," it remains a disembodied enterprise for those who manage and orchestrate the politics of death of global war. It is through the dialectics of the embodiment and disembodiment of global violence that the dehumanization of the majority of the globe's population takes on a normative and naturalized state of existence. Arasanayagam's short story also casts light on the limitations of Hardt and Negri's understanding of the biopolitics of global civil war, for the latter can account neither for the new fictions of violence in former colonial spaces nor for what Mbembe calls the "necropolitics" (2003, 11) of late modernity. Mbembe's term refers to his analysis of global warfare as the continuation of earlier and the development of new "forms of subjugation of life to the power of death" and its attendant reconfiguration of the "the relationship between resistance, sacrifice, and terror" (2003, 39). 4 Despite the many theoretical intersections of Hardt and Negri's and Mbembe's work, Mbembe's notion of necropolitics sees contemporary warfare as a species of such earlier "topographies of cruelty" (2003, 40) as the plantation system and the colony. Thus, in contrast to Hardt and Negri, Mbembe argues that the ways in which global violence and warfare produce subjectivities cannot be dissociated from the ways in which race serves as a means of both deciding over life and death and of legitimizing and making killing without impunity a customary practice of imperial population control. If global civil war is a continuation of imperial forms of warfare, it must rely on strategies of embodiment, that is, of politicizing and racializing the colonized or now "disposable" body for purposes of self-legitimization, specifically when taking decisions over the value of human life. After all, on a global level, race propels the ideological dynamics of ethnic and global civil war, while, on the local plane, it serves to orchestrate the brutalization and polarization of the domestic population, reinforcing and enacting patterns of racist exclusion and violence on the non-white body. In contrast to Hardt and Negri, then, Mbembe invites us to articulate imperial genealogies for the necropolitics of today's global civil wars. In other words, if imperialism was a form of perpetual low-intensity global war, the biopolitics of imperialism aimed at creating different forms of subjectivization. For example, while in India, the imperial administration sought to create a functional class of native informants, in Africa and the Caribbean, the British Empire created the figure of homo sacer. The latter, as Agamben argues, refers to the one who can be killed but not sacrificed. Homo sacer, Agamben clarifies, constitutes "the originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed" (1998, 85). Thus, the native is included in the imperial order only through her exclusion, while, simultaneously her humanity is stripped of social life and transformed into bare life, ready to be commodified on slavery's auction blocs and foreclosed from the dominant imperial psyche. Agamben's understanding of bare life derives from his reading of the Nazi death camps as the paradigmatic space of modernity in which the distinction between "fact and law" (ibid., 171), "outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit" (ibid., 170) dissolves and in which biopolitics takes the place of politics and "homo sacer" replaces the "citizen" (ibid., 171). While the notion of bare life is instrumental for theorizing biopolitics and the normalization and legalization of state violence under the pretense of, for example, protective arrests and preemptive strikes, it also suggests that the human body can be read as pure matter or in empirical terms. What goes unnoticed is to what extent the production of bare life depends on ideologies of race, that is, on the racialization of bodies, citizenship, and the concept of the human. For instance, under imperial rule, bare life is subjected to death and its politics in ways slightly different from those suggested by Agamben. More specifically, the killing of natives or slaves as bare life ??? then and today, as Rwanda's race-based genocide clarifies ??? not only configures human life in terms of its "capacity to be killed" (Agamben 1998, 114), that is as homicide and genocide outside of law and accountability, but also measures the value of human life on grounds of race. The making of bare life is a racialized and racializing process rooted within the necropolitics of colonialism. For, killing the native or slave presupposes the remaking of the human into bare life both through ideologies of pseudo-scientific racism and by subjecting them to what Orlando Patterson calls the "social death" (1982, 38) of the slave, that is, to a symbolic death of the human as a communal and social being that precedes physical death. 5 Thus, imperialism's necropolitics involves the making of disposable lives through practices of zombification and the "redefinition of death" itself (Agamben 1998, 161). In this sense, imperialism not only facilitated the extreme forms of racialized violence characteristic of global civil war, but it also helped create the conditions for making bare life the acceptable state of being for the present majority of the globe's population. Not unlike Jean Arasanayagam's short story, Mbembe's account of the Rwandan genocide and the Palestinian intifada suggests that the new global subjectivities are not so much the networked multitude Hardt and Negri imagine. Rather, emerging from the "new fictions" of global war, they are the suicide bomber, the mercenary, the martyr, the child soldier, the victim of mass rape, the refugee, the woman dispossessed of her family and livelihood, the mutilated civilian, and the skeleton of the disappeared and murdered victims of global civil war. What these subjectivities witness is that, on one hand, living under conditions of global civil war means to live in "permanent???pain" (Mbembe 2003, 39) and, on the other hand, they refer back to the dialectical mechanisms of colonial violence. For under the Manichaean pressures of colonialism, colonial violence always inaugurates a double process of subjection and subject formation. Frantz Fanon famously argues that anti-colonial violence operates historically on both collective and individual subject formation. For, on the one hand, "the native discovers reality [colonial alienation] and transforms it into the pattern of this customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom" (1963, 58), and on the other, a violent "war of liberation" instills in the individual a sense of "a collective history" (ibid., 93). Thus, as Robert Young suggests, anti-colonial violence "functions as a kind of psychotherapy of the oppressed" (2001, 295). Yet, it seems that read through the necropolitics of imperialism, global civil warfare no longer aims at the "pacification" of the colonial subject or the "degradation" of the "postcolonial subject" (ibid., 293) but, as I suggested earlier, at the complete abolishment of the human per se. We may therefore say that if global civil war produces new subjectivities, it does so through, what I have referred to as a process of zombification. Understood as sustained acts of negation, zombification ??? a term that harks back to Fanon ??? refers to a dialectical process of the embodiment and disembodiment of global war. The former refers to the exercise of ultra-objective violence ??? that is, the systematic "naturalization of asymmetrical relations of power" (Balibar 2001, 27) ??? in order to regulate, racialize, and extinguish human life at will, while the latter suggests the production of narratives of "de-corporation" (ibid., 25) and detachment by those who manage and administrate global civil war. The notion of zombification, however, connotes not only the exercise of, but also the exorcism of, the ways in which global war is scripted on and through the racialized body. Thus, a post-colonial understanding of global war needs to think through the necropolitics of war, including the uneven value historically and presently assigned to human life and the politicization of death. The latter issue will be addressed in the last section of this paper. The next section examines the cultural production and perpetuation of normative narratives of global warfare. The Rhetoric of the Archaic and Michael Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost" Published shortly after Sri Lanka's civil war became entangled with the global politics of the South and the rise of the Sri Lankan nation-state to one of the war's principal and most corrupt actors, Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost dramatizes both the transformation of the country's civil war into a permanent state of exception and the failure of global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to intervene in the war's rising human rights abuses and violent excesses. While the novel presents an extraordinary search for social justice through narrative and seeks to understand the operative modes of violence beyond their historical and social configurations, it also tends to sublimate and aestheticize violence by treating it as a normative element of human and, indeed, planetary life. My purpose here is to indicate that the novel's own project of dramatizing the complicity between religious and secular, anti-colonial and nationalist agents of war, and civilians and global actors (i.e., NGOs) remains compromised by the novel's aesthetic investment in a particular rhetoric of the archaic. The latter, I argue, unwittingly coincides with normative narratives of global war and facilitates the reader's detachment from the ways in which the Global North has reconstructed global life as a permanent state of exception. Ondaatje's novel (2000) opens with an Author's Note that locates the narrative at a time when "the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north???had declared war on the government" and "legal and illegal government squads were???sent out to hunt down" both groups. In this instance, the Hobbesian rhetoric of a "war of all against all" is more than a clich??. In fact, it is symptomatic of the novel's ambiguous critique of the role of the Sri Lankan nation-state and its elaborate, modernist discourse of violence. The Note foreshadows what the narrator later repeats on several occasions, namely that Sri Lanka's war is a war fought "for the purpose of war" (ibid., 98) and for which "[t]here is no hope of affixing blame" (ibid., 17). In short, the "reason for war was war" (ibid., 43). At first glance, the narrative's emphasis on the war's self-perpetuating dynamics implies a Hobbesian understanding of violence as the natural state of human existence. At the same time, it translates the actual politics of Sri Lanka's war into the Deleuzean idiom of the "war machine." For, according to Deleuze and Guattari, armed conflict functions outside the control and accountability of the "state apparatus???prior to its laws" (1987, 352), and beyond its initial causes. Although such an interpretation of Sri Lanka's war reflects what the political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda calls the "intractability of the Sri Lankan crisis" (1999, 158), its political and ethical stakes outweigh its gains. 6 To begin with, the novel's leitmotif of "perpetual war" situates Sri Lanka's conflict within a general context of global war, because, as the narrator reports, it is fought with "modern weaponry," supported by "backers on the sidelines in safe countries," and "sponsored by gun-and drug-runners" (Ondaajte 2000, 43). In this scenario, the rule of law has deteriorated into "a belief in???revenge" (ibid., 56), and the state is either absent or part of the country's all-consuming anarchy of violence. This absence suggests that the state no longer functions, in Max Weber's famous words, as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" (2002, 13). It is of course possible to argue that the novel's critique of the Sri Lankan nation-state lies in its absence. It seems to me, however, that the narrative's tendency to locate the dynamics of Sri Lanka's war outside the state and within a post-national vision of a new global order generates a normative narrative of global war. On the one hand, it resonates with the popular ??? though misleading ??? notion that the "appearance of 'failed states'," as Samuel Huntington argues in his controversial study The Clash of Civilizations, intensifies "tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict" and thus "contributes to [the] image of a world in anarchy" (1996, 35). On the other, situating Sri Lanka's war outside the institutions of the state re-inscribes a Hobbesian notion of violence that helps legitimize and cultivate structural violence as a permissive way of conducting politics. Such a reading of violence, however, overlooks that in a global context violence has become "profoundly anti-Hobbesian" (Balibar 2001, xi). Balibar usefully suggests that the twentieth century history of extreme violence has made it impossible to regard violence as "a structural condition that precedes institutions." Instead, he maintains, "we have had to accept???that extreme violence is not post-historical but actually post-institutional." It "arises from institutions as much as it arises against them" (ibid., xi). Thus, in such popular post-colonial narratives of war as Anil's Ghost, the normalization of violence figures as a forgetting of the institutional entrenchment and historical use of violence as a state-sanctioned political practice. If Ondaatje's novel presents Sri Lanka's war as an "inherently violent" event (Das 1998), it is also an event narrated through the symbolism and logic of archaic primitivism. For example, in the novel's central passage on the nature of human violence, the narrator observes, "The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the extreme actions of nature or civilisation ???Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives???A dog in Pompeii. A gardener in Hiroshima" (Ondaatje 2002, 55). The symbolic leveling of the arbitrariness of primordial chaos and the apparently ahistorical anarchism of violence create a rhetoric of the archaic that is characteristic, as Nancy argues, of "anything that is properly to be called war" (2000, 128). He convincingly argues that archaic symbolism "indicates that [war] escapes from being part of 'history' understood as the progress of a linear/or cumulative time" and can be rearticulated as no more than a "regrettable" remnant of an earlier age (ibid., 128). In that, Nancy's observation coincides with Hardt and Negri's that the "war on terror" employs a medievalist rhetoric of just and unjust wars that moralizes rather than legitimizes the use of global violence by putting it outside the realm of reason and critique. In Nancy's observation, however, two things are at stake. First, what initially appears to be a postmodern critique of the grand narratives of history in fact demonstrates that a non-linear account of history may lend itself to the transformation of extreme violence into exceptional events. In this way violence is normalized as a transhistorical category that fails to address the unequal political and economic relations of power, which lie at the heart of global wars. Second, Nancy rightly warns us against treating war as an archaic relic that is "tendentiously effaced in the progress and project of a global humanity" (2000, 128). For not only does war return in the process of negotiating sovereignty on a global and local plane, but the representation of war in terms of archaic images also repeats a primordialist explanation of what are structurally new wars. As theorists such as Appadurai and Kaldor have argued, the primordialist hypothesis of global wars merely reinforces those mass mediated images of global violence that dramatize ethnic wars as pre-modern, tribalist forms of strife. Huntington's notion of civilization or "fault-line" wars as communal conflicts born out of the break-up of earlier political formations, demographic changes, and the collision of mutually exclusive religions and civilizations presents the most prominent and politically influential version of a primordialist and bipolar conceptualization of global war. In contrast to Huntington's approach, however, the narrative of Anil's Ghost contends that all forms of violence "have come into their comparison" (Ondaatje 2000, 203). Notwithstanding its universalizing impetus, the novel thus insists on the impossibility to think the nation and a new global order outside the technologies of violence and modernity. Indeed, in the novel's narrative it is the suffering of all war victims that "has come into their comparison" and suggests that the new wars breed a culture of violence that shapes everyone's life yet for which no one appears to be accountable. On the one hand, then, the novel's self-critical humanitarian project seeks to initiate a communal and individual process of mourning by naming, and therefore accounting for, in Anil's words, "the unhistorical dead" (ibid, 56). On the other hand, read as its critical investment in the war's politics of complicity, the novel's humanitarian endeavor is countered by the narrator's tendency to articulate violence in archaic and anarchistic terms. For, to revert to the symbolic language of "primitivism and anarchy" and "to treat [the new wars] as natural disasters," as Kaldor observes (2001, 113), designates a common way of dealing with them. Thus the rhetoric of the archaic not merely dehistoricizes violence but contributes to the making of a normative and popular imaginary through which to make global wars thinkable and comprehensible. Thus, their violent excesses appear to be rooted in primordialist constructions of the failed post-colonial nation-state rather than a phenomenon with deep-seated roots in the global histories of the present. Such a normative imaginary of global war is produced for the Global North so as to dehistoricize its own position in the various colonial processes of nation formation and global economic restructuring of the Global South. In this way, as Ondaatje's novel equally demonstrates, the Global North can detach itself from the Global South and create the kind of historical and cultural distance needed to accept ultra-objective violence as a normative state of existence. Conceptualizing war as a phenomenon of criminal and anarchistic violence, however, may do more than merely conform to the popular imagination about the chaotic and untamable nature of contemporary warfare. Indeed, anarchistic notions of violence tend to compress the grand narratives and petite recits of history into a total, singular present of perpetual uncertainty, fear, and political confusion and generate what the post-colonial anthropologist David Scott sees as Sri Lanka's "dehistoricized" history. Given the important role the claiming of ancient Sinhalese and Hindu history played in the violent identity politics that drive Sri Lanka's war, Scott suggests that devaluing or dehistoricizing history as a founding category of Sri Lanka's narrative of the nation breaks the presumably "natural???link between past identities and the legitimacy of present political claims" (1999, 103). This strategy seems useful because it uncouples Sri Lanka's colonially shaped and glorified Sinhalese past from its present claims to political power. We need to note, however, that, according to Scott, dehistoricizing the past does not suggest writing from a historical vacuum. Rather, it refers to a process of denaturalizing and, thus, de-legitimizing the normative narratives of ethnicized and racialized narratives of national identity. Anil's Ghost engages in this process of "dehistoricizing" by foregrounding the fictitious and fragmented, the elusive and ephemeral character of history. Indeed, as the historian Antoinette Burton suggests, the novel offers "a reflection on the continued possibility of History itself as an exclusively western epistemological form" (2003, 40). The latter clearly finds expression in what Sarath's brother, Gamini, condemns as "the last two hundred years of Western political writing" (Ondaatje 2000, 285). Steeped in the imperial project of the West, such writing is facilitated by and serves to erase the figure of the non-European cultural Other in order to produce and maintain what Jacques Derrida famously called the "white mythology" (1982, 207) of Western metaphysics. The novel usefully extends its reading of violence into a related critique of knowledge production, so that the latter becomes legible as being complicit in the production of perpetual violence and war. This critique is perhaps most articulated through the character of Palipana, Sarath's teacher and Sri Lanka's formerly renowned but now fallen anthropologist. Once an agent of Sri Lanka's anti-colonial liberation movement, Palipana represents the generation of cultural nationalist who sought history and national identity in an essentially Sinhalese culture and natural environment. Rather than employing empirical and colonial methods of knowledge production and historiography, Palipana had left the path of scientific objectivity, tinkered with translations of historical texts, and "approached runes???with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills" (Ondaatje 2000, 82) until "the unprovable truth emerged" (ibid., 83). Now, years after his fall from scientific grace, Palipana lives the life of an ascetic, following the "strict principles of" a "sixth-century sect of monks" (ibid., 84). To him, history and nature have become one, for "all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain" (ibid., 84). Yet, Ondaatje's construction of Palipana and his account of the eye-painting ritual of a Buddha statue ??? a ritual that assumes a central place in the novel's cosmopolitan vision of artisanship as a practice of cultural and religious syncretism in the service of post-conflict community building ??? are themselves built on a number of historical texts listed in the novel's "Acknowledgment" section. As Antoinette Burton astutely observes, "the orientalism of some of the texts on Ondaatje's list is astonishing, a phenomenon which suggests the ongoing suppleness of 'history' as an instrument of political critique and ideological intervention" (2003, 50). Rather than effectively "dehistorizing" the character of Palipana, then, Ondaatje bases this character and the eye-painting ceremony on a central Sri Lankan modernist text, Ananada K. Coomaraswamy's Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908/1956). Cont For Hardt and Negri, then, the state of exception functions as the universal condition and legitimization of global civil war, while positioning the United States as a global power, which transforms war "into the primary organizing principle of society" (2004, 12). They rightly observe that the state of exception blurs the boundaries between peace and war, violence and mediation. Yet, curiously enough, Hardt and Negri's understanding of the state of exception largely emphasizes the concept's regulatory and pragmatic politics, so that the United States emerges as a sovereign power on grounds of its ability to decide on the state of exception. By exempting itself from international law and courts of law, protecting its military from being subjected to international control, allowing preemptive strikes, and engaging in torture and illegal detention (ibid., 8), the United States instrumentalizes and maintains war as a state of exception in the name of global security and thus seeks to consolidate its hegemonic role within Empire. Although Hardt and Negri openly disagree with Agamben's reading of the state of exception as defining "power itself as a 'monopoly of violence' " (2004, 364), it seems to me that Agamben's theory of the state of exception, as put forward in Homo Sacer rather than in States of Exception, might be usefully read alongside Hardt and Negri's crucial claim that global civil war as well as resistance movements depend on the "production of subjectivity" through immaterial labour (2000, 66). What this argument overlooks is that, according to Agamben, the state of exception constitutes an abject space or "a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion" (1998, 181), where subjectivity enters a political and legal order solely on grounds of its exclusion. Moreover, the sovereign ??? albeit a nation, sovereign power, or global network of power ??? can only transform the rule of law into the force of law by suspending the legal system from a position that is simultaneously inside and outside the law. Through these mechanisms of exclusion and contradiction, subjectivity is not so much created as it is deprived of its social and political relationships. Thus the "originary activity" of global civil war is the violent conflation of political and social relationship and thereby the "production of bare life" (ibid., 83), of life that need not be accounted for, as is the case with the civilian casualties of the US-led war against Iraq. The state of exception, however, also figures as a prominent concept in post-colonial theory, for it raises questions not only about the ways in which we configure the human but also how we understand imperial or global war. In 1940, Benjamin famously wrote, "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight" (1968, 257). Benjamin's statement, as Homi Bhabha reminds us half a century later in his essay "Interrogating Identity," can be usefully advanced for a critical analysis of the dialectical ??? if not revolutionary ??? relationship between oppression, violence, and anti-colonial historiography. Indeed, "the state of emergency," as Bhabha says, "is also always a state of emergence" (1994, 41). Read in the context of today's global state of exception, namely the recurrence and intensification of ethnic civil wars across the globe and the coincidence of democratic and totalitarian forms of political rule, Bhabha's statement entails a number of risks and suggestions for a post-colonial historiography of global civil war. First, Bhabha's notion of emergency/emergence reflects his critical reading of Fanon's vision of national identity and thus reconsiders the state of emergency as a possible site of "the occult instability where the people dwell" (Fanon 1963, 227) and give birth to popular movements of national liberation. In this context, the state of exception might be understood as both constitutive to the alienation that is intrinsic to liberation movements and instrumental for a radical euphoria and excessive hope that create and spectralize the post-colonial nation-state as a deferred promise of decolonization. It is through this perspective that we can critically evaluate Hardt and Negri's endorsement of what they call "democratic violence" (2004, 344). This kind of violence, they argue, belongs to the multitude. It is neither creative nor revolutionary but used on political rather than moral grounds. When organized horizontally, according to democratic principles of decision making, democratic violence serves as a means of defending "the accomplishments" of "political and social transformation" (ibid., 344). Notwithstanding the concept's romantic and utopian inflections, democratic violence also derives from Hardt and Negri's earlier argument that "the great wars of liberation are (or should be) oriented ultimately toward a 'war against war,' that is, an active effort to destroy the regime of violence that perpetuates our state of war and supports the systems of inequality and oppression." This, they conclude, is "a condition necessary for realizing the democracy of the multitude" (ibid., 67). In one quick stroke, Hardt and Negri move anti-colonial liberation wars into their post-national paradigm of Empire and divest them of their cultural and historical particularities. Moreover, translating explicitly national liberation movements into a universalizing narrative of global pacifism precludes a critique of violence within its particular historical and philosophical formation. In contrast, a post-colonial analysis of global war must tease out the intersections between the ways in which racialized violence constitutes colonial and post-colonial processes of nation formation and helps construct an absolute enemy through which to legitimize global war and to abdicate responsibility for the dehumanizing effects of global economic restructuring. Second, while Bhabha's pun is symptomatic of the resisting properties that he sees as operative in the various practices of colonial ambiguity, it also, despite Benjamin's opinion, draws attention to the possibility that oppression alters the linear flow of Western history and challenges "the transparency of social reality, as a pre-given image of human knowledge" (Bhabha 1994, 41). Here, Bhabha rightfully asks to what extent do states of emergency or acts of extreme violence constitute a historical rupture and, more importantly, call into question the nature of the human subject. It is at this point that a post-colonial reading of the state of exception fruitfully coincides with Agamben's notion of exception. For in both cases, the focus of inquiry is the construction of disposable life through the logic of necropower and the collapse of social and political relationships that enable the exercise of particularly racialized forms of violence, including torture and disappearances. Third, Bhabha's notion of the double movement of emergency and emergence envisions an anti-colonialist historiography in terms of a dialectical process of perpetual transformation. It is at this point, however, that the coupling of emergency or exception and emergence becomes problematic for at least two reasons. First, combining both terms prematurely translates the violence of the political event into that of metaphor and risks erasing the micro- or quotidian narratives of violence ??? such as Arasanayagam's account of war ??? that both legitimate and are perpetuated by political and social states of emergency. In order to examine the relationship between global and communal forms of violence, a critical practice of post-colonial studies, I suggest, must reassess the term "transformation" and, concurrently, the assumption that acts of extreme global violence can be advanced in the service of "making history" (Balibar 2001, 26). In other words, if, as Hannah Arendt argues, there has been a historical "reluctance to deal with violence as a separate phenomenon in its own right" (2002, 25), it is time to examine the possibility of employing post-colonial studies in the service of a non-dialectical critique of global war. This kind of critique must ask to what extent those on whose bodies extreme violence was exercised are a priori excluded from articulating any transformative theory of violence. How, in other words, does bare life ??? if at all possible ??? attain the status of subjectivity within the dehumanizing logic of exception or global civil war? Fourth, like Bhabha, we need to take seriously Benjamin's insight into the intrinsic relationship between violence and the conceptualization of history. Notwithstanding Bhabha's pivotal argument that the violence of a "unitary notion of history" generates a "unitary," and therefore extremely violent, "concept of man" (1994, 42), I wish to caution, alongside Benjamin's analysis of fascism, that what enables today's global civil war is that even "its opponents treat it as a historical norm" (Benjamin 1968, 257). What is at stake, then, in dominant as well as critical narratives of global civil war is their representation as natural rather than political phenomena, and the acceptance of globalization as a political fait accompli. Both of these aspects, I believe, contribute to the proliferation of dehistoricized concepts of the global increase of racialized violence and war. It seems to me, however, that the enormous rise of violence inflicted by global civil wars requires a post-colonial historiography and critique of global war that questions notions of history based on cultural fragmentation, rupture, and totalization. Instead, such a historiography must seek out patterns of connection and connectivity. But more importantly, as I have argued in this paper, it must trace the post-colonial moment of global civil war and begin to read contemporary war through the interconnected necropolitics of global and imperial warfare. Thus, to understand the logic and practice of global war we need to develop a greater understanding precisely of those civil wars and national liberation wars that do not appear to threaten the new global order. Furthermore, a post-colonial critique of global civil war should facilitate the decoding and rescripting of both the normalizing narratives and racialized embodiment of global civil warfare. The alternative is to decolonize waterWilson 19 (Nicole Wilson, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell, et al, “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance,” Water, 11)The diverse understandings, constituencies and interests that surround water can be neglected, further erased, or oversimplified when water governance actors assume what normative and shared understandings of water are [2]. Feminist scholarship, Indigenous theorists, and political ecologists have contributed valuable frameworks and analytics to extend analysis of politics and governance. Applied to water, we can engage these approaches to understand water not as a hydrological or biophysical system but as a “hydro-social” system, inseparable from politics, culture, and economy [9]. Offering another important example, Indigenous scholars and allies have foregrounded Indigenous water ontologies and epistemologies, rooted in responsibilities to water as a living entity and suggesting that colonial understandings of water, as a material resource, should be challenged and decolonized to address past injustices and move towards more just and sustainable interactions with, and uses of, water (e.g., [11,13,16,17]). Ethnographers, including feminist scholars, have re-scaled and re-contextualized water’s access, uses, and governance through a focus on citizenship and racialization, the emotional and affective embodiments of water, and the politics, negotiations and relations of “the everyday” (e.g., [18–23]). Examples of wider conversations opened-up include how bodies are enrolled in uneven geographies of water access, the multi-species and multi-actor entanglements that (re)constitute “hydro-social” and infrastructural assemblages, and analytical re-orientations of governance to include intangible meanings and values of water (e.g., [18–23]). From such scholarship, a broader understanding of what governance might entail is brought into view, often contrasting with a narrow managerial perspective on how to “better” govern water [1]. These provocative entry points invite attention not only to the uneven distribution and access to water for humans and non-humans, but also highlight the wider governing ethics, arrangements, histories, and political-economic systems.LinksL – TopicThe AFFs Water Governance expands the Colonial grip of the settler state – reinforces the water insecurity and control regime Wilson 21, Nicole J., et al. Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, Assistant Professor"Governing water insecurity: navigating indigenous water rights and regulatory politics in settler colonial states."?Water International?(2021): 1-19.//KBMirroring the broader water insecurity literature, research about Indigenous peoples has often focused on the material dimensions of household water insecurity including water access, quantity, quality and affordability (Goldhar et al., 2013; Medeiros et al., 2017; Wright et al., 2017). As Jepson et al. (2017) note, such framings, while important, fail to account for the influence of water–society relationships on water insecurity. This includes the complex and diverse ways that water is accessed, valued and governed as well as the socio-political structures and processes that shape these relationships (Linton, 2010). Accordingly, uneven power relations in water governance and politics play a critical role in shaping water insecurity and well-being (Miller et al., 2020). Water insecurity frameworks must account for the ways that water links Indigenous bodies to settler colonial infrastructure and governance systems (Latchmore et al., 2018; Mitchell, 2019; Wilson & Inkster, 2018). To achieve this, we engage with scholarship from the fields of Indigenous water governance and politics as well as critical Indigenous studies. [P] Scholarship on Indigenous water governance and politics highlights how the expansion of settler colonial States was, and continues to be, tied to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through mechanisms that include policy and law, ideology, and discourses about identity (Curley,?2019b; Daigle,?2018; Montoya,?2017; Todd,?2018; Yazzie & Baldy,?2018). Indigenous water governance tends to centre on the understanding that water is a more-than-human person or a living entity to which there are relational responsibilities, a principle central to Indigenous sovereignty, livelihood and survival (e.g., Craft,?2018; McGregor,?2014). In contrast, settler colonial water governance is rooted in Modern water – a concept used to describe frameworks that view water as a solely material substance or commodity, something quantifiable, manageable and ultimately available for unsustainable human use (McGregor,?2014; Wilson & Inkster,?2018). These modernist ideas of water, which are at the root of settler colonial State water governance, impose significant ontological and material violence on Indigenous peoples as they permeate water law, infrastructures, and assessments of water insecurity and risk, to the exclusion of Indigenous cultural, spiritual and physical health as well as the health of water itself (Wilson et al.,?2019; see also Meehan et al.,?2020).[P]Critical Indigenous scholars raise concerns about the nature of the settler colonial States, which have implications for water insecurity. Colonial understandings of sovereignty and jurisdiction assume that States alone exercise the final authority over a given territory. Indigenous studies scholars continually encounter this assumption, despite the recognition that increasing connections between domestic and international politics makes absolute sovereignty a myth?L – Atmospheric ViolenceAtmospheric violence is not just pollution, but rather an inevitable condition of indigenous existence.Simmons 17 (Kristen Simmons is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Anthropology. 2017. "Settler Atmospherics." Member Voices,?Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology, November 20. ; AKIM)Breathing in a settler atmosphere is taxing. Some of us can’t breathe. In the fall of 2016 many of us watched shaky Facebook video livestreams that resembled a warscape of heavy military equipment and smoke. Standing Rock and the Mni Sose (Missouri River) were choke points for water protectors asserting indigenous sovereignty, and sites for violent, experimental techniques of control used by police and private security forces.I went to Standing Rock twice in November 2016 to be in good relation. I went in keeping with Kim TallBear’s (2016) proposal to approach kinship as “a partial and productive tool to help us forge alternatives to the settler-colonial state.” As many indigenous scholars have articulated, relational ethics are based in reciprocity and obligation with the land and other-than-humans. Glen Coulthard (2014, 13) describes this place-based foundation of indigenous decolonial thought and practice as?grounded normativity, which ought to “inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world.”The conditions we breathe in are collective and unequally distributed, with particular qualities and intensities that are felt differently through and across time. For indigenous nations, the imbrications of U.S. militarism, industrialism, and capitalism have always been palpably felt on indigenous lands and through indigenous bodies, from extraction to experimentation. The regimes of these foundational violences are the surrounds of settler atmospherics. Christina Sharpe (2016) argues that antiblackness is as pervasive as the climate. This, too, is the surround of settler atmospherics. Put otherwise, settler atmospherics are the normative and necessary violences found in settlement—accruing, adapting, and constricting indigenous and black life in the U.S. settler state.One of the technologies of governance that capacitated this violence at Standing Rock was the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), which authorizes states to enter into agreements with other states in order to share emergency management personnel during crisis situations. With some?seventy-six law enforcement agencies from ten states?dispatched over a four-month period, the compact turned Standing Rock into?“a sort of law enforcement laboratory.”?Outside of natural disasters, EMAC has thus far only been used to handle the crisis of Indians and the crisis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Joseph Masco (2017, S73) argues that the very notion of crisis is in crisis and that crisis has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century: “Crisis talk today seeks to stabilize an institution, practice, or reality rather than interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for that endangerment to occur.” The construction of Standing Rock as a crisis ruptures history and installs an event-based logic, rather than inviting structural interrogation. It ruptures our relations. As?Nick Estes argues, the #NoDAPL struggle is a continuation of the Indian Wars and of the settler colonial project of indigenous elimination. What, we should ask, is made to get lost? What gets obfuscated? What gets disavowed? What gets refused?Tear gas and pepper spray (both riot control agents) became the dominant crowd-control tactics deployed against nonviolent water protectors at Standing Rock. Riot control agents are defined in?the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention?as “any chemical . . . which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.” The Convention banned these agents as a method of warfare internationally, but?their use is paradoxically permitted?by domestic law enforcement. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions known as the Marshall Trilogy nest indigenous nations in a “cramped space” (Povinelli 2016, 6) through their designation of “domestic, dependent nations,” rendering the use of tear gas and pepper spray on unarmed protectors at Standing Rock permissible.A Freedom of Information Act public records request uncovered a 133-page?“field force operations” training manual?from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Center for Domestic Preparedness, which was sent between law enforcement personnel in North Dakota. The manual describes riot control agents as designed to accomplish five tasks: disrupt, disorient, disable, distract, and disperse. It lists the three most commonly used types: chloroacetophenone, orthochlorobenzalidene malononitrile (both colloquially known as tear gas), and oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray. The manual is not much for chemical specificity, noting that “all of these agents produce about the same effects,” emphasizing the immediacy and temporariness that allow them to sever the present.At the actions in which I participated, riot control agents were used in spray form and water protectors did what they could to shield themselves with the materials at hand: cloth bandannas, surgical masks, goggles. These materials could be picked up at various stations around camp by those who didn’t come prepared. People leaving the action to go back to camp would often pass off what they had. However, most techniques were insufficient for fully protecting against exposure and treating the aftermath of the injury became key. Medics would treat exposures with a 50/50 mixture of liquid antacid and water to soothe the eyes, nose, and mouth. On November 20, which became known as Backwater Sunday, over three hundred people suffered injuries, and most suffered both hypothermia and chemical exposure. Pepper spray was mixed with water in the water cannons and tear gas canisters were deployed as projectile weapons, fired directly at protectors at close range. Medics described how the mixture the police were using pooled on the asphalt road and froze as black ice in the freezing temperatures.A horrifying email chain with the subject line “Fwd: Israelis Crowd Control Method” circulated among police officers in the early fall. The email was brief, linking to?a YouTube video?titled “Skunk: A ‘Degrading Form of Abuse’ or Safe, Nontoxic Alternative to Rubber Bullets?” The written text accompanying the link extolled the virtues of Skunk: “the Israeli biomedical engineers have done it again.” Skunk is classified as a malodorant, nonlethal weapon, and it has been used by the Israel Defense Forces since 2008. While there is no proof that Skunk was used at Standing Rock, it is available in the United States and?was purchased by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department?after the Ferguson protests. With substances like these, the atmosphere becomes not only a medium for violence and control, but also one through which affects to demean are engineered.The atmosphere is increasingly a sphere to be weaponized. Peter Sloterdijk argues as much with his conception of?atmoterror, in which the environment becomes a coercive object of technological mediation. Sloterdijk (2009, 41) emphasizes that humans “simply cannot not breathe,” which is why atmospheric weapons are a profound form of terror(ism) that create atmospheres of apprehension. To this end, it is indigenous nations that disproportionally contend with the toxic legacies of late industrialism in the air (Fortun 2014). There are?532 Superfund sites?on tribal lands, nearly one for each of the 562 federally recognized indigenous nations in the United States. The settler colonial project of U.S. Empire is, after all, to place indigenous nations and bodies into suspension. Treating Indians as crisis or colonial residue, regulating them, as Jodi Byrd (2011, 20) argues, “to the site of already-doneness that begins to linger as unwelcomed guest to the future,” suspends large-scale processes of capitalism, militarism, racism, and colonialism. We become excessive and need to be managed, or else we are ghostly traces that must be pushed aside.Differently put, suspension is a condition of settler colonialism—it suffuses all places, and keeps in play the contradictions and ambiguities built into the colonial project. This essay aligns itself with the larger political project of attuning to and staying with those contradictions and ambiguities (see Haraway 2016). Audra Simpson (2014, 3, 12) describes the “strangulated political order” of indigenous nationals, noting that “under the conditions of settler colonialism, multiple sovereignties cannot proliferate robustly or equally.” Some of us cannot breathe.Our attunement to settler atmospherics can perpetuate further injury (see Stevenson 2014). It can be pathologized as anxiety, paranoia, or conspiracy in an atmosphere of uncertainty and half-knowing. At Oceti Sakowin, too, we experienced various suspensions: of time, bodies, affects. Anticipation of state violence became a rhythm, with constant low-flying helicopters, floodlights, and a large militarized police presence creating a tension that settled deep into muscles. The forces of strangulation were viscerally felt at Oceti Sakowin camp as water protectors facedattack dogs, handcuffs, flex cuffs, stress positions, water cannons, fists, feet, assault rifles, arrest warrants, rural county jails, felonies, misdemeanors, private property, body armor, drones, private security, tear gas, mace, armored Humvees, the intentional defilement of gravesites, the North Dakota National Guard, the North Dakota State Patrol, Border Patrol riot shields, billy clubs, concrete barricades, airplanes, Blackhawk helicopters, Caterpillar earthmovers, and media censorship and harassment. (Estes 2017)Alongside the asphyxiation of “indigenous governmental forms, philosophical practices, and gender roles” (Simpson 2014, 155), I would argue that colonial governmentality necessarily strangulates other forms of relationality and coalition building. Key valences of this relational severing are toxic strangulations—social and chemical—that indigenous nations and other marginalized communities endure (Murphy 2017). These materials are difficult to trace, require multiple forms of expertise to negotiate, and we have been trained to not see them.For Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee (2015), suspension is a method for orientation in an atmospheric problem-space. A life in suspension generates multiple openings and entryways into structural conditions, and allows for the challenging of our assumptions and disbeliefs: our common sense. In a colonial settler state this questioning must come with an awareness of the pervasiveness of settlement in shaping ordinary life. Such a phase shift from existing forms of settler common sense brings out displacements with different qualities: what can you willfully unsettle in relation with others?Those in suspension arc toward one another—becoming-open in an atmosphere of violence. Porosity thus becomes a site of potential, exposure, and entanglement all at once, questioning the stability of our worlds, human and nonhuman. In a porous relationality—attuning to how others (cannot) breathe, our haptics are enhanced and we develop capacities to feel one another otherwise. Choy (2011) reminds us of the Latin root of?conspire, as a breathing together, declaring: “Breathers of the world, conspire!” We need to conspire to strategize logics of agitation, which displace and unsettle. Doing so calls us not to ignore difference, but to create alter-relations with one another. As?Choy underscores elsewhere, “breathing together rarely means breathing the same.”What would it take for individuals to reconceptualize the embeddedness in which we all already are?with?and have the potential to be?for—to stage the grounds for a collective reimagining, a conspiration, an atmospheric otherwise? Or, what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013, 11) terms, “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you”? While EMAC enabled massive police-state coalitions that most likely will continue, so too did massive #NoDAPL coalitions coalesce. Christina Sharpe (2016, 106) argues that “the weather necessitates changeability and improvisation . . . it produces new ecologies.” To this end, on September 2, 2016, Black Lives Matter’s national chapter released?a statement in solidarity with water protectors at Standing Rock, avowing: “We are clear that there is no Black liberation without Indigenous sovereignty.” New ecologies are forming for liberation in a settler atmosphere.Atmospheric water management is too late – mitigation methods to stop extinction forecloses the possibility to analyze how atmospheric pollution is already killing indigenous folk.Thompson 17 (Geneva E.B. Thompson graduated from UCLA School of Law in 2016 with specializations in Critical Race Studies and Public Interest Law and Policy. She focused her legal education on the intersection of federal Indian law and environmental law, examining how Native nations balance environmental protection with economic development. She has clerked with the Department of Justice Environmental and Natural Resources Division, Indian Resource Section, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, and the Tribal Law and Policy Institute during law school. Geneva is currently working at Wishtoyo Foundation and Ventura Coastkeeper as the UCLA School of Law Emmett Family Public Service Fellow in Environmental Law. "Environmentalism and human legal framework: The continued frontier of Indigenous resistance."?Indigenous Peoples' JL Culture & Resistance?4 (2017): 9.; AKIM)In the present day, new colonial, capitalist, and economic projects are leading to ecological destruction in the form of climate change. Generally, climate change is defined as the warming of the earth from the increased amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, primarily from human activity.54 These human-made emissions derive from the burning coal, oil, and gas, the clearing of forests, and “big agricultural” practices.55 These practices produce a mixture of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride; each gas, when combined with the others, causes global climate change and has adverse effects on public health and welfare.56 While human activities are correctly to blame for climate change, the majority of the carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be traced to a handful of oil and gas companies.57 These companies have spent considerable amounts of money influencing governments to limit the amount of regulation on their activities in order to protect their profits.58 Their actions, and the U.S. government’s compliance with their demands, have demonstrated a total disregard of the scientific proof that the burning of oil and gas is causing climate change, destroying the earth, and harming people. The impacts of climate change include: the warming of the atmosphere and oceans, the melting of snow and ice, rising sea levels, and increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.59 The warming of the planet causes extreme weather and climate events, such as stronger and more frequent storms, higher saline levels in the oceans, species extinction and migration, and rising sea levels from ice melt and thermal expansion, causing land loss.60Policymakers across the world are balancing policy decisions between implementing preventative, mitigating, and adaptive measures against the impacts of climate change. Because many Native communities have already felt climate change impacts, this paper will not address preventative measures. Mitigating measures are defined as “human intervention[s] to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.”61 Examples of mitigation projects include a wide range of technological, socioeconomic, and institutional developments that decrease the amount of emissions produced and decreased the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere.62 Adaptive measures are defined as “[t]he process of adjustment to actual or expected climate [change] and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities.”63 Some examples of adaptation projects include: disaster risk management, infrastructure adjustments, public health measures, water management, reforestation, improving energy infrastructure, and crop resiliency.64 Various mitigating and adaptive measures are being discussed and implemented around the world at various levels of government. Native nations must work to internalize similar measures as part of their resistance strategies to combat the impacts of climate change and colonial ecological destruction.Climate change will impact Indigenous communities first, and likely the hardest, because they are “heavily dependent on natural resources, severe weather events like droughts, floods, wildfires, and snowstorms make tribal communities particularly vulnerable and impact American Indians and Alaska Natives more than they impact the general population.”65 Native nations are often extremely poor, have little access to support from the federal government, and their culture and religious traditions are connected to the land and ecosystems.66 While each Native nation has its own traditions and differing connections to the land and natural resources, most nations depend on the natural environment for their subsistence. 67 Further, because many Native nations are struggling for economic self-sufficiency, they are adopting and depending on ecologically destructive practices to provide for their communities.68 Many Native nations have been forced to again relocate, find new hunting and fishing areas, and rebuild infrastructure to meet their needs in a changing environment.69L – BioDThe aff whitewashes history because the focus on species ignores the thousands of relationships Natives have lost with plants and animals.Whyte 18 [Kyle P. Whyte – George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability teaching environmental justice; Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises; SAGE Journals; 5-30-2018; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-2021In my many conversations in the last several years with Preston Hardison, a policy analyst for the Tulalip Tribes and advocate of the protection of Indigenous knowledge, we often discuss how for many Indigenous peoples, the loss of local access to a culturally or economically significant plant or animal due to colonial domination is comparable to that species becoming extinct (Hardison, 2017). Different forms of colonialism, of course, whether through environmental destruction, land dispossession or forced relocation, have ended Indigenous peoples’ local relationships to thousands of plants, animals, insects, and entire ecosystems. While these relationships often continue to be enacted through Indigenous peoples’ living memories, heritage, ‘‘felt knowledges’’ (Million, 2013), social identities (e.g., clans), and philosophies, they have stopped as relationships involving direct ecological interaction. As Audra Mitchell’s research shows, today’s global discourses of extinction are often so focused on ‘‘species’’ that they cannot come to grips with Indigenous peoples’ experiences of having their relationships with nonhumans greatly disrupted by colonialism (Mitchell, 2016).Their focus on protecting biodiversity will be coopted by the settler state to force Indians off their land- Biodiversity conservation is historically linked with a view that humans can’t contribute to the ecosystems they inhabitMollett & Kepe 2018 Sharlene Mollett is an Associate Professor cross-appointed with the Department of Human Geography, Centre for Critical Development Studies and the Graduate Program in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.? Thembela Kepe?is a professor in the Geography department at University of Toronto at Scarborough “Land rights, biodiversity conservation and justice—rethinking parks and people” Accessed 7/14/21In this volume we employ a political ecology approach to examine the logics, impacts, and practices of conservation and environmental protection. Our collective concern is with the way biodiversity conservation, supposedly designed to improve global conditions, is too often employed as a mechanism for elite control of resources and natures (Peet et al. 2010). Our insights draw from a genealogy of biodiversity conservation that is linked to international development’s concern with biological diversity and the rise of the concept vis-à-vis the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, and its accompanying Convention on Biological Diversity. The aim, overwhelmingly emerging from scientific and policy circles, focused on transforming peoples’ attitudes so as to halt how some humans treat nature as a treasure of conquest as opposed to a collective responsibility for care (Escobar 2008). As Escobar maintains, under this realization, the conservation of biodiversity became a tireless task, a mission to be carried out in and on behalf of the magic, sacrosanct kingdom of wilderness.… By putting a scientific spin on the crisis, conservation biologists purported to become the authoritative spokesperson for an entire movement to save nature, having as its fundamental goal the “preservation of intact ecosystems and biotic processes.” (Takacs 1996, 79, cited in Escobar 2008, 139) Taylor & Francis: Not for Distribution Introduction: rethinking parks and people 3 Indeed, as Redford (2011) agrees, conservation organizations largely ignore the politics and power embedded in conservation and the places where environmental protection takes place. Such organizations are seemingly more concerned with “science driven approaches” “based on biocentric values and assumptions, privileging natural science views of both problems and solutions” (Redford 2011, 325; Chapin 2004). While there has been more attention to politics from conservation organizations more recently, conservation policy still operates as though humans are fundamentally menaces to the other kinds of nature. While Redford and others suggest this has opened up space to think of “humans as legitimate elements in nature and explicitly part of the solutions to the conservation problems,” many of the chapters argue that only certain humans get to play a role in conservation. Said differently, even in the designs of biodiversity conservation that claim to offer a more humanized form of protection— i.e., biosphere reserves, carbon markets, payments for ecosystem services—the overwhelming fact remains that local people are meant to sacrifice land control, food security, cultural traditions, and relations to nature on behalf of a global, affluent community that continues to rely on the “merchandising of biodiversity” “green developmentalism,” and market conservation “that leaves intact the underlying framework of economics and the market that is inimical to nature in the first place” (Escobar 2008, 143; Martinez Alier 1996; McAfee 1999). In this volume we are not concerned with finding fault with biodiversity conservationists, but rather we seek to disclose the chains of explanations for the reentrenchment of precarious social inequalities that are reproduced by biodiversity conservation mechanisms complicit in local peoples’ dispossession, dehumanization, and ongoing subjugation by states and elites. Nor do we assert that environmental protection is homogenous and always harmful. Rather, we insist that the consequences of protected area management relates to particular historical, cultural and political contingencies (Igoe 2011; West et al. 2006). While some of us in this volume are more concerned with the disclosure of these revelations and the multiple logics of power that inform them, others work toward some kind of “solution.” We as editors, however, adhere to the postcolonial political ecological mantra that any “solution” that does not name power in its multiple, intersecting and more than economic iterations and leaves colonial processes intact engenders “a facile dishonesty by suggesting that an easy way out of our immense difficulties lies right around the corner” (Wainwright 2008, 284). We suggest that change starts with thinking differently and thus, in this vein, we rethink the relations between parks and people.L – CartographyWestern cartographic language’s overwriting of enviornmental indigenous epistemology is the fundemental bedrock of settler coercision of Indigenous peoples through the imposition of western social constructions – reconstitutes “land” through rigid western notions of boundary and property for extraction INSTEAD OF wholistic, live-based understanding of naturePearce and Louis 08 [Margaret Wickens Pearce and Renee Pualani Louis. Margaret Wickens Pearce is Citizen Potawatomi and an assistant professor of geography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Renee Pualani Louis is Hawaiian and recently completed her doctorate in geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma?noa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 32:3 (2008) 107-126. Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. //dylan] DGPMapping and Indigenous PeoplesAll cultures engage in some form of mapmaking.8 Mapping, like language, is a cultural process that reflects the ontological and epistemological structures of that culture. As a result, different map traditions develop separately in different cultures and are the unique manifestations of needs for spatial tools in that particular time and place.9 When one society expresses spatial concepts by using the rhetorical structures of another society’s cartographic tradition, it is a process of cartographic translation in which information is inevitably lost. The history of the mistranslation and misrepresentation of Indigenous cartographies into Western cartographies virtually defines the history of Western colonization and coercion of Indigenous peoples.10 The roots of this mistranslation are evident when non-Indigenous and Indigenous cartographies are compared.Indigenous MappingIndigenous cartographies are as diverse as Indigenous cultures, from Hawaiian performative cartographies to Navajo verbal maps and sand paintings and the Nuwuvi Salt Song Trail.11 Indigenous mapping may be gestural, chanted, or inscribed in stone, wood, wall, tattoo, leaf, or paper. Indigenous maps may be used to assess taxes, guide a pilgrim, connect the realms of the sacred and profane, or navigate beyond the horizon. Clearly, Indigenous cartographies are process oriented as opposed to product dependent. Rundstrom uses the term process cartography to differentiate Indigenous cartographies from Western cartographies.12 Process cartography is an incorporative, as opposed to an inscriptive, practice that places emphasis on the process rather than on the artifacts that result from the process. Process cartography connects oral, written, performative, and experiential modes of mapping as a means to transmit situated Indigenous cultural knowledge from one generation to the next.Indigenous processual cartography often incorporates the landscape as an extension or part of the map. The map extends from the community into the landscape through inscriptions on trees and rocks, drawings on the ground, or dance and ceremony. Indigenous processual cartography also often emphasizes the significance of storied place names and the recitation or visiting of those named places for recollection of situated stories. Finally, Indigenous processual cartographies also differ from Western cartography in that they emphasize experienced space, or place, as opposed to the Western convention of depicting space as universal, homogenized, and devoid of human experience.13 Despite these differences, many communities have looked to new GT as holding the potential to overcome these profound inadequacies. As a result, GIS and GT as the primary mode of Indigenous mapping have gained particular strength, fostered by the rise of Indigenous GIS conferences and special Indigenous sessions at GIS conferences worldwide, the Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI’s) integration of tribal GIS to the ESRI Conservation Program, and resources freely available through the Aboriginal Mapping Network. Advocates of GT have written that participatory GIS and 3D modeling make powerful applications for Indigenous self-determination because of their perceived flexibility and “democratizing” process that fosters public participation.14 The increasing application and advocacy of Western GT for mapping Indigenous lands has not been without its criticism. In 1995, Rundstrom wrote that “GIS technology, when applied cross-culturally, is essentially a tool for epistemological assimilation, and as such, is the newest link in a long chain of attempts by Western societies to subsume or destroy indigenous cultures.”15 Drawing on the work of Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Rundstrom pointed to the role of GIS as not merely a technology but a technoscience, a kind of knowledge in which the “technology has become the embodiment of science and its precepts.”16 Embedded in this technoscience, GIS epistemologies are “potentially toxic to human diversity” because they deemphasize, ignore, or devalue concepts that are of central importance to Indigenous epistemologies, including the ubiquity of relatedness, the value of nonempirical experience, the need to control access to levels of geographical knowledge, and the value of ambiguity over binary thought.17When Indigenous cultural knowledge is represented by Western GT, there is often a loss of meaning, even if those technologies generally support the mapping needs of a community. As Fox writes, spatial information technology is useful for enabling local groups to regain control of their resources, map the boundaries of their customary lands, and communicate information on their traditional resource management practices to outsiders and decision makers; it is useful for mapping the material aspects of culture and relating these to spatial structure; and it can assist in the resolution of spatial conflicts. . . . The chief failing of this technology has been its inability to further our understanding of the cultural logic that lies behind the relations of space.18The cultural logic that has been left behind by the encoding of Indigenous knowledge in GIS, writes Fox, includes concepts of scale, time, and “boundaries and areas and the preservation of continuity between them.”19 More recently, Kyem returned attention to the epistemological limitations of GIS mapping projects in non-Western communities, such as his Ghanaian case study, and concluded that although “the technology remains a poor medium for resolving ideological conflicts that are usually sustained by values,” GIS is “more effectively applied to manage within-system conflicts than disagreements that occur between individuals and groups located in different sociopolitical systems.”20Renaming the land changes the land: western spatilized language refies ongoign settler colonial transformation and packaging of indigenous culture through the spatial image of the West – specifically it constructs the land as something to be tamed, altered, and exploited resulting in destruction of indigenous cultural valuesSmith 13 [Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Professor of Education and Maori Development at the University of Waikato, founding member of Nga Tamatoa. BA, MA (honors), PhD at the Univeristy of Auckland. “Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples.” Zed Books Ltd., Oct 10, 2013 . //dylan] DGPSimilar claims can be made about other concepts, such as time and space. These concepts are particularly significant for some indigenous languages because the language makes no clear or absolute distinction between the two: for example, the Maori word for time or space is the same. Other indigenous languages have no related word for either space or time, having instead a series of very precise terms for parts of these ideas, or for relationships between the idea and something else in the environment. There are positions within time and space in which people and events are located, but these cannot necessarily be described as distinct categories of thought. Western ideas about time and space are encoded in language, philosophy and science. Philosophical conceptions of time and space have been concerned with: (1) the relationships between the two ideas, that is, whether space and time are absolute categories or whether they exist relationally; and (2) the measurement of time and space.16 Space came to be seen as consisting of lines which were either parallel or elliptical. From these ideas, ways of thinking which related to disciplines of study emerged (for example, mapping and geograpliy, measurement an geometry, m(otion and physics) . These distinctions are generally part of a taken-for-granted view of the world. Spatialized language is frequently used in both everyday and academic discourses.Henri Lefebvre argues that the notion of space has been 'appropriated by mathematics' which has claimed an ideological position of dominance over what space means. Mathematics has constructed a language which attempts to define with absolute exactness the parameters, dimensions, qualities and possibilities of space. This language of space influences the way the West thinks about the world beyond earth (cosmology), the ways in which society is viewed (public/private space, city/ country space), the ways in which gender roles were defined (public/ domestic, home/work) and the ways in which the social world of people could be determined (the market place, the theatre).18 Compartrnentalized, space can be better defined and measured.Conceptions of space were articulated through the ways in which people arranged their homes and towns, collected and displayed objects of significance, organized warfare, set out agricultural fields and arranged gardens, conducted business, displayed art and performed drama, separated out one form of human activity from another. Spatial arrangements are an important part of social life. Western classifications of space include such notions as architectural space, physical space, psychological space, theoretical space and so forth. Foucault's metaphor of the cultural archive is an architectural image. The archive not only contains artefacts of culture, but is itself an artefact and a construct of culture. For the indigenous world, Western conceptions of space, of arrangements and display, of the relationship between people and the landscape, of culture as an object of study, have meant that not only has the indigenous world been represented in particular ways back to the West, but the indigenous world view, the land and the people, have been radically transformed in the spatial image of the West. In other words, indigenous space has been colonized. Land, for example, was viewed as something to be tamed and brought under control. The landscape, the arrangement of nature, could be altered by 'Man': swamps could be drained, waterways diverted, inshore areas filled, not simply for physical survival, but for further exploitation of the environment or making it 'more pleasing' aesthetically. Renaming the land was probably as powerful ideologically as changing the land. Indigenous children in schools, for example, were taught the new names for places that they and their parents had lived in for generations. These were the names which appeared on maps and which were used in official communications. This newly named land became increasingly disconnected from the songs and chants used by indienous peoples to trace their histories to bring forth spiritual elements or to carry out the simplest of cermeonies. More significantly, however, space was appropriated from indigenous cultures and then 'gifted back' as reservations, reserved pockets of land for indigenous people who once possessed all of it.Other artefacts and images of indigenous cultures were also classified, stored and displayed in museum cases and boxes, framed by the display cases as well as by the categories of artefacts with which they were grouped. Some images became part of the postcard trade and the advertising market or were the subject of Western artistic interpretations of indigenous peoples. Still other 'live' and performing examples were put 'on stage' as concert parties to entertain Europeans. Indigenous cultures became framed within a language and a set of spatialized representations.19L – Colorado River CompactThe Colorado River Compact been a constant power imbalance between the USFG and Indigenous peoples. Bray ‘21 - Laura Ann, A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1921 Supreme Court case extended the doctrine of prior appropriate across state boundaries, raising alarm in states within the Colorado River Basin that rapid growth in California and other downriver states would leave slower-growing states without a future water supply. The seven states in the Colorado River Basin began negotions on how to share the river, which led to the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The Colorado River Compact forms the foundation of what would become known as the “Law of the River”—a complex set of federal laws, interstate compacts, international treaties, court decisions, and regulatory guidelines that govern the river (US BOR 2008). Briefly, the Colorado River Compact divides the river into an Upper and Lower Basin at Lees Ferry, Arizona, and requires that the Upper Basin deliver 7.5 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin annually, roughly half of what was believed to be the river’s average flow. States in two basins subsequently negotiated among themselves on how to divide their half of the water. Following the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact of 1948 dividing the waters between Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, Upper Basin states introduced the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) in Congress—including both the NIIP and SJCP. The United States’ push to gain territorial control during the twentieth century contributed to the construction of a White colonial state and national identity (Berry and Jackson 2018). Unsurprisingly then, western water development has generally worked to dispossess Native nations and Indigenous people (Deloria 1985; Lawson 1994; McCool 1994). The major interstate water compacts of the 20th century largely ignored and excluded Native nations entirely. Reservoirs flooded Indigenous land and displaced tribes from their territory. And tribes have struggled to 5 build and fund water infrastructure for agriculture, domestic, or industrial use. Yet across the 20th century, the US Supreme Court also granted and repeatedly confirmed priority rights of Native nations to western waters.L – ConsultationConsultation Link – the plan depoliticizes decisions about water through administrative politics that presume consultation on a project-by-project basis is sufficient – obfuscates cumulative impacts and has no fora to address resource centered governance. Curran 19’ – is an associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and the Executive Director, Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria. She earned her LLB at the University of Victoria and her LLM at University of California Berkley. [Deborah; Published 2019; “Indigenous Processes of Consent: Repoliticizing Water Governance through Legal Pluralism”, ]The framework of settler colonialism—the way that colonization occurs across a geographic landscape through the control of land and people [11]—channels Indigenous rights challenges to decision-making about the environment into state-based administrative and legal processes. These processes define how Indigenous peoples can interact with water governance by a state or government within their traditional watersheds and establish the boundaries or scope of the conversation. State processes, such as environmental impact assessment, may mandate consultation with members of Indigenous communities about the potential impacts of a proposed project on their ways of life, but is typically limited to evaluating the project apparatus and not cumulative or broader watershed impacts. More fundamentally, state-prescribed environmental and natural resource decision-making processes do not provide a forum within which Indigenous communities can address the method of governance itself, and how their own laws, governance practices and rights are expressed.Participation in state consultation processes creates legitimacy in, and reliance on, those activities that serves to depoliticize the decisions at issue [12,13]. Problems with the scope and scale of governance are channeled through narrowly-defined administrative practices, which validates the process of decision-making while controlling the means by which opposition to a project is expressed [14]. In effect, consultation can channel and dissipate dissent, thus depoliticizing these processes and rendering them administrative exercises rather than addressing the underlying issues about who is making decisions and has authority to govern a watershed. To repoliticize, therefore, is to break out of state-sanctioned consultation processes to challenge the very basis of decision-making. It is to affirm the complex, multiscalar and political nature of environmental governance. In Mouffe’s view, debate in the public sphere and a consideration of alternatives are required elements of repoliticization [15] (p. 147). Therefore, the term repoliticizing in this context refers to Indigenous communities rejecting state processes and creating their own interventions in a public way to shift the authority for and jurisdiction over water governance.Water governance scholars are increasingly exploring the necessity of including traditional knowledge and values in water governance, and identify the importance of enriching ontological understandings about water and socio-ecological relationships in decision-making about water [16] (pp. 216–217) [17,18,19]. However, the focus on using traditional knowledge and values as inputs to governance processes can uncritically accede to state frameworks of decision-making [20,21]. Von der Porten et al. caution against using Indigenous knowledge systems as an input into Eurocentric decision-making processes [22]. Water governance conflicts cannot be resolved by greater consideration of traditional knowledge or Indigenous worldviews without addressing the locus of decision-making and attending to its depoliticizing tendencies.Indigenous opposition to environmental decision-making is a challenge to the settler colonial basis of water governance and the state’s assertion of authority to make unilateral decisions about traditional territories [23,24]. While the state may take note of customary or Indigenous water rights, colonial water laws—enacted by the various levels of governments of nation states—are presumed to have authority [25,26,27]. In this context, Indigenous peoples are restating their inherent legal and governance authority [28,29,30]. This authority predates settler law and, in many places, continues to operate but at a scale and with a level of transparency that is not obvious to public and state processes [28,31].Indigenous laws are place-based [23] (p. 202) and take as their starting point a healthy environment [16] (p. 15). Borrows links the reconciliation between state and Indigenous peoples with reconciling with the earth [32]. Indigenous laws and perspectives embody a concern for the integrity of the entire connected environment [33,34], not just a small portion of a watershed where a project is located.L – Climate/ExtinctionApocalyptic scenarios justify more colonialism by covering up colonialism’s disproportionate effect on the environment, masking ongoing violence, and reinscribes the settler logic of colonizing more places because of a deteriorating environment.Koch 21 [Natalie Koch – Department of Geography and the Environment; Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert; Geoforum; 5-21-2021; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-20212. Whose apocalypse? The desert, dystopia, and colonial masteryApocalyptic narratives have become a staple of Western discussions about climate change and environmental futures that seem to pose an existential threat to human existence (Anson, 2020, Barker, 2020, Braun, 2015, Buell, 2010, Casseg?rd and Th?rn, 2018, Fiskio, 2012; Garforth, 2018; Lilley et al., 2012, Mathews and Barnes, 2016, Skrimshire, 2010). As noted above, Indigenous and decolonial scholars have forcefully shown how these narratives bolster colonial logics that silence alternative views of harm, risk, danger, and the future (see also Davis and Todd, 2017, Erickson, 2020, Gergan et al., 2020; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). The challenge, Delf Rothe (2020: 146) notes, is that “the idea of a (single) future catastrophe and its underlying assumption that ‘we are all in this together’ conceals social antagonisms in the present,” while disregarding the fact that huge portions of the world “have already lived through the ecological catastrophe brought about by European colonialism and its repercussions.” These social and political divides must therefore be at the core of any analysis of “the” apocalypse.The dramatic idea of apocalypse was central to producing Biosphere 2′s spectacle, but so too was the Arizona desert where the facility was built. Deserts hold a special place in Western imaginations as dystopias and places of extremes (Davis, 2016, Isenberg et al., 2019). They are frequently treated as a metaphor for global warming and the future challenges of securing food, energy, and water in a changing environment. Desert images thus index environmental collapse – perhaps the most cliched icon of climate change today is a photograph of a patch of parched soil. Their visibly limited natural resources makes deserts easy icons for fearful visions of scarcity, but the same traits have also make deserts popular places for scientists, state-builders and other colonial figures to showcase the marvels of modern science and human ingenuity in overcoming extreme climates.These reductive narratives are not new: deserts have long circulated as a trope, rather than places to be experienced and understood in their full human and ecological complexity – reduced to barren wastelands, sparse in vegetation, and ostensibly depopulated. It is not surprising, then, that the desert-as-trope also figures prominently in imaginaries of environmental apocalypse. But how does such a broadly consistent coding come about? “In tracing how individual visions sometimes rise to the status of collectively held objectives,” Sheila Jasanoff (2015: 25) suggests, we need to attend “not only the material instruments that reformers are able to accumulate but also their uses of symbolic and cultural resources, such as images, texts, memories, metaphors, and language itself.” This multi-textual approach is needed because all environmental imaginaries are inherently political: descriptions of desert landscapes are never as simple as they seem.Through images and rhetorical constructions, deserts fit into diverse political storylines about how particular people relate to one another and to the natural environment. This is especially apparent in how deserts are treated not only as dystopian, but also as otherworldly. Otherworldliness is especially apparent in visual references to desert landscapes in discussions about the end of human life on Earth and the need to travel and settle on other planets – and most specifically, Mars. On the one hand, environmental collapse or other forms of catastrophe that are said to make Earth uninhabitable are visually cued through desert landscapes. On the other, Mars is currently the place most commonly referenced as where humans should be preparing to settle when the apocalypse arrives. Yet Mars is consistently framed as a desert, with its famous red-rock landscape serving as visual evidence (Lane 2011).Beyond this drawing of parallels, the deserts of the U.S. Southwest have been treated as a testing ground for astronauts for decades. As early as 1960, NASA started sending teams of astronauts for desert survival training in Nevada and Arizona (Fulmer, 2018, Ranson, 2019). More recently, a former NASA contractor and Mars Society president, Robert Zubrin, founded the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. Funded by donations from the likes of SpaceX founder and Mars enthusiast Elon Musk, the site has been developed on the basis of its desert landscape. As Zubrin explained to the Los Angeles Times: “We wanted a large theater of operations uninhabited, unvegetated and geologically interesting that we could explore” (quoted in Kelly, 2019). The newspaper’s feature on the facility includes images of people romping around the Utah desert in space suits, with red rock formations in the backdrop, as if playing Mars – just like the astronauts 70 years before, themselves preparing to romp across the moon.Regardless of whether this romping is best classified as genuine training or simply playing dress-up, the mediated spectacle of it all ultimately fuels a broader imaginary of Mars as a place to be colonized, which Jason Dittmer (2007) has noted in his analysis of media coverage of NASA’s Mars missions. The parallels noted between Mars and places on earth are not passive descriptions: they are imperial claims that naturalize the planet as a sphere of human activity and “part of a modern impulse to make nature conform to our desires” (Dittmer, 2007: 125; see also, Dunnett et al., 2019, Lane, 2011, Kirsch, 2020). Beyond naturalizing a colonial perspective of Mars itself, projects like the Mars Desert Research Station also naturalize colonialism in Utah and the United States. This is especially apparent in how they are constructed as laboratories for modernist techno-science – outside time, depopulated, and “blank slates” outside politics (Koch, forthcoming-b). That is, if Utah is to represent Mars, Mars is also imagined to be Utah: the romping white scientists are explorers of a foreign terrain ripe for colonial mastery.But this is not Mars: here on Earth, and in the American West in particular, colonial mastery is not theater. It is history and present-day reality. A detailed account of U.S. imperial expansion is outside the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that the desert Southwest is not and never was a blank slate, but the homeland of numerous Indigenous groups. In imaginaries of the desert as an empty wasteland, the human and spiritual presences are not just ignored, but actively erased – this being the imperial project of American expansion. So if environmental imaginaries are inherently political, is imperative to ask who is participating in constructing narrative constructions of the desert and what interests they are advancing (knowingly or unknowingly), but also whose voices and visions are ignored, silenced, or sidelined. It is precisely here that the imaginative violence of apocalyptic narratives meet the real violence of settler colonialism. If these communities have already experienced and continue to experience apocalypse, then the important question is whose apocalypse “we” are talking about.Projects like the Mars Desert Research Station and, as we shall see, Biosphere 2, mobilize the desert aesthetic and its ostensible similarity to Mars to bolster the claims they make to preparing for human exploration and habitation of Mars. In justifying such projects, advocates constantly emphasize the need to “get ready now,” because of the impending environmental collapse of Earth. For example, in the much-touted tract justifying Biosphere 2, Space Biospheres, two of the men behind the project suggest that humanity faces a “historic imperative” of colonizing territories beyond Earth: “biospherics opens up, together with astronautics, the ecotechnical possibilities, even the historic imperative, to expand Earth-life into the solar system and beyond that to the stars and then in time’s good opportunity to the galaxies” (Allen and Nelson, 1987: 1). They were far off the mark when suggesting that this would be possible by 1995, but regardless, the survivalist narrative is limited to a techno-fetishistic vision of colonizing an elsewhere, while neglecting the colonialism of here: the settler colonial occupation of Indigenous lands in the U.S. Southwest and the colonial origins of this environmental devastation (Curley, 2021, Curley and Lister, 2020, Voyles, 2015, Whyte, 2018). Rather than recognizing these ongoing challenges, Biosphere 2’s “ecotechnical” storyline that humans will simply have to “abandon ship” forecloses conversations about how contemporary colonial systems actually perpetuate environmental ruin here on Earth.Who, then, do promoters of projects like Biosphere 2 or the Mars Desert Research Station think will save us on this great adventure into our neighboring celestial bodies? Predictably, their techno-fetishistic visions assume a particular kind of colonial hero: the white male scientist. Now largely imagined in a white lab coat, the scientist-as-hero has long been an icon of modernist science. Whatever his specific accoutrements may be, he is white, male, Anglo-European, and committed to the principles of positivism and empiricism. In today’s genre of eco-catastrophism, this iconic scientist is not only the privileged voice warning of environmental collapse, but also the one who is imagined to have the solutions. Eco-catastrophism thus “draws on this universal subject position of ‘anthropos’ and rearticulates it through the figure of the planetary manager: a ‘rational’, scientific subject that manages the different parts of the Earth system on the basis of a comprehensive knowledge of the Earth system” (Rothe, 2020: 151). Like the Anthropocene and other related environmental crisis narratives, the universal image of the Anthropos “is itself a colonial figure” that bolsters “structures that privilege whiteness as the savior of our environmental future” (Erickson, 2020: 112; see also Casseg?rd and Th?rn, 2018, Gergan et al., 2020, Yuen, 2012). Like all securitizing discourses, this masculinist vision of techno-expertise facing down environmental collapse comes with a pre-packaged set of solutions – what are today loosely labeled “eco-modernism.”Natives are living through dystopia now. Framing climate as an apocalyptic event legitimizes violence nowWhyte 18 [Kyle P. Whyte – George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability teaching environmental justice; Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises; SAGE Journals; 5-30-2018; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-2021Some people see the Anthropocene as a coming period of irreversible destabilization of the global climate system—an impending climate crisis. Academics, journalists, and artists have conjured apocalyptic and dystopian portrayals of perilous futures of mass species extinctions, ecosystem degradation and social upheaval (Cafaro and Primack, 2014; Methmann and Rothe, 2012; Mitchell, 2016; Skrimshire, 2010). In fiction portrayals, ranging from The Bone Clocks to Carbon Diaries 2017, climate futures are dystopian times of rationing, government assistance, major extinctions, social unrest, drastic measures, and defaced landscapes (Ignatius, 2014; Lloyd, 2011; Mitchell, 2014). Joni Adamson cites a trend for speculative fiction to be written and used by academics to address dreaded futures tied to ‘‘climate change’’ and ‘‘global ecological transformations’’ (Adamson, 2016: 216). In the United Nations’ deliberations on climate change, logics of apocalypse are present through discourses of climate change as ‘‘catastrophic’’ and akin to ‘‘two world wars’’ (Methmann and Rothe, 2012). Audra Mitchell observes growing references to the thought that climate change could be a factor leading to the extinction of all humans (Mitchell, 2016: 27). Scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Simpson, who recently authored the book As We Have Always Done, observes how ‘‘.. focusing on imminent ecological collapse is motivating Canadians to change if you look at the spectrum of climate change denial across society. It is spawning a lot of apocalypse movies...’’ (Klein, 2013; Simpson, 2017).1 Janet Fiskio’s (2012) study confirms Simpson’s observations, showing that in literature, activism and the media ‘‘the narratives employed to describe climate change are familiar: apocalyptic visions inflected by utopian, dystopian, and millenarian imaginaries drawn from speculative fiction, disaster films, and biblical texts’’ (Fiskio, 2012: 13). In an article titled, ‘‘Climate Change is So Dire We Need a New Kind of Science Fiction to Make Sense of It,’’ Claire Evans writes that ‘‘we need an Anthropocene fiction. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction... a form of science fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange reality...’’ (Evans, 2015).As a Potawatomi scholar and activist, I feel that Indigenous peoples do not always share quite the same science fiction imaginaries of dystopian or apocalyptic futures when they confront the possibility of a climate crisis (Whyte, 2017b). Candis Callison, relating to Arctic Indigenous peoples, writes that we need to recognize what ‘‘climate change portends for those who have endured a century of immense cultural, political and environmental changes’’ (Callison, 2014: 42). Callison’s work recognizes that the hardships many non-Indigenous people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration.In my many conversations in the last several years with Preston Hardison, a policy analyst for the Tulalip Tribes and advocate of the protection of Indigenous knowledge, we often discuss how for many Indigenous peoples, the loss of local access to a culturally or economically significant plant or animal due to colonial domination is comparable to that species becoming extinct (Hardison, 2017). Different forms of colonialism, of course, whether through environmental destruction, land dispossession or forced relocation, have ended Indigenous peoples’ local relationships to thousands of plants, animals, insects, and entire ecosystems. While these relationships often continue to be enacted through Indigenous peoples’ living memories, heritage, ‘‘felt knowledges’’ (Million, 2013), social identities (e.g., clans), and philosophies, they have stopped as relationships involving direct ecological interaction. As Audra Mitchell’s research shows, today’s global discourses of extinction are often so focused on ‘‘species’’ that they cannot come to grips with Indigenous peoples’ experiences of having their relationships with nonhumans greatly disrupted by colonialism (Mitchell, 2016).Some Indigenous peoples, then, offer the idea that we confront climate change having already passed through environmental and climate crises arising from the impacts of colonialism. Robin Kimmerer often tells the story of one of the Potawatomi relocation processes from the Great Lakes region to Kansas and Oklahoma in the 19th century. The relocation process was literally a drastic change in climate regions and the ending of many ancient relationships with the species and ecosystems of Potawatomi homelands. Reflecting 226 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2) on today’s climate crisis as the experience of de?ja` vu, Kimmerer says ‘‘Once again, we are in a situation of forced climate change adaptation’’ (Kimmerer, 2014). Dan Wildcat claims that Indigenous vulnerability to climate change today is part of previous removals occurring as part of U.S. colonial expansion: ‘‘geographic’’ (displacement, e.g., Trail of Tears and the forced occupation of reservations); ‘‘social’’ and ‘‘psychocultural’’ (such as through removal of children to boarding schools) (Wildcat, 2009: 4). Leanne Simpson discusses how ‘‘Indigenous peoples have always been able to adapt, and we’ve had a resilience. But the speed of this—our stories and our culture and our oral tradition doesn’t keep up, can’t keep up... Colonial thought brought us climate change’’ (Klein, 2013). In the epigraph, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and recent author of the Right to Be Cold, discusses in an interview how ‘‘Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way’’ (Robb, 2015; Watt-Cloutier, 2015).In light of what was said in the previous paragraph, it should not be surprising that Indigenous persons see our current situation as already having been through a crisis that is ongoing. Lee Sprague, known most recently for his organizing the Michigan Cold Water Canoe Rescue at Standing Rock, says that we already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future (Sprague, 2017; Whyte, 2017b). Larry Gross writes that ‘‘Native Americans have seen the end of their respective worlds... Indians survived the apocalypse’’ (Gross, 2014, 33). Sprague’s and Gross’ framing of today’s times comes out in Indigenous science fiction expression. Grace Dillon interprets Indigenous futurisms in literature and the arts as expressing how Indigenous peoples are currently living in a ‘‘postNative Apocalypse’’ (Dillon, 2012: 10). Building on Dillon’s research, Conrad Scott’s recent study discusses how ‘‘Indigenous literature, following the culturally destructive process of colonial European advancement and absorption of what is now called the Americas, tends to narrate a sense of ongoing crisis rather than an upcoming one’’ (Scott, 2016: 77).Indigenous peoples then do not always approach the climate crisis as an impending future to be dreaded. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd see an insidious irony in the different ways Indigenous and nonIndigenous persons approach the Anthropocene and climate crisis. They describe colonialism as a seismic shockwave that ‘‘kept rolling like a slinky [as it worked] to compact and speed up time, laying waste to legal orders, languages, place-story in quick succession. The fleshy, violent loss of 50 million Indigenous peoples in the Americas is something we read as a ‘quickening’ of space-time in a seismic sense’’ (Davis and Todd, 2017: 771–772). They then point out that ‘‘the Anthropocene or at least all of the anxiety produced around these realities for those in Euro-Western contexts—is really the arrival of the reverberations of that seismic shockwave into the nations who introduced colonial, capitalist processes across the globe in the first half-millennium in the first place’’ (Davis and Todd, 2017: 774).2The perspectives referenced in the last few paragraphs point to the idea that Indigenous peoples have already endured harmful and rapid environmental transformations due to colonialism and other forms of domination. As Davis and Todd articulate so clearly, these environmental transformations—‘‘the fleshy violent [losses]’’—seem actually a lot like what many other people in the world fear will happen with climate destabilization when these same people portray apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction futures.3 Given Indigenous experiences of, scholarly work on and testimonies about colonialism, it should not be hard to imagine why many Indigenous persons I know do not accept historical narratives that privilege the idea that climate change and the Anthropocene raise the issue of how to understand and stop a dreaded future movement from stability to crisis. Consider a brief history of Anishinaabe/Neshnabe? peoples, who include diverse Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississauga and other peoples whose homelands are in the Great Lakes region but also, through relocation, in places such as Oklahoma, Kansas, and North Dakota.Anishinaabe/Neshnabe? peoples often relate their histories through concepts of constant migration and motion occurring at different scales. Historically, Anishinaabe peoples root themselves in a complex migration story through which their societies changed homelands repeatedly as they moved from what is now called the Eastern U.S./Canada region to the Great Lakes region. Within Anishinaabe heritage, Anishinaabe societies governed themselves using a seasonal round system. Part of the political philosophy guiding this system is that government institutions and social identities should be organized to change and shift throughout the year to adjust to the dynamics of ecosystems. So at different times during the year, different institutions and identities of political authority are active, which range from clans, lodges, families, networks, bands, villages, among others. In these traditions, gender and sexuality are more fluid than the binary gender system in many cultures in the U.S. Regarding gender, Anishinaabe heritage has more gender options, greater gender fluidity, and a culture of respecting diverse leadership capacities and roles across different genders. Identity fluidity has an important role in these traditions, where historical accounts show that people constantly transformed their identities in relation to other humans and nonhumans to form new strategic kin connections and to take up the projects of ancestors who had walked on (Blaeser, 1999; Doerfler et al., 2013; Lyons, 2010; Noodin, 2014; Sinclair, 2016; Sleeper-Smith, 2001; White, 1991; Witgen, 2011).I interpret speculatively the diverse work of historians Michael Witgen, Susan SleeperSmith, and Michael McDonnel as showing that our Anishinaabe ancestors were likely to have been surprised when the U.S. settlers confronted them with the assumption that they had title to Indigenous lands, made laws and took actions that sought to end Anishinaabe seasonal round systems, did not need to engage in the transformational exercise of forging of kinship relationships and dismissed the leadership of women, for example, using sexist slurs and assumptions (McDonnell, 2015; Sleeper-Smith, 2005; Witgen, 2011). As Indigenous peoples, some of us awaken to a situation that those ancestors who were surprised by U.S. arrogance and domineering would have seen as a dystopian science fiction scenario. Our collective agency is dominated by the U.S. Some Anishinaabe communities forcibly left the Great Lakes region entirely, setting up their own nations in places like what is currently Oklahoma or Kansas or finding asylum with other Anishinaabe peoples on the Canada side. The majority of U.S. citizens and arrivants have not even heard of Anishinaabe, nor do our histories show up fairly or at all in state educational systems in the Great Lakes region. We have lower health and wealth statistics compared to other people who live here and have less capacities for protecting the environment around us, starting businesses and trade relationships and having meaningful political representation through our own governing bodies and those of the U.S. and its states. Like dystopian narratives, we find ourselves in a time our ancestors would have interpreted as a portrayal of our societies with dramatically curtailed collective agency. They would have been surprised and horrified to know in such a short period of time so much would have changed.It ignores dystopias tribes are experiencing now.Curley and Lister 20 [Andrew Curley – assistant professor at the University of Arizona, research focuses on the everyday incorporation of Indigenous nations into colonial economies; Majerle Lister – graduated from ASU with a major in Political Science and a minor in Philosophy; "Already existing dystopias: tribal sovereignty, extraction, and decolonizing the Anthropocene"; Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State; 10-9-2020; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-14-2021However, extractive industries have helped assuage some of the longstanding impacts of genocide, violent displacement, and forced assimilation. For generations, Indigenous peoples were able to survive on their lands through strategic engagement with extractive industries and capitalism. The legacies of these practices scar the landscape. They helped us survive on the land but also destroyed much of it in the process. With colonization, Indigenous peoples saw their lands taken and lives permanently altered. This constituted its own dystopia. Tribes later suffered through forced assimilation, continued land theft, and the creation of tribal institutions with legal and political rights strongly associated with the expansion of capitalism and extractive industries within and around Indigenous communities. Oil and gas fracking around Indigenous lands have witnessed the abduction and murder of Indigenous women who are ensnared into man camps. Coal created hundreds of jobs, a sense of economic dependency, and eventual collapse. These multiple, overlapping, and current dystopias are lost on most commentaries on climate change. To decolonize the Anthropocene requires attention to the more complicated landscape of colonialism as they pertain to Indigenous peoples and nations.L – CWAWater quality control thru CWA enforces Indigenous people to never engage with the state and strengthens colonial control – state systems dampen self-determination and limits self legitimacy Neville, K. J., & Coulthard, G. (2019). // Assistant Professor, Political Science & School of the Environment, University of Toronto// Transformative water relations: Indigenous interventions in global political economies.//KBthe politics of recognition, much of which cautions against Indigenous participation in colonial state systems. Although participation can offer Indigenous peoples some additional power within the state, it can undermine broader and longer-term transformation of governing relationships by acknowledging the authority of the colonial state, thus limiting possibilities for reclaiming autonomy and self-determination (Coulthard 2014; Daigle 2016). By engaging with specific cases—for example, water quality standards across the United States, water rights and legal precedent in Arizona, water contamination from upstream agriculture in coastal Washington—the authors of this Special Issue provide in-depth empirical evidence for the tensions they identify in these “colonial entanglements,” a concept from Dennison (2012) used by both Curley and Diver et al. to examine the dynamics of Indigenous peoples’ participation within the structures of settler states.[P] The interventions in this issue explore the possibilities for—but also limits of— the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, authority, and values into settler state governance practices. Diver et al. examine the adoption of state-like powers by tribal governments in the United States, where provisions under the Clean Water Act allow their “treatment as a state” in terms of conferring on them the authority to set local water quality standards. Conducting an analysis across the tribes in the United States that have engaged with TAS provisions, with a focus on environmental contaminants, they document the inclusion of cultural and ceremonial concerns in tribes’ water quality standards. Still, these entanglements lead to a form of water management that, although it expands the limits otherwise imposed by the state, still adheres to colonial perspectives on water resources, especially given structural constraints to tribal authority posed by US property rights regimes.[P] Curley further complicates the story of colonial entanglements addressed by Diver et al. with his examination of Hopi and Navajo leaders’ assertion of their water rights through appeals to phrasing from a twentieth-century US Supreme Court case. Curley takes us to the Little Colorado River, where he tracks opposition to water settlements by Hopi and Navajo (Diné) citizens, demonstrating how these communities used existing US water laws and court decisions to contest state-mediated water allocations. Rather than acquiescing to state control, Curley argues that Hopi and Navajo claims revealed the contradictions embedded in the actions of the state, undermining the legitimacy of colonial water law and increasing the governance space for upholding alternative water relations. These conflicts reveal the possibilities for disrupting colonial assumptions and power systems through engagement with the state, revealing that appeals to state structures need not always fall into the problematic politics of recognition. L – DesalApolitical framing of desalination technology masks key hydro-social issues in inequal access through privatization, distribution flow, and changing landscapesWilson et al 19 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance” Water 2019, 11, 1470; doi:10.3390/w11071470 //dylan] DGPThree articles in the Special Issue examine the political landscape of emergent technologies, including those associated with bottled and packaged water, and desalination technology. Of interest is how these emergent technologies of water treatment and distribution articulate with long-standing concerns of decision-making, regulation, uneven access, or shifting ecological and justice concerns.First, Pacheco-Vega [60] understands the proliferation of bottled water as a political phenomenon enrolled within the relationships between industrial marketing and weak regulatory regimes. While societal norms serve a partial and context-specific explanation behind the sustained growth of global bottled water, Pacheco-Vega argues a “systematic attack” on water infrastructure, utilities, and experiences has unfolded, not merely “on the part of multinational corporations with a stake in commodifying local resources, but also local governments who abdicate their responsibility towards citizens” [60]. In doing so, Pacheco-Vega [60] problematizes containerized and commodified liquids as a mechanism to enact the human right to water and as one that prioritizes (if not serves) the bottled water industry over public water distribution networks. Here, an explicit analysis of the politics of water access and associated production processes (e.g., bottled water) reveals the ways that regulatory gaps enable exploitation by the bottled water industry [60]. In a second article, Kooy and Walter [61] re-theorize the politics of packaged drinking water (PDW) in Jakarta (Indonesia) using a “situated Urban Political Ecology” (UPE) analysis of the wider urban water distributions in which it is inserted. These authors interrogate the unevenness of individual “choices” for securing safe drinking water and highlight the ambiguity of PDW’s impact on water access and associated insecurities. Here, packaged water must be situated and understood in relation to broader circuits, water flows, and uneven water insecurities [61]. To do so invites us to ask and answer critical questions: What leads certain households (and communities) to rely on packaged water, and how do such situations emerge in relation to other widespread considerations consistent with a UPE approach, including governance failure, service gaps, and similar concerns [61]? Indeed, these are exactly the kinds of questions that are not commonly emphasized in work on packaged water where the focus remains on the individual, and on ideas of choice and preference [60,61]. Here, Kooy and Walter [61] further interrogate the politics of what it means to focus on individual and household water security and quality, rather than broader systemic or structural concerns. Overall, these contributions understand bottled and packaged water as emerging from particular discursive framings, regulatory gaps, and in relation to uneven and unequal access conditions in particular sites [60,61]. Herein, the politics of water governance shape the possibility for these water flows and circuits, and in turn the movement and sale of packaged water further condition the broader politics, governance, and management of water. In both senses, packaged water is an important site for the political, particularly with respect to the intersection with social/political and regulatory conditions in different times and places.Shifting focus, Campero and Harris [62] center their analysis on water desalination technology in Chile. The authors highlight the implications of the mining industry’s use of desalination within an undefined socio-legal landscape. In this case, again, the apolitical nature of the technology has the effect of masking both the uneven and shifting outcomes and the distribution of benefits from particular water uses and conditions [62]. Not surprisingly, the mining sector is able to benefit from the legal loopholes and apolitical valence of desalinization to fundamentally shift hydro-social landscapes and mining geographies in contemporary Chile [62]. Alongside the papers on bottled water [60,61], new technologies and facets of water availability are being reconfigured in relation to shifting economic requirements (e.g., mining production). There are clear regulatory gaps which are being effectively exploited by the mining industry to further mining interests.L – Econ/National InterestDiscourses centered on “national interest” or “economic benefit” as well as formalized water institutions directly depoliticize waterWilson et al 19 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance” Water 2019, 11, 1470; doi:10.3390/w11071470 //dylan] DGPSeveral articles of the Special Issue encompass the politics of infrastructure and water insecurity. As one example, Mawani’s [54] research in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) demonstrates how religious difference and access to municipal water supply infrastructure operates through, and is mediated by, multiple state and non-state actors. In particular, she suggests practices of (un)mapping municipal water access can contribute as an analytical and methodological framework in water governance [54]. Water governance in certain Muslim majority spaces, ostensibly left “unmapped” and outside the remit of formal planning processes, are concordant gaps in critical infrastructure [54]. Here, the politics and practices of zoning, engineering, and other technical requirements are important factors that produce and animate “underserved” Muslim areas of the city [54]. Offering another example of entanglements between institutions and infrastructure is Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al. [55], who explore the extent to which a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) scheme contributes to an integrated and sustainable Water–Energy–Food nexus (WEF) in Colombia. Where PES is often idealized as an integrative institutional mechanism capable of accounting for environmental externalities, their research suggests the program helps justify large-dam development and has enabled the developer to directly and indirectly accumulate and secure the reservoir’s water while constraining the possible set of livelihoods in upstream and downstream spaces [55]. Such institutional arrangements thus do not inherently (or even, actively) contribute to a sustainable and equitable WEF nexus [55]. Their analysis attends to the diverse politics, negotiations and experiences across scales in an effort to illuminate which interests are served by such projects, and as a means of countering the universalized language, logics, and objectives of PES and the WEF nexus [55]. A third example comes from Atkins [56], who suggests the “national interest” of the Belo Monte Dam in Brazil is a core site around which both de-politicization (economic benefits) and re-politicization (corruption) movements converge and coalesce. The effects of resistance and (re)politicization movements are not contained to a singular project but have animated and altered the political terrain of hydropower development in Brazil [56]. Their analysis highlights the various narratives for and against the project, highlighting the intensely political contestations and ways it was discursively linked to ideas of corruption or elite interests [56]. In line with the “post-political” (above), both Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al. [55] and Atkins [56] highlight how “politics” can become obfuscated through particular discourses (e.g., national interests or economic benefits) and formalized social-ecological institutional arrangements (i.e., PES), producing spaces for the consolidation, justification, and development of large-dam development.L – EISEnvironmental Assessment Link – the plan depoliticizes decisions about water through administrative politics that presume consultation on a project-by-project basis is sufficient – obfuscates cumulative impacts and has no fora to address resource centered governance. Curran 19 [Deborah, Faculty of Law and School of Environmental Studies, Indigenous Processes of Consent: Repoliticizing Water Governance through Legal Pluralism. Water 2019, 11(3), 571; ] In both of these conflicts the nation state governments—at the federal, state or provincial levels —maintain that they consulted with the Indigenous communities through state-initiated processes such as environmental assessment. In turn, the Indigenous communities articulate the governance standard as one of “free, prior and informed consent”, a component of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the UN Declaration or UNDRIP) [10], that reflects Indigenous people’s laws and water governance responsibilities that predate colonization. These tensions about Indigenous sovereignty and the right to a healthy ecology manifest as issues of consultation and consent: The state depoliticizes decisions about water by directing them into administrative processes like environmental assessment while Indigenous communities are repoliticizing water governance by creating evaluation processes that reflect their own legal traditions and standards. The framework of settler colonialism—the way that colonization occurs across a geographic landscape through the control of land and people [11]—channels Indigenous rights challenges to decision-making about the environment into state-based administrative and legal processes. These processes define how Indigenous peoples can interact with water governance by a state or government within their traditional watersheds and establish the boundaries or scope of the conversation. State processes, such as environmental impact assessment, may mandate consultation with members of Indigenous communities about the potential impacts of a proposed project on their ways of life, but is typically limited to evaluating the project apparatus and not cumulative or broader watershed impacts. More fundamentally, state-prescribed environmental and natural resource decision-making processes do not provide a fora within which Indigenous communities can address the method of governance itself, and how their own laws, governance practices and rights are expressed.L – EnvironmentalismThe Affirmative’s Technocratic Environmentalism fails to address Indigenous Suffering and reinforces Settler Colonialism Curnow & Helferty 2018 Joe Curnow is an Assistant?Professor?at the University of Manitoba. Anjali Helferty is a PHD in adult education and community development, focused on settler climate activists and solidarity with Indigenous peoples. “Environment and Society, 2018, Vol. 9, Indigenous Resurgence, Decolonization, and Movements for Environmental Justice (2018), pp. 145-163” Accessed 7/12/2021These historians situate what we would understand as environmentalism within racialized colonial logics that use environmental discourses as a ruse for the expansion of capital, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the exploitation of slaves and workers. This legacy is important to acknowledge, as it is often unwittingly woven through the ideologies of the environmental movement today. While the implied virtuousness of conservation work in the present can make it seem unrelated to the violence of settler colonialism (Isaki 2013), these roots of modern mainstream environmentalism continue to impact the movement. From the beginning, conservation was tied to racist, sexist, and classist notions of wilderness protection in order to serve urban, bourgeois, white men’s desire to construct themselves as rugged frontiersmen (Aguiar and Marten 2011; Collier 2015; Thorpe 2011). Claims of ownership over “wild” spaces were used to justify land theft based on the concept of terra nullius—that land was empty and available for the taking. The ideological underpinnings of terra nullius, which cannot be separated from the larger project of Indigenous dispossession and erasure (Dowie 2011), are foundational for conservation movements today that “protect” land through separation from people living with/on it. Tens of millions of people have been displaced by conservation efforts, and conservation organizations have failed to effectively respond to widespread criticism of their efforts on human rights grounds (Agrawal and Redford 2009). Even the official doctrine endures: it was only in 2014 that terra nullius was declared invalid in Canada (Fine 2014), and the 1964 US definition of wilderness from the Wilderness Act as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” persists to this day (Dowie 2006). In recent decades, environmentalism has shifted and grown to include ecological approaches combating pesticide use; fighting toxic waste contamination; launching Earth Day; protecting endangered species, especially whales, and forests; fighting the seal hunt; and promoting recycling and ethical consumerism. Most recently, mainstream movement has taken up the discourse of climate justice (Curnow and Gross 2016; Goodman 2009) to respond to critiques that the climate movement has ignored the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities of color, especially postcolonial coastal states, that have been severely impacted for years (Adger et al. 2006; Our Power Campaign n.d.). In this context, many climate activists have looked to bridge environmental justice ideas with climate activism. However, in the context of mainstream environmentalism, this shift often remains largely semantic, with many of the policy solutions that are advocated for staying at the level of technocratic management of fossil fuel emissions.L – ExtinctionApocalyptic rhetoric is a settler move to innocence that reifies apocalyptic death for Indigenous people – the Malheur occupation proves.Anson 20 [April Anson – Assistant Professor in the the Department of Classics and Humanities; "Master Metaphor": Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency; Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities; 10-27-2016; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-2021The Malheur occupiers took further inspiration from two fringe Mormon apocalyptic texts, The Nay Book and the white horse prophecy, two texts that link the occupiers’ apocalyptic habit to the white nationalist innocence secured through the state of emergency.10 Though denounced by the Mormon Church, The Nay Book is a collection compiled by Keith Allen Nay, a Bundy family friend and fellow rancher. It offers religious justification for rejecting federal rule of law through “a scrapbook mix of letters, founding documents of both the United States and the Church of Latter- day Saints of Jesus Christ mixed with ideas that have existed in the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement for decades.”11 Th e book is oft en associated with the white horse prophecy, a disputed Latter- day Saints text that tells of an imperiled, divinely inspired US Constitution saved by Latter- day Saints elders riding on the white horse of the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.12 Both the white horse prophecy and The Nay Book have close ties to the John Birch society, a Far Right white supremacist organization that boasts Fred Koch among its fi rst eleven members. Koch was one of its primary fi nancial backers and the father of the billionaire funders of climate change denial David and Charles Koch, who were themselves John Birchers.13 Th is network is exemplary of the apocalyptic narrative’s political, racial, and environmental analogs.Within this apocalyptic habitus, the armed Malheur occupiers marshaled the rhetoric of frontier masculinity, anxieties about federal overreach, and subtextual fears of white genocide to bolster declarations of their own sovereign authority over the homelands of the Burns Paiute.14 In their apocalyptic prophecies and state- of- emergency declarations, the occupation performed a type of “settler apocalypse”— stories that tell of the end of the whole world but are, in reality, specific to white settlers.15 While it is important to avoid collapsing all paramilitary activity under the label of white nationalism, it is equally vital to recognize the ways the rhetoric of apocalypse, especially the state of emergency that often defines its logic, works to secure the innocence of its white settler subjects, even as they reject state power.16 Th at recognition clarifi es how the state of emergency, or state of exception, functions as the legal paradigm for a “settler move to innocence,” what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne 64 Resilience Vol. 8, No. 1 Yang call an “attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.”17 Th e occupiers were, aft er all, found innocent. Th eir acquittal suggests that the blamelessness of settler sovereignty is not merely a story; it is structured into the legal and political landscapes of the settler state.The state of emergency’s white- innocence- making mechanics were thrown into sharp relief by the rhetoric of apocalypse, ongoing emergency, and continuous resistance that circulated at Standing Rock. Standing Rock Sioux leadership shared their prophecy of apocalypse, telling of a time when the Zuzeca Sapa, the black snake, would slither across the earth, poisoning water before destroying the world.18 Recognizing this prophecy in the fossil fuel fl owing through the Dakota Access Pipeline, elders, water protectors, and their allies galvanized to defend their people and the other eighteen million living downstream.19 Th e protests, then, belong to a long narrative tradition guiding Indigenous resistance to the “apocalyptic death worlds of rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft , and smallpox” that have always accompanied the extraction economies of the settler state, to follow Nick Estes account in Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline. 20 Estes situates these apocalypses in the broader conditions of Indigenous refusal, because “while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories.”21 As typical of this dynamic, the #NoDAPL movement surged aft er “Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency on August 19, 2016— to safeguard the pipeline’s fi nal construction.”22 Estes notes that Dalrymple used the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which grants powers typically reserved for natural disasters but, tellingly, were also deployed in Baltimore “to crush a black- led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray.”23 Pairing #NoDAPL and #BlackLivesMatter, Estes describes, but does not draw out, the state of emergency insulating extraction economies through the creation and maintenance of racialized threats to the settler state.Indeed, in Malheur, Standing Rock, and Baltimore, alike, the state of emergency secures white settler innocence, even or especially amid its fuel- thirsty apocalypses.24 In stark proximal contrast, only a week after Dalrymple’s August 16 declaration, on August 26 the Standing Rock Tribal Council declared a state of emergency to protect their rightful claim to land based on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.25 Soon aft er, prayerful water protectors were met by state and federal police and privately contracted mercenaries, all clad in riot gear. Drones and planes constantly surveilled; guns scoped over warlike barricades. Th is spectacle compelled many media outlets to compare the illegal, armed, and violent threats of the Malheur occupation with the unarmed Oceti Sakowin and allies in order to highlight the incommensurable responses from local and federal offi cials.26 Many called the Bundy occupation an instance of “white terrorism” deserving of a militarized police response.27 Still, only the water protectors at Standing Rock have been charged with terrorism or targeted by the FBI terrorism taskforce.28 These disparities were, and remain, foreseeable.29 Th ey are embedded in the functions and fictions of the state of emergency in the settler state.Discourses prioritizing existential threats are moves to innocence – they mask the responsibility of settler states in structures of violence which drives survival risks.Mitchell 17 (Audra, a settler scholar who lives and works on the Ancestral and treaty lands of the Neutral (Attawandaron), Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas of the New Credit, She currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at Wilfrid Laurier University. From 2015-18 she held the CIGI Chair in Global Governance and Ethics at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, “Decolonizing against extinction part II: Extinction is not a metaphor—it is literally genocide,” September 27, )Extinction is not a metaphor…Extinction has become an emblem of Western, and white-dominated, fears about ‘the end of the(ir) world’. This scientific term is saturated with emotional potency, stretched and contorted to embody almost any nightmare, from climate change to asteroid strikes. In academic and public contexts alike, it is regularly interchanged with other terms and concepts – for instance, ‘species death’, global warming or ecological collapse. Diffused into sublime scales – mass extinctions measured in millions of (Gregorian calendar) years, a planet totalized by the threat of nuclear destruction – ‘extinction’ has become an empty superlative, one that that gestures to an abstract form of unthinkability. It teases Western subjects with images of generalized demise that might, if it gets bad enough, even threaten us, or the figure of ‘humanity’ that we enshrine as a universal. This figure of ‘humanity’, derived from Western European enlightenment ideals, emphasizes individual, autonomous actors who are fully integrated into the global market system; who are responsible citizens of nation-states; who conform to Western ideas of health and well-being; who partake of ‘culture’; who participate in democratic state-based politics; who refrain from physical violence; and who manage their ‘resources’ responsibly (Mitchell 2014).Oddly, exposure to the fear of extinction contributes to the formation and bolstering of contemporary Western subjects. Contemplating the sublime destruction of ‘humanity’ offers the thrill of abjection: the perverse pleasure derived from exposure to something by which one is revolted. Claire Colebrook detects this thrill-seeking impulse in the profusion of Western blockbuster films and TV shows that imagine and envision the destruction of earth, or at least of ‘humanity’. It also throbs through a flurry of recent best-selling books – both fiction and speculative non-fiction (see Oreskes and Conway 2014; Newitz 2013; Weisman 2008). In a forthcoming intervention, Noah Theriault and I (2018) argue that these imaginaries are a form of porn that normalizes the profound violences driving extinction, while cocooning its viewers in the secure space of the voyeur. Certainly, there are many Western scientists, conservationists and policy-makers who are genuinely committed to stopping the extinction of others, perhaps out of fear for their own futures. Yet extinction is not quite real for Western, and especially white, subjects; it is a fantasy of negation that evokes thrill, melancholy, anger and existential purpose. It is a metaphor that expresses the destructive desires of these beings, and the negativity against which we define our subjectivity.But extinction is not a metaphor: it is a very real expression of violence that systematically destroys particular beings, worlds, life forms and the relations that enable them to flourish. These are real, unique beings, worlds and relations – as well as somebody’s family, Ancestors, siblings, future generations – who are violently destroyed. Extinction can only be used unironically as a metaphor by people who have never been threatened with it, told it is their inevitable fate, or lost their relatives and Ancestors to it – and who assume that they probably never will.This argument is directly inspired by the call to arms issued in 2012 by Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang and more recently by Cutcha Risling-Baldy. The first, seminal piece demonstrates how settler cultures use the violence of metaphorical abstraction to excuse themselves from the real work of decolonization: ensuring that land and power is in Indigenous hands. Risling-Baldy’s brilliant follow-up extends this logic to explain how First People like Coyote have been reduced to metaphors through settler appropriation. In both cases, engagement with Indigenous peoples and their relations masks moves to innocence: acts that make it appear as if settlers are engaging in decolonization, while in fact we are consolidating the power structures that privilege us.In this series, want to show how Western, and white-dominated, discourses on ‘extinction’ appear to address the systematic destruction of peoples and other beings while enacting moves to innocence that mask their culpability and perpetuate structures of violence. As I argued in Part I of this series, extinction is an expression of colonial violence. As such, it needs to be addressed through direct decolonization, including the dismantling of settler colonial structures of violence, and the resurgence of Indigenous worlds. Following Tuck, Yang and Risling-Baldy’s lead, I want to show how and why the violences that drive extinction have come to be invisible within mainstream discourses. Salient amongst these is the practice of genocide against Indigenous peoples other than humans.…it is literally genocide.What Western science calls ‘extinction’ is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of desirable ‘human’ activities. It is an embodiment of particular patterns of structural violence that disproportionately affect specific racialized groups. In some cases, ‘extinction’ is directly, deliberately and systematically inflicted in order to create space for aggressors, including settler states. For this reason, it has rightly been framed as an aspect or tool of colonial genocides against Indigenous human peoples. Indeed, many theorists have shown that the ‘extirpation’ of life forms (their total removal from a particular place) is an instrument for enacting genocide upon Indigenous humans (see Mazis 2008; Laduke 1999; Stannard 1994). Specifically, the removal of key sources of food, clothing and other basic materials makes survival on the land impossible for the people targeted.Nehiyaw thinker Tasha Hubbard (2014) makes a qualitatively distinct argument. She points out that the Buffalo are First People, the elder brothers of the Nehiyaw people (and other Indigenous nations – see Benton-Banai 2010). Starting in the mid-1800s, the tens of millions of buffalo that ranged across Turtle Island were nearly eliminated through strategic patterns of killing carried out by settler-state-sponsored military and commercial forces. Their killing was linked to governmental imperatives to clear and territorially annex the Great Plains by removing its Indigenous peoples. As Hubbard points out, methods of destroying buffalo herds included large-scale killing, but also the disruption of their social structures, the destruction of the ecosystems on which they rely, and the removal of calves. These acts involve each of the components of the definition of genocide enshrined in the UN Genocide Convention: (a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.From Hubbard’s viewpoint, rooted in Nehiyaw philosophy and ethical-legal principles, the systematic destruction of the buffalo is not like genocide, nor is it exclusively a tool for carrying out genocide against human peoples. It is genocide in its own right: an attempt to destroy a particular First People and the possibilities of its continuity. In other words, the deliberate and systematic attempt to eliminate the buffalo, enacted by settler states, simultaneously enacted genocide against Indigenous peoples and their nonhuman relatives.Genocides of Indigenous peoples (human and otherwise) continue apace in contemporary settler states, transformed into multiple manifestations. For instance, they are integral to ‘biosecurity’ strategies designed to police the biological boundaries of these states and their citizens. Laced with racializing and xenophobic rhetoric (Subramaniam 2001), strategies such as culling or planned eradications are intended to remove ‘invasive’ or ‘foreign’ life forms in order to protect ‘Native’ ones. Many of the ‘invasive’ life forms targeted for destruction were transported to unfamiliar lands through colonial patterns of settlement and global trade flows.However, this logic of elimination (Wolfe 2006) is often perverted, turned against Indigenous* beings whose flourishing impedes the expansion or consolidation of the colonial state. For instance, Deborah Bird Rose (2011 a, 2011 b) shows how this form of violence is continually waged against flying foxes, who are framed by the settler state as “pest[s] whose extinction is [deliberately] sought”. This act of elimination involves explicit genocidal ideation, or the imagination of the destruction of a people. Rose characterizes it as a “matter of imagining a world without [dingoes or flying foxes], then setting out to create it” (Rose 2011a). The Australian settler state has used multiple tactics to induce terror and preclude flourishing amongst flying foxes, from the emission of high-pitched electronic signals to smearing trees with python excrement (Rose 2011b). Indeed, in 2014, I lived near to the roosting site of a group of flying foxes in Turrbal and Jagera Country (suburban Brisbane to settlers). Such nesting places are called ‘colonies’ , reflecting a Western scientific rhetoric that frames Indigenous peoples as ‘invaders’ of the settler state. The trees that housed the nesting site backed onto a municipal facility, whose fence had been covered with barbed wire, in which many of the bats snared their wings and starved to death. This ‘security’ measure – designed to protect the facilities relied upon by urban settlers from the intrusion of flying foxes – is a powerful weapon for precluding ongoing flourishing of Indigenous other-than-human peoples. I learned from neighbours that this ‘colony’ had previously been ‘moved’ from several other sites around the city, suffering significant declines in population each time. Indeed, despite reported declines of 95% in flying fox communities in Queensland and neighbouring New South Wales, the Queensland settler state legalized the shooting of the bats in 2012 by fruitgrowers.Of course, in some cases, the elimination of life forms is not as targeted or intentional – it may take the form of land-based extractive violence, the creep of ocean acidification, the decimation of rainforests by climate change. Proponents of a Eurocentric definition of genocide could argue that these events lack intention. Indeed, within international law, intention to commit genocide is a necessary criteria for conviction. However, theorists of critical genocide studies have long argued that this definition is inadequate: it brackets out a great many of the acts, logics and structures that produce the destruction of unique peoples. According to Tony Barta, definitions of genocide that focus on ‘purposeful annihilation’, and in particular on physical killing, have “devalu[ed] all other concepts of less planned destruction, even if the effects are the same” (Barta 2000, 238). For this reason, he shifts the focus from ‘genocidal intention’ to ‘genocidal outcome’ – that is, from the abstract assignation of genocidal agency to the felt and embodied effects of eliminative violence. It is the focus on intent, he contends, that allows white Australians to imagine that their relationship with Aboriginal people is non-genocidal despite overwhelming evidence of systematic and deliberate racialized destruction over several centuries. In contrast, an approach based on ‘genocidal outcomes’ makes it possible to account for complex causality and weak intentionality – that is, for myriad acts mediated by subtle, normalized structures that, together, work to eliminate a people. I want to argue that the same logic applies to nonhuman peoples: the destruction of a life form, its relations with other beings and its possible futures is a genocidal outcome, whether or not intention can be identified.Similarly, Christopher Powell (2007) argues that, since a ‘genos’ is a“network of practical social relations, destruction of a genos means the forcible breaking down of those relationships…these effects could be produced without a coherent intent to destroy. They could result from sporadic and uncoordinated actions whose underlying connection is the production of a new society in which there is simply no room for the genos in question to exist. They might even result from well-meaning attempts to do good” (Powell 2007, 538)As I have argued elsewhere, extinction is defined by the breaking of relations and the systematic destruction of the conditions of plurality that nurture co-flourishing worlds. Whether inflicted out as a deliberate act of extirpation, or as the convergent effect of eliminative logics expressed over centuries and enormous spatial scales, extinction is the destruction of relations and the heterogenous societies they nurture.Understood in this way, ‘extinction’ is not a metaphor for genocide or other forms of large-scale violence: it is a distinct manifestation of genocide. Masking the genocidal logics that drive extinction involves several moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012). Treating extinction as something short of genocide entrenches Eurocentric understandings of personhood that are limited to homo sapiens, which is itself an act of violence against these peoples. Ironically, the entrenchment of this dichotomy also enables the logic of ‘dehumanization’, in which human communities are likened to reviled nonhumans (for instance, cockroaches) in order to motivate violence against them. As I have argued elsewhere (Mitchell 2014), the logic of generalised ‘dehumanisation’ is uniquely effective in Western frameworks in which the lack of ethical status for beings other than humans removes obstacles to their mass destruction. Within worlds in which human and nonhuman persons are linked through complex systems of law, treaties, protocols and long-standing relations, this claim is illogical. Within Western settler states, however, it functions as a means of justifying ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples and their relations.In addition, by framing extinction as a problem for a universal figure of ‘humanity’ (more on this to follow…) mainstream discourses of extinction obscure its profound entwinement with race and racializing structures. These examples make it clear that eliminative violence is targeted on specific groups of people and their other-than-human relations, as defined by the aggressors. Indeed, patterns of genocidal violence extend racializing categories, hierarchies and eliminative impulses to other-than-human peoples. Just as approaching gender violence separately from race effaces their intersection, understanding extinction as distinct from race is deeply misleading. This is not only because racialized people are more likely to suffer from the effects of ‘extinction’ and other forms of environmental racism (which they are). It is also because the eliminative violence that drives extinction extend and enact race beyond the category of homo sapiens by defining particular groups against white settler norms and as threats to the settler society. To approach extinction separately from issues of race is, therefore, to miss one of its most defining features.Extinction is not a metaphor – in many cases, it is quite literally genocide enacted against Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human relations. To treat it as a metaphor is to obscure and participate in the structures of violence that drive it. From this perspective, in addition to active decolonisation efforts, and the resurgence of Indigenous peoples, addressing extinction also requires attacking the genocidal, racializing, eliminative logics that are diffused throughout settler (and other) states. It also requires honouring the unique relations, worlds and peoples that are targeted by these discourses and practices.L – Federal ControlThe USFG and the states have always been against Indigenous people having rights to their water. Curley ’19 - Andrew, (Global Environmental Politics?(2019) 19 (3): 57–76. )White settlers moved into the region only after the United States forcefully removed Diné and Apache peoples onto reservations and away from the origin of the Little Colorado River in Arizona’s White Mountains.4 From the beginning, the colonial political and legal structures of water governance disadvantaged Indigenous nations. Water colonization was part of a larger project of settler colonialism in the United States and Canada. Like land and territory, settlers intruded onto Indigenous water systems. In western states and provinces, where the climate is drier, settlers displaced Indigenous communities and diverted limited waterways into expanding agricultural fields and livestock watering holes (see also Norman, this issue). They built towns and dams while denying the flow of water downstream to Indigenous peoples, who were forced onto reservations. By the 1920s, western states needed to legalize their theft of western water sources. The Colorado Compact of 1922 unilaterally allocated the entirety of the Colorado River and its tributaries to the seven “western” states who met in Santa Fe to divide the river. Subsequent state water law ignored prior Indigenous claims and usage of water sources and was built on this agreement. Hydrologic estimates at the time were crude and incomplete. The Colorado River was overestimated and overallocated (Abruzzi 1995; Weatherford and Brown 1986). Indigenous rights to the river or any of its tributaries were purposefully ignored, even though the US Supreme Court had ruled that tribes were entitled to water only fourteen years earlier. The origin of Indigenous entanglements within colonial water laws goes back to the Winters US Supreme Court decision in 1908. White ranchers in Montana denied the Milk River to downstream Nakoda and Aaniiih peoples, who were forced onto the Fort Belknap reservation. Winter (“Winters’” was a clerical error), the main plaintiff in the case, argued that tribes had forfeited their rights to surface water when they signed punitive treaties with the United States. Winter and others argued that reservations only guaranteed land, not water (McCool 2006). The Supreme Court eventually rejected this argument and ruled that reservations, as federal lands, maintained “reserved” water rights (Shurts 2000). Following this decision, Indigenous nations asserted stronger water claims through the US court system using this logic. In western states and provinces, water laws became expressions of nineteenth-century utilitarian logics of resource exploitation and commodification. These laws “produced” or constructed nature according to the ontology of the settler colonialist and exerted claims over Indigenous jurisdictions (cf. Nadasdy 2007; Pasternak 2017). Water laws generated new sociopolitical, cultural, and legal realities ( Jepson 2012). They differ from state to state, or province to province, but they construct new environmental realities around them. From the perspective of white settlers, western waters were erratic and infrequent. Sometimes riverbeds ran with water, especially during monsoon seasons, but most of the year, they were dry. Western water governance required a radical reorientation of how water was understood and accounted for (McCool 2006; Shurts 2000). Moving away from riparian systems in the east, western water law worked to make water both legible and quantifiable (Wilkinson 1985). To this day, the legibility of water is a regular concern for hydrologists, who have concluded that the waters are overallocated. These waters are also declining because of decreasing snowfall in the winter and increased evaporation in the summer linked to damming and processes of climate change. Since the late 1970s, water “settlements” have become the standard legalpolitical mechanism through which Indigenous nations gain any “right” of access to western waters (Thorson et al. 2006). The Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that the 1952 McCarran amendment, which waived US sovereign immunity in the case of water rights adjudication, also applied to water rights litigation between tribes and states. State courts were made the venue of litigation, despite the fact that they are less supportive of Indigenous authorities. Tribes compete with state governments for control over the same resources. Consequently, tribal governments feel pressure to settle their water claims instead of risking what little rights they might get through litigation. L – “Good Governance”Good governance discourse focused on outcomes separates us from social aspects of waterNicole Wilson, Leila Harris, Joanne Nelson, Sameer Shah ’19 - (The Peter A. Allard School of Law, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada, Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada, (This article belongs to the Special Issue?Water Governance: Retheorizing Politics), )Defined above, governance differs from government in that the latter is focused on formal government institutions, rules, regulations, and managerial practices while the former involves wider considerations over how, and for whom, water is managed and made available [1]. This broader governance framework includes focus on the interplay between actors, preferences, and political-economic imperatives [1], as well as historical, socio-cultural, and legal considerations, and privileging of certain values, preferences, and worldviews. A focus on government and management invites attention to politics as the formal regulation of water, inter-jurisdictional negotiations, or outcomes of policies. Such an orientation also often implies that better information and sharing of scientific data will help mitigate or solve problem x or y. Relatedly, such pursuits might also assume that (a) water is knowable and can be managed, and (b) norms and desires are universal and can be put into practice [7–9]. The reality is often remarkably different: Water access and rights are often linked to contentious politics of struggle, water access and quality is deeply differentiated, water uses are fundamentally contested, and what water “is” and how water is known, constructed, and lived is variegated and difficult to conceptualize, let alone implement [8,10–14]. Allied with this, Perreault [15] suggests such calls for “good [water] governance”, often ambiguous and vague, can: help conceal the political and economic interests that lie behind the institutional arrangements, social relations, material practices and scalar configurations involved in so-called ‘good governance’. If we are to employ this concept, then it is imperative we do so critically, carefully elucidating the political nature inherent in the institutional arrangements and socio-environmental relationships to which it refers. he diverse understandings, constituencies and interests that surround water can be neglected, further erased, or oversimplified when water governance actors assume what normative and shared understandings of water are [2]. Feminist scholarship, Indigenous theorists, and political ecologists have contributed valuable frameworks and analytics to extend analysis of politics and governance. Applied to water, we can engage these approaches to understand water not as a hydrological or biophysical system but as a “hydro-social” system, inseparable from politics, culture, and economy [9].[1] Calls for “good governance”, [2] advocacy under “economic benefit,” and [3] formalized policy actions limited to regulations, jurisdiction, and scientific policy outcomes assumes water is depoliticized and purely biophysical, masking the hydro-social reality of water governance – this concealment of hydrosocial politics both [1] reifies settler colonial DISCURSIVE overwriting of indigenous water epistemologies and [2] DIRECTLY ruptures indigenous water governanceWilson et al 19 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance” Water 2019, 11, 1470; doi:10.3390/w11071470 //dylan] DGPDefined above, governance differs from government in that the latter is focused on formal government institutions, rules, regulations, and managerial practices while the former involves wider considerations over how, and for whom, water is managed and made available [1]. This broader governance framework includes focus on the interplay between actors, preferences, and political-economic imperatives [1], as well as historical, socio-cultural, and legal considerations, and privileging of certain values, preferences, and worldviews. A focus on government and management invites attention to politics as the formal regulation of water, inter-jurisdictional negotiations, or outcomes of policies. Such an orientation also often implies that better information and sharing of scientific data will help mitigate or solve problem x or y. Relatedly, such pursuits might also assume that (a) water is knowable and can be managed, and (b) norms and desires are universal and can be put into practice [7–9]. The reality is often remarkably different: Water access and rights are often linked to contentious politics of struggle, water access and quality is deeply differentiated, water uses are fundamentally contested, and what water “is” and how water is known, constructed, and lived is variegated and difficult to conceptualize, let alone implement [8,10–14]. Allied with this, Perreault [15] suggests such calls for “good [water] governance”, often ambiguous and vague, can:help conceal the political and economic interests that lie behind the institutional arrangements, social relations, material practices and scalar configurations involved in so-called ‘good governance’. If we are to employ this concept, then it is imperative we do so critically, carefully elucidating the political nature inherent in the institutional arrangements and socio-environmental relationships to which it refers. [15]The diverse understandings, constituencies and interests that surround water can be neglected, further erased, or oversimplified when water governance actors assume what normative and shared understandings of water are [2]. Feminist scholarship, Indigenous theorists, and political ecologists have contributed valuable frameworks and analytics to extend analysis of politics and governance. Applied to water, we can engage these approaches to understand water not as a hydrological or biophysical system but as a “hydro-social” system, inseparable from politics, culture, and economy [9]. Offering another important example, Indigenous scholars and allies have foregrounded Indigenous water ontologies and epistemologies, rooted in responsibilities to water as a living entity and suggesting that colonial understandings of water, as a material resource, should be challenged and decolonized to address past injustices and move towards more just and sustainable interactions with, and uses of, water (e.g., [11,13,16,17]). Ethnographers, including feminist scholars, have re-scaled and re-contextualized water’s access, uses, and governance through a focus on citizenship and racialization, the emotional and affective embodiments of water, and the politics, negotiations and relations of “the everyday” (e.g., [18–23]). Examples of wider conversations opened-up include how bodies are enrolled in uneven geographies of water access, the multi-species and multi-actor entanglements that (re)constitute “hydro-social” and infrastructural assemblages, and analytical re-orientations of governance to include intangible meanings and values of water (e.g., [18–23]). From such scholarship, a broader understanding of what governance might entail is brought into view, often contrasting with a narrow managerial perspective on how to “better” govern water [1]. These provocative entry points invite attention not only to the uneven distribution and access to water for humans and non-humans, but also highlight the wider governing ethics, arrangements, histories, and political-economic systems that give rise to, sustain, and reinforce such patterns (e.g., [20,24–28]).[1]Approaching “the political” from such a broadened perspective, the purpose of this Special Issue is to offer a set of openings and entry points regarding what politics in water governance might mean, and how we might approach it more meaningfully as scholars (and practitioners). One framing that is helpful in highlighting key elements of power that are likely to be significant for such a task is offered by Brisbois and de Lo? [29,30]. Highlighted below, these authors extend Lukes’ [31] elaboration of power as instrumental, structural and discursive in the context of collaborative water governance. Instrumental power reflects influence over others exerted through expressions of force (e.g., financial, technical and social) [30,31]. As one example, Bakker et al. [32] trace such concerns with respect to regulatory injustices of water governance for Indigenous peoples in Canada. Structural power refers to the historical, social, economic, and political contexts through which particular water governance arrangements come into being, and (re)produce systems of injustice and inequality [29–31]. States serve a central role in exercising structural power because they hold (and claim) the authority to determine the problem-framing and set of possible solutions for how water, or water problems, will be governed [29,30,33]. Structural power further includes broader systems of colonialism and racism that (re)produce uneven quantities and qualities of water [21,34,35]. For instance, systemic inequalities include those constituted through settler colonialism as an economic and political system that structures Indigenous peoples’ ability to assert their self-determination [36,37]. As several authors have asserted through analysis of such considerations, these inequities are not necessarily about specific negotiations and interactions, but much more about the uneven playing field of structural and historical relations. For example, Mushkegowuk (Swampy Cree) scholar Michelle Daigle [38] discusses the ways neoliberal settler colonialism shapes particular types of water governmentalities. She states:Mushkegowuk water governance, like Indigenous water governance across Canada, is further ruptured through neoliberal policies that secure and stimulate capitalist accumulation at the expense of Indigenous autonomy and environmental sustainability. [38] In this example, neoliberal governmentalities, structural racism, and racial capitalism coalesce resulting in particular ruptures of water-related decision making—with unjust and unsustainable outcomes. To appropriately highlight these longer histories, and broader relations of power and inequality that structure water governance, it is important to engage multi-scalar lenses, and to embed an analysis of current decisions and outcomes in relation to broader histories and contexts (e.g., of neoliberal hegemony, racial capitalism, and colonialism) (e.g., [21,35]). It is important thus to note that structural power is not necessarily the direct interplay among opposing actors or interests, but often more diffuse historical trajectories and systems (of inequality, or political economy) that impinge on water governance and its current instantiations.[2]Discursive power is another dimension and refers to the capacity of actors to construct or shape norms, values, and framings, including in ways that prevent actors from recognizing that particular solutions or implements can harm their interests (see [30,31]). Such power is often characterized using governmentality–defined by Foucault as “the conduct of conduct” [39,40], or the myriad ways that human behavior is directed and regulated, often in ways that are diffuse, everyday, self-oriented, and implicated in a range of socio-political relations beyond formal spheres of “politics” (at times referred to as capillary power). Among other examples, Vos and Boelens [41] examine water justice in relation to the virtual water trade and argue that neoliberal water governmentalities “aim to organize and direct water users’ behavior by approaching users as rational, enterprising agents who economically benefit from water development . . . ” [41]. Other examples similarly highlight certain discourses of conservation, efficiency, or even the human right to water that condition particular water-related uses or shifts. Consider, for instance, the argument that a focus on the human right to water can privilege human users over ecosystems, or that this discourse and policy has also served as justification for large water transfers from rural users to urban consumers [42,43].Political ecologists, human geographers, and anthropologists have more recently scrutinized ontological and epistemological politics or sedimented notions of how water is understood, governed, used, and incorporated into daily life practices [13,14,38,44–47]. These offerings suggest that alternative and counter-hegemonic approaches (in relation to epistemologies, axiologies, and ontologies) are of critical importance in re-defining our relationships with water in ways that might further justice and sustainability goals. A related example is the literature on the “post-political”, referring to the intentional de-politicization of environmental crises particularly in service of capitalist accumulation (e.g., geo-engineering or large infrastructure development) [48,49]. These processes offer clear examples of discursive power, often working to suggest certain processes are “natural” (e.g., water scarcity), or domains of technology and engineering, in ways that work to evacuate the associated politics.L – GuamThe colonization of Guam lead to violence and the genocide of 90% of the population – those historical roots must not be ignored.Rapadas 7 – Rapadas Psychological Services, PLLC Hagatna in Guahan (Juan M. Rapadas, “Transmission of Violence: The Legacy of Colonialism in Guam and the Path to Peace”, Volume: 1 issue: 2, pgs. 33-40, )The essence of colonialism is the direct and overall subordination of one country to another on the basis of state power being in the hands of a dominating foreign power (Woddis, 1967). The act of taking over and conquering a land and its people is never a peaceful endeavour and is almost always accompanied by violence, subjugation, and dehumanisation. Sadly, over the centuries, indigenous peoples by the millions as well as human slaves from all corners of the globe have become victims of this ‘policy’ of colonialism or in the language of the colonialists, ‘manifest destiny’ (Corbett, 2003).In the Western Pacific, when Spanish warships came to ‘discover’ Guam in the 1500s, they brought disease, famine, violence and war. Tens of thousands of native Chamorus died throughout the centuries of rule. The devastation was almost total, as the census numbers at the time, showed a 90% decrease from 40,000 Chamorus, as estimated by a Spanish missionary in the late 1600s, to about 4,000 by the early 1700s. Epidemics, crushed rebellions, natural disasters, induced abortions, and migration out of Guam, all contributed to a significant decline of the indigenous people. Relegated to only five settlements in which the survivors were forced to live, everyday life was a tremendous struggle for survival (Sanchez, 1989). By the mid-1850s, there were about 3,500 native Chamorus remaining. Many of those counted in the census had mixed ethnicities of Spanish and various other European countries as well as Filipino, Japanese and Chinese.From the time the Spanish landed on Guam shores in 1521 until the mid-19th century, the insidious conspiracy to conquer and ‘wipe out’ the natives was complete and successful. There were no more Native Chamorus left and what remained was a ‘docile and demoralised race’ (Sanchez, 1989, p. 48). The tears, the blood, the humiliation, the wresting of lands, cultural dilution, and just the overall suffering remain embedded in the soil, in the trees, in the air, and in the memories, consciousness, and inner souls of the surviving Chamorus.There is no disputing the loss, devastation, and trauma inflicted upon the native Chamorus. What of the effects and the aftermath of such pain and how can it be conceptualised? Becker (2004) in describing theories of trauma and organised violence states that trauma: implies a notion of tearing, of rupture, of structural breakdown; can only be defined and understood with reference to a specific context, which should be described in detail; is a process that develops sequentially and contains both an individual intrapsychic dimension and collective, macro-social dimension that are interwoven.Blagg (2000, p. 12) in a handbook describing crisis intervention in aboriginal family violence cites his own 1999 meta-analysis of literature on violence in Indigenous communities. He identifies multicausal factors, for high rates of violence, including: marginalisation and dispossession, loss of land and traditional culture, breakdown of community kinship systems and aboriginal law, entrenched poverty, and racism.Becker’s definition of trauma, its insidious overarching effects and Blagg’s inclusion of socio-historical variables in explaining the violence often seen in indigenous communities are quite appropriate and helpful in understanding the Chamoru colonisation experience, the Japanese and USA occupations, and the continued re-enactment of violence in the homes of the native Chamoru on Guam. The theories confirm that in the area of trauma and dehumanisation, it takes more than the passage of time to heal all wounds.In modern psychology and psychiatry, the diagnosis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is given to individuals who have suffered a trauma that elicited reactions of intense fear, horror, and helplessness (APA, 2000). As a result of this trauma, a person suffering from PTSD would generally have three symptom clusters of re-experiencing, avoidance, and arousal. With the diagnostic label a whole host of other co-occurring and/or related psychological problems can arise like depression, anxiety, extreme guilt, anger explosiveness, and substance abuse (Davidson & Fairbank, 1993). However devastating the diagnosis, PTSD was not meant to describe whole communities, cultures, and civilisations. The diagnostic label was created almost 30 years ago to help clinicians conceptualise the fallout from traumatic events like combat experience and rape, to understand the experiences, and to develop treatment plans for individual clients and their family members who may also suffer along with the individual patient. For colonisation victims, the PTSD diagnosis is just too inadequate and simplistic to fully conceptualise the experience. There should be a diagnostic label or nomenclature developed that describes a condition where recent and past histories of the people are replete with violence, death, rape, torture, dehumanisation, loss of land, culture, language, and spirit; a condition that seems to describe all the experiences of indigenous, colonised peoples.New diagnostic labels could be proposed such as ‘rippled PTSD’ to describe the effects of a stone dropped into a pool, ‘post-colonialism stress disorder (PCSD)’, or ‘post-trauma transmission disorder (PTTD)’. Whatever the case, the past devastating injustices, wounding, and pain must not be forgotten or ignored and should, at the very least be acknowledged, talked and written about. This article will help elucidate the native Chamoru experience over the centuries within the context of being a conquered, traumatised people. Some recommendations will be offered to help modern day, native Chamorus and Guam as a whole overcome the violence of the past and present and to propel them into and through the 21st century by following the path to peace and justice.The 1AC is another attempt at ‘liberating’ Guam Rapadas 7 – Rapadas Psychological Services, PLLC Hagatna in Guahan (Juan M. Rapadas, “Transmission of Violence: The Legacy of Colonialism in Guam and the Path to Peace”, Volume: 1 issue: 2, pgs. 33-40, )However, because of the war against terrorism and tensions in the Koreas, Guam is seeing some increased military presence. Although generally economically positive, the military build-up engenders the fear within some of the people of being targeted for destruction because of a close relationship with the US military and proximity to the US Air Force and naval bases on Guam. Some local indigenous leaders object to the build-up because of the possibility that the US government will take more land for military purposes, and because of perceived threat from North Korea and from terrorists. For many large and small business owners the increased presence is a blessing. Increased military means more customers, more renters, and more taxes. Amid all the increased revenues’ ‘hype,’ the local government has been sending mixed messages to the Federal government. For example, the Governor of Guam recently signed an executive order that, at first read, says that the government of Guam remains opposed to the military presence in no uncertain terms, yet the same resolution states that the government is in full support of military operations on Guam, and proud to support US Pacific Defence operations (Crisostomo, 2005a). If the government appears ambivalent, the sentiments of other local Chamorus probably reflect the same attitude. The pushpull, duality of both loving and hating US neo-colonialist actions continues today, and causes internal and external turmoil. The government of Guam is the largest employer of all those able to work. Private sector jobs are available but very low paying. The majority of people in the community are in the lower middle to lower socioeconomic status (SES). There is high use of entitlement programs, food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing. By far the group that uses these programs most are the indigenous Chamorus.Indigenous Chamorus have the highest rates of diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cancer on Guam when compared to other ethnic groups like Filipinos, Europeans, other Asians, and Micronesians. Unfortunately, these health trends are almost identical for other native populations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Hawaii, North America, and Micronesia. Over the last 20 years, Guam has seen increases in the incidences of family violence, drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, and suicide. Adult and juvenile crimes appear to be on the rise, and native indigenous Chamorus are responsible for the majority of those crimes, by far.Over the last few decades the Native Chamoru seem to be a sad, dispirited people, not unlike other indigenous peoples who have also suffered tremendously over the centuries at the hand of the colonial powers. In each of these areas, the native populations are highly overrepresented in the adult and juvenile prisons and drug and alcohol treatment facilities (Rapadas, 2001). As mentioned previously, native groups often have the highest rates of modern-day diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and cancer (Ocampo & Kanehe, 2005). These groups are also over-represented in the usage of entitlement programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and welfare and most native families live under the poverty levels in their respective state, territory, or country.It seems that today’s social ills have, in part, resulted from decades of unresolved trauma, violence, and unchecked colonial domination. The multi-layered ‘soul wounds’ have taken their toll over the centuries. As mentioned previously, there are no pure Chamorus left, they have been killed by war and disease. The original native language has been forever altered over the centuries by an incorporation of other languages, mostly Spanish. These facts, coupled with the conscription of lands, water and other natural resources have stripped the spirit, livelihood and identities of the native Chamorus. Most recently, the Japanese brutal takeover and attempt at colonising Guam in the 1940s added tragic insult to mortal injury to the Chamoru people and culture. This relatively recent trauma and wounding of the Chamoru people continues to afflict today’s generations of Chamorus, by transmission of the brutality, hatred, and violence within their own families.World War II is the most salient and recent stressor. Guam was the only USA territory captured and occupied by the Japanese for a period of 32 months. Japanese rule was characterised by autocratic policies, brutality, atrocities, rape, and use of ‘comfort women’, forced marches and massacres. It was like a tragic re-enactment of centuries of victimisation, passivity, helplessness, and fatalism that Guam had experienced from other colonial powers like the Spaniards and to a lesser degree of violence, the USA invaders, who by action and inequitable policies, treated Chamorus like ‘third world’, secondclass citizens.More than likely, the fallout of the war left survivors with varying levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Left without any real outlets for the horrific trauma, having to rebuild their communities from the ground up, and feeling grateful about being ‘liberated,’ the Chamoru people never regained a firm footing on reclaiming their lands and re-establishing pre-war life and culture. In the process of the US rebuilding, vast parcels of native land were occupied and used by the military. Placed in refugee camps for several weeks after the liberation, most families were denied title or return to their ancestral lands. The mishandling and disrespect to which the Chamoru people were subjected by the US government did not help in lessening the effects of war trauma. At the time it probably seemed appropriate because of the gratitude, but in hindsight, the USA government was asserting its colonising power like other world powers before them, and the Chamoru people continued to feel helpless well after the end of WWII.Although PTSD is a westernised formulation, aspects of the disorder, like intrusion and numbing, are universal (Friedman & Marsella, 1996), similar to the symptoms seen in Chamoru victims. There is no doubt that the indigenous Chamorus suffered PTSD as a result of the suffering and trauma after World War II, but in many ways our experience is also unique, and requires some creative ways to heal and to restore peace and justice.Bastien, Kremer, Kuokkanen, and Vickers (2003), in their recent book chapter on the impact of colonisation, genocide, and racism in indigenous populations, describe how colonisation results in a complete and total transformation of the indigenous people on a multitude of levels of the economy, politics, physiological, law, social activity and psychological activity. Their paper is focused mainly on the psychological and the physiological levels. The authors hypothesised four aspects of healing colonial violence that are critical for the indigenous people to become reconstituted and re-established. The first aspect is remembering and acknowledging the destruction by colonisation. A second aspect is a reconnection with ancestral healing methods. The final two ingredients in healing colonial violence are reaching out to others, and the reconstruction of indigenous concepts of community. These four aspects seem to be a good beginning for the indigenous Chamorus, to help reclaim their lives, their culture, and their spirit.The theme of my paper is that the societal ills of Guam are both directly and indirectly caused in part by the historical, traumatic past and the Chamorus’ inability to fully overcome the damage, destruction, and loss of spirit throughout the centuries. In addition, the intergenerational transmission of violence is a real, human phenomenon that more than likely applies to the Guam experience. In the literature, discussions about the transmission of violence through the generations bring about the topic of the Holocaust, and its effects on survivors. Are there similarities between these two distinct and very different cultures of Chamorus and the Jewish people? Can the detailed study of the Holocaust victims help the USA understand the Chamoru colonised experiences?L – Hydrosocial Cycle DisruptionDisruption of tribal hydrosocial cycles by the impostion of hyper-technical hydrosocial cycles in western governance refy the western reconstitution of space-time in the ongoing settler colonization process – specifically disruptions can be (but are not limited to): [1] disturbing tribal fishing cycles [2] boom-bust cycle logic [3] usage of western project planning and water quality risk *Hydrosocial Cycle: “a socio-natural proces by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time in cyclical and repeated ways” --- a type of hydrosocial relationshipCohn et al. 18 [Teresa Cavazos Cohn (Department of Natural Resources and Society, University of Idaho. Ph.D. Montana State University, Department of Earth Sciences, Geography; B.A. The Colorado College Maj. English, Min. Central American Studies, 1996. Research Interests: Water and hydrosocial relations with emphasis on Indigenous communities, Cultural geography of the American West, and Science Communication and Education), Kate Berry (Research interests: Water governance; geographies of social identity; Indigenous geographies; cultural politics of water; legal geographies; environmental justice; geographies of racialization; environmental conflict transformation. Education: Ph.D., Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, 1993; M.S., Watershed Science, Colorado State University, 1985; B.S., Forestry & Natural Resources, Northern Arizona University, 1980), Kyle Powys Whyte (Dr. Kyle Whyte, Professor of Environment and Sustainability / George Willis Pack Professor) and Emma Norman (Research Interests: questions related to water governance, borders, and environmental and social justice. Education: Ph.D. Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., March 2009.; M.S. Geography, Huxley College, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, June 2001; B.A. International Studies, Environmental Policy, Colby College, Waterville, ME, May 1995. Senior Thesis Title: Population Growth and Deforestation in Rural Nepal: An Environmental History from 1814-1948.) “Spatio-Temporality and Tribal Water Quality Governance in the United States” Water 2019 11, no. 1: 99. ] DGPSpace and time, and their connection as space-time, create a fundamental fabric of reality, as well as a practical concern of daily life. Conceptions of time and space are diverse among Indigenous groups and perhaps impossible to thoroughly represent or interpret through a different language and culture. Regardless, we offer a few rough sketches from scholarly literature. Northern Arapaho space-time is a “four-stage-four-direction order that synthesizes linear and circular motion within the same space-time” [53]. Aymara people use the word nayra (eye/front/sight) as an expression for the past, and qhipa (back/behind) for the future, and thus gesture forward when referring to the past and backward when referring to the future [54]. Residents of the eastern Australian Aboriginal community Pormpuraaw use directional terms (North/South/East/West) instead of what English-speakers refer to as right or left and time progressions are represented from east to west, as an English timeline would move from left to right [55]. The Yupno of mountainous Papua New Guinea conceive of the past as downhill, the present as located with a speaker, and the future as uphill in a non-linear temporality, reflecting the local topography [56]. Like the Yupno spatio-temporal constructs, some chronologies do not track time as a linear flow of the past, present, or future [57]. The Anishinaabemowin (Neshnabémwen) expression aanikoobijigan (yankobjegen) means both ancestor and descendant, so the speaker is linked simultaneously to future and past generations through spiraling time [58]. Finally, in Maori, the words space and time are the same [59].Several Indigenous scholars emphasize that altering such fundamental conceptions of space-time is a critical component of Euro-American colonization processes. With regard to time, Vine Deloria [60] wrote, “It is debatable which factor was most important in the destruction of tribal ceremonial life: The prohibition of . . . traditional rituals . . . or the introduction of white man’s system of keeping time.” Regarding space, Linda Tuhiwai Smith [59] emphasizes, “ . . . indigenous world view, the land and the people, have been radically transformed in the spatial image of the West. In other words, indigenous space has been colonized.” The collision/combination of Euro-American and Indigenous space-times has resulted in hybrids, desynchronizations, divergence, resistance, evolution, and adaptation [61] or spatio-temporal colonial entanglement [23,62]. These dynamic space-times are central—and often invisible—to governance dynamics, associated with networks that connect tribal governance processes to “a more comp2. Spatio-Temporal Themes in Water Governance Literature2.1. Spatio-Temporality in Tribal Water Quality GovernanceFocusing on spatio-temporality, we have identified three central themes through which to examine tribal water quality governance: Spatio-temporal cycles, technological mediation, and interrelationship and fluidity. In the following discussion, we describe each theme and then connect the theme to a tribal water quality governance example. We continue to draw on these examples to illustrate governance networks, ontological pluralism, political colonial processes, and decolonization using a spatio-temporal lens.2.2. Spatio-Temporal CyclesCycle is defined most generally as a series of regularly repeated events, though the term carries disciplinary nuances [64]. In Earth sciences, “cycle” refers to processes of movement and transformation; for example, the Oxford Dictionary of Geology and Earth Sciences defines the hydrologic cycle as “the flow of water in various states through the terrestrial and atmospheric environments” [65]. Linton, and others [66–69] examine the historical roots of this term, note its limitations, and use the term “hydrosocial cycle” to acknowledge and emphasize the importance of social processes in dimensions of water. Linton and Budds define the “hydrosocial cycle” as “a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time” [66]. The following discussion embeds itself in this broader context, in which combined social and physical processes shape, and are shaped by, the flow of water [69] in cyclic or repeated ways over space and/or time.Cycling may take place on large or small spatio-temporal scales [70,71] and involve synchronous or asynchronous patterns in social relationships with water [72,73]. This cycling may involve annual processes such as, for example, toxic contaminants in streams that cycle seasonally [71] or increased water temperatures related to anthropogenic climate change, which affect fisheries [74]. Governance processes, rather than bio-physical processes, may also drive cycling, such as those involving environmental impact statement procedures as dictated by the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) [75] or judicial appeals processes [76]. More pointedly, cycles may circulate within networks of socio-natural systems with ontological and political dimensions. We offer the following tribal water quality example involving mining impact on water quality and the Nez Perce Tribe.Water Quality Governance Example: Stibnite Gold Project and the Nez Perce TribeIn September 2016, Midas Gold submitted a plan proposing new mining and milling activities in a historical mining district of West Central Idaho. “The Stibnite Gold Project” involves National Forest System lands, and specifically, the Payette National Forest, within an area open to mineral extraction under the General Mining Act of 1872. The project aims to extract four to five million ounces of gold and 100–200 million pounds of antimony over an approximate 20-year construction and operations period [77]. On 9 October 2018, the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee passed a resolution formally opposing the Stibnite Project [78]. The Tribe expressed concern about the environmental and cultural impacts of mining operations, including the effects of a proposed open pit mine, 100 million tons of toxic mine tailings, and 350 million tons of waste rock to be stored at the site in perpetuity. The site, which has been intermittently mined since 1902, is located in the Nez Perce aboriginal territory, where the Tribe maintains treaty rights ensuring tribal use of usual and accustomed places [79–81]. The South Fork of the Salmon River, downstream of the mine, supports a culturally significant salmon fishery; the Tribe spends over 2.5 million dollars each year on hatchery supplementation, fishery research, and watershed restoration in that area to support salmon populations impacted by prior mining practices [78,81].A comparison of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee resolution to oppose the Stibnite Gold Mine [78] and Midas Gold’s Stibnite Gold Project Plan of Restoration and Operations [77] illustrates several examples of spatio-temporal cycles associated with mining and water quality. First, the Tribe links proposed Stibnite activities to disruption in cyclic patterns associated with networks that sustain water quality-salmon-Nez Perce relationships. Salmon and water quality are both critical to Nez Perce culture. As a medicine, water flushes toxicity from stream systems, animals, and people; and cold, clean, high altitude water (which characterizes water at the Stibnite site) is valued over lower elevation warmer waters, in part because it supports salmon, which are central to Nez Perce ideological and material foundations [79,82]. Nez Perce people have maintained traditional fishing cycles—and governance that ensures the continuance of these cycles—for generations, with regard to fish harvests of tribal members [79], for example, and the development of multi-million dollar fisheries programs [81]. In a whitepaper developed to increase knowledge about the Tribe’s interests and activities in and around the Stibnite Gold Project area, the Tribe emphasizes mining threats to water quality and salmon [81]: [The Tribe has] installed nine fish passage projects . . . and decommissioned 180 miles of road to reduce sediment levels . . . detrimental to listed fish species. Renewed mining activities such as the Stibnite Gold Project, however, could undermine the gains in fisheries and habitat improvements vital to the Tribe by negatively affecting . . . watersheds through increased sedimentation to streams (mining activities, increased traffic adjacent to streams), potential fuel and chemical spills, and decreased water quality resulting from mineral exploration.Moreover, the Nez Perce Tribe suggests that proposed mining activity is directly connected to historic cycles of negative cultural and water quality impacts; the corporate project could be the next in a series of broken promises. For example, the tribal resolution references mining boom-bust cycles affecting local economies and water quality, including repeated incidents in which gold mining resulted in disastrous consequences for the Tribe: Gold mining has left a legacy of destruction and contamination and boom and bust economies, the scars of which are still visible throughout the Tribe’s aboriginal territory, the American west, and world; and . . . gold mining within the Tribe’s aboriginal territory has specifically led to the diminishment of the Tribe’s Reservation in the Treaty of 1863; the armed clash between the Nez Perce and the U.S. Army; and the diminishment of the Tribe’s Treaty-reserved natural resources, including the extirpation of Spring/Summer Chinook salmon in the upper East Fork South Fork Salmon River in the 1940s.Finally, temporal cycles differ between Midas Gold’s plan and the Nez Perce resolution. Midas Gold outlines three time-cycles: Three years of construction and development, 12 to 15 years of operation, and two to three years of reclamation and closure. In contrast, the Nez Perce Tribe views the mining operation as one in a series of resource extractive events since Euro-American settlement, negatively impacting water quality and fisheries. In short, because of their connection to place, Nez Perce governance cycles are much longer than the mining company’s, based on many generations’ prior experiences, as well as critical socioecological cycles that will sustain the Tribe and water quality for many generations to come.In sum, spatio-temporal cycles, or repeated processes over space and/or time in tribal water quality governance, are illustrated in this example through the disturbance of cyclic patterns that sustain water quality-salmon-Nez Perce relationships, boom-bust cycles affecting local economies and water quality, and different conceptions of spatio-temporal cycles related to project planning and water quality risk.L – IBWCThe IBWC is creates an imperial relationship where the US makes unilateral actions regardless of the treaty at the expense of Mexico.Sundberg 15 (Sundberg, Juanita, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia. "The state of exception and the imperial way of life in the United States—Mexico borderlands."?Environment and Planning D: Society and Space?33.2 (2015): 209-228.; AKIM)Without NEPA, DHS was freed from pursuing consultation and environmental assessment procedures to determine the impacts of border fencing construction and operation in the short and long term and from proposing alternatives to proposals deemed undesirable in the light of federal laws.(l0) While little to no systematic research has been published on this unprecedented suspension of laws, numerous institutions and individuals suggest DHS is producing vulnerabilities for humans and other-than-humans whose existence as individuals and collectives is interdependent (Flesch etal, 2010; Sundberg, 2011). To address these concerns, I briefly discuss (l)the lack of project parameters; (2) the Rio Grande River’s hydrological system; and (3) habitat for twenty federally listed threatened and endangered species.'111(1) Limitless limits The waiver provision establishes vague geographical and temporal parameters. Section 102 of the IIRIRA as amended in the REAL ID Act gives the DHS secretary authority to waive laws “in the vicinity of the United States Border” in areas with “high illegal entry” (Sancho, 2008; Vina and Tatelman, 2005). As the border is interpreted to mean a zone extending one hundred miles inland, the area affected is not clearly delimited. The only mention of temporal limits relates to the completion of fencing by 31 December 2008. Are the waivers invoked in 2008 still in effect after fencing is completed or as segments of fencing are litigated in court? To put this question another way, is the Clean Water Act suspended in 2008 in effect today? Although these parameters are not set, DHS has initiated new projects in areas covered by the waivers, citing the original waivers as authorization. This leaves residents uncertain about basic protections (Sancho, 2008, page 447).(2) HydrologyThe Rio Grande River’s hydrological system, and the institutions created to manage it, profoundly shape how the Secure Fence Act is operationalized in Texas. The International Water and Boundary Commission (IBWC) oversees binational treaties between Mexico and the US, including the 1970 Boundary Convention that forbids both countries from constructing anything in the river’s floodplain that might obstruct or deflect the flow of water (Mumme, 2010). In consultation with the IBWC, fences in the valley were sited north of the flood control levee system in Cameron County (sometimes as much as two miles north), while in Hidalgo County walls were inserted into existing levees.However, the IBWC initially rejected fences in Roma, Rio Grande City, and Los Ebanos on the grounds that they would act as dams, preventing water from flowing away from communities and deflecting water into Mexican cities (see Nicol, 2013). A 2011 letter from the Mexican section’s principal engineer states that Mexico is opposed to construction in these specific sites because fencing will collect debris and deflect water flow into Mexico during a flood event (cited in Nicol, 2012). Nevertheless, documents recently obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS has convinced the IBWC’s US section to unilaterally agree to the construction of eighteen-foot steel bollard fencing in the Roma, Rio Grande City, and Los Ebanos floodplains (Sherman, 2012). If DHS unilaterally moves forward with the fencing, the US will be in violation of the 1970 treaty.The IBWC’s Mexican section has reason to be concerned about this unilateral move, as fencing constructed without adequate consultation and study in other border areas has caused significant damage to property and loss of life. For instance, the Border Patrol— without notifying the IBWC— constructed a five-foot concrete barrier in a Nogales, Arizona stormwater tunnel (McCombs, 2008a). During a 2008 storm, rainwater backed up and flooded Nogales, Mexico, causing $8 million in damage; two bodies were found in the flooded area (McCombs, 2008b). Subsequent analysis determined that nearly eight feet of the twenty-foot barrier was on Mexican soil (McCombs, 2011). The Nogales incident does not bode well for binational communities along the Rio Grande River and signals the extent to which lives in the region are politically irrelevant to the country’s leadership.L – InfrastructureInfrastructure modernization lives a dual life – it’s fueled by racialized divisions of labor rooted deeply in slavery and is woven into future-oriented temporalities of finance that are active channels of global exploitation.Davies 21 – Visiting Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield (Dr. Archie Davies, “The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife”, 6/1/21, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 0, Issue 0, )The coloniality of infrastructure (i): Race and labourThis brings me to the second half of this paper, which aims to draw out some key categories of infrastructure’s coloniality, in the forms first of race and labour, and then of finance and gender. Kendra Strauss has noted that ‘scholarship on infrastructure has had relatively little to say about labour’ (Strauss, 2019). This is beginning to change, as we can see what Lugones calls the ‘thorough meshing of labour and race’(Lugones, 2007: 191) inside the infrastructural labour analyzed by Zeiderman(2020). In terms of the material analyzed here, we can see racialized divisions of labour clearly in the film Veneza Americana. Heavy labour is done by Black and darker-skinned Brazilians, while white overseers observe. And as the first section showed, the work of knowledge production and the control over technology was in the hands of white, male, imperial engineers, and their allies in Brazilian elite society and the state.Aníbal Quijano wrote that ‘the coloniality of power’ identifies:the ‘racial’ social classification of world population – expressed in the ‘racial’ distribution of work, in the imposition of new ‘racial’ geocultural identities, in the concentration of the control of productive resources and capital, as social relations, including salary, as a privilege of ‘Whiteness’. (Quijano, 2007: 171)Recife in the 1920s was expanding rapidly through booms and busts of informal urbanization in syncopation with droughts in the backlands of the Northeast. People migrated to the city and lived among the marshes and mangroves in what were known as mocambos, a Northeastern iteration of the favela that overtook many of the central areas of the city. These urban populations – comprising both internal migrants and Afro-Brazilians – were the racialized underside of the city that the historian Zélia Gominho characterized as the ‘Venice of the Americas vs the Mucambópolis’. The white elite saw mocambos as threatening; coded as dark-skinned, revolutionary and sub-human (Davies, 2020). Indeed, there are connections here that run along infrastructural lines: not only was the informal city characterized as politically threatening, but port and logistics workers were key to the emergence of working class organization in Brazil (Meade, 1997: 57, 98), as well as transnational anti-colonial solidarity (Featherstone, 2015; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2013). It was not incidental that the term mocambo is etymologically and historically connected to the idea of the quilombo – the community of escaped enslaved people that so threatened the stability of the Brazilian state project for centuries (Nascimento, 1985). It was from the areas of the mocambos that the abortive 1935 communist revolution in Recife emerged (Fischer, 2014).Veneza Americana only shows one side of infrastructure’s dual life. Though built by the people who lived in the mocambos, infrastructural space was defined as their opposite and became the border between the two. In the long, failed and fractured process of trying to cleanse the urban landscape of racialized informality, infrastructure was the liminal point of difference. In 1934, for instance the Governor, Novais Filho, specifically banned informal settlements within 200 m of railway lines, tramways and roads (Zélia Gominho, 2012: 61). The visual ordering of the city, which had deep racial undertones, was organized around an aesthetic sensibility to which infrastructure was central. As Stanley Blake shows, Recife’s illustrated press of the time – with noteworthy examples such as the Afro-Brazilian photographer Francisco Rebello – reproduced visual representations of Recife’s poor and working classes that relied heavily on racial stereotypes, configuring darker skinned Recifenses in racist and eugenicist terms (Blake, 2016). Veneza Americana takes care not to show the mocambos that dotted and indeed overtook many of the central areas which the film portrays. The vision of the city that Veneza Americana portrays is an imaginary one, however much it dwells on the concrete and construction of the city’s modern infrastructure. However, what the film cannot help but show are the workers who lived in mucambópolis. The cinematic gaze has to pass through human work to pick out the machines and the logistics. The camera cannot hide what is in plain sight: infrastructural modernity is constantly made and remade through gendered and racialized labour.The processes of racialization in question have specific historical geographies in Northeast Brazil (Arruti, 1997). The region’s social structure functioned through racialized divisions of labour, based on hierarchy and exploitation. The internal migrants and working classes who built the infrastructure that British engineers planned were racialized subjects who included both Afro-descendant, Black Brazilians, caboclos of African and indigenous heritage, sertanejos from the backlands, and other characteristically Brazilian forms of racial mixture. This racial division of labour has deep roots in slavery, and in the longer durée of the Northeast of Brazil. As Zeiderman has recently explored on the Magdalena river, these logics manifest in specific, articulated forms within infrastructural labour: what he calls the ‘situated afterlives of race and labour’ (Zeiderman, 2020). In Brazil, as elsewhere, the legal abolition of slavery did not mean abolition of the social relations of racialized labour exploitation, nor the abject conditions of life of many Black and indigenous Brazilians (Gonzalez, 2019; Ratts, 2007). Racialized and exploitative labour relations in the sugarcane industry persisted through the 20th century (Dabat and Rogers, 2017).Regional dynamics were embedded in global negotiations of race. For instance, embedded and ongoing labour in the railway and port were bound up with the compromised position of the British in relation to the trade in enslaved people. Officially opposed to slavery, British-owned companies should not, according to their own constitutions, have employed enslaved labour to build the Recife–S?o Francisco line in the 1850s (Edmundson, 2016), yet adverts in the local press sought out enslaved labour through intermediaries (Freyre, 2011: 97). John Hawkshaw recounted the racial divisions of labour embedded in the railway and river port works in Venezuela where he learnt his trade. In Aroa, there were 200 English workers, mainly Cornish miners, on between 8 and 12 pounds a month, 1000 ‘creole’ workers, controlled by the English workmen on 2 shillings and 6 pence as well as even lower paid ‘native labourers [who] were extremely active in the water, and were quite as ready to go an errand to the bottom as to lend a hand above’ (Hawkshaw, 1838: 109). Hawkshaw does not state his own payment.Hawkshaw’s account reveals anti-Spanish tendencies and a familiar set of imperialist clichés about dark continents, but also an imperialist, liberal abolitionism. This is articulated both aesthetically – ‘I really do not see on what ground persons who rejoice in a complexion, sometimes pasty, sometimes purple, sallow perhaps as saffron, white or grey, or still more nearly allied to the colour of a farthing rushlight, should arrogate to themselves a superiority of beauty over the bronzed features and flashing eyes of their southern brethren’ – and in terms of intellectual acuity – ‘that philosophy appears to me to be but shallow which supposes that, by a similar treatment, the African could not be raised to as high an eminence […as] to fill the Professor’s chair’ (Hawkshaw, 1838: 207–208). Nevertheless, while he was rhetorically opposed to slavery, he was willing to differentiate between ‘gentler’ variants in Venezuela. The themes of labour and race were no less fraught in Recife than in Aroa. As Zeiderman shows in his study of the Colombian riverboat workers, different kinds of infrastructural labour and processes of racialization are articulated to one another. Casimir de Melo describes similar divisions of labour in Recife’s infrastructure (de Melo, 2008). My concern here has not just been with the work of building infrastructure, but its design and engineering. As Lugones argues, ‘modernity and coloniality afford a complex understanding of the organization of labour. They enable us to see the fit between the thorough racialization of the division of labour and the production of knowledge’ (Lugones, 2007: 192). Such divisions operate in the labour of making (and re-making) infrastructure, but crucially, too, in that the production of knowledge was the preserve of white European men: there is an association between engineering knowledge and whiteness.6 The control over knowledge (engineering, cartography, contracting, technologies), as well as control of financial flows, was central to the maintenance of dependency.The coloniality of infrastructure (ii): Finance and genderWhile engineers got their hands into the mud, financiers and investors kept their hands clean. But the expansion of Brazilian infrastructure was contingent on British financial capital. The global flows of commodities that passed through Recife, and the infrastructure which carried and modulated those flows, were woven into the future-oriented temporalities of finance. In Giovanni Arrighi’s terms, the long 20th century was one of the ‘highest moments of finance capital’ (cited in Baucom, 2005: 27), at the end of the ‘British cycle’, when financialization of circum-Atlantic accumulation intensified. For Baucom, ‘as commodity capital is to the nineteenth century’s intensification of the seventeenth, so finance capital is to the long twentieth century’s intensification of the eighteenth’ (2005: 22). Through finance, infrastructure’s geographies are Janus-faced – they look to the past as well as to the future (Santos, 2004, 2009).In the mid-19th century, the Brazilian Empire funded investment in railways by establishing guaranteed returns on capital. British engineers were central. In 1875, John Hawkshaw addressed the British Association of Engineers as its President:The empire of Brazil also, which I have lately visited, is arriving at the conclusion, which I think not an unwise one, that the State can afford and will be benefited in the end by guaranteeing 7 per cent upon any railway that can of itself be shown to produce a net income of 4 per cent, on the assumption that the nation will be benefited at least to the extent of the difference. (Hawkshaw, 1875a: 44–45)Hawkshaw’s role in this conclusion was probably less passive than his tone suggests (Beaumont, 2015). These agreements remained in place into the 1900s, and in ‘1898, a third of the federal budget was going on railway guarantees’ (Miller, 1993: 167 and 133–136). The rates fluctuated, but building railways were incentivized by a high guaranteed return on capital invested; for first British railway in Pernambuco, the guaranteed return was 7% (de Melo, 2008: 41–43; Manchester, 1964). This allowed British railway investment to survive fluctuations in the Brazilian export economy and continue to pay dividends to shareholders (de Melo, 2008: 41–45). It meant that ‘the [railway] companies had no real stake in seeing agricultural production rise or even in contributing to regional or national development in Brazil’ (Edmundson, 2016: 3). Greenfield’s analysis of S?o Paulo’s urban infrastructure shows how a British-owned enterprise in 1870 ‘received an exclusive monopoly, and the right to receive compensation – in gold – for its physical plant and equipment should the not be renewed at the end of its twenty-five year life’ (Greenfield, 1978: 38). He concludes that the weakness of the public sector was profoundly exacerbated by ‘financial and technological dependency’: ‘while dependency did not produce the onset of public service problems in Sao Paulo, it contributed mightily to their persistence’ (Greenfield, 1978: 59). Even the British ambassador was less than charitable in the 1920s when he commented that ‘in years of prosperity [the British-owned Leopoldina railway] did little to win the favour of their public or to assist in the development of the country’ (Miller, 1993: 167). For the Recife–Sao Francisco line, by 1877 the Brazilian government ‘guaranteed ?350,000 yearly for construction although it had already paid a sum equal to the original cost of the road as a result of the seven per cent guarantee’ (Manchester, 1964: 324). The priority to build miles of track was disarticulated from the productive use of the railways: the outlay of capital was an end in itself, which guaranteed returns.The dividends from railway companies flowed into British coffers throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries (Manchester, 1964). The nature of these returns relates to debates over finance in studies of infrastructure. As Purcell, Loftus and March argue, in the case of the financialization of water infrastructure, the expansion of the capital base helps to lock in future unit water prices, ‘setting the terrain for dependable revenue sources around which interest bearing capital […] is mobilized to appropriate value from the capitalization of infrastructure’ (Purcell et al., 2020: 14). The guaranteed return on investment functioned in a somewhat similar way. The historically specific ways finance has profited from fixed capital has been central to the coloniality of infrastructure for two centuries (Cowen, 2019; Khalili, 2020). Ian Baucom draws out the allegorical and imaginary nature of financial accumulation, perennially constituted upon future returns. In centring the financialization of infrastructure we can recognize how its contemporary material configuration relies not only on past circulations, but on future ones.Following financial connections, as Deborah Cowen does in her work on the Canada Pacific Railway, can bring new relations into the frame. Infrastructure was financialized from its invention, and the relationship between engineering and finance was deep: projects selling stocks in new railway companies used the good names of engineers to drum up support among possible investors (Edmundson, 2016). Though infrastructural labour is almost exclusively male (see Zeiderman, 2020), drawing on Lugones’ interpretation of coloniality, we can see how chains of finance bring to bear particular modalities of gender. Lugones went beyond Quijano to show how colonialism produced system not only of race, but of gender and heterosexualism. There is, indeed, a strange, gendered dynamic at work in financial neo-colonialism, on which greater research is needed: ‘English girls’ were given stocks in Brazilian railways as dowries (Edmundson, 2016). This kind of shareholding was relatively common among wealthy and middle class women of various socioeconomic backgrounds in Britain in the period (Rutterford and Maltby, 2006). In Howard’s End (1910) E.M. Forster captures the role of railway finance in the reproduction of class relations in Edwardian Britain:[Mrs Munt] learnt, to her horror, that Margaret, now of age, was taking her money out of the old safe investments and putting it into Foreign Things, which always smash. Silence would have been criminal. Her own fortune was invested in Home Rails, and most ardently did she beg her niece to imitate her. “Then we should be together, dear.” Margaret, out of politeness, invested a few hundreds in the Nottingham and Derby Railway, and though the Foreign Things did admirably and the Nottingham and Derby declined with the steady dignity of which only Home Rails are capable, Mrs. Munt never ceased to rejoice, and to say, “I did manage that, at all events. When the smash comes poor Margaret will have a nest-egg to fall back upon.”Forster’s irony suggests how imperial finance breathed through social relations in Britain. It gestures towards particular colonial, gendered dynamics of stockholding: a significant proportion of shares in Northeastern railways were held by British women (de Melo, 2008: 186), including unmarried women like Mrs Munt. Lugones argued that coloniality/modernity ‘constructs gender and gender relations hegemonically’, while ‘banning […] white bourgeois women from the sphere of collective authority, from the production of knowledge, from most control over the means of production’ it nevertheless creates hierarchical systems in which race and gender are interconnected. This system requires us, as Mrs Munt’s shares show, to analyze the ‘articulation between labour, sex and the coloniality of power’ (Lugones, 2007: 206). We might consider, for instance, the relations between women of the British gentry who held shares in Foreign Things and the women whose faces we see at the front of the crowd in Veneza Americana. Their positions in relation to the infrastructure of export, and what it yields, are vastly different. Lugones shows that the aporias of liberal white feminism have deep historical and financial foundations. These articulations have material foundations dug into the landscapes of cities like Recife and London. The erection of particular systems of heterosexualism and gender oppression in the metropole were in dialectical relationship with the super-exploitation of racialized and gendered labour in the colony, and the maintenance of relations of dependency between regional bourgeoisies and global capital.While Margaret and Mrs Munt may not control ‘collective authority’, their investment shores up broader systems of colonial finance. The temporal qualities of such investments are crystallized in the permanently imagined futures, and future pasts, of Forster’s grammar: the ‘smash’ is ahead, though never realized, but when it does come, Margaret will be able to again fall back on that (unsmashed), gendered double-metaphor of both futurity and permanence: the nest-egg. Forster’s sentences fold together decline, stolidity, collapse, futurity and never ceasing expansion. The sequence of tenses is laced with the temporalities of finance itself, including the gravity defying rise of the Foreign Things. There is, here, an echo of the guaranteed returns that the colonial qualities of financialized neo-colonialism ensured. Infrastructure, not least through its financialization, was an active channel for global systems of exploitation. Here Ian Baucom’s notion of the spectral and ghostly qualities of financial capitalism across the Atlantic is relevant. It seems to recall the trapped, hazy and interstitial visions of Recife’s infrastructure in Veneza Americana. The delicate, Glasgow tea set in Recife’s railway museum has its own phantoms. Infrastructural modernity, not least in its colonial dimensions, is at once a ghost of the past and a vision of the future.ConclusionThe British role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people led to an ‘orgy of construction’, and the spidery spread of infrastructure across the British Isles as a slavery-financed web of docks, railways, canals, roads and lighthouses accelerated industrial modernity in Britain (Baucom, 2005). The story of Recife’s infrastructure is another chapter in the same narrative. Modernity in Recife is not separate from, but connected to the urban technological networks of European modernity. As ‘the architectures of contemporary trade are rooted in a longer history of imperialism, dispossession and territorial conquest’ (Chua et al., 2018: 619–620), it is vital to understand these longer histories of infrastructure. Investigating technological networks turns our attention to global flows of knowledge and power as well as of commodities. Epistemic flows intersected with infrastructural flows as British capital and knowledge re-made the urban space, ecology and landscape of Recife in relation to global forms of modernity, finance and expertise. Material connections between cities like London and Recife extended into the design and construction of infrastructures and into the ways in which space and ecologies were destroyed and remade into infrastructural landscapes of export. Infrastructures entrench colonial modernity and instantiate the international racial division of labour in the landscape. We can, therefore, enrich our understanding of their place in modernity by accounting explicitly for their coloniality.L – Invasive SpeciesWestern understanding of invasive species are settlerist, ignore Indigenous cultural values, and worsen for ecological conditions.Reo and Ogden 18 [Nicholas Reo – Environmental Studies Program and Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth; Laura Ogden – Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth; Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species; Sustainability Science; 5-4-2018; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-2021Our findings illuminate three key aspects of Anishnaabe perspectives about introduced species that contrasts with the mainstream conservation perspectives. First, for Anishnaabe, plants and animals are family members and respected as elder siblings to humans. Plants and animals move across the landscape, and mobility is not inherently good or bad, regardless of precipitating cause. Second, humans have an obligation to figure out the nature of our relationship with new arrivals, which includes careful consideration of their potential gifts and our reciprocal responsibilities. Neglecting our responsibilities for longstanding plant and animal relations is one way Anishnaabe people explain the ecological impacts of introduced species. Third, Euro-American approaches to land management, such as invasive species eradication programs, can create barriers to Anishnaabe fulfilling their responsibilities to plant and animal kin.Anishnaabe cultural values that underlie each of these findings have parallels and applicability far beyond our study area. We recognize that no two indigenous people have the same worldview. However, kinship with more than-human beings is foundational to many indigenous societies, shaping their stewardship ethics and practices. Examples range from Rarámuri kincentric ecology (Salmon 2000), the personhood of water in Māori societies (Kawharu 2000; Muru-Lanning 2016), animal relatives controlling hunting outcomes among Cree (Berkes 2012), Kluane First Nation practices of reciprocity in hunting (Nadasdy 2007), and many others. We also see important synergies outside of indigenous contexts, for instance in the more-than-human scholarship in geography (Haraway 2008; Whatmore 2002) and multi-species ethnography in anthropology (Haraway 2008; Ogden 2011; Ogden et al. 2013; Tsing 2015). We also recognize that the conservation biology community utilizes a diverse range of approaches and holds diverse perspectives about introduced species, including work that considers bi-directional impacts (Jeschke et al. 2014) and beneficial ecological outcomes of some introductions (Schlaepfer et al. 2011; Tassin and Kull 2015). The Anishnaabe understandings and perspectives presented here will be of interest to each of these intellectual communities.Addressing global environmental change requires comprehensive and proactive approaches to Earth stewardship that value and incorporate diverse knowledge systems (Clark et al. 2016; Chapin et al. 2011). Incorporating indigenous cultural values and perspectives in these efforts is valuable for multiple reasons, though we highlight two.First, indigenous peoples manage a significant percentage of the Earth’s critically important habitats, though they make up only 5% of the world’s population (Carino 2009, p 21). Based on the most conservative estimates, indigenous nations own or have customary rights to at least 20% of the Earth’s territory (Stevens 2014; Collins 2009, p 84, see Fig. 3), a percentage that exceeds the total of the world’s terrestrial protected areas (Juffe-Bignoli et al. 2014). In the United States, for example, American Indian Tribes control three times more land in the 48 contiguous states than the National Wildlife Refuge System (Schmidt and Peterson 2009). Throughout the world, indigenous lands offer high rates of biological diversity and ecologically intact habitats, for complex reasons including the legacies of displacements to lands far removed from settler interest and development (Toledo 2001; Sobrevila 2008). Recent scholarship suggests that biodiversity conservation efforts depend upon indigenous lands to ensure representation of functionally and biologically distinct forest classes (Asner et al. 2017) and protection of threatened species (Renwick et al. 2017).Second, there is an emerging consensus that indigenous knowledge is fundamental to conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services. For example, both the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ conceptual framework and Article 8 of the Convention on Biological Diversity urges the preservation and sharing of diverse scientific disciplines, stakeholders, and knowledge systems, including indigenous and local knowledge for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity (Díaz et al. 2015; CBD 2017). These recommendations stem from research findings that demonstrate a correlation between cultural and biological diversity (Pretty et al. 2009), as well as the importance of indigenous knowledge and practices in maintaining biodiversity (Gorenflo et al. 2012; Walsh et al. 2013; Ens et al. 2015). Indigenous cultural values about introduced species do not always align with dominant conservation paradigms, and these cultural values should be understood as an aspect of broader knowledge systems and ethical commitments that have proven beneficial to conserving environments and species. Johnson et al. (2016, p 3) make a compelling argument for reframing sustainability science to involve more thoroughly “Indigenous science”, recognizing that this process requires us “to think in ways that take seriously and actually respond to information, understanding and knowledges as if difference confronts us with the possibility of thinking differently”. An important step in this direction could be to take seriously and respond to indigenous knowledge and perspectives on introduced species.L – JurisdictionThe 1AC’s uniformity requires the elimination and social death of Native alternatives.Patrick Wolfe 13, writer and historian, held appointments at various universities, including La Trobe University, Harvard University, Stanford University and the Universities of Melbourne and New Orleans, “Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 3, no. 3–04, Routledge, 11/01/2013, pp. 257–279 In the contemporary Western academy, especially in the USA, the repudiation of binarism partakes of a certain sacredness. Not only are its premises unquestionable, though they certainly are. More strictly, and in keeping with Durkheimian fundamentals, the repudiation of binarism expresses membership of a collectivity that constitutes the source and origin of righteousness. Hence the heat that typically accompanies its enactment. An identification is at stake. In notable contrast to the customary wordiness of scholarly interchange, the repudiation in question is typically expressed with emphatic brevity, the charge of binarism constituting one of the more conversation-stopping items in academic theory’s inventory of reprimands. Despite the semblance of consensus, however, a dissenting positionality persists. As one who argues that settler colonialism is premised on a zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, I have regularly been accused of binarism – though not once by a Native. Why should it be that the spectre of binarism, so disturbing to nonNative sensibilities, should be less troubling to Natives? More provocatively, could it be that the repudiation of binarism represents a settler perspective? To the extent that this may be the case, the heat that the issue generates is revealing. It takes us directly to the affective dimensions of settler subjecthood, a conflictual realm that many of the essays in the first volume of this special collection opened up.1 To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all its empirical inadequacy, the concept of the frontier has the virtue of expressing the protean fact of a historical coming together of societies that had previously been mutually discrete. Prior to a certain point or points, their separateness had been unqualified. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion – a cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing the existence of an unqualified empirical binarism. The question is not, therefore, one of the ground for binarism, but one of where and when – if at all – the originary binarism became dissolved or transcended. Significantly, scholars of the doctrine of discovery have not questioned the polarity of Natives and Europeans, so we can take it that the requisite historical rupture – assuming it occurred – was postponed for some centuries in the wake of Columbus.2 A breakthrough, if such it can be called, came in the USA in the form of the Marshall court’s concept of domestic dependent nationhood, which decisively compromised the inconvenient binarism hitherto presupposed in the formalities of separate national sovereignties. In failing to distinguish adequately between Indian sovereignty and that assigned to European nations, the embryonic republican legal system had set US and Indian sovereignties in counterpoint to each other. Cherokee v. Georgia downgraded that theoretical symmetry, encompassing Indian sovereignty within and below that of the USA without jettisoning the language of statecraft.3 In so doing, the judgement adapted the horizontal vocabulary of international relations to the vertical reality of domination.4 As such, Marshall’s pluralist innovation was emphatically unilateral. It expressed conquest, which hardly undoes opposition. Despite the rhetoric of coexistence, in other words, the judgements in no way undid the binary reality. Rather, the rhetoric of coexistence served as an instrument of conquest, as the Jacksonian removals that coincided with the judgements so brutally demonstrated. Accordingly, far from a historical rupture, the Marshall episode suggests that the denial of binarism may itself constitute an instrument of conquest. Moreover, in the contemporary US academy, Marshall does not lack apologists.5 Where, then, is the rupture? The primal binarism that is maximally visible during the era of the frontier subsequently becomes less and less visible in settler-colonial discourse – which, as Lorenzo Veracini has pointed out, persistently seeks its own transcendence through declaring itself a thing of the past.6 In the wake of the frontier – and here at least I agree with Frederick Jackson Turner – something very important happens. The end of the frontier marks the end of the centuries-long process whereby Natives have been being transformed, spatially at least, from outsiders into insiders. They have become surrounded by, and contained within, settler society. Typically, this is a drawn-out process. Removal only postpones it. Sooner or later, the land hungry, the diggers of gold, the extractors of oil, the scalpers, the doggers, the sex workers, the pastoralists, the railroad men and the farmers – Turner’s whole litany of types – arrive at the boundaries of the substitute homelands to which Natives have been removed and the process starts all over again, aggravated by the fact that, the second or third time around, Natives’ ties to their land are that much less robust.7 In the wake of this protracted historical containment, with no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy.8 To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream. Without minimising the catastrophic long-term death rates that settler colonialism has brought about, therefore, we should not view the logic of elimination as solely a drive to exterminate Native human beings. Rather, as Colonel Richard Pratt was well aware, the irreconcilable Native difference that settler polities seek to eliminate can be detached from the individual, whose bare life can be reassigned within the set of settler social categories, a social death of Nativeness.9 Hence the demonisation of Indigenous collectivity in the immediately post-frontier Dawes-era USA, which persisted until John Collier devised a scheme, incorporated in the 1934 Indian Reorganisation Act, whereby tribal organisation might itself be domesticated.10 As in the case of Marshall, this strategy sought to neutralise Natives’ irreducible externality to the settler social contract. In both cases (Marshall and Collier), tribal autonomy would be diminished through incorporation rather than opposition. This situation prompts me to register an appreciative disagreement with Veracini, who has aptly pointed out – my disagreement being with his inference rather than with the point itself – that settlers bring their sovereignty with them.11 This enables Veracini to distinguish between settlers and immigrants, the latter being those who do not bring a sovereignty with them. On its own terms, this distinction seems questionable (where, for instance, does it leave White settlers of Irish descent?). Even assuming Veracini’s triadic scheme, however (settlers, immigrants and Natives), Natives remain distinct as the only bearers of sovereignties that exceed the monistic version that settlers imported with them, immigrants having abandoned or been made to forfeit their own. This awkward fact has prompted settler authorities’ repeated attempts to represent the unilateral as consensual. In the USA, from the treaty era onwards, Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives’ consent to their own dispossession. Not only is this situation inherently binary but a preoccupation common to these policy alternations, which have all sought to incorporate Natives either individually or collectively, has been the suppression of that very binarism. To this extent, the post-structuralist indictment of binarism endorses colonial policy-making. Thus it is na?ve, if not consciously complicit, for academic discourse to recapitulate multiculturalism’s claim to have subverted a binarism of White vs. the rest. Rather, multiculturalism maintains settler authorities’ historical suppression of Indigenous specificity into the so-called ‘post-racist’ era. As we have seen, frontier history raises the question of when, if at all, the colonial binarism became diluted or pluralised. Assimilationists do not doubt its persistence. Rather than when the original binarism became diluted, they want to know how it can be diluted in the present. Thus the matter goes to the core of the politics of academic representations. In deploying its administrative resources to suppress Native difference, settler discourse concedes institutional life to the very problem it seeks to eliminate. For something to be suppressed, it must first exist. By its very charter, an Office of Indian Affairs or an Aborigines Department attests to the persistence of the Native problem. During the era of the frontier, this is only to be expected. Territory, together with its Native population, remains to be conquered, so there remains an acknowledged external threat that requires institutional management. In the wake of the frontier, however, the continued need for institutional management becomes anomalous, attesting as it does to the persistence of a refractory externality that proclaims conquest not to be complete after all. To the extent that conquest remains incomplete, as Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch suggest in their chapter below, the settler state rests – or, more to the point, fails to rest – on incomplete foundations. Here, then, is an affective ground for the settler anxiety that binarism provokes: it signals incompleteness. In seeking to internalise the Native problem, the settler state seeks to complete itself. This requirement is independent of simple demographic numbers. It persists so long as uncontained alternative sovereignties, areas of incompleteness, persist within the bounds of the settler polity. To contain these alternatives – to complete its polity – settler discourse seeks to depoliticise them. To this end, a key strategy is to conflate the Native problem with internal disorders such as crime, insanity and cognate forms of delinquency or neglect. For the external to be rendered internal, in other words, the political is rendered technical. A well-known, if premature, example of this device was the transfer of the US Office of Indian Affairs from the War Department to the newly created Department of the Interior, which took place in 1849, when the US Cavalry had barely set hoof on the Great Plains.12 The transfer’s prematurity was consistent with settler expansion. It expressed a desire for completion. As such, it prefigured the rash of anti-tribal initiatives, mopping-up for operations for civilisation, which rapidly complexified US Indian affairs administration in the Dawes years following the end of the frontier. The more the Native question is problematised, however, the less it goes away. In mobilising against Native specificity, settler discourse inadvertently supplements Native agency, chronically reinscribing the frontier in domestic discourses ostensibly addressed to technical means rather than political ends. Thus abetted, the Native repressed insistently returns to haunt post-frontier settler culture.13 This confounding of attempts to negate the Native/settler binary is a phenomenon of considerable generality. I have more than once cited a striking example of assimilationist propaganda to illustrate the extension of eliminationist logic into Australian domestic discourse.14 I return to the example here for two reasons: first, for comparative purposes, to connect my earlier analysis to the cross-cultural observation (between Australia and the USA) that, in the post-frontier era, settler authorities characteristically seek to depoliticise Indigenous externality through rendering it a technical problem for civic administration and, second, for analytical purposes, to illustrate the new point that settler attempts to suppress the Indigenous binary are inherently contradictory and, as such, are more likely to sustain their object than to suppress it. In 1947, A.O. Neville, who for the preceding quarter century had served as Protector of Aborigines for the state of Western Australia, published an exculpatory memoir entitled Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in The Community. In Australian parlance of the time, ‘coloured’ referred to people whose biological ancestry encompassed both Native and settler components. The proposition that such people should be in ‘the’ (i.e. White people’s) community distinguished them from ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal people, who were classified as external to settler society. On the basis of this elementary assimilationism, Neville had presided over an official campaign of child abduction, whereby countless Indigenous children, generally of relatively light complexion, had been taken from their families without warning or pretence of consent, typically by force or by stealth, the express intention being their merger into White society. Though the post-war context in which his book appeared was dominated by news of the Nuremberg trials, with negotiations over the terms of Rapha?l Lemkin’s proposed genocide convention in full swing at the newly established United Nations, the principal problem that Neville acknowledged for his policy was not its genocidal nature. Rather, he was concerned that candidates for adopting the stolen children could be deterred by the prospect of atavistic throwbacks, whereby subsequent generations of their putatively White families might produce Black offspring. To allay this concern, Neville presented the following illustration. Duly buttressed by anthropological technicalities, this image was intended to show that, given successive admixtures of Whiteness, Aboriginal genes could be expected to recede evenly through the generations (Figure 1). 15 [[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]]For the purposes of my present argument, the key factor in this picture is its numerical limit. Aboriginality ends with the boy. To the left of him (his right), all is Whiteness. Thus the racial arithmetic (‘full’, ‘half’, etc.) is not an expression of static degrees. Rather, it is a three-generational lap count to extinction. This, then, is the settler-colonial logic of elimination in one of its discreetly technocratic post-frontier modalities. Despite the semblance of plurality in the hierarchical arrangement of the depicted subjects, their internal variety serves to maintain the fundamental cut-off separating them from the Whiteness that extends, invisible and unqualified, from the left-hand edge of the picture. Neville’s illustration was intended to vouchsafe an elementary binarism that claimed intermediate anomalies for the dominant pole. On its surface, Neville’s fractional mathematical idiom directly parallels blood quantum discourse in the USA. Moreover, as various scholars and activists have pointed out, the outcome – the attrition of Indigenous numbers – is also consistent. While this consequence of blood quantum has been well critiqued,16 the idiom’s operative terminology remains largely unexamined. Why, in particular, mathematics, and why its particular combination with blood? Posing the question thus highlights the simple fact that blood, being liquid, readily lends itself to quantification. It would be impossible to calibrate, say, culture or politics with comparable precision. As such, blood is well adapted to sustain the technical vocabulary that, as observed, supplants the political language of international relations in post-frontier settler discourse. As in the case of skull measurement, the politics are overwhelmed by the objective technicalities of numerical reasoning.17 Thus blood quantum perfectly satisfies the requirements of a political ideology. As classically formulated by Marx and Engels, ideologies have two primary characteristics: they legitimate the hegemony of a particular social group, and they do so by assimilating that hegemony to nature, which places it beyond human intervention.18 As a measurable liquid, blood straightforwardly constitutes an object of natural science, a quality that powerfully legitimates blood-quantum discourse’s furtherance of the settler-colonial logic of elimination. A related consequence of blood quantum’s mathematical phrasing is more specific to the suppression of binarism. As we saw in the Neville illustration, the proliferation of fractions can obscure the priority of the division separating Natives from settler society. In the USA, this effect is hyperelaborated in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s blood-quantum reckonings, which reflect the exigencies of tribal enrolment and titular succession from the allotment rolls that were instituted at the dawn of the twentieth century. Though terms such as ‘full-blood’, ‘mixed-blood’ and ‘half-breed’ had been common enough for most of the nineteenth century, it was not until Dawes commissioners confronted the problem of determining which Indians should be entitled to individual allotments of reservation land, and of what extent, that these casual designations came to acquire mathematical refinement. This development can be dated, with some precision, from the year before Turner published his seminal essay on the frontier.19 Writing in 1892, Indian Affairs Commissioner T.J. Morgan distinguished the rigorous quantifications that the administrative requirements of tribal allotment had necessitated from the looser usage of earlier eras.20 Back in 1856, Morgan declared, it had been enough for AttorneyGeneral Caleb Cushing simply to recommend that: ‘half-breeds (and in his opinion he seems to use the expressions half-breeds and mixed-bloods interchangeably), should be treated by the executive as Indians in all respects so long as they retain their tribal relations’. 21 So unfamiliar was his refinement, however, that Morgan proceeded immediately to ignore it, going on to refer to Chief John Ross, whose detractors never tired of pointing to his seven white great-grandparents, as ‘a Cherokee chief, who was a half-breed’. 22 In the event, Morgan’s innovation was to have disastrous consequences for the thousands of Indians who found themselves excluded (or, with political misjudgement, excluded themselves) from the Dawes rolls,23 an eliminatory effect that was subsequently compounded by the additional blood-quantum provisions that would accompany tribal enrolment under the Indian New Deal of the 1930s.24 Blood quantum furnished a post-frontier analogue to the Vanishing Indian. Thus it was not only on the surface that the BIA’s mathematical idiom resembled Neville’s Australian formula, for which it constitutes a precedent. In either case, racial arithmetic provided for the social death of Nativeness. It would be hard to find a more extreme example of numerical fractions obscuring a governing binarism than the obsessively elaborated sanguinary catalogue that was still being included in a fieldworkers’ manual put out by the Phoenix, Arizona, office of the BIA in 1984 (Figure 2): [[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]]This morbid excess of reason – which would surely stretch the point beyond credibility had it not actually been issued for official use – exemplifies the statistical overwhelming of binarism with manic clarity. While the chart conspicuously specifies, in the box outlined in bold in the bottom left-hand corner, that ‘N.I. means Non-Indian’, only one of its 593 classifications (the one at top left) is actually occupied by the designation ‘N.I.’. 25 The other 592 classifications all denote descending degrees of Indianness. The governing discrimination, in relation to which all the others are hierarchically organised, is that designating the monolithic self-sufficiency of the Non-Indian category, a classificatory black (or White) hole that systematically draws the smaller fractions of Indianness into itself. Beneath the bamboozling variety of its surface, this chart actually provides for two cardinal categories, Indian and Non-Indian. Unqualified and self-sufficient, the lone monolith in the top left-hand corner, like the Whiteness extending invisibly beyond the left-hand edge of Neville’s illustration, is a cut-off that reinscribes the frontier in contemporary bureaucratic procedure. In comparison to the Australian example, however, the category ‘Non-Indian’ is notable for its ethnic versatility. To establish themselves, the Australian colonies did not import enslaved people.26 Rather, the coerced labour put to work in Australia was initially provided by convicts, an almost exclusively White group who did not transmit their condition to succeeding generations. As a result, the racial politics of Australian settler society have developed very differently from the situation in the USA. In keeping with the aims of the White Australia Policy, Aboriginal assimilation provided for a departure from Aboriginality that was simultaneously an entry into Whiteness. The two were synonymous. Whiteness was the only destination. In the USA, by contrast, there were other destinations. In particular, the post-slavery ‘one-drop’ rule provided for Indigeneity to be overwhelmed by Blackness as well as by Whiteness – a situation that has not only been exploited by settler society but, of late, by some Native groups as well.27 Thus comparison with the US example enables us to clarify an ambiguity in settler discourse that is left unresolved in the Australian case. Native assimilation is not primarily a recruitment into Whiteness. If that were so, it would be hard to see its purpose, as supplementary White people can be acquired more easily through immigration. Rather, Native assimilation is primarily an elimination of Indigeneity. In the case of Indians being made Black under the provisions of the one-drop rule, two ethnocratic goals are achieved simultaneously: Indian elimination and White racial purity. Those who promote racist exclusions within Indian tribes might do well to reflect on this consideration. The semblance of plurality that emerges from assimilation’s extravagant mathematics is not, of course, without foundation. As groups of immigrants who have arrived under widely varying dispensations, from bondage to subsidised passage, settler societies typically evince a high degree of internal heterogeneity. Indeed, this was the focus of the first volume of this collection. But the existence of major differentiations within settler (and, for that matter, within Native) societies does not alter the binary nature of the Native/settler divide. The respective differentiations are of different orders. In this connection, it is important not to be misled by voluntarism. The opposition between Native and settler is a structural relationship rather than an effect of the will. The fact that I, for example, am an Australian settler is not a product of my individual consciousness. Rather, it is a historical condition that preceded me. Neither I nor other settlers can will our way out of it, whether we want to or not. No doubt our respective individual consciousnesses affect how each of us responds to this shared historical positionality, but they did not create it and they cannot undo it. The fact that enslaved people immigrated against their will – to cite the most compelling case for voluntarism – does not alter the structural fact that their presence, however involuntary, was part of the process of Native dispossession. White convicts also came against their will. Does this mean that their descendants are not settlers? There could hardly be a better illustration of the determinate nature of structural relations than the recent report that the Jewish Agency has been recruiting Native Peruvians from Iquitos, in the Amazonian rainforest, to bolster the population of Israeli colonies in occupied Palestine. Allegedly, the recruits in question trace their descent from a group of Mizrahi Jews from the Maghreb who migrated to the Amazon region in the nineteenth century to work in the rubber industry. More than 250 are reported to have arrived in the 1990s, with a further 100 currently having their applications considered by the Israeli Interior Ministry.28 Regardless of the outcome of the Israeli Interior Ministry’s deliberations (the Jewish Agency has reportedly been asked to supply ‘complementary’ evidence in relation to the group), the mere possibility of Natives from one country being enlisted as settlers in a different people’s country demonstrates the supra-individual, structural contingency of the designations ‘Native’ and ‘settler’. It also highlights the error of essentialising Nativeness. The state of being Native is not an inherent quality that individuals carry anywhere with them. In addition to its cultural and political dimensions, it is structural and site-specific. Circumstances permitting, there is nothing to prevent colonised Natives from one region becoming settlers in a different region (think, for instance, of Native American soldiers stationed in Hawai’i). It is very important to note that this does not entail a statement about either the historical fortunes or the moral worth of (in this case) putatively Jewish-Amerindian individuals. Regardless of the conditions that motivated their dealings with the Jewish Agency, their presence in occupied Palestine would take space and resources away from Native people, a consequence that would not be affected by the conditions they encountered on arrival. From the 1950s on, when recently arrived Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) were relegated to marginal transit camps (ma’abarot), Israel made a practice of populating frontier areas with low-status immigrant groups.29 Such divisions are, however, internal to Israeli settler society. They do not affect the subordinate groups’ participation, willing or otherwise, in the colonial process. Whatever differences may distinguish the individual motivations of stigmatised Mizrahim (or, for that matter, Peruvians) from the eliminationist fanaticism of army-backed religious settlers, they share the historical situatedness of being part of the process of Palestinian dispossession. L – Mexico – TohonoThe Plan fails to help indigenous peoples living along the Mexico border and ensures their waterways will be exploited Madrigal 19 Raquel Andrea González Madrigal is a visiting lecturer and Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) postdoctoral fellow at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on examining the U.S.-Mexico border as a settler colonial and imperial phenomenon, and the relational tensions between and among undocumented im/migrant rights and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty.? “Immigration/Migration and Settler Colonialism: Doing Critical Ethnic Studies on the U.S. - Mexico Border”Given this centrality of Native land, O’odham migrated to and from their land living in a two-village migratory system where they moved to different locations depending on the season and available food from the earth. In this, during the hot summer, they traveled to cooler mountain valleys, which was at the base of the mountains.63 They lived there until crops were planted and growing well before winter season, often making trips higher up the mountains to collected acorns, pine nuts, and edible grasses.64 When winter came, they moved into the mountains where there were wells, springs or pools of water in natural catch basins, there, hunting became the main source of food.65 Even as water was scarce in the desert, the O’odham had intimate knowledge of their land in which they were able to find other sources of water by digging in washes or other places, and harvesting sag`uaro cacti fruit pods to make wine for rainmaking ceremonies.66As a result of overlapping Spanish, Mexican and U.S. colonialism, the O’odham have encountered, survived and resisted an unrelenting number of structural changes: from 1783 when the San Xavier mission was first begin built to 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to the 1854 when Gadsden Purchase legalized the United States’s stealing of more Native land from the colonial state of Mexico to 1874 when the San Xavier reservation was established to 1917 when the Tohono O’odham reservation established and to 1937 O’odham adopted their fist constitution. 67 Today the Tohono O’odham are an apartheid and occupied Nation colonized by the U.S. and Mexican state regimes. In particularly, the Border Patrol has established checkpoints, detention centers and surveillance mechanisms encircled throughout their land and reservation. As the international boundary dissects and bisects their land, the U.S. and Mexico governments have proposed construction projects for waste and chemical dumps on site, including U.S. initiatives for Air Force bases, anti-immigration laws, and Arizonan municipal and property ordinances over their mountain ranges and water wells. Where once O’odham were villagers who maintained close-knit kinship systems through economic and ceremonial practices that required the freedom of movement to variously dispersed regions and sacred sites, 68 now they are caught in the crossfires of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands where they mistaken as “illegal aliens” and are subjected to harassment, detainment, and deportation by Border Patrol. In the gravity of this, Indigenous sovereignty for the Tohono O’odham is historically contingent in their him’dag – the O’odham way of life. 69 O’odham sovereignty is first and foremost land based; it is made up of their deep relations and connections to the earth as it requires freedom, movement and mobility precisely on these terms of kinship, economic, and ceremonial relations across their nation. In this, the Tohono O’odham people are not immobile and bisected, they are itinerant, regional, and evasive of boundaries, including reservation boundaries and wish to remain so. L – Mexican InstabilityThe notion of Mexico as a failing state is the West’s way of promoting failed Western statecraft which legitimizes the perpetuation of the imperialist Western state.Helland and Borg 13 [Leonardo Figueroa Helland – Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management, works at the intersection of diverse critical paradigms to study how indigenous knowledges combine with various transformative approaches to address environmental challenges, climate crises and social injustices; Stefan Borg – works at the Department of Economic History and International Relations at Stockholm University, "The Lure of State Failure"; International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Volume 16, 2014 - Issue 6: Law and Lawlessness in the Indian Ocean; 5-13-2013; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-13-2021This article critiques state failure discourses from a poststructural and postcolonial perspective. We argue that these discourses are wedded to Euro-Western notions of the state and that, therefore, they fail to articulate other modes of political community to which we seek to open world political theory. First, we deconstruct prevalent state failure discourses to unearth the problematic character of their underlying commitments to a Eurocentric state. Second, we engage the way such discourses are deployed in the Failed States Index. Third, we propose an alternative account of why the Western model of the state has failed, explaining how the (neo)colonialist insistence on the propagation on this model enables the proliferation of violence conventionally attributed to state failure. Finally, we seek to open the notion of state failure to alternative forms of community obscured by the reification of the Western model of statecraft as the universal mode of political life.In the 1990s, the notion of state failure emerged atop the agenda in a West preoccupied with maintaining order in the new unipolar world. The U.S-led so-called war on terrorism provided further impetus since it was often held that failed states provided breeding ground for terrorism. Lately the Pentagon warned that even neighboring Mexico was becoming a ‘failed state’ (Kurtzman 2009). Milliken and Krause (2003) note two reasons for the interest in state failure. First, it is deemed a threat to the order of contemporary global politics and to the powers dependent upon it like states, international organizations, and corporations. Second, the humanitarian consequences allegedly resulting from state failure are emphasized. Alleged failed states fail not only to maintain domestic order but also to provide infrastructures for peace-keepers and various NGOs. It is therefore unsurprising that the notion of state failure lends itself to ‘crossing the academic-policy divide’ (Tickner 2008) and has become exemplary of ‘policy-relevant’ scholarship (e.g. Rotberg 2003, 2004). However, the notion of state failure has received scant attention from critical perspectives (exceptions include Bilgin and Morton 2002; Hill 2005; Majikian 2008).This article seeks to contribute to a critical understanding of state failure. We contend that predominant state failure discourses are wedded to a Western notion of the state (cf., Hill 2005) and fail to recognize other modes of political life. To substantiate and draw out the implications of this contention, we undertake two steps. First, we deconstruct current state failure discourse. Second, we offer an alternative theorization of state failure drawing on a postcolonial understanding of what occurs in places where state failure purportedly happens. Finally, we gesture towards the promising possibilities resulting from ceasing to reify the Western model of the state as the universal mode of political life.The deconstructive phase proceeds thus. We start by analyzing some paradigmatic state failure texts, focusing on the Harvard University Failed States Project. State failure discourses foster the belief that if the modern state fails violent anarchy necessarily ensues. Such discourses foreclose all alternatives beyond a narrow choice between the modern Western state and violent anarchy. This is not a genuine choice but a dualistic framing that seduces audiences into desiring further advances from the modern Western state. State failure discourses rehearse a traditional Hobbesian subtext where a brutal state of nature serves as the constant legitimizing narrative for the perpetuation of the modern Western state before its subjects and for its (neo)colonial transplantation to the rest of the globe. The scene of anarchic brutality is largely externalized to the ‘Third World’ but traces of it remain latent on the ‘inside’ as specters of what threatens to return if dwellers of more ‘stable’ pastures fail to reenact the modern state. And while state failure is portrayed as occurring in distant places, globalization now threatens to propagate instabilities that could reignite the original anarchy haunting every state from within.State failure discourses can only work by universalizing and normalizing the construct of an interstate order made up of bounded sovereign states. The construct of a universalized and normalized Westphalia depends on the argument that, if state failure occurs, it must be attributed to the faults of particular countries; yet a deconstructive reading of the Failed States Index (FSI) reveals that its widespread evidence of state failure worldwide rather suggests the general failure of the attempts to universalize and normalize the model of the Western sovereign state. The FSI shows that the state is always everywhere at risk of failing, and that this ‘state’ as one particular modality of political life seems to succeed almost only in predominantly Euro-Westernized regions. Yet, by constantly invoking the specter of violent anarchy, the FSI turns its own mounting evidence of global state failure from a proof of the inadequacy of one particular model of political life (the modern Western ‘state’) into the justification for its perpetual universalization. The universalization of the Western ‘state’ is henceforth postulated as the ultimate, yet ultimately unfulfillable, global desideratum, to which the rest of the world must permanently play catch up. We unravel the discursive infrastructures that attempt to turn the modern Western state into the only alternative for organizing life and the ultimate global desideratum.We then propose an alternative account of the violence occurring where the ‘state’ is said to be ‘failing’. We propose that it is not the failure to re-enact the modern Western state in postcolonial settings that causes violence. Rather, the desire for such a state is complicit in unleashing violence. This desire is what state failure discourses stimulate. As is well known, colonial powers drew arbitrary boundaries, ignoring organic political modes, and complexities of colonial and postcolonial power relations (Badie 2000; Roldan and Caruso 2007). Henceforth, postcolonial locations became sites for two mutually reinforcing triggers of violence stemming from the desire for the state. On the one hand, the local and global powers conferred to those who successfully claim to embody the ‘state’ trigger fierce struggles over the appropriation of sovereignty as the essence of statehood. On the other hand, violence is triggered by the fear of failing to occupy the central position, instead becoming subject to others who do. To conclude, we argue that the general failure of the desire to globalize and perpetuate the modern Western state need not be catastrophic. Rather, it enables us to create alternative political worlds whose imagination is foreclosed by a commitment to the bounded sovereign state.Discourse of the Mexican under siege by cartels instantiates waves of racialized colonialism by positioning Mexico as culturally inferior and in need of development – these representations undergird violent neoliberal apparatuses which makes structural violence and Mexican instability inevitable.Carlos 14 [Alfredo Carlos – PhD Candidate in Political Science at UC Irvine, former Q. A. Shaw McKean, Jr. Fellow with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University; March 2014; “Mexico “Under Siege”: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?”; Latin American Perspectives Volume 41 Number 2] DL 7-13-2021According to major U.S. newspapers and policy makers, Mexico is currently waging a “war on drugs.” Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (quoted in Dibble, 2010) described the situation as “starting to resemble an insurgency” and compared it to Colombia’s crisis some two decades earlier. The Los Angeles Times (February 19, 2009) sponsored a conference with the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute at which it suggested that Mexico is “under siege” by drug cartels. Regular updates on the drug war appear in U.S. newspapers. For instance, on January 20, 2010, the Associated Press ran a story entitled “7 Bodies Linked to Drug Cartels Found in Mexico”; on March 19, CNN had one entitled “Drug Criminals Block Roads in Mexico”; and on June 23 the New York Daily News announced, “Mexican Drug Violence Nears Bloodiest Month, President Felipe Calderon Pleads for Country’s Support.” A simple Google News search will show that Mexican drugs, drug-related violence, and antidrug efforts are front and center in Mexico and the United States and have become the primary issue between the two countries. Drug-related violence is not, however, Mexico’s foremost problem, and the reporting on it obscures the more serious and immediate economic and social problems it faces. More important, it masks their origin in U.S. economic foreign policy while providing justification for continued and future U.S. paternalism and domination. The media and the government in the United States have a long history of constructing and perpetuating this type of discourse about Mexico. It is linked to discourses surrounding the colonization of the Americas, the white man’s burden, the extermination of the native population, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, racial segregation in the United States, and prejudice against immigrants. While the current discourse regarding Mexico is different in that Mexicans themselves are concerned about what is going on, the way it is shaped and manipulated by the media reflects the earlier ones. Gilbert Gonzalez (2004: 7) suggests that the current understandings and representations of Mexico date back to the 1800s, when “U.S. capital interests sought to penetrate Mexico.” The original discourse was expressly linked to economic processes, and the same is true of the current drug-related violence story. In that regard discourse can be and in this case is extremely powerful. Meta-Narratives and Dominant Discourses Michel Foucault (1972–1977: 120) argues that “discourse serves to make possible a whole series of interventions, tactical and positive interventions of surveillance, circulation, control and so forth.” Discourses generate knowledge and “truth,” giving those who speak this “truth” social, cultural, and even political power. This power “produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault, 1979: 194). For Foucault (1972–1977: 119), “what makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is . . . that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” In essence, power produces discourse that justifies, legitimates, and increases it. Similarly, Edward Said (1994: 14), speaking in reference to literary discourse, says that literature as a cultural form is not just about literature. It is not autonomous; rather, it is about history and politics. He says that literature supports, elaborates, and consolidates the practices of empire. Television, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, advertisements, and the Internet all help construct stories, creating cultures of “us” that differentiate us from “them” (Said, 1994: xiii). They all elaborate and consolidate the practices of empire in multiple overlapping discourses from which a dominant discourse emerges. Dominant discourses are constructed and perpetuated for particular reasons. As Kevin Dunn (2003: 6) points out, representations have very precise political consequences. They either legitimize or delegitimize power, depending on what they are and about whom (Said, 1994: 16). Said asserts that a narrative emerges that separates what is nonwhite, non-Western, and non-Judeo/Christian from the acceptable Western ethos as a justification for imperialism and the resulting policies and practices and argues that discourse is manipulated in the struggle for dominance (36). Discourses are advanced in the interest of exerting power over others; they tell a story that provides a justification for action. For Said, there is always an intention or will to use power and therefore to perpetuate some discourses at the expense of others. It is this intentionality that makes them dangerous and powerful. As Roxanne Doty (1996: 2) suggests, through repetition they become “regimes of truth and knowledge.” They do not actually constitute truth but become accepted as such through discursive practices, which put into circulation representations that are taken as truth. Dominant discourses, meta-narratives (master frames that are often unquestioned [see Klotz and Lynch, 2007]), and cultural representations are important because they construct “realities” that are taken seriously and acted upon. Cecelia Lynch (1999: 13) asserts that “dominant narratives do ‘work’ even when they lack sufficient empirical evidence, to the degree that their conceptual foundations call upon or validate norms that are deemed intersubjectively legitimate.” They establish unquestioned “truths” and thus provide justification for those with power to act “accordingly.” They allow the production of specific relations of power. Powerful social actors are in a prime position to construct and perpetuate discourses that legitimize the policies they seek to establish. Narrative interpretations don’t arise out of thin air; they must be constantly articulated, promoted, legitimized, reproduced, and changed by actual people (Lynch, 1999). Social actors with this kind of power do this by what Doty (1996) calls self-definition by the “other.” Said (1994: 52) suggests that the formation of cultural identities can only be understood contrapuntally—that an identity cannot exist without an array of opposites. Western1 powers, including the United States, have maintained hegemony by establishing the “other”: North vs. South, core vs. periphery, white vs. native, and civilized vs. uncivilized are identities that have provided justifications for the white man’s civilizing mission and have created the myth of a benevolent imperialism (Doty, 1996: 11; Said, 1994: 51). The historical construction of this “other”’ identity produces current events and policies (Dunn, 2003). Through constant repetition, a racialized identity of the non-American, barbaric “other” is constructed, along with a U.S. identity considered civilized and democratic despite its engagement in the oppression, exploitation, and brutalization of that “other.” Consequently, dominant discourses and meta-narratives provide a veil for “imperial encounters,” turning them into missions of salvation rather than conquests or, in Mexico’s case, economic control (Doty, 1996). Dunn (2003: 174) suggests that dominant discourses legitimize and authorize specific political actions, particularly economic ones. L – National ParksThe Affirmative ignores the history of the national parks- they once belonged to the Native Americans but were violently stolen from themTreuer 2021 David Treuer is the author of?The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. “RETURN THE NATIONAL PARKS TO THE TRIBES” Accessed 7/15/21When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for battle. While the Miwok hid, the militiamen sought to starve them into submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley’s air with the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe’s own campfires to set the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia’s campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.) The parks were intended to be natural cathedrals: protected landscapes where people could worship the sublime. They offer Americans the thrill of looking back over their shoulder at a world without humans or technology. Many visit them to find something that exists outside or beyond us, to experience an awesome sense of scale, to contemplate our smallness and our ephemerality. It was for this reason that John Muir, the father of modern conservationism, advocated for the parks’ creation.More than a century ago,?in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because?American Indians had strategically burned them?to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.The national parks are sometimes called “America’s best idea,” and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we’d signed under duress. When describing the simultaneous creation of the parks and Native American reservations, the Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk noted darkly that the United States “made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller.”L – OilFocus on quick, technical fixes shifts the realm of possibilities that abandons the possibility of decolonization.Red Nation 21 (THE RED NATION?is dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism. They center Native political agendas and struggles through direct action, advocacy, mobilization, and education. They are a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating for Native liberation, 5-14-2021, "Excerpt," YES! Magazine, ; AKIM)In this era of catastrophic climate change, why is it easier for some to imagine the end of fossil fuels than settler colonialism? To imagine green economies, carbon-free wind and solar energy, and electric, bullet-train utopias but not the return of Indigenous lands? Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world—a zombie apocalypse—than the end of capitalism? It’s not an either/or scenario. Ending settler colonialism and capitalism?and?returning Indigenous lands are all possible—and necessary.The question of restoring Indigenous land to Indigenous people is thoroughly political, which means the theft of it was—and is—not inevitable or beyond our current capacities to resolve. The same goes for Black reparations, ending the hardening of the US border, defunding US imperialism, and stopping the continued exploitation of resources and labor in the Global South by countries up north. “The issue is that accumulation-based societies don’t like the answers we come up with because they are not quick technological fixes, they are not easy,” Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has said.Fifty years ago, decolonization—nations freeing themselves from colonial rule—and land reform inspired global visions for a socialist future, advancing the class struggle further than it has ever gone before by raising the living standards of billions in the Global South. Some Western socialists seem to have abandoned that future in favor of technological pipe dreams like mining asteroids, gene editing, and synthetic meat, without addressing the real problem of overconsumption in the Global North, which is directly enabled by the dispossession of Indigenous and Black life and imperial wars in the Global South. We need a revolution of values that re-centers relationships to one another and the Earth over profits.Anti-ImperialismThe geopolitical relationship countries like the United States have with the rest of the world is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism. Imperial projects build upon settler colonial ones. For the last 20 years, we’ve seen the United States destroy countries and communities in a quest for oil. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was for oil. Cultural treasures from one of the oldest civilizations on the planet were destroyed in the first days of the invasion, but the US military and its mercenary contractors chose to guard oil infrastructure. US oil companies secured contracts with the provisional government the US installed after it deposed Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. Those who recognized the US’ geopolitical motivation for the war soon called for “energy independence” in the United States instead of anti-imperialism. Consequently, Republicans and Democrats spent much of the 2000s promoting oil and gas expansion in the United States and Canada, and this has translated into new oil and gas production on stolen Indigenous lands.L – PersonhoodThe ecocentric justification for personhood decreases Indigenous sovereignty, places Western ideals of property rights in the forefront, and hurts the environment.Hansche and Meisch 21 [M. Hansche – Works at International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities; S. Meisch – Works at Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities; "55. Rights for rivers"; Justice and food security in a changing climate; 6-13-2021; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-15-2021A growing global movement demands rights for non-human nature in general and rivers in particular (Ben?hr and Lynch, 2018; Chapron et al., 2019; Strang, 2020a,b; Wilson and Lee, 2019). Currently, some countries assign rivers the status of legal person (cf. Chapron et al., 2019). The most prominent case is the Whanganui River in New Zealand. In Colombia, the Supreme Court ruled that the Rio Atrato has legal rights. In Ecuador and Bolivia, nature and thus rivers have the status of legal persons, while in Bangladesh all rivers enjoy such a status. In India, the attempt to grant rights to rivers was stopped by the Supreme Court.Calls to grant rivers a legal status usually refer on two different arguments. First, ‘ecocentric perspectives’ argue for a greater protection of rivers from harmful human interventions. Second, by drawing on concepts of ‘corrective justice’ (on concepts of justice, cf. Kalfagianni and Meisch, 2020), other perspectives call for the participation of indigenous peoples in issues concerning them and their livelihoods. In the past, they and their concerns have generally been marginalised in many settler societies (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018; Strang, 2020b). Both arguments are often mentioned together. However, there are inherent contradictions between both lines of argumentation, which, in addition, become manifest in practical contexts of nature use and conservation (e.g. Bremer and Funtowicz, 2015; Yates et al., 2017).Despite these contradictions, advocates of rights for rivers often seem evasive or ambivalent when it comes to ethical justifications, as can be seen quite well in Chapron et al. (2019: 1392): ‘Whether nature has moral rights is likely to remain debated, but nature clearly can have legal rights […] Although moral considerations often influence the development of legal rights (and vice versa), legal rights need not have a moral basis. The law can give rights to all kinds of entities if it finds reason to do so.’In this paper, we believe it is necessary to address these normative challenges. First, we address inherent tension between normative justifications of rights for rivers. Subsequently, we discuss a prominent case, the Whanganui River (New Zealand), and speculate how the legal personhood of a river might affect Methodology and further challenges to environmental ethics Justice and food security in a changing climate 357 agriculture and food production. This case, we argue concludingly, raises challenging questions for further research in applied ethics.The dilemma of ecocentricmAdvocates of rights for rivers refer to various ecocentric positions (Chapron et al., 2019; Strang, 2020a,b; Wilson and Lee, 2019), drawing on descriptions grounded in the critical social science analysis, according to which Western societies ‘entrenched, over centuries, a dualistic worldview in which (feminised) Nature is ‘other’ to (masculinised) human Culture’ (Strang, 2020b: 115). By contrast, they call for attributing ‘Nature’ an ‘intrinsic value’ (Chapron et al., 2019: 1392). In this way, river rights advocates embrace ecocentric arguments (on ecocentrism, cf. Dierks, 2016; Eser and Potthast, 1999). This environmental ethical approach rejects anthropocentric approaches, which it accuses of an instrumental stance to nature. In contrast, ecocentrists advocate a nature-centred ethics and argue for the moral primacy of holistic entities – such as species or ecosystems – over individual beings. Thus, ecocentrism even transcends other non-anthropocentric approaches such as sentientism and biocentrism that seek to give direct moral consideration to individual entities (such as animals or plants). Philosophers associated with this position are Aldo Leopold or J. Baird Callicott.Ecocentrism has also been subject to criticism. Two aspects are directly relevant to the debate of rights for rivers. The first concerns the epistemological problem of determining the moral subject. The second relates to the place of humans in ecocentric approaches. From both, tensions can arise, in theory and practice, between ecocentric rationales and those seeking to give indigenous communities greater say over their own affairs.First, as ecosystems are mental constructs, questions about systemic boundaries emerge. Ecosystems are neither stable, nor is it an undisputable given where a system ends and another begins. This creates the challenge of determining what a system (e.g. a river) is that should merit intrinsic value and, thus, (legal) rights. River rights advocates seem more concerned with what rights rivers should have than with how exactly to delineate river systems. The challenge becomes apparent by considering the following description: ‘Rivers change progressively over their course from headwaters to mouth, from steep streams that are narrow and turbulent to wider, deeper, often meandering channels.’ (Middleton, 2012). Rivers are dynamic systems. So, the question arises as to what belongs to a river: its catchment area? Its banks? Tributaries? Floodplains? The animals and plants living in it? Certain amounts of rainfall? Feeding glaciers? What happens when a river changes its course? These questions are only few examples – and depending on the respective answers, it soon becomes clear how rights collisions might arise. So, clarifying what is meant by river is not trivial, neither in scientific nor in ethical terms. After all, the scientific criteria of what constitutes the river that should receive rights are based on value judgments. Such judgments need to be made transparent and ethically justified.Second, ecocentrism does not ascribe any special or even higher value to humans within entities such as ecosystems. Various ecocentric positions even have a reputation of being misanthropic (cf. Dierks, 2016), that is, of seeing humans as a disruptive element, to be removed if necessary. This perspective has, in itself, been criticised as standing, almost inevitably, in contrast to a human rights regime. In addition, some ecocentric approaches advocate positions often called ‘ecototalitarianism’ or ‘ecofascism’. Obviously, the use of such labels is highly questionable. What becomes evident, though, is that holistic positions assigning a higher value to a system than to individuals must provoke considerable ethical inquiries – and rightly so.In the case of rights for rivers ecocentric positions risk running into a dilemma. In fact, a major driver for introducing river rights is to give indigenous peoples a greater say in the management of their livelihoods. Paradoxically, an ecocentric interpretation of river rights could make this more difficult if ‘Nature’ were to be protected from ‘Humans’ (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018).Challenges also arise in practice, as environmental and conservation policies are often driven by ecocentric intuitions (Bremer and Funtowicz, 2015; Yates et al., 2017). From a philosophical perspective, one can of course ask to what extent these practical contexts are really based on ethical ecocentrism. However, they do share the conviction that ecosystems need to be protected from humans. In addition, there is the scientific pedigree of ecocentrism and the conviction that ecologists, conservationists, and other scientific disciplines know best how to deal with and protect ecosystems such as river or water systems. Thus, even when indigenous (as well as other local) communities are involved in resource management, the difficulty arises that their knowledge and values are often discounted as unscientific and therefore as less relevant (Bremer and Funtowicz, 2015; Yates et al., 2017).The case of Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) in New ZealandAbove, we have drawn attention to the danger of inherent contradictions in the justification of rights for rivers. Below, we look at the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) on the Northern Island of New Zealand which is the most prominent and elaborated case of a legal personhood of a river and also the one attracting the most academic interest so far. Hence, the example can indicate in what ways the above-mentioned contradictions actually arise in practice.Legal and political provisionsIn March 2017, Te Awa Tupua was granted the status of a legal person in the ‘Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, 2017’. This provides the river with some legal rights, including a right to ‘enter […] contracts, own [..] property, [or] sue and be sued in court’ (O’Donnell et al., 2020: 409; Talbot-Jones and Bennett, 2019: 3). In other words, such a step gives the river the legal tools to protect itself, and ‘expands legal systems to include consideration of the needs and rights of nature’ (O’Donnell, 2018). Conceptually, this was regarded as a step to overcoming anthropocentric understandings of law, to recognising nature as more than just a factor for benefits to humans and to accounting legally for damage done to the environment (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). Yet, a closer look reveals that such ecocentric arguments were less important for initiating the Te Awa Tupua Act. Instead, the ethical arguments justifying the status of Te Awa Tupua as a legal person are rather based on socio-ethical considerations. The Act especially refers to the indigenous law and worldviews of the local Maori, the Whanganui iwi. In their understanding, the river and the iwi are the same, reflecting the physical and metaphysical importance of the river to the iwi – hence, contradicting Western legal understanding of nature as a dichotomous counterpart to the human (O’Donnell, 2018). Consequently, recognising Te Awa Tupua as a legal person, primarily reflects the increasing acceptance of indigenous worldviews within the legal system rather than ecological or conservationist ambitions. This becomes evident as the Act contains an extensive part of apology and acknowledgements towards the Maori iwi (Te Awa Tupua Act, 2017), classifying the Act as a case of corrective ‘and’ distributive justice (Kalfagianni and Meisch, 2020). Other international cases of rights for rivers support this observation by showing the strong role of indigenous thought in the drafting and implementation of such acts (O’Donnell et al., 2020).The legal person of Te Awa Tupua is defined by its non-physical and cultural components as well as its physical components as ‘the space of land that the waters of the Whanganui river cover at its fullest flow without overtopping its banks and […] the subsoil, the plants attached to the bed, the space occupied by the water, and the airspace above the water’ (Te Awa Tupua Act, 2017: Part 1, Section 7). So, the Act is basically about a property right, i.e. the river owns itself. However, there are conceptual path dependencies inbuilt in this construction. First, there is a long tradition in the Anglo-Saxon legal systems Methodology and further challenges to environmental ethics Justice and food security in a changing climate 359 of dealing with property issues. It is now applied to a river – thus, creating interesting regulations. For instance, the river owns the airspace above its surface. One could speculate over potential hydrological or spiritual reasons for that; however, it is a feature of Anglo-Saxon property rights regimes that a property holder also owns the air column above its property. Second, the law refers to former Crown property and not to the entire river. So, strictly speaking, the river does not belong to itself outright.The Act created the Te Pou Tupua as guardian ‘required to act and speak to the benefit of the river’s health and well-being’ (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). This legal body consists of one representative of the iwi and one of the Crown (Te Awa Tupua Act, 2017: Part 2, Section 3). Consequently, Te Pou Tupua plays a central role as it legally represents the river, allowing to practically appeal to the rights given to the river. Additionally, the Act creates different collaboration groups and committees for the development of the river management. This includes Te Kopuka, a forum of various stakeholders, including representatives of the iwi, governments, business, and others. They discuss and develop a concept for Te Awa Tupua regarding all its hydrological and hydro-social meanings (Kauffman and Martin, 2018: 7), recognising the importance of environmental protection but also other aspects of public interest like the usage for hydroelectricity (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018: 37; O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018; Talbot-Jones and Bennett, 2019: 3). Next to Maori traditions, this forum is meant to bring together different interest groups to ensure environmental protection, while still recognising and mediating between the different interests of fields such as economy, health, and ecology (Kang, 2019: 643-644).Relevance for food productionHow then does recognising a river as a legal person affect sectors such as agriculture and food production that are highly dependent on water? As developments in New Zealand are quite recent, we cannot tell much for certain. From the legal provisions, some educated guesses are possible. The legal status of Te Awa Tupua hardly touches agriculture and food production. For instance, the use of water (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018: 40) as well as aquatic life (Talbot-Jones and Bennett, 2019: 3) are little affected by the Act, making fishery generally possible. While direct restrictions for food production are unlikely, they might occur indirectly when a certain consumption by the food sector affects other, protected elements of the river or Te Tou Tupua (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018: 37). Despite potential limitations, it appears more likely that holistic river management concepts and cooperation between different stakeholders might incentivise, or even demand more sustainable approaches to food production.ConclusionIn our paper, we looked at the phenomenon of rights for rivers. Such rights are demanded by a global movement hoping to stop the destruction of river systems and to give indigenous peoples a greater say in determining their own livelihoods. We first showed that epistemological and ethical challenges arise. They result from tensions between justifications referring to ecocentrism and corrective justice. In the worst case, they would stand at odds to each other. Second, we looked at the most prominent case of a right for rivers. It turned out that the creation a legal personhood for the Whanganui River was not motivated by environmental, but social ethics. Since the iwi see themselves as part of the river, the right to the river could not rest with them but had to rest with the river. Respecting iwi cosmology, the ‘Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act’ settled the epistemological issue of what the river is. It also created institutions of joint management. Meanwhile, it also turned out that, and how, the Act merges indigenous worldviews with Anglo-Saxon legal traditions (especially concerning property rights) (Salmond, 2014). For the future, it remains to be seen how ecocentric and indigenous framing interact with each other and how they are dealt with in specific situations.If the current trend gathers momentum, the discussion on rights for rivers might become an object to study normative contradictions and tensions between different public policies. Cases in other countries reveal the complex interplays between right for rivers (or nature) and environmental protection legislations. Often environmental protection could well be possible even without river rights if existing conservation laws would be respected. For instance, the first successful case of a lawsuit concerning rights for nature, the case of Vilcabamba river in Ecuador, was only necessary because local governments had previously ignored existing environmental law (Corte Provincial de Justicia de Loja, 2011). In addition, rights for rivers ‘may well create more problems than it solves’ (O’Donnell, 2018) by shifting the focus from a social responsibility to protect the environment to a self-responsibility of nature (Eckstein et al., 2019: 811) or by creating the image of environment and humans competing over water (O’Donnell, 2018), thus ‘undermin[ing] the cultural narratives that support environmental protection’ (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2018: 41). Hence, without considering appropriate cultural and social preconditions, rights for rivers could pose a threat to previous achievements in environmental protection. Since agriculture and food production are major water consumers, one of the key issues will be how much water they use and in what ways.Personhood goes hand-in-hand with discourses of climate emergency which combine to form environmental colonialism.O’Donnell et al 20 [Erin O'Donnell – water law and policy specialist, focusing on water markets, environmental flows, and water governance, PhD in water-related studies; Anne Poelina – adjunct senior research fellow at Notre Dame; Alessandro Pelizzon - Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University, PhD focused on native title and legal pluralism; Cristy Clark – research focuses on legal geography, the commons, and the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism and the environment, PhD; "Stop Burying the Lede: The Essential Role of Indigenous Law(s) in Creating Rights of Nature"; Transnational Environmental Law; November 2020; Accessible Online at DOI:10.1017/S2047102520000242] DL 7-15-2021Furthermore, a number of authors alert us to the risk that the discourse of ‘climate crisis’, and specifically the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’, open the door for a state of environmental exception, with the ensuing suspension of democratic protocols and hostility towards the active and participatory role of all humans in finding a collective way out of this crisis.53 This risk is particularly acute when it comes to Indigenous peoples, and is already apparent when proponents of rights of Nature seek to manage humans out of Nature in order to protect its wilderness values,54 thus running the risk of environmental colonialism.55 Environmental colonialism is here characterized as the imposition of a culturally specific construction of ‘nature’, as well as a set of related normative and ethical assumptions, by those in a position of dominance upon those who are in a subordinate power relationship. In Foucauldian terms, Michael Cepek defines such an operation of disciplinary power as ‘environmentality’.56Finally, the uneven distribution of sovereign power between internationally recognized nation states and Indigenous peoples whose ancestral territories are located within the boundaries of those colonial nation states exerts subtle, yet constant, pressure towards a reductive appraisal of the ontological plurality of non-colonial traditional worldviews.57 The result is a plethora of often unquestioned ontological and epistemological assumptions about the very concept of ‘nature’ on the part of all interlocutors (sometimes including Indigenous peoples who lack the necessary sovereign power to counter such assumptions), with the ontologically violent result of reducing Indigenous ideas about nature and human interactions with the non-human world to a globally familiar, yet extremely reductive, dominant paradigm.58 As Nopera Dennis-McCarthy argues, ‘[t]here is an inherent tension between western and Indigenous legal traditions. This tension arises from the divergent worldviews propounded by either normative system, which are often difficult to reconcile’.59It is also important to note that the concept of Indigeneity is complex and not necessarily the appropriate lens through which to identify peoples and law and custom in all cases. For example, in former colonial countries such as India and Bangladesh, Indigeneity may be a less relevant criterion for ecological jurisprudence than the interests of local people who continue to embed a responsibility requirement into land and water management. The critical issue is one of interdependence, and an ethic of land management centred on responsibility and stewardship or guardianship.60Therefore, we argue that the emergence of an ecological jurisprudence currently faces four challenges: firstly, acknowledging the role of Indigenous peoples as leaders in the movement to create rights of Nature (while also acknowledging that not all Indigenous peoples support or accept rights of Nature); secondly, acknowledging the role of Indigenous laws in shaping a truly universal – and thus inherently intercultural – ecological jurisprudence, and explicitly reflecting this role within rights of Nature; thirdly, moving beyond traditional concepts of weak legal pluralism61 by seeking recognition of rights of Nature reforms in Indigenous law by Indigenous peoples as a measure of validity for ecological jurisprudence; and, fourthly, relatedly and potentially the most challenging, reconceptualizing law's nature in order to overturn a ‘key feature of western thought since the Enlightenment, the disjunction between nature and culture’.62 In Section 3 we examine how rights of Nature laws have been addressing these four challenges to date.Personhood causes the extinction of rivers and undermines the rights of Indigenous people because it is grounded in Western ideology.O’Donnell 21 [Erin O’Donnell – Professor at Melbourne Law School; "Rivers as living beings: rights in law, but no rights to water?"; Griffith Law Review; 4-1-2021; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-16-2021Rivers and wetlands are some of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.1 Since 2017, some of the most beloved and iconic rivers and lakes in the world have been recognised in law as legal persons and/or living entities, with a range of legal rights and protections.2 These profound legal changes allow the law to ‘see’ complex systems as legal subjects, and may enable us to harness the power of environmental law to prevent their future extinction. But does the recognition of rivers in law as legal persons or living beings actually help to save them?The recognition of complex, landscape scale systems as legal and/or living beings represents one of the biggest structural changes in environmental law in decades. UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd, described legal rights of nature as a ‘legal revolution’ that could help to level the playing field between humans and nature.3 More profoundly, the recognition of rivers legal and/or living beings is also often grounded in Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies and laws, which can lead to more pluralist environmental laws as well as the opportunity to transform the relationship between people and rivers in colonial settler states.4 However, the new legal frameworks which give rivers rights also tend to deny the new river beings the right to control their own lifeblood: the water which flows between their banks.Water extraction for drinking, irrigation, mining, and energy generation is a key driver of poor river health,5 but the new governance arrangements for the living rivers have all left the existing rights to use water from the river in place. Even worse, recognition of rivers as legal persons can entrench an adversarial narrative, in which our willingness to protect rivers is eroded, and replaced by a zero-sum, transactional relationship in which there are clear winners and losers.6 Rather than empowering rivers in law to resist their own existential threats, these new legal arrangements may ultimately make it even more difficult to prevent the degradation and loss of rivers.In this paper, I begin by examining the multitude of ways in which rivers are recognised as legal rights holders or living entities in law. These differences establish the legal rights and powers of the rivers, as well as the foundation for the next phase of the human relationship with rivers. The UN Secretary General noted in 2019 that the emerging ‘Earth-centred paradigm [of environmental law] guided by the oldest jurisprudential traditions of humankind is inherently pluralistic’, 7 and when examining the question of rivers as living beings and legal persons, a pluralist perspective is essential to overcome the shortcomings of Western legal theories of personhood, which still struggle to recognise that natural entities can be legal persons.8 More profoundly, the recognition of rivers, lakes, mountains, animals, and all of nature as legal subjects is often the result of Western legal frameworks adopting and translating concepts from the laws of Indigenous peoples. However, without deep, respectful engagement, such translations can also involve a reinterpretation (or appropriation) of Indigenous laws that may obscure or undermine the rights of Indigenous peoples.Secondly, I consider the specific legal and living personhood of rivers based on comparative analysis between leading international examples of riverine personhood (in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, Bangladesh, and Colombia) and two Australian examples that depend on living entity status rather than legal rights. These rivers have been defined in law in multiple ways, but one consistent trend across all the examples of ‘living rivers’ is that their legal rights do not explicitly include rights to water.I then consider the question of how extinction can apply to rivers, and how the recent construction of rivers as living beings could exacerbate extinction risks. In doing so, I apply a pluralist understanding of environmental protection, reflecting the laws of both Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states. As stated by Poelina et al, recognition of rivers as living beings with a right to life ‘is grounded in ancient First Law (Traditional Law, Customary Law, or Aboriginal Law) which promotes the holistic natural laws for managing the balance of life.’ 10 Based on the evidence from the rivers, I argue that ‘extinction’ can and does apply to rivers, and that the construction of rivers as legal and/or living beings can increase this risk in key ways.11Lastly, I explore potential ways to address the extinction problem that environmental law has exacerbated by recognising rivers as legal and/or living beings, whilst simultaneously denying them the specific legal rights they need. This discussion further demonstrates the power of a pluralist approach to environmental law, and help to frame a future legal and policy agenda riverine protection.Rights of Nature used in “eco-friendly” legal doctrine are a slippery slope that can lead to a further perpetuation of settler colonialismMiller 19 (James Miller 2019-James Miller (he/him/his/Professor) is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Indigenous Studies with a joint appointment in Canadian-American Studies, Salish Sea Studies and the Huxley College of the Environment. A Kanaka Maoli scholar, architect, and urbanist, James runs a design lab, ’Ike Honua, centering Indigenous knowledge in building resilient communities through architectural and planning frameworks. Under the lens of climate change adaptation, James Miller’s research investigates the role of Indigenous Design Knowledge in the creation of culturally supportive environments through climate migration. Currently, James is investigating the transboundary placemaking of Indigenous communities from the Marshall Islands and the intersection of Oceanic Indigenous knowledge in building community resilience. Miller’s scholarship provides a space for Indigenous knowledge systems tied to the production of the built-environment to be recognized within fields dominated by western-centric world views. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Architecture from the University of Oregon with specializations in cultural sustainability and Indigenous design knowledge.less “ARCHITECTURE AND THE RIGHTS OF NATURE” rs)The term the rights of nature is often used within the discourse of environmental justice to achieve particular goals and effects, which, we argue, is yet another colonial expression of terra nullius meant to ensure settler colonial regimes are maintained in perpetuity. This paper posits that use of the rights of nature is problematic in its production of eco-friendly legislation and eco-friendly architecture, and both require critical assessment. The rights of nature is plagued by conflicting usages, post-colonial interpretations and a historiography that stretches back to the early yearnings of American environmentalist John Muir for environmental justice to a growing number of legal arguments that have now been established as precedential cases expanded as the result of fears of environmental degradation and indigenous activism over lands and resources that were previously stolen, abused or neglected under settler regimes. In 1972, the case of Sierra Club v. Morton came before the US Supreme Court, which lead to deliberation over whether nature should have its own rights, although without success. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his dissent, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium,” he wrote, “should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to create and pass laws acknowledging that nature is no longer subject to human ownership. This new ideology appeared in New Zealand which acknowledged that people are part of nature; they are not separate from it or dominant over it. Since then these laws have expanded globally to emphasize nature as a rights holder, as well as the importance of human beings to uphold and protect these rights. The rights of the Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui River in New Zealand were precedent setting cases in which nature was granted legal recognition in 2014. Current architectural practices, framed as “green,” often operate under the guise of ecological sustainability using the rights of nature as a form of justification, but the architecture that results often produces an inauthentic form of Indigenization using methods that are problematically embedded within the interweaving of the rights of nature and terra nullius in support of settler-colonial fantasies. The rights of nature can provide a dangerous form of justification for the consumption of Indigenous knowledge and can justify efforts to occupy and develop land in ways that are perceived as being more sensitive and harmonious with nature, yet are not. To derail these dangerous fantasies and practices, we need to provide limits for how concepts like the rights of nature may be applied as guidelines within architectural pedagogy and practices, while respecting and acknowledging the domain and the intellectual property of Indigenous peoples. To do this we must actively question how we teach and use the rights of nature in the architectural studio, while constantly reflecting on whom these enlightened approaches are servingL – PlaceThe western construction of “place” as the relationship between humans and nature through the logic of capitalism is part of the broader reconstruction of indigenous social constructs during the settler colonial process – physical land repatriation alone is insufficient, decolonization requires undoing this social construction of land Seawright 14 [Gardner Seawright. Gardner Seawright is a teacher-scholar whose work in a middle school social studies classroom informs the larger examination of the ways that race influences curriculum and the everyday act of teaching. His work explores the relationality and phenomenology of whiteness in the classroom, as well as the development of antiracist, anti-colonial, and place-based curricula. From these lenses, using both qualitative and theoretical approaches, Gardner's scholarship analyzes teacher-student relationships, the limits and possibilities of antiracist solidarity, place-based and environmental education, qualitative methodologies, teacher education, and social studies education. He holds a Ph.D in philosophy at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Parkside, Institute of Professional Educator Development. “Settler Traditions of Place: Making Explicit the Epistemological Legacy of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism for Place-Based Education.” Educational Studies, A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50:6, 554-572, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2014.965938 //dylan] DGPEve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) offer a similar sentiment. They write, “Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (5). Tuck and Yang’s, as well as Memmi’s, understanding of the colonial project, emphasizes homemaking as the violent imposition of new social constructs defining the ecological world—defining place—at the expense of previously dominant Indigenous worldviews. The reconstitution of places through settler colonization in North America was justified by an anthropocentric white supremacist epistemology established on particular understandings of civilization and personhood. A conception of rationality, welded to deeply held beliefs in the binaries of civilized/savage, mind/body, culture/nature, facilitated the taking and remaking of Indigenous land by Anglo-European settlers. This expropriation was not a simple land theft, but a reconstitution of land. The way nature was perceived, understood, and interacted with was transformed at the most fundamental levels. The infinitely complex and diverse world that falls under the umbrella term nature (humans animals, more-than human animals, plants, soil, watersheds, air, minerals, streams, etc.) was now understood according to the logic of capitalism. This logic (which is represented by John Locke and his political theory that is epistemically normalized in the West) provides the perception that the uncultivated self and uncultivated land is worthless (Locke, 1690/1952; Pateman and Mills, 2007). Under these imposed epistemic conditions, the self and place are understood through an equation of economic potentiality, fostering a politics of place and politics of self-predicated upon the exploitation and cultivation of humans and the ecological world.Settler colonization was, and continues to be, an act of white supremacy. Arlo Kempf (2010) delineates how continued colonization constitutes the dominant social system and the subsequent racialized and gendered social hierarchy. Kempf argues that white-heterosexual-male privilege is bound to a logic of domination and can be seen in colonial moments that occur “when behavior, based on social location, has concrete negative consequences for one actor or group, and concrete positive consequences for another” (16). The negative and positive consequences of colonial moments manifest in material (overt, structural, institutional, economic, cultural) and immaterial (spiritual, emotional, epistemological, psychological, ideological) ways. Colonial moments systematically and longitudinally enacted accent the reality of the settler colonial process as one of “profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence,” that transcends any single historical moment and exists contemporarily as a system that depends on the continued occupation of stolen lands (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Colonial moments should hold particular attention for those who have been socially marked as both white and settler. Many scholars of race, gender, and epistemology have pointed out that dominant and oppressive cognitive norms are internalized across subject positions, but, despite this reality, white settler epistemologies perform a particular service for those conscripted into a white settler positionality. This service (the distribution of unearned privileges) is seen in colonial moments that impact white settlers and their own epistemic positionality whether it is desired or not. In those colonial moments that privilege is distributed (sometimes unknowingly or unwanted), the white settler epistemology is reproduced by the direct imposition of epistemic realities onto all of those that fall within a white settler dominion. What this means is that when epistemic deconstruction is employed within a place-based education, epistemic positionality must be entertained and understood alongside the politics of white-heteropatriarchal privilege.This Lockeian idea of “place” creates the ideological social actor by defining self-ownership through one’s ability to labor, i.e. accumulate external ownership, which includes appropriation of nature. Meaning that “becoming successful” neccesarily entails accumulation of “racial,” “heteropatriachal,” and “natural” entities that are all potential propertySeawright 14 [Gardner Seawright. Gardner Seawright is a teacher-scholar whose work in a middle school social studies classroom informs the larger examination of the ways that race influences curriculum and the everyday act of teaching. His work explores the relationality and phenomenology of whiteness in the classroom, as well as the development of antiracist, anti-colonial, and place-based curricula. From these lenses, using both qualitative and theoretical approaches, Gardner's scholarship analyzes teacher-student relationships, the limits and possibilities of antiracist solidarity, place-based and environmental education, qualitative methodologies, teacher education, and social studies education. He holds a Ph.D in philosophy at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Parkside, Institute of Professional Educator Development. “Settler Traditions of Place: Making Explicit the Epistemological Legacy of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism for Place-Based Education.” Educational Studies, A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50:6, 554-572, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2014.965938 //dylan] DGPThere are ontological implications embedded in place. How individuals understand themselves and their relation to the social world is dependent on their perception of the socioecological world and the interpretations of place available to them according to their operant epistemology. Settler society’s knowledge system provides a vision of an ideal actor rooted in a “rational” drive to appropriate nature, accumulate property, and cultivate.The epistemic outline of the ideal white-settler actor can be seen in the founding principles of the herrenvolk ethic (Mills 1998). The founding principle is simple as it is derived from the commonly held presumption in the United States that all persons are created equal, but an unspoken caveat is maintained in the maxim that some folks who have been racially marked and gendered as inferior beings do not have access to the full personhood needed to be accorded in the agreement (Mills 1998, 152). The work of John Locke is an exemplar of the driving moral ethic of the West, as it is representative of the common liberal and moral/political culture that is foundational to the philosophy and epistemology of the Western world (Harris 1995; Mills 1997, 1998; Pateman and Mills 2007). Locke’s philosophy centers on concepts of individualism, self-ownership, property, state of nature, freedom, and rationality; all of which presuppose a reciprocating relationship among “civilized” members of society.According to Locke (1690/1952) all men are equal unless “the lord and master of them all, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty” (4). To pinpoint the white male supremacy embedded in this eugenic conception of equality, personhood and labor must be explicated. Among those marked as equals (white men), it is considered that “every man has a property in his person; this nobody has any right to but himself” (Locke, 1690/1952, 17). Embodied property—the capacity to own one’s self and labor-power—is the essential property. Through the property of self (i.e., labor) one appropriates additional property. Lockean labor theory suggests that self-ownership is constituted by one’s ability to labor, and the use of one’s labor to gather, till, harvest, sow, chop down, etc., merges labor with nature and creates an extension of one’s property.In line with the “laws of nature” presented by John Locke, full persons are bound to respect fundamental freedom of other full persons—“we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man” (Locke, 1690/1952, 4). Based on this understanding, the African slave trade and settler colonization in the Americas could only have been undertaken based on the socially fabricated assumption that African, Indigenous, and other peoples of color were indeed “inferior creatures” (6). The foundational essay by Cheryl Harris (1995) explicates the fundamental principle behind this position, that whiteness is property and in contrast to the lack of embodied property found in non-whiteness. This indicates that when Locke (1690/1952) says, “every man has a property in his person,” he is operating from a particular racialized and gendered conception of personhood (17). The Lockean person is a “self-owning, nature appropriating, rights-bearing being,” so the absence of property fixed to nonwhiteness ultimately equates to non-personhood, thus positioning folks of color into the realm of nature and all things potentially appropriable (Mills 1998, 154).According to Locke (1690/1952), “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it to them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational—and labor was to be his title to it” (20; emphasis added). The freedom of the Lockean man is both rooted in and has helped formulate liberal capitalistic principles—in his “natural state” man has the right to dispose of (trade) his possessions (his property, including his own labor power and all things appropriated through his labor power) only bound by the laws of nature without being impeded by the will of any other man (Locke, 1690/1952, 4). The laws of nature informing Locke’s work are predicated on the assumption that the rational actor is predisposed toward the industrious appropriation of nature, meaning that the rational social actor, in his natural state, will endeavor to accumulate and cultivate property.Pursuit of property is accompanied by the need to cultivate, to instill one’s labor into the property. The Lockean sense of nature considers land to be “almost worthless,” because “it is labor then, which puts the greatest part of the value upon land” (Locke, 1690/1952, 26). Man is situated as superior to nature carrying, within the only potential worth for the natural world. This scenario elevates men to a status of dominion over the entire ecological world and all inferior beings (which, horrifically, includes communities of color and women, as well as all more-thanhuman animals). The desire of men to actualize this potential dominion results in a social understanding in which white propertied male individuals must utilize their “industrious talents” to accumulate private property to become “rational” men of substance (Mills 1998, 154). The sense-of-self produced by this ethic is imbued with this desire to not only accumulate property but to cultivate, alter, and commodify the natural world. Contained within the limits of the natural world and potential property are non-white, female, and animal bodies, which links the racialized conception of personhood and a white ontology with white male supremacy and the rampant exploitation of the natural world.“Historically, of course, Lockeanism of this Herrenvolk, racialized kind has justified both native American expropriation and African slavery, giving rise to a white moral consciousness accustomed to full or partial ownership first of nonwhite land and bodies and later of differential opportunities vis-a-vis nonwhites, with baseline ` expectations constructed accordingly. The Europeans who conquered and settled the continent represented aboriginal economies as virtually nonexistent, an assessment that gave rise to the notion of a New World arising ex nihilo through the labor of the [whites].” (Mills 1998, 162, emphasis in original)Whites are given personhood within this system; non-whites are labeled as nonor subpersons. Within the white settler epistemology, a person’s state of being and identity is correlated with exercising power over (appropriating and cultivating) the Earth and those marked as inferior. This means that within this structure of white supremacy, any individual actor operationalizing this epistemology, in line with normalized differential opportunities, are encouraged to aggressively exploit non-white bodies and the natural world, because doing so is rational and the pathway to fully realizing the extent of one’s personhood. Consider this in relation to the example cited previously of settler actors aggressively pursuing Indigenous plants, seeds, and knowledges for purpose of genetic engineering and the mass accumulation of profit.Although the overt and crude manifestations of white supremacy have been diminished, the system continuously evolves and is codified in discreet and nuanced ways that reinscribe a racially predetermined social hierarchy. Although the means of white supremacy have changed, the end remains the same, and the foundational epistemology and ethic justifying the racial order are still in their required position. The drive to accumulate property and extract wealth from places and people remains central to becoming a successful person within the Western imaginary.Locke’s property-based ethic is foundational to Western epistemologies and the settler-colonial project in the Americas. The resulting epistemological praxis of settler society produces a white supremacist ontology that is dependent on a particular conception of place. The ideal white actor’s sense of being is entangled with a conception of place established upon ideas of self-cultivation, capital extraction, and accumulation. The predefined white settler sense of place is capitalistic, anthropocentric, heteropatriarchal and white supremacist in nature. L – ProlifUS uses nuclear weapons to shape global norms. This is an ordering of the world in a constructed image of manageable threats in order to justify its own supremacy. The impact is life in Nuclear Apartheid: which justified the worst forms of colonial violence and inequality.*edited to remove ableist languageChung 14 (CHUNG, ALEX H, B.A. (Hons) International Relations and Politics School of Social Sciences University of Notre Dame Australia. "Postcolonial Perspectives on Nuclear Non-Proliferation."?ISAC-ISSS Joint Annual Conference. 2014.; AKIM)?Security studies have traditionally been concerned with?relations between?‘great powers’, within a hierarchy?of stronger and weaker sovereign territorial states (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 329). The field of security politics has largely been?blind?[inattentive] to?and disregarded the security needs and interests of ‘small’ or ‘weak’ states by conceptualising security primarily around the organisation of ‘great power’ politics, underpinned by Eurocentric and racist assumptions?(Biswas, forthcoming 2012). “Security studies is by and for Western powers,” (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 344). There exists?a rather limited awareness?in international relations (IR) of ‘non-Western’ perspectives on global politics, thus?constructing?what Ken Booth remarked?as?IR’s “ethnocentric, masculinised, northern and top-down” formulation?(Bilgin 2008, p. 6- 7). Within the international system,?“the taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security systematically understate?and misrepresent the role of?what we now call?the global South in security relations,” (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 330). Western constituted social science and humanities have largely ignored the impact of the postcolonial agenda and the Global South and on international norms and practices (Grovogui 2011, p. 178).?Agency is presumed to be in the hands of the ‘great powers’ and?western political perspectives are constructed as and considered to be?the pinnacle of?international?norms?(Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 340). This paper seeks to approach the question of nuclear security and nuclear nonproliferation from the perspective of those states that see themselves as marginalised by an unequal global security architecture, and demonstrate how?the current nuclear nonproliferation regime perpetuates logics of Eurocentric and colonial violence and inequity. Nuclear weapons were introduced to the world over 65 years ago by the United States with the purpose of winning a war against the Axis powers of Japan and Germany (Daadler & Lodal 2008, p. 80). The destructive nature of nuclear weapons presents a tremendous existential threat to the safety and security of the world. In the words of Rajiv Gandhi, addressing?the UN?General Assembly on 9 June 1988, “Nuclear war will not mean the death of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth,” (Shultz et al. 2007, p. 2). Accordingly, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) envisioned the end of nuclear weapons, as the most universally accepted arms control agreement with 189 state members,?by recognising five Nuclear Weapon States (NWS)?– the US, Russia, China, France, and Britain (Peterson 2010).?In return for the promise?by all NWS states?to completely disarm, and assistance in the acquisition of civilian nuclear energy technology, all Non-Nuclear Weapon States (NNWS) forever forego obtaining nuclear weapons, thereby preventing horizontal proliferation with the stated goal of complete global nuclear disarmament (Gusterson 1999, p. 113). It is significant to note that international institutions such as?the UN and the nuclear non-proliferation regime “are largely the product of interstate diplomacy dominated by Western great powers,” (Barkawi & Laffey 2006, p. 331).?The five NWS states also hold the five?permanent?member seats on?the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), leading some to criticise the NPT for legitimising and?institutionalising nuclear power at the?hands of the?very few, and at the same time prohibiting?the pursuit of?nuclear?security by the rest of the world?(Biswas 2001, p. 486; Biswas, forthcoming 2012). While there have been symbolic reductions in the nuclear stockpiles of the NWS states?via bilateral and multilateral treaties, the indefinite and unconditional extension of the NPT in 1995 continues to legitimise the existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the NWS/P-5, allowing them to modernise their nuclear arsenals, and engage in vertical nuclear proliferation without interference from the international community (Singh 1998, p. 41).?The exclusive nature?of the NPT?and?the?alignment of NWS?status?with the UNSC P-5?is indicative of an international regime that perpetuates?logics of?colonial violence, oppression, and inequity?as represented?by?the emblematic clash between?nuclear “haves” and nuclear “have-nots”?(Biswas 2001, p. 486; Peterson 2010). As such, the institutionalised demarcation of NWS and NNWS states has led to accusations of “nuclear apartheid” (Biswas 2001, p. 486; Singh 1998, p. 48).?Put simply,?“nuclear apartheid”?highlights the material inequalities in the distribution of global nuclear resources?–?“inequities that are written into, institutionalised, and legitimised through some of the major arms-control treaties, creating an elite club of nuclear ‘haves’ with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that are to be denied to the vast majority of nuclear ‘have nots’,” (Biswas 2001, p. 486). This is evidenced by the United States having “worked diligently to preserve its nuclear supremacy” since 1945; by attempting to keep the nuclear “secret” in perpetuity, by limiting America’s European allies’ ability to command atomic weapons independently, and endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to keep the Middle East and South Asia free of nuclear weapons (Maddock cited in Rotter 2011, p. 1175).L – Puerto RicoPuerto Rico is in a perpetual colonial state of exception, creating the conditions for sustained state terrorism and the legitimization of settler colonialism as a socio-political structure.Atiles-Osoria 16 – Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, and a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Portuguese Foundation for the Sciences and Technology at the Center for Social Sciences of the University of Coimbra (José Atiles-Osoria, State Crime Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, “Colonial State Terror in Puerto Rico: A Research Agenda”, pgs. 220-222, )This article proposes the concept of state colonial terror as category for the analysis of political violence against Puerto Rican anticolonial and social movements by the American and Puerto Rican governments and pro-state organizations1 in the context of the Puerto Rican colonial conflict. Broadly, I intend to show how state political violence and terrorism were used in the colonization of Puerto Rico to legitimate US colonialism, and to control and demobilize Puerto Rican anticolonial movements.It is important to understand that an approach to the Puerto Rican colonial conflict must necessarily take into consideration the various and multiple forms that colonialism entails.2 As a starting point, this approach should recognize that colonialism represents a complex socio-political structure in which different narratives, scales of power, legitimacy and violence are expressed and manifested in terms of material, spatial, territorial (geopolitical), epistemological and existential (biopolitical) forms. Furthermore, colonialism also entails processes of negotiation and dialogue between different (often unequal) sectors, the appropriation of discourses and practices, and the participation of sectors and actors that are neither colonial agents nor part of anticolonial movements (e.g., members of civil society, political–economic elites, corporations).This article explores the significance or semantic dimension of the concept of colonial state terror within a more complex legal and political structure that I here define as a “colonial state of exception”. The state of exception has been traditionally understood as the suspension of the rule of law and certain constitutional guarantees by the sovereign, which has the effect of normalizing an “emergency situation”. Agamben (2005) developed the concept of the state of exception to shed light on the legal and political configuration of contemporary liberaldemocratic states, especially the US, in the post 9/11 era. The paradigm is based on the analysis of state uses and abuses of executive orders and declarations of states of emergency (either by the executive or by the legislative branches of government) for the “management” of situations that threaten national security and the rule of law. With these exceptional measures, governments establish a space of indistinction between the legal and extra-legal, and/or creates spaces without law – zones of anomie. Agamben (2005) suggests that these exceptional measures and spaces of anomie have been normalized in contemporary liberal-democracies, becoming the “dispositive” of administration and governance of public and political life. Thus, the state of exception has entailed the depoliticization of politics and its subordination to law and legal discourses.However, when one analyses Agamben’s (2005) definition of the state of exception in colonial contexts, the state of exception begins to look rather different. From the colonial perspective, the state of exception not only refers to the liberal-legal analysis of the suspension of the rule of law; it also involves the legal constitution of colonialism, the creation of colonial identities and sub-identities, the legitimacy of colonial violence, the overlap or superposition of law on the politics and the criminalization and repression of those who oppose to the colonial regime.3 Thus, Agamben’s (2005) extensive and otherwise persuasive analysis of the state of exception does not account for all the contexts in which this concept can be applied, particularly those that cannot be dealt with from a liberal juridical perspective. As this article demonstrates, the colonial state of exception entails a broader interpretation of the state of exception. In my view, the US colonial state of exception in Puerto Rico created the legal and political conditions for colonial domination and for the systematic uses of state terrorism against those opposed to the colonial system.There is a long academic tradition that deals with colonialism and its violence. From the writings of Frantz Fanon (1999, 2009) through postcolonial theories (Mbembe 2001; Young 2001) to the current studies on decoloniality (MaldonadoTorres 2007), features of colonialism such as the relations of violence, racism, discrimination and human rights violations have been described. However, there is an important gap in the critical analysis of state terrorism in colonial contexts. That is, many scholars have worked on the concepts of state terrorism and colonialism (Blakeley 2009; Boehmer and Morton 2009; Morton 2013), however, their research is conducted in postcolonial contexts and informed by postcolonial studies. In contrast, this article contributes a critical analysis of state terrorism in a territory that is currently a colony. The analysis aims to deal not with past colonial violence, but rather with colonial state violence in the present and potentially in the future. In that sense, we need a colonial perspective/theory for the study of the violent colonial present.Likewise, a considerable number of authors have tackled the issue of repression, state violence and the criminalization of Puerto Rican anticolonial movements (Acosta 1998; Bosques Pérez and Colon Morera 1997; Nieves Falcón 2002, 2009; Paralitici 2004, 2011). However, despite their rich and valuable contribution to the analysis of colonial state violence in Puerto Rico, these approaches fail to address the complexity of colonial state terror. They are interested in showing how US and Puerto Rican governments exercised colonial violence, but do not provide a sufficiently deep analysis of the colonial conflict as exhibiting a relationship between colonialism, law, political violence and counter-terrorism terrorism.4To achieve this deeper analysis of the dynamics of colonial state violence in Puerto Rico, I incorporate the analytical narrative of the colonial state of exception as a foundational aspect of the superstructure or colonial power matrix. To this end, the article will illustrate how the Puerto Rican and US governments have implemented various forms of colonial state terrorism to preserve the colonial-exceptional structure. The implementation of these forms of state terrorism has also enabled extreme right-wing groups to exercise terrorist violence against the Puerto Rican anticolonial movements,5 which has resulted in a multidimensional colonial conflict.Puerto Rico has been a key interest for colonizers – it’s permanent state of exception means Puerto Rico is forced to comply with whatever the US tells them to do without any resistance – otherwise they are faced with various forms of violence.Atiles-Osoria 16 – Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, and a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Portuguese Foundation for the Sciences and Technology at the Center for Social Sciences of the University of Coimbra (José Atiles-Osoria, State Crime Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, “Colonial State Terror in Puerto Rico: A Research Agenda”, pgs. 222-224, )Puerto Rico is a Caribbean archipelago consisting of the Isla Grande, the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra and a series of smaller islands. It enjoys great biodiversity, important natural and mineral reserves, reserves of drinking water and fertile soils. This fact, combined with its strategic geopolitical position in the Caribbean Sea, made it a key interest for colonizers, leading to over 500 years of colonial domination. For the last 118 years (1898 to 2016), it has been under US control. The US invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, in the historical context of the Spanish-Cuban-US War, and as a result of a series of economic, geopolitical and colonial-imperialist interests developed in the US since the mid-nineteenth century. Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam were ceded as spoils of war to the US government under the Treaty of Paris. This treaty was signed after Spain lost the Spanish-Cuban-American War, ending nearly 406 years of Spanish colonial rule on Puerto Rico.Subsequently, in 1900, under the organic law known as the Foraker Act,6 and after two years of military rule, a civil government in Puerto Rico was established. At this time, this territory became a domain of the US Congress under the Territorial Clause,7 which subjugates the Puerto Rican nation to the US legal system. At the same time, and as a result of the judicial decisions and opinions expressed in the Insular Cases8 as discussed below, the US Supreme Court decided that “PR belongs to the US, but it is not part of it” (C.D. Burnett 2005; Rivera Ramos 2001; Venator 2006). This legal and political construction established an area of political and socio-legal indeterminacy, or what might be described as the configuration of a permanent state of exception.In 1917, the Jones Act was passed, reforming part of the Foraker Act of 1900. One of the few major changes introduced by the Jones Act was the imposition of US citizenship upon Puerto Ricans, despite the opposition of the majority of Puerto Rican leaders, and a good part of US leaders and citizens. One paradigmatic example of the state of exception Puerto Ricans live in is this US citizenship. That is, as long as Puerto Ricans live in Puerto Rico, they are not accorded rights such as the right to vote in the election for the representatives of Congress and the president of the US.The colonial status of Puerto Rico took a new turn in 1952 with the creation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was established as a legal and political category in 1950 under Public Law 600 of 1950 of the US Congress9 and was presented to the UN in 1953. This supposed solution to the Puerto Rican colonial condition was presented to the UN as a strategy to legitimize one of the last colonial territories in Latin America and the Caribbean to the rest of the world.With the concept of the “Commonwealth”, the Caribbean archipelago was transformed into a new form of colony. The category of Commonwealth provides certain legal, economic and political power to Puerto Rico, which departs significantly from a classical model of colonialism. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico did not become a “post-” or “neo-” colonial state, or a state that was liberated from colonialism, since the US did not transfer the sovereignty to the people of Puerto Rico and its political institutions. In other words, the US continued to exercise sovereignty in Puerto Rico, distinguishing the case from the model proposed by neoand post-colonial theorists who assert that postcolonial states are sovereign states that remain under some degree of political, military, cultural and economic intervention or control of the former colonial power (see, for example, Young 2001). By contrast, Puerto Rico has been locked into the same socio-legal and political situation since 1898, when it was invaded by the US and a state of exception was imposed to support the colonial administration. With the benefit of historical hindsight, it becomes clear that all that changed in 1952 with the creation of the ‘Commonwealth’, was the name applied to and ways of legitimising colonialism. Colonial strategies of control and domination remained essentially the same.These historical–political dimensions have made Puerto Rico a landmark of contemporary colonialism and one case where the US colonial and hegemonic practices could be evinced. However, during this colonial period there have been dozens of movements, groups and organizations that have struggled for independence and have sought to challenge the colonial state of exception. Many of these movements have acted within the law, using electoral strategies; others have acted in on the boundary between legality and illegality; while yet others have opted for the armed struggle as a strategy for the decolonization. As we will see in the following sections of this article, all of these movements have faced various forms of persecution, repression, criminalization, state violence and terrorism. State violence and terrorism is a fundamental feature of the socio-legal, political and economic situation in Puerto Rico, which must be understood primarily as a colonial state of exception.Existing ‘support’ for American imperialism is shaped by an internalization of inferiority – centuries of oppression resulted in the suppression of decolonial attitudes in favor of legitimizing the colonial system. A decolonization of the mind is necessary to mobilize agents of social change.Rivera-Pichardo et al. 21 – Eduardo J. Rivera-Pichardo is a Political Psychology PhD candidate at NYU. John T. Jost, Professor of Psychology and Politics and Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. Verònica Benet-Martínez is an ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University's Department of Political and Social Sciences. “Internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification: The case of Puerto Rico”, Journal of Social Issues, pgs. 21-22, )This study represents what we hope will be the first step in developing a social psychological understanding of the phenomenon of colonial system justification. It reflects an exploration of ideological processes in the context of relatively extreme social and political inequality, which has previously been identified as an important direction for theoretical and practical application (Henry & Saul, 2006; Jost et al., 2004; Vargas-Salfate et al., 2018). Our findings reveal that the internalization of inferiority and epistemic motivation were both associated with Puerto Ricans’ tendency to defend, justify, and bolster the U.S. hegemonic system and ongoing presence in Puerto Rico. System justification processes were manifested most explicitly in terms of support for U.S. statehood and the territorial status quo.Our study suggested that support for statehood—like support for the territorial status quo— was linked to the internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification. In this sense, pro-statehood attitudes may reproduce colonial ways of thinking rather than a decolonial, system-challenging perspective, as proponents of statehood have claimed. At the same time, it is clear that some Puerto Ricans expressed decolonial attitudes, rejecting both group-based inferiority and the legitimacy of the colonial system. Presumably, this enables them to escape, in a psychological sense, some of the strictures of colonialism—and to support Puerto Rican national independence, which appears to be a decolonial response to the present situation. Although support for national independence remains a minority position today, there are signs that resistance to neoliberal and colonial arrangements may be gathering strength. For instance, the “Summer of 2019” peaceful uprisings led to the removal of the pro-statehood and neo-liberal governor Ricardo Rosselló and his cabinet (see Cabán, 2020). And in the general election of November of 2020, the Pro-Independence Party of Puerto Rico (Partido Independentista de Puerto Rico) won 14% of the vote, which was its highest total since 1952, when it received 19% of the vote (CEEPUR, 2020).In this work we have sought to integrate insights derived from decolonial theory, especially the writings of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967, 1961/1963) and system justification theory (Jost et al., 2004; Jost, 2020) to better understand and appreciate the experiences and attitudes of Puerto Rican citizens today. We propose that when members of disadvantaged groups—such as colonial subjects in Puerto Rico—hold attitudes that are conducive to the preservation of the status quo, this is explained in part by the internalization of pro-colonial ideological rhetoric that attempts to legitimize inequality, oppression, and exploitation, and, to the extent that it is successful, fosters a sense of inferiority on the part of the colonized. The results of our inquiry are consistent with the idea that hegemonic social representations are, on some level, internalized by many Puerto Ricans, and that justification of the colonial status quo serve the epistemic needs of the individual (Jost, 2020; Moscovici, 1988).We conclude on a hopeful note, which is that further social-scientific research on the effects of colonialism will help not only to uncover the racialized psychological violence that is inherent in allegedly “post-colonial” settings, but also that it will help to mobilize agents of social change. Following Fanon, we believe that taking a psychological as well as a political level of analysis is necessary for revealing and recovering from the harms of colonial mentality and taking the first steps toward decolonization of the mind. All of this, in turn, requires a holistic understanding of the connection between the subjective and the objective, that is, the ways in which the individual’s consciousness is shaped by—and may, in turn, contribute to reshaping—the oppressive material structures of modern colonial society. Only then, as Fanon (1952/1967, p. 100) argued, is one finally in a position to choose action over passivity when it comes to confronting the true sources of injustice and conflict in society.The 1AC is disaster capitalism – colonial, neoliberal policies in place are the root cause of the devastation in Puerto Rico and the 1AC does little to alleviate the burdens that Native residents face. Independently, these are solvency deficits to the aff.de Onís 18 – Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication & Social Justice at the University of Colorado Denver. She researches and teaches environmental and energy communication and Latina/o/x communication, informed by rhetorical studies (Dr. Catalina M. de Onís, Frontiers in Communication, “Energy Colonialism Powers the Ongoing Unnatural Disaster in Puerto Rico”, 1/29/18, )On September 20, 2017, Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico. Blasting the Caribbean archipelago with 155-mile/h winds, this, in many ways, unnatural disaster exposed the brutal consequences of energy colonialism and an extractivist economy, as well as ongoing and increasing advocacy for decentralized solar infrastructure by many local residents and other renewables supporters. This paper argues that acknowledging colonial power relations and their consequences is essential for studying the interplay of energy systems, environments, and actors. To support this claim, this essay outlines Puerto Rico’s history as a US colony by focusing on key policies and their implications; examines openings for and barriers to decentralized, community solar in Puerto Rico; and concludes by discussing future research directions on just energy transitions and the imperative of uprooting colonialism and agitating for community self-determination and energy justice in these transformations.On September 20, 2017, Hurricane María rattled Puerto Rico. Weakened by a $73-billion debt crisis, outdated infrastructure, and Hurricane Irma, which skirted the Caribbean archipelago just weeks before, the US unincorporated territory could not sustain the damage caused by the nearly Category 5 María. This most unnatural disaster accelerated the already launched collision of Puerto Rico’s entwined economic, energy, and environmental crises (Bonilla, 2017; de Onís, 2017a; Lloréns et al., 2018). As of this writing, about 40 percent of households are still without electricity, and those that have power often do not have consistent access. For months after the storm, many people also lacked potable water, which resulted in some residents drinking from superfund and other contaminated sites (Hand, 2017). Meanwhile, the death toll linked to the storm exceeds one-thousand people (Center for Investigative Journalism, 2017).Examining this still-unfolding humanitarian crisis requires studying Puerto Rico’s historical and present-day experiences with colonialism, especially energy colonialism. This extractivist system and discourse marks certain places and peoples as disposable by importing and exporting logics and materials to dominate various energy forms, ranging from humans to hydrocarbons (Atiles-Osoria, 2014; de Onís, 2017a; McDermott, 2017). During the last 4 years, I have studied how Puerto Rico—a US colony since 1898—has been exploited as a sacrifice zone for empire building and experimentation, corporate greed, and toxic energy projects (Bullard, 1993).1 I also have encountered many social movement actors and energy studies scholars engaged in long-time struggles for alternatives to imported fossil fuels and centralized systems that deny community member control over their own energy futures. To examine the pre- and post-María milieu, this essay outlines Puerto Rico’s history as a US colony by focusing on key policies and their consequences; examines openings for and barriers to decentralized solar energy in Puerto Rico; and concludes by discussing directions for future research on energy transitions and the importance of foregrounding self-determination and energy justice for those most impacted by these projects and policies.2On Colonialism, Carbon, and CorruptionPrior to Hurricane María, entwined economic, environmental, and energy exigencies set the scene for a perfect storm of devastation. While several policies played a role in and are important for understanding Puerto Rico’s contemporary situation, I focus on three that epitomize Puerto Rico’s colonial dilemma. These are: the Jones Act, Operation Bootstrap, and the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA).The 1920 Jones Act, also known as the Merchant Marine Act, requires that all goods entering Puerto Rico’s ports arrive on US-made, US-staffed, and US-flag-carrying ships, an arbitrary policy imposed on the so-called “Rich Port.” This Act has choked hurricane relief efforts, as much-needed supplies have sat in local waters waiting to be distributed or have been sent back to their points of origin. While President Trump lifted the Jones Act for 10 days, because of public pressure, this temporary waiver did little to alleviate the burdens created by this economic dependency and its high financial and other costs.Another twentieth century policy that continues to haunt Puerto Rico is Operation Bootstrap. Beginning in the 1940s, this industrialization-by-invitation initiative implemented loopholes and tax incentives, thus positioning Puerto Rico as a destination for wealthy investors and corporate polluters, including the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries (Berman Santana, 1996). This form of “petrochemical colonialism” targets precarious communities that are in contemporary times exploited not by slave owners but “by the petrochemical industry executive as the new ‘master’ and ‘overseer’” (Bullard, 1993, p. 13).Puerto Rico’s current energy mix continues to be shaped by this heavy carbonization initiative. According to the Puerto Rico Energy Commission (PREC, 2016), petroleum, natural gas, coal, and renewables constitute 62, 18, 17, and 3 percent of Puerto Rico’s energy mix, respectively. Those numbers translate into a reliance on imported fossil fuels for 97 percent of the Big Island’s energy needs, causing residents to pay two to three times more than the average US household on their electricity bills.Accompanying this energy backdrop, in 2016, President Barack Obama and the US Congress approved PROMESA, which granted unbridled power for “managing” the debt crisis to an undemocratically elected control board, locally called “la junta.” Numerous individuals and groups have criticized PROMESA for, its neoliberal austerity agenda and sweeping oversight abilities. Board members have proposed, cutting retirement pensions, closing numerous K-12 schools, gutting funding for the public university system, and fast-tracking “critical” energy projects (PROMESA, 2016). In response, many community members have rejected the legislation and its colonial impositions, with slogans such as “se acabaron las promesas,” translated as “promises are over,” and “la gente antes que la deuda,” or “people before debt.”The debt situation and other colonial efforts to ensure Puerto Rico’s economic dependency have yielded dire consequences for local residents. Prior to the 2017 hurricane season, about half of Puerto Ricans lived in poverty, faced high unemployment rates, and had a per capita income of about $15,000 per year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). Now the situation is much, much worse. Personal financial distress is tied to the debt crisis, a result of risky municipal bond sales, as well as other monetary dealings that have burdened residents with financial hardships, while benefiting wealthy investors (Kolhatkar, 2017).In response to a lack of resources and adequate recovery efforts, more than 300,000 residents have left the archipelago for Florida alone since María, and those numbers are expected to grow in the months and years ahead (Bonilla, 2018). Prior to the storm, Puerto Rico was home to 3.4 million people, a number persistently eroded in the past decade, as Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens, moved north in search of more livable conditions (Duany, 2002; Centro, 2017).Human movements are not the only changes unfolding in this US colony. Puerto Rico’s bankrupt public power utility, the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority (PREPA), faces privatization and is experiencing substantial challenges in restoring electricity to the Big Island. Despite assurances from local government and power authority officials insisting that electricity would be restored 3 months after the storm, portions of Puerto Rico likely will remain without power until May 2018—or later (Robles and Mazzei, 2017). One reason for this delay is because of poorly selected and negotiated contracts with inexperienced companies with questionable ties.The Puerto Rican government’s three-million-dollar agreement to restore its decimated grid with Montana-based Whitefish Energy sounded alarms. New to the energy sector, the company employed only a few people at the time of the contract signing and had no experience with a project the size required for Puerto Rico (Whitefish Energy, 2017). Critics of the deal were quick to point out that US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Whitefish Energy are from the same Montana town, and the company formerly employed Zinke’s son (Geiling, 2017; Goldman, 2017). Amid growing concerns about local and US government and corporate corruption, the Puerto Rico-Whitefish agreement was canceled in late October 2017 (Noticel, 2017). Another two-million-dollar contract with Oklahoma-based, fossil-fuel energy company Cobra also stirred controversy. These two deals exemplify disaster capitalism, as politicians and others mobilize shock to curtail agency and resistance to advance a neoliberal, free-market agenda that works to silence alternative perspectives and pathways (Klein, 2007).Those still without power are frustrated by the delays but also have become accustomed to PREPA’s mismanagement. Prior to María, costly electric bills, frequent and widespread outages, environmental pollution, human health harms, and the denial of local community control over residents’ own energy futures were the norm in Puerto Rico (Wanzer-Serrano, 2015). This situation has made some large-scale renewable energy proposals particularly appealing.Existing ‘support’ for American imperialism is shaped by an internalization of inferiority – centuries of oppression resulted in the suppression of decolonial attitudes in favor of legitimizing the colonial system. A decolonization of the mind is necessary to mobilize agents of social change.Rivera-Pichardo et al. 21 – Eduardo J. Rivera-Pichardo is a Political Psychology PhD candidate at NYU. John T. Jost, Professor of Psychology and Politics and Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. Verònica Benet-Martínez is an ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University's Department of Political and Social Sciences. “Internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification: The case of Puerto Rico”, Journal of Social Issues, pgs. 21-22, )This study represents what we hope will be the first step in developing a social psychological understanding of the phenomenon of colonial system justification. It reflects an exploration of ideological processes in the context of relatively extreme social and political inequality, which has previously been identified as an important direction for theoretical and practical application (Henry & Saul, 2006; Jost et al., 2004; Vargas-Salfate et al., 2018). Our findings reveal that the internalization of inferiority and epistemic motivation were both associated with Puerto Ricans’ tendency to defend, justify, and bolster the U.S. hegemonic system and ongoing presence in Puerto Rico. System justification processes were manifested most explicitly in terms of support for U.S. statehood and the territorial status quo.Our study suggested that support for statehood—like support for the territorial status quo— was linked to the internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification. In this sense, pro-statehood attitudes may reproduce colonial ways of thinking rather than a decolonial, system-challenging perspective, as proponents of statehood have claimed. At the same time, it is clear that some Puerto Ricans expressed decolonial attitudes, rejecting both group-based inferiority and the legitimacy of the colonial system. Presumably, this enables them to escape, in a psychological sense, some of the strictures of colonialism—and to support Puerto Rican national independence, which appears to be a decolonial response to the present situation. Although support for national independence remains a minority position today, there are signs that resistance to neoliberal and colonial arrangements may be gathering strength. For instance, the “Summer of 2019” peaceful uprisings led to the removal of the pro-statehood and neo-liberal governor Ricardo Rosselló and his cabinet (see Cabán, 2020). And in the general election of November of 2020, the Pro-Independence Party of Puerto Rico (Partido Independentista de Puerto Rico) won 14% of the vote, which was its highest total since 1952, when it received 19% of the vote (CEEPUR, 2020).In this work we have sought to integrate insights derived from decolonial theory, especially the writings of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967, 1961/1963) and system justification theory (Jost et al., 2004; Jost, 2020) to better understand and appreciate the experiences and attitudes of Puerto Rican citizens today. We propose that when members of disadvantaged groups—such as colonial subjects in Puerto Rico—hold attitudes that are conducive to the preservation of the status quo, this is explained in part by the internalization of pro-colonial ideological rhetoric that attempts to legitimize inequality, oppression, and exploitation, and, to the extent that it is successful, fosters a sense of inferiority on the part of the colonized. The results of our inquiry are consistent with the idea that hegemonic social representations are, on some level, internalized by many Puerto Ricans, and that justification of the colonial status quo serve the epistemic needs of the individual (Jost, 2020; Moscovici, 1988).We conclude on a hopeful note, which is that further social-scientific research on the effects of colonialism will help not only to uncover the racialized psychological violence that is inherent in allegedly “post-colonial” settings, but also that it will help to mobilize agents of social change. Following Fanon, we believe that taking a psychological as well as a political level of analysis is necessary for revealing and recovering from the harms of colonial mentality and taking the first steps toward decolonization of the mind. All of this, in turn, requires a holistic understanding of the connection between the subjective and the objective, that is, the ways in which the individual’s consciousness is shaped by—and may, in turn, contribute to reshaping—the oppressive material structures of modern colonial society. Only then, as Fanon (1952/1967, p. 100) argued, is one finally in a position to choose action over passivity when it comes to confronting the true sources of injustice and conflict in society.We need to first grapple with the colonial ideologies, discourses, and policies that shape the 1AC – otherwise, they lock in unsustainable growth and petrochemical colonialism.de Onís 18 – Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication & Social Justice at the University of Colorado Denver. She researches and teaches environmental and energy communication and Latina/o/x communication, informed by rhetorical studies (Dr. Catalina M. de Onís, Frontiers in Communication, “Energy Colonialism Powers the Ongoing Unnatural Disaster in Puerto Rico”, 1/29/18, )This essay addresses a multi-pronged energy emergency in Puerto Rico—and its complexities—to contribute to disrupting the underlying infrastructural and other injustices that perpetuate fossil fuel dependency and its uneven impacts. Focusing on Puerto Rico is important for energy democracy scholarship for at least two reasons: (1) it makes the unsustainability of our hydrocarbon frenzy feel urgent, and (2) it evinces that energy transitions must consider the role of energy colonialism in shaping contemporary realities and how to grapple with, and ultimately uproot, relationships grounded in extractivism.First, the archipelago’s energy challenges and its related, disproportionate experiences with environmental degradation and climate disruption make Puerto Rico an apt location for examining the precarity and consequences of carbon-based economies (Pezzullo and de Onís, 2017). Detailed study of Puerto Rico’s energy exigencies helps make the need to transition justly and sustainably from high- to low-carbon energy sources feel pressing and vital. In other words, critically engaging Puerto Rico’s frontline experiences brings an urgency to the imperative of keeping fossil fuels in the ground and unsettles pervasive complacency by those currently privileged enough to look the other way. While the mainstream news media and US government narratives often limit descriptions to the turmoil faced by Puerto Ricans, many residents and their diasporic counterparts are mobilizing resources to construct alternative energy futures.Second, though neoliberalism shapes our global unsustainable energy milieu, colonial ideology, discourses, and policies also lock us into our current carbon-fueled crisis (Chakrabarty, 2009; Endres, 2009; Schneider et al., 2016). A study of this Caribbean locale makes the underlying logics of domination and dispossession difficult to ignore and provides possibilities for imagining more just, less exploitative alternatives. Thus, future research on energy policy, discourses, and injustices should foreground the role of energy colonialism and its legacies in shaping deliberations and decision-making processes and how various discursive practices enable and constrain more sustainable energy futures.While the energy emergencies facing Puerto Rico are, in some ways, very specific to this Caribbean archipelago, the concerns raised in this essay also are relevant whether one lives on an island, on a large land mass, or in a rural or urban area, as humanity confronts the climate change and policy imperative of participating in the “Great Transition” from a fossil fuel, carbon-based economy to a renewable, decentralized, and energy just one (Brown, 2015). Rising and acidifying oceans, desertification, species extinction, and the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, epitomized by Hurricane María, remind us of the growing urgency posed by our climate crisis and the untenable practices that fuel this reckless trajectory (de Onís, 2012). The alternative path is not easy, and it involves grappling with the tensions of alienation and interconnection, loss and love, crisis and caring, and harm and hope that shape our present moment (Pezzullo and Cox, 2017; Pezzullo and de Onís, 2017). The material sea change linked to global climate disruption already threatens life in disproportionately impacted communities. However, as evinced by different grassroots and academic collaborators in Puerto Rico, a sea change of another kind is possible.L – Rational ActorUS water goverance reproduces white supremacist epistemologies – Renders indigenous bodies fungible to white social hierarchiesSeawright, G. (2014). Settler Traditions of Place: Making Explicit the Epistemological Legacy of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism for Place-Based Education. Educational Studies, 50(6), 554–572. Mills explains the parameters of Western society's rational social actor in his discussions of the operative herrenvolk ethic. The herrenvolk, or master race ethic, is part of the epistemic package associated with white supremacy, which facilitates the "cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement" (Mills [24], 18). To properly situate this ethic, the social epistemology that serves as its foundation must be briefly explained. The white social epistemology is part of a social contract dictating the norms and regulations at the foundation of dominant society. In the case of the United States, the social contract is infused with intersecting forms of domination and social control (patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, human supremacy, citizenship and civility; Mills [24]; Pateman [28]; Pateman and Mills [29]). The social contract in question contains within it the social technologies for the epistemic normalization of socially constructed hierarchies, as well as the impetus for dominant society to reinvest, reproduce, and valorize the status quo. Put simply, the social contract endeavors to teach people how to be oppressors and how to be the oppressed.[P] Western schooling is implicated in the propagation of this substantive ignorance, a violent knowledge system, as was noted by Du Bois ([10]/1920) as well as contemporary scholars (Cajete [ 7], [ 8]; Calderón, [ 5], [ 6]; Outlaw [27]; Sullivan [37]). Lucious Outlaw Jr. (2007) argues that ensuring the dominance of this knowledge system is part of the centuries-long determined efforts expended by settler-colonists-become-imperialist-capitalist white racial supremacists to ensure that successive generations of white children would be nurtured systematically with both knowledge and ignorance to grow into confirmed, practicing racial supremacist white adults. And second, successive generations of children—Black, Brown, Yellow, Red, mixed—would be miseducated to be racially inferior adults subordinate to white adults and children. (197; emphasis in original) [P] The perpetuation of racial domination and a state of colonization requires a deliberate miseducation of children across subject positions in accordance with sanctioned legitimate knowledge (Mills [24]; Outlaw, [27]; Sullivan 2007). This schooled miseducation is part of what Linda Martín Alcoff ([ 2]) calls myth maintenance. Alcoff argues that contemporary racialized society is in a constant state of myth maintenance due to a desire to perceive its actions (a continued history of violent colonization and imperialism) as moral, or at least excusable. This myth maintenance facilitates the continued valorization of white bodies and white actions and the dehumanization of bodies marked as non-white. Integral to the maintenance of white supremacy is the permanence of these justificatory systems of knowledge production that not only create valorizing narratives for racial hierarchies, and human exploitation, but ecological exploitation as well. This myth maintenance also continues the rampant exploitation of non-human animals. Martusewicz et al. (2011) explain in EcoJustice Education that "[r]acism rests on, and depends upon anthropocentrism" (158). The racial and gender hiearchization of society is predicated on assumptions of humanness. Slavery and the expropriation of Indigenous lands were validated through a perception of non-white peoples as animals. "Thus, in order to successfully inferiorize and subjugate a group of people based on their likeness to animals, we must first have a deeply entrenched belief that animals, and in fact all of nature, is inferior to humans" (Martusewicz et al., 2011, 158). Place, as an educational point of departure, could allow for a critical engagement with the complex and intertwining components of domination that are foundational to settler traditions of place.L – Social EmpowermentOversight of specific social contexts of certain marginalized groups in the popularization of formal government water policies through language of social empowerment is a powerful masking tool that depoliticizes water politics so as to facilitate expressed exclusion and hierarchy Wilson et al 19 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance” Water 2019, 11, 1470; doi:10.3390/w11071470 //dylan] DGPContributions further explore long-standing political questions of who is able to participate in water-related decision-making, whose knowledges and voices count in such negotiations, and how certain (vulnerable) actors and communities may be situated within institutions or decision-making processes (cf. [6]). For example, Razavi [57] examines the unfilled promises of social control and improved access-conditions under the re-municipalization of water service in Cochabamba (Bolivia). Contextualized using a typology to characterize different modalities of “participation”, she argues that demands for “transformative” participation (i.e., implying a transfer of power) following the city’s short-lived experience of water privatization have culminated in “nominal” modes of citizen engagement (i.e., reinforcing standing social orders), a process mediated, stalled, and resisted through the “radical” reception of democratization, the fragmentation of social movements, and clientistic relations between state bureaucracies and elites [57]. A second example is MacDonald’s [58] critical interrogation of Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) as a fundamental mechanism in water governance reform. MacDonald’s [58] research in Tajikistan illustrates how WUAs reproduce exclusionary outcomes by requiring members to possess farmland, in turn threatening rural food security and sovereignty for those without such land. As a result, such households remain voiceless within architecture of WUAs, with their kitchen gardens and subsistence crops threatened (among other consequences) [58]. Again, while couched in the language of empowerment and engagement, such research helps underscore the political exclusions and consequences of these processes as they articulate with social contexts. This contribution [58] is one of several [55,57] that makes explicit linkages across the resource security nexus. Taken together, both cases [57,58] illustrate how exclusion becomes expressed, if not reinforced, both through formal governance institutions (and, processes of institutional change), as well as show re-scaled governance can re-configure exclusion in problematic fashions. In a third example, Workman [59] considers that ways that water scarcity is produced by and embedded in water policies and infrastructures in Lesotho. Highlighting the “micro-politics” of water, this contribution re-centers the political by situating local tensions (the power of chiefs) within national policies and development agendas [59]. In this way, Workman [59] highlights the complex interaction among formal and informal governance structures (or plural and multi-scalar governance structures), illustrating that politics further plays out in terms of the tension, interface, and frictions between them. Once more, we can understand how popularized water governance arrangements, here as Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) [59], vigorously promoted by various agencies, and across scales, produce uneven and intensely political outcomes as it plays out in practice.L – Target TemperatureGeophysical systems don’t have precise tipping points. Instead 2 degrees only reflect tail end effects for first world, temperate countries. Turns Case – 2 degrees naturalizes the disproportionate effects of ongoing apocalypse that make it too late for the colonized while faking scientific objectivity.Tschakert 15 [Author Information – Professor at Department of Geography and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University; "1.5°C or 2°C: a conduit’s view from the science-policy interface at COP20 in Lima, Peru"; Climate Change Responses; 3-27-2015; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-13-2021Despite the usefulness of the 2°C target as a ‘boundary object’ between science and policy makers [1] and its partial yet insufficient success in triggering political action, the target has been subject to repeated and partially severe criticism. Among parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), many Caribbean states proclaimed already at COP15 that a 2°C temperature rise was unacceptable as a safe threshold for the protection of small island states and that even a 1.5°C increase would undermine the survival of their communities. At COP16 in Cancun 1 year later, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) reiterated this claim. Several least developed countries (LDCs) joined AOSIS insisting on a long-term goal that would lower rising global average temperatures to below 1.5°C warming, accounting jointly for more than 100 of all countries most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. This majority (>70%) among the parties comprises, besides the low-lying small island states, essentially all low- and middle-income countries, with the exception of two lower middle-income countries (India, Indonesia) and a few upper-middle income countries such as China, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico; the parties that support a 2°C target are all high-income countries and nine upper middle-income countries, the above four included [6]. The latter evidently unite the high-emitting, high-income OECD nations.Critique of the 2°C target also came from scientists, ranging from climate scientists to economists, political scientists, human geographers, and other social scientists. Arguably best known is James Hansen’s critique that, a decade ago, disapproved of the 2°C upper threshold for climate safety as irresponsible, arguing that it inappropriately accounted for climate sensitivity and climate feedback processes and, hence, committed the planet to significant warming [7]. Hansen subsequently urged abandoning the 2°C target altogether and committing to a 1°C danger limit [8] or a 350 ppm CO2 target [9], which is lower than today’s 400 ppm. ‘[T]he oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.’ [10]. Others consider the 2°C target scientifically unfounded, due to insufficient data and reasoning [11,12]. Further scientists and environmentalists, including Paul Randers and Jorgen Gilding who outlined the need for emergency actions as part of their ‘One Degree War Plan’ [13], as well as Greenpeace and the Climate Action Network International have now also been advocating for limiting warming below 1.5°C. David Victor and Charles Kennel [12], while acknowledging that the 2°C target represents a bold and easy to grasp goal, contend that it is both essentially unachievable and impractical. Their suggestion to ‘ditch’ the 2°C warming target has now triggered a wave of contestation, mainly among climate scientists.Less well known perhaps is a critique from feminist social scientists who interrogate what may be deemed ‘acceptable’ and what may be ‘dangerous’, and for whom, and who contest the global community as a homogeneous entity. Joni Seager, for instance, demonstrates how notions of acceptability always mirror ‘a prism of privilege, power, and geography’ [14]. She argues that those for whom a 2°C target appears to be a relatively safe bet are the richer countries in temperate latitudes, as well as politicians and economists from the global North deeply entrenched in a masculinized rationality that nature can be controlled and that in the imminent climate race with inevitable winners and losers they will be among the former. Seager rejects the notion of a 2°C target as a real geophysical threshold that neatly distinguishes between little and much danger; instead, she argues that the target represents the point ‘when global warming “comes” home to the rich world, …. when “their” [the others’] problems are likely to become “ours”’ [14]. Diana Liverman [15] also emphasizes the uneven spatial geographies associated with global danger levels as even small temperature rises and other risks threatening vulnerable livelihoods in one locale would be offset by gains and benefits somewhere else. This unevenness, however, disappears in the aggregate and masks very concrete and embodied, lived experiences of danger. Moreover, danger at different temperature thresholds, as schematically illustrated in the iconic Burning Embers graphic introduced by the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, conveys considerable risk for certain unique and threatened systems at 2°C warming, such as glaciers, arctic and coastal ecosystems, as well as indigenous and small island communities. Yet, it obscures risks for millions of poor and vulnerable populations in the arguably less charismatic drylands. What is considered unique and threatened emerges from value judgments that, so far, have largely been in the scientific eye of the beholder, not the one endangered.A degree of average global warming may indeed be the most convenient and compelling mathematical construction (the mean) of the overall severity of climate change impacts. Yet, not only does such a single-index of climate change risk inadequately capture the complexity of the climate system [12], it also poorly reflects locally experienced temperature increases and extremes and hence the large variation across regions and continents. No single person or any single species faces a global average. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was one of the most outspoken non-delegate critics in Copenhagen in 2009, drawing attention to the fact that a 2°C global average would mean 3°C–3.5°C or more for Africa, hence the ‘cooking of the continent’ and its condemnation to incineration and no modern development [16]. Abundant evidence from around the world confirms the uneven and localized impacts of already occurring climate change (0.8°C average global warming since pre-industrial times). This evidence does not only consider rising temperatures and sea level rise but also shifting trends in rainfall patters and extreme events and impacts such as floods, droughts, and heat waves. This evidence is most recently assessed and summarized in Working Group II of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), for the world regions and sectors including natural and managed systems, urban and rural areas, economic services, human health, livelihoods and poverty, and human security [17].Most problematically, the notion of a scientifically sound and globally tractable 2°C target is often erroneously mapped onto Article 2 of the UNFCCC; an implied connection is made between 2° and ‘dangerous’, although no specific number is provided in the convention’s text [14]. In fact, the convention does not define a dangerous level for global warming or a limit for GHG concentrations, arguably on purpose. It states as its ultimate objective to ‘achieve … stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.’ Rather than deliberating different danger metrics or avoiding serious damage, continuous debates revolve around pinpointing what precisely this temperature threshold for climate safety ought to be and how it translates into acceptable and unacceptable risk and damage and for whom. In the following section, I reflect on science-policy debates on adequate warming targets, through the lens of the fourth UNFCCC structured expert dialogue at COP20 in Lima, Peru, in early December 2014. My aim is to highlight arguments that explore whether a 1.5°C warming target by the end of the 21st century would indeed be a safer danger limit for humanity and, if yes, whether it is still within reach.L – TechSettler colonialism uses “progressive” ideals of science, technology, and environment salvation to reconstruct the white settler hero and paper over apocalypses Indigenous people face every day.Koch 21 [Natalie Koch – Department of Geography and the Environment; Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert; Geoforum; 5-21-2021; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-12-2021At the time, I did not understand much about the relationship between science and spectacle, but almost 30 years after my first visit to Biosphere 2, I have learned that it is impossible to disentangle the two. In my subsequent academic research, I came to see spectacle as a technology of government, which actors use strategically to advance certain agendas and visions of the world (Koch, 2018). Developed in the 1980s by the company Space Biospheres Ventures in cooperation with the University of Arizona, Biosphere 2 was a consummate spectacle. And like many spectacles, it was designed to be a one-off. That is, it was always acknowledged to be an experiment only. As a kind of utopian spectacle to sell a techno-optimistic future, it was engineered to draw attention to possible solutions for the coming environmental apocalypse – itself a dystopian spectacle. Of course, the project never succeeded in engineering the world out of its environmental troubles, but did this speculative exercise actually do something more? Whose interests did it actually serve?As this article shows, Biosphere 2′s promoters were adept propagandists. Naturally, nobody had thought to seal a bunch of humans in a glass bubble before, but such experimental projects in the desert are not particularly new. Nor are they particularly progressive: the logic, I will argue, is quintessentially colonial. Imperial projects also have a long history of employing “experiments” or “models” to introduce their new mode of social ordering, and Euro-American imperialism was always interwoven with modern scientific technologies and concepts. Harnessing the discursive power of science, Biosphere 2’s planners nimbly adapted the story of environmental apocalypse to sell their clichéd visions as visionary. In doing so, they also sold themselves as visionary. The colonial logic of modernist science has always discounted other ways of knowing, strategically constructing a particular kind of hero – the white male scientist – who has arrived to save the day. This supposedly enlightened or superior knowhow in turn works to justify settler control of Indigenous lands. In considering the case of Biosphere 2, then, we must ask who its promoters are and whose “apocalypse” are we being sold?This last question has been powerfully posed by many Indigenous scholars, who point to the colonial undercurrent of apocalyptic environmental narratives, or what April Anson (2020: 63) refers to as “settler apocalypse” – “stories that tell of the end of the whole world but are, in reality, specific to white settlers.” Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018: 225), extends this argument and stresses how “dystopian or postapocalyptic narratives of climate crises […] can erase Indigenous peoples’ perspectives on the connections between climate change and colonial violence.” Speaking from the North American context, he notes how many Indigenous communities understand “their societies as already having endured one or many more apocalypses” (Whyte 2018, 236). Diné geographers Andrew Curley and Majerle Lister (2020) likewise describe these past and present apocalypses as a layering of “already existing dystopias,” which are also erased by narratives of settler apocalypse. That is,With colonization, Indigenous peoples saw their lands taken and lives permanently altered. This constituted its own dystopia. Tribes later suffered through forced assimilation, continued land theft, and the creation of tribal institutions with legal and political rights strongly associated with the expansion of capitalism and extractive industries within and around Indigenous communities. Oil and gas fracking around Indigenous lands have witnessed the abduction and murder of Indigenous women who are ensnared into man camps. Coal created hundreds of jobs, a sense of economic dependency, and eventual collapse. These multiple, overlapping, and current dystopias are lost on most commentaries on climate change (Curley and Lister, 2020: 260).This article thus seeks to understand whose “apocalypse” was advanced in the project to build Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert. It is built on a recognition that settler colonialism, as a system of structural violence, includes elements that are overtly destructive (e.g. displacement, genocide), as well as elements that are productive (e.g. scientific endeavors, economic “opportunities” for both settlers and Indigenous/nonwhite people who are enticed to participate in the same structures that oppress them). These negative and positive elements of systems of oppression are never separate (Foucault 1975), but analyzing an ostensibly productive project in the American Southwest like Biosphere 2 requires a different analytical focus than analyzing the overtly destructive acts of colonial genocide and violence in the same place.While this article does not directly examine the violent history of Arizona’s colonization (see Blackhawk, 2006, Crandall, 2019, Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, Lahti, 2012), Biosphere 2 offers important insights about how the state’s settler colonial power structure was developed with support from the discursive resources of science and environmentalism. I thus examine how certain environmental imaginaries are interwoven with scientific networks of power to sell apocalyptic visions of living in a changing planet, and by whom. Techno-fetishistic projects in the desert have a long history of using apocalyptic narratives to justify material interventions in environmental policy and exploration, and to deflect attention from their role in perpetuating (settler) colonial projects of violence and exclusion. Uniting insights from geography, environmental studies, STS (science and technology studies), and Indigenous studies, this article takes apocalyptic imaginaries seriously and asks how they “touch down” across history and diverse places around the world – whether deserts or not – and what role they play in re/configuring cross-scalar power relations.To do so, I draw from a larger study on the politics and environmental history of empire in Arizona, which has included archival research, interviews, and fieldwork from 2018 to 2020 (Koch, forthcoming-a). My interviews for this broader project routinely touched on Biosphere 2, but none were on the record (per request or per legal constraints), so that data is not presented here. Instead I use textual analysis, paired with site visits in December 2019, to contextualize the history of Biosphere 2 within the longer genealogy of experimental projects in deserts. A great deal of secrecy still surrounds the project today and no archival records are accessible to the public.1 As such, the textual analysis included a review of all published articles, books, podcasts, and other materials covering the history or commentaries about Biosphere 2 from 1991 to the present, collected via the author’s institutional library databases and a systematic search of relevant materials online. Texts analyzed also included the accounts displayed in the Biosphere 2 visitor spaces, such as the museum-like entry foyer and inside the diverse facilities open to visitors. Although I have been to the site numerous times over 30 years, the site visits in 2019 allowed me to record how different tour guides presented the facilities and the history of the Biosphere 2 project and to gain access to additional materials not available online (e.g. promotional videos shown to visitors, activities designed for children, etc.). The discursive approach sheds light on how ostensibly “positive” or “progressive” ideals of science, technology, and environmental salvation are harnessed to build the settler colonial structures of exclusion and Indigenous dispossession. This story is not isolated to the U.S. Southwest, so by centering the question of whose apocalypse we are being sold, this article conceptually contributes to efforts to map contemporary forms of environmental injustice and settler colonial violence – which are not limited to the violent theft of land and life, but might also look like a gleaming white laboratory in the desert. That is, the seductive spectacle of settler science is a form of violence too.The process of western technological mediation in water control technologies such as monitoring regimes and control infastructure refies western hydrosocial spatio-temporalities of place-based epistemology – i.e. it effectively enforces western reconstitution of indigenous space-time knowledge through western spatialities in the ongoing settler colonial process*Technological Mediation: application of (western) scientific knowledges and practices to water*The example is direct and only about legal conflicts, but the warrants in the example provide causuality for the crticial aspect of water control technologies as a whole: LOGIC: tech mediation in water control technologies relies on western conceptions of “place” and “land” – such knowledge is part of the place-based epistemology crituqe (reconstitution of indigneous knoweldge bad)Cohn et al. 18 [Teresa Cavazos Cohn (Department of Natural Resources and Society, University of Idaho. Ph.D. Montana State University, Department of Earth Sciences, Geography; B.A. The Colorado College Maj. English, Min. Central American Studies, 1996. Research Interests: Water and hydrosocial relations with emphasis on Indigenous communities, Cultural geography of the American West, and Science Communication and Education), Kate Berry (Research interests: Water governance; geographies of social identity; Indigenous geographies; cultural politics of water; legal geographies; environmental justice; geographies of racialization; environmental conflict transformation. Education: Ph.D., Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, 1993; M.S., Watershed Science, Colorado State University, 1985; B.S., Forestry & Natural Resources, Northern Arizona University, 1980), Kyle Powys Whyte (Dr. Kyle Whyte, Professor of Environment and Sustainability / George Willis Pack Professor) and Emma Norman (Research Interests: questions related to water governance, borders, and environmental and social justice. Education: Ph.D. Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., March 2009.; M.S. Geography, Huxley College, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, June 2001; B.A. International Studies, Environmental Policy, Colby College, Waterville, ME, May 1995. Senior Thesis Title: Population Growth and Deforestation in Rural Nepal: An Environmental History from 1814-1948.) “Spatio-Temporality and Tribal Water Quality Governance in the United States” Water 2019 11, no. 1: 99. ] DGPSpace and time, and their connection as space-time, create a fundamental fabric of reality, as well as a practical concern of daily life. Conceptions of time and space are diverse among Indigenous groups and perhaps impossible to thoroughly represent or interpret through a different language and culture. Regardless, we offer a few rough sketches from scholarly literature. Northern Arapaho space-time is a “four-stage-four-direction order that synthesizes linear and circular motion within the same space-time” [53]. Aymara people use the word nayra (eye/front/sight) as an expression for the past, and qhipa (back/behind) for the future, and thus gesture forward when referring to the past and backward when referring to the future [54]. Residents of the eastern Australian Aboriginal community Pormpuraaw use directional terms (North/South/East/West) instead of what English-speakers refer to as right or left and time progressions are represented from east to west, as an English timeline would move from left to right [55]. The Yupno of mountainous Papua New Guinea conceive of the past as downhill, the present as located with a speaker, and the future as uphill in a non-linear temporality, reflecting the local topography [56]. Like the Yupno spatio-temporal constructs, some chronologies do not track time as a linear flow of the past, present, or future [57]. The Anishinaabemowin (Neshnabémwen) expression aanikoobijigan (yankobjegen) means both ancestor and descendant, so the speaker is linked simultaneously to future and past generations through spiraling time [58]. Finally, in Maori, the words space and time are the same [59].Several Indigenous scholars emphasize that altering such fundamental conceptions of space-time is a critical component of Euro-American colonization processes. With regard to time, Vine Deloria [60] wrote, “It is debatable which factor was most important in the destruction of tribal ceremonial life: The prohibition of . . . traditional rituals . . . or the introduction of white man’s system of keeping time.” Regarding space, Linda Tuhiwai Smith [59] emphasizes, “ . . . indigenous world view, the land and the people, have been radically transformed in the spatial image of the West. In other words, indigenous space has been colonized.” The collision/combination of Euro-American and Indigenous space-times has resulted in hybrids, desynchronizations, divergence, resistance, evolution, and adaptation [61] or spatio-temporal colonial entanglement [23,62]. These dynamic space-times are central—and often invisible—to governance dynamics, associated with networks that connect tribal governance processes to “a more comp2. Spatio-Temporal Themes in Water Governance Literature2.1. Spatio-Temporality in Tribal Water Quality GovernanceFocusing on spatio-temporality, we have identified three central themes through which to examine tribal water quality governance: Spatio-temporal cycles, technological mediation, and interrelationship and fluidity. In the following discussion, we describe each theme and then connect the theme to a tribal water quality governance example. We continue to draw on these examples to illustrate governance networks, ontological pluralism, political colonial processes, and decolonization using a spatio-temporal lens.2.2. Spatio-Temporal Cycles Cycle is defined most generally as a series of regularly repeated events, though the term carries disciplinary nuances [64]. In Earth sciences, “cycle” refers to processes of movement and transformation; for example, the Oxford Dictionary of Geology and Earth Sciences defines the hydrologic cycle as “the flow of water in various states through the terrestrial and atmospheric environments” [65]. Linton, and others [66–69] examine the historical roots of this term, note its limitations, and use the term “hydrosocial cycle” to acknowledge and emphasize the importance of social processes in dimensions of water. Linton and Budds define the “hydrosocial cycle” as “a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time” [66]. The following discussion embeds itself in this broader context, in which combined social and physical processes shape, and are shaped by, the flow of water [69] in cyclic or repeated ways over space and/or time. Cycling may take place on large or small spatio-temporal scales [70,71] and involve synchronous or asynchronous patterns in social relationships with water [72,73]. This cycling may involve annual processes such as, for example, toxic contaminants in streams that cycle seasonally [71] or increased water temperatures related to anthropogenic climate change, which affect fisheries [74]. Governance processes, rather than bio-physical processes, may also drive cycling, such as those involving environmental impact statement procedures as dictated by the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) [75] or judicial appeals processes [76]. More pointedly, cycles may circulate within networks of socio-natural systems with ontological and political dimensions. We offer the following tribal water quality example involving mining impact on water quality and the Nez Perce Tribe. Water Quality Governance Example: Stibnite Gold Project and the Nez Perce Tribe In September 2016, Midas Gold submitted a plan proposing new mining and milling activities in a historical mining district of West Central Idaho. “The Stibnite Gold Project” involves National Forest System lands, and specifically, the Payette National Forest, within an area open to mineral extraction under the General Mining Act of 1872. The project aims to extract four to five million ounces of gold and 100–200 million pounds of antimony over an approximate 20-year construction and operations period [77]. On 9 October 2018, the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee passed a resolution formally opposing the Stibnite Project [78]. The Tribe expressed concern about the environmental and cultural impacts of mining operations, including the effects of a proposed open pit mine, 100 million tons of toxic mine tailings, and 350 million tons of waste rock to be stored at the site in perpetuity. The site, which has been intermittently mined since 1902, is located in the Nez Perce aboriginal territory, where the Tribe maintains treaty rights ensuring tribal use of usual and accustomed places [79–81]. The South Fork of the Salmon River, downstream of the mine, supports a culturally significant salmon fishery; the Tribe spends over 2.5 million dollars each year on hatchery supplementation, fishery research, and watershed restoration in that area to support salmon populations impacted by prior mining practices [78,81]. A comparison of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee resolution to oppose the Stibnite Gold Mine [78] and Midas Gold’s Stibnite Gold Project Plan of Restoration and Operations [77] illustrates several examples of spatio-temporal cycles associated with mining and water quality. First, the Tribe links proposed Stibnite activities to disruption in cyclic patterns associated with networks that sustain water quality-salmon-Nez Perce relationships. Salmon and water quality are both critical to Nez Perce culture. As a medicine, water flushes toxicity from stream systems, animals, and people; and cold, clean, high altitude water (which characterizes water at the Stibnite site) is valued over lower elevation warmer waters, in part because it supports salmon, which are central to Nez Perce ideological and material foundations [79,82]. Nez Perce people have maintained traditional fishing cycles—and governance that ensures the continuance of these cycles—for generations, with regard to fish harvests of tribal members [79], for example, and the development of multi-million dollar fisheries programs [81]. In a whitepaper developed to increase knowledge about the Tribe’s interests and activities in and around the Stibnite Gold Project area, the Tribe emphasizes mining threats to water quality and salmon [81]: [The Tribe has] installed nine fish passage projects . . . and decommissioned 180 miles of road to reduce sediment levels . . . detrimental to listed fish species. Renewed mining activities such as the Stibnite Gold Project, however, could undermine the gains in fisheries and habitat improvements vital to the Tribe by negatively affecting . . . watersheds through increased sedimentation to streams (mining activities, increased traffic adjacent to streams), potential fuel and chemical spills, and decreased water quality resulting from mineral exploration. Moreover, the Nez Perce Tribe suggests that proposed mining activity is directly connected to historic cycles of negative cultural and water quality impacts; the corporate project could be the next in a series of broken promises. For example, the tribal resolution references mining boom-bust cycles affecting local economies and water quality, including repeated incidents in which gold mining resulted in disastrous consequences for the Tribe: Gold mining has left a legacy of destruction and contamination and boom and bust economies, the scars of which are still visible throughout the Tribe’s aboriginal territory, the American west, and world; and . . . gold mining within the Tribe’s aboriginal territory has specifically led to the diminishment of the Tribe’s Reservation in the Treaty of 1863; the armed clash between the Nez Perce and the U.S. Army; and the diminishment of the Tribe’s Treaty-reserved natural resources, including the extirpation of Spring/Summer Chinook salmon in the upper East Fork South Fork Salmon River in the 1940s. Finally, temporal cycles differ between Midas Gold’s plan and the Nez Perce resolution. Midas Gold outlines three time-cycles: Three years of construction and development, 12 to 15 years of operation, and two to three years of reclamation and closure. In contrast, the Nez Perce Tribe views the mining operation as one in a series of resource extractive events since Euro-American settlement, negatively impacting water quality and fisheries. In short, because of their connection to place, Nez Perce governance cycles are much longer than the mining company’s, based on many generations’ prior experiences, as well as critical socioecological cycles that will sustain the Tribe and water quality for many generations to come. In sum, spatio-temporal cycles, or repeated processes over space and/or time in tribal water quality governance, are illustrated in this example through the disturbance of cyclic patterns that sustain water quality-salmon-Nez Perce relationships, boom-bust cycles affecting local economies and water quality, and different conceptions of spatio-temporal cycles related to project planning and water quality risk.2.3. Technological MediationHydrosocial spatio-temporalities are influenced—intentionally and unintentionally—by the application of scientific knowledge and practices to water. We refer to this as technological mediation. As Leslie Head suggests, human communities are dependent on distant water flows, but also “pipes, pumps, weirs, and web-based financial transfer instruments”, along with other technologies that mediate “human-water relations in various ways and across both space and time” [72]. Such technological mediation may involve water quality through monitoring regimes that assess certain parameters in particular places over time [83]; water infrastructure including dams, diversions, treatment facilities, and irrigation equipment [69,84–87]; and a range of technologies that are not specifically water-oriented, but influence water governance [72,88]. As such, technologies that Tribes contend with (each in their own fashion) serve to mediate power relations, inform cultural histories [87], and reconfigure space and time, as they restructure “watery” networks.Water Quality Governance Example: The MiccosukeeThe Miccosukee Tribe of Indians (or simply, the Miccosukee) became a federally recognized Tribe in 1962. In 1994, the Miccosukee received TAS status under the CWA and in 1999, the EPA approved their water quality standards. Given that Miccosukee homelands are in close proximity to the City of Miami, Florida, the Tribe has been active in initiatives designed to protect water quality, wildlife, and tree islands of the Everglades. In addition to reservation lands in and around the Everglades, the Miccosukee Tribe has a perpetual lease to lands within Water Conservation Area 3A, deep within the Everglades. Tribal members hunt, fish, and gather materials in these areas, engage in religious planting and harvesting on tree islands, and operate a recreational business for visitors to the Everglades [89]. As Carden observes, tribal members rely “upon the integrity of Everglades ecosystem to support its religion, culture, and economic survival” [89].The Miccosukee Environmental Protection Agency supports a dedicated Water Resources Department (Miccosukee WRD) that addresses water flows and water quality as a key aspect of Everglades restoration. This tribal initiative is especially challenging due to the multiple layers of water control technologies deployed and operated at various times by different government entities, each designed to manage waters of the Everglades. For example, the Central and South Florida (C&SF) Project is a particularly intricate and aggressive system of water control operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers composed of dams, gates, canals, levees, and pumping stations, designed to control water flows over 16,000 square miles so as to serve the various needs of a residential area to the east, an agricultural area to the south, and the Everglades National Park, but not the needs of the Miccosukee [90]. As a result of this and other water control systems, it is clear that the “watery” networks the Miccosukee are involved in are strongly mediated by a variety of technologies. In an effort to improve the impact of these highly modified aspects of the Everglades’ flow regime, the Miccosukee WRD has deployed its own technological mediation by addressing the hydroperiod, water depth, flow volume, and velocity in ways that couple with their water quality management initiatives [91] and which differ from other governments’ efforts. With this end in mind, the Tribe recently asserted its opposition to a proposed Florida transportation and recreation project [92]. The Tribe looks to both the past and the future in developing approaches to address flow regime modifications that change the spatialities of water and land within the Everglades. In so doing, the Miccosukee both counter and deploy technologies to spatially and temporally re-orient “watery” networks.Because water quality is important to the Tribe, the Miccosukee have actively resisted technologies that may contaminate the waters of the Everglades and litigation has become a significant dimension of their tribal water quality governance. The Miccosukee Tribe has instigated or been an intervenor in many different cases related to water quality and environmental issues in the Everglades, including cases that started in 1988, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2004, many of which continued for years [93]. For example, a 1998 case, which resulted in a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the Miccosukee, concerned a pumping system operated by the South Florida Water Management District (the District). The Miccosukee sought to require the District to be regulated under a CWA National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for conveying waters laden with high levels of phosphorus and other contaminants into the Everglades, [89]. The District argued that the Everglades are one—a singular water—denying any change to spatial boundaries and thus arguing that regulation was rendered irrelevant. Conversely, the Miccosukee successfully argued that water quality differences resulted in a different set of spatialities in which boundaries were created by differences in water quality [93]. This litigation, along with other court battles, underscore another strategy for tribal water quality governance, one that effectively changes the spatial orientation of a “watery” network through technological mediation. In so doing, the Miccosukee open up a “third space of sovereignty.”L – TribesThe aff rigs water policy towards ONLY those tribes the USFG recognizes as properly Indian country – ensures settlerism – state centered organization is a Western ideal imported from Europe to suppress indigenous populations.Alfred 99 (Taiaike, A leading Kanien’kehaka scholar versed in both indigenous and western traditions, PhD at Cornell, direct of the Canadian Indigenous Governance Program, “Peace, Power, Righteousness: an indigenous Manifesto, p. 46-48)Under colonization, hundreds of indigenous nations that were previously autonomous and self-governing suffered a loss of freedom. Even today, the lives of their people are controlled by others. The problems faced by social workers, political scientists, physicians, and teachers can all be traced to this power relationship, to the control of Native lives by a foreign power. In the midst of Western societies that pride themselves on their respect for freedom, the freedom of indigenous people to realize their own goals has been extinguished by the state in law and to a great degree in practice. Above all, indigenous nationhood is about reconstructing a power base for the assertion of control over Native land and life. This should be the primary objective of Native politics. The problem is that at present Native politics is still understood and practised in the context of the law as structured by the state. Within this context, the state has nothing to fear from Native leaders, for even if they succeed in achieving the goal of self-government, the basic power structure remains intact. From the perspective of the state, marginal losses of control are the trade-off for the ultimate preservation of the framework of dominance. What we need is a nationalist perspective that directly challenges that framework. A first step in developing that perspective is to understand the intellectual basis of the state's control over Native people. We must deconstruct the notion of state power to allow people to see that the settler state has no right to determine indigenous futures. ? ? ? In the conventional Western understanding, a leader's power is based on control of certain strategic resources: for example, service provision, connections to the outside, and specific symbols with special meaning within the culture. It is exercised by manipulating various resources to secure changes in a target. Thus power in the Western sense involves the imposition of an individual's will upon others. Even the most progressive non-indigenous notions of power, such as the one developed by Burns, still involve satisfying the personal motives of the leader. While Burns distinguishes between 'naked power', in which there is no engagement of leader to follower, and real leadership, in which the goals of leader and follower are merged, power is still defined in terms of 'securing changes in the behaviour of the respondent, human or animal, and in the environment'. Especially for indigenous peoples-all too familiar with state power founded on coercion-Burns's 'naked power' seems the norm. Michel Foucault identified two ways of understanding state power. The first sees state sovereignty as being created through the contractual surrender of individual rights. In this view, it is the abuse of state power-its extension beyond the accepted legal framework-that results in 'oppression' of individuals. Most of Western political theory concerns the tensions that arise within a constitutionally regulated matrix of political power. The other, deeper, understanding of power proposed by Foucault sees the over-extension of state power within a constitutional framework not as abuse but as the 'mere effect and continuation of a relation of domination' that is fundamental-'a perpetual relation of force'. Instead of defining oppression as an over-extension of state power within a legal framework, Foucault points to the continual domination by force necessary to maintain that framework itself. This approach is particularly useful for analyzing the relationship between the state and indigenous peoples-one in which not only the expression and extension of state power, but the entire framework on which the sovereignty of the state depends, is in question. A critique of state power that sees oppression as an inevitable function of the state, even when it is constrained by a constitutionally defined social-political contract, should have special resonance for indigenous people, since their nations were never party to any contract and yet have been forced to operate within a framework that presupposes the legitimacy of state sovereignty over them. Arguing for rights within that framework only reinforces the state's anti-historic claim to sovereignty by contract. By accepting that claim we empower the state to dominate indigenous peoples. In this way 'perpetual relations of force' have become the norm. Indigenous people of course recognize the difference between the coercive state and their traditional systems. But in seeking to empower themselves, do they run the risk of reproducing the power relations based on domination that Foucault recognized in the state? Is it possible to resist state domination in this regard? The state attempts to rewrite history in order to legitimize its exercise of power (sovereignty) over indigenous peoples. Native people struggle to resist the co-optation of their historical sense. But the fact remains that in order to negotiate a withdrawal from the colonial relationship they must still interact with the state, which uses all kinds of incentives to prevent Native leaders from representing traditional understandings.“Strategic” State engagement in the context of WQS is a farce that propagates recognition politicsKate and Coulthard J 2019, (Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh Northwest Territories, Dr. Kate J Neville is cross-appointed between the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment. Her research interests are in global environmental politics, with a focus on resource governance, global commodity markets, and contested water and energy projects. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and a Master’s in Environmental Science from Yale University. "Transformative Water Relations: Indigenous Interventions in Global Political Economies," MIT Press Direct, Reshaping of Settler States and Practices Alongside the invitation to GEP scholars to consider ontological and methodological challenges, the Special Issue articles present a series of analyses that reveal how the lines between participation in and resistance to colonial systems can be blurred. Indigenous governments and communities can strategically wield the tools of the state to acknowledge and defend their lands, practices, and values. The use of colonial systems to defend Indigenous rights offers one path toward greater autonomy and can alter the practices of the state itself, reshaping governance in multiple ways. Still, these processes have limits, and there are dangers to such integration (Coulthard 2007, 2014). Even as they assess the possibilities for altering state practices through engagement, our authors draw on the deep and expanding literature on the politics of recognition, much of which cautions against Indigenous participation in colonial state systems. Although participation can offer Indigenous peoples some additional power within the state, it can undermine broader and longer-term transformation of governing relationships by acknowledging the authority of the colonial state, thus limiting possibilities for reclaiming autonomy and self-determination (Coulthard 2014; Daigle 2016). By engaging with specific cases—for example, water quality standards across the United States, water rights and legal precedent in Arizona, water contamination from upstream agriculture in coastal Washington—the authors of this Special Issue provide in-depth empirical evidence for the tensions they identify in these “colonial entanglements,” a concept from Dennison (2012) used by both Curley and Diver et al. to examine the dynamics of Indigenous peoples’ participation within the structures of settler states. The interventions in this issue explore the possibilities for—but also limits of— the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, authority, and values into settler state governance practices. Diver et al. examine the adoption of state-like powers by tribal governments in the United States, where provisions under the Clean Water Act allow their “treatment as a state” in terms of conferring on them the authority to set local water quality standards. Conducting an analysis across the tribes in the United States that have engaged with TAS provisions, with a focus on environmental contaminants, they document the inclusion of cultural and ceremonial concerns in tribes’ water quality standards. Still, these entanglements lead to a form of water management that, although it expands the limits otherwise imposed by the state, still adheres to colonial perspectives on water resources, especially given structural constraints to tribal authority posed by US property rights regimes. Curley further complicates the story of colonial entanglements addressed by Diver et al. with his examination of Hopi and Navajo leaders’ assertion of their water rights through appeals to phrasing from a twentieth-century US Supreme Court case. Curley takes us to the Little Colorado River, where he tracks opposition to water settlements by Hopi and Navajo (Diné) citizens, demonstrating how these communities used existing US water laws and court decisions to contest state-mediated water allocations. Rather than acquiescing to state control, Curley argues that Hopi and Navajo claims revealed the contradictions embedded in the actions of the state, undermining the legitimacy of colonial water law and increasing the governance space for upholding alternative water relations. These conflicts reveal the possibilities for disrupting colonial assumptions and power systems through engagement with the state, revealing that appeals to state structures need not always fall into the problematic politics of recognition. Offering a bridge between the challenges of colonial entanglements and alternative relational approaches, Norman turns to ways in which Indigenous communities can circumvent unresponsive government processes. With a focus on the US West Coast, she documents efforts by the Lummi Nation (Coast Salish people), with concerns about water quality for shellfish harvesting, to work 8 ? Transformative Water Relations Downloaded from by guest on 26 June 2021 directly with upstream farmers to reconnect rights to responsibilities for water in the Salish Sea. To convince those upstream communities to participate in negotiations, Lummi leaders first invoked legal action against farmers for contaminating shellfish beds. However, the nation quickly shifted its focus away from colonial litigious practices to relationship-building efforts that better reflect the nation’s values. The relational focus of this work, both social relationships across Lummi and settler communities and place-based relationships between communities and water, highlights the transformative potential of rejecting settler state practices of negotiation and regulation. Norman’s work asks us to further consider the ontological assumptions underpinning governance practices and possible futures, considering relational alternatives to mitigating and repairing the damage wrought by industrial activities on social economies. We end the Special Issue with a policy-oriented intervention. In their Forum piece, Arsenault et al. point to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from full and meaningful participation in environmental impact assessments for development projects in Canada, highlighting the “substantive inequities” that persist in the process. Acknowledging the historical roots—and contemporary re-entrenchment—of Indigenous peoples’ mistrust in these government processes, the Forum authors turn to the ways in which more serious engagement with traditional knowledge by Western scientists could transform impact assessment and decision-making. By considering pathways for enhancing Indigenous voices within planning and development, the Forum offers a pragmatic route forward for amending existing colonial governance practices. Readers might consider whether the Forum authors’ proposal for Indigenous participation in state-led processes of environmental assessment (Arsenault et al.) creates openings for more radical transformation of the state, as considered by Diver et al. regarding the use of TAS provisions and in line with Curley’s account of the power of Indigenous interpretation and deployment of treaties, sovereignty, and water. Still, such integration into colonial processes might further entrench the politics of recognition, and perhaps Norman’s account of Lummi relational approaches would be more instructive for changing negotiations over landscapes and development. Taken together, these articles demonstrate how the industrial and extractive logics of settler states have disrupted and obscured the pre-existing economies of Indigenous peoples, yet they also reveal how Indigenous practices, legal systems, and water relations are reshaping settler states—with varyL – Water as ResourceWater as resource is a settler ontologyWilson et. al. 17 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Multiple ontologies of water: Politics, conflict and implications for governance.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2017;35(5):797-815. doi:10.1177/0263775817700395 //dylan] DGP Recent attention has been paid to the costs of a drinking water focus in water governance. Basdeo and Bharadwaj (2013), for example, have shown how a technical focus and hierarchical ordering of water needs has led to a neglect of many social, cultural and spiritual needs among First Nations. Anishnaabe scholar Deborah McGregor (McGregor, 2012: 11) has stressed this point:Water is not a single, discrete aspect of the environment; it is part of a greater, interconnected whole. When one considers water, therefore, one must consider all that to which water is connected and related [i.e. a relational ontology of water as a living being]. Elders felt current government initiatives around water to be limited and short-sighted. When one considers water, one must consider all that water supports and all that supports water. Therefore, a focus on just drinking water is misguided. It is not in keeping with traditional principles of... the interdependence of all living things. One must also consider, for example, the plants that water nourishes, the fish that live in water, the medicines that grow in or around water, and the animals that drink water.In a case of developing small-scale water treatment facilities for small communities and First Nations, we have observed cases where drinking water was separated and its infrastructure prioritized over other needs and an interconnected ontology of water-as-lifeblood. This prioritization stems from, and supports, hegemonic ontologies of water-as-a-resource, which separate and distinguish water according to different uses – an understanding of water’s existence that does not reconcile with the connected ontology of water-as-lifeblood. This approach is entrenched in water policies at various scales, including in Federal Bill S-8 (The Safe Drinking Water Act for First Nations) and BC’s new Water Sustainability Act (Provincial Bill 18, which distinguishes between various – largely settler colonial – water needs and uses). Regarding water governance in practice and in place, we observed how the installation of a drinking water treatment facility resulted in damage to existing irrigation infrastructure, in the process infringing upon livelihoods in the community and affecting the relationship between community members and the engineers implementing the project. Conversations with community members and engineers also revealed that the newly designed water intake and canal (required for the treatment centre) also altered existing stream dynamics, thereby affecting surrounding ecosystem functions as well as a sacred body of water downstream, and consequently relegating a relational ontology of allconnecting water.As Rasmussen (2016) has argued (in the context of irrigation development in the Andes), these divergent understanding of the effects of water management and infrastructure reflect the fact that different ways of knowing water within a particular landscape often collide, materially altering water flows and producing various water infrastructures in the process. Here, we argue that water infrastructures are equally produced by encounters among multiple water ontologies. In our example, the separation and prioritization of drinking water is only possible if we frame water as a separable resource, thereby ‘cleaving apart’ (Lavau, 2013) multiple water ontologies, even as they simultaneously collide in particular landscapes and in the political space of water management. In our example, this collision remains unequal, leaving a fractured politics surrounding the ontological disjuncture.6The point here is not that we should abandon attempts to provide clean drinking water. Rather, the point is to recognize and acknowledge that the above efforts, and the policies that support them, are only made possible as part of a hegemonic ontology of water-asresource. Alternative ontologies of water, such as water-as-lifeblood, might suggest radically different policies and efforts. If we understand water to exist as a living, interconnected, and important entity for all beings, then separating drinking water from water as a whole might not be an accepted goal or practice in water governance. Alternative approaches would not undermine a focus on providing safe drinking water, but might rather position those efforts as one component of a broader approach to hydrosocial governance. We do not mean to suggest that water-as-lifeblood and ontologies of water-as-a-resource are inherently incompatible. However, as our example below illustrates, an ontology such as water-aslifeblood forces us to approach freshwater in fundamentally different ways (including its spatial connections) as a living being that connects and supports diverse forms of life across placesThis drive for ownership over natural resources (1) makes the contemporary ideological social actor a white male settler (2) an justifies the continued domination of entities deemed “uncivilized” by western cultureSeawright 14 [Gardner Seawright. Gardner Seawright is a teacher-scholar whose work in a middle school social studies classroom informs the larger examination of the ways that race influences curriculum and the everyday act of teaching. His work explores the relationality and phenomenology of whiteness in the classroom, as well as the development of antiracist, anti-colonial, and place-based curricula. From these lenses, using both qualitative and theoretical approaches, Gardner's scholarship analyzes teacher-student relationships, the limits and possibilities of antiracist solidarity, place-based and environmental education, qualitative methodologies, teacher education, and social studies education. He holds a Ph.D in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Institute of Professional Educator Development. “Settler Traditions of Place: Making Explicit the Epistemological Legacy of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism for Place-Based Education.” Educational Studies, A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50:6, 554-572, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2014.965938 //dylan] DGPThe Western body of knowledge produces a fetish of ownership that sits at the foundation of settler traditions of place. The Western imaginary encourages ownership and domination of the land, while simultaneously curtailing the possibilities and parameters of ownership in a racialized and gendered manner, delimiting who can own, what can be owned, and how things should be owned.In the United States, historical and contemporary examples of white-settler epistemic constructions of the natural world help illustrate settler traditions of place and their intersecting components (racialized, gendered, and economized understandings of land, self, and others). Terra nullius and the settler colonial push westward serve this notion in the historical register. Terra nullius, or the belief that prospective land for colonizing/settling is in fact empty, was predicated upon an understanding that only so-called civilized societies/peoples can own land (Pateman and Mills 2007). Despite the presence of many Indigenous nations in North America, European colonizers perceived the continent as empty, because only so-called uncivilized peoples populated it.The ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands and the extreme reluctance of settlers operating with the prevailing epistemology to acknowledge this reality provides ample evidence of contemporary settler relations to place. But a more specific example of how the white settler knowledge regime encourages a continued drive toward ownership can be seen in industrial agriculture and the genetic modification and patenting of crops and other products. As part of settler traditions of place, industrial food production and genetic engineering exhibit white supremacist, capitalistic, and settler understandings of the world.In pursuit of property, the West plunders natural resources from around the world and has laid claim to ownership over vast swaths of nature through patents and copyrights. In Biopiracy, Vandana Shiva (1997) powerfully illustrates how the Western world has pirated the seeds, plants, and knowledge of Indigenous peoples across the globe. These actions are justified by racialized and gendered perceptions of Indigenous knowledge holders, marking them as uncivilized and incapable of owning or properly cultivating their knowledge, seeds, and plants. The stolen seeds and plants are cultivated and manipulated at the genetic level, and subsequently patented for continued ownership and profit. The actors participating in these actions are situated within the white settler epistemology as successful and rational. From this perspective, these settler actors are simply realizing their full potential. These acts of settling are not the simple accumulation of property to individually settle-down, but are part of a continuous drive to pursue and consume property of all kinds and add it to a settled dominion.Industrial agriculture is the byproduct of the dominant Western epistemology that has normalized and rationalized the aggressive accumulation of massive amounts of land and other properties. This remains the norm despite the fact that the actions resulting from this knowledge system have displaced, dispossessed, and exploited many—primarily Indigenous communities and communities of color, but also poor white settlers. But due to the racialized nature of the Western knowledge regime, epistemic conditions have been cultivated in such a way that this deleterious perception of reality remains the norm for many of those who are oppressed by its mass operationalization.The need for a full understanding of the logic of domination that flourishes across Western society has been emphasized by activists, scholars, and educators alike, making an argument that there needs to be an intimate examination of taken-for-granted assumptions about the world (Martusewicz et al., 2011). Settler traditions of place impact the possibilities of place-based education, and if this educational model is broadly oriented toward social and ecological justice, then the body of knowledge that emerged from settler interactions with the natural world must be understood in its entiretyRecursive framing water as “resource” prevents the emergence of alternative hydrosocial realities Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern Abstraction,” p. 13)We can see how particular kinds of water can be held fast in recursive webs of social and natural processes. Because such fixations — like the identity of water as a resource for producing hydroelectricity — are the product of mixing water with social processes, they perform a kind of political work in the sense that they strengthen some social relations while making it difficult for others to establish or sustain themselves. To treat water as an economic resource allows some people to use it as a means to whatever ends they may have the economic and technological capacity to effect. Thus, alternative, potential meanings and relations with water may be ignored or shunted aside, along with the people for whom such mean- ings and relations are constitutive of life and livelihood. The business of fixing water, in other words, is hardly just an intellectual performance; in each instance, it allows for certain hydrosocial realities while making it difficult or impossible for others to spring to life. The meanings of water that get fixed in any particular time and place can therefore be seen as a function of the relative power of different social actors. L – Water ScarcityThe notion of water scarcity as naturally determined is settler colonialist, which turns the aff through error replication.Tharaud 21 [Jerome Tharaud – Assistant Professor of English, PhD, University of Chicago; "Western Salvage: Scarcity, Settler Colonialism, and Adaptation in Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow"; OUP Academic; 3-29-2021; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-14-2021Wallace Stegner is perhaps best known as a chronicler of the arid West. As he put it in his 1987 lecture “Living Dry,” “The West is defined … by inadequate rainfall, which means a general deficiency of water . . . . Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one” (American West 6, 8). But if Stegner anticipated an environmental historian’s definition of the West as “a region of scarcity, where water sources are few and far between,” he also explored scarcity as a cultural condition (Worster, Under 31). From his ruminations on John Wesley Powell’s “homemade education” (Beyond 8) to his account of the “deprivation” of his own “frontier” upbringing (Wolf Willow 25, 23), Stegner mapped another geography of Western scarcity: information deserts where books are rare treasures; aging towns whose young people have left in search of opportunity; places where entire histories have eroded away, replaced by imported traditions. This essay examines that alternative geography through its most eloquent statement, Wolf Willow (1962). As Stegner reconstructs his family’s failed venture homesteading a borderland wheat farm and his formative experiences in the nearby town of “Whitemud” (his fictionalized name for Eastend, Saskatchewan), he illuminates the relationship between different forms of scarcity, the historical process that has produced them, and possible strategies for adapting to them. Wolf Willow thus offers an opportunity to reconsider not only the history of Western regionalism and its relationship to settler colonialism, but also the potential futures of the region—considered both as a particular geography and as a general concept—in an age of global climate crisis.Stegner’s definition of the West in terms of its aridity (drawing on the ideas of Powell, Mary Austin, and Walter Prescott Webb before him) has been hotly contested in recent decades. By the time of his death in 1993, even as Western water scarcity gained renewed attention through popular histories like Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1986) and scholarly ones like Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), scholars had begun to argue that the region was too complex to reduce to a single geographical variable.1 Noting that large portions of the Pacific Northwest, California, and the Plains have abundant rainfall, Richard White wrote that “Aridity certainly separates vast sections of the West from the East and South, but it also divides the West itself” (3); rather than being “naturally determined,” the region’s “geographical boundaries” were “politically determined” (4). In a word, the West was defined not by water but by “conquest” (4). Patricia Nelson Limerick’s influential The Legacy of Conquest (1987) encapsulated the field’s rejection of the triumphalist legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis in favor of a more nuanced, ambivalent portrait of the West not as a frontier “process” but “as a place—as many complicated environments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge” (26). While acknowledging that “Aridity is, after all, the quality that most distinguishes the West (with the exception of the Pacific Northwest) from the rest of the country” (135), Limerick considered it just one among several defining regional characteristics, including distance from national power centers, reliance on extractive economies, and “the presence of most of the nation’s Indian reservations” (30).2 This internal diversity has led one historian to conclude that “It is more accurate to think of the West as a collection of subregions than as a single unified region” (Dorman, Hell 4). To take one example, geographers William Wyckoff and Lary M. Dilsaver define the “Mountainous West” not only in terms of the natural forces that make the mountains “islands of moisture” surrounded by drier Plains and deserts, but by four historical and cultural characteristics, including the ways mountains have functioned as “barriers to easy movement and communication across the region,” their economic role as “a zone of concentrated resources” from furs to minerals to timber (3), their political role as an “area of government control” containing vast tracts of the nation’s public lands, and their cultural role as “a restorative sanctuary” where people seek recreation and spiritual renewal (4).Uniting these reappraisals is the idea that the modern West is fundamentally relational—shaped by encounters between water and aridity, people and land, settlers and Native people, citizens and their governments. Yet even a cursory survey of Stegner’s voluminous writing about the West reveals that he did not privilege the drama of wet and dry to the exclusion of the others, but grappled with all of them in their complex interrelation. In fact, as this essay will argue, by portraying goods as varied as water, books, and “wilderness” as precious and dwindling resources, Stegner helps us understand such scarcities as braided products of conquest—specifically of settler colonialism. That insight can in turn help reframe ongoing debates over the nature of scarcity in an era of climate change, bringing material conceptions of resource scarcity developed by ecologists and economists into dialogue with the more culturally oriented approaches of literary scholars, sociologists, and cultural geographers (among others). Ultimately Wolf Willow reveals how a more holistic conception of scarcity might help people adapt to a hotter, drier West, and to a world in which material and cultural scarcities are increasingly intertwined.Settler Colonialism and the Production of ScarcityStegner provides an image of this intertwined condition early in Wolf Willow when he recounts a conversation with an “English novelist friend” about the disparities in their upbringing (24). While his friend “had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four onward to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent in every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries, and British Museums,” Stegner notes,I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, without architecture, almost without music or theater, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books. I was charged with getting in a single lifetime, from scratch, what some people inherit as naturally as they breathe air. And not merely cultural matters. I was nearly twelve before I saw either a bathtub or a watercloset, and when I walked past my first lawn, in Great Falls, Montana, I stooped down and touched its cool nap in awe and unbelief. I think I held my breath—I had not known that people anywhere lived with such grace. (24)Stegner’s seamless transition from cultural deprivation to the water scarcity that makes indoor plumbing and irrigated lawns seem like minor miracles posits a continuity between the cultural and the material: his drive to acquire culture is aligned with a desire for symbols of middle-class refinement that depend on intensive water use. But if Stegner’s narrator remains captivated by abundance here, his friend’s reply hints at an alternative: “He looked at me and said dryly, ‘Perhaps you got something else in place of all that’” (25).Stegner’s account of cultural scarcity rehearses a trope of frontier memoir that connects Hamlin Garland’s recollections of Mitchell County, Iowa, in the 1870s to William Kittredge’s book-starved youth in Oregon’s Warner Valley nearly a century later. In 1917 Garland wrote, “It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy, half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper” (121). In a similar vein Kittredge recalled, “we lived a long way from bookstores. And I had come to worship and yearn for books and ideas” (74), a condition that found him “ordering eight or ten deeply serious books a month long distance from San Francisco, [and] hungering before the meager collections shelved in stationery stores when I got to town” (75). This experience of literary scarcity was not limited to Anglo-American settlers: growing up in the bush of central Saskatchewan, Métis author Maria Campbell “read everything I could find” (77), including her mother’s treasured collection of English classics, in a household where “money was so scarce” that a single sheet of writing paper was “precious” (59). Such experiences evoke the phenomenon that historian David D. Hall has documented in another settler-colonial outpost, Puritan New England, where the “scarcity” (37) of books contributed to a distinctive culture of literacy and an intensive “reading style” (54). Without denying the nostalgia and romanticization that tinges many of these recollections, we might nonetheless recognize in them what historian James H. Moorhead describes as a “culture of scarcity,” in which “people read the few widely circulated books intensely, even reverently, and could thus be expected to achieve something approaching a common culture” (237).What distinguishes Stegner’s account, however, is his awareness of the disenchantment lurking beneath the re-enchantment of scarce cultural goods. This is what he discovers (along with so much else) in the town dump, where he finds books of all things—his own books. The multi-volume set of Shakespeare’s works that his father “had bought, or been sold” years earlier and then lugged thousands of miles from North Dakota to Washington State to Iowa and finally to Saskatchewan, here meets its untimely end:One of the Cratchet girls had borrowed them, a hatchet-faced, thin, eager, transplanted Cockney girl with a frenzy for reading. Stained in a fire, they had somehow found the dump rather than come back to us. The lesson they preached was how much is lost, how much thrown aside, how much carelessly or of necessity given up, in the making of a new country. We had so few books that I knew them all; finding those thrown away was like finding my own name on a gravestone (35).What’s so confounding about this scene is that the very thing that is coveted ends up being discarded. Beneath its Dickensian flourishes, Stegner dramatizes a “paradox” of Western resources that applies to books and water alike: that of severe scarcity met with profligate waste (Barbier, Water Paradox 1).To understand that paradox, it’s helpful to recall what political theorist Nicholas Xenos has called the modern “invention of scarcity” (7). In premodern Europe, scarcity referred to the lack of a particular thing for a discrete period of time: one spoke of “a scarcity of” or “a time of scarcity” (3), not scarcity in general. But in eighteenth-century England this began to change, as industrialization made possible a “Consumer Revolution” (8) in which the proliferation of luxury goods fueled an unending cycle of display, desire, and emulation that began in London and spread through the countryside, generating demand for the latest in everything from calico and porcelain to buttons and books. David Hume and other political economists of the time recognized that this new consumer economy had so blurred the line between needs and desires that it replaced the periodic natural scarcities of earlier ages with a constant social condition, what Xenos calls “a world of perpetual scarcity” (10). The older concept of periodic natural scarcities, meanwhile, was itself recast as a universal condition in the work of Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that population growth would constantly outstrip food production (Xenos 38).As environmental economist Stefan Baumg?rtner has argued, over the next two centuries the traditions of thought represented by Hume and Malthus would diverge into two distinct theories of scarcity adopted by different academic disciplines. In the “relative scarcity” theorized by neoclassical economists, people confront a plethora of goods that they desire but finite means to purchase them (Baumg?rtner et al. 489). So they weigh their preferences and make substitutions: when demand drives prices up for the newest iPhone, say, some consumers will choose to forego it and buy a less scarce good instead—a cheaper Samsung. Markets mediate among more or less scarce goods, including environmental goods like water, carbon pollution, and biodiversity. The “absolute scarcity” (490) privileged by ecologists and hydrologists, in contrast, stresses a Malthusian sense of the ratio between the available quantities of natural resources such as water, land, and food, and the fixed nature of human requirements for those “essential goods” (491). Baumg?rtner envisions a “besieged town” (490) in which the food supply is dwindling: past a certain point people can no longer simply shift their preferences and substitute other goods for scarce food items. To translate this into Stegnerian terms, as the flow of the Colorado River diminishes and the level of Lake Mead threatens to drop below its lowest intake, Las Vegas and other communities that depend on it begin to look less like yuppies wrangling over smartphones and more like besieged cities in the grip of absolute scarcity.At first glance this distinction might seem to map neatly onto Stegner’s experiences in Wolf Willow. Relative scarcity, typically associated with wants as opposed to needs, describes his sense of cultural deprivation, while absolute scarcity captures his encounter with Plains aridity. But in fact these categories are not as clear-cut as they seem. Sociologist Adel Daoud has offered the most sustained critique of conventional formulations of scarcity, emphasizing what he calls “the missing sociocultural element” (“Robbins” 1206). He argues that even the most seemingly absolute forms of scarcity are in a sense socially created: the phenomenon of “global hunger,” for instance, often portrayed as a deficit between calorie requirements and available quantities of food, is in fact caused not by lack of food per se but by the failure of the system of “entitlements” that determines how food is distributed—a condition he calls “quasi-scarcity” (“(Quasi)Scarcity” 215). Likewise on the relative side, Daoud has documented how the practice of “voluntary material simplicity” by Tibetan Buddhists in Sweden turns relative scarcity into “relative abundance by deflating material wants,” demonstrating that the supposedly ubiquitous human condition of scarcity postulated by neoclassical economists is in fact culturally constructed (“Modus Vivendi” 276).The basic insight that unites these scholarly accounts is that scarcity is not an immutable natural condition but a social product. As geographer David Harvey puts it, “To say that scarcity resides in nature and that natural limits exist is to ignore how scarcity is socially produced and how ‘limits’ are a social relation within nature (including human society) rather than some externally imposed necessity” (147). From a world-historical perspective, the “social relation” fundamentally responsible for the scarcities described in Wolf Willow is settler colonialism, the ongoing process by which nation-states in Europe and North America have extended colonial domination over the land, resources, and peoples of a vast swath of the globe over the past 500?years.3 In North America this process was carried out in large part by extinguishing Indigenous land claims, surveying the land, and distributing it to Euro-American and European settlers. This was famously accomplished through the grid land survey enacted in the United States through the Land Ordinance of 1785, expanded westward by Thomas Jefferson (who had proposed it in the first place), and settled through a series of Homestead Acts beginning in 1862; a decade later Canada instituted a similar grid survey with the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 (LaDow 12–13, 16). Though it might seem counterintuitive, this system of 160-acre parcels intended for small independent farms produced Western water scarcity in the sense that it wasn’t until some poor sucker staked a claim on a homestead in western Kansas or Saskatchewan and tried to farm it like he would in Iowa or Ontario that a deficiency of rainfall existed. Stegner understood this intuitively because he had lived it: his father, George Stegner, was that sucker, drawn to the Plains by the promise of cheap land and quick wealth (Fradkin 23, 28–29). Wolf Willow, by framing Stegner’s history of the Cypress Hills with his memoir of the failure of that dream, places his family’s searing experience within the broader arc of Western conquest and settlement. One result of his attempt to excavate a usable regional past is an awareness that the 320 acres his family settled on in 1915 had replaced existing patterns of land use, like the “long strip farms” Métis people had established along local rivers to guarantee every landholder access to water (59). Stegner comes to understand, in other words, that what people tend to think of as the region’s absolute scarcity is in fact relative because it depends on a suite of values and institutions and narratives—on culture, broadly speaking.Of course the most devastating form of resource scarcity that settler colonialism produced was borne not by settlers but by Native peoples, as Euro-American agriculture and extractive industry disrupted traditional economies, “turn[ing] native flora and fauna into a dwindling resource and curtail[ing] the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production” (Wolfe 395). To take one particularly illuminating example, the mining boom in northern Nevada in the 1860s stripped the mountain pine forests that Paiutes depended on for pine nuts at the same time that settler sheep and cattle ranching decimated the bunch grasses and other plants they cultivated and depleted the rivers they fished. With the Paiutes’ entire seasonal economy disrupted, they increasingly resorted to wage labor on ranches and in boomtowns like Virginia City, working on hay crews, driving wagons, and hauling firewood. Instead of the kin-based bands that had traditionally moved from the Walker River into the deserts and mountains over the course of the year, Paiutes began camping on the outskirts of the city, the men heading into town every morning in search of work while the women scavenged alleys and dumps for firewood and food. As Louis S. Warren explains, “Where the desert’s scarce resources had compelled the dispersion of peoples, the city’s market sucked wood, water, and food into its maw like a vortex, and the Comstock Lode and the markets that fueled it hammered away at the old hunting and gathering networks for vast distances” (80).As this example shows, settler colonialism not only produced material scarcity by disrupting a carefully calibrated sufficiency of local resources; it depleted cultural resources by rearranging the traditions and social ties that organized Paiute culture. A similar pattern occurred on the Plains, where ecological destruction (particularly of the bison) made the Lakota, Arapaho, and other Native peoples increasingly dependent on wage work and government rations, which gave US Indian agents leverage to enforce “progressive” behavior on their wards (Warren 158; see also Ostler 129–30, 133–34, 139–43). In the most infamous example of such coerced assimilation, Native children who were sent to US government boarding schools off the reservation (and were fortunate enough to survive) returned home alienated from traditional cultural practices, social bonds, economic skills, and languages—at least temporarily (Adams 277–83, 297–301; Jacobs 273–74). Indigenous children in Canada endured a similar ordeal in state-supported boarding schools that were if anything even harsher and more assimilationist than their US counterparts (Woolford 5–6). Boarding schools offer prime evidence for Patrick Wolfe’s influential argument that settler colonialism asserts control over territory through a “logic of elimination” that seeks to destroy Indigenous people, either by physically killing them or by eliminating them as a distinct culture (Wolfe 388, 397, 400; Jacobs 4; Woolford 3, 298). In other words, settler society first produces ecological scarcities that starve Native people and reduce them to dependency, and then uses that power to generate cultural scarcity by eliminating Native knowledge, languages, and other cultural resources. As philosopher Jonathan Lear argues in his study of the Crow nation, the destruction of the buffalo and the confinement of Plains peoples on reservations threatened not just particular economic and cultural practices but the loss of a shared world in which actions and events are “intelligible” (40), such that traditional forms of tribal “subjectivity” (49) and even the possibility of history itself are obliterated. As the Crow chief Plenty Coup famously lamented, “But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (qtd. in Lear 2).Critics have accused Stegner of erasing this traumatic history, even of complicity in it. As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, in Wolf Willow he “appropriate[s] the American Indian imagination in the same way the colonists appropriate the land and resources of the New World” (39). To be fair, Stegner does document settler-colonial processes in the historical portions of Wolf Willow, which detail the assault on Plains Indian cultures “by conquest, disease, trade rum, and the destruction of the buffalo” (53), and elsewhere, perhaps most directly in One Nation (1945), where he confronts the disastrous legacy of US Indian policy, including “the boarding schools that were prisons to generations of Indian youngsters” (148). Nonetheless, Wolf Willow enacts the desires and erasures that accompany the “triangular system of relationships” that settler colonialism establishes between settlers, the metropolitan society they have left behind, and the Native people they have displaced (Veracini 17). In contrast to the binary relationship between colonizer and colonized characteristic of imperial projects based primarily on resource extraction, settlers stand in the middle, torn between “two origins of authority and authenticity”: between European culture and a competing desire to disavow that culture and declare themselves “native” products of the land—a desire that tends to result in narratives that elide the histories of actual Indigenous people and represent the land as “empty” (Johnston and Lawson 370, 365, 364).4 This “indigenization of the settler” (Johnston and Lawson 369), which rhetorically eliminates Native people while seeking “to recuperate indigeneity” (Wolfe 389) as part of settler identity, is clearly reflected in Stegner’s account of his childhood self as a “sensuous little savage” (19) who would later declare that “If I am native to anything, I am native to this” (20).Yet rather than merely indulging in “imperialist nostalgia”—the regret for peoples and places one is complicit in destroying (Rosaldo)—Wolf Willow does something more complex. The Stegners were participants in and beneficiaries of the settler-colonial project, but ultimately they became its victims, “trapped” like the flies in their tarpaper shack as they await a fate that represents not only a private defeat but also “the failure of a system and a dream” (280). Stegner’s recognition of that experience as the product of a system that ruined not only his family but “thousands of others [that] had been betrayed by homestead laws totally inapplicable on the arid Plains” (281) is part of what makes Wolf Willow more than a frontier memoir, and what gives it a legitimate claim as a work of historical imagination—what Stegner later called “true history of a kind” (Stegner and Etulain 161).The Stegners arrived in Eastend in 1914, in time to witness the tail end of a “wheat boom” that fueled Canada’s economic expansion, as GDP rose by nearly five percent a year between 1896 and 1913 (Barbier, Scarcity 404). That boom was part of what economists have called “the ‘Golden Age’ of Resource-Based Development” that lasted from 1870 to 1914, as Western nations embarked on “unprecedented land conversion and natural resource exploitation across many resource-rich regions of the world” (Barbier, Scarcity 2). But as Stegner reveals so poignantly in Wolf Willow, beneath the official narrative of prosperity and economic growth lay a darker story, as the Canadian government recruited settlers to grow wheat for export on land “too dry or too far from a railroad to be decent wheat land” (257). For families like his, laboring on the periphery of empire, the economic engine they fed with their wheat and sweat repaid them with not only a sense of material scarcity but of cultural deficiency—the provincial shame that is a central drama of Wolf Willow. Stegner ultimately recognizes that the same economic forces that ensure that the “semi-arid Plains” will remain “doomed to a lower standard of living than most parts of the country enjoy” (287) also mean that places like Whitemud will continue to be culturally stunted: “generations of children are to grow up without architecture, art, theater, dance, music, or conversation,” and therefore “the only alternatives for the intelligent and talented young will be frustration … or escape” (288). The community thus has become “an exporter of manpower” as its young people leave in search of “places where real opportunity exists” (291), leaving behind “a dead little country town” (300). Without positing a moral equivalency, one might recognize in this economically-induced “export” of settler youth a certain symmetry with the politically-motivated coercion of Indigenous children into boarding schools. In other words, Stegner’s practice of “claiming indigenousness” (Cook-Lynn 37), rather than simply obscuring the history of Native dispossession, reveals a deeper logic in the way settler colonialism unleashes scarcity on Natives and settlers alike. What marks Stegner’s West as a “plundered province” (in Bernard DeVoto’s famous phrase) is not simply the extraction of its wheat or its copper, but the theft of a far more precious resource: its children, and the continuities of culture and place they represent.Policy responses to water scarcity rooted in adaptation management techniques sunders the tie between water and community and increase state-endorsed neoliberal privitation Schmidt 17 [Dr. Jeremy J. Schmidt. PhD from the university of Western Ontario (Trudeau Scholarship and SSHRC Fellowship); Currently associate professor at Durham University who focuses on the social dimensions of land, water, and energy through the ethical dimensions of the human-earth relationship. He previously held post-doctoral positions at Harvard University, Dalhousie University, and was Assistant Professor of Environmental Geography at Carleton University. Journal of the Southwest, Volume 59, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2017, pp. 204-226 (Article). Published by The Southwest Center, University of Arizona DOI: 10.1353/jsw.2017.0011. //dylan] DGPIn 1977, at the United Nations Conference on Water in Mar del Plata, global experts declared water was scarce (Biswas 1978). Shortly thereafter, in 1982, Alberta hosted a conference on water scarcity in western Canada (Sadler 1983). Yet Alberta's response to water scarcity continued to rely on increasing supply and, in 1986, it began construction of the Oldman Dam. Amidst the ensuing conflicts over the dam described below, the explicit tie of water to the "community" was sundered. This set the stage for policy reforms that aligned new forms of economic and cultural capital with water policy through both water markets and new forms of shared governance. Alberta's shifts mirrored neoliberal trends of re-regulating water elsewhere, such as in the United States (see Ingram et al. 1984). Reforms in Alberta also reflected contests over how government reflected the "community," or if it should continue to do so at all (see, generally, Rose 1996). For instance, the withering away of "community" in public policy rationale led Kennett (1992: 10) to conclude that, in Canada, "conceptions of community appear to have limited relevance to the design of federalism as it relates to water management." Clearly, however, this is incorrect; "community" once played an explicit role in Canadian water policy that directly affected water policy in Alberta and marginalized indigenous peoples deemed outside of that "community." Understanding how notions of community could so easily be jettisoned, then, requires examining how the social construction of "community" was reformulated through policy reforms mobilized alongside concerns over water scarcity.After decades of federal-provincial tensions—from the PFRA of the 1930s through until Alberta took over infrastructure funding in the 1970s—the Oldman Dam controversy cut to the quick of what interests (if any) the national "community" retained in provincial water decisions. Glenn (1999) provides the authoritative account of how the dam's ecological effects and flooding of indigenous and private lands presented two fronts of opposition. On one front, an ecological coalition, known as Friends of the Oldman River (FOR), launched a legal challenge in 1989 that claimed the environmental assessment for the dam was inadequate. After losing the initial decision, FOR won at Canada's Federal Court of Appeal in the spring of 1990, which effectively meant further work on the dam was illegal. The federal government, however, had no appetite for enforcing the order, especially after other provinces weighed in to support Alberta's position that resource development required [End Page 211] provincial autonomy. Parallel to the legal and political wrangling, a second front of opposition opened when a First Nations group, known as the Lonefighters, took direct action and began using heavy machinery to construct a diversion channel around the dam in early August 1990. By the end of the month, the Lonefighters had trenched a canal that began to divert some water. On August 30, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) enforced a provincial injunction against the Lonefighters without incident.With the Lonefighters removed, Alberta forged ahead with construction, citing public safety concerns over leaving the dam partially built. In the meantime, Alberta had appealed the Federal Court decision to Canada's Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's view and ordered a new environmental assessment, which led to the creation of a federal review panel that held public hearings regarding the Oldman Dam in the fall of 1991. The panel ultimately recommended that the dam be decommissioned but, in recognition that this would not likely happen, made a series of recommendations it hoped would arrest Alberta's pathological trend of creating new "needs" for water by approving ever more land for irrigation. Even these moderate recommendations weren't successful; after the Oldman Dam was completed in 1992, Alberta approved an irrigation expansion of 14,000 hectares (34,500 acres), which was more land than could be supported even with the new water supply (Glenn 1999).While the court-ordered environmental assessment was under way, Alberta initiated a public review of its 1931 Water Resources Act. The timing, as Glenn (1999) notes, may have been designed to split the ability of the public to fully participate in both processes. In any case, provincial reforms targeted problems of tying water to the community. Of principal concern was that, because water licenses were approved for specific uses, and appurtenant to the land identified in the original license, it was difficult to transfer water rights to new demands (Percy 2005). Further, the patchwork of regulations used to solve problems, such as the "Instream Objectives" discussed earlier, provided no tools for a systemic departure from the policy norms Alberta had inherited from the federal government. As legal expert David Percy (1996: 228) remarked, by the time Alberta "euthanized" the Water Resources Act, the province's water policies looked like "an accident victim in a cartoon, entirely swathed in bandages to cover individual problems and its total shape visible only in outline."On April 30, 1996, the provincial government introduced Bill 41, [End Page 212] the Water Act. The Water Act was pushed quickly into law through a special government session held in the summer of 1996 and divorced water from residual notions of the community. That link had been maintained in Alberta's 1931 Water Resources Act, which held a provision in Section 11(1) that allowed the public to apply for water licenses that would keep water in its natural state. It is somewhat unclear what effects (if any) Section 11(1) had on water allocation but the Water Act nevertheless dropped the clause. Opposition members in Alberta's legislative assembly argued that eliminating this clause curtailed the possibility of the public to secure its own interests. To this, the provincial government responded that a newly created "Director" would hold discretionary powers over the public interest and could grant the government a water license for environmental protection (Alberta Hansard 1996). Two decades later, opposition worries were confirmed when the Alberta court upheld the view that only the government could hold licenses for achieving water conservation objectives (Water Conservation Trust of Canada v. Alberta, 2015).The Water Act was passed in August 1996 when, citing "pressing needs" for water in southern Alberta, the government used a procedural rule to close legislative debate. Heinmiller (2013) has argued that debates over the Water Act were shaped by coalitions that had emerged during the conflict over the Oldman Dam and which polarized environmental coalitions against the agricultural interests in southern Alberta that aligned with government agendas. Indeed, as one member of the government put it, "This is a popular Bill in southern Alberta, and we need it. Unless you live there, unless you know the water shortages that we experience daily in southern Alberta, you cannot appreciate it" (Taylor 1996: 2155). That member, Lorne Taylor (1996: 2156), went on to argue that water be treated as a commodity like any other: "I think we should be able to investigate selling water and making it a natural resource as are oil, gas, minerals, and promoting them and using them to increase economic development in the province." The Water Act came into force in 1999 and disconnected water from earlier notions of the "community" in three ways (Alberta Environment 2003a): (1) It made it possible to transfer water rights without transferring land, which severed the earlier notion that water in place was a type of wealth; (2) it legalized the creation of a water market to transfer water to new areas and new uses, which redefined what counts as a "beneficial use" into increasingly economic terms; and (3) it allowed for watershed plans that could be developed [End Page 213] by persons other than the government, such as multi-stakeholder groups, which removed the synonymy between the "community" and the "government" that provided rationale for Alberta's initial water law.Two years later, in 2001, problems of water scarcity became acute when Alberta experienced its most severe drought since western settlement. For the first time, total licensed water withdrawals in southern Alberta exceeded the total water available (Alberta Environment 2005). The drought sparked numerous paleoclimatic studies on water variability in Alberta. Using tree rings and lake sediments, these studies revealed that the 20th century had been atypically wet, that surface water availability was declining, and that warming temperatures would likely reduce water availability while increasing demand through higher rates of evapotranspiration (Laird et al. 2003, Sauchyn et al. 2003, Rood et al. 2005, Schindler and Donahue 2006). Alberta Environment (2004b) published a dissenting study based on the instrumental record alone; it claimed that reduced water availability was not part of broader climatic trends. Then, in the shadow cast by the drought, Alberta adopted key reforms to water policy that took advantage of new forms of economic and cultural capital.This neoliberal management as a reaction to water scarcity stems from the settler drive to dominate environmental resources and results in the construction of “target populations” in water policy predicated on the intrinsic exclusion of indigenous nations Schmidt 17 [Dr. Jeremy J. Schmidt. PhD from the university of Western Ontario (Trudeau Scholarship and SSHRC Fellowship); Currently associate professor at Durham University who focuses on the social dimensions of land, water, and energy through the ethical dimensions of the human-earth relationship. He previously held post-doctoral positions at Harvard University, Dalhousie University, and was Assistant Professor of Environmental Geography at Carleton University. Journal of the Southwest, Volume 59, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2017, pp. 204-226 (Article). Published by The Southwest Center, University of Arizona DOI: 10.1353/jsw.2017.0011. //dylan] DGPIn Alberta, international discourse has historically been marshaled to the settler-colonial ends of establishing, preserving, and extending control over land and resources through the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this context, the reasons for Dr. Ingram's resignation from the province's "world class" environmental monitoring panel highlighted the ongoing, structural exclusion of indigenous peoples. It also highlighted the limitations that institutional design put on forms of scientific knowledge that would enhance understanding of energy development on ecological communities (e.g., Rooney et al. 2012, Kurek et al. 2013). In two senses, then, Alberta's water policies were entangled with the social construction of the "community" that water policies served and which excluded first and foremost indigenous peoples and secondly the ecological systems—what Aldo Leopold (1966) famously called the ecological community—from policy design.In retrospect, reflecting on Dr. Ingram's resignation also helps to highlight how the social construction of Alberta's "target population" in water policy has been shaped through how the settler community [End Page 218] imagines and legitimates its liberal democracy. Initially, the rejection of private water rights was legitimated by imagining a near synonymy between the settler "community" and the state. The demands of the settler-colonial project for land, and water, continued to structure Alberta's water policy as it shifted from an explicit emphasis on "community" toward governance formats that drafted economic and cultural capital into water policy—namely, through the creation of water markets and the incorporation of civil society coalitions into shared governance programs. However, recent research continues to confirm that the significant and powerful interests of industry are shaping and curtailing the ways in which water governance proceeds, especially in northern Alberta (Brisbois and de L?e 2016). Critically, however, the move from community to capital continues to construct the "target population" of water policy in unjust ways. For instance, a decade after the Oldman Dam was completed the Alberta and Canadian governments finally settled their disputes with the affected First Nations. The agreement included a multi-million-dollar arrangement, but also required that the Piikani First Nations assent to the statement that they had no "prior or superior entitlement to water" (Phare 2009). As Phare (2009) notes, the required relinquishing of indigenous rights is surprising, especially given the lack of historical or legal precedent for recognizing them officially. Speculatively, one wonders whether the out-of-court settlement was designed to prevent such a precedent from potentially being set—and thereby to keep the social construction of the "target population" in Alberta's settler-colonial water policy from reflecting on its trajectory from community to capital.L – Watershed“Watershed” is epistemologically rooted in reframing ahupua’as as a fixed area of private property from which resources are extracted – this settler cartographic language erases the “depth of place” in indigenous language which specifically conceptualize Ahupua’s as complete, self-sustaining, alive systems that supported indigenous communities in a fluid symbiosisPearce and Louis 08 [Margaret Wickens Pearce and Renee Pualani Louis. Margaret Wickens Pearce is Citizen Potawatomi and an assistant professor of geography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Renee Pualani Louis is Hawaiian and recently completed her doctorate in geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma?noa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 32:3 (2008) 107-126. Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. //dylan] DGPHawaiian political boundaries, formalized by the early 1600s, organize the islands into levels according to geographical and political relationships. In this system, an ahupua‘a is a land unit divided according to the distribution of resources and extends from the mountain ridges out to the sea. The word ahupua‘a originates from the way the boundary was mapped on the land by an ahu (stone pile) surmounted by the image of a pua‘a (pig). This land division, with its variable plant zones from the rainforest down to the beach and marine zones from the shore to just beyond the reef, ideally provided the necessary resources to sustain life for the communities that reside within them. Ahupua‘a were considered complete ecological and economic production systems; however, when environmental conditions changed and an ahupua‘a lost a particular resource, residents would trade for this resource with their neighbors from other ahupua‘a. Most community members carried out routine tasks such as the production of food, the building of various shelters, the making of clothing, and the construction of tools, with the belief that the akua (gods) were pleased with the results of their labor and constantly provided divine guidance in all their pursuits. Thus, every aspect of a day in the life of a Hawaiian involved an intimate relationship with the spiritual essence of the place where they lived. This system of resources management was integral to the Native Hawaiian way of life, and its legacy still remains a significant element in the lives of those who reside in Hawai‘i today, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian alike.31 The marked boundaries of the ahupua‘a were not intended to restrict travel between divisions; rather they encoded the way the ahupua‘a were to be used. Ahu indicated to the populace which resources were freely available, required permission, and were restricted according to one’s birthright or status. Most significantly, the locations and meanings of ahu were designed to be flexible and move with the shifting locations of resources with environmental and seasonal change.32When the Hawaiian government under the Hawaiian monarchy switched to private property under advisement of Western counselors, ahupua‘a boundaries were translated into a Western concept of boundary, thus distorting their meaning and function. The Hawaiian concept of boundary as inclusive and fluid—adjusting to changing environmental conditions with the seasons for the equitable distribution of natural resources—was misrepresented as a nonIndigenous concept of boundary as an exclusive, fixed line. Large landowners with capitalistic ventures inevitably evicted all people who lived within their boundaries because they were under the impression that everything within their boundaries was their property. This mistranslation of the meaning of ahupua‘a replaced traditional Hawaiian resource management with the modern land-use planning view of land and ocean resource management as separate systems. The mistranslation is also written on the Western map today, as in the example from the island of O‘ahu in figure 1. The lines that delineate the boundary are a solid overlay that ends at the coastline. Indigenous language reconceptulizes “watershed” as an “ahupua’a” – Hawaiian indigenous epistomology recharacterizes we call watersheds as alive and complete: biotic and abiotic interdependence and self-sustainance – reflects the shortcomings of “watershed” in refying a settler resource-extraction appraoch to waterKato 18 [Masahide T. Kato. (He began his pedagogic work at Leeward Community College, Waianae Moku in search for indigenous epistemology that is in harmony with all life forces (i.e., “pono”). With his background in literature, anthropology, and political science, he has explored the intersection of culture and politics both in pedagogy and research. Besides his academic work, he volunteers for Na Kupuna a me Na Kako?o O Hālawa protecting sacred sites at Hālawa valley and for Diverse Arts Center educating youngsters on the true meaning and function of hip hop culture. PhD. Political Science University of Hawaii at Manoa; MA Social-Cultural Anthropology Hiroshima University; MA Political Science University of Hawaii at Manoa; BA English and American Studies Kobe University of Foreign Studies) “Community Resonance: Indigenous Epistemology and the Learning Community Program at the University of Hawai?i, West O?ahu.” Learning Communities Research and Practice, 6(1), Article 7. //dylan] DGPService Learning as an Expression of Indigenous Values The service leaning activities were co-coordinated by Piko project staff and Dr. Michal Hayes, Education professor in the Nānā I Ke Kumu cohort. Our coordinators chose the service learning sites from among local community organizations that manage these historically significant sites and provide cultural learning activities in our service area. The Wai'anae district, where the two service learning sites are located, has the highest concentration of Native Hawaiians in the world. 2It also has the highest concentration of successful community-based programs to improve the socio-economic well-being of the indigenous population on this island. In order for students to experience the traditional Hawaiian ecosystems, the sites were aligned according to the mountain-to-ocean watershed system: the mountain area (or uka), the middle area (kula), and the ocean side (kai). This traditional watershed system is called ahupua'a.For the mountain area (uka) site, we worked with the Gill-Olson Joint Venture that manages the Palehua Forest Reserve. Located on the mountain ridge up above our campus, the Palehua Reserve consists of 3,700 acres of agricultural and preservation land. The Gill-Olson Joint Venture acquired the land from the Campbell Estate in 2009 and began implementing their 150 year native forest restoration and providing educational programs for the community (Fleck, 2015- 16). Their full-time ranger and cultural guide, Thomas Anuhealii, had already played a critical role in our service learning program in the past by sharing his expertise in indigenous cultural values and traditional ecological knowledge with our students. At the reserve, students worked to remove invasive California bunchgrasses from one of the mountain top cultural sites used for navigation trainings and celestial observations in traditional Hawaiian society. The Ka'ala farm cultural educational center in the Wai'anae Valley, located in the middle or kula part of the watershed system, provided an opportunity for students to work in the traditional kalo (taro) terrace, also known as the lo'i, which was made from the ancient stone structure. At the farm, students worked on the lo'i kalo, planting their feet into the muddy water to remove the weed just as their ancestors had done. Butch Detroye, the cultural guide at this site, helped us reflect deeply on the meaning of working collectively in the muddy lo'i.The third location, the oceanside or kai site, was the E Ala Voyaging academy located at the Waianae boat harbor. The academy’s director, Kaina Nakanealoha, a seasoned expert in traditional wayfinding and traditional ecological knowledge, has been spearheading the restoration of the E Ala Voyaging canoe, which was berthed in the Waianae community in 1981 (Terrell, 2015). Here, students helped with the reconstruction of the traditional canoe. At all three sites, the traditional protocol was observed, and the activities were contextualized in the traditional Hawaiian cultural values. Students also had a precious opportunity to learn from Hawaiian cultural practitioners at each site about traditional ecological knowledge that has sustained the ahupua'a ecosystem. Service learning activities served as the experiential base of the overarching learning goals (Auamo Kuleana, 'Ike '?ina, Aloha '?ina). Accordingly, the service learning experience itself provided a space for both students and instructors to reflect on a holistic view of the learning community, its overarching goals, and its diverse disciplinary means to attain the goals. In addition to these service learning activities, students were also provided with ongoing cultural experiences on campus through Student Development courses. Staff and faculty who are well-versed in Hawaiian culture conducted a series of workshops at the traditionally constructed hale or the community hall, named Kuahuokala, adjacent to the organic garden. The mini workshops featured traditional cultural knowledge such as herbal medicine; lomilomi (traditional massage); lashing; and medicinal, ritual, and other traditional uses of maia (banana). Service learning work at the Pu?uhonua community. Photo by POLS 110 Media Team. 6 Learning Communities Research and Practice, Vol. 6 [], Iss. 1, Art. 7 Classroom Community In order to trace the process by which the resonance from the classroom and learning community came to reverberate with that of the larger community, I turn to my field notebook. For the first two weeks of the learning community, students seemed to cluster around the sub-groups of their cohort with a clear demarcation between the learning community students (15 students) and non-learning community students (4 students). One of the major factors that broke the ice was the presence of two (male and female) non-learning community members who were military veterans in their fifties. Their enthusiasm for learning resonated with the brand-new enthusiasm of the first-year learning community students. As they naturally played the role of mākua (“parents” in Hawaiian) in the class dynamics, classroom interactions came to resemble the indigenous notion of an extended family called 'ohana. Etymologically, 'ohana is from 'oha which means a “sprout” or “offshoot” of the kalo plant; structurally 'ohana is an “all inclusive” extended kinship by “blood, marriage and adoption” (Handy & Pukui, 1972, pp. 2–3). When the multigenerational class structure was contextualized in the indigenous cultural values, it became natural for us to follow the 'ohana model. About a month or so into the semester in early October, there was a “crisis” in our class community. One of the regular class activities is “current news,” during which students take turns presenting the latest news related to issues of sustainability, climate change, and community-based governance. It was Ms. O’s turn that morning, and she brought up news about a Sudanese American high school student who was arrested for showing his homemade digital clock to his teachers. Her main point was a rhetorical question: how can we as humanity combat climate crisis if we are divided due to lingering prejudices and stereotypes? But the subsequent discussion split the class along the lines of military experience. The veterans and the students from military families expressed deep-seated anxiety based on their own or their family members’ frontline experience. Their heightened emotion was so overwhelming that at first my repeated attempt to remind them of Ms. O’s original message did nothing to quell the intensity. During this experience, the class truly became an 'ohana in the sense that, when we did get Ms O’s message, we moved from our superficial amicability to a deeper bond as a community. Ultimately, we all got the message that Ms. O was conveying: if we can’t transcend our differences how can we form a community? In hindsight, we realized that the significance of the episode was twofold. First, it showed the power of a genuine learning community to neutralize potential divisions due to students’ diverse background and life experience. And second, Ms. O’s point resonates with indigenous epistemology and the main learning goals for this learning community, which is to support the intertwined relation between ecological and community well-being. Combatting the climate crisis requires 7 Kato: Community Resonance humanity to come together by transcending differences and also by redefining our individual and collective relationship with mother earth. What we were trying to achieve in our learning community is a micro and local level version of what Ms. O was seeing on a planetary scale. Experiencing community in this way resonated with concepts we were studying. What really struck a chord with the students was understanding the fundamental principle behind the traditional watershed system called ahupua'a, a “self-sustaining environment, extending from the mountain to the sea with productive interdependence of all life forms” (Blaisdell, Lake & Chang, 2005, p. 373). Written by well-respected Kanaka Maoli kupuna (elder) physician, biologist, and kumu hula (hula teacher), a short academic article entitled “Cover Essay: Ka Ahupua'a” provided students with a vital key to the understanding of the totality of the ecological governance that once permeated every facet of life in Hawai'i. For our students, one major takeaway from this article was the traditionally held belief that the 'āina is alive. As Dr. Hayes communicated to me, they often referred to the concept in his class as well as in their service learning activities. Students held on to this concept for the remainder of the semester as it provided a vital link between classroom learning, 'āina-based service experience, and our three overarching goals. In other words, students seemed to be able to apply the concept to integrate diverse aspects of the learning community into a coherent whole. L – Water TreatiesStatus quo transboundary water governance relies on a framework that we call hydrocolonialism – it produces colonization through status imbalance in water governance and ecosystem damage that directly affects tribes.Strube and Thomas 21 (Johann Strube Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, The Pennsylvania State University, United States of America. Kimberley Anh Thomas Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America. 2021. Damming Rainy Lake and the ongoing production of hydrocolonialism in the US-Canada boundary waters. Water Alternatives 14(1): 135-157; AKIM)In this article, we show how transboundary water governance and the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty (BWT) have been instrumental in the smooth operation of Settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Anishinaabewaki,2 the traditional homeland of the Ojibwe that surrounds the Great Lakes. We are specifically studying the Rainy Lake (Gojiji-zaaga'igan) Basin on the border of Minnesota and Ontario. Water governance has been integral to a binational, Settler colonial joint venture through which European-descended Settlers established themselves in this area. The construction of hydroelectric dams in the early 20th century facilitated colonisation by enabling industrial development and damaging ecosystems and species on which the local Ojibwe and Métis communities depended, in particular the lake’s stands of wild rice (Zizania palustris, or Manoomin in the Ojibwe language).We build our argument on recent scholarship on transboundary water governance that understands international borders as processual and socially produced (Thomas, 2017a), and introduces actors beyond Westphalian states, such as Indigenous Nations. Such a reorientation unseats prevailing narratives that portray water governance in the US-Canada boundary waters in positive terms. Recognising that Indigenous Nations and Settler colonial states have equal status in political negotiations around the use of water, our analysis instead reveals negative hydro-hegemony between the United States and Canada on one side, and the Anishinaabe and Métis Nations on the other. We advance hydrocolonialism as a framework to describe these relationships.Modern Settler states reproduce colonial relations in how they govern natural resources. Although Indigenous communities in North America are increasingly involved in comanaging shared resources – Rainy Lake is a case in point – central aspects of Settler colonial domination persist. We find the concept of hydrocolonialism helpful for understanding these processes and we develop the term to build on recent theorisation of the legal strategies of hegemons (Akhter, 2019). Our argument encourages policy changes to decolonise water governance around Rainy Lake and elsewhere along the US-Canada border.Tribal exclusion from transboundary water governance facilitates the expansion of settler colonialism – Indigenous representatives fail and operate as neocolonial governmentality rather than decolonization. Strube and Thomas 21 (Johann Strube Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, The Pennsylvania State University, United States of America. Kimberley Anh Thomas Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America. 2021. Damming Rainy Lake and the ongoing production of hydrocolonialism in the US-Canada boundary waters. Water Alternatives 14(1): 135-157; AKIM)The literature on transboundary water governance has been disconnected from scholarship on Settler colonialism. Transboundary water governance research has overwhelmingly focused on interstate relations, to the exclusion of non-state sovereign entities such as Indigenous Nations. Focusing on the case of the Rainy Lake watershed in the Boundary Waters region of North America, we identify the denial of Indigenous communities as equal parties in transboundary water governance as the linchpin of ongoing Settler colonialism.Water figured prominently in the foreign settlement of the territory known as Anishinaabewaki. In the early 20th century, the US and Canada welcomed privately financed hydropower dams to develop forestry-based industries, despite standing treaties with local Indigenous Nations and documented negative impacts of dams on their livelihood. Today, Settler colonialism is perpetuated in the form of the Ojibwe’s limited influence within the International Joint Commission (IJC), which has coordinated regional water development since the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty.Although Indigenous representatives are now included in the IJC’s local watershed board, this development does not go beyond what Gaudry and Lorenz (2018) define as inclusive indigenisation: a pathway to mainstreaming Indigenous perspectives within existing colonial institutions without challenging the underlying structures of oppression. Similarly, Coulthard (2014) characterizes the recognition of Indigenous rights claims within the legal framework of the Settler state as being neocolonial governmentality rather than an opportunity for decolonisation. Attention to hydrocolonialism challenges the dominant interpretations of the BWT and the IJC as examples of successful cooperation. Our work thus calls for a reconfiguration of the state-centric framework of hydrohegemony to include Indigenous Nations. Acknowledging the US-Canada Settler colonial joint venture as a hydro-hegemon with respect to the Ojibwe and Métis Nations illuminates a path to re-establishing Indigenous sovereignty and recovering international law from its colonial origins. Expanding international water law to include Indigenous Nations at the bargaining table constitutes an incremental form of decolonisation which is consistent with the "somewhat tragic reality that resistance must work, to some extent, within the parameters of what is being resisted" (Rajagopal, 2003: 10; see also Curley, 2019a). We maintain, therefore, that Indigenous self-representation is only a first step towards autonomy.Water governance in the Rainy River Basin exemplifies the relationships between Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Nations across their shared waters. Historically, these Settler states, together, stripped Indigenous Nations of their right to manage water in their traditional territories, not only in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario but across North America (Colombi, 2012; Daigle, 2018; Schneider, 2013; Norman, 2014). The BWT manifested Settler claims to exclusive jurisdiction over transboundary waters.Treaty logics are badStevenson 18 ((Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation State, )Interpretation of Indigenous rights in our contemporary moment has occurred most definitively through Canada’s Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement policies (CLCAs)—what are often referred to as the “modern treaties” and what the Canadian government calls “the unfinished business of treaty-making” (Government of Canada, “Comprehensive Claims”). In the broadest sense, CLCAs seek to address ownership, management, and use of lands, waters, and natural resources (Land Claims Agreement Coalition; Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada). More significantly, they set out to determine the meaning and breadth of Aboriginal right and title in terms that the state deems legible within the constraints of the assertion of Crown sovereignty. While significant progress has been made by Indigenous peoples through the CLCA process, Bonita Lawrence writes, Ultimately, there is little difference between, on the one hand, historical treaty making and policies based on assimilation, and on the other, modern treaty making and policies based on containment and the notion that Native peoples will be domesticated through subordination to Canadian authority and therefore finally neutralized as sovereign entities. (2012, 74-75) Similarly, Jeff Corntassel critiques Indigenous self-determination that relies on Western rights-based discourse, such as that articulated through the comprehensive claims process, arguing that “the pursuit of a political/legal rights-based discourse leads indigenous peoples to frame their goals/issues in a state-centered (rather than community centered) way.” (2008, 115) 7 In early 2018, the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau announced that it will be exploring a new framework for Indigenous rights in Canada. The development of this framework is still underway at the time of submission of this dissertation. 26 Indeed, major incongruities exist between the state and Indigenous peoples within comprehensive claims agreements. First and foremost, Indigenous peoples insist that what the state calls “Aboriginal title” to land arises from their having lived upon and used the land since time immemorial (Henderson 2002; Kulchyski 2013). Further, within this viewpoint, Aboriginal rights are territorially-based and asserted in the ongoing lived practice of Indigenous culture within the lands and waters that they have always occupied (Battiste and Henderson 2002). Conversely, the Canadian state’s approach suggests that Aboriginal title is derived from a set of legal documents, such as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and that Aboriginal rights are subject to a set of predetermined tests outlined in the Van der Peet case8 (Christie 2007; Kulchyski 2013; Turner 2006, 2013). Further still, it is the Canadian government’s policy to seek certainty, extinguishment, and perhaps most unapologetically under the former Harper administration, termination, of Aboriginal rights through comprehensive claims agreements (Blackburn 2007; Diabo 2012; Mackey 2014, 2016). In Peter Kulchyski’s words, “Simply put, most First Nations see modern treaties as ways of reaffirming and asserting their continuing ownership of their traditional territories. The state sees modern treaties as a way of ending that ownership in “exchange” for much smaller pieces of land and a small chunk of capital” (2013, 108). The irreconcilability of these different viewpoints over land use and ownership may be best understood as matters of sovereign jurisdiction. As such jurisdictional matters, the “claims” of Indigenous peoples are situated and confined within the framework of Canadian colonial law. Within the courts, the struggle has been whether or not the law 8 The Van der Peet case (1996) further defined Aboriginal rights as outlined under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. The case resulted in a list of 10 criteria, known as the “Integral to a Distinctive Culture Test,” which is intended to determine how Aboriginal rights are to be defined. For a list of the 10 criteria, see: . 27 should recognize Aboriginal right and title based on Indigenous relationships to the land, or whether the Anglo-Canadian norms of private property ownership should be upheld (Bhandar 2015). Shiri Pasternak writes, “At the heart of this encounter, is a conflict over the inauguration of law—or the authority to have authority—and the specific forms of struggle that arise when competing forms of law are asserted over a common space” (2014, 146). Canada’s assertion of jurisdiction over all of the lands and waters within its borders enshrine the form of the law solely within the colonial context, negating Indigenous assertions of sovereign right and title as they might otherwise arise within their own culturally, historically, legally, and politically specific milieu (Pasternak 2014; Borrows 2002, 2010). Indeed, those who find themselves within “the territorial boundaries of Canada are already presumed to exist within a particular body of law” (Pasternak, 148). While section 35 of the Constitution Act recognizes and affirms Aboriginal rights, the various interpretations of this form of recognition highlight the limitations of Indigenous rights and the meaning of Indigenous sovereignty that are derived from state recognition. While many scholars have echoed the sentiment that Section 35 “recognizes Aboriginal rights, but it did not create them” and that “Aboriginal rights have existed before Section 35” (Hanson, “Constitution Act”), Indigenous peoples have consistently had to prove and establish these rights through settler state and judicial forms of recognition. As Taiaiake Alfred states, There had been a lot of court activism and a lot of legal decisions that amounted to the court saying: 'There's such a thing as aboriginal title. You don't have it, but aboriginal title exists, so I'm sending this decision back down so that you can try again to prove that you have it. But when you are the person whose land is being used by mining interests, uranium explorers, settlers and so forth, you don't see as 28 a victory ten more years of lawyers doing battle in court for this vague concept of aboriginal rights and title. (2015, 5) Indeed, despite the 2014 Tsilhqot'in decision, where the supreme court determined that the criteria for Aboriginal title had been met for a small piece of the Tsilhqot’in Nations’ territory, declaring Aboriginal title for the first time in Canadian history (Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia), Indigenous title to land remains over-determined by Western land rights discourse, which has made little room for Indigenous conceptions of land tenure, sovereignty, and the legal orders through which they are articulated and defined. It is within this fraught legal context that many activists and scholars have articulated and enacted a resistance to state-sanctioned engagement over rights disputes in Canada (Alfred 2009; Coulthard 2007, 2014; Diabo 2012). This viewpoint suggests that Indigenous self-determination has been co-opted within a limiting liberal pluralistic “politics of recognition” that seeks to “reconcile Indigenous claims to nationhood with Crown sovereignty,” which is, of course, also jurisdictional sovereignty (Coulthard 2007, 438). Further, following the work of Yellowknife Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, this view of rights claims is best characterized as a settler-colonial relationship, in which power relations “in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power” have been structured and enacted within “a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (Coulthard 2014, 6-7, emphasis in original). Within this viewpoint, Canadian Indigenous rights policies are operationalized in ways that fix interpretations of Indigenous rights within the settler colonial social relations of capitalist ownership and presumed sovereign jurisdiction; attempts on the behalf of Indigenous nations to engage in state-sanctioned 29 rights claims are correspondingly fixed within and limited by this settler colonial purview (Alfred 2005; Coulthard 2014; Corntassel 2008). Indigenous conceptions of rights and assertions of sovereignty, however, exceed and unsettle these limited settler-colonial notions. Indigenous peoples have inherent rights—rights that do not flow from the Crown, and which produce different kinds of knowledge through alternative, albeit subjugated discourses around land, water, peoplehood, culture, belonging, and law. As Heather Dorries states, “This inherent right . . . is derived from the fact that Indigenous peoples were sovereign before European settlers arrivedL – Weather ModWeather control is a based on a colonialist anxiety to extend a fantasy of climatic control and continue settler colonialist domination.Mahony 18 (Mahony, Martin, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Georgina Endfield, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool. "Climate and colonialism."?Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change?9.2 (2018): e510.; AKIM)Climatic variability was a constant cause for concern for both indigenous societies and European colonists. Both groups, however, comprehended and responded to this variability within the frameworks of their own climatic philosophy. The imperial positioning of climate within what Livingstone (1991, 1995, 2002) has referred to as a ‘moral economy’, for example, and particularly the association of drought with wayward indigenous practices, has been discussed elsewhere, and above (Endfield and Nash, 2002a; Davis 2004; 2007). Indigenous societies in many parts of colonial Africa, however, conceptualised and responded to climatic variability within their own ethno-climatic frame of reference. Rainmaking ceremonies were among a number of key drought responses among indigenous communities in central southern Africa (Landau, 1993: 3), even if such practices were considered by early colonial settlers, specifically missionaries, to be indicative of heathen superstition and, as such, a barrier to the civilising mission.From the colonists’ side, anxieties about extreme climates, and their apparent changeability, combined with imperial confidence in human power over nature to inform a number of fantasies of climatic control. The German architect Herman S?rgel’s scheme for the damming of the Mediterranean and the engineering of African climates is a particularly noteworthy example of a colonial dream of climate control which, although never realised, gained great cultural traction and was re-worked for a variety of political contexts – the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Cold War. Dubbed Atlantropa, the scheme would drain the Mediterranean, sourcing near infinite hydroelectric power from dams at Gibraltar, Port Said and Gallipoli, would check the apparent expansion of the Sahara (Davis, 2016) and, through the construction of gigantic lakes further south, would open up new lands – with moderated climates – to European settlement. This engineering of African climates and environments was reasoned to be a way of ensuring continued European domination of the continent, while the infinite supply of electricity was expected to bring peace and cultural and economic renewal to a united Europe (Lehmann, 2016). This pairing of environmental anxiety and boundless technological optimism, and political cosmopolitanism with racist imperialism, built upon earlier French ambitions to flood large portions of the Sahara and moderate the climate (D. K. Davis, 2007; Heffernan, 1990; Le?tolle & Bendjoudi, 1997; Marcot, 2003), and echoed others’ plans to ‘rewater’ the Kalahari (e.g. Schwarz, 1920; McKittrick, 2015).When attempts to control colonial climates did emerge in practice, they were usually on a more modest scale. A long drought in Queensland between 1895 and 1903 saw government meteorologist Clement Wragge attempt cloud seeding with artillery guns (Garden, 2014; Powell, 1991), but in late 19th century North Otago, New Zealand, official meteorologists were rather more circumspect about such experiments. Anxieties about a dearth of rainfall led to a curious set of locally-funded rainmaking efforts, which frequently put in conflict popular opinion, religious ideologies of environmental stewardship and a professionalizing meteorological establishment keen to establish its credentials as an authoritative science, distinct from popular prophesy and from folk remedies for drought (Beattie, 2014; also Henry, 2015). While early 20th century meteorologists showed their status anxiety through very public denunciations of climate control schemes, the early Cold War revival of weather modification, particularly rainmaking, saw techniques and theories flow from American scientists like Irving Langmuir (see Fleming, 2010) to places like India and South Africa. Efforts to revive the British government’s infamously famished ‘groundnut scheme’ in Tanganyika by shooting silver iodide bombs at passing clouds (Mahony, in review) nonetheless paled in comparison to contemporary American efforts to divert hurricanes with nuclear weapons – just one indicator perhaps of the shifting loci of western imperial power in the post-war period, and harbingers of the even more ambitious geoengineering ideas which would emerge a few decades later (Fleming, 2010; Harper, 2017).The Affirmative’s attempt to control and manage the weather will inevitably be used to justify the superiority of the settler state over Indigenous peoples and indigenous knowledge- Meteorology has always been a colonial science.Mahony and Endfield 2018 Martin Mahony is a lecturer in human geography at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. He works on the history of atmospheric science and technology and on the politics of climate change. Georgina Endfield?is Professor of Environmental History at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. “Climate and Colonialism”Early European encounters with the tropics, from the fifteenth century onwards, raised new questions about the origins and global migrations of plants, animals and people. In the writings of the Christopher Columbus and his associates, “[c]limatic explanations were easily seized upon to explain cultural behaviour and differentiation” (Grove, 1995: 154). Climatic explanations of human difference were shaped by two key ideas, collectively referred to as the tropical paradox – that of tropical abundance, and that of differential mortality. The idea of tropical abundance held that tropical areas, with their hot, humid climates and rich soils, were highly biologically productive, and that little human work was required to grow subsistence crops. Travellers like Sir Walter Raleigh sent home reports of tropical inhabitants eating only that which ‘nature’ brings forth, and luxuriating amid the redundancy of hard agricultural labour. These ideas, solidified in the sixteenth century, had lasting effects on imperial policies and practices, perhaps most notably in taxation schemes which were designed to compensate for the oversupply of cheap, productive land which was thought to keep local wages too high (Curtin, 1990). Such abundant lands were nonetheless attractive places to take control of and exploit. More deeply, Europeans began to wonder whether their inhabitants, apparently free from the consequences of the biblical Original Sin, could even be considered as part of the same human family. Theories of polygenesis began to ascribe different origins to the diversity of apparent racial groups, while the supposed relationship between climate and the necessity of labour contributed to new ideas about the inherent physical and cultural superiority of Europeans. The more testing, fickle climate and relative resource scarcity of Europe had, it was theorised, shaped a more hardy, energetic people, capable of sophisticated social and technological innovations in their struggle with their environment. The Tropics, in contrast, were constructed as places of moral degeneration, places that fostered indolence and laziness, echoing earlier hypotheses postulated as part of the Querrelle d’Amerique, the historical dispute between European and American intellectuals over the apparent antiquity of the Americas, the size and strength of its animal and plant populations relative to those of the Old World, and the moral, intellectual and physical capacity of its populations (Gerbi, 1973). Intertwined climatic, racial and moral ideologies provided an enduring moral and ethno-climatological frame of reference that influenced colonial attitudes, images, tropes and metaphors and afforded travel writers and commentators a “unique framework within which to explore national and imperial identity” (Taylor-Brown, 2016: 306; on analogous Japanese colonial attitudes to tropical climates, see Zaiki & Tsukahara, 2007). Ideas about the nature of different climates also powerfully shaped the emerging geographies of European imperialism. Geographer William B. Meyer argues that early British colonists of North America saw in the southern Atlantic seaboard a region inevitably akin to the Mediterranean, and which could therefore correct Britain’s trade imbalances in popular products like wine, olives and rice, while also perhaps sating a rapacious mercantile appetite for precious metals which were believed more abundant under a warm sun (Meyer, 2000; White, 2015). The South, therefore, attracted a moneyed, aristocratic, conservative Anglican elite keen on exploiting these new agricultural potentials, in strong contrast to the religious non-conformists who settled the north east. It was this social response to an assumed southern climate which, Meyer argues, led to some of the distinct cultural traits of the southern US, as opposed to the climate itself, to the which the culture and politics of the regions have often been attributed (Meyer 2000). The radical differences of the tropical environments which Europeans explored and colonised – and the apparent differences of the people who inhabited them – were also encountered through the lens of differential mortality. Before the emergence and acceptance of germ theory and the new science of immunology, the very different reactions of different groups to tropical environments reinforced ideas of inherent racial differences. European travellers and settlers struggled against diseases to which the local population appeared to have an inherent immunity, while the converse destruction of many local populations upon European arrival, though occasionally attributed to the cruelty and savagery of the invaders, by the seventeenth century was seen as a divine act, clearing the way for European colonisation of tropical lands (Curtin 1990). We look more closely at the entanglements of racial and medical climatology below, tracing their lineages through later periods of colonisation. In the next section, however, we turn to what historians of science have learned about how this concern for colonial climates shaped emerging infrastructures for climatic knowledge-making The spread of European meteorological techniques to colonial settings largely followed two paths. One saw early explorers, soldiers, medics, missionaries and, later, administrators, taking with them thermometers, barometers and other bits of meteorological kit, the recording of weather positioned as part of the practice of making strange new environments legible to European sciences and states. Another path, gaining momentum rather later, saw more organised efforts to coordinate meteorological observation across global space. Historians have recently started to reconstruct these processes, with White (2015) for example showing how early European settlers in North America made a number of intellectual breakthroughs which laid the foundations for the later emergence of climatology. Such histories are beginning to show how, like other colonial sciences, the sciences of climate were not simply ‘tools’ of empire: along with related sciences of race and health, they did not just serve to help enact ‘a project already imagined’, but helped bring ‘into being the colonial project itself’ (Seth, 2009: 375). Globe-trotting mercantile and naval ships had long brought back to European metropoles observations of oceanic weather which started to be pieced together into new pictures of climatic patterns, not least of course the trade winds, which fundamentally shaped patterns of trade and exploration (Naylor, 2015; Schwartz, 2015; also Foxhall, 2010). In India and neighbouring seas, early efforts to understand weather and climate were born of the demands of oceanic trade, of dealing with storms on land and at sea, and in India particularly, of reconciling imperial government with a monsoonal climate. For Grove, the year 1791 represents ‘the first occasion on which weather and agrarian observations made by scientific observers and others in the tropics were sufficiently elaborate and sufficiently coordinated…for some of the first speculations to be firmly made about global rather than regional climatic events’ (Grove, 1998: 302). This was a product largely of the expanding reach of the East India Company, with new observations possible in colonies and trading posts across the globe, and by a number of EIC staffers who, inspired by the writings of Joseph Priestley and others, took with them a commitment to air and climate as vital elements of health, wellbeing and prosperity. By the 1810s, knowledge was circulating about simultaneous droughts in India, the Caribbean and the embryonic colonies of Australia (O’Brien, 2014a), with figures such as EIC Governor of St Helena Alexander Beatson, formerly a military surveyor in India, becoming key nodes in new networks of meteorological knowledge production. But this was all still subject to the interest and whims of enthusiastic individuals. The push for more coordinated observational efforts came later, as metropolitan savants expressed new enthusiasm for Baconian modes of thought and the collection of global climatic data in order to draw new inferences about the physical laws governing atmospheric processes. In 1836 Alexander von Humboldt urged the Royal Society to make better use of Britain’s imperial reach in recording worldwide weather patterns (Brock, 1993). Historical attention has recently focused on the subsequent ‘magnetic crusade’ of the 1840s, which saw the British establishing magnetic, meteorological and tidal observatories at various key points around the empire, including Singapore, Bombay, the Cape of Good Hope, and Toronto. Sustained scholarly interest in this period has revealed how the cooperation of a variety of scientific, military and commercial bodies was central to the imperial expansion of the ‘observatory sciences’, and how a multitude of interests – few of them purely ‘scientific’ – fed into the growth of imperial scientific endeavour (Aubin 2010; Carter, 2009; Cawood, 1979; Collier, 2013; Hall, 1990; Hunt, 1997; Locher, 2007; Marsden & Smith, 2007; Miller, 1986; Williamson, 2015).(Aubin et al., 2010) Few of the observatories established during the Magnetic Crusade continued to function for long or continuous periods afterwards (Williamson 2015) and until the early 20th century, when the rise of international aviation saw meteorology become a crucial ‘infrastructural science’ (Turner, 2010), only a limited number of European colonies had well-supported ‘weather services’ (Mahony, 2016; for a brief but valuable discussion of the French colonies, see Duvergé, 1995). During the 19th century meteorological effort largely continued to follow shipping – Mauritius, for example, had a dedicated meteorological society from 1851 which compiled ship observations and, largely through the work of Charles Meldrum, ventured new hypotheses about the behaviour of tropical cyclones (Island of Mauritius Meteorological Service, 1974; Mahony in review). Such works of compilation continue to reward researchers, this time those endeavouring to reconstruct historical patterns of atmospheric circulation (Allan et al. 2016). In the Australian colonies meteorology was among the first sciences to be institutionalised, its practitioners serving ‘as important environmental interpreters for colonists and governments’ (O’Gorman, 2014: 180]. Antipodean meteorology is well recorded by historians, with institutional histories increasingly giving way to more nuanced accounts of the complex motivations behind meteorological knowledge production (O’Gorman, Beattie, & Henry, 2016). By the 1860s all the Australian colonial governments had some form of institutionalized meteorology, and the rise of telegraphy meant that regional climates ‘took on abstract forms through isobar maps and statistical evaluations’. In so doing, meteorologists ‘answered the calls of colonialism and modern science to know and categorize, and in so doing, control environments’ (O’Gorman 2014, 181). Further north, Zaiki and Tsukahara (2007) have shown how Japan’s late nineteenth-century imperial expansion, conducted under a rubric of ‘scientific colonialism’, was accompanied by a rapid expansion of meteorological observatories and an institutionalisation of the science in imperial universities. In New Zealand, formal meteorological observations began appearing in newspapers in the 1850s, displacing an earlier engagement with Maori weather knowledges and methods of foretelling, although evidence suggests that some of these methods – such as close observation of cloud formations – were picked up by settlers and continued to be used (Holland & Williams, 2014). Future research could profitably focus on these exchanges and hybridisations of knowledge within colonial ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1991; Roberts, 2009). The evidentiary legacies of such knowledges, whether in the form of diaries, correspondence or oral histories, are already being used to reconstruct regional and local climate change (Culver, 2014). The different ways in which people have been affected by and have coped with past climate variability is often embedded into local knowledge systems, passed down through generations in the form of memory, folklore and cultural wisdom (Challinor, Wheeler, Garforth, Craufurd, & Kassam, 2007). These knowledge systems afford important insights into climate-society interactions in the past, with important for lessons for present-day debates about adaptation, vulnerability, and resilience (e.g. Endfield & Nash, 2002; Hannaford, Jones, & Bigg, 2015; Kelso & Vogel, 2015; Nash & Endfield, 2008; Nash & Grab, 2010). Where reliable meteorological observations in the 19th century did exist, speculation about climatic cycles soon followed. Controversy reigned in Britain and India as to whether periodic famines striking the latter could be understood through new methods of statistically analysing sunspot cycles (Anderson, 2005; Porter, 1986: 274-78). But the search for cycles was not just about anticipating fickle colonial climates. It was also an effort to make sense of an emerging global economy, shaped by the contours of European imperialism, and to understand how the new ‘national’ economies of places like Australia and India fitted into the warp and weft of new global patterns of trade and profit. As Mirowski (1984: 346) argues, William Stanley Jevons’ work on sunspot cycles, often derided as an intellectual aberration, should instead be considered as part of a unified intellectual project to “portray the market as a “natural” process, so that doubts about its efficacy would be assuaged, or at the very least, countered by scientific discourse”. New understandings of a global climate system were being co-produced with new understandings of a global economy. ImpactsOntologyIndigenous existence occupies the ontological position of elimination through the dual myths of terra nullius and the Vanishing Race.Allard-Tremblay and Coburn 21 (Allard-Tremblay, Yann, Political science, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada and Elaine Coburn, Sociology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada. "The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing."?Political Studies?(2021): 00323217211018127.; AKIM)In Africa, the Middle East, South America, and much of the rest of the world, decolonization often meant the expulsion or departure of most colonial settlers. In contrast, in settler colonial states like Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, settlers have not left, even as independence from the metropole was gained, so that, in the now well-known observation quoted earlier: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe, 2006: 388). The systemic oppression and domination of the colonized by the colonizer is not historical—firmly in the past—but ongoing and supported by radically unequal political, social, economic, and legal institutions. As Green (2003: 52) summarizes, both historically and today, “Colonization is not only the physical occupation of someone else’s land, but also about the appropriation of others’ political authority, cultural self-determination, economic capacity and strategic relationship.” Colonizers ongoingly assume or assert this authority and control over Indigenous peoples as well as exogenous “Others” (Veracini, 2010: 20). Historically, the latter includes slaves, indentured laborers, and today racialized migrants, who are purposefully excluded, or precariously and selectively assimilated into the White settler colonial polity (Amadahy and Lawrence, 2009; Dhamoon, 2015; Veracini, 2010). Underlying the dynamics and relationships constitutive of settler colonialism is land, specifically the settler’s acquisition of land (Coulthard, 2014; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). To this end, settler colonialism aspires to the elimination of the native, either through assimilation, displacement, or extermination, especially for those deemed unassimilable (Strakosch and Macoun, 2012; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). In settler colonial contexts, relationships with Indigenous peoples, whose existence troubles settlers’ desires for land, co-exist with relationships with racialized exogenous Others exploited for their labor (Arvin et al., 2013: 12; Veracini, 2010), or excluded at the border. In contrast, whatever their supposed cultural “defects” as foreigners, White migrants are presumed to be more easily assimilable into a nation imagined as foundationally and enduringly White but with “multicultural” Others (Bannerji, 2000). In these ways, the settler colonial state makes distinctions between exogenous Others who, with proper control and guidance, may become apt for incorporation into the settler polity through selective inclusion on a minoritarian basis and those who are ontologically or culturally incapable of membership—the “abject other” (Veracini, 2010: 27–28)—destined for progressive elimination or perpetual exclusion. Ultimately, the settlers’ acquisition of land is carried out through the settler state’s control of who may or may not be granted permanent, full membership into the settler collective and, therefore, who may or may not access the lands over which settlers claim sovereignty (Veracini, 2010: chapter 1).In settler colonialism, the practice and institutionalization of access to land, regarding both Indigenous peoples and resident or migrant exogenous Others, depends upon racialization, which takes complex, changing forms. As Wolfe (2016: 21) summarizes, “race is colonialism speaking,” and race logics operate according to opportunistic narratives that hierarchize arbitrary physical differences, with those characterized as “White” granted full membership while all others are selectively, provisionally, or precariously included or actively excluded and eliminated. In settler colonial societies, “[r]ace in action,” as Wolfe (2016: 32) explains is flexible enough that racial categories can be mapped onto diverse social realities, the phenotype of Indigenous and racialized Others opportunistically interpreted as signaling the appropriateness of their assigned social location and labor. In North America, at the most general level, Indigenous peoples are understood as racial and culture primitives doomed to be superseded, in a Social Darwinist logic, by racially and, in a cultural variant, civilizationally superior Whites. In a related but distinct move, Blackness, for instance, variously interpreted but now characterized by the “one drop rule,” was historically construed as indicating an ontology destined for the institution of slavery (Browne, 2015; Wolfe, 2016: 30–31), and today identified with fitness for menial physical labor or criminality (Maynard, 2017; Muhammad, 2011). Such racist logics saturate the structures of settler colonial societies, and are institutionalized through policies ranging from residential schools, to selectively racially restrictive immigration laws, to racist policing practices.Regarding Indigenous-White settler relationships, racialized narratives are complicated by the perpetual temporal displacement of a perfected settler colonial reality. If as Wolfe (2006) observes, the elimination of Indigenous peoples, whether through physical extermination or cultural assimilation, is the endpoint of settler colonialism, then Strakosch and Macoun (2012: 52) point out that this imagined or wished-for outcome— whether in the past or in the future—is never truly achieved. As they explain:Instead of the moment of decolonization, [the wished-for endpoint of settler colonialism] is the moment of full colonization—or rather, it is both, because in this imagined moment colonial relationships will dissolve themselves and settler authority will be naturalized. This transformative event is both an impossible colonial dream, premised on the disappearance of Indigenous political difference, and a concrete political project that justifies all manner of tactics in the present.The endpoint of settler colonialism is the imagined moment where the colonial relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples are superseded, because Indigenous peoples no longer exist to jeopardize settler occupation and sovereignty. Insofar, as settler colonialism aims for the naturalization of settler authority and to correct its own imperfectly realized occupation, the ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples justifies diverse eliminatory and assimilationist politics and policies—ironically, proving the incompleteness of the settler colonial project.In settler colonialism, there is no decolonial or postcolonial moment, no beyond-theendpoint. Settler colonial policy seeks Indigenous extinction although methods for achieving these aims change in response to Indigenous affirmations of their humanity and associated struggles. As Veracini (2010: 113–114) explains:Lacking the possibility of a clearly defined decolonising moment (i.e., the moment in which it is settler colonialism that is discontinued), settler colonial contexts retained the policy objectives, if not the methods, of their settler colonising pasts. The drive towards further extinction and/or assimilation of indigenous law, tenure, autonomy, and identity was retained.Rather than a significant break with past policies, contemporary self-government agreements and land claim settlements, for instance, can be seen as functionally geared towards the ongoing objective of legitimating and naturalizing settler sovereignty and thus eliminating Indigenous presence qua Indigenous presence (Coulthard, 2014). As Alfred and Corntassel (2005: 601) suggest, settler colonial institutions are “shape-shifters” so that “the instruments of domination are evolving and inventing new methods to erase Indigenous histories and senses of place.” Even the politics of reconciliation in Canada, for instance, continues to presume the sovereign authority of the settler colonial state, leaving unquestioned the Crown’s legal authority, both party and judge when adjudicating the state’s relationship with diverse Indigenous peoples.The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism: Settler Colonial IdeologiesOur central theoretical claim is that ideologies of settler colonialism must be understood both in light of the logic of elimination and in light of the vanishing endpoint of settler colonialism. We need to appreciate how these ideologies shape-shift and return to support a goal that is never fully achieved. This is why we refer to ideological tropes of settler colonialism as Flying Head ideologies.Flying Heads appear in a Wendat and Wyandot1 story (Barbeau, 2015: 311–313; Sioui, 1994: 50–51), although there are other versions. It is retold here to performatively recenter Indigenous imageries to metaphorically make sense of political dynamics. We are not excavating or appealing to the teachings embedded in the story, but instead, foregrounding an Indigenous culture for metaphorical hermeneutics, as relevant and as meaningful as other cultural repertoires used in contemporary theorizing.2During their travels, the Wyandots came upon a river belonging to Giants, who opposed their crossing. After various unsuccessful attempts to cross the river, where many Wyandots were captured and killed by the Giants—who were “cruel and wicked cannibals” (Barbeau, 2015: 312)—the Wyandots developed a plan to capture and destroy their enemies. With the help of the Big Turtle, they managed to cross under the river and mount a surprise attack; during which the Little Turtle “brought the Thunder and the Lightning” (Barbeau, 2015: 312) to control the Giants. Taking advantage of the Giants’ momentary incapacity: The Little Turtle carried the Giants to a high rock that overhung the river. Here the head of each Giant was cut off and thrown down into the raging water. But the surprise of the Wyandots, and their dismay also, was great when at the dawning of the day they saw all these Giant Heads rise from the waters, with streaming hair covered with blood which shone like lightning. They rose from the troubled waters uttering horrible screams, screeches, and yells, flew along the river, and disappeared (Barbeau, 2015: 312).It is said that the Flying Heads continue to pursue the Wyandots, seeking revenge for their losses and causing sickness and death in their wake. We suggest that racist settler colonial myths are like Flying Heads that despite being defeated, rise up again and return to plague Indigenous peoples, often with devastating consequences.As already suggested, most of these ideologies can be broadly understood within a Social Darwinist evolutionary perspective that conceptualizes Indigenous peoples in racialized terms, with Indigenous peoples cast in the role of primitive Others compared to more advanced, evolved, or civilized settlers, racialized as White. LaRocque (2010: 39– 47) characterizes this, in a conceptual shorthand, as the “civ/sav” dichotomy: settlers are civilized and Indigenous peoples are primitive, backwards, even prehistoric figures, no matter their actual contemporaneity with settlers. Within this general civ/sav framework, we argue that the following two key recurring Flying Head ideologies, each with diverse expressions, persist: the myths of terra nullius and “the Vanishing Race.”Terra Nullius. This myth asserts that settlers arrived in literally empty lands or alternatively and more commonly, in lands that are figuratively empty due to the normatively inappropriate occupation of those already there, thus denying meaningful Indigenous presence both at the moment of the colonial invasion and subsequently.3 As Asch (2002: 25) has argued, focusing on English law, terra nullius originates in the early-seventeenth century, when juridical decisions maintained that non-Christian “infidel” nations offended both “the law of God and of nature,” so justifying Christian rule over heretical natives, recognized as literally present but religiously, hence politically, absent as right-bearing peoples.4 In the eighteenth century, the influential lawyer and Enlightenment philosopher Emer de Vattel, notably following liberal philosopher John Locke (2003), elaborated the agricultural-productivist argument that title to land requires its efficient use; one cannot claim land in a manner that excludes those who could make more productive use of it. In a notorious passage, De Vattel (2008) wrote:Those who still pursue this idle mode of life, usurp more extensive territories than, with a reasonable share of labor, they would have occasion for, and have therefore no reason to complain, if other nations, more industrious, and too closely confined, come to take possession of a part of those lands. Thus, though the conquest of the civilised empires of Peru and Mexico was a notorious usurpation, the establishment of many colonies on the continent of North America might, on their confining themselves within just bounds, be extremely lawful. The people of those extensive tracts rather ranged through than inhabited them.Following this productivist account, before the European invasion, North America was not literally empty, but effectively empty of civilized peoples, whose productive use of the land would justify their occupation, and who might therefore claim natural rights to sovereignty.By the twentieth century, racist ideologies about primitive versus supposedly more evolutionary and civilizationally advanced peoples were invoked to simultaneously acknowledge native presence but deny that this implied any right to sovereignty and selfdetermination (Asch, 2002: 25). At least three variations of terra nullius thus succeed each other, overlapping in time, respectively depending on the denial of meaningful Indigenous religious, political-economic and (relatedly) civilizational existence. All are justified against the standards of settler colonial norms and practices, narrowly and exclusively equating White Europeans and their ways with rights-bearing humanity.The Vanishing Race. This myth sees Indigenous peoples as doomed, because they are ontologically or culturally ill adapted to the contemporary civilized world (Deloria, 1982: 91; Pappas, 2017: 96–104). This is known as “the Vanishing Race” or “Vanishing Indian” (Berry, 1960)5 trope, after one of the best-known images of the nineteenth-century photographer and propagandist Edward S. Curtis, depicting a single file of Plains Indians on horseback wending their way toward the horizon, symbolizing their disappearance, given an inevitably settler colonial future incompatible with Indigenous ways of life. Curtis’ staged photos carefully stripped his Indigenous subjects of any signs of interactions with settler culture, to record what was “scientifically” known to be inevitable: Indigenous peoples were remnants of a bygone age, destined to be extinguished, superseded by a superior European race and civilization (Deloria, 1982).The Vanishing Race, published in 1913, is one unusually explicit scholarly formulation (and invention of) this narrative. In the introduction, the author, Joseph K. Dixon (1913: 3) writes that “Annihilation is not a cheerful word, but it is coined from the alphabet of Indian life and heralds the infinite pathos of a vanishing race. We are at the end of historical origins.” In this romantic lament for the doomed “Indian brother,” Dixon (1913: 4) locates Indigenous peoples firmly in the past, while the “conquering race” of White settler colonizers occupies a future where Indigenous peoples appear only as ghosts: “The door of the Indian’s yesterdays opens to a new world—a world unpeopled with red men (sic), but whose population fills the sky, the plains, with sad and spectre-like memories— with the flutter of unseen eagle pinions.” Such unabashed romanticism, in the Noble Savage tradition, inspires Dixon’s lament for the inevitable demise of Indigenous peoples. This trope persists alongside ugly and differently dehumanizing stereotypes of the Indigenous barbarian, “atheistical, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, brutish (in one word) diabolical creatures,” as one seventeenth-century American writer, quoted by Berry (1960: 52), described Indigenous peoples. Whether noble or brutish, for the settler colonizers the future is the same: “right or wrong, for good or ill, the Indian was doomed” (Berry, 1960: 52).The Vanishing Race trope emphasizes the incompatibility of Indigeneity with the present and the future, always-already defined as belonging to the settlers. Today, this argument is expressed in several variants; here, we consider two. First, the “Indian race” vanishes because of intermixing with settlers, a literal diluting of Indigenous “blood” and so, in racial-biological conceptions of Indigeneity, disappearing through this loss of “racial purity” (Berry, 1960: 54–55; TallBear, 2003). Simultaneously, such intermixing is interpreted as rendering White settlers “Indigenous,” nativized through the same contact that disappears Indigenous presence. The divide between settlers and Indigenous peoples is claimed to be already (or soon) dissolved through métissage: settlers acquire Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples are diluted into the settler collective (Leroux, 2019; Veracini, 2010; Vowel, 2016: 43–47; Wolfe, 2006: 389). Second, moving from blood and race to civilization and culture, the “Indian” may vanish because she fails to embody and perform authentic, romantic aboriginality (Smith, 2009; Wolfe, 1994: 110–118, 1999: 168– 190). The urban Indigenous person, for instance, is no longer truly Indigenous, as measured against the standards of the stereotypical colonial imagination that freezes Indigenous peoples in rural and reserve settings (Adese, 2015; Lawrence, 2014; Peters and Andersen, 2013). Regardless of descent and relationships, the urban Indigenous person, though literally alive, is held to have ceased to be culturally authentically aboriginal; hence, no longer effectively exists as an Indigenous person. In both variants, the Vanishing Race asserts that Indigenous peoples have disappeared or are fast disappearing, leaving their lands open for morally justified occupation.The purpose of these ideological claims and their variations is to legitimate settlement. The political, moral, and sometimes juridical claim of these Flying Head myths is that “colonisation is an inherently non-violent activity; the settler enters a ‘new, empty land to start a new life’; indigenous people naturally and inevitably ‘vanish’; it is not settlers that displace them” (Veracini, 2010: 14). Since settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, Flying Head ideologies are not the historical artifacts of a lamentable racist past, but organic to its reproduction and continuity today (Wolfe, 2006: 402). In short, the elimination of the native is performed at the level of ideas, as well as in practice, requiring, as Dahl (2018: 4) explains, disavowal and erasure: “the active and interpretive production of indigenous absence.”Erasure is an ideological construction, which exists alongside and is necessitated by persistent Indigenous presence—a presence that challenges the legitimacy of settler occupation and sovereignty. This means that “[a]t stake in settler colonial ideology is not simply racial assumptions about the inferiority of indigenous bodies, but, more saliently, the spatial absence of indigenous peoples in geographic mappings of land” (Dahl, 2018: 79). Settler colonial ideologies need to deny and mask the foundational and ongoing violence of the settler state; they do so by clearing the land in claiming that Indigenous peoples were not and still are not, for one reason or another, truly, permanently and legitimately occupying the land.RC of WaterSettler Colonialism is the root cause of unequal access to water- failure to address it means the aff fails.Hartwig 2020 Lana Hartwig?is a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute and School of Environment and Science at Griffith University, Queensland. “Water colonialism and Indigenous water justice in south-eastern Australia” Accessed 7/13/21Indigenous claims to freshwater exemplify the tensions in these settler-colonial political relations and environmental governance regimes. Water and water places are crucial to Indigenous peoples’ spirituality, well-being, livelihoods and identities, and their aspirations for self-determination span cultural, political and socioeconomic dimensions (Robison et al., 2018). Water is an essential element in complex attachments to place and the reciprocal, ethical relations that bind people and their territories (Te Aho, 2010; Bates, 2017; Hemming et al., 2019). In many societies, water is an animate being, sometimes described as mother or the lifeblood of a territory (Anderson et al., 2019; Yates et al., 2017). Settler-states typically obstruct Indigenous peoples’ rights to water (Boelens et al., 2018; Jackson, 2018b).Unequal access to water and the political processes that direct management are fundamentally rooted in colonialism (Berry & Jackson, 2018; Curley, 2019b; Estes, 2019; Gibbs, 2009; Poelina et al., 2019; Robison et al., 2018; Weir, 2009). Imperial conquest and colonization resulted in dispossession and displacement of land and water tenures, while development dramatically transformed the waterscapes of Indigenous territories. Colonial expropriation of water deprived communities of their means of subsistence, interfered with lifeways and traditions founded on water cultures and debilitated social institutions, and thereby further eroded the political power of Indigenous peoples to influence subsequent resource allocations. Kul Wicasa scholar Nick Estes (2019, p. 133) describes colonial water expropriation as an ongoing project: ‘Water is settler colonialism’s lifeblood – blood that has to be continually excised from Indigenous people’.Settler Colonialism is the root cause of water insecurity Harris 19 - Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada 2 Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada; 3 Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada 4 Heritage Department, Tr’ond?k Hw?ch’in, Dawson City, YT Y0B 1G0, Canada Correspondence “Water is Medicine: Reimagining Water Security through Tr’ond?k Hw?ch’in Relationships to Treated and Traditional Water Sources in Yukon, Canada” ? //rmThere is growing acknowledgement that the material dimensions of water security alone are inadequate; we also need to engage with a broader set of hydrosocial relationships. Indeed, more holistic approaches are needed to explain Indigenous peoples’ relationships to water including the use of traditional water sources such as mountain creeks and springs. In this paper, we seek to reimagine water security through a case study of Tr’ond?k Hw?ch’in’s relationships to both treated and traditional water sources throughout the First Nation’s traditional territory in Yukon, Canada. Through community-based research including interviews with Elders and other community members, we examine the importance of traditional water sources for meeting important health requirements including physical, spiritual and cultural wellbeing. This intervention contributes to ongoing debates about what it means to secure safe and affordable water in three key ways: First, we argue that Indigenous water relations invite a shift towards more a holistic understanding of water security; second, we contend that settler colonial politics should be understood as a root cause of water insecurity; finally, we explore how Two-Eyed Seeing can be applied as an alternative to the ‘integration’ of Western scientific and Indigenous approaches to drinking water.Water security frameworks must be reimagined to reflect Indigenous water relationships more fully [10,29]. Indigenous peoples rely on water to meet their material needs (e.g., as a source of drinking water, as habitat for medicinal plants, fish, and animals, as a travel route in multiple seasons), but Water 2019, 11, 624 3 of 19 water is not merely valued as a material substance. While Indigenous relationships to water are highly diverse, they tend to express and understand water as a living entity with agency or “spirit” to which Indigenous peoples have reciprocal responsibilities; a perspective which sharply contrasts with settler views of water as a ‘resource’ available for human use and extraction [30–36]. For instance, Wilson and Inkster (2018) examine how Yukon First Nations’ (including TH) invocations of the need to “respect water” make clear the complex connectivity between the material and non-material dimensions of water where water is understood as “a living entity, with the ‘person-like’ quality of agency referred to as ‘spirit.’ From this perspective, water not only enables human life by meeting physical needs, but water is life or alive” [36] (p. 9). In other words, all aspects of Indigenous water relations are informed by relational ontologies and epistemologies that are not easily characterized by a dualistic lens that separates the material from non-material dimensions of water, and humans from other than human relatives such as water [34,37]. These relationships to water are multifaceted, structured by protocols, and encompass practices and knowledge about the relationships between humans and the other-than-human world that are the basis of Indigenous systems of governance and law [31,32,38,39].Water security frameworks based on material understandings alone fail to account for the complexity of Indigenous water relationships. This parallels critiques of conventional health risk assessments, which continue to focus on the physical dimensions of health to the exclusion of many other sources of exposure and harm that impact the social, cultural, psychological and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples [40–42]. Such aspects are interlinked with physical health and involve dimensions that many Indigenous peoples consider to be of equal or greater importance [43,44]. For instance, using a case study of the forced relocation of traditional riverbed communities from river basin settlements on the Narmada River to a resettlement site on the plains in Malu, Gujarat, Mehta (2013) shows that a focus on the material dimensions of water alone did not account for the dramatic impacts on well-being brought about by changing relationships, access and control over water [17]. Focusing on the material dimensions of water alone can thus erase, and even contribute to dramatic losses to identity, health, knowledge and traditions associated with Indigenous ways of life [44–46]. In this instance, the contamination of a traditional water source not only physically restricts access to these water sources, but also prevents Indigenous peoples from meeting reciprocal obligations to water, resulting in relational losses with material and non-material implications for identity, spirituality, and culture.Indigenous peoples frequently identify historical and ongoing settler colonialism as the most important factor affecting their well-being [47,48]. Settler colonialism refers to a form of colonialism in which colonizers dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land for settlement and resource development. Dispossession is initially carried out through physical force, but a variety of technologies are used to maintain this state (e.g., maps, numbers, and law). Both are legitimated, justified and reinforced through mechanisms including policy, ideology, and discourse about identity [49]. Although both colonialism and settler colonialism are based on domination by an external power, only settler colonialism seeks to replace Indigenous peoples with a settler society [50]. As such, settler colonial governance structures constrain Indigenous peoples’ ability to maintain relationships to the lands and waters within their territories, which are fundamental to sustaining material needs as well as for identity formation and enacting physical, communal and spiritual relationships [18,36,51–53]. Indigenous scholars have described settler colonial domination as violence that disrupts relationships between Indigenous peoples and the more than human world [54–56]. Tuck and Yang (2012) discuss how “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” [54] (p. 5). Thus, settler colonialism impacts water security not only through initiating material loss (e.g., the impacts of resources development on water quality), but also has political ontological implications (e.g., the imposition of systems of governance based on settler understandings of water as a resource rather than as a living relation impacts the social-sociocultural and spiritual connections with water). In the same vein, Mushkegowuk (Swampy Cree) scholar Michelle Daigle (2018) highlights the need to situate “drinking water issues [for Indigenous peoples] Water 2019, 11, 624 4 of 19 within structural colonial legacies and continuities such as the Canadian government’s ongoing disinvestment in infrastructure within Indigenous communities” [52] (p. 162). Thus, any approach to water security for Indigenous peoples must acknowledge settler colonialism as a root cause. Further, the social, cultural, psychological, and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples is not often accounted for in assessments because they can be more difficult to characterize and measure [45,46]. Their exclusion is also highly political because a truly holistic assessment that includes colonialism would reveal that water insecurity cannot be addressed through technical solutions alone, but requires the transformation of broader governance structures in order to acknowledge Indigenous water rights, responsibilities and authorities [18,31,57]. water as “resource” is the root cause of the water crisisWilson 18 (Nicole Wilson, PhD in Resource Management from University of British Columbia, Jody Inkster, Professor at University of Alberta/Yukon College, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground,” Environment and Planning, 1.4)//BB‘‘Respecting water’’ raises important ontological challenges. To engage with this, we take as our point of departure the broader question – what is water? – a question that has been raised by scholars in a variety of fields (e.g. Boelens, 2014; Chen et al., 2013; Linton, 2010; Strang, 2004; Wagner, 2013). As Linton (2010) notes, the answer to this seemingly simple question is taken for granted, due to the pervasiveness of the concept of Modern Water or settler-colonial understandings of water as a material resource. Water or H2O in this modern interpretation is abstracted from social context or ‘‘rendered technical’’ (Li, 2007), making it possible to understand water as a resource available for human consumption and use that can be known and managed or manipulated by humans (Groenfeldt, 2013; Linton, 2010; Strang, 2004). Modern Water, it is argued, dominates current approaches to water governance, whereas the separation of water from its social context is thus considered at the root of contemporary water crises (Schmidt and Shrubsole, 2013). Therefore, critics argue that challenging this requires ‘‘attention to water’s social context and dynamics, and to reposition water as inherently political’’ (Linton and Budds, 2014: 175). Yet, to date, few academics have explicitly addressed the ontological politics of water (cf. Boelens, 2014; Linton, 2010; Norman, 2012; Wilson, 2014; Yates et al., 2017). This paper thus examines water as a ‘‘more-than-human’’ entity through the lens of post-humanism and critical Indigenous studies. It explores conflicts in water governance and how dominant ontologies of water, based on the idea of Modern Water, inform present approaches to water governance, and how instead a project of decolonizing might unsettle conventional water governance. Working towards meaningful water governance alternatives will necessarily involve prioritizing Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and forms of governance.BiopowerSettlerism founds biopoliticsMorgensen 11 [Scott Lauria Morgensen is assistant professor of gender studies at Queenrsquo;s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is coeditor of Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now” The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 1:1, 52-76 J.P.]Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’. 3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’. 4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’. 5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’. 6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’. 7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’. 12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today.Settler colonialism based upon a biopolitical process which hurts Indigenous Peoples.Scott Lauria Morgensen 13, 2-28-2013, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, "The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now," Taylor & Francis, ; SamySettler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.EnviroSettler colonialism is damaging to both the environment and Indigenous peoplesWhyte 18 Kyle; KYLE WHYTE is the Timnick Chair in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. His research covers areas including Indigenous climate and environmental justice, the ethics of intercultural knowledge exchange, and Indigenous philosophies of food sovereignty and environmental futures. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.; “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice”; ; SamySettler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples’ facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples’ social resilience as self-determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.Diverse persons, including scholars, writers and activists, have described settler colonial domination as violence that disrupts human relationships with the environment. Lee Maracle writes that “violence to earth and violence between humans are connected” (2015: 53). Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang discuss how “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (2012: 5). Vanessa Watts claims that “the measure of colonial interaction with land has historically been one of violence . . . where land is to be accessed, not learned from or a part of ” (2013: 26). Th e Women’s Earth Alliance and The Native Youth Sexual Health Network recently produced a report entitled Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence. The report states that colonially supported extractive industries create “devastating impacts of environmental violence” (WEA and NYSHN 2016). J.M. Bacon refers to “colonial ecological violence” as a process of “disrupt[ing] Indigenous eco-social relations” (2018: 1).GenocideIndigenous people have no political say in their ecology. The genocide caused by the western world has eliminated them enough to devalue their ideals. Sturm ’17 - Circe, (REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF SOVEREIGNTY AND SETTLER COLONIALISM: Lessons from Native North America, )The Australian historian Patrick Wolfe’s (1999, 2006) highly influential work argues that settler colonialism differs from franchise colonialism in several ways. First, the primary natural resource extracted under settler colonialism is indigenous land, a practice that leads to a second key distinction, what Wolfe (1999, 27) refers to as “the logic of elimination.” Although indigenous people have at times been used as a labor pool during the process of land expropriation, often their labor is eventually replaced with that of other populations, such as South Asian indentured laborers in the case of Guyana or African chattel slaves CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 32:3 342 in the case of the United States. This replacement serves the goals of the new settler society, because the logical assumption is that the ongoing existence of indigenous peoples threatens the new social order: hence, to avoid them making an alternative claim to the land and their own political authority over it, they must be made to disappear. This process of elimination might occur via outright genocide, forced removal, or different forms of coercive cultural, social, and political assimilation. A third key difference that Wolfe notes is that settlers claim indigenous lands as their own, with the intention of staying and building a new society. Thus settler colonialism cannot be relegated to the past as something with only residual effects; rather, we need to understand it as an ongoing structure of oppression in which settlers actively maintain their rights to occupy indigenous territories in the present. Scholars working in settler-colonial societies recognize that this oppressive relationship, as with other forms of colonialism, becomes justified via racialization, so that indigenous individuals and their collective polities are made to seem inferior to Western European ones and thus to have less legitimate political claims (e.g., Kauanui 2008; Klopotek 2011; Povinelli 2002). Settler Colonialism itself is characterized by the idea of genocide.Laurelyn Whitt and Alan Clarke 19, Alan Clarke is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Wisconsin-Parkside. J.D., William and Mary; LL.M., Queen’s University (Canada)., “North American Genocides Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law”, ; SamyWith this destination in mind, we begin, in Chapter 1, by canvassing and critiquing a number of the grounds on which genocides of Indigenous Peoples in North America have been denied and dismissed. Chapter 2 defends the validity of retrospectively applying the Conventional account of genocide to historical cases antecedent to the UNGC, even as it acknowledges the legal constraints which necessarily attend retrospective analyses of this type. In Chapter 3, we engage some of the key concepts that settler colonial studies contributes to this project, in particular the suggestion that settler colonialism is characterized by an eliminatory dynamic. We argue that when settler colonialism is under pressure, as it often is for various reasons, it turns episodically to acts of genocide. However, since genocide is but one form such an eliminatory dynamic might take, we do not argue that settler colonialism is invariably or unremittingly genocidal. Sustaining such a claim would require, among other things, the examination of a far greater number of cases than we address here.Settler colonialism’s eliminatory dynamic is a product of its unrelenting commitment to land and resource acquisition and the attendant conviction that the colonized, Indigenous population - regarded as inferior in multiple respects — presents a primary obstacle to such acquisition. It is, moreover, crucial to understanding the endurance and resilience of settler colonialism as a social formation which has survived, adapting itself to changing circumstances, regimes, and forms of power, while it generates new strategies for eliminating Indigenous Peoples and for securing their lands and resources, whether tangible or intangible.” The understanding of genocide that emerges within settler colonial theory is often described as “structural genocide,” though we prefer the term “systemic genocide.” It differs from the Conventional, legal account of genocide in some significant ways. We concur with the view that genocide is both a legal concept and a socio-historical concept, and that both of these are needed to adequately address genocide, especially in settler colonial contexts.? At the same time, we acknowledge that history and the law are very different projects with very different ends. While historical inquiry must not be restricted to legal rules of evidence,” neither should the legal account of genocide be jettisoned. Neither account is adequate on its own, and both capture aspects of the phenomenon of genocide that are vital to preventing it, as well as to under- standing how it functions historically and in the present. These issues are examined at some length in Chapters 7 and 8, where we assess the development, as well as the limitations and stand-alone adequacy, of the Conventional legal account of genocide. The goal of settler colonialism is the genocide of Indigenous peoples.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz 15, 10-27-2015, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American historian, writer, and activist., "Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies in North America,", ; SamyGovernmental policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has noted: “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.” The history of North America is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of government authorities was to terminate the existence of Indigenous Peoples as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide. US and Canadian history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of states and continuing in the 21st century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and policies of termination.WarThe Anglosphere is in terminal crisis – Settler’s hold on violence threatens the entire planet with endless racial war.Mishra 18 (Pankaj, MA @ Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi “The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult,” New York Times, )In the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States would jointly forge an identity geopolitics of the “higher races.” Today it has reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the greatest modern empire. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” President Trump said last year in a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about “large-scale killing” of white farmers in South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert Murdoch’s media, of white supremacists around the world. To understand the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking liberal democracies today, we must examine the experience of unprecedented global migration and racial mixing in the Anglosphere in the late 19th century: countries such as the United States and Australia where, as Roosevelt wrote admiringly in 1897, “democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien.” It is in the motherlands of democracy rather than in fascist Europe that racial hierarchies first defined the modern world. It is also where a last-ditch and potentially calamitous battle to preserve them is being fought today. This “race selfishness” was sharpened in the late 19th century, as the elites of the “higher races” struggled to contain mass disaffection generated by the traumatic change of globalization: loss of jobs and livelihoods amid rapid economic growth and intensified movements of capital, goods and labor. For fearful ruling classes, political order depended on their ability to forge an alliance between, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “capital and mob,” between rich and powerful whites and those rendered superfluous by industrial capitalism. Exclusion or degradation of nonwhite peoples seemed one way of securing dignity for those marginalized by economic and technological shifts. The political climate was prepared by intellectuals with clear-cut racial theories, such as Brooks Adams, a Boston Brahmin friend of Roosevelt, and Charles B. Davenport, the leading American exponent of eugenics. In Australia, Pearson’s social Darwinism was amplified by media barons like Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert and a stalwart of the eugenics movement) and institutionalized in a “White Australia” policy that restricted “colored” migration for most of the 20th century. Anti-minority passions in the United States peaked with the 1924 immigration law (much admired by Hitler and, more recently, by Jeff Sessions), which impeded Jewish immigrants and barred Asians entirely. By the early 20th century, violence against indigenous peoples, immigrants and African-Americans reached a new ferocity, and nativist and racist demagogues entrenched a politics of dispossession, segregation and disenfranchisement. Seeking to maintain white power globally, Roosevelt helped transform the United States into a major imperialist power. Woodrow Wilson, too, worked to preserve, as he put it, “white civilization and its domination of the planet” even as he patented the emollient rhetoric of liberal internationalism that many in the American political and media establishment still parrot. At the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, which Wilson supervised, the leaders of Britain, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada not only humiliated the many Asians and Africans demanding self-determination; they also jointly defeated an attempt by Japan, their wartime ally, to have a racial equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The exposure of Nazi crimes, followed by decolonization and civil rights movements, generally discredited quasi-scientific racism and stigmatized overt expressions of white supremacism. In our own time, global capitalism has promised to build a colorblind world through economic integration. But as revolts erupt against globalization in its latest, more disruptive phase, politicians and pundits in the Anglosphere are again scrambling to rebuild political communities around what W. E.B. Du Bois in 1910 identified as “the new religion of whiteness.” The intellectual white web originally woven in late-19th-century Australia vibrates once more with what the historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds termed “racial knowledge and technologies that animated white men’s countries and their strategies of exclusion, deportation and segregation.” Mr. Trump, for instance, has chosen Australia’s brutal but popular immigration policies as a model: “That is a good idea. We should do that too,” he said in January 2017 to Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister at the time, as he explained his tactic of locking up refugees on remote islands. “You are worse than I am,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Turnbull. If right-wing Australian politicians were among the first to mainstream a belligerent white nationalism, the periodicals and television channels of Rupert Murdoch have worked overtime to preserve the alliance between capital and mob in the Anglosphere. Indulged by Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers, writers like Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Roberts repeatedly urged American neoconservatives after the Sept. 11 attacks to take up the aging white man’s burden and quell mutinous natives. A broad range of figures in the Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition and extermination of black and brown brutes. Not surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors who build platforms where political correctness, Islam and feminism are excoriated, the facts of injustice and inequality denied, chests thumped about a superior but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active settler-colonialist project. Emotional incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of white power. For the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today. Whiteness denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth find themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe increasingly challenged. Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him to vote for Mr. Trump. Other panicky white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience, remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce. The low comedy of charlatanry, however, should not distract us from the lethal dangers of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial knowledge, according to which the swarthy enemy was subhuman, inviting extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair. A century ago, the mere suspicion of being thrust aside by black and yellow peoples sparked apocalyptic visions of “race suicide.” Today, the “preponderance of China” that Pearson predicted is becoming a reality, and the religion of whiteness increasingly resembles a suicide cult. Mr. Trump’s trade wars, sanctions, border walls, deportations, denaturalizations and other 11th-hour battles seem to push us all closer to the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the rulers of the “higher races,” “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”Slow ViolenceIndigenous people struggle because of settler colonial sovereignty which leads to slow violenceDhillon 21 - Jaskiran Dhillon is an anti-colonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Cultural Anthropology, Truthout, The Nation, Feminist Formations, Environment and Society, Social Texts, and Decolonization among other venues. She is the author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017) and co-editor of Standing with Standing Rock: Indigenous resistance, planetary dystopia, and the politics of environmental justice, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1866390//rmFollowing these critical inquiries, my work herein is attendant to the specificity of political critique that emerges through the work of Indigenous scholars and their accomplices who are calling attention to colonial state power and relations of domination characteristic of settler colonialism in the here and now (Coulthard, 2014; Moreten-Robinson, 2015; Simpson, 2014). In my view, these critical appraisals move across a range of socio-political spaces and times and carry significant import when translated to a deconstruction of the underlying politics and ideologies inherent to the dominant environmental justice movement as a whole. Following in step, this article attempts to do two things. First, it outlines a nascent, anti-colonial critique of the environmental justice movement by beginning to trace the ideational and material forms of colonialism present in environmental politics and further sheds light on how colonialism operates discursively through this movement. Second, I gesture toward the need, even urgency, for Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and decolonization to be placed front and centre in all of our social movements. I do this by offering a window into the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which breaks from the logics of environmental politics centreing whiteness through the reconceptualization of water as something much more than a ‘resource’, much more than a stock or reserve upon which one can draw when necessary (Ferry & Limbert, 2008).2 Instead, the political resistance at Standing Rock brings critical visibility to what a movement for environmental justice looks like when it is approached through an anti-colonial lens, thus offering a new modality of resistance for the preservation of the planet.When ‘water’ – the life giving composition of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom – is positioned as kinship instead of resource, water becomes a central actor in a resistance movement to protect what Kyle Whyte (2018, p. 135) refers to as collective continuance: a society’s overall adaptive capacity to maintain its members’ cultural integrity, health, economic vitality, and political order into the future and avoid having its members experience preventable harms. It becomes about place-based practices and associated knowledge that is built on centuries of intergenerational guidance. Mni Wiconi, then, embodies the strength and wisdom of ancestral anti-colonial struggles imprinted on the land and Mni Sose. When we think of water as kinship as demonstrated by the Sioux’s resistance at Standing Rock, we reject the idea that the struggle against DAPL is merely a resistance against a pipeline. We reframe this battle as a battle for an ethics of living that rejects colonial time and gives equal weight to human and other than human relations, including plants, animals, elemental forces and the cosmos, as constituents of a collective whole (Dhillon & Allooloo,Water as justice. It is important to note that centreing Indigenous experience and political movements like Standing Rock is not a plea for inclusion in the pluralist milieu. It is about making visible the reality of systemic violence and injustice that is part of everyday life for Indigenous communities, and the inescapable, ongoing fact of settler complicity in reproducing these dynamics. The struggle for water at Standing Rock, thus, is also a struggle against what Rob Nixon calls the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of toxic buildup (and I am not just speaking to environmental racism here) across a range of life experiences for Indigenous peoples. Hence, a resistance movement that is centred on protecting the Mni Sose, or Missouri River, is also a movement that speaks to the interconnected forms of structural violence that are tightly woven together. A struggle for water becomes a struggle for decolonization and justice as a whole. This includes addressing limited access to education that is centred in Indigenous epistemology, inadequate housing, extreme levels of poverty, police state violence and criminalization of Native peoples through the invention of colonial law (see Heidi Stark’s work on criminal empire), truncated access to health care, and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous homelands through treaty violations are all part of the resistance at Standing Rock Slow violence is exponential and a major threat multiplier, so it needs to be prioritized Nixon 11 Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”, pgs. 2-3 primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean 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. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, 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.AltAlt – CartographyThe transmodern apporach of adopting indigenous “depth of place” when epistemologically mapping indigenous environemntal sites enables individual indigenous cultural understandings of the land – it’s key to broader decolonizationPearce and Louis 08 [Margaret Wickens Pearce and Renee Pualani Louis. Margaret Wickens Pearce is Citizen Potawatomi and an assistant professor of geography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Renee Pualani Louis is Hawaiian and recently completed her doctorate in geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma?noa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 32:3 (2008) 107-126. Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. //dylan] DGPBut is it possible to transcend these barriers for effective use of this technoscience called GIS? David Turnbull writes that technoscientific knowledge must be reframed, not discarded: we must be “committed to the idea that technoscience can be and should be other than it is.”21 This reframing is necessary for cultural survival: “How can we have technoscience that does not dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean people but enhances their lives? How can we develop new criteria to achieve these ends and how can we ensure that these criteria are implemented? . . . How can we ensure that we do not impose a universal monoculture either biologically or socially? How can we reframe science and technology in such a way that we encourage biological and cultural diversity? Our survival is dependent on both.22” Overcoming the limitations of any technoscience requires a break from modernist science, not through postmodernism, as Turnbull writes, but through the transmodern, “a way station at which some kind of synthesis of the two can be achieved, without the excesses of either” the modern or postmodern. The solution, as Turnbull frames it, is to create a “shared knowledge space in which equivalences and connections between differing rationalities can be constructed. Communication, understanding, equality and diversity will not be achieved by others adopting Western information, knowledge, science and rationality. It will only come from finding ways to work together in joint rationalities and in knowledge spaces constituted through these joint rationalities.”23 Some scholars are actively working to change GIS and GT to accommodate epistemological diversity. McLaffery and Kwan have both maintained that GIS practices can be transformed through the development of new analytical methods for mapping feminist experience.24 Kwan, for example, uses the oblique angles of 3D to emphasize a feminist point of view in the spaces of the map and encodes linear trajectories with different hues to depict the changing lines of emotion that affect women’s experiences of place in the city.25 We agree with these innovative uses of GT and suggest that another way in which epistemological differences can be better expressed through GT is by focusing on the structures of cartographic language.Potential Cartographic Languages: An Example from Hawai‘iHawaiians understand place as a multidimensional metaphysical continuum that ranges from the heavenscape through the landscape on to the oceanscape. It is also a repository for cultural knowledge. Knowledge of place is not only limited to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell but also incorporates other more abstract “senses” that are linked to intuition, place, time, and connection to the past, present, and future.26 These more abstract senses are a critical part of Hawaiian spatial-knowledge acquisition, symbolization, and transmission and can only be accessed through various cultural practices, including prayer, ceremony, visions, and dreams.From a Hawaiian perspective, all natural and cultural resources are interrelated and culturally significant. They believe the ‘a?ina (land) is alive, embodied with a spiritual essence, and that they are genealogically linked to it as their kula?iwi (homelands).27 Hawaiians honor the mana (spiritual power or essence) of their kula?iwi through the act of naming.28 Hawaiians named all parts of their environment, thus making their individual attributes of each known. For example, although there were no distinct altitudes that separated the various layers of the heavens, each was named according to function. Land regions were named according to their physical characteristics and the type and size of vegetative growth. Ocean regions were similarly distinguished according to their physical characteristics and the resources each provided. This “depth of place” knowledge is not confined to the boundaries on land, but is inextricably intertwined with the spiritual realm. All parts are interrelated, extend vertically and horizontally in every direction, and directly impact one another. Even though Hawaiians transformed space into personalized place by naming the various strata of the heavens, regions on the landscape, and depths of the ocean, the boundaries of these sacred and profane places are generally considered to be fluid. There are no specific altitudes that delineate the margins of heaven. They were distinguished based on observable phenomena. Likewise land and ocean regions were often defined by the type and size of resources. Even political land boundaries were not separated by distinct lines but rather by a buffered area.Depth of place is also reflected in the way Hawaiians personalized the natural environment by associating kinolau (physical manifestations of gods) with various natural features and by distinctively naming various elements of nature. For example, Lono, noted as the god of fertility, “was seen in the skies in the form of dark clouds or lightning [or] as steam billowing from active volcanoes. On land, Lono would manifest himself as a pig or a kukui tree. In the ocean, he would take the form of the humuhumunukunukuapua‘a fish.”29 Different places were given distinct, place-specific names for wind, rain, stars, cloud types, lava formations, and ocean wave movements that describe not only their individual traits but also the specific phenomena associated with them. For example, “Ka makani ka? ‘aha‘aha la‘i o Niua’ alludes to ‘the peaceful ‘aha‘aha breeze of Niua that drives in the ‘aha‘aha fish.’ In this example, ‘aha‘aha refers to both the fish and breeze of the same name. Fishermen knew that when this breeze blew, it was the right time to launch their canoes in search of the ‘aha‘aha fish.”30 Hawaiians express depth of place through various performative mapping practices, including mo‘olelo (narrative historical accounts), ‘?olelo no‘eau (proverbs), mele (songs), hula (dances), ki‘i p?ohaku (petroglyphs), kalaina (carvings), and lei (garland) making, kapa (bark cloth), and ka?kau kaha (tattoo) design. It is also expressed in mapping on the landscape through the traditional political boundaries of the ahupua‘a.Ahupua‘a Resource Management and Mapping Hawaiian political boundaries, formalized by the early 1600s, organize the islands into levels according to geographical and political relationships. In this system, an ahupua‘a is a land unit divided according to the distribution of resources and extends from the mountain ridges out to the sea. The word ahupua‘a originates from the way the boundary was mapped on the land by an ahu (stone pile) surmounted by the image of a pua‘a (pig). This land division, with its variable plant zones from the rainforest down to the beach and marine zones from the shore to just beyond the reef, ideally provided the necessary resources to sustain life for the communities that reside within them. Ahupua‘a were considered complete ecological and economic production systems; however, when environmental conditions changed and an ahupua‘a lost a particular resource, residents would trade for this resource with their neighbors from other ahupua‘a. Most community members carried out routine tasks such as the production of food, the building of various shelters, the making of clothing, and the construction of tools, with the belief that the akua (gods) were pleased with the results of their labor and constantly provided divine guidance in all their pursuits. Thus, every aspect of a day in the life of a Hawaiian involved an intimate relationship with the spiritual essence of the place where they lived. This system of resources management was integral to the Native Hawaiian way of life, and its legacy still remains a significant element in the lives of those who reside in Hawai‘i today, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian alike.31 The marked boundaries of the ahupua‘a were not intended to restrict travel between divisions; rather they encoded the way the ahupua‘a were to be used. Ahu indicated to the populace which resources were freely available, required permission, and were restricted according to one’s birthright or status. Most significantly, the locations and meanings of ahu were designed to be flexible and move with the shifting locations of resources with environmental and seasonal change.32 When the Hawaiian government under the Hawaiian monarchy switched to private property under advisement of Western counselors, ahupua‘a boundaries were translated into a Western concept of boundary, thus distorting their meaning and function. The Hawaiian concept of boundary as inclusive and fluid—adjusting to changing environmental conditions with the seasons for the equitable distribution of natural resources—was misrepresented as a nonIndigenous concept of boundary as an exclusive, fixed line. Large landowners with capitalistic ventures inevitably evicted all people who lived within their boundaries because they were under the impression that everything within their boundaries was their property. This mistranslation of the meaning of ahupua‘a replaced traditional Hawaiian resource management with the modern land-use planning view of land and ocean resource management as separate systems. The mistranslation is also written on the Western map Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. 116 american indian culture and research journal today, as in the example from the island of O‘ahu in figure 1. The lines that delineate the boundary are a solid overlay that ends at the coastline. To restore sustainability and ahupua‘a resource management is no small task. It requires active participation and long-term commitments from all community members including government, corporate, commercial, and private landowners in order to integrate ahupua‘a principles and practices within a modern government organizational and legal framework. It also requires mapping capable of expressing ahupua‘a depth of place. In the following section we will explore how that might be possible in the remapping of Nu‘alolo Kai, an ahupua‘a on northwest Kaua‘i. Mapping Depth of Place at Nu‘Alolo Kai Nu‘alolo Kai is a half-mile-long narrow strip of shoreline on Kaua‘i, located at the base of steep cliffs that quickly rise to nearly one thousand feet. It has a wide fringing reef at the northeast end that provided the Hawaiians that lived at this fishing village with the sustenance of aquacultural abundance. To supplement their diet, Hawaiians also terraced the perched valley of Nu‘alolo ‘Aina located approximately one hundred feet above the northeast end of Nu‘alolo Kai. Inaccessible by land, Nu‘alolo ‘Aina was reached by ladders set up at Alapi‘i Point. Alapi‘i literally means the path (ala) that one clings to (pi‘i) and describes how a person had to cling to the cliff face to traverse it. Figure 1. O‘ahu Ahupua‘a land divisions. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place 117 Nu‘alolo Kai is a part of the Na? Pali Archaeological District and is listed on both the national and Hawai‘i registers of historic places. Since 1996, the State Parks Nu‘alolo Kai Archaeological Resource Management Project has uncovered “numerous archeological and culturally significant sites including terraces, burial sites, house sites, walls, heiau and a water cistern.”33 Archaeologists believe the area was continuously occupied since the arrival of the first Polynesians in Hawai‘i, nearly eight centuries ago, until the turn of the twentieth century when the population moved to Hanalei and Waimea.34 Since that time, this well-preserved cultural complex has been overgrown with mostly alien vegetation due to inattention. The depiction of Nu‘alolo Kai on a conventional Western map is shown in figure 2. The map combines the US Geological Survey (USGS) map with a shaded relief created from a USGS ten-meter Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Figure 3 depicts the same region from a USGS Landsat image of Kaua‘i. In Western convention, both maps are oriented with north at the top and presented in an orthogonal perspective, that is, an aerial perspective that has been adjusted such that there is no single point from which the map is projected. From these two maps, we gain a sense of Nu‘alolo Kai as a fixed location in space, a uniform, homogenous, gently sloping beach without people. Neither map gives any indication of Nu‘alolo Kai as a place of seasonal changes so significant that traditionally the mapping of this place was always in motion. Figure 2. Detail from US Geological Survey topographic map with shaded relief. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. 118 american indian culture and research journal To reincorporate the seasonal and cyclical variations that defined both mapping and resource management at Nu‘alolo Kai, we worked with the same digital geographic data sets used in the creation of the maps in figures 2 and 3 to map Nu‘alolo Kai in a different way, altering some dimensions of cartographic language in order to express some of those missing elements of place. First, we addressed the question of perspective, shifting it from the orthogonal, aerial perspective to an oblique angle, shown in figures 4 and 5. By shifting to the oblique, the viewing angle of the map reader shifts from the “view from nowhere” to one that is situated in place. Oblique perspective also allows the map reader to see the sheer cliff line, with its complex interaction of shade and shapes, which dominates the landscape but is largely invisible in the orthogonal, aerial perspective. By shifting perspective, we were also able to address the map’s orientation. The conventional map of Nu‘alolo Kai is oriented with north at the top, and the map reader looks down at a shoreline, which appears to be accessed from the interior and whose central place-making features, the cliffs, are invisible. But Nu‘alolo Kai is only accessible from the water, and thus it is always viewed from this angle, which looks toward shore. The fixed, seasonless, and timeless space of the map was addressed through a focus on the dimension of lighting. With the viewing angle in Figure 3. US Geological Survey landsat image of Kaua‘i. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place 119 Figure 4. View angle of Nu‘alolo Kai oblique perspective. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Figure 5. Nu‘alolo Kai oblique perspective using the VNS2 program. Map scene by Everett Wingert, 2004. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. 120 american indian culture and research journal place, the sun’s movement was animated and rendered across a southwest portion of Nu‘alolo Kai (see fig. 6), at one angle and position to represent summer (fig. 7) and one for winter (fig. 8), including different times of day for each seasonal rendering (5 am, 8 am, 12 noon, 4 pm, and 7 pm). These maps demonstrate the significance of seasonality to representing depth of place. In the summer maps in figure 7, the sun is high and illuminates all parts of the landscape. In the winter maps of figure 8 in which the sun is low, portions of the landscape receive no sunlight (in particular the area near the black dot in figure 6). This lack of sunlight is an important element in an understanding of Nu‘alolo Kai as a place, for in winter the ground never dries, thus promoting the germination and sprouting of ilo (worms or maggots). The Hawaiian term for this time of year is ho‘oilo (to cause germination or sprouting). Ho‘oilo is also the time of year that the Milky Way is prominent; Hawaiians affectionately refer to the Milky Way as ilo because it looks like a big worm in the night sky. Resources at Nu‘alolo Kai are not only shaped by sun angle, but they are also shaped by the shifting tides. As the tide recedes, marine resources trapped in various tidal pools are gathered as part of the day’s food preparation. Generally speaking, women and children harvested the seaweed and shellfish from the reef and shoreline; and men did most of the offshore fishing by using traps, nets, and hook and line. Both men and women purposely left part of their catch at the ko‘a (fishing shrine) to ensure continued aquacultural bounty. To represent the significance of tides, the map of Nu‘alolo Kai was re-rendered from the shoreline looking out to sea or toward a northeast direction (fig. 9) to show the daily cycle of tides across the reef system that fronts Nu‘alolo Kai (fig. 10) at different times of day (5 am, 8 am, 12 noon, 4 pm, and 7 pm). These maps depict the average high- and low-tide levels in accordance with the limitations of the software; ideally, these tides should also be depicted in terms of their seasonal differences in summer and winter. Reimagining Cartographic Language These animations draw on a few aspects of cartographic language in order to portray depth of place at Nu‘alolo Kai. Line symbols such as the contour lines and the park boundary, which represent a fixed boundary and a static or unchanging landscape, have been removed and replaced with shaded areas only. The shift to a low, oblique perspective, almost profile, overcomes the disembodied space of the conventional map and illuminates the identity of Nu‘alolo Kai as a place defined by cliff and sea. This quality of situatedness is echoed in the orientation of the map as that of an actual observer looking from the water to shore. These shifts in perspective and orientation remove both the authorlessness of the map as well as the human emptiness of the place: we see Nu‘alolo Kai from someone’s point of observation, which provides the map reader with a feeling of being situated in the map. By including us in the map’s space, the animation draws on one quality of traditional performative cartography, that of connecting the mapmakers with the audience by incorporating everyone into the map. The shifts in temporal perspective created by the animation overcome the seasonless space of conventional mapping of Nu‘alolo Kai. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place 121 Figure 6. View angle Nu‘alolo Kai animation frames. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Figure 7. Nu‘alolo Kai animation frames that illustrate the movement of the summer sun by using the VNS2 program. Map scene by Everett Wingert, 2004. Figure 8. Nu‘alolo Kai animation frames that illustrate the movement of the winter sun by using the VNS2 program. Map scene by Everett Wingert, 2004. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. 122 american indian culture and research journal Finally, the use of lighting as not fixed, as in conventional practices of shaded relief, but as shifting by time of day and season, brings in depth of place. As demonstrated here, GT is flexible and can be used to express Indigenous conceptions and representations of place more powerfully than are currently used by either Indigenous or non-Indigenous mapmakers. Such improvements do not necessarily require new geographic data sets; rather we emphasize that existing digital data, as in the USGS data of these animated examples, can better depict Indigenous place merely through a careful consideration of form, that is, the way that cartographic language is used to represent that digital data. Although these maps more accurately express nuances of Indigenous depth of place, cross-cultural misrepresentation lingers. In traditional Hawaiian Figure 9. View angle Nu‘alolo Kai reef front animation frames. Map by Renee Pualani Louis, 2006. Figure 10. Nu‘alolo Kai reef front animation frames that illustrate the daily tidal cycle by using the VNS2 program. Map scene by Everett Wingert, 2004. Published as M. Pearce and R. Louis. Mapping Indigenous depth of place. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Special Issue, “Mainstreaming Indigenous Geographies,” 32 no. 3 (2008), 107-26. ? 2008 by UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place 123 cartographies, Hawaiian spatial knowledge is represented through integrated and interactive performances of oration and brings the cartographer, the subject matter (the place being portrayed), and the map reader together in the same place at the same time. In Western cartography knowledge is represented through performances of inscription that physically and temporally separate the place and the cartographer from the observer. In the animated maps presented here, the landscape remains devoid of story and the human dimension. The maps continue to privilege sight as the sense by which the map reader learns about the seasonal spatiality of tides and ignores the other sensory dimensions such as the sounds of the tides’ changing rhythms and the rustling in the winds as they stir the leaves and grasses, or the nuanced shifts in smell from the tides’ ebb and flow. With audio technology now easily incorporated into animated cartography, and scented GT emerging, such sensory expansion of the maps is technologically within reach.35 Thus, these animations may be improved and reworked for the human and storied content of the visual dimension, the performativity of the map’s structures and their connection of reader and mapmaker, and the incorporation of other sensory mappings in order to represent completely the Hawaiian understanding of the depth of place. However, through these visual depictions of Nu‘alolo Kai as embodied, situated, fluid, and experienced, they bring us one step closer to representing appropriately the ahupua‘a as a resource management system. Envisioning Indigenous Cartographies: An Agenda for Indigenous KnowledgeThe problem that faces Indigenous peoples worldwide is to find a way to incorporate Western GT and cartographic multimedia while minimizing the mistranslations, recolonizations, and assimilations of conventional technoscience. As Stone writes, “Map or be mapped.”36 We recognize that any re-representation of Indigenous knowledge by using Western cartographic techniques will entail some loss of information in translation.37 But we believe that by making that translation more accurate through a theoretically informed and innovative application of cartographic language, the combination of “traditional wisdom” with “modern technical know-how,” we can demonstrate the effectiveness of GT and multimedia as tools not only for protecting cultural sovereignty but also for articulating exemplary cartographic practices for the shared knowledge space of the transmodern.38Through the informed practice of cartographic representation—innovation rooted in tradition—we envision a future in which Indigenous communities formulate their cultural mapping programs in a way that protects and fosters cultural sovereignty, maps the Indigenous without leaving the Indigenous behind, and simultaneously transforms the way non-Indigenous people read, interpret, and make use of maps of Indigenous cultural knowledge. In so doing, we hope to overcome the chasm of cultural miscommunication between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds that so often manifests in loss of territory and cultural rights under colonial conditions.Alt – Critique PlaceThe alt is to adopt individual epistomologcial friction that challneges western conceptualizations of “place”The western school perpetuates foundational western conceptualizations of “place” – indigneous place-based education in debate deconstructs (1) colonial capitalist impulses to control and dominate nature (2) the individual existing “ideal social actor” built around racist and sexist western norms by the process of self-estrangement Seawright 14 [Gardner Seawright. Gardner Seawright is a teacher-scholar whose work in a middle school social studies classroom informs the larger examination of the ways that race influences curriculum and the everyday act of teaching. His work explores the relationality and phenomenology of whiteness in the classroom, as well as the development of antiracist, anti-colonial, and place-based curricula. From these lenses, using both qualitative and theoretical approaches, Gardner's scholarship analyzes teacher-student relationships, the limits and possibilities of antiracist solidarity, place-based and environmental education, qualitative methodologies, teacher education, and social studies education. He holds a Ph.D in philosophy at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Parkside, Institute of Professional Educator Development. “Settler Traditions of Place: Making Explicit the Epistemological Legacy of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism for Place-Based Education.” Educational Studies, A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50:6, 554-572, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2014.965938 //dylan] DGPThe importance of contextualizing Western traditions of place in relation to white supremacy and settler colonialism when implementing place-based education depends on the goals and orientation of the educational strategy. If there is a desire to be broadly oriented toward social and ecological justice, toward decolonization (and the repatriation of indigenous lands), then these histories must be considered alongside their guiding epistemological framework. Not exposing the foundational Western beliefs in ownership and private property in critical place-based education is akin to not correlating anti-racism with white-privilege.The colonial impulse to dominate and control nature is embedded in the official knowledge of schools. Challenging this traditional Western theory of place is already being done by ecojustice educators (Martusewicz et al. 2011) and can be found in Indigenous communities’ long legacy of ecologically sophisticated place-based education (Cajete 1994, 1999; Deloria and Wildcat 2001; Kawagley and Barnhardt 1999). Educators and educational scholars whose work is rooted in Indigenous epistemologies have emphasized the need to interrogate Western perceptions of reality. Critique provided by Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat (2001) suggests that education rooted in Western understandings of the world provides no insight regarding “living relationships” and the processes between humans and the living world (31). Michael Marker (2006) suggests that Western schools are disconnected from place, history and a narrated past; the “destination of schooling is away from land and community and toward a scientific/technological attitude about relationships between humans and animals” (493). These endeavors to critique and epistemologically engage must continue and build from the foundation laid by these scholars.[1] The Western understanding of land and the natural world is not a simple abstract perception that can be altered with a competing ecologically informed perception. The dominant understanding of place is a product of how the settler-self is constituted within white settler epistemology. Settler identity is linked to the dominant interpretation of land. Michael Marker (2006) points to this, and argues that Indigenous knowledges are a threat to Western claims of “authenticity in relation to land and identity” and present a “direct challenge to the core assumptions about life’s goals and purpose” (486). The foundational relationship between place, white supremacy, and settler colonialism needs to continue to be contended with in social- and ecojustice education. An effective place-based education not only reshapes abstract understandings of nature and land, but provides a pathway for the tearing down and reconstruction of oppressive ontological relationships with the natural world.[2] Conceptions of self are impacted but not determined by structural epistemology. The ideal social actor embedded in white settler epistemology is a guiding force that exists relationally to individual actors. Meaning, depending on an individual’s subject position and epistemic praxis, they will have a particular epistemic positionality that reflects how an individual is situated within networks of power, thus impacting experiential realities and the possibilities of resistance (Medina 2013). The possibilities of epistemic resistance have to be contextualized in relation to epistemic positionality, “for differently situated subjects have differential epistemic responsibilities (different not only in degree, but also in kind)” (Medina 2013, 17; emphasis in original). An individual’s subject position will shape their epistemic responsibility. In other words, white-setter epistemology curates an ideal social actor established upon racist and sexist norms, and there is an epistemic responsibility to resist that construction, but that resistance is going to depend on individual positionality in relation to that ideal social actor. There must be a process of self-estrangement and self-problematization based on how individual ontologies are constructed and how the ontological self correlates to the ideals of the prevailing epistemology. This self-estrangement can be facilitated through place-based educations.Ultimately, this article is an argument for more socially and ecologically just educations that are epistemologically informed. Ongoing critical epistemic introspection is one of the key steps in trying to counter injustice. But this is no easy task, as Jose Medina (2013) has pointed out: “Our cognitive, affective, and political lives are permeated by different forms of conformity and resistance that shape our lives in various [not always fully coherent] ways” (14). With this in mind, the position I have articulated here is a call for epistemic resistance, which will mean different things for different people. Cognitive and emotional turmoil will manifest in a variety of ways, but it is this turmoil—this epistemic friction—that is necessary for critical epistemic introspection and for the deconstruction of structural oppressive epistemologies. Medina suggests that epistemic friction encourages the two poles of a resistance feedback loop, resistant experiences and resistant imaginations. Friction hopefully encourages the imagination of a better epistemic reality, which hopefully leads to alternative epistemic praxis that, in turn, leads to additional friction and a refreshed critical imagination—and so on and so forth. Place-based education holds the radical potential to situate this epistemic reality and be part of a watershed of collective critical imagination that can alter the violent relationships with humans and the more-than-human world. I agree with David Greenwood (2013a) when he suggests that “it is necessary to look back across time, and to look beyond schooling, for the places and selves we may not yet know” (99, emphasis added). A process of critically looking back and imagining a better place to decolonize current epistemological realities—to engage in an active process of sabotage (self-sabotage and structural sabotage) and reconstruction of previously known realities.Gregory Cajete (1999) considers all humans to harbor an innate desire to be reciprocal with nature. A system of white settler supremacy, through capitalistic structuring of society and the economization of everything, works to alienate people from a healthy relationship with the natural world and local places. Healthy, sustainable, and reciprocal relationships to the social geography we are emplaced in have been bastardized, corrupted, and perverted by the same systems that let capital, competition, and private property define life. If we desire to foster socially just ecological education than there must be awareness of the politics of place and the politics of self that challenge that future. Place-based education carries the capacity to center epistemology within a process of pushing settler society away from ecological damage and racial and gender supremacy and toward the cultivation of a healthy reciprocal relationship with the natural world.Alt - DecolDecolonization GoodCorntassel 12 -is an associate professor of indigenous studies at the University of Victoria. His research centers around indigenous political movements, community resurgence, and sustainable self-determination. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona [Jeff; Published 2012; “ Re-envisioning resurgence: Indigenous pathways to decolonization and sustainable self-determination”; ]Being Indigenous today means struggling to reclaim and regenerate one’s relational, place-based existence by challenging the ongoing, destructive forces of colonization. Whether through ceremony or through other ways that Indigenous peoples (re)connect to the natural world, processes of resurgence are often contentious and reflect the spiritual, cultural, economic, social and political scope of the struggle. As Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2009) points out in his extensive study on the psychological and physical impacts of colonialism on Indigenous peoples within a Canadian context, “...colonialism is best conceptualized as an irresistible outcome of a multigenerational and multifaceted process of forced dispossession and attempted acculturation – a disconnection from land, culture, and community – that has resulted in political chaos and social discord within First nations communities and the collective dependency of First Nations upon the state” (p. 52). This disconnection from our lands, cultures and communities has led to social suffering and the destruction of families and yet “...the real deprivation is the erosion of an ethic of universal respect and responsibility that used to be the hallmark of indigenous societies” (Alfred, 2009, p. 43). When considering how colonization systematically deprives us of our experiences and confidence as Indigenous peoples, the linkages between colonialism, cultural harm, and the disintegration of community health and well-being become clearer. Furthermore, this is a spiritual crisis just as much as it is a political, social, and economic one.Despite Prime Minister Harper’s assertions, that “we” in Canada “have no history of colonialism” (Ljunggren, 2009), contemporary colonialism continues to disrupt Indigenous relationships with their homelands, cultures and communities. One of our biggest enemies is compartmentalization, as shape-shifting colonial entities attempt to sever our relationships to the natural world and define the terrain of struggle. For example, policymakers who frame new government initiatives as “economic development” miss the larger connections embedded within Indigenous economies linking homelands, cultures and communities. By focusing on “everyday” acts of resurgence, one disrupts the colonial physical, social and political boundaries designed to impede our actions to restore our nationhood. In order to live in a responsible way as self- determining nations, Indigenous peoples must confront existing colonial institutions, structures, and policies that attempt to displace us from our homelands and relationships, which impact the health and well-being of present generations of Indigenous youth and families. Indigenous resurgence means having the courage and imagination to envision life beyond the state.Decolonization offers different pathways for reconnecting Indigenous nations with their traditional land-based and water-based cultural practices. The decolonization process operates at multiple levels and necessitates moving from an awareness of being in struggle, to actively engaging in everyday practices of resurgence. After all, whether they know it or not (or even want it), every Indigenous person is in a daily struggle for resurgence. It is in these everyday actions where the scope of the struggle for decolonization is reclaimed and re-envisioned by Indigenous peoples. Decolonizing praxis comes from moving beyond political awareness and/or symbolic gestures to everyday practices of resurgence (de Silva, personal communication, 2011)i. This shift means rejecting the performativity of a rights discourse geared toward state affirmation and recognition, and embracing a daily existence conditioned by place-based cultural practices. How one engages in daily processes of truth-telling and resistance to colonial encroachments is just as important as the overall outcome of these struggles to reclaim, restore, and regenerate homeland relationships. While decolonization and resurgence are often treated separately from each other in scholarly analysis, for the purposes of this article they are viewed as interrelated actions and strategies that inform our pathways to resistance and freedom.Decolonization better than state centered approachesCorntassel 12’ -is an associate professor of indigenous studies at the University of Victoria. His research centers around indigenous political movements, community resurgence, and sustainable self-determination. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona [Jeff; Published 2012; “Re-envisioning resurgence: Indigenous pathways to decolonization and sustainable self-determination”; ]When addressing contemporary shape-shifting colonialism, the rights discourse can only take struggles for Indigenous decolonization and resurgence so far. Indigenous mobilization strategies that invoke existing human rights norms, which are premised on state recognition of Indigenous self-determination, will not lead to a sustainable self-determination process that restores and regenerates Indigenous nations. According to Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard (2007),“the politics of recognition in its contemporary form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend” (p. 437). By embedding themselves within the state-centric rights discourse, “Indigenous nations run the risk of seeking political and/or economic solutions to contemporary challenges that require sustainable, spiritual foundations” (Corntassel, 2008, p. 115-116).Furthermore, by mobilizing around a rights discourse, there is a danger of buying into an “illusion of inclusion” being promoted by state-centered forums: “Consequently, a system that once denied an Indigenous rights agenda now embraces it and channels the energies of transnational Indigenous networks into the institutional fiefdoms of member countries” (Corntassel, 2007, p. 161).Article 46, part 1 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is telling in this regard: “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, people, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act contrary to the Charter of the United Nations or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” While Indigenous peoples do not tend to seek secession from the state, the restoration of their land-based and water-based cultural relationships and practices is often portrayed as a threat to the territorial integrity of the country(ies) in which they reside, and thus, a threat to state sovereignty. The politics of recognition highlights the shortcomings of pursuing rights-based strategies for Indigenous peoples desiring decolonization and restoration of their relationships with the natural worldAs I reference in the article above (Corntassel, 2007), rights are derived from state-centric forums while Indigenous nations’ responsibilities to the natural world originate from their long-standing relationships with their homelands –relationships that have existed long before the development of the state system. Rights, on the other hand, are re-gifted rhetoric from artificial states. As Indigenous peoples we act on our enduring, inherent responsibilities. While there has been limited success in advancing claims of Indigenous cultural harm/injury in global forums and judicial bodies, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, as of this writing no global forum has yet held Canada accountable to standards related to land-based and water-based cultural practices, homeland reclamation, and subsistence.Given that a state-centered rights discourse has limits in terms of addressing questions of Indigenous recovery and community resurgence, a responsibility-based ethic grounded in relationships to homelands and community knows no limits. Our ancestors and future generations will recognize us as Indigenous by how we act on these responsibilities. For example, Cheryl Bryce and her family have been managing their traditional Lekwungen territories for centuries and Cheryl continues to harvest kwetlal (camas, a starchy bulb that has been a staple food and trade item for Indigenous peoples in the region for generations) on park lands and private properties, despite threats to her and her family’s well-being from settlers attempting to deny her access to Lekwungen homelands(Penn, 2006).The rights discourse does little to assist in Cheryl’s everyday acts of resurgence on her family territory. Political/legal rights-based approaches do not offer meaningful restoration of Indigenous homelands and food sovereignty. Nor do they address the urgency of the struggle -the revitalization of traditional foods, as well as community roles and responsibilities, is critical to the future survival and regeneration of Lekwungen peoples. A community’s cultural continuity is premised on direct actions to protect these sacred relationshipsDecolonize researchWheaton-Abraham 16’ -earned her MA in applied anthropology from Oregon States University. She is a member for the Ktunaxa Tribe and her research centers around native identity and decolonization. [Jyl M.; Published 2016; “Decolonization and Life History Research: The Life of a Native Woman”, IK: Other Ways of Knowing, Vol. 2, ]Decolonizing is a different way of understanding and interpretation, which actively resists gendered and racialized assumptions, along with narratives of domination and the inevitability of European colonization and control. Decolonizing research "center[s] [indigenous] concerns and world views, leading to an understanding of theory and research from indigenous perspectives and for our own purposes” (Smith 2012, 41). Decolonizing research is action, “inclusive of all knowledge systems and respectful of the researched” (Chilisa 2012, 4). It involves being conscious of the fact that indigenous people created and sustained lives and cultures on these lands prior to European arrival and that all of our lives and cultures continue to be influenced by colonization today. Decolonizing can also be understood as a process, which entails gaining a deeper understanding of Western knowledge and history, how they are positioned as superior to native knowledge (Chilisa 2012), and how they shape the perceptions and experiences of both colonizers and the colonized.For me, decolonizing this research was both action and process. Working with my mother was an act of resistance against the continuity of research which privileges a white European experience on this land and within academia. Rather than correcting her grammar and rewording her statements, I present her stories as she spoke them, out of respect for her as an individual and to challenge the academic tradition of changing a native person’s words and still calling them their own. I considered how this research would honor the Ktunaxa covenant with the Creator. Decolonizing this research was also a process of learning about federal and state laws as well as social practices and beliefs regarding native people, and how these have impacted my mother’s life. It meant re-examining concepts such as racism, European Imperialism, and primacy, to working through personal fears and judgments as I wrote. In the end, I understood how my mother and her stories exemplify what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance, the survival and presence of native people in the face of the continued colonization of their lands, minds, and bodies (Vizenor 1999, iiv). Without a decolonizing perspective, I may not have connected the humiliating act of cutting my mother’s hair with my grandmother’s experiences at an Indian boarding school. I may not have grasped the persistence of the marginalization of my tribe without the knowledge that when my mother was little, her community which included the elderly and pregnant women, had to shovel their own way to town. I would not understand how white European heteropatriarchy has degradedthe status of native women within my tribe; my great-grandmother was spiritual leader, while my grandmother and mother were treated as property meant to be abused and controlledI did not write this paper to arouse feelings of pity or guilt. I did not intend this research to be “damage centered,” characterized by Eve Tuck as research “intent on portraying our...tribes as defeated and broken...operat[ing] from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (Tuck 2009, 412). I was not motivated by the possibility of reparations. My intentions were to create a space which honors my mother’s humanity; to interrupt anthropological research portraying the lives of native people, particularly women, as hopeless; and to upset traditional researcher/participant relationships rooted in the support of colonizer/colonized domination and control. Decolonizing research is often understood as solely for indigenous or colonized communities. Indigenous researchers often cite life expectancy rates and substance use as urgent needs for new research methods and perspectives that take into account particular histories and needs. However, the reality is most anthropological researchers are not indigenous, and they are not producing the bulk of indigenous-centered work. Anthropology is an overwhelmingly white Euro-American profession, shaped by colonial practices and beliefs. We must become aware of how this fact continues to influence our discipline and our research, and decide if that is how we want continue. As researchers, we must ask ourselves these questions; how long can we structure our work with a colonizer perspective and claim it is insightful, useful and helpful? How can we seek to end gendered violence and racialized poverty when our work protects a certain privileged status and fragility? How can we move forward and face the challenges we all share without hearing, learning about, and owning our collective history? Decolonization is about understanding how the past has shaped colonizers and the colonized alike; in other words, you and me. I believe we must move beyond the structures and beliefs that shaped my mother’s life and continue to shape all of ours today. I leave you with these words, which my mother told me, “You think these things happened a long time ago.The K is key to decolonizing the state and the mindset of people- it spills down- mindset change via acidemia leads to decolonization of the mind that is a prerequisite to decolonizing the state- other strategies fail. Bernal 21 (Victoria Bernal 4/16/21 Ph.D., Northwestern University Research Interests: political anthropology; gender and feminist theory; digital media and cyberspace; transnationalism, migration, and diaspora; states, security, surveillance, citizenship, NGOs, civil society, the public sphere, and protest; violence, war, and memorialization; Islam, African Studies “Digitality and Decolonization: A Response to Achille Mbembe” rs)Mbembe introduces his lecture by saying he takes inspiration in part from recent student protests in South Africa. “At the core of these events,” he says, “is the hope—especially among the younger generation—for something new, which would not simply be a repetition of what we thought we had got rid of…It is this hope that explains the renewed injunction to decolonize institutions, or for that matter, knowledge itself.” Mbembe cautions, however, that we lack an idea of what decolonized knowledge might look like and that “the lack of a theory of knowledge [is] a potentially fatal weakness of the decolonizing project.” He makes it clear that curricular reforms and mere substitutions of European materials and personnel with African ones is insufficient, and that a more profound unsettling of what constitutes knowledge and knowledge production is both necessary and already underway.Debates about decolonizing institutions and knowledge production have succeeded in spawning entire new fields and perspectives such as subaltern studies and postcolonial studies, which have challenged the status of quo of research (Said?1979; Spivak?1988; Chakrabarty?2007). Prominent scholars have addressed the politics of knowledge in the context of global North/South relations in ways that brought questions about who conducts research on what and on whom and from what perspective to the fore. While issues of imperialism and white supremacy are global, Africans have particular histories of racialization, enslavement, and colonialism. Accordingly, as Mbembe does, I will mainly consider decolonial questions related to Africa. Calls to decolonize education in Africa are not new, but the #RhodesMustFall protests to which Mbembe refers that took place at the University of Cape Town in 2015 reverberated beyond the continent, bringing new attention and urgency to decolonial efforts (Ahmed?2020).South African students developed a “decolonial framework centered on Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, and Black radical feminism” (Ahmed?2020:283). Others have approached decolonizing the university in varied ways. At Makerere University, for example, the MPhil/PhD program in Social Studies defined its decolonial project in terms of “seeing the world from African vantage points; ending the pervasive consultancy culture; and asking context‐specific home‐grown questions” (Serunkuma?2019:119). The focus on “consultancy culture” at Makerere goes to the material conditions of scholarship in Africa, where institutions and individual scholars often depend on funding from the global North. Knowledge production is then tied to external research agendas rather than to African priorities. I observed similar struggles in Tanzania, where I found that “the practices of international donors have regime-like effects” enabling and constraining the work of activists and academics (Bernal?2017:39). As these examples and Achille Mbembe suggest, what must be done to decolonize, and what the future of such knowledge production will look like are ongoing questions. Perhaps rather than any blueprint, what is needed most is the opportunity for radical experimentation.As an anthropologist, I am convinced that decolonizing knowledge will not be possible without decolonizing society. Imperial prejudices and practices regarding Africans still operate powerfully and globally at various scales from the interpersonal to the international. Having now been married for decades to an African and raising our “bi-racial” daughters (who are perceived as Black in the U.S.), I have an intimate experience of racism that complements my academic knowledge. Perhaps we need a theory of anti-blackness before we can have a theory of knowledge that can undergird processes of decolonization. The ways that global inequalities are rationalized and perpetuated in relation to Africans and people of African descent have proven resilient and flexible, changing in sync with shifts in the global political economy and the rise of neoliberalism. I am struck, for instance, by a 2019 campaign on CNN International, #myfreedomday, which features an ad focused on “child slavery” in Africa. At the start of the ad, a voiceover mentions the location as Ghana but, without any further information or contextualization, the scenes shown are typical of how some part of Africa is used to represent the whole, a generic Africa, too often depicted in terms of a negative attribute, lack, or need. The ad shows a fisherman’s pirogue from which boys are diving down into the water. The narration likens these boys to slaves who need to be freed.Alt – RehistoricizeThe Alternative is to rehistoricize the history of Colonialism in water distributionBray 2021 Laura Bray is a Professor in the?Sociology?department?at?North Carolina State University “Dividing the San Juan: Settler Colonialism, Water Inequality, and Rural Injustice in the US Southwest- A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy” Accessed 7/12/2021During NIIP project negotiations, Navajo officials met with racialized ideas about citizenship, natural resource management, and tribal nationhood that worked to diminish Navajo sovereignty and legal claims to San Juan waters. These racial projects were specifically tailored to rural land use and resources, suggesting that racialization may occurs differently in urban and rural settings in ways that shape the formation and experience of environmental inequality. Third, I expand research on the workings of state power within the production of environmental injustice by revealing mundane forms of legal-rational domination. These mechanisms provided flexible tools for project officials to reduce the impact of the NIIP under the cover of law. The Navajo Tribe recognized and resisted the many bureaucratic attempts to remake the project, but the conflicts attracted little public attention or controversy. The bureaucratic and legal cover thus helped to legitimize environmental inequality. In this case, the bureaucratic mechanisms worked to align the project settler colonial objectives of limiting Native access and control over natural resources but could easily be mobilized to accomplish other ends. The history of water development in the San Juan River Basin continues to hold relevance for water management and conflicts today. As others have pointed out, federal Indian water law grants Indigenous people priority rights but remains colonial law that and frequently fails Indigenous people (Curley 2019a). Understanding the history American Indian water projects within settler colonial contexts can inform resistance and pathways toward more sustainable and equitable water futures. Resistance to water colonization comes in many forms, including asserting tribal rights to co-govern shared resources (Cantzler and Huynh 2016; Emanuel and Wilkins 2020), rejecting water quantification and rights settlements (Curley 2019a), and fighting fossil fuel and other extractive industries that threaten waterways (Estes 2019; Gilio-Whitaker 2019). Through these activities, Indigenous people have taken the lead in imagining alternative ways of living with water (McGregor, Whitaker and Sritharan 2020; Wilson et al. 2019).Alt – Retheorize PoliticalRe-theorizing the water politics as hydro-social undoes settler colonial damage that occurs in depoliticization/making of water governance, policies, and discourses – opening this can of worms through hydrosocial questioning is a necessary perquisite to (1) engagement with hidden social struggles of water and (2) using indigenous hydrosocial conceptsWilson et al 19 [Dr. Nicole J Wilson [Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair in Arctic Environmental Change and Governance, University of Manitoba]; Dr. Leila M Harris [Dr. Leila M. Harris is a Professor at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance, is a member of the EDGES research collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability Perspectives], and is an Associate of the Department of Geography, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC.), Julian S Yates [Human Geography, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Julian is political ecologist and development geographer who focuses on the intersection of the politics of Indigenous knowledge, inter-cultural adult education, rural development policy, planning, and practice, and environmental governance.] “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance” Water 2019, 11, 1470; doi:10.3390/w11071470 //dylan] DGPWater governance practices that elide “the political” do not challenge the direct production and concealment of uneven social-ecological risks, nor do such approaches create opportunities to articulate and redraw water-related decisions, uses, or practices in ways that will be more just and sustainable. As many of the contributions make clear, particular discourses, policies, and governance frameworks too often suggest that certain “solutions”—be it decentralization, PES, participation, IWRM, or nexus approaches—will overcome problems with water governance. Yet, as these contributions demonstrate, such constructs mask the associated “politics”, but politics are integral to such interventions and their uneven outcomes. There is an ongoing need for attention to these politics, as well as new analytics and methods to highlights their dimensions. There has been considerable progress to promote analyses that center and re-theorize “the political” in water governance. Clear themes emerge in this Special Issue, including the need to interrogate purportedly apolitical institutional structures and infrastructural interventions, as well as to investigate the on-the-ground realities as ‘apolitical’ interventions. As such, the themes outlined above help to underscore some of the concerns associated with de-politicized water governance, and further offer insights on what it means to position politics at the forefront of water governance analyses. The contributions also include radical re-formulations of water governance, including a focus, for example, on ontologies, axiologies, and epistemologies within the contributions on Indigenous water governance. Through these contributions, the wider political terrain that enables the production of certain waters—be it desalinated, packaged, or bottled, and their uneven outcomes (e.g., private over public interests, mining industry over domestic users)—come to the fore. Together, the contributions contained within engage with and offer new insights to both re-center and re-theorize the politics of water governance.There are also new openings made possible by the contributions here. Among them, we expect scholarship to further the types of questions and realities offered by the considerable work on Indigenous water governance. Noted here, there are many political struggles and openings provided by deeper engagement with these realities, histories, and ways of knowing and ways of governing. There are also ongoing political challenges and debates more fundamentally about what societally and politically we want to do about biophysical and water related challenges, such and those associated with climate change or ongoing water related degradation. Thus far, there has often been a reversion to the “technical” (e.g., augment supply by building new dams, the pursuit of desalinization, or compensate upstream users through schemes such as PES). Even if such options proceed with the notion that these are technical solutions, and thus evacuated of politics, this is not the reality. As such, we must make visible and confront these politics head on: Who benefits, who loses, why? In addition, there are options and possibilities such as those associated with narrative water ethics or Indigenous legal frameworks that might offer hope for bringing these contestations and trade-offs to the fore; that is, what do these offer for the future of water governance and what new work, concepts, and governance mechanisms might enable us to do this more adequately, appropriately, and with an orientation towards justice and sustainability?As technologies and governance practices continue to change and adapt, there will undoubtedly continue to be new and different questions to be addressed and considered. As we do so, we must continue to attend to the politics of such interventions. The pretense of apolitical and win-win interventions must also be taken as a red flag—here, an analysis to understand the politics might be all the more difficult, yet of critical importance. We also see considerable value, illustrated in the pages of this volume, regarding the important learning that can occur across disciplines and geographies, whether from bringing realities of First Nations into conversation with the situation elsewhere, or by linking political ecology with urban studies, planning, anthropology, and other approaches. Here we can break new conceptual and analytical ground, whether that relates to the concept of “unmapping” [54] or thinking about the implications of nibi (water) giikendaaswin (Ogamauh annag qwe, see Chiblow) [74], or through understandings of Indigenous wellbeing as connected to territory and the relationships that are forged with and through water [76]. We find such critiques and learnings to be of vital importance. Especially when they can be conveyed in ways that highlight the conceptual and empirical lessons, and also that can be read in ways that are accessible and relevant to diverse audiences. We are pleased to offer this Special Issue, with the hope that we have met and maybe even exceeded these goals.Alt – Indigenous JurisprudenceThe Alternative is to cede control of water and regulatory powers to native tribesKrakoff 13 Sarah Krakoff is an Associate Fellow at Vermont Law School's New Economy Law Center, as well as?the Raphael J. Moses Professor of Law at the University of Colorado. Her areas of expertise include American Indian law, natural resources and public land law, and environmental justice. “Settler Colonialism and Reclamation: Where American Indian Law and Natural Resources Law Meet” ? Accessed 7/12/2021The final unraveling of settler-colonialism, which would redeem both American Indian law and natural resources law, would be to unhook natural resources law from its Lockean (and Jeffersonian) assumptions. Instead of measuring tribal rights based on dated ideas about Western land use and arcane understandings of tribal governments, the better approach would be a hybrid that reaches back to a pre-colonial past while also incorporating ecological and economic realities of today. Such an approach would allow tribes, on the one hand, to use waters (and lands) as they did historically, but also to be contemporary economic actors. Their rights to those resources would not depend on claims to irrigate the desert, but instead would exist regardless of whether they chose to keep water in the stream or, moving in another direction, to market it to users with higher needs. Reversing settler colonialism in natural resources law, in other words, means both going back to tribal resource use patterns of the past, and going forward to recognize tribes as contemporary governments and economic actors today.Indigenous led governance is better than comanagementParsons, M., & Fisher, K. (2020). // Senior Lecturer, the?University of Auckland, Indigenous peoples and transformations in freshwater governance and management. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 44, 124–139. //KBThis logic might also extend to the concept of water rights and the governance of such rights, Another option would be to shift from the co-management of water, dominated by settler views of water and modes of governance, to Indigenous-led modes of governance and co- governance rooted in a politics of kinship and respect for water. Indigenous scholar and lawyer (Anishinaabe-Me ?tis) Aime ?e Craft (2017) asks what Indigenous water laws or the Anishinaabe nibi inaakonigewin (‘‘our water law’’) might contribute to improving decision- making about water? While noting that all legal traditions emphasize rights, obligations, and responsibilities and most often include reciprocal and bilateral rights and obligations (between the individual and the state), she theorizes that Anishinaabe water law differs from other legal traditions in that it is ‘‘focused primarily on responsibility, rather than rights, and that it is multi-layered, multi-dimensional and sources from relationships among beings (human and non-human)’’ (Craft, 2017: 107). Through this lens, we understand Indigenous water laws to engage ontologically pluralistic approaches to governance that seeks to acknowledge the status, rights, and privileges of more-than-humans that are equal to humans and in a manner that ensures those benefits are recognized and protected. Calls for legally pluralistic water governance systems often assume that Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and legal traditions are only relevant at the local scale and questions about whether and how these principles and institutions can be scaled up to regional or national levels, are rarely posed (Merrey, 2009). If it is the case that Indigenous water laws tend to center on the inclusion of all relations and perspectives, governance arrangements built on Indigenous law and institutions might not only better reflect Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, but perhaps also better serve the collective good through engaging pluralist perspectives rather than those rooted in scientific rationalism, private property, and individualism.Western mismanagement of water recourses has led to a lack of water in the first place- the alternative is to cede control of water and land back to native tribes.Larned 2018 Susan M.?Larned?is the founding member of Larned Law Group, P.A. (more needed for qualifications here) “WATER IS LIFE: THE NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBAL ROLE IN PROTECTING NATURAL RESOURCES” Accessed 7/12/21As a cultural society interconnected with the environment, the Indian tribes are vital to creating long lasting solutions to protecting water resources.399 Despite efforts to assimilate the native people and erase their indigenous way of life, public awareness of the rights of this powerful, yet marginalized people, is growing.400 This is essential because the path of conquering and abusing non-renewable natural resources is not sustainable.401 Native American culture teaches oneness with all creation, and that what is taken from the earth needs to be given back.402 The Native American tribes are standing up for the truth of their sovereign rights, and teach non-natives about caring for and protecting the earth.403 Indian tribes must continue to build their institutional and economic capacity to self-rule together to strengthen their voices and return towards greater independency.404 Claiming their sovereign right to self-determination will reframe Indian tribes from having dependent reliance on the federal government to independent negotiators with protected rights based in enforceable Treaty agreements.405 The Native American culture and spiritual way of life offers powerful lessons that need to be incorporated into the non-Native culture. Native Americans must return as the caretakers of the land and water embrace and be recognized for the key role and purpose they provide in solving our looming water crisis.Alt – Indigenous Water ProtectorsIndigenous water protectors solveEmanuel & Wilkins 20 [Ryan Emanuel is a professor of hydrology in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. He earned his Bachelors degree from Duke University, and a Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in environmental sciences, David Wilkins earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research centers around indigenous self-determination and governance, and he is a member of the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina, Published 25 July 2020, “Breaching Barriers: The Fight for Indigenous Participation in Water Governance” Water. 2020; 12(8):2113. ]Indigenous interests in water governance may extend beyond provisioning clean water and building resilience in the face of floods or droughts. Although these and other governance objectives are important, and although US Tribal nations participate in efforts toward these ends, Indigenous priorities may also include protecting water and water-related landscapes for diverse historical, cultural, and spiritual reasons (Section 3.1). In some cases, Native peoples do not have direct jurisdiction over these waters and must use other strategies, including government-to-government consultation, to ensure that their perspectives are fairly considered during decision-making (Section 3.2). State-recognized Tribes are not guaranteed consultation—flawed as the process may be—and face additional barriers to participation in decision-making and other aspects of governance (Section 3.3).3.1. Indigenous Perspectives on Water and Water GovernanceThroughout the US, Indigenous perspectives on water may lead to governance strategies that share objectives with federal and state water laws and policies, including a desire to provide ample, clean water for a variety of human and non-human uses [60,61]. However, Indigenous peoples may be motivated by other priorities, including deep, identity-defining connections to specific rivers, coastlines, wetlands, and other waters. These connections go beyond protecting water as a commodity or resource; they point to the maintenance of traditional life ways, languages, and cultural practices. Food ways, for example, are one easily recognizable mode of connection between water and Indigenous peoples. Salmon, shellfish, and wild rice are frequently cited examples of Native foodways that are sensitive to water quality and depend on specific aquatic habitats [62,63,64]. In present-day North Carolina, the Lumbee River and its adjacent wetlands have long supplied Native peoples with fish, game, medicinal plants, building materials, and other resources [42].Other connections, including religious ceremonies and historical commemorations, are critically important, even if their links to water quality or other environmental factors are less apparent. For example, the Lumbee Tribe holds special reverence for its namesake river as the stronghold of 19th century Indigenous leader, Henry Berry Lowry. From 1865 until 1872, Lowry led a multi-racial band in a guerrilla war, first against the Confederate Home Guard and later against state and federal authorities [42,43,65]. The Lowry band leveraged knowledge of the river and tributary swamps to conduct raids and evade capture for years. Lowry disappeared in 1872 but remains an enduring symbol of leadership and resistance for Lumbee people and others, many of whom consider the river to be a de facto memorial to Lowry [43].Some Native communities adapt existing regulatory frameworks to reflect their own values and standards for safeguarding water and water-related places. For example, the Swinomish Tribe of present-day Washington has expanded existing methods for assessing and rating wetlands by incorporating traditional ecological knowledge about culturally significant plants to protect tribally managed wetlands [66]. Native peoples elsewhere have adopted novel strategies to protect specific waterways. For example, the Yurok Tribe of present-day California has recently granted personhood status to the Klamath River, which gives the river certain rights as well as legal standing in Tribal courts [21]. This action codifies, at least in Tribal court proceedings, the unique relationship between Yurok people and the Klamath River, which is part of their ancestral and present-day territory. Moreover, it builds upon a slow but growing trend of Tribal governments (and other national governments around the world) that are extending legal rights to the natural world, including the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and the Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin, who in 2017 and 2018, respectively, adopted ordinances providing legal rights to their lands [67]. The Lumbee Tribe’s 2009 ordinance to reclaim the ancestral name of their river [25] was largely symbolic and has no regulatory significance, but the act nevertheless reflects the river’s centrality to Lumbee identity. These examples further highlight those Indigenous perspectives may inform decisions about waters or water-related landscapes directly under Tribal jurisdiction (e.g., Swinomish [66]), or they may apply to waters not under Tribal control (e.g., Lumbee [25]).Other modes of Indigenous water governance move beyond internal policies, ordinances, and regulations to critique external processes that prioritize state and federal perspectives while de-emphasizing Indigenous views. For example, the Water Protector movement, which organized in response to the federal government’s authorization of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across unceded treaty territory of the Oceti Sakowin, advocated not only for clean water but also for the rights of Indigenous governments to participate meaningfully in permitting decisions that impact tribally significant waters [68]. In 2016, representatives from more than 300 Tribal nations gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation in North Dakota to support the Water Protector movement [69]. Such broad support suggests that Tribes are well aware of the important—yet asymmetric—nature of water governance across boundaries and jurisdictions, viz., [70]. Moreover, the Water Protector movement illustrates the holistic nature of water governance strategies for many Tribes; critiques of laws and policies that determine whose voices carry weight in shared decision-making are well within the scope of their concerns. Although specific goals of preventing water pollution and other environmental harms are embedded in their critiques, the Water Protector movement highlights broader issues associated with policies that have long restricted Indigenous peoples from meaningful participation in high-level decisions about water governance [58].Water Protectors echo an ancient understanding by Indigenous peoples that water is not only an essential substance for all life but is also integral to culture and collective identity. This intimate relationship can motivate Indigenous peoples to protect water and water-related places as precious resources, identity markers, or both. In any case, Indigenous perspectives on water may be infused with values that differ, fundamentally, from the values underpinning non-Indigenous water governance, which centers on defining limits to the exploitation, degradation, and pollution of water. These differences can lead to both opportunities and challenges for Tribes who seek to secure water access, preserve specific waterways, or protect other interests.Indigenous people have different relationships and networks with water. Colonial dispossession arises and so does indigenous resurgence and resistanceYazzie and Baldy 18 – Yazzie - Ph.D., American Studies, University of New Mexico; M.A., American Studies, Yale University; B.A., Political Science, Grinnell College - Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy? is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. Her research is focused on Indigenous feminisms, California Indians and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Research from San Diego State University. She also has her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol 7., No 1, 2018, pp. 1-18 ? M. Yazzie & C. Baldy. “Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water” //rmThe now popular discourse “Water Is Life” has become almost ubiquitous across multiple decolonization struggles in North America and the Pacific over the past five years. Its rise in popularity reflects how Indigenous people are (re)activating water as an agent of decolonization, as well as the very terrain of struggle over which the meaning and configuration of power is determined (Yazzie, 2017). Indigenous freedom fighters have reclaimed water, land, and Indigenous bodies within a network of life that simply refuses to disappear and relinquish its embedded relationships with the spaces and places from which Indigenous peoples emerge, and to which we belong (Goeman, 2017; Yazzie, 2017). From the Oceti Sakowin protecting the Missouri River from contamination by the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the Maori declaring that the Whanganui River has rights akin to those of humans (Roy, 2017), water is seen as an ancestor and as a relative with agency within this network of life, one who deserves respect, care, and protection. In short, in recent years Indigenous peoples have been rising up to develop vibrant struggles for decolonization that are, in the words of Zoe Todd (2017), “embedded in watery worlds” with our “water kin.”The final cluster of articles by Michelle Daigle, Beth Rose Middleton, Morning Star Gali, and Darcie Houck, and Angel Hinzo examine state and corporate driven water laws, as well as the various forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence that have arisen to contest and refuse colonial dispossession enacted through such laws. Mushkegowuk scholar Michelle Daigle centers Indigenous water governance at the intersection of Indigenous self-determination, extractive capitalist development, and water contamination and dispossession. Through a spatial analysis, Daigle traces contemporary forms of water dispossession enacted through mining extraction to the larger colonial-capitalist objectives of the original signing of the James Bay, or Treaty 9, agreement. She balances her discussion of dispossession with a discussion of how Mushkegowuk peoples are resurging against settler colonial and capitalist regimes by regenerating their water relations, and how water itself cultivates a form of resurgence that regenerates Indigenous kinship relations and governance practices.Alt – Ontology of WaterThe alternative is a re-orientation of water away from an object to be managed towards a more-than human entity with agential capacityWilson and Inkster 20 (, " Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground," 2018, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, )Indigenous peoples have been governing the lands and waters within their territories since time immemorial, and Indigenous governance systems can be understood as dynamic legal orders, rooted in those traditions, while adapting to contemporary circumstances (Borrows, 2002; Napoleon, 2013). While Indigenous governance systems have been disrupted or constrained by settler-colonial forms of governance, Indigenous peoples have enduring knowledge of such systems in practice and oral history (Borrows, 2002; Napoleon, 2013). Respect remains central to these. For example, during an interview conducted in 2012, one Elder from Carcross/Tagish First Nation discussed the importance of traditional governance structures, such as the clan system, for guiding respectful relations with water.9 This Elder noted, ‘‘The laws that we have for water are in the clan houses. Those kinds of things are important because we need to respect water’’ (Elder 7, 2012). Further, Vanessa Watts (2013: 23) notes, ‘‘non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society. The very existence of clan systems evidences these many historical agreements between humans and nonhumans.’’ While Indigenous cultures are often seen as holding a value system that ought be considered in settler governance processes (Nadasdy, 1999), ontologies are not external to governance. Critical Indigenous scholars show us how Indigenous ontologies, sovereignty and governance are linked through Indigenous thought and practice, which is guided by the principles of respect, relationality, responsibility, and reciprocity (Coulthard, 2014; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016; Manson, 2015; Wilson, 2009). Denying the agency or subjectivity of more-than-human relations erases the role these entities play in practicing and knowing responsibility and in Indigenous sovereignty itself. Such practices are the engagement of a politics of kinship on the ground (Manson, 2015; Rifkin, 2010). Coulthard (2014: 13) refers to these Indigenous decolonial principles and practices as grounded normativity, or ‘‘the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.’’ In other words, for Indigenous peoples’ water (and land) are understood not simply as a physical asset, but as a way of knowing (epistemology) and being (ontology) embedded in 526 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(4) a universe of relations between human and non-human beings that can guide forms of governance and resistance. Through this lens, respect for water can be understood as a politics of kinship that is inextricably linked to Indigenous understandings of water and water governance. The following section explores the ontological politics of water governance in Yukon Territory, which is shaped by modern land claims and selfgovernment agreements as well as the politics of kinship First Nations engage through respect for water.Water is not an objectWilson 18 (Nicole Wilson, PhD in Resource Management from University of British Columbia, Jody Inkster, Professor at University of Alberta/Yukon College, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground," 2018, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, )Indigenous peoples have been governing the lands and waters within their territories since time immemorial, and Indigenous governance systems can be understood as dynamic legal orders, rooted in those traditions, while adapting to contemporary circumstances (Borrows, 2002; Napoleon, 2013). While Indigenous governance systems have been disrupted or constrained by settler-colonial forms of governance, Indigenous peoples have enduring knowledge of such systems in practice and oral history (Borrows, 2002; Napoleon, 2013). Respect remains central to these. For example, during an interview conducted in 2012, one Elder from Carcross/Tagish First Nation discussed the importance of traditional governance structures, such as the clan system, for guiding respectful relations with water.9 This Elder noted, ‘‘The laws that we have for water are in the clan houses. Those kinds of things are important because we need to respect water’’ (Elder 7, 2012). Further, Vanessa Watts (2013: 23) notes, ‘‘non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society. The very existence of clan systems evidences these many historical agreements between humans and nonhumans.’’ While Indigenous cultures are often seen as holding a value system that ought be considered in settler governance processes (Nadasdy, 1999), ontologies are not external to governance. Critical Indigenous scholars show us how Indigenous ontologies, sovereignty and governance are linked through Indigenous thought and practice, which is guided by the principles of respect, relationality, responsibility, and reciprocity (Coulthard, 2014; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016; Manson, 2015; Wilson, 2009). Denying the agency or subjectivity of more-than-human relations erases the role these entities play in practicing and knowing responsibility and in Indigenous sovereignty itself. Such practices are the engagement of a politics of kinship on the ground (Manson, 2015; Rifkin, 2010). Coulthard (2014: 13) refers to these Indigenous decolonial principles and practices as grounded normativity, or ‘‘the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.’’ In other words, for Indigenous peoples’ water (and land) are understood not simply as a physical asset, but as a way of knowing (epistemology) and being (ontology) embedded in 526 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(4) a universe of relations between human and non-human beings that can guide forms of governance and resistance. Through this lens, respect for water can be understood as a politics of kinship that is inextricably linked to Indigenous understandings of water and water governance. The following section explores the ontological politics of water governance in Yukon Territory, which is shaped by modern land claims and selfgovernment agreements as well as the politics of kinship First Nations engage through respect for water.To challenge colonialism, we must change how we think about water. Voting Negative means reconceptualizing water as something more than just a resource to be used.Wilson and Inkster 2018 “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground” Dr. Nicole J. Wilson is a scholar of settler origin whose research focuses on Indigenous peoples, environmental governance, and environmental change in the Arctic. She is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. Accessed 7/12/2021Decolonizing water governance such that water is respected in the Yukon First Nations multifaceted sense of that work will also be necessarily rooted in views of water as a present agentive being within a network of relational or kincentric ties, responsibilities, and obligations. The many steps that might lead to that decolonization involve what Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2014) refers to as multiple nested forms of sovereignty. By this, she means that Indigenous sovereignty is a constantly unfolding set of practices, rooted in relational politics, and existing within a settler state. Indigenous nations thus strategically engage with state conceptions of sovereignty, while seeking to assert forms of governance that people also consider consistent with their ontologies. For Simpson, Indigenous peoples are also necessarily engaged in a politics of refusal; they reject (in that refusing) the fiction of the settler state by avowing the viability of Indigenous forms of governance and insist that their governance not be subsumed within settler colonialism (e.g. swallowed up as ‘‘data points’’ to be integrated into a co-management plan). In this sense, we understand Yukon First Nations ongoing assertion of the need to ‘‘respect water’’ as a refusal of the concept of Modern Water itself, including the many associated ideas about water such as water as property and the governance arrangements that enact such assumptions. It is not enough to simply discuss the limitations of the current system or show the many ways that Yukon First Nations continue to resist imposed modes of governance. Rather, water governance arrangements in Yukon and Indigenous–state relations more broadly require a fundamental shift towards nested sovereignty. Political ecologists have called for the development of water governance systems characterized by legal pluralism to counteract the ways that colonial laws and institutions destabilize and distort Indigenous management institutions (see Bassi, 2010; Boelens et al., 2007; Boelens and Vos, 2014; D’Andrea, 2012; Gupta et al., 2014; Zwarteveen et al., 2005). Our analysis builds on this literature to highlight a commitment to ontological pluralism that actively acknowledges and supports governance practices that differ from those engaged by settler colonialism (Collard et al., 2015: 328). Elsewhere, Wilson (2014) calls this hydrosocial multiplicity to acknowledge the need to reaffirm Indigenous laws, customs, epistemologies, and ontologies about water. Building on Indigenous traditions, this requires decentering human agency and recentering the agency of more-than-human persons (Todd, 2014) to develop alternative modes of governance to overcome current imbalances in the ontological politics of water. To counter the negative impacts of historical and ongoing colonialism, pluralistic approaches must go beyond the invocation of respect or deference on the part of settler bureaucrats (see Simpson, 2004) to acknowledge Indigenous authority to decide based on their own traditions and legal orders. It also means rethinking the very agency of all beings and thinking of water as a living entity deserving of many things. This involves thinking of water as kin with its histories enlivened in the landscapes it carves and the people it holds, past and future. Any such ontological pluralism also necessarily requires a fundamental rethinking of governance including the values, decision-making processes, and institutions that are involved in such as system. Modern Water is rooted in scientific rationalism, which is an ontologically monistic perspective or one where there is a singular knowable material world or truth out there. Moreover, if a metaphysical dimension exists, that existence is framed as an inert material space onto which people project their values and beliefs. The alternative requires a dynamic struggle- only voting neg resolves the impactsYazzie and Baldy 18 Melanie K. Yazzie is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at UNM. She was recently the Katrin H. Lamon Residential Scholar at the School for Advanced Research.Cutcha Risling Baldy?is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University.?She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis. “Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol 7., No 1, 2018, pp. 1-18” Accessed 7/13/21What we propose here is thus not a project of self-reflexivity that occurs at the site of individual consciousness raising or healing. Rather, it is a project of inter-reflexivity, a struggle for decolonization premised on the accountabilities we form in lively relation to each other. The act of (re)making our accountability in relationship to water and (re)claiming our relational theories of water culture remind us that we are water based, that we have water memory. As Cutcha notes, in Hoopa, we define ourselves in relationship to water; but more than that, Hoopa understand our place in the world based on how water views the world, or even how water views us. Our directions are views from the river that runs through our valley. “Worldview” is “water view,” a view from the river not a view of the river. We move upriver,1 or downriver,2 to the river, or from the river.3 So our theoretical standpoint is one that foregrounds water view, (re)claiming knowledges not just for the people, but also for the water; not just looking at our relationship to water, but our accountability to water view. Decolonization, however, is not only a vocation of mind over matter, a therapeutic salve for history that will materialize into emancipation for all if we could just liberate our minds through a return to culture. Smith shows us that decolonization is a dynamic struggle that is worked out and contested between a cacophony of living beings, structures, forces, and dreams. In other words, decolonization is a thoroughly historical and material struggle. The reclaiming of our accountability to water view has been the hallmark of struggles for decolonization (including research and direct action) in recent years. Our resurgent commitment to water view has reinvigorated our human liveliness and our decolonial conviction. This accountability to water view envisions and enacts an ethos of “living well,” which Harsha Walia (2013) points out defies “the capitalist and colonial system’s logic of competition, commodification, and domination” (p. 255). Living well requires “interdependency and respect among all living things” (Ibid). We call this ethos of living well radical relationality, which is radical in the sense of roots or origins, as in a relationality from which all life and history derives meaning and shape (like water view), and also in the sense of a dramatic and revolutionary change from our current epoch of power, as in a radical shift towards decolonization (Yazzie, 2017). We conceive of radical relationality as a term that brings together the multiple strands of materiality, kinship, corporeality, affect, land/body connection, and multidimensional connectivity coming primarily from Indigenous feminists (Danforth, 2015; Dhillon, 2016; Goeman, 2016; TallBear, 2017). It provides a vision of relationality and collective political organization that is deeply intersectional and premised on values of interdependency, reciprocity, equality, and responsibility. ATFWWater debates should center ontological questions first – must challenge water as resource prior to asking how we protectKoban 21 - John Koban (2020) Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States “Ecological Restoration or Healing?: Conflicting Ontologies and Missed Opportunities in Public Debates Surrounding Mississippi River Gorge Restoration, Environmental Communication” DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2019.1696854//rmThis article describes an instance of public debate about the proposed dam and lock removals along the Upper Mississippi River Gorge in Minnesota, showing ways that environmental controversy plays out in settler colonial and Indigenous publics, attending to who and what gets heard and valued in public debate about potential river restoration. Importantly, this essay attends to ontological incommensurability that may exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous publics in public debates about the environment. I ultimately argue that in settler colonial contexts, Indigenous ontologies - storied realities and experiences that are emergent in practice - in relation with the river cannot be heard by settler colonial publics because they fundamentally challenge settlers’ ontological claims to land and water as resource for their exclusive use. Such claims are rooted in colonial violence that contribute to destruction of ecosystems. This essay shows, however, that Indigenous individuals and communities continue to create unique realities with story and visual art to exert presence in the face of settler attempts of erasure, and it shows how better understanding of political ontologies allows for more thorough and ethical engagement when controversies about land and water arise in public debate.This essay has extended thinking in environmental communication by reflecting on the ways that conflicting ontologies play out (or not) in public controversies about ecological restoration/healing projects. Some ontological relationships with the river, particularly ones grounded in settler-colonial orientations, experience the water as a resource to be managed by humans with liberal democratic modes of governance (e.g. public comment sessions). Public comment sessions are not problematic per se, but they can work in opposition to Indigenous ontologies that may experience water as a relative, as a spiritual life-giving force (i.e. would it be proper or make sense to have a public comment session about a relative?). For example, public comment sessions about river restoration might reject a broader range of relations with the river that can be revealed with story and visual arts. These extended ranges of relations with the river include the work that collectives like Healing Place enact. Here I am not arguing that public comment work ought to end, but I am suggesting that it ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 593 cannot be the sole mode of public engagement if we are trying to work counter to settler-colonial systems of environmental governance. Even if a public comment session is fully inclusive of Indigenous voices, if it is the only outlet for environmental decision-making processes, a singular ontological orientation toward knowledge and the natural world is being enacted.In public debates about Mississippi river healing, Indigenous residents have been publicly showing their long connections with and of knowledge the river with art and community engagement. Because of settler colonial structures guiding “scientifically” grounded natural resources management and urban development, however, their voices have been silenced, ignored, or framed as merely cultural/historical.2 The public disconnect in this case dramatizes Iris Marion Young’s concept, “cultural imperialism,” which “consists in a group’s being invisible at the same time that it is marked out and stereotyped,” while the dominant group “project their own values, experience, and perspective as normative and universal” (Young, 1990, p. 123). As Young explains, “Much of the oppressive experience of cultural imperialism occurs in mundane contexts of interaction,” and with this case – public comment and debate about the potential for Mississippi River restoration. Public comment can certainly be a valuable forum for debate about environmental issues if it is done in truly democratic ways that meaningfully engage local stakeholders (Brulle, f9 is particularly crucial because they can be forums that constitute an engaged citizenry around environmental concerns (Turnhout, Van Bommel, & Aarts, 2010), and in this case, the citizenry being constituted appears to be a settler colonial one. This article extends the above work concerned with public controversy and debate about environmental concerns, and it also questions the legitimacy of the role of public comment in the first place, especially when public comment implicates Indigenous interests. I make this suggestion because (1) public comment may not be a forum that is inclusive of some Indigenous modes of environmental governance and decision-making process (though it certainly can be); (2) the physical locations of public debate may not be geographically accessible to or welcoming of Indigenous people; and (3) public debate in settler states tend to take a singular ontological understanding of the natural world for granted in a political reality with asymmetrical power imbalances. Given power imbalances, cultural imperialism, and ontological incommensurability, how can public debate about 584 J. KOBAN environmental restoration become a productive mode of engagement that unsettles settler-colonial modes of environmental engagement?The purpose of this essay, then, is to describe how controversy about potential Mississippi River restoration has played out in settler publics and in Indigenous publics, paying attention to who and what gets heard and valued in public debate about potential river restoration, also paying attention to incommensurability that can arise between Indigenous and non-Indigenous publics. Attending to sites of incommensurability are important because they are opportunities for knowledge and management collaboration across difference (Whyte, 2013), but in this case, those opportunities for collaboration have been rejected from the start. I ultimately argue that in this settler colonial context, Indigenous ontologies – storied realities and experiences that are emergent in practice – in relation with the river cannot be heard by settler publics because they fundamentally challenge settlers’ exclusivist claims to land and water as resource; such claims are rooted in colonial violence, and they result in the destruction of ecosystems. This is not to suggest that non-Indigenous publics are uninterested in Indigenous concerns with ecological issues, for some of them likely are concerned, but by and large, in public debate about ecological restoration, especially in this case, Indigenous concerns are not being adequately addressed, and even if they were, the modes and places of conversation are not inviting of Indigenous speakers. In this case, the method of a public comment session advances a singular mode of debate and conversation that excludes Indigenous knowledge and modes of engagement from the outset. Moreover, this settler non-hearing of Indigenous arguments misses valuable opportunities to address ecosystem restoration concerns across differences in generative and respectful ways (McGreavy, Silka, & Lindenfeld, 2014). Such opportunities may yet be fraught, but they might be enacted if modes of public engagement are radically rethought to account for difference across ontologies, and this includes radically rethinking and designing appropriate and respectful modes of community engagement; this will include a move away from the exclusive use of public comment forums led by state technocrats and scientists in exclusionary locations.Avow Complicity 1stMutimer 18 [David; 2018; Professor and Chair of Department Political Science @ York U; Chris Hendershot; Office of the Dean @ York U; “Critical Security Studies,” The Oxford Handbook of International Security, Kindle Edition]Despite avowed commitments to critique concepts and practices that sustain militarized, carbon dependent, or zero-sum security relations, critical security scholars must also imagine the possibility that criticality can still affect domination and exploitation. That is to say, CSS needs to more thoughtfully consider its ongoing complicity with the settler-colonial and imperial ordering of global relations. As two scholars who live and work on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and most recently, the territory of the Mississauga of the Credit River (CAUT 2016) and are thus sustained through the occupation of this territory, we must immediately confront our complicity in settler-colonialism. Or to paraphrase Sundberg (2014: 35), as citizens of a settler-colonial state, we “have a profound obligation and responsibility to confront the widespread implications of colonialism in [our] scholarship and to ask what [security] thought has to become to face the political, philosophical, and ethical challenges of decolonizing.” Without a vigorous un-settling, CSS will be incapable of working for and with “Indigenous sovereignty in its material, psychological, epistemological, and spiritual forms” (Sium et al. 2012: v). What must be more readily confronted is that criticality does not obviate complicity with colonialism, imperialism, and racialized domination. Expansive referents, nonpositivistic metatheories, and openness to difference can certainly create the intellectual space to read and cite the work of Patrick Wolfe (2006) or Glen Coulthard (2014) or Sarah Hunt (2014). Or to consider how the Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and/or Native Hawaiians are affected by and affect security politics. Critical scholars who focus on the security politics of the Arctic are already including Indigenous concerns and knowledge in their analysis. Using securitization theory, Greaves (2016) engages with Inuit and Sámi discourses “in order to explain variation in different understandings of (in)security” among Indigenous Peoples as well as recognizing how colonial agendas constrain the capacities of Indigenous Peoples “to advance a conception of (in)security that is distinct from those of settler governments” (2016: 462-3). Harrington and Lecavalier (2014) work through an emancipatory approach in order to understand how Inuit discourse, particularly that which is articulated by and through the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and traditional knowledge “offers an important emancipatory alternative to traditional practices of environmental security” (2014: 114). Yet, inclusion and recognition of Indigenous Peoples and knowledge does not necessarily un-settle the academy (Ahenakew 2016). Greater inclusion need not contest the fact that the academic study of security, whether it be traditional or critical, is not possible without (settler) colonialism/imperialism. Ontologically, the world of nation states, citizens, consumers, the environment, water, and food cannot exist as referents of security because they do not exist as such without colonial rearrangements of economics, geographies, and politics (see Byrd 2011; Samson and Gigoux 2017). Epistemologically, notions of threat and danger are entwined with colonial determinations of the civilized, productive, and/or human (see Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013). Methodologically, the Anglo-European “modernization” of academic knowledge production does not occur without the discovery, classification, and collection of “native” people, flora, and fauna (Tuhiwai Smith 2012). Politically, the educational authority of Anglo-European universities rests, in many instances literally, on the coercive disposition of land, suppression of language, and spiritual and creative practice, as well as the ignorance of traditional knowledge (see Todd 2016). Only through honestly confronting this (ongoing) complicity with colonialism can critical security scholarship sincerely consider, support, and enact decolonial possibilities.AT: PermInclusion is a discovery narrativeDhillon 18’ –is an author and associate professor of Global Studies at The New School. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her work centers around social and political movements aimed at indigenous justice and decolonization. [Jaskiran; Published 2018; “Indigenous Resurgence, Decolonization, and Movements for Environmental Justice”; Environment and Society: Advances in Research; ]Within the mainstream environmental justice movement, the knowledge and social practices of Indigenous communities have sparked considerable attention. Indeed, in the wake of a planetwide movement riddled with idioms about “saving our home,” there has been a tidal wave of interest in Indigenous knowledge(s) about the land, water, and sky—a desire to “capture and store” the intergenerational wisdom that speaks to the unpredictable path lying ahead. Littered throughout academic writing, climate justice protests, and climate science reports is a host of references to the importance of harnessing Indigenous knowledge systems in the service of global sustainability. As a case in point, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary report for 2014 asserts: “Indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change, but these have not been used consistently in existing adaptation efforts. Integrating such forms of knowledge with existing practices increases the effectiveness of adaptation” (IPCC 2014: 26, emphasis added). More recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former US President Barack Obama issued a joint statement on climate, energy, and Arctic leadership that makes an explicit reference to Indigenous science and traditional knowledge by stating that “Canada and the US are committed to collaborating with Indigenous and Arctic governments, leaders, and communities to more broadly and respect- fully include Indigenous science and traditional knowledge into decision making, including environmental assessments, resource management, and advancing our understanding of cli- mate change and how best to manage its effect” (PMO 2016, emphasis added). Particularly note- worthy within both these frames is the vernacular of integration and inclusion that underlies the broader impetus for seeking Indigenous knowledge.While at first glance these inclusionary politics could be considered a move in the right direction—the “integration” of Indigenous knowledge as something to be used in the interests of global recovery from environmental crisis—it merits a deeper and more nuanced reading. Pushing us to consider the problematics associated with state-driven “discovery” of Indigenous knowledge, Deborah McGregor highlights the way in which Indigenous knowledge of the environment is derived through a living process that stems from Indigenous relationships to “Creation.” It is produced through a body of ancient thought, experience, and action—generated by the things that one does rather than something that one simply knows. She argues: “The “natural world,” “environment,” or “Creation” are essential parts of Indigenous knowl- edge. Indigenous knowledge is not just “knowledge” per se. It is the lives lived by people and their particular relationship with Creation” (2004: 390). From McGregor’s perspective, Indig- enous knowledge is not a noun; it is not a commodity or product that can be drawn upon as a last-ditch effort to be integrated into a battalion of adaptive solutions to save us all. To acquire this knowledge means entirely shifting our current patterns of living in the every day: it is cumulative and dynamic, adaptive and ancestral, and it is produced in a collective process that is fundamentally centered on the way one relates. Mishuana Goeman furthers this point when she speaks of the complexity, history, and political vitality in a storied land—a land that literally and figuratively acts as a placeholder that moves through time and situates Indigenous knowledges. “Indigenous scholars,” Goeman writes, “must continue to think of space or the function of land as more than a site upon which humans make history or as a location that accumulates history” (2008: 24).We might ask, then, whose interests are being served by attempts to extract and distill bits and pieces of Indigenous knowledge to work in the service of climate recovery? What is lost in this process of “integration” when it is not occurring in conjunction with moves toward decolonization that center the question of colonization and its impacts, when there is no clear intention to understand how the colonial spatial restructuring of the land has affected Indigenous relationships to land? Despite the fixation on Indigenous knowledge systems, it seems, limited attempts have been made to theorize how conquest and persistent settler colonial violence necessarily factor into debates over the climate crisis and environmental injustice more generally—this, despite the creation of territories of material and psychic abandonment largely fueled by white settlers and “settlement.” Critical questions need to be asked: How are Indigenous political demands for decolonization taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia? How might “environmental justice” work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests? In a similar vein, Zoe Todd (2016) asks: “What does it mean to have a reciprocal discourse on catastrophic end times and apoca- lyptic environmental change in a place where, over the last 500 years, Indigenous peoples faced (and face) the end of the worlds with the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions? What does it mean to hold, in simultaneous tension, stories of the Anthropocene in the past, present, and future?”To address these lines of inquiry, this volume of Environment and Society aims to set forth a theoretical and discursive interruption of the dominant, mainstream environmental justice movement by reframing issues of climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens. Specifically, the writers for this volume are invested in positioning environ- mental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts and larger structures of power that foreground the relationships among settler colonialism, nature, and planetary devastation. The nine critical appraisals presented here also move across a range of sociopo- litical spaces and realities (ranging from site-specific resistance efforts to broader theoretical discussions) and thus carry significant import when translated to an anticolonial deconstruc- tion of the underlying politics and ideologies inherent to the dominant environmental justice movement as a whole. By offering this range of perspectives, this volume reaches to: (1) illumi- nate how mainstream environmental justice politics are inherently preoccupied with the main- tenance of settler state sovereignty and settler futurity; (2) showcase how Indigenous struggles to protect and defend the land, water, and air are embedded within Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies that fundamentally challenge settler domination over nature and are inextrica- bly linked to advancing decolonization; and (3) raise important questions about solidarity and politicized allyship with Indigenous communities as they engage in resistance efforts to protect their homelands and assert political claims for self-determination.Decolonizing water requires an abandonment of frameworks of possessionCraft 18, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Common law, University of Ottawa and an Adjunct Professor in Law at the University of Manitoba, Indigenous Lawyer (Aimee, “Decolonizing Water: A Conversation with Aimée Craft,” CIGI Online, )//BBCG: My next question is around the Decolonizing Water Project, how would you propose that we live collectively and live a good life in relation to water? AC: The first and easiest answer to that is that we have to understand that we are in relationship with water, that water has a spirit and that it has life. It is life-giving. But it also has its own life-giving and spirit. It has its own agency and therefore we need to recognize that in taking up this responsibility, it’s not one of control or ownership, or jurisdiction over water, but rather a relationship to and with water. That is a truly decolonizing understanding of the relationship that we have with water; that it has its own agency and decision making. A prime example of that is in thinking about the duality of water; it is a source of life but also able to take life. In thinking of decolonizing water, we have had such a perverted relationship with water in modern times, we’re looking at water as something we can control, own and consume — that is what we need to set aside if we are truly going to have decolonizing relationships relating to water. One other piece is abandoning the ideas and frameworks around possession — we must rethink how we make our decisions as humans that effect water. Jurisdictions that we create as humans are also not responsive to the jurisdictions that water has created itself. For example, in a watershed, the water has told us indirectly in how it wants to be in relationship with us.AT: 3rd Space of SovAttempting to be recognized by the government papers over historical Indigenous dispossession.Simpson 17 (Simpson, Audra, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA. "The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia."?Postcolonial Studies?20.1 (2017): 18-33.; AKIM)In this article, I consider what I frame as a ‘not easy answer’ to the problem of political will and politics in settler colonial societies. These are societies defined by the coloniality of their past and their presents, and thus are societies beset by ongoing inequalities and structural violence that demand justice. Yet, the problem of justice imagines ‘recognition’ to be the philosophical and institutional remedy to matters of ‘historical injustice’ – to matters of dispossession, violence, and as the Introduction to this set of articles indicates, matters of inequality and thus of power. In this piece, I offer a deepening of earlier arguments I have made about recognition, about its presumed infallibility and centrality to matters of justice. ‘Refusal’ rather than recognition is an option for producing and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical relationship to states. In this piece, I use ethnographic examples to deepen this earlier argument about the generative alternative that refusal may play not only as a political practice but also as a mode of analysis.The implicit backdrop for this argument is the aforementioned political present, and the particularity of electoralism in settler states. Electoralism, predicated on the notion of political will communicated through a vote, seems upended in this moment. ‘We did not vote for him’ some would say, in a popular sense. My focus, however, is not on the failures of an electoral college system or perhaps errors in polling methodology, but the deeper issue that is obfuscated by the apparent agreed-upon nature of voting-asconsent or as expression of political will. If indigeneity is taken to be a social and political fact, all other arguments based on right to land are rendered spurious. This process of making land one’s own, against Indigenous political orders – what Manu Vimalassery has recently called ‘the counter-sovereignty’ of settler projects, which orient against Indigenous sovereignty – animates this argument as well.1 Energised by this approach to the legal history of United States settler laws of dispossession, however, I argue above all against the practice of reduction, both in our analysis and in our political imaginations, to ‘recognition’. ‘Recognition’ is seen as the sine qua non if not the end point, the orgasm of justice today.2 This overstatement of its possibility is in part because complex politics have been rendered in reduced forms that imagine ‘flat (dehistoricized) pluralism’. 3By ‘recognition’, I mean the political practice, rooted in philosophical formula of seeing, unencumbered, what and who is before you – seeing as one ought to be seen, in a way that is consistent with one’s sense of self and property. What this translates into in legal contexts, for questions of justice, is the affirmation of one’s (inherent) rights by the state. But these are states, in colonial contexts, that were born only through the devices of lethal force and dispossession and, in the case of the United States, economic and political enslavement of particular populations.4 These broad but particular and differently experienced racial histories bear upon the present in significant ways. In this piece, I focus on the particular way in which law in colonial contexts enforced Indigenous dispossession and then, granted freedom through the legal tricks of consent and citizenship. For Native people, this ruse of consent marks the inherent impossibility of that freedom after dispossession, a freedom I argue is actually theft.5 This because of the trickery of ‘consent’ in colonial contexts, which papers over the very conditions of force and violence that beget ‘consent’. Treaty-making is one such case that I will discuss. The long view of history, that in settler colonial contexts is actually always short, invokes a fundamental hegemony of interpretation such as viewing the ‘signing’ of agreements as full and robust consent, and consent as justice. In such political configurations, there are no further matters to be discussed. Time starts anew; the matter is done. We know with the analytic of settler colonialism that matters are not done, that oppressive structures survive agreements. Yet, in spite of the problematic historical, philosophical and legal basis of settler societies, ‘recognition’ appears to be the only political game in town, and with that comes the presumed unassailability of electoral politics as a device for not only representation, no matter how mediated and concessionary it may be, but also the recognition of rights and the exercising of rights.Rather than recognition and its ruse of consent, I have proposed elsewhere a political alternative of refusal.6 This article moves with recourse to ethnographic and legal cases to a deeper exposition of that alternative, one that also articulates to the present. In order to get at the architecture of this argument, I will consider the way in which I came to the concept of refusal in order to work through both the material of ‘the field’, and the field of analytic possibilities that availed themselves to the study as I started to write it up.Contractual relationships are a settle guise to set up the conditions for war and land grabs – the impact is endless suffering and dispossession. Simpson 17 (Simpson, Audra, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA. "The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia."?Postcolonial Studies?20.1 (2017): 18-33.; AKIM)Would you consent to have your land taken? Are the treaties I described earlier a model for thinking through just relations on stolen land? The trick of law in settler spaces is to pretend that this in fact was not a theft that all parties consented to this fully and that appropriation of land was in fact just. And thus, matters are settled. Recent work by Heidi Stark unmasks the conceit of this as fact with recourse to events in what is now American and Indigenous history.45 Stark’s thesis is the following: the nascent U.S. and Canada constructed Indigenous people (mostly men) as criminal in order to mask their own criminality. They did so by actually converting treaties from Indigenous understandings of forms of relationship (often called ‘renewal’) to contracts and land cessions. By interpreting these agreements as contracts, they set up conditions for outright war through the sanctioning of constant incursions upon Indigenous land. These incursions ‘rendered unlawful the moment they violated the treaties that authorized their presence across Indigenous lands’. 46 She then offers in painstaking detail accounts of the hangings and the incarcerations of predominantly indigenous men as they resisted these wrongful interpretations of treaty: everywhere from Modoc country, to Tsilhqot’in in what is now British Columbia, to Dakota territory in what is now Minnesota. Native male bodies were hanged, were shot, were incarcerated for the purposes of a land grab, but this land grab was also achieved in part by the interpretive move by the state: the move from the model of relationship to contract, with the subsequent move to inevitable contravention and the production of criminality. Stark then argues, this was the making and the masking of a ‘criminal empire’. 47. This ‘criminal empire’ was driven by a desire for land and resources, achieved through the force of violence and executed and sealed through contractual thinking and law – a law that masked settler state criminality while producing Indians as criminals.I articulate Stark’s account and analysis to Rosas’s ethnography and also to Danaiyairi’s interviews because they all point to the press of states and law as they do their work of ‘governing’ and fail, at points, to achieve ‘perfect settler sovereignty’, ‘neoliberal sovereignty’ or what some might perceive as simply ‘governance’. The practices and techniques of institutional ‘recognition’, of bringing peoples presumed alterity into the ambit of the state through the devices of treaty, of contract, later of citizenship itself, the mechanisms of rights appear to offer fairness, protection a form of justice. All of these techniques also require concession to the authority of foreign and dispossessing political will but also serve to diminish the authority and sovereignty (even when recognised, ever so slightly), of robust Indigenous political orders. These varying accounts have demonstrated state’s effort to enclose life for land and sometimes their failure at this, but also in broad strokes, a kind of cunning practice of recognition and governance.48 In this, I mean a calculating effort to (in Lisa Ford’s terms) perform territorial rationality, jurisdiction and governance by any legal and discursive means necessary,49 but also to (in my terms) steal while making those who you steal from, the criminal. This is the ruse of consent, they did not consent to this fully, they know this, it is the liberal move again and again to pretend as if this ruse of consent signals freedom and the free will to consent to this. It is a ruse laid bare in these electoral moments in the U.S.A, when people are starting to point to where they think ‘the facts’ lie – where the origin stories are, and what the sturdiness of those stories is – all motivated by the specious grasp on both ethics and truthtelling by the current regime. These double moves are the conditions as well, for and of refusal.The ethnographic and historical cases here point to the multiple ways in which contractual thinking and dispossession have produced historical consciousness in indigenous people that pushes against the contained, diagnostic language of politics (or perhaps political science itself) and rendered refusal an expression of this consciousness. Refusal is a symptom, a practice, a possibility for doing things differently, for thinking beyond the recognition paradigm that is the agreed-upon ‘antidote’ for rendering justice in deeply unequal scenes of articulation. A master and a slave are unequal. One owns the other. Seeking oneself in the gaze of another can be a fallacy of endless suffering if not in and of itself an impossibility. Will they see me as I ought to be seen? Turning away, as Coulthard has argued, and as I have argued and demonstrated in Mohawk Interruptus, is a technique, is a possibility.50 Every possibility is not in the gaze or the minds of the master, nor is the hope of mutuality (underwritten by a hope for sincerity) something that all seek. History is also littered with those painful, disappointing, mobilising stories of so many failed attempts at justice, and also at times, refusal. Why keep trying? One might wonder. This practice of refusal, one of various sorts, revenges the conceit of easy politics, of the very notion that Indigenous peoples had all things been equal would have consented to have things taken, things stolen from them. I have charted this out in this brief thesis on refusal. Rosas’ interlocutors smash these categorical imperatives, what I call the ‘easy answers’. The people I work with refuse the eliminatory efforts of the state. They operate as nationals in a scene of wardship and dispossession. They are different from Rosas’ interlocutors, but they operate from a similar and flagrantly selfassured position, utterly escaping the answer that is easy to record or to analyse. My ethnographic and analytical prerogative is to make the practice of ethnography itself a refusal in time with theirs.AT: Noble SavageSaying tribes have distinct eco-relations from settlers is a fact, not a noble savage stereotype – but charges of romanticism are derailing.Grande 99, (Sandy Marie Anglas Grande, Program In Education And Human Development, Colby College, fall 1999, Environmental Ethics 21, “Beyond the Ecologically Noble Savage: Deconstructing the White man’s Indian,” p. 315)The “we are all the same” argument, most prevalent in the early 1970s, contends that had American Indians “developed” to the same degree of technical proficiency (as white culture), they too would have ventured down the inevitable path of modernization and overconsumption. In “Primitive Man’s Relationship to Culture,” Guthrie argues that “man’s attitude toward the environment has not changed in the millennia since his evolution from lower animals. Only his population size and sophistication of his technology are different.”24 To argue that the overconsumption of modern culture is, in essence, the same25 as “primitive man’s” categorically denies the vastness of the “pre-Columbian” population as well as the power of their cultures to shape attitudes and fetter behaviors. It is, in a sense, a deterministic argument that rejects the influence of culture, if not deny it altogether. In addition, the assertion that we as humans are all the same provides a convenient rationalization for the mass destruction exacted by modern culture, absolving the perpetrators of any responsibility and/or obligation towards its reparation. After all, we “modern humans” are simply enacting the destiny of the race, it isn’t our fault that we have simply arrived at this moment first. The argument also ignores the fact that many so-called “primitive peoples” continue to persist in maintaining traditional ways, even in the face of incessant encroachment and onslaught of available technologies. In short, it denies that Indians are not only historical but contemporary peoples. Native American communities continue to demonstrate their rejection of certain modern trappings and commitments to forging unique approaches to modern life, ones that work to retain traditional culture and spiritual foundations. The drive to “prove” that we are all the same, that we have all been equally virulent in our attitudes toward and treatment of the natural world, begins to look suspiciously like an opportune justification or, in Freudian terms, a mass projection to relieve the anxiety of knowing that the excesses of the modern world have exacted unprecedented destruction of the planet and its Indigenous inhabitants. If nothing else, it is a thinly veiled attempt at rationalizing the genocidal and ecocidal practices that characterize Indian-white relations in the Americas. AT: Too SlowAppeals to quick action go neg Gallegos 15 [Lori, instructor in the Department of Philosophy @ Stony Brook University, Ph.D. in philosophy @ Stony Brook, graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, B.A. in philosophy and foreign languages @ University of New Mexico, May 2015, “Sketch of a Decolonial Environmentalism: Challenging the Colonial Conception of Nature through the Biocultural Perspective,” Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, Vol 6:1, pg. 44]A final concern I would like to address here involves the feasibility of putting decolonial environmentalism into action. One might defend the global warming and sustainability focuses, worrying that a decolonial environmentalism recommends changes — such as a conceptual and ethical reorientation to the en-vironment — that are too complex or would take too long. One might argue that the fact of the matter is that environmental devastation is a serious problem right now, and we cannot wait for a new environmental philosophy to sink in or a deeper relationship with environment to develop. To this I would answer that as a supplement to global warming and sustainability focuses, the biocultural perspective’s concern with the local — regional peoples, languages, values, flora and fauna — is in numerous ways more immediate and would hence be more effective for motivating action than the planetary doomsday perspective taken by the alternate approaches. First, a focus on the biocultural diversity of one’s own region is geographically more immediate. This means that local legislation and one’s own activities can have a direct influence on environmental outcomes. Second, with the biocultural perspective, environmental concerns have more emotional immediacy because one has the sense that his or her own habitat is at stake and because the issues are more concrete. As opposed to focusing primarily on far-away ice sheets and glaciers or just on future generations, one can focus on a specifiable group of people that will be concretely affected by particular decisions. For this reason, local movements, such as those of the Mapuche Indians, the Pueblo Indians, or impoverished workers fighting for land are tangibly more energized and focused than global environmental movements, which can feel abstract and overwhelming, and where advocates can feel powerless to effect change.AT: SharmaSharma = v wrong Dhamoon 15 (Rita Kaur Dhamoon is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Victoria, Lekwungen and WS?NE? territories. Her research interests are gender and feminist politics, critical race theory, and anti-colonial politics. A FEMINIST APPROACH TO DECOLONIZING ANTI-RACISM: RETHINKING TRANSNATIONALISM, INTERSECTIONALITY, AND SETTLER COLONIALISM. Feral Feminisms Issue 4, Summer 2015. DOA 5-9-18. ) Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright (2008-9) agree with Lawrence and Dua on the importance of attending to the specificities of oppression faced by non-whites, the failure of a civil-rights and multicultural approach, and the need to produce liberatory strategies of critique that do not reproduce the ruling strategies of colonial modernity and state formations. Though their analysis emphasizes a critique of racial and neoliberal hegemonies, I focus on their work because it effectively denies the constitutive feature of settler colonialism, namely the relevance of Indigenous dispossession. Sharma and Wright (2008-9) refuse the idea that all migrants are settler colonists and also critique the goal of Indigenous (and nation-state) nationalism because, as they argue, nationalisms reproduce colonial logics and are linked to “neoliberal practices that have further globalized capitalist social relations and to the related neo-racist practices” (2008-9, 123). For Sharma and Wright, inequities between variously forced, less-than-voluntary, or even fully voluntary migrants and/or their descendants should not position people of colour as settler colonists; to position migrants of colour as settler colonists is to conflate migration and colonial processes. As such, they critique Lawrence and Dua’s position because it requires that “the only way not to be a ‘colonizer’ is to remain on the land with which one is associated […] [even though] ironically, migration is often one response of people who have been colonized and dispossessed of their prior livelihoods” (Sharma and Wright 2008-9, 123). Sharma and Wright rightly punctuate that different migration processes and contexts should not be conflated (Lawrence and Dua also note this), and that migrants have various forced and voluntary trajectories of movement across geopolitical and cultural borders. However, Sharma and Wright then use this variation to dismiss the significance of settler colonialism, specifically because they do not account for the ways in which the ability to settle in a new place may be premised on structures of continuing colonialism premised on Indigenous dispossession. Ultimately, they conclude that the naturalization of Indigenous connection to the land fosters neoliberal and neo-racist modes of belonging through autochthony (i.e., the state of being native to a particular area) and is contrary to challenging ruling practices and relations. While there are a number of possible critiques of the arguments advanced by Sharma and Wright, I focus here on their conceptions of power, settler colonialism, and nation. Rather than reading Lawrence and Dua’s call as one of accountability within the margins, Sharma and Wright adopt an Oppression Olympics framework, whereby groups are positioned as if they are competing for the mantle of the most oppressed, without disrupting hegemonies of power. Put differently, Sharma and Wright must erase the colonizing processes and effects of Indigenous difference in order for migrants of colour to hold the mantle of the most oppressed. In doing so, they fail to attend to the relational and relative degrees of differentiation among and between migrants of colour and Indigenous peoples that are produced in the service of the settler nation. Sharma and Wright also repeatedly suggest that Indigenous peoples are obstacles to migrant freedoms (Saranillo 2013), and wrongly imply that Indigenous liberation is intrinsically about expelling non-Indigenous peoples. They imply that Lawrence and Dua have created this binary, but they repeatedly deny and depoliticize the differences between Indigenous peoples and other non-whites; for example, they assume the differences between Natives and non-Natives are a “dualistic hierarchy established by neo-racist thought” (Sharma and Wright 2008-9, 6) and they deny historical Indigenous continuity of title because such claims too are deemed to be neo-racist. In other words, for migrants of colour to be assigned their due attention in liberation struggles, Sharma and Wright need Indigenous peoples to disappear, which is an inherently conservative and imperialistic logic. As Heidi Stark (2014) notes, Sharma and Wright fail to recognize that one “ruling strategy” is to naturalize the erasure of Indigenous dispossession; moreover, the liberation goals advanced by Sharma and Wright are presupposed by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and cultures. Further, Sharma and Wright wrongly assume that settler colonialism is defined as “the forced movements of enslaved Africans, the movement of unfree indentured Asians, or the subsequent Third World displacements and migrations of people from across the globe, many of them indigenous people themselves” (2008-9, 121). Rather, settler colonialism can operate without the forced movements and displacements of migrants of colour as its constitutive features are the attempted/actual eradication of Indigenous peoples, unhindered access to land, and the naturalization of colonial state-based sovereignty as legitimate. The problem for liberation struggles is thus not so much about whether migrants are settler colonists, but rather how migrations and the movement of non-whites are enabled and regulated by a global system of nation-states and corporations in the service of settler colonial projects and vice versa. Accordingly, anti-racist work should be directed against hegemonies of migration and Indigenous dispossession as interconnected manifestations of white-supremacist capitalism, of which some hegemonies are based on societal and state-produced colonial hierarchies that privilege non-Indigenous peoples, including people of colour, at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Thus far, as Lawrence and Dua note, there has largely been an erasure or conflation between racisms and colonialisms even in some anti-racist circles, which ultimately overlooks, for example, the variations of racisms and colonialisms against Blacks, Muslims, Chinese peoples, and Indigenous peoples. Sharma and Wright also express concern about solidarities, but it seems to rest on a blatant conservative denial of uneven colonial processes of settler dominance. Finally, Sharma and Wright’s claim that all nationalisms are deemed antithetical to decolonization is deeply rooted in western colonizing ontologies. Critiques of nationalism are of course important—I agree with Third World feminists that some nationalisms can be exclusionary, neoliberal, and exploitative, especially of women. However, Sharma and Wright make two assumptions about nationalism that preclude its liberatory potential: first, that autochthony is “deeply embedded within the processes of capitalist globalization” (2008-9, 124), and second, that nationalism inevitability replicates nation-state formations of exploitation and regulation. These assumptions are themselves bound to western ontologies of nation, whether liberal or Marxist, in which it is assumed land is always a commodity whether privately owned or collectively/commonly shared, that man can/must master nature in/as the nation, and that decolonial conceptions of nation about sharing land are not available. These colonizing and indeed patriarchal ontological frames limit Sharma and Wright because they do not imagine social identities outside of “ongoing practices of ruling” (2008-9, 126); they deem sovereignty to be intrinsically about “planetary expansion and dominance of capitalist social relations” (2008-9, 128); and they start from the premise that those who seek nationalisms (including Indigenous peoples) “also share—or strive to share—the racist control of people’s mobility across and through spaces claimed by various ‘nations’” (2008-9, 128). Not only do Sharma and Wright conflate Indigenous nationalisms with Eurocentric modalities of nationalism, of which expulsion, exclusion, containment, and management of non-white subjects is a constitutive feature, they close off decolonial conceptions of nation and land and, in doing so, they depoliticize nationalism, contrary to their claim. In contrast, there are existing ontologies of nation that refuse hierarchies of power and still open decolonial modes of governance. For example, Glen Coulthard (2014) grounds his critique of colonial recognition in Indigenous conceptions of nationhood that centre land as an “ontological framework for understanding relationships” that are non-exploitative and based on material survival, constitutive meanings of identity, and relationships between humans and between humans and the environment (60). Decolonization for Coulthard is about considering “land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations,” not as a struggle for land (2014, 78). By ontologically closing off conceptions of nation that transcend the nation-state, Sharma and Wright do precisely what they critique by effectively depoliticizing forms of nationalism advanced by marginalized peoples. Moreover, they conflate immigration and colonialism because they dehistoricize nationalizing and transnational imperial processes (Saranillio 2013) while simultaneously depoliticizing linkages between practices of immigration and colonialism that advance modes of nation-building. Ultimately, while I take seriously their point that migrants variously arrive in circumscribed contexts (whether “freely” or involuntarily), contra Sharma and Wright, it is the differential impact of settlement on Indigenous peoples and on people of colour, and not just the intention of migrants of colour, that should matter to decolonizing and anti-racist feminist practices. The differential impact of settlement does not serve migrants of colour any more than it does Indigenous peoples (although for different reasons), for the effect is to consolidate colonial and racializing formations of the nation-state. As such, settler colonialism has to be confronted directly rather than downplayed.Aff AnswersFWPolicy research about water rights is good – analysis of problems, research, and debate can meaningfully improve water rights as part of a nonlinear process of struggle.Roth et al. ‘05 [Dik; Assistant Professor, Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University & Research; Rutgerd Boelens; Special Professor, Political Ecology of Water in Latin America, University of Amsterdam; Margreet Zwarteveen; Professor of Water Governance at IHE Delft; 2005; "Water Rights and Legal Pluralism: Beyond Analysis and Recognition"; Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity, Rutgers University Press; ; accessed 6-28-2021; SM]In our view, however, modesty about what can be achieved through policy and legal changes is not the same as defeatism or a laissez-faire attitude. Laws and policies can and do make a difference, and are important in codetermining control over water and respective positions of power, either strengthening or challenging the status quo. Though support processes cannot plan irrigation and water management development or the new constellation of powers in a mechanistic and linear sense, they can support local “political action for water control.” Identification of interest groups, analysis of problems, needs, and potential assets of least favored groups, interactive action research, facilitation of networks and horizontal linkages (alliance-building capacity), facilitation of negotiation forums accessible to the least powerful groups, preparing them (demand- and proposal-making capacity), and institutional backing in these platforms—all are important elements in such strategies of empowerment.In understanding and supporting such struggles for water control, it is important to realize that making both law and policy does not simply involve acts by higher-level decision makers, the “patriarchal rationalists who synthesize available information and make informed, objective decisions within the constraints imposed by an external unruly world” (Moench et al. ????: x). Water rights are dynamic and locally specific. Day-to-day water use and management practices are the result of ongoing processes of negotiation and bargaining between different actors, often with different powers and rights. The definition and enforcement of water rights, by implication, are not the exclusive domain of rational engineers and planners who have the right credentials in terms of expertise and authority for making “technical” choices. On the contrary, they are part of wider political, economic, and social processes in which different actors are involved. In Nepal, as Bhushan Udas and Zwarteveen have shown, water policies come about in meetings between donor agencies and government staff when they discuss the conditionalities of projects and loans. In Gujarat, well-to-do and high-caste farmer groups form an effective lobby against state government plans to better regulate and control groundwater extraction (chapter ?). In South Africa’s former Homelands, traditional authorities and chiefs continue to exercise control on water allocation practices, even though formal authorities now rest with municipalities (chapter ?). The different chapters also highlight the wide variety of actors whose individual or collective decisions influence water use patterns.Rather than looking at policies as texts and regulations that originate from the expert center to be implemented by the water-using population, it is more useful to look at the formulation and implementation of water laws and policies as complex processes of formal and less formal, legal and illegal, open and hidden interaction and negotiation between interest groups with different agendas and different abilities and means to voice their concerns (Long and van der Ploeg ????; Thomas and Grindle ????). Reforms, including those that deal with the recognition of a plurality of legal orders, cannot be understood or dealt with when assuming a hierarchic, “rationalist” planning model and institutional monism. It requires, instead, acknowledging and promoting the view of legal and institutional changes as more or less open, nonlinear, and ongoing processes of social dialogue, debate, negotiation, and struggle. Doing this raises its own questions and dilemmas concerning representation, voice, and other differences of power and culture that render mutual understanding and dialogue difficult. A process-focused and pluralist institutional approach brings with it a shift from understanding water realities only in the terms used by the experts and measured against their normative planning ideals to one that is expressed in the terms and frames of reference of those who experience them. It implies, in other words, the treatment and analysis of all people (and not just experts or those with formal powers) as knowledgeable and capable actors, allowing for serious consideration of their actions, skills, concerns, and perspectives.No Ontology“Incommensurability” frames makes indigenous liberation impossible by setting terms of victory as all-or-nothing – ontology reifies acquiescence to subtler settler powerBusbridge 18—Research Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University (Rachel, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,” Theory, Culture & Society Vol 35, Issue 1, 2018, dml)The prescription for decolonisation—that is, a normative project committed to the liberation of the colonised and the overturning of colonial relationships of power (Kohn & McBride, 2011: 3)—is indeed one of the most counterhegemonic implications of the settler colonial paradigm as applied to IsraelPalestine, potentially shifting it from a diagnostic frame to a prognostic one which offers a ‘proposed solution to the problem, or at least a plan of attack’ (Benford & Snow, 2000: 616). What, however, does the settler colonial paradigm offer by way of envisioning decolonisation? As Veracini (2007) notes, while settler colonial studies scholars have sought to address the lack of attention paid to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in conventional historiographical accounts of decolonisation (which have mostly focused on settler independence and the loosening of ties to the ‘motherland’), there is nevertheless a ‘narrative deficit’ when it comes to imagining settler decolonisation. While Veracini (2007) relates this deficit to a matter of conceptualisation, it is apparent that the structural perspective of the paradigm in many ways closes down possibilities of imagining the type of social and political transformation to which the notion of decolonisation aspires. In this regard, there is a worrying tendency (if not tautological discrepancy) in settler colonial studies, where the only solution to settler colonialism is decolonisation—which a faithful adherence to the paradigm renders largely unachievable, if not impossible. To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to return to Wolfe’s (2013a: 257) account of settler colonialism as guided by a ‘zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives’. The structuralism of this account has immense power as a means of mapping forms of injustice and indignity as well as strategies of resistance and refusal, and Wolfe is careful to show how transmutations of the logic of elimination are complex, variable, discontinuous and uneven. Yet, in seeking to elucidate the logic of elimination as the overarching historical force guiding settler-native relations there is an operational weakness in the theory, whereby such a logic is simply there, omnipresent and manifest even when (and perhaps especially when) it appears not to be; the settler colonial studies scholar need only read it into a situation or context. It thus hurtles from the past to the present into the future, never to be fully extinguished until the native is, or until history itself ends. There is thus a powerful ontological (if not metaphysical) dimension to Wolfe’s account, where there is such thing as a ‘settler will’ that inherently desires the elimination of the native and the distinction between the settler and native can only ever be categorical, founded as it is on the ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ (2013a: 258). It is here that the differences between earlier settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and the recent settler colonial turn come into clearest view. While Jamal Hilal’s (1976) Marxist account of the conflict, for instance, engaged Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in terms of their relations to the means of production, Wolfe’s account brings its own ontology: the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction becomes that of settler/native, and the class struggle the struggle between settler, who seeks to destroy and replace the native, and native, who can only ever push back. Indeed, if the settler colonial paradigm views history in similar teleological terms to the Marxist framework, it does not offer the same hopeful vision of a liberated future. After all, settler colonialism has only one story to tell—‘either total victory or total failure’ (Veracini, 2007). Veracini’s attempt to disaggregate different forms of settler decolonisation is revealing of the difficulties that come along with this zero-sum perspective. It is significant to note that beyond settler evacuation (which may decolonise territory, he cautions, but not necessarily relationships) the picture he paints is a relatively bleak one. For Veracini (2011: 5), claims for decolonisation from Indigenous peoples in settler societies can take two broad forms: an ‘anticolonial rhetoric expressing a demand for indigenous sovereign independence and self-determination… and an “ultra”-colonial one that seeks a reconstituted partnership with the [settler state] and advocates a return to a relatively more respectful middle ground and “treaty” conditions’. While both, he suggests, are tempting strategies in the struggle for change, though ‘ultimately ineffective against settler colonial structures of domination’ (2011: 5), it is the latter strategy that invites Veracini’s most scathing assessment. As he writes, under settler colonial conditions the independent polity is the settler polity and sanctioning the equal rights of indigenous peoples has historically been used as a powerful weapon in the denial of indigenous entitlement and in the enactment of various forms of coercive assimilation. This decolonisation actually enhances the subjection of indigenous peoples… it is at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental to indigenous peoples in settler societies (2011: 6-7). The ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ plays a particularly ambivalent role in Veracini’s (2011: 6) formulation, where the categorical distinction between settler and native obstructs the ‘possibility of a genuinely decolonised relationship’ (by virtue of its lopsidedness) yet is a necessary political strategy to guard against the absorption of Indigenous people into the settler fold, which would represent settler colonialism’s final victory. The battle here is between a ‘settler colonialism [that] is designed to produce a fundamental discontinuity as its “logic of elimination” runs its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation’ and an anti-colonial struggle that ‘must aim to keep the settler-indigenous relationship going’ (2011: 7). In other words, the categorical distinction produced by the frontier must be maintained in order to struggle against its effects. Given the lack of options presented to Indigenous peoples by Veracini (2014: 315), his conclusion that settler decolonisation demands a ‘radical, post-settler colonial passage’ is perhaps not surprising – although he has ‘no suggestion as to how this may be achieved and [is] pessimistic about its feasibility’. Scholars have long reckoned with the ambivalence of the settler colonial situation, which is simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonising and decolonising (Curthoys, 1999: 288). Given the generally dreadful Fourth World circumstances facing many Indigenous peoples in settler societies, it could be argued that there is good reason for such pessimism. The settler colonial paradigm, in this sense, offers an important caution against celebratory narratives of progress. Wolfe (1994), it must be recalled, wrote the original articulation of his thesis precisely against the idea of ‘historical rupture’ that dominated in Australia post-Mabo, and was thus as much a scholarly intervention as it was a political challenge to the idea of Australia having broken with its colonial past. Nonetheless, the fatalism of the settler colonial paradigm—whereby decolonisation is by and large put beyond the realms of possibility—has seen it come under considerable critique for reifying settler colonialism as a transhistorical meta-structure where colonial relations of domination are inevitable (Macoun & Strakosch, 2013: 435; Snelgrove et al., 2014: 9). Not only does Wolfe’s ontology erase contingency, heterogeneity and (crucially) agency (Merlan, 1997; Rowse, 2014), but its polarised framework effectively ‘puts politics to death’ (Svirsky, 2014: 327). In response to such critiques, Wolfe (2013a: 213) suggests that ‘the repudiation of binarism’ may just represent a ‘settler perspective’. However, as Elizabeth Povinelli (1997: 22) has astutely shown, it is in this regard that the totalising logic of Wolfe’s structure of invasion rests on a disciplinary gesture where ‘any discussion which does not insist on the polarity of the [settler] colonial project’ is assimilationist, worse still, genocidal in effect if not intent. Any attempt to ‘explore the dialogical or hybrid nature of colonial subjectivity’—which would entail working beyond the bounds of absolute polarity—is disciplined as complicit in the settler colonial project itself, leaving ‘the only nonassimilationist position one that adheres strictly and solely to a critique of [settler] state discourse’. This gesture not only disallows the possibility of counter-publics and strategic alliances (even limited ones), but also comes dangerously close to ‘resistance as acquiescence’ insofar as the settler colonial studies scholar may malign the structures set in play by settler colonialism, but only from a safe distance unsullied by the messiness of ambivalences and contradictions of settler and Native subjectivities and relations. Opposition is thus left as our only option, but, as we know from critical anti-colonial and postcolonial scholarship, opposition in itself is not decolonisation.PermPerm do both – indigenous resistance can articulate a third space of sovereignty by engaging politics – refuse the false choice that offers either civil rights or anticolonialismBruyneel 7 (Kevin, Professor of Politics at Babson College, “The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations”, 2007, )In writing this book, a question often popped into my mind, the one famously posed by postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak: “Can the subaltern speak?” Spivak’s question is not about the vocal cords of the colonized; it is about the colonizer’s ear drums; “Can the subaltern speak?” really means, “Are the colonizers deaf?” not “Are the colonized mute?” This study has demonstrated ways in which the American settler-state and nation have sought, often successfully, to impose temporal and spatial limitations on indigenous political life. In resistance, indigenous political actors speak against and across the boundaries of colonial rule by articulating and fighting for a third space: a space of sovereignty and/or citizenship that is inassimilable to the modern liberal democratic settler-state and nation. The settler polity is often deaf to the indigenous claim for a third space because this claim refuses to accommodate itself to the political choices framed by the imperial binary: assimilation or secession, inside or outside, modern or traditional, and so on. Looked at in this way, indigenous political resistance is refusal of a false choice. Among other things, this book has been an effort to expose to clearer light the presence and politics around the third space, defined by colonial impositions and postcolonial resistances. To conclude the book, I look at how the third space concept could positively reshape the language and therefore the terms of and possibilities for indigenous–settler - society relations in the future, and I also suggest its applicability to the wider political discourse and politics around sovereignty.REFUSING THE FALSE CHOICE: SEEING THE THIRD SPACEIn their introduction to the important collection Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous People, the volume’s editors, Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, note that for some of their contributors, such as James Tully as well as Will Kymlicka and J. G. A. Pocock, “there can be no equal standing for indigenous peoples until they are acknowledged as equal sovereigns within a postcolonial constitutional arrangement,” while “for others, such as [Iris] Young and [Augie] Flores and [Roger] Maaka, it is the very nature of the sovereign state that must be rethought.”? While these descriptions flatten the complex views of each of these scholars, there is something worth drawing from the two approaches implied here. The first approach seeks to rethink governance from below by seeking to secure and “arrange” multiple nodes of sovereignty in a multilayered political system wherein settler and indigenous polities can coexist, overlap, and interweave jurisdictions. Th e second approach, by contrast, rethinks governance from above by arguing that the hegemonic “sovereign state,” and thus state sovereignty, is inherently incompatible, and in fact hostile, to the secured existence of indigenous political autonomy.What I find compelling and significant here is the general direction in which these thinkers are going on this issue, which is to see and argue that the viability of political autonomy for indigenous tribes will not come through accommodation of the settler - state’s political system, boundaries, and culture. Rather, it will require some degree of meaningful change in the settler - society’s institutional organization and ideational approach and the concomitant solidification of a location and form of indigenous sovereignty that is self - determined and thus not dependent on the settler - society. Missing from these formulations, however, is a precise concept as well as a vocabulary that can pin down the alternatives represented in this “postcolonial arrangement” and/or “rethinking of the sovereign state.” I propose that the “third space” may well provide the vocabulary that both captures and helps to constitute a viable, increasingly sought - after location of indigenous postcolonial political autonomy that refuses the choices set out by the settler-society. But cultivating this discourse and seeing its constitutive possibilities is easier said than done, so one of the first steps toward moving in this direction will involve refusing the false choice set out by the settler - state.In a 1998 Law Review article, Julie Cassidy set out and critiqued the terms of the false choice presented to those advocating sovereignty for indigenous nations and tribes: “Th e resolution relating to Aboriginal sovereignty is often mistakenly perceived as only involving two possibilities: (1) acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty and the consequent de- struction of the “occupying” state’s sovereignty; or (2) continuation of the past denial of Aboriginal sovereignty. However, it is possible for both entities to enjoy concurrent sovereignty.”? The false choice here is that either indigenous tribes and nations must become sovereign states, thereby destroying the settler-states within which they reside, or their citizens must accept unambiguous inclusion in the settler polity, thereby denying their collective claim to sovereignty. This false choice of either destruction or denial is built on colonialist and statist presumptions. The colonialist presumption is that the settler polity and its institutions represent the ideal of modern political development, while indigenous political society and institutions are, at best, underdeveloped or, at worst, primitive, and thus incapable of real independence in our time. The statist presumption is that legitimate, viable sovereignty can be secured and expressed only through statist institutions, the purview of which is singular and plenary over political space marked by unambiguous boundaries.When articulated in tandem, these colonial - statist presumptions form the foundation of the imposition of colonial rule over indigenous people within liberal democratic settler - states such as the United States. We saw this during and especially after the Civil War when, in their own way, each of the three branches of the American federal government sought to clearly define and secure the reunified boundaries of the American nation - state by domesticating indigenous tribes to them, which included ending the formal process of treaty - making and codifying U.S. plenary power. During the Progressive era, these colonial - statist imperatives drove U.S. policies that sought to break up what Teddy Roosevelt called the “tribal mass” through various means, including allotment of indigenous territory, the unilateral conferral or imposition of U.S. citizenship on people who were already citizens of their tribes, and the closure of U.S. political boundaries to indigenous people not residing within what America deemed its political space. This imperative persisted in different ways throughout the twentieth century, such as in the midcentury termination policy, and has taken its most notable contemporary form in the antitribal sentiment evident in mainstream American electoral politics, citizen groups’ discourse in the civil society, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Over the course of American political history, indigenous sovereignty has been deemed something that needed to be denied — for example, through the codification of U.S. plenary power — and/or something that threatened the destruction of U.S. state sovereignty, as expressed, for instance, by contemporary anti - tribalism. The enduring presence of colonial ambivalence has maintained the parameters of this false choice, putting indigenous sovereignty and political life in a seemingly impossible colonial bind that has positioned indigenous tribes as “domestic to the United States in a foreign sense.” In fact, this ambivalence has served to forestall the complete imposition of any particular thrust in the vacillating history of U.S. Indian policy. The ambivalence inherent to the false choice is also, in part, a product of and opens room for what I have referred to as indigenous postcolonial resistance. This is a resistance that defies American colonial imperatives and seeks to reframe the boundaries that purport to bind indigenous political life.Like the approaches offered by the scholars noted earlier, Julie Cassidy’s alternative of “concurrent sovereignty” refuses the idea that the only options available result in either the destruction of state sovereignty or the denial of indigenous sovereignty. Her refusal echoes the efforts of indigenous political actors and movements discussed in this book. John Ross and his Cherokee colleagues refused the treaty terms that they thought would destroy their nation. In so doing, although they likely lost more than they won in the 1866 treaty negotiations, they nevertheless maintained the unity of the Cherokee nation and in important ways shaped its sovereign purview in the Indian Territory. During the Progressive era, Clinton Rickard and his compatriots, among others, fought to refuse the imposition of U.S. citizenship and the rigid American political boundaries that they saw as inimical to citizenship in their own nations. Their eff orts amounted to a defense of the independent political life of those nations, and they resonate to this day in, among other things, the annual traditions enacted at the U.S.–Canadian border that symbolically and physically express an indigenous refusal to abide settler - state boundaries. In the 1960s and 1970s, the politics of indigenous refusal gained its greatest notoriety when the Red Power movement refused the false choice of either the assimilatory aims of the civil rights movement or the nationalist separatism of third world anticolonialism. Instead, Red Power fought for a right to self-determination as a proactive challenge to and even “recolonization” of American colonial boundaries, symbolized by the occupation of Alcatraz Island and by Vine Deloria’s notion of the modern “tribe as a nation ex- tending in time and occupying space.” Deloria’s vision was that of tribes whose identity and expression of sovereignty transcend the boundaries of colonial time — that feeling of being “unreal and ahistorical,” as he called it — and by so doing are better able to secure and expand the location of indigenous people in postcolonial space, across the boundaries of colonial rule.The political history of indigenous people’s refusals of the false choice set out for them indicate a persistent effort both to self-determine what sovereignty means to them and to expose the uncertainty and even impossibility of U.S. sovereignty as a totalizing claim to supreme, legitimate authority. In this regard, indigenous and U.S. or settler claims to sovereignty face the challenge of dealing with the instability of the term itself. Recall Roxanne Doty’s point, noted in chapter 1: “The social construction of sovereignty is always in process, and is a never completed project.” This process can be seen in the political interchange between American colonial impositions, colonial ambivalence, and indigenous postcolonial resistance, which continually struggle over the precise meaning and purview of the political authority claimed by the settler-state and the many indigenous tribes. While the American perspective cleaves to a statist notion of sovereignty as a source of domination, indigenous politics in its many forms refuses to be contained by the limits of the boundaries of the settler-state and the nation. These refusals demonstrate that indigenous political identity, agency, and autonomy reside in postcolonial time and space, always already across the temporal and spatial boundaries marked out by the settler - state and the colonialist political culture. By articulating this postcolonial fact, indigenous political actors and institutions reveal that settler - state boundaries are just one way — a colonialist way — to map out a people’s relationship to time and space in North America, and they can offer the third space of sovereignty as a politically and discursively locatable alternative. In this regard, it is my hope that the idea of the third space also contributes to the general aims pursued by the scholars noted earlier as well as by scholars of indigenous politics such as Tom Biolsi, who builds his contemporary analysis on the premise that “the nation-state, it turns out, is only one among several (perhaps many) political geographies imagined, lived, and even institutionalized under modernity by American Indians.”? The “imagining” of alternative “political geographies” is a fundamental part of the effort to see viable alternatives to the statist or colonialist conception of sovereignty. To be sure, this anti statist or anticolonial effort does not exist in a vacuum, relevant only to indigenous political concerns, but is connected to and possibly even constitutive of the effort to reimagine the role and meaning of sovereignty in the political world generally.Repurposing institutions goodCurley 19 Andrew, tenure track Assistant Professor. Andrew is currently an assistant professor in geography at University of North Carolina and received his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University, Research interests in Indigenous Geographies, Resource Geography, Navajo, “’Our Winters’ Rights”: Challenging Colonial Water Laws, Global Environmental Politics 19:3, August 2019, , ppg. 57-59Much of the scholarship on Indigenous water rights in the United States focuses on legal and political rights awarded or denied in water settlements. This article highlights the voice of settlement opponents within Diné communities over the proposed Little Colorado River Settlement in 2012 between the Navajo Nation and Arizona. Using interviews with key actors, observations of water hearings, and a mini focus group with settlement opponents, my research finds that the proposed water settlement produced contradictory logics, practices, and frameworks that combined two “traditions of Indigenous resistance,” one rooted in the language of self-determination and sovereignty and the other in emerging notions of decolonization. This hybridity of seeking increased water recognition within colonial law, while advocating for decolonial waterscapes, speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscapes of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, in opposing the water settlement, Diné opponents and community members demonstrate that they seek to rectify the injustice of ongoing settler colonialism and realize their collective capabilities as nations, not “Indians,” “tribes,” or “minorities” within and against the authorities of the colonial state. On April 5, 2012, US senators Jon Kyl and John McCain from Arizona met with Navajo Nation Council delegates in the western Diné community of Tuba City. Their intent was to persuade lawmakers to settle Navajo claims to the Little Colorado River, a dry and shallow waterway that originates high in the mountains of central Arizona and concludes at the confluence of the main Colorado River, just north of the Grand Canyon. The settlement established the terms by which the Navajo Nation would forever “resolve” its collective claims to the river in exchange for small water infrastructure and remaining waters after upstream diversions are taken into account. Although the tribal government was initially in favor of the agreement, much of the Diné community rejected it and mobilized outside of the meeting to express their collective frustration and discontent.1 They criticized governing officials and reminded them that “water is life.” Much of the narrative of water rights and Indian water settlements in the United States focuses on the legal-political “rights” to water that tribes maintain within western water laws (Burton 1991; Colby et al. 2005; Curley 2019b; McCool 2006; Perramond 2018; Thorson et al. 2006). These are important studies because they document the structuring of water use in practice. But the emergent perspectives of water and law among community actors is sometimes missing from these narratives, that is, the grounded understandings and decolonial strategies that both use and negate colonial laws. Recently, Yazzie and Baldy (2018) emphasized the “decolonization” of waterscapes as a pathway to radical Indigenous knowledge and practices around water. For Yazzie and Baldy, decolonization is not simply a metaphor, as Tuck and Yang (2012) put it, or a practice of “awareness raising” (Smith 2013); it is material struggle. My research finds that this struggle produces contradictory logics, practices, and frameworks that combine traditions of Indigenous resistance with a dominating discourse of rights to water. In highlighting the dialog, debate, and discourse over the future of the Little Colorado River, this article seeks to document ongoing, expanding, and changing notions of water governance for Indigenous peoples today, notions that speak to both rights and decolonization. The central point is that Diné water governance transcends the colonial limitations of western water law through use of both pragmatic and decolonial practices. Diné advocates work to maximize water quantification while supporting the idea of traditional water uses for sustainable lifeways. This hybridity of seeking increased water recognition within colonial law, while advocating for decolonial waterscapes, speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscape of Indigenous communities that our critical politics sometimes ignores, misses, or downplays. This article highlights the voices of the Diné people who resisted what appeared to be the inevitability and finality of a water settlement. Their critiques provide an important understanding for how we might interpret water settlements and decolonization between Indigenous peoples and colonizing states. Schlosberg and Carruthers (2010), for example, find that questions of justice for Indigenous peoples are not concerned simply with distribution of resources but also with the “capability” of the resources to fulfill the well-being of a people at the level of the collective. They emphasize that justice for Indigenous peoples is community based and capabilities centered. Like Ciplet et al. (2013), they build on Sen’s (2009) notion of justice related to achieving the fulfillment of people’s capabilities. However, this approach misses the historic critique of unrectified settler colonial theft that is repeated in Indian water settlements. Indian water rights were designed to fulfill the colonial purpose of reservations. They were not meant to resolve senses of injustice or wrongful dispossession inherent within the structure of U.S. colonial governance. Although Diné critics speak in the language of law and legalism when they exclaim “our winters’ rights,” referencing an important Supreme Court decision that I will discuss later, they are also speaking beyond the law and to these broader notions of justice that cannot be resolved in a water settlement. It is not the particulars of the settlement that mobilize Diné resistance but the inherent sense of injustice that water settlements reproduce. In the presentation of this argument, I follow Diné thinking and planning philosophies.2 Diné opposition to the Little Colorado River Settlement was not simply a shared understanding among actors; it was an intellectual process. First, there was thinking and planning—highlighted in the section titled nitsáhákees dóó nahat’á. In this section, I show how opposition to the water settlement was built on two ideological trends and frameworks in Indigenous activism, nation building, and decolonization. These trends framed the argument against the proposed water settlement and addressed the larger notion of injustice in the colonization of Indigenous water sources. Afterward, I highlight how Diné people acted and lived out this thinking and planning in action—collective opposition to the settlement. Action was called iina, which also refers to “life,” toh éí ííńá or “water is life.” Finally, siihasin calls on us to reflect on what was learned and derive some preliminary conclusions. I conclude that the struggle was an effort to reclaim and revitalize Diné lifeways. My research suggests that Indigenous opponents to water settlements built their frameworks on a sense of rights and recognition that is rooted in ideas of traditional knowledge and historic practices on the land. Proponents understood these practices as better suited for sustainable living than existing quantification schemes provide. Their frameworks blended statist and aboriginal conceptualizations of water into a bundle of complicated and contradictory ideas of inherent Indigenous water rights. Both nation building and decolonial notions of Indigenous water governance undermined the legitimacy of colonial water laws while positing a sense of inherent rights to the water in the interest of increasing the amount of water the Navajo Nation was owed. The de- in decolonial did not completely negate colonial institutions as a site of struggle and advocacy. Rather, opponents reworked and repurposed colonial infrastructures toward Indigenous lifeways and decolonial nation ernment action key Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. 17 (Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. 3/29/17 Since 2002, the mission of Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. has been to assist individuals, businesses, organizations and governments to develop respectful, effective, and informed Indigenous relations. We have a suite of great courses to choose from that will inform, develop and strengthen your understanding of Indigenous Peoples, and to work, consult, employ, and negotiate with Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous Awareness Indigenous Relations Working Effectively with Indigenous Peoples? Indigenous Consultation and Engagement Indigenous Employment: Recruitment & Retention Working with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We offer a combination of training options for individuals and organizations including eLearning via our Indigenous Relations Academy and Virtual Learning, Classroom Learning, as well as Private Learning for Organizations. Our training and free resources are designed to help people with a range of experience and diverse goals move beyond basic Indigenous awareness to developing practical skills and tools for working with Indigenous Peoples and communities everywhere. Our blog has many great free articles that can be accessed right now. ictinc.ca/blog Website Industries Education Management Company size 1-10 employees Headquarters Port Coquitlam, British Columbia Type Privately Held Founded 2002 Specialities Indigenous relations training? rs)Ever since the release in 2015 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s summary report on?residential schools?there has been an awakening on the part of non-Indigenous Canadians to the harsh realities of the Indigenous experience in Canada. The Commission’s?94 calls-to-action?(CTAs) have ignited organizations and institutions to examine their operations and identify ways to answer and implement applicable CTAs. These actions and initiatives often lead to discussions on a broader context about decolonization and indigenization. But, what do those terms mean? This article provides a very basic explanation of a very complex topic.Decolonization:Decolonization restores the Indigenous world viewDecolonization restores culture and ?traditional waysDecolonization replaces Western interpretations of history with Indigenous perspectives of historyDecolonization is about shifting the way Indigenous Peoples view themselves and the way non-Indigenous people view Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are reclaiming the family, community,?culture, language, history and?traditions?that were taken from them under the?federal government policies?designed for assimilation. Some communities are reclaiming control via self-government agreements, treaties, or other negotiated agreements. It’s about revealing, renewal and rediscovery.For more on self-government, download our free ebook?An Overview of Indigenous Self-GovernmentDecolonization requires non-Indigenous Canadians to recognize and accept the reality of Canada’s colonial history, accept how that history paralyzed Indigenous Peoples, and how it continues to subjugate Indigenous Peoples. Decolonization requires non-Indigenous individuals, governments, institutions and organizations to create the space and support for Indigenous Peoples to reclaim all that was taken from themA third space of sovereignty leverages ambivalence in native-settler relations – indigenous resistance appropriates and fights the power of the settler state. Barker 15 (Adam J., Adjunct Research Professor in Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield and PhD in Human Geography from the University of Leicester, “The third space of sovereignty: the postcolonial politics of U.S.-Indigenous relations,” Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 103-106, )Settler states – including the USA – have a long history of imposing artificial boundaries on Indigenous peoples, then casting those boundaries as natural and always-present. The edge of the reserve or reservation is equated with the borders of traditional territories; the limits of fifteenth century economic practice is equated to the limits of Indigenous political economy; and so on. In Kevin Bruyneel’s truly excellent work, The Third space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations, he reveals the ways that Indigenous resistance confounds colonial thought by transgressing borders and boundaries. Instead of static and contained polities, to be regarded with ‘colonial ambivalence’, Indigenous nations in resistance instead assert themselves as dynamic, surprising, flexible, and fundamentally challenging to political thought in America.Bruyneel’s book was released in 2007; this review might seem to be after the fact. However, recent events have reiterated the necessity of analyses like Bruyneel’s: the Idle No More movement; the fight over the name of the Washington National Football League franchise; the ongoing conflicts over reservation casinos; the increasing attention that activists have drawn to massive violence against Indigenous women; and looming conflicts over resources such as water throughout much of the continent. All of these clashes have recently forced Indigenous peoples into the forefront of North American politics, and there are signs that the terms of the discourse are shifting. Virulent colonial racism no longer receives unqualified support; as Taiaiake Alfred pointed out during the Idle No More protests in January 2013, it has become apparent that ‘there is support among Canadians for a movement that embodies principled opposition to the destruction of the land and the extension of social justice to Indigenous peoples’. 1 But given that conflicts over land, resource extraction and colonial violence continue, what do these changes mean for North American political economies, for resurgent Indigenous nationhood, and for settler states and national identities? Bruyneel’s comprehensive study of U.S.-Indigenous relations from the Civil War to the present can help to understand the trajectory of these challenges and changes.This book is based on Bruyneel’s doctoral research, a fascinating combination of historical study, political theory and analysis, and postcolonial critique, combining to reveal the ways that Indigenous resistance has both appropriated and fought against the power of the American settler state. The two key concepts that Bruyneel introduces have a great deal of contemporary relevance. First, Bruyneel’s work focuses on borders and boundaries, specifically those imposed by settler colonisation and hardened by nationalist state building, capitalist exploitation, and racialised social exclusion. These boundaries, he reveals, have become the site of Indigenous resistance as they are both co-opted and confronted by Indigenous assertions of sovereignty. Second, Bruyneel discusses how this state of affairs persists based on the attitude of ‘colonial ambivalence’ that underpins settler perceptions of Indigenous peoples. Sometimes claiming Indigenous people as ‘part of’ the American nation and therefore subject to state power, and at others rejecting Indigenous belonging in the nation, solidifying Indigenous difference as a point of contention, the American settler state refuses to commit to a position on Indigenous nationhood. While this is part of the key operation of settler colonialism – a genealogical outgrowth of the ‘non-encounter’ that informs settlement – Bruyneel reveals that Indigenous peoples have taken advantage of this ambivalence to make space for themselves in sometimes unlikely places.The book begins with an extensive introduction to colonial boundary making and the history of Indigenous-U.S. relations; this is essential given the cross-disciplinary nature of the book, and Bruyneel’s engagement with sometimes-opaque postcolonial theories. Setting out in clear terms the nature of the conflicts between Indigenous and Settler peoples, this chapter situates Indigenous-U.S. politics firmly in the continuum of settler colonisation and Indigenous resistance. Effectively marrying sweeping, macro-political analyses of hundreds of years of colonial conflict with particular contemporary stories that demonstrate these conflicts in action, Bruyneel establishes the ‘nonbinaristic third space’ of Indigenous politics as his field of study.Following from this, the next four chapters in turn examine different eras in Indigenous-U.S. relations, from the time of the Civil War up to the present. The first of these eras overlaps with the close of the Civil War and focuses on the tensions between the Cherokee Nation, communities of which allied with both Union and Confederate forces during the War, and an American Government suddenly concerned with securing its political foundations and uncertain borders. Bruyneel focuses on the ways that the ‘informal territory’ known a Indian Country both troubled the American political imagination, but also served as the primary battleground in the colonial drive to ‘domesticate’ Indigenous nations, including the Cherokee. Bruyneel focuses on the interplay between two political groupings within the Cherokee nation, divided along a ‘section fault line’ between the Northern Cherokee under John Ross, and the Southern Cherokee led by Stand Watie. As the American Government turned decisively towards expanding its power and territorial base, the factions within the Cherokee nation responded in very different ways. However, despite the differences – with Ross’s group, who represented the majority of Cherokees, taking an oppositional stance, and Watie’s southern communities playing to the government’s selfinterests – the efforts of both groups ultimately resulted in a Treaty agreement that, while ‘not a great one for the Cherokee’, nonetheless reflected the efforts of ‘the politics-on-the-boundaries approach that sought to secure the Cherokee nation’s autonomy in the third space, neither fully foreign nor domestic’ (57).Moving to a discussion of the early twentieth century, Bruyneel investigates the contentious issue of citizenship in the American state, and the ways that Indigenous peoples have fought to access the rights of citizens – including protection from abuses at the hands of the settler state – without surrendering their responsibilities to their nations and homelands. Focusing on the conflicts caused by the imposition of the international (Canada–USA) border through Indigenous communities – perhaps the clearest example of the imposition of a colonial spatial boundary on Indigenous peoples in the book – Bruyneel shows how Indigenous politics in the 1920s subverted discourses of citizenship as belonging. Asserting rights that pre-date the imposition of the state, such as the right to travel freely through a territory that spans the official border, Indigenous peoples ‘practiced a politics-on-the-boundaries approach by working within the American political system to gain further freedom for indigenous people across and beyond the boundaries of that system’ (118). While this boundary struggle may not have resulted in the dissolution of the border, it did make very clear to settler state authorities that the issue could not be ignored, and served as a rallying cry for a further ‘postcolonial boundary politics’ (119).These further boundary politics are clearly visible as Bruyneel turns his attention to the Civil Rights era, and so reaches an era of political contention probably familiar to most readers. Prominent in this chapter is the voice of the late Vine Deloria, Jr, as Bruyneel draws out the connections between his groundbreaking and unsettling book, Custer Died for Your Sins, and the protests, direct actions, and lobbying associated with the Red Power Movement generally and the Trail of Broken Treaties specifically. First, Bruyneel repositions Deloria’s concept of ‘tribal nationalism’ as a form of ‘postcolonial nationalism’, a ‘modern political identity that sought to defy and challenge containment by American boundaries, refusing spatialization as either inside or outside, urban or rural’ (141). Contra the anticolonialism of Franz Fanon, Deloria did not so much seek to destroy colonial boundaries as to leverage them; this was embodied in the Red Power Movement, which Bruyneel insightfully differentiates from the wider civil rights struggles going on around it. Contrasting Red Power with both the confrontational positions of Black Power and the institutional appeals of civil rights movements, Red Power (especially in Deloria’s articulation of it) was an ‘effort at both playfulness and confusion … an attempt to redefine the terms of political negotiation from the perspective of the tribes rather than to assimilate them to the discourse of the American polity’ (150). Here, Bruyneel’s postcolonial analysis is most fully realised, as he draws in work from Homi Bhaba, the discourse around the Vietnam War, and the political demands of the Trail of Broken Treaties to demonstrate how Indigenous politics in this era deflected the aggression of the settler state (rather than confronting it directly), and also claimed space and power from the settler state (rather than asking for it in the form of individual rights).Finally, Bruyneel examines contemporary conflicts around gaming and ‘Indian casinos’, especially in the state of California where political racism and opposition to Indigenous nationhood carried Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Governor’s seat on a wave of anti-Indigenous sentiment in 2003. In this section Bruyneel effectively fleshes out the implications of the ‘temporal boundaries’ imposed on Indigenous peoples: economic power or success on the part of tribes operating casinos are met with an ‘antitribal and anti-Indian subtext [that] … calls forth the imperial binary of savagery-civilization, producing the picture of wild gaming tribes acting with reckless abandon, out of time with and thus a threat to the civilized pace of American society’ (184). Bruyneel demonstrates how this temporal boundary was used by Schwarzenegger’s campaign to generate an aggrieved sentiment among the electorate; the language of having a ‘fair share’ of the ‘billions’ made by tribal casinos ‘became a metonym for the colonizing polity’s sense of mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of the colonized’ (191). This perverse view became the rallying cry for several lobbying groups that hid anti-Indian racism among a ‘political topography’ in which America sovereignty is constructed ‘so rigidly … and exclusionary’ that any expression of Indigenous sovereignty – including within the confines of the state – ‘threatens to shatter the standing and space of American sovereignty’ (200). Shifting to focus on the Oneida nation in New York State, one of the few tribes who have been able to use casino money to purchase land and increase their reservation base, there is evidence of an important shift in the ‘ambivalent’ politics of the settler state. Court cases over Oneida tax immunity resulted in legal decisions through which Indigenous peoples are forced into a false choice between preserving culture (temporally acceptable but economically and politically disempowered) and building casinos (politically and economically acceptable only if indigeneity is abandoned).One might be tempted to ask if the tide in American politics had turned, and that Indigenous politics-on-the-boundaries were no longer able to leverage colonial ambivalence in resistance. However, the concluding chapter of the book provides the antidote to this conjecture. Bruyneel turns to the work of several contemporary Indigenous theorists and scholars to discuss emerging ways that Indigenous peoples are continuing to creatively transgress colonial boundaries, perhaps most importantly by reimagining and rearticulating the concept of sovereignty itself. Among the scholars that Bruyneel references is Taiaiake Alfred and his influential construction of sovereignty from an Indigenous viewpoint. Drawing from Alfred’s critique that state concepts of sovereignty cannot be the determining factor in Indigenous politics, Bruyneel establishes the choices presented by American law and policy – Indigenous peoples as either contemporarily relevant but no longer indigenous, or retaining culture but disempowered politically and economically – as false choices to be refused in favour of asking ‘better questions’. Bruyneel concludes by stating thatit is as unhelpful to ask indigenous tribes and people if they reside inside or outside the United States as it is to ask the United States and the American people if they reside inside or outside of, say, the Iroquois Confederacy. (229)As such, Bruyneel’s conclusion is that such binaristic thinking, while exposed and exploited by Indigenous politics-on-the-boundaries, is ultimately something to be transcended in the process of decolonisation.Bruyneel’s book is a challenge; it asks easy questions with difficult answers, and difficult questions with no immediate answers at all. It can also be a linguistic challenge at times; as much as his engagement with postcolonialism brings to his analyses, it sometimes obscures his point as well. There are places (especially in the introduction) where postcolonial and scholarly jargon can distract from the main point. But these are minor quibbles. The important point to return to here is that Bruyneel’s book, despite being now five years old and based on research older than that, remains extremely relevant. Indigenous peoples, as shown by Idle No More and the Indigenous Nationhood Movement, by Save Wiyabi and Walking with Our Sisters, and by many other efforts at organising against and across colonial boundaries, continue to challenge the fundamental, assumed reality of North American Settler life. The settler states of the USA and Canada, for all their power, have never been able to silence Indigenous voices, not in the Civil War era, and not now; nor does that seem likely to change any time soon.L/T – DamsThe aff gets rid of dams which extend the logic of terra nullius to impose settler colonial needs upon Indigenous resources.Strube and Thomas 21 (Johann Strube Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, The Pennsylvania State University, United States of America. Kimberley Anh Thomas Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America. 2021. Damming Rainy Lake and the ongoing production of hydrocolonialism in the US-Canada boundary waters. Water Alternatives 14(1): 135-157; AKIM)Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which an exogenous community seeks to reproduce itself in an appropriated territory (Veracini, 2010); violence is required to displace the Indigenous inhabitants of that territory. North America is a prime example, where European-descended Settlers committed genocide against Indigenous peoples in their campaign to establish themselves in these foreign territories. They vandalised complex forms of Indigenous social organisation and established a colonial system in which Whites were imagined to be the masters of the land and over people of colour (DunbarOrtiz, 2014; Glenn, 2015). Many Indigenous peoples, however, have survived this onslaught. Indigenous Nations now find themselves in the difficult position of being subjected to colonial legal systems while simultaneously asserting their inherent sovereignty and traditional ways of life. Settler colonialism involves the transformation of a territory into a landscape that provides Settlers with culturally appropriate livelihoods (Glenn, 2015). The ideological basis for this erasure was the early framing of North America as terra nullius – land that belongs to nobody – despite the presence of Indigenous peoples on the continent (Veracini, 2010; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). This ahistorical perspective has led Settlers to disregard Indigenous water governance arrangements and impose water laws that support colonisation (Hunt, 2014; Yazzie and Baldy, 2018; Curley, 2019a, 2019b; Daigle, 2018). Materially, Settlers have terraformed the landscape to serve their economic and cultural needs. They cut forests, ploughed land, and engineered rivers. This allowed them to recreate European lifestyles, but severely damaged the environmental relations on which Indigenous peoples depended (Whyte, 2015a). Settler colonialism continues to be reproduced and contested in North America and elsewhere, prompting Wolfe (1999) to describe Settler colonialism as an ongoing structure. 3 Recently, a number of water-related developments that predominantly benefit Settler society have threatened the ecological integrity of tribal lands (Hoover, 2017; Estes and Dhillon, 2019; LaDuke and Cowen, 2020). For instance, the generation of hydroelectricity disproportionately burdens, and often displaces, Indigenous communities in North America as well as globally (VanCleef, 2016; Thompson, 2015; Waldram, 1993; Cooke et al., 2017; Loney, 1995; Martin and Hoffman, 2011). In Canada, new hydroelectric dams and diversions such as the Lake St. Martin Outlet Channels in Manitoba (Ballard and Thompson, 2013; Thompson, 2015), the Lower Churchill Project at Muskrat Falls in Labrador (Calder et al., 2016), and the Site C Project at the Peace River in British Columbia (Bakker and Hendriks, 2019) displace Indigenous communities and flood their traditional hunting and trapping areas. Whyte (2015a) argues that developments on tribal lands, which expose Native American communities to environmental risks, continue historic Settler industrial campaigns. Indigenous Nations are also frequently dominated in the management of existing structures and the governance of traditional lands. They often find themselves in the awkward position of having to defend Indigenous sovereignty over natural resources within colonial law (Curley, 2019a; Simpson, 2014), a seemingly impossible proposition. Efforts of the state to integrate Indigenous communities into the co-management of natural resources has often led the latter to adopt administrative practices that displace the very Indigenous culture they were intended to protect (Nadasdy, 2003); Indigenous Nations, however, also find ways to bend colonial law to meet their objectives (Wilson, 2019; Clark and Joe-Strack, 2017). Our research adds to this literature by showing how hydroelectric dams and water governance reproduce Settler colonial social relations in the Rainy Lake watershed.L/T – PersonhoodEnvironmental personhood increases Indigenous control over nature and is empirically successful.Etty et al 20 [Thijs Etty – Lecturer and Researcher in European Law and Transnational Environmental Governance at the VU University Amsterdam, teaches a variety of bachelors and masters courses; Veerle Heyvaert – Professor at the LSE Law Department and founding Editor-in-Chief of Transnational Environmental Law; Cinnamon Carlarne – leading expert in environmental law and climate change law and policy, bachelors in law and MA in environmental change and management from Oxford, Bruce Huber – professor of law at Notre Dame, J.D. and PhD in political science; Jacqueline Peel – leading, internationally-recognised expert in the field of environmental and climate change law, professor at Melbourne, PhD in Law from Melbourne; and Josephine Van Zeben – Professor and Chair of the LAW group at Wageningen University, PhD in Law and Economics; "Indigenous Rights Amidst Global Turmoil"; Transnational Environmental Law; 11-17-2020; Accessible Online at ] DL 7-16-2021Laura Schimm?ller's article follows neatly after the Symposium collection in its attention to the rights of nature as a novel legal formulation.9 A handful of other recent articles in TEL have critically examined the recent turn towards the establishment of legal rights for non-human natural entities.10 Building on this work, Schimm?ller asks whether granting rights to nature might prove an effective approach in Germany, a civil law country without a significant Indigenous population. Her principal points of reference are New Zealand, which through legislation has established legal personhood for two ecosystems since 2014, and Ecuador, where a constitutional amendment in 2008 enshrined protection for the ‘rights of Mother Earth’. Unsurprisingly, neither country matches perfectly the particular legal, political, and cultural makeup of Germany, yet Schimm?ller draws encouragement from their recent experiences all the same.Although the concept of the rights of nature has attracted significant attention from environmentalists, Schimm?ller observes that the legal enactments that create such rights ‘[a]t first sight … might not resemble a reform that is directly related to environmental law’.11 Instead, these efforts are principally ‘attempt[s] to codify Indigenous perspectives into modern legal frameworks’.12 In New Zealand, legislation granting rights to the Te Urewera area (in 2014)13 and the Whanganui River (in 2017)14 represents the latest efforts to resolve long-standing land management disputes between Māori tribes and the Crown.15 In creating legal guardians for these ecosystems, the legislature integrated customary Māori language, values, and concepts to recentre the management process along lines more responsive to historical Indigenous claims. The law does not spell out ‘much of the content of the rights and duties granted to nature’ because its aim was rather to refashion the model for tribal cooperation with the Crown.16 Ecuador's constitutional provisions that address the rights of Mother Earth also draw heavily on Indigenous traditions. Quechuan terms are employed without translation, and the concept of a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, prevalent within Andean Indigenous populations, is central in the Constitution's preamble and environmental provisions.17Schimm?ller points out that these two countries were not identical in their approach. The Ecuadorian Constitution explicitly allows any person to demand public authorities to apply rights of nature, while ‘[t]he narrow approach in New Zealand, aimed at recognizing Māori responsibilities for their land, arguably has less of a focus on nature's rights in themselves’.18 It is undoubtedly too soon to draw firm conclusions about the merits of each strategy, let alone the efficacy of rights of nature as a general matter. Legal reform is a social process, and although these particular reforms herald a sea change in environmental jurisprudence, they will no doubt engender opposition. Success or failure will depend largely on the vigour with which litigants assert the newly created rights, the legislatures develop them, and the courts endorse and apply them. The Ecuadorian courts, for example, have needed ‘education’ to clarify ‘newly found norms in court’.19Could rights of nature take root in German soil? There are boulders in the field, but Schimm?ller finds cause for optimism. The jurisprudential obstacles have to do primarily with the doctrine of standing. Germany's public interest litigation model already allows certain recognized environmental organizations to access the courts, leading some analysts to conclude that a rights of nature approach ‘in terms of practical enforcement … would in practice create no significant difference compared with the existing model’.20 Moreover, the cultural landscape lacks the Indigenous and spiritual elements that have significantly informed rights-based approaches elsewhere. Nonetheless, Schimm?ller argues that the move from human duties to nature's rights could powerfully influence German environmental thought and ‘reshape the legal and moral conceptions of the environment’.21 It remains to be seen, of course, which direction environmental advocates pursue in German courts, but we are confident that this article will prove an important contribution to the debate.Granting Personhood to Rivers helps Native Americans fight pollution and climate changeSmith 7/19 Anna V. Smith is an assistant editor at High Country News. “Some Indigenous Communities Have a New Way to Fight Climate Change: Give Personhood Rights to Nature” This summer, the Yurok Tribe declared rights of personhood for the Klamath River—likely the first to do so for a river in North America. A concept previously restricted to humans (and corporations), “rights of personhood” means, most simply, that an individual or entity has rights, and they’re now being extended to nonhumans. The Yurok’s resolution, passed by the tribal council in May,?comes during another difficult season for the Klamath; over the past few years, low water flows have caused high rates of disease in salmon, and cancelled fishing seasons.With the declaration, the Yurok Tribe joins other Indigenous communities in a growing Rights of Nature movement aimed at protecting the environment. Last year, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe?adopted the Rights of Manoomin?to protect wild rice—manoomin—and the freshwater sources it needs to survive in Minnesota. And in 2017, the New Zealand government?adopted the Rights of the Whanganui River, stemming from a treaty process with Māori iwis, or tribes, that gives the river its own legal standing in court. “By granting the rights of personhood to the Klamath River, not only does it create laws and legal advocacy routes, but it’s also an expression of Yurok values,” says Geneva Thompson, associate general counsel for the tribe and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, who worked on the resolution. “The idea is that the laws of a nation are an expression of the nation’s values.”The Yurok resolution draws inspiration from the Rights of Manoomin, as well as the?United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which enshrines the right of Indigenous people to conserve and protect their lands and resources. Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge—in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders. “From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems,” says David Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, of the Yurok Tribe’s resolution. “We must no longer view the natural world as a mere warehouse of commodities for humans to exploit, but rather a remarkable community to which we belong and to whom we owe responsibilities.”In essence, the Yurok resolution means that if the river is harmed, a case can be made in Yurok tribal court to remedy the problem. Currently, says Yurok Tribe General Counsel Amy Cordalis, laws like the Clean Water or Endangered Species acts can be used to protect rivers by addressing symptoms of problems like diseased fish or pollution. But the Yurok resolution seeks to address the river’s problems directly and holistically, including the impacts of climate change. “You’re working towards making the river whole again,” Cordalis says.?In December 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and the 1855 Treaty Authority, an organization that upholds treaty rights for Chippewa bands, established legal personhood for wild rice. The resolution draws from the Rights of Nature—an international concept that argues that nature should have the same rights as humans—and is the first law to recognize legal rights of plant species. The rights spell out that within White Earth and other Chippewa ceded territories, wild rice has “inherent rights to restoration, recovery and preservation,” including “the right to pure water and freshwater habitat,” the right to a healthy climate and “a natural environment free from human cause global warming.” Frank Bibeau, executive director of the 1855 Treaty Authority and a White Earth tribal member, says the rights are an extension of Ojibwe treaty rights both on and off the reservation. And they may soon be put to the test—the proposed crude oil Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which requires state approval, would cross into off-reservation areas where manoomin and freshwater sources are.The resolutions give tribal nations new legal strategies for use in court, especially in regards to climate change: “The idea of having legal avenues to address the harms of climate change is an important next step as legal systems adapt to the climate crisis,” says Thompson at the Yurok Tribe. And they also encourage a change in mindset, says Maia Wikaira, an environmental law attorney who worked with the Yurok Tribe’s legal team, and a member of the Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Rarawa and Ngāpuhi tribes of New Zealand. As tribal nations establish rights for nonhumans, it creates an opportunity for states to follow suit, and incorporate the concept into their own court systems. “It’s another example of where long-held Indigenous perspectives and association with the natural world are not only being embedded within our legal system—they’re being seen in popular environmental movements as an innovative way forward and a necessary step,” Wikaira says. “So, old is new again.”?Rights of nature have already been established in Colombia, Ecuador and India, with varying success, and have also appeared in non-Native communities in the U.S. In Ohio this February, voters passed a law—which is already being challenged—granting Lake Erie personhood rights. An attempt in 2017 by Coloradoans to force the state to?grant the Colorado River rights of personhood collapsed?after the state threatened possible sanctions against the lawyer behind the case.Now, Thompson says, the relationship between the Yurok Tribe and the Klamath River is reflected in the tribe’s law. “It shifts the conversation, and it shifts the value system, because you see the environment has a right to be clean and protected for the environments sake.”Yes ProgressProgress possible — specifically true in the realm of water. Cunilio 16 — third-generation attorney and was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2011, she graduated cum laude from the University of Colorado Boulder having majored in Political Science. (Kathleen; Published: April 14, 2016; “EPA’s New Rule Eases Tribe’s Ability to Apply for Treatment As a State Status Under the Clean Water Act”; University of Denver Water Law Review; Accessed: June 22, 2021; )//CYangThe EPA’s new rule demonstrates important progress in Indian Country for two reasons. First, by treating tribal nations similarly to states recognizes inherent tribal sovereignty. The EPA’s new rule reflects the federal government’s modern trend of treating tribes similarly to a state government in delegating administrative authority. This delegation of authority is a product of the Self-Determination Era, which commenced with President Richard Nixon’s 1970 speech to the Congress on Indian Affairs.[22] The federal government helps in promoting and recognizing tribal self-governance through government-to-government partnerships.[23] The Self-Determination Era refers to somewhat of an American Indian “nation-building” movement, which included establishing tribal governments, courts, police forces, and schools.Second, the Revised Interpretation is important because only about forty of the 300 Indian Tribes with reservations have obtained the EPA’s approval for TAS status.[24] This is not to say that tribes cannot regulate their waters without TAS approval, but the EPA’s recognition provides further funding and certification programs to help legitimize and strengthen tribal water management. Tribes generally lack a tax base upon which to develop water management, but with TAS recognition, tribes receive money for water management projects. Thus, allowing tribes with ‘checkerboard’ reservations (that is reservations with large swaths of both member and nonmember land) to bypass the Montana test will make it easier for tribes to receive funding from the federal government for maintaining and improving reservation water quality.Overall, alleviating this administrative barrier will make it easier for tribes to implement CWA programs targeted at reservation water quality. It will save tribes both time and resources in their TAS applications, as well as relieve the EPA of identifying on a case-by-case basis whether an individual tribe can meet the Montana test. Moreover, this rule should encourage more American Indian tribes to apply for TAS status in order to successfully implement CWA programs.[25] This is an important step because clean water is paramount to Indian tribes, not just for sustenance, but also for spiritual, medicinal, and cultural reasons.[26] For example, the most recent tribe to receive TAS status, the Santa Ana Pueblo, views the water within their New Mexico reservation as important for maintaining its own cultural heritage.CWA GoodThe clean water act keeps waters clean through governmental actions and protections American Rivers -no date (American Rivers believes a future of clean water and healthy rivers everywhere, for everyone is essential. Since 1973, we have protected wild rivers, restored damaged rivers and conserved clean water for people and nature. With headquarters in Washington, D.C. and 300,000 supporters, members and volunteers across the country, we are the most trusted and influential river conservation organization in the United States, delivering solutions for a better future. )In 1969 Ohio’s Cuyahoga River was so fouled by industrial pollution that the river caught on fire.Public outcry over dirty rivers spurred Congress to pass the landmark?Clean Water Act?in 1972. The historic law was designed to protect all of our waters – from the smallest streams to the mightiest rivers – from pollution and destruction.Thanks to the Clean Water Act, billions of pounds of pollution have been kept out of our rivers and the number of waters that meet clean water goals nationwide has doubled – with direct benefits for drinking water, public health, recreation, and wildlife. The Act represented a huge step forward by requiring states to set clean water standards to protect uses such as swimming, fishing, and drinking, and for the regulation of pollution discharges.Essentialism BadIncommensurability is rooted in occidentalist essentialism that undermines anti-colonial struggle thru romanticism that authenticity tests and self marginalizes natives.Anderson 9. Chris. Michif (Métis) from western Canada; associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies, Alberta. “Critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density,” Cultural Studies Review 15(2): 80-4. Emory Libraries.In two recent articles,3 American Indian studies professor Duane Champagne challenges ‘Western’ academic disciplines’ epistemological ability to analyse contemporary Indigeneity.4 Specifically, their failure to consider Indigenous collectivities’ active role in colonial contexts in terms not readily discernable in Western forms of knowledge means these disciplines miss large elements of Indigeneity and, as such, fail to offer a plausible basis for its analysis. Champagne contends that despite its current failure to do so, American Indian studies—extrapolated here to include all Indigenous studies—should instead assume this mantle by presuming the distinctive agency of Indigenous peoples, including a focus on exploring our relations according to our distinctive epistemologies and according to the goals and mandates set by Indigenous communities. Not only will this distinguish Native studies from the rest of the academia, it will better position it to assist Indigenous peoples in righting their relationships with dominant, ‘whitestream’ society.5 I agree with Champagne’s assertion that Indigenous studies—whether within or outside specific departments and faculties—should exist in contemporary academia and that Indigenous communities ought to constitute a central focus to this endeavour. Despite his obvious love for the discipline (a fidelity I share), however, his peculiar positioning of Indigenous studies as different needlessly marginalises our density and, in doing so, unnecessarily gives ground to disciplinary turf long claimed by older disciplines. Thus, although he usefully positions Indigenous communities as producers of complex knowledge about indigeneity, his separation of Indigenous from white society unnecessarily marginalises two elements of our density critical to this relationship: 1) the extent of Indigenous communities’ knowledges about whiteness (a social fact which requires an expertise in ‘Western’ concepts); and 2) the extent to which the production of academic knowledge through Indigenous studies is shaped by the ‘whitestream’ academic relations of power, marking it in tension with other forms of knowledge (such as community knowledge). Both are unfortunate omissions. Regarding the first, the epistemological aprioris of whiteness are a dominant representational source through which Western societies produce and consume Indigeneity. As such, Champagne recklessly jettisons so-called Western disciplinary concepts and methodologies as immutable precisely where and when they are most necessary. Regarding the second, he dismisses the contextual importance of accounting for the academic institutional conditions under which native studies units (are allowed to) exist. My sympathetic critique of Champagne’s argument is divided into three major parts and a conclusion. Part one extrapolates his analysis of current native studies and his prescriptions for how to fix it. In this context I examine his charge that ‘Western’ disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and so on) are too epistemologically constricted to properly explain Indigenous agency or communities and I emphasise his failure to account for the conditions of possibility under which Native American studies entered into academic history (to borrow Foucauldian phraseology).6 This latter element challenges the relationships he posits between both Indigenous studies and other academic disciplines and Indigenous knowledge within and outside the academy. Part two unpacks his tropes to reveal an epistemological and ontological essentialism which positions Indigeneity as separate from (his notion of) colonialism, such that an endogamous focus on the former obviates the need for accounting for the influence of the latter (or at least, that native studies can analyse the former in a manner which separates it from the Western academic herd). I argue that Champagne reproduces a variant strain of ‘Aboriginalism’ 7 that oversimplifies contemporary Indigeneity and overstates the immutability of concepts emanating from existing ‘Western’ disciplines. In doing so, he unnecessarily limits the contributions Indigenous studies is ideally positioned to make in deconstructing Aboriginalist discourses and in doing so produces an oddly parochial formulation of the discipline. Finally, in part three I offer my own prescriptions for an Indigenous studies anchored in Indigenous density (rather than difference). The temporal and epistemological complexity of our relationships with whitestream society means that Indigenous studies must counter hegemonic representations of Indigeneity which marginalise or altogether ignore our density. Following in the footsteps of Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s path-breaking work, I argue that Indigenous studies’ study of both Indigeneity and whiteness must use all available epistemologies, not just those which apparently distance Western disciplines from Indigenous studies analysis.8 While Champagne’s formulation can possibly be stretched to examine whiteness, the epistemological strategies he proposes for analysing Indigeneity capture only specific, isolated elements of our complexity. The essay ends with a discussion of the implications of this argument. I Locating (Champagne in) the discipline of native studies Native studies ‘state of the discipline’ pieces often begin by differentiating our scholarship from that of longer-standing disciplines.9 Though these are as often prescriptive as reflective of actual practice, such immanent analysis signals a healthy and growing discipline. American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell suggests that, at least in native studies, these debates often play themselves out in a tension between two poles of analysis: essentialism/difference and adaptation/assimilation.10 She suggests that the essentialism cluster is rooted in an extreme form of post-colonialism which ‘implies that American Indian ways of thinking existed before colonialism and remain unknowable by anyone outside those cultures. Native American studies/American Indian studies can recover the long-suppressed values, epistemologies, and voices from colonial oppression’.11 Conversely, adaptation clusters typically emphasise the agency of Indigenous collectivities in the face of whitestream colonialism. Like the essentialism cluster, however, Kidwell argues that in its extreme variant: the idea of adaptation, or acculturation, or agency represents the ultimate disappearance of Indian identity into American society. If Indians dress like everyone else, speak like everyone else, attend public schools, are citizens of the state in which they live and citizens of the United States, how can they justify claims to a distinctive identity?12 Like others taking the essentialist position in the debate,13 Champagne contends that Indigeneity and Indigenous communities are fundamentally different in ways which elide the epistemological premises of Western disciplines (more on this in part two). These disciplines employ data collection concepts and practices saturated with a concern for ‘examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’.14 Indigenous issues are merely positioned as a specific instance of more general patterns of minority oppression.15 Such thinking has, he suggests, detracted intellectual energy from the more laudable Indigenous studies disciplinary goal of ‘conceptuali[s]ing, researching, and explaining patterns of American Indian individual and collective community choices and strategies when confronted with relations with the American state and society’.16 Champagne suggests that most native studies departments are multidisciplinary in character with faculty scattered in numerous disciplines teaching theories and concepts from numerous academic fields, to students as often as not from non-Aboriginal backgrounds, with a vague mandate for increasing or generating broader awareness about Indigenous history and contemporary realities.17 He admits that this multidisciplinarity is often advantageous in that ‘programs could be constructed from long-standing disciplines, and often seasoned scholars could be called upon to provide guidance and support’.18 However, to the extent that concepts central to Western disciplines remain ‘oriented toward examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’,19 these approaches effectively stifle the ability of American Indian studies to produce disciplinarily endogamous theory and methodology. The existing Indigenous studies academic landscape is thus, Champagne explains, littered with disjointed and epistemologically scattered forays into (and about) Indigenous communities. The current inability to produce distinctive theory and method has exacerbated institutional marginality (his context is American but this is readily extrapolated more broadly): fiscal conservativism limits the likelihood that even well-meaning administrators will build-in the solid, permanent funding required for stable Native studies departments (since money made available for ‘Aboriginal issues’ is just as likely to go to more wellregarded disciplines such as anthropology, history or education); broader multicultural or diversity concerns overshadow the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences by linking them to broader forms of ‘minority’ oppression (thus the seemingly natural fit of native studies departments within ‘ethnic studies’ faculties); and mainstream theorising and methodological thinking has shown a reluctance to ‘think outside the box’ of Western modes of analysis.20 Champagne argues in a nutshell that: the university bureaucratic environment, weak resource support, the emphasis on race and ethnic paradigms over an indigenous paradigm, and the relegation of Indian Studies to serve general diversity interests for the university will continue to constrain, and often will prevent, full development of indigenous studies departments and programs at many universities.21 Champagne’s understanding of native studies’ relationship to the academy is reminiscent of the humanism Foucault critiques in his examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexuality regulation.22 Foucault takes such explanations to task for their tendency to position power repressively as an entity which prevents actions and curtails freedoms. Foucauldian notions of power instead stress its repressive and constitutive character. They emphasise how discursive power shapes the formation of subjectivities which, in turn, shape the conditions under which subjects ‘enter into history’. Wedded to a repressive understanding of power, Champagne makes a homologous correlation between the current academic institutional marginality of Native studies and the forms of marginality Indigenous communities experience outside the academy. Thus correlated, he argues that a robust and holistic Indigenous paradigm can assist in rectifying this repression. For Champagne, then, academic and nonacademic Indigenous knowledge are comrades-in-arms, with Indigenous studies—anchored in an Indigenous paradigm—providing the missing link. In this guise, his Indigenous paradigm places Indigenous communities and nations at its centre, instead of colonial critique. Native studies, Champagne explains, ‘cannot center on a critique of the colonial experience but rather must focus on the individual and community choices American Indians make to realize their culture, values, and political and economic interests within the constraints and opportunities presented by changing colonial contexts’.23 While colonial critique can be useful for examining external forces relating to political, legal and market conditions, it ‘exclude[s] choice and social action on the part of Native historical and cultural experience, and in effect American Indians are not analyzed as players in their own historical contexts but rather viewed as billiard balls knocked around by powerful colonial powers and forces’.24 Champagne thus draws a clear distinction between, on the one hand, what he thinks Western disciplines, with their focus on colonialism, can explain about indigeneity and on the other, what makes Indigenous peoples truly Indigenous and, presumably, what these disciplines remain unable to explicate. Perhaps equally importantly, he assumes that such boundaries are discrete and readily discernable, such that he effectively erases the object–subject relationship within which all other academic disciplines produce knowledge.25 Champagne’s ostensible focus on Indigenous communities reflects a central disciplinary trope of native studies. For example, Cook-Lynn states bluntly that ‘Indian Studies as an academic discipline was meant to have as it constituencies the native tribal nations of America and its major purpose the defense of lands and resources and the sovereign right to nationtonation status’.26 This emphasis on tribally specific knowledge is also emphasised by Muskogee scholar Craig Womack, who argues the need for ‘more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns’ in a literary context,27 part of a larger ‘literary nationalism’ movement with broadly allied concerns.28 Holm et al. argue even more specifically that native studies should emphasise the exploration and support of and for what they term ‘peoplehood’, positioned to include language, sacred history, territory and ceremony,29 while Kidwell suggests that native studies should endeavour to emphasise Indigenous relationships with land, the inclusion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, our inherent sovereignty and the importance of our Indigenous languages.30 Thus, while Champagne’s focal concerns are not abnormal, his attempt to isolate Indigenous communities epistemologically from the broader social fabric of dominant, whitestream society effectively removes a large part of our arsenal for combatting the damaging representations of Indigeneity woven into larger society. Parts of his argument turn on the idea that colonialism exists external to Indigenous communities and nations, as something we are subject to. Thus, it isn’t that we don’t suffer (from) colonialism; rather, its power resides outside our communities. From this perspective, theories of colonialism are explanatory tools but are not enough in-and-of-themselves because their externality precludes their ability to fully comprehend and analyse our communities’ distinctiveness. In line with the repressive formulation of power which anchors his understanding of Indigenous studies, for Champagne colonialism = sameness/assimilation and indigeneity = difference/freedom. I will have more to say on this below, but suffice it to say for now that his prescriptions become particularly problematic when he attempts to circumscribe the theories and methods native studies should use in analysis of/with Indigenous communities. One can perhaps forgive Champagne’s diagnosis in this context, since it represents only part of his argument and, as I said, is a common trope of Indigenous studies. However, consider a fuller example of his positioning of colonialism: Colonial theories emphasize external forces such as political, legal, market, and cultural constraints and hegemonies to which American Indian communities are subject. Colonial arguments are powerful tools and explain much change in American Indian communities, but the kind of change that is explained is externally enforced and often coercive. Such change is often subtly resisted and not internalized. [footnote omitted] An old Spanish saying is ‘I bend my knee but not my heart’.31 While his statements might legitimately swell our hearts with pride at the ways our ancestors resisted colonialism/oppression while retaining their dignity, traditions and collective self consciousness, they nonetheless avoid questions about how the cultural power of nationstates do not merely oppress, but seduce as well.32 Champagne’s essentialism in effect marginalises the complex ways in which our Indigenous habitus (to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu) is inevitably and irrevocably constituted in and by the fields of struggle we occupy.33 His colonialism thus staggers between a vulgar Marxism which stresses an autonomous subject who can/must reject (or accept) colonialism and an equally vulgar structural-functionalism that measures Indigenous agency and collective choices against a Cartesian indigeneity which exists outside the life and reach of contemporary nation-states’ cultural power.Noble Savage BadRomanticizing Natives as ecologically pure is racist and leads to victim blaming nativeGilio-Whitaker 17, Policy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies, and is an award-winning journalist at Indian Country Media Network. With a bachelor’s in Native American Studies and a master’s in American Studies, Dina’s research interests focuses on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. For the past several years has been involved with Indigenous peoples’ participation in the United Nations arena. (Dina, “The Problem With The Ecological Indian Stereotype,” KCET, )We’ve all heard it a million times: Native Americans are the original environmentalists. Not that it’s not flattering. In a country whose history is built and maintained on the erasure of the “inferior” indigenous population, as a Native person I can say it’s nice to get credit for something once in awhile. Nor is it entirely a falsehood. It’s true that indigenous peoples in the U.S. (and around the world) tend to have relationships with the land and the environment that are qualitatively different than populations built on imperialism and heavy industrialization. But to apply to them the blanket statement that they are “original environmentalists” is to overlook the meaning of the concept of environmentalism on the one hand, and on the other to mischaracterize Native peoples’ actual relationship to land. It creates an impossibly high standard to live up to, exposing Native peoples to dangerous policy objectives when they fail to meet those standards. Euphemistically called the “ecological Indian” stereotype,[1] it has its roots in the earliest portrayals of Indians by European settlers. Back then, though, they were not the celebratory representations they are today. They hark back to a time when Native peoples were generally understood as so inferior that they were not even fully human. Consider the words of George Washington: “Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” To Washington, Indians were clearly no different than animals, indistinguishable from any other form of wildlife. They lurked about in the wilds of the “untamed” landscape, attacking without cause. Naturally, this informed Washington’s policies toward them (which were largely war and displacement), earning him the Iroquois moniker “Town Destroyer.” In the settler imagination Native people had to be constructed as less than human in order to justify settlers’ relentless and often illegal incursions into Indian lands. By the nineteenth century, with the rise of anthropology, emergent theories classified humans by different races in what we know today as scientific racism. The theories that constituted scientific racism contributed to the narrative of the “vanishing Indian” who was doomed to perish by virtue of his inherent inferiority, and these narratives were plainly visible in popular cultural representations. Indians were common subjects of the earliest Hollywood films, which invariably lamented the tragedy of their vanishing at a time when they were outnumbered and militarily defeated. These cinematic representations capitalized on what by then were firmly established tropes of the noble savage in American literature. The noble savage was a recuperated version of the ignoble savage, the wild beasts of the forest who needed to be excised from the environment because they were obstacles to “progress.” Now safely disappearing, the noble savage could be enshrined into America’s romanticized narratives in which settlers as the rightful inheritors of the land were destined to replace the primitive indigenes. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, Indians reliably appeared in cinema and other popular culture texts as the ignoble savage. What would those old spaghetti westerns and Louis L’Amour novels be, after all, without bloodthirsty, marauding Indians? The civil rights movements of the 1960s ushered in a new era of Indian cultural representations. Native peoples were rising up, fighting for the protection of their treaty rights in places like the Pacific Northwest and Alcatraz Island. This is when Indians became cool, even if they were portrayed predominantly by non-Natives. Think Tom Laughlin in Billy Jack; Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse; Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man. 1971 saw the official birth of the environmental Indian stereotype with the launch of an anti-littering campaign that featured the famous “crying Indian.” Dressed in full buckskin regalia and feather headdress — an invocation of the disappeared noble savage — the “Indian” is shown among intermingled images of pristine nature and man-made pollution. Never mind that the Indian is no Indian at all, but the long-ago-outed 100 percent Sicilian fraud Espero Oscar de Corti. Chief Seattle's fake speech excerpt A popular excerpt from a speech attributed to the Suwamish Chief Sealth, but actually written by a Texas screenwriter in 1971. The ecological Indian is thus a mixed bag of beguiling messages. He is part of a larger phenomenon in the American cultural landscape, one that is a reflection of the country’s ambivalent relationship with indigenous peoples. As the noted Native scholar Philip Deloria argued in his now-classic book Playing Indian, this ambivalence spans centuries, embodied in federal policies that vacillated between extermination on the one hand, and assimilation on the other. It explains American’s bizarre obsession with appropriating all things Indian, from the theatrical Indian impersonations of the Boston Tea Party to the Indian hobbyist organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, and even the pervasive use of non-Native actors to play Native roles. Native American appropriation is enmeshed with — really, a product of — the American imperative to claim ownership of that which is not one’s own, beginning with land, and inevitably identity. By the 1960s, when disaffected American youth began waking up to their spiritually and morally bankrupt society, they looked to indigenous peoples for answers. The counterculture movement was born, and back to the land the hippies went, bedecked in beads, feathers, and buckskins. There they lived in pseudo tribal communities (which invariably involved tipis), and flocked to Indian reservations to learn Native wisdom. They learned that Indians had a different, more harmonious relationship to the land. The intensely romanticized savage Indian was redeemed. But he became the symbol of renewed hope for America, the possibility to return to a simpler and more honorable past. At its core, however, the trope of the ecological Indian symbolizes an idealized — and largely fictitious — appeal to a perceived lost purity, and in the words of Noel Sturgeon, is “the founding moment of conservationist or preservationist environmentalism.”[2] Preservation and conservation was the language of the earliest environmentalists, beginning in the early twentieth century with the creation of the National Parks Service. Both imagined a “pure” environment, either free of human interference, or in need of a highly regulated human presence. Either way, the environment was seen for its utilitarian value relative to humans. In other words, humans were viewed as as separate from, and even a threat to, a pristine natural environment. Yet indigenous peoples hadn’t just lived sustainably in virtually all of the landscapes on the continent for thousands of years; many Native nations are also known to have had complex land management practices. That these facts were and are systematically ignored was part of larger patterns of erasure, genocide, and dispossession.Ecologically noble savage myth undermines self-determinationRodrigue-Allouche 15, MA Uppsala, Dept of Archaeology and Ancient History, (Sarah, “Conservation and Indigenous Peoples The adoption of the ecological noble savage discourse and its political consequences, Proquest Theses)In this thesis, I have argued that the claim of indigenous ecological nobility fosters an unethical kind of environmentalism relying on power dynamics between white environmentalists and complex, heterogeneous and changing indigenous peoples. The ecological noble savage idea is based on epistemological racism which has been subtle within environmental movements’ discourse since the 19th century. Dichotomies between nature and men led to essentialism regarding Indigenous societies. If the most archaic form of essentialism, which described Indigenous peoples as barbaric and inferior, gradually disappeared after the Second World War, the most positive form of essentialism ascribing them the role of ecological noble savages has resisted up to today. Indeed, it is much harder to dismantle positive stereotypes than negative ones. Attachment to place and traditional ecological knowledge of a certain region are undeniable but, as I have argued here, the belief that indigenous peoples are intrinsically conservation stewards is a myth, in which we should not buy if we want to adopt an ethical approach to protecting our world free from power dynamics. If we do not want to fall into the trap of racism, hegemony, neo-colonialism and domination, it is essential to rethink environmentalist attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples. The ecological crisis we currently face calls for a common response and a common concern. It is every nation’s responsibility, as well as every individual’s duty to protect our threatened Earth. I suggest that it is time to reconsider a more inclusive way to conceive environmentalism, not based on differences but based on our common destiny as humans. Indeed, in this thesis I have tried demonstrating that stereotypes - even positive - towards Indigenous peoples have been a source of misunderstandings and confusion within the conservation movement. It seems that the main task lies in finding the right balance between human species and non-human species. The quest for ecological protection might be the quest for the balance between species. Alliances between environmentalists and indigenous peoples should be questioned because of their history of ambivalence and failures and contentious confrontations. As I have tried to highlight, land rights relying on conservation aptitudes are doomed to failure and those two concepts should not be mixed and misused. Comparing land rights struggles for indigenous peoples in Amazonia and Australia triggers a reflection about ethical land rights policy in the 21st century. Land stewardship has been used as a political tool, appealing to various stakeholders, to policymakers in global environmental governance, to scientists working for conservation programmes as well as to Indigenous peoples themselves. However, ecological nobility has presented many dangers and shortcomings when used as a political tool. Traditional ecological knowledge and community-based conservation have sometimes been disregarded or abused by policy-makers. Locked in a role of ecological noble savages, indigenous peoples have not benefited from selfdetermination as much as they could have expected given the United Nations declarations AT: Resource LinkSettler legalese of “resource” management and sovereignty paradigms ensures pro indigenous water protections that spill up to challenge colonization – refuse authenticity tests of contact zone maneuvering Hemming et al 19 (Steve Hemming, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney. Daryle Rigney, Director of the INCF Research Hub, a citizen of the Ngarrindjeri Nation. Simone Bignall, Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Strategy and Engagement at Flinders University. Shaun Berg, Berg Lawyers. Grant Rigney, Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority. (2019) Indigenous nation building for environmental futures: Murrundi flows through Ngarrindjeri country, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 26:3, 216-235, DOI: 10.1080/14486563.2019.1651227)Ngarrindjeri are First Nations people of the southern-most estuarine region of the Murray-Darling Basin where the ‘meeting of the waters’ takes place, as the fresh waters of Murrundi (River Murray) flow through the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth and mix with tidal salt water (see Bell 1998, 2008; Ngarrindjeri Nation 2006; Taplin 1878). The topography and confluence of flows produces a unique coastal wetland ecology, protected in 1971 under the international Ramsar Convention, as a region of global significance (see Hemming and Rigney 2012). The crucial importance of the ‘Meeting of the Waters’ for Ngarrindjeri is now registered under South Australian cultural heritage legislation (see Bell 1998, 562–570; Hemming 2009). This recognition was hard-won, coming only after a protracted legal process including a Royal Commission into the Hindmarsh Island bridge development, in which the verity and significance of Ngarrindjeri traditions was publicly debated and contested by ‘expert’ evidence (see Bell 1998; Fergie 1996; Hemming 1996, 2006; Simons 2002; Stevens 1995). The legal and 218 S. HEMMING ET AL. political processes ultimately enabled the capital works to proceed in the face of Ngarrindjeri concerns that the development would desecrate and destroy elements of a key, ‘watersbased’ creation place (see Saunders 2003; Trevorrow 2003). Despite the devastating toll this issue exerted on Ngarrindjeri leaders, elders and citizens, they emerged from it with an increased political literacy and understanding of the settler legal system (see Hemming, Rigney, and Pearce 2007; Trevorrow and Hemming 2006).Ngarrindjeri leaders have since used this insight to support the (re)building of their Indigenous Nation and have revitalised authoritative structures of political representation, making the peak governance bodies of this Aboriginal Nation more capable and effective in asserting Ngarrindjeri rights and interests in the lands and waters that comprise Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwar (spirit/body/Country). Recognising, resisting and refusing the violence of authenticity tests deployed by the settler state, in contexts such as cultural heritage management (CHM), native title claims and natural resource management (NRM), is a crucial first step towards water justice and the advancement of sovereign, Ngarrindjeri Nation (re)building (see Hemming and Rigney 2010; Hemming, Trevorrow, and Rigney 2002; Jackson and Langton 2012; Simpson 2014). A long-term alliance between strong political leadership, critically engaged scholarship 2 and independent legal advice, has also been important to the success of Ngarrindjeri strategies in ongoing, colonising ‘contact zone’ relations (see Berg 2010; Bignall, Hemming, and Rigney 2016; Cornell 2015a, 2015b; Hemming 2006; Hemming et al. 2016; Hemming and Rigney 2008, 2010; Pratt 1992; Vivian et al. 2016). Over many years, Ngarrindjeri Nation (re)building activities have relied upon the committed support of scholars at Flinders University and independent legal representation from Berg Lawyers. Research, funded by initiatives such as the Murray Futures Program, through the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Goyder Institute for Water Research and other scientific bodies, has assisted Ngarrindjeri leaders to effectively map, understand and work to transform the colonising systems of power and distributive justice that affect the governance capacity of Indigenous Nations and Country (see, e.g. DEWNR and NRA 2014a, 21; Hemming and Rigney 2016; Hemming, Trevorrow, and Rigney 2002; Hemming et al. 2017; Rigney, Hemming, and Berg 2008). This ongoing program of political leadership supported by formal research that employs a decolonising methodology with a specifically sovereign Indigenous agenda (Smith 1998) has focussed on securing Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe and creating a just relationship with the Australian settler-state.AT: Extinction LinkExtinction outweighs Burns 17 (Elizabeth Finneron-Burns is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick and an Affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, What’s wrong with human extinction?, , Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2017)Many, though certainly not all, people might believe that it would be wrong to bring about the end of the human species, and the reasons given for this belief are various. I begin by considering four reasons that could be given against the moral permissibility of human extinction. I will argue that only those reasons that impact the people who exist at the time that the extinction or the knowledge of the upcoming extinction occurs, can explain its wrongness. I use this conclusion to then consider in which cases human extinction would be morally permissible or impermissible, arguing that there is only a small class of cases in which it would not be wrong to cause the extinction of the human race or allow it to happen. 2.1. It would prevent the existence of very many happy people One reason of human extinction might be considered to be wrong lies in the value of human life itself. The thought here might be that it is a good thing for people to exist and enjoy happy lives and extinction would deprive more people of enjoying this good. The ‘good’ in this case could be understood in at least two ways. According to the first, one might believe that you benefit a person by bringing them into existence, or at least, that it is good for that person that they come to exist. The second view might hold that if humans were to go extinct, the utility foregone by the billions (or more) of people who could have lived but will now never get that opportunity, renders allowing human extinction to take place an incidence of wrongdoing. An example of this view can be found in two quotes from an Effective Altruism blog post by Peter Singer, Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage: One very bad thing about human extinction would be that billions of people would likely die painful deaths. But in our view, this is by far not the worst thing about human extinction. The worst thing about human extinction is that there would be no future generations. Since there could be so many generations in our future, the value of all those generations together greatly exceeds the value of the current generation. (Beckstead, Singer, and Wage 2013) The authors are making two claims. The first is that there is value in human life and also something valuable about creating future people which gives us a reason to do so; furthermore, it would be a very bad thing if we did not do so. The second is that, not only would it be a bad thing for there to be no future people, but it would actually be the worst thing about extinction. Since happy human lives have value, and the number of potential people who could ever exist is far greater than the number of people who exist at any one time, even if the extinction were brought about through the painful deaths of currently existing people, the former’s loss would be greater than the latter’s. Both claims are assuming that there is an intrinsic value in the existence of potential human life. The second claim makes the further assumption that the forgone value of the potential lives that could be lived is greater than the disvalue that would be accrued by people existing at the time of the extinction through suffering from painful and/or premature deaths. The best-known author of the post, Peter Singer is a prominent utilitarian, so it is not surprising that he would lament the potential lack of future human lives per se. However, it is not just utilitarians who share this view, even if implicitly. Indeed, other philosophers also seem to imply that they share the intuition that there is just something wrong with causing or failing to prevent the extinction of the human species such that we prevent more ‘people’ from having the ‘opportunity to exist’. Stephen Gardiner (2009) and Martin O’Neill (personal correspondence), both sympathetic to contract theory, for example, also find it intuitive that we should want more generations to have the opportunity to exist, assuming that they have worth-living lives, and I find it plausible to think that many other people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) probably share this intuition. When we talk about future lives being ‘prevented’, we are saying that a possible person or a set of possible people who could potentially have existed will now never actually come to exist. To say that it is wrong to prevent people from existing could either mean that a possible person could reasonably reject a principle that permitted us not to create them, or that the foregone value of their lives provides a reason for rejecting any principle that permits extinction. To make the first claim we would have to argue that a possible person could reasonably reject any principle that prevented their existence on the grounds that it prevented them in particular from existing. However, this is implausible for two reasons. First, we can only wrong someone who did, does or will actually exist because wronging involves failing to take a person’s interests into account. When considering the permissibility of a principle allowing us not to create Person X, we cannot take X’s interest in being created into account because X will not exist if we follow the principle. By considering the standpoint of a person in our deliberations we consider the burdens they will have to bear as a result of the principle. In this case, there is no one who will bear any burdens since if the principle is followed (that is, if we do not create X), X will not exist to bear any burdens. So, only people who do/will actually exist can bear the brunt of a principle, and therefore occupy a standpoint that is owed justification. Second, existence is not an interest at all and a possible person is not disadvantaged by not being caused to exist. Rather than being an interest, it is a necessary requirement in order to have interests. Rivka Weinberg describes it as ‘neutral’ because causing a person to exist is to create a subject who can have interests; existence is not an interest itself.3 In order to be disadvantaged, there must be some detrimental effect on your interests. However, without existence, a person does not have any interests so they cannot be disadvantaged by being kept out of existence. But, as Weinberg points out, ‘never having interests itself could not be contrary to people’s interests since without interest bearers, there can be no ‘they’ for it to be bad for’ (Weinberg 2008, 13). So, a principle that results in some possible people never becoming actual does not impose any costs on those ‘people’ because nobody is disadvantaged by not coming into existence.4 It therefore seems that it cannot be wrong to fail to bring particular people into existence. This would mean that no one acts wrongly when they fail to create another person. Writ large, it would also not be wrong if everybody decided to exercise their prerogative not to create new people and potentially, by consequence, allow human extinction. One might respond here by saying that although it may be permissible for one person to fail to create a new person, it is not permissible if everyone chooses to do so because human lives have value and allowing human extinction would be to forgo a huge amount of value in the world. This takes us to the second way of understanding the potential wrongness of preventing people from existing — the foregone value of a life provides a reason for rejecting any principle that prevents it. One possible reply to this claim turns on the fact that many philosophers acknowledge that the only, or at least the best, way to think about the value of (individual or groups of) possible people’s lives is in impersonal terms (Parfit 1984; Reiman 2007; McMahan 2009). Jeff McMahan, for example, writes ‘at the time of one’s choice there is no one who exists or will exist independently of that choice for whose sake one could be acting in causing him or her to exist … it seems therefore that any reason to cause or not to cause an individual to exist … is best considered an impersonal rather than individual-affecting reason’ (McMahan 2009, 52). Another reply along similar lines would be to appeal to the value that is lost or at least foregone when we fail to bring into existence a next (or several next) generations of people with worth-living lives. Since ex hypothesi worth-living lives have positive value, it is better to create more such lives and worse to create fewer. Human extinction by definition is the creation of no future lives and would ‘deprive’ billions of ‘people’ of the opportunity to live worth-living lives. This might reduce the amount of value in the world at the time of the extinction (by killing already existing people), but it would also prevent a much vaster amount of value in the future (by failing to create more people). Both replies depend on the impersonal value of human life. However, recall that in contractualism impersonal values are not on their own grounds for reasonably rejecting principles. Scanlon himself says that although we have a strong reason not to destroy existing human lives, this reason ‘does not flow from the thought that it is a good thing for there to be more human life rather than less’ (104). In contractualism, something cannot be wrong unless there is an impact on a person. Thus, neither the impersonal value of creating a particular person nor the impersonal value of human life writ large could on its own provide a reason for rejecting a principle permitting human extinction. It seems therefore that the fact that extinction would deprive future people of the opportunity to live worth-living lives (either by failing to create either particular future people or future people in general) cannot provide us with a reason to consider human extinction to be wrong. Although the lost value of these ‘lives’ itself cannot be the reason explaining the wrongness of extinction, it is possible the knowledge of this loss might create a personal reason for some existing people. I will consider this possibility later on in section (d). But first I move to the second reason human extinction might be wrong per se. 2.2. It would mean the loss of the only known form of intelligent life and all civilization and intellectual progress would be lost A second reason we might think it would be wrong to cause human extinction is the loss that would occur of the only (known) form of rational life and the knowledge and civilization that that form of life has created. One thought here could be that just as some might consider it wrong to destroy an individual human heritage monument like the Sphinx, it would also be wrong if the advances made by humans over the past few millennia were lost or prevented from progressing. A related argument is made by those who feel that there is something special about humans’ capacity for rationality which is valuable in itself. Since humans are the only intelligent life that we know of, it would be a loss, in itself, to the world for that to end. I admit that I struggle to fully appreciate this thought. It seems to me that Henry Sidgwick was correct in thinking that these things are only important insofar as they are important to humans (Sidgwick 1874, I.IX.4).5 If there is no form of intelligent life in the future, who would there be to lament its loss since intelligent life is the only form of life capable of appreciating intelligence? Similarly, if there is no one with the rational capacity to appreciate historic monuments and civil progress, who would there be to be negatively affected or even notice the loss?6 However, even if there is nothing special about human rationality, just as some people try to prevent the extinction of nonhuman animal species, we might think that we ought also to prevent human extinction for the sake of biodiversity. The thought in this, as well as the earlier examples, must be that it would somehow be bad for the world if there were no more humans even though there would be no one for whom it is bad. This may be so but the only way to understand this reason is impersonally. Since we are concerned with wrongness rather than badness, we must ask whether something that impacts no one’s well-being, status or claims can be wrong. As we saw earlier, in the contractualist framework reasons must be personal rather than impersonal in order to provide grounds for reasonable rejection (Scanlon 1998, 218–223). Since the loss of civilization, intelligent life or biodiversity are per se impersonal reasons, there is no standpoint from which these reasons could be used to reasonably reject a principle that permitted extinction. Therefore, causing human extinction on the grounds of the loss of civilization, rational life or biodiversity would not be wrong. 2.3. Existing people would endure physical pain and/or painful and/or premature deaths Thinking about the ways in which human extinction might come about brings to the fore two more reasons it might be wrong. It could, for example, occur if all humans (or at least the critical number needed to be unable to replenish the population, leading to eventual extinction) underwent a sterilization procedure. Or perhaps it could come about due to anthropogenic climate change or a massive asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out the species in the same way it did the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Each of these scenarios would involve significant physical and/or non-physical harms to existing people and their interests. Physically, people might suffer premature and possibly also painful deaths, for example. It is not hard to imagine examples in which the process of extinction could cause premature death. A nuclear winter that killed everyone or even just every woman under the age of 50 is a clear example of such a case. Obviously, some types of premature death themselves cannot be reasons to reject a principle. Every person dies eventually, sometimes earlier than the standard expected lifespan due to accidents or causes like spontaneously occurring incurable cancers. A cause such as disease is not a moral agent and therefore it cannot be wrong if it unavoidably kills a person prematurely. Scanlon says that the fact that a principle would reduce a person’s well-being gives that person a reason to reject the principle: ‘components of well-being figure prominently as grounds for reasonable rejection’ (Scanlon 1998, 214). However, it is not settled yet whether premature death is a setback to well-being. Some philosophers hold that death is a harm to the person who dies, whilst others argue that it is not.7 I will argue, however, that regardless of who is correct in that debate, being caused to die prematurely can be reason to reject a principle when it fails to show respect to the person as a rational agent. Scanlon says that recognizing others as rational beings with interests involves seeing reason to preserve life and prevent death: ‘appreciating the value of human life is primarily a matter of seeing human lives as something to be respected, where this involves seeing reasons not to destroy them, reasons to protect them, and reasons to want them to go well’ (Scanlon 1998, 104). The ‘respect for life’ in this case is a respect for the person living, not respect for human life in the abstract. This means that we can sometimes fail to protect human life without acting wrongfully if we still respect the person living. Scanlon gives the example of a person who faces a life of unending and extreme pain such that she wishes to end it by committing suicide. Scanlon does not think that the suicidal person shows a lack of respect for her own life by seeking to end it because the person whose life it is has no reason to want it to go on. This is important to note because it emphasizes the fact that the respect for human life is person-affecting. It is not wrong to murder because of the impersonal disvalue of death in general, but because taking someone’s life without their permission shows disrespect to that person. This supports its inclusion as a reason in the contractualist formula, regardless of what side ends up winning the ‘is death a harm?’ debate because even if death turns out not to harm the person who died, ending their life without their consent shows disrespect to that person. A person who could reject a principle permitting another to cause his or her premature death presumably does not wish to die at that time, or in that manner. Thus, if they are killed without their consent, their interests have not been taken into account, and they have a reason to reject the principle that allowed their premature death.8 This is as true in the case of death due to extinction as it is for death due to murder. However, physical pain may also be caused to existing people without killing them, but still resulting in human extinction. Imagine, for example, surgically removing everyone’s reproductive organs in order to prevent the creation of any future people. Another example could be a nuclear bomb that did not kill anyone, but did painfully render them infertile through illness or injury. These would be cases in which physical pain (through surgery or bombs) was inflicted on existing people and the extinction came about as a result of the painful incident rather than through death. Furthermore, one could imagine a situation in which a bomb (for example) killed enough people to cause extinction, but some people remained alive, but in terrible pain from injuries. It seems uncontroversial that the infliction of physical pain could be a reason to reject a principle. Although Scanlon says that an impact on well-being is not the only reason to reject principles, it plays a significant role, and indeed, most principles are likely to be rejected due to a negative impact on a person’s well-being, physical or otherwise. It may be queried here whether it is actually the involuntariness of the pain that is grounds for reasonable rejection rather than the physical pain itself because not all pain that a person suffers is involuntary. One can imagine acts that can cause physical pain that are not rejectable — base jumping or life-saving or improving surgery, for example. On the other hand, pushing someone off a cliff or cutting him with a scalpel against his will are clearly rejectable acts. The difference between the two cases is that in the former, the person having the pain inflicted has consented to that pain or risk of pain. My view is that they cannot be separated in these cases and it is involuntary physical pain that is the grounds for reasonable rejection. Thus, the fact that a principle would allow unwanted physical harm gives a person who would be subjected to that harm a reason to reject the principle. Of course the mere fact that a principle causes involuntary physical harm or premature death is not sufficient to declare that the principle is rejectable — there might be countervailing reasons. In the case of extinction, what countervailing reasons might be offered in favour of the involuntary physical pain/ death-inducing harm? One such reason that might be offered is that humans are a harm to the natural environment and that the world might be a better place if there were no humans in it. It could be that humans might rightfully be considered an all-things-considered hindrance to the world rather than a benefit to it given the fact that we have been largely responsible for the extinction of many species, pollution and, most recently, climate change which have all negatively affected the natural environment in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Thus, the fact that human extinction would improve the natural environment (or at least prevent it from degrading further), is a countervailing reason in favour of extinction to be weighed against the reasons held by humans who would experience physical pain or premature death. However, the good of the environment as described above is by definition not a personal reason. Just like the loss of rational life and civilization, therefore, it cannot be a reason on its own when determining what is wrong and countervail the strong personal reasons to avoid pain/death that is held by the people who would suffer from it.9 Every person existing at the time of the extinction would have a reason to reject that principle on the grounds of the physical pain they are being forced to endure against their will that could not be countervailed by impersonal considerations such as the negative impact humans may have on the earth. Therefore, a principle that permitted extinction to be accomplished in a way that caused involuntary physical pain or premature death could quite clearly be rejectable by existing people with no relevant countervailing reasons. This means that human extinction that came about in this way would be wrong. There are of course also additional reasons they could reject a similar principle which I now turn to address in the next section. 2.4. Existing people could endure non-physical harms I said earlier than the fact in itself that there would not be any future people is an impersonal reason and can therefore not be a reason to reject a principle permitting extinction. However, this impersonal reason could give rise to a personal reason that is admissible. So, the final important reason people might think that human extinction would be wrong is that there could be various deleterious psychological effects that would be endured by existing people having the knowledge that there would be no future generations. There are two main sources of this trauma, both arising from the knowledge that there will be no more people. The first relates to individual people and the undesired negative effect on well-being that would be experienced by those who would have wanted to have children. Whilst this is by no means universal, it is fair to say that a good proportion of people feel a strong pull towards reproduction and having their lineage continue in some way. Samuel Scheffler describes the pull towards reproduction as a ‘desire for a personalized relationship with the future’ (Scheffler 2012, 31). Reproducing is a widely held desire and the joys of parenthood are ones that many people wish to experience. For these people knowing that they would not have descendants (or that their descendants will endure painful and/or premature deaths) could create a sense of despair and pointlessness of life. Furthermore, the inability to reproduce and have your own children because of a principle/policy that prevents you (either through bans or physical interventions) would be a significant infringement of what we consider to be a basic right to control what happens to your body. For these reasons, knowing that you will have no descendants could cause significant psychological traumas or harms even if there were no associated physical harm. The second is a more general, higher level sense of hopelessness or despair that there will be no more humans and that your projects will end with you. Even those who did not feel a strong desire to procreate themselves might feel a sense of hopelessness that any projects or goals they have for the future would not be fulfilled. Many of the projects and goals we work towards during our lifetime are also at least partly future-oriented. Why bother continuing the search for a cure for cancer if either it will not be found within humans’ lifetime, and/or there will be no future people to benefit from it once it is found? Similar projects and goals that might lose their meaning when confronted with extinction include politics, artistic pursuits and even the type of philosophical work with which this paper is concerned. Even more extreme, through the words of the character Theo Faron, P.D. James says in his novel The Children of Men that ‘without the hope of posterity for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins’ (James 2006, 9). Even if James’ claim is a bit hyperbolic and all pleasures would not actually be lost, I agree with Scheffler in finding it not implausible that the knowledge that extinction was coming and that there would be no more people would have at least a general depressive effect on people’s motivation and confidence in the value of and joy in their activities (Scheffler 2012, 43). Both sources of psychological harm are personal reasons to reject a principle that permitted human extinction. Existing people could therefore reasonably reject the principle for either of these reasons. Psychological pain and the inability to pursue your personal projects, goals, and aims, are all acceptable reasons for rejecting principles in the contractualist framework. So too are infringements of rights and entitlements that we accept as important for people’s lives. These psychological reasons, then, are also valid reasons to reject principles that permitted or required human extinction. Existential fears need not be settler projections of demise but can be contingently appropriated to reverse indigenous erasureWeiss 15—Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago (Joseph, “UNSETTLING FUTURES: HAIDA FUTURE-MAKING, POLITICS AND MOBILITY IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL PRESENT,” Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Division of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, December 2015, 223-232, dml)And yet, something has changed in this landscape from the initial erasures of Native futurity we drew out in the first chapter. In the narratives of colonial actors like Duncan Campbell Scott, it was absolutely clear that “Indians” were disappearing because their social worlds were being superseded by more “civilized” ways of living and being, ones that these Native subjects would also, inevitably, in the end, adopt (or failing that, perish outright). There was a future. It was simply a settler one. But the nightmare futures of that my Haida interlocutors ward against in their own future-making reach beyond Haida life alone. Environmental collapse, most dramatically, threatens the sustainability of all life; toxins in the land and the waters threaten human lives regardless of their relative indigeneity, race, or gender (e.g. Choy 2011; Crate 2011). Put another way, the impetus for non-Haida (and non-First Nations subjects more generally) to be “united against Enbridge” with their indigenous neighbours comes in no small part because an oil spill also profoundly threatens the lives and livelihoods of non-Aboriginal coastal residents, a fact which Masa Takei, among others, made clear in Chapter 3. Nor is the anxiety that young people might abandon their small town to pursue economic and educational advantage in an urban context limited to reserve communities. Instead, the compulsions of capitalist economic life compel such migrations throughout the globe. The nightmare futures that Haida people constitute alternative futures to ward against are not just future of indigenous erasure under settler colonialism. They are erasures of settler society itself. There is thus an extraordinary political claim embedded in Haida future-making, a claim which gains its power precisely because Haida future-making as we have seen it does not (perhaps cannot) escape from the larger field of settler-colonial determination. Instead, in Haida future-making we find the implicit assertion that Haida people can make futures that address the dilemmas of Haida and settler life alike, ones that can at least “navigate,” to borrow Appadurai’s phrasing, towards possible futures that do not end in absolute erasure. If Povinelli and Byrd are correct and settler liberal governance makes itself possible and legitimate through a perpetual deferral of the problems of the present, then part of the power of Haida future-making is to expose the threatening non-futures that might emerge out of this bracketed present, to expose as lie the liberal promise of a good life always yet to come and to attempt to constitute alternatives. AT: Decol FailsBorder Dispute Turn – decolonization centered on land return is untenable – they can’t settle territorial disputes between native communities – intensifies colonial violenceGupta and Ferguson 92 (Akhil Gupta – Department of Anthropology at Stanford, and James Ferguson – Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7(1):6-23)Representations of space in the social sciences are remarkably dependent on images of break, rupture, and disjunction. The distinctiveness of societies, nations, and cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic division of space, on the fact that they occupy "naturally" discontinuous spaces. The premise of discontinuity forms the starting point from which to theorize contact, conflict, and contradiction between cultures and societies. For example, the representation of the world as a collection of "countries," as in most world maps, sees it as an inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each "rooted" in its proper place (cf. Malkki, this issue). It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms "society" and "culture" are routinely simply appended to the names of nation-states, as when a tourist visits India to understand "Indian culture" and "Indian society," or Thailand to experience "Thai culture," or the United States to get a whiff of "American culture." Of course, the geographical territories that cultures and societies are believed to map onto do not have to be nations. We do, for example, have ideas about culture-areas that overlap several nation-states, or of multicultural nations. On a smaller scale, perhaps, are our disciplinary assumptions about the association of culturally unitary groups (tribes or peoples) with "their" territories: thus, "the Nuer" live in "Nuerland" and so forth. The clearest illustration of this kind of thinking are the classic "ethnographic maps" that purported to display the spatial distribution of peoples, tribes, and cultures. But in all these cases, space itself becomes a kind of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization are inscribed. It is in this way that space functions as a central organizing principle in the social sciences at the same time that it disappears from analytical purview. This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture results in some significant problems. First, there is the issue of those who inhabit the border, that "narrow strip along steep edges" (Anzaldua 1987:3)of national boundaries. The fiction of cultures as discrete, object-like phenomena occupying discrete spaces becomes implausible for those who inhabit the borderlands. Related to border inhabitants are those who live a life of border crossings-migrant workers, nomads, and members of the transnational business and professional elite. What is "the culture" of farm workers who spend half a year in Mexico and half a year in the United States? Finally, there are those who cross borders more or less permanently- immigrants, refugees, exiles, and expatriates. In their case, the disjuncture of place and culture is especially clear: Khmer refugees in the United States take "Khmer culture" with them in the same complicated way that Indian immigrants in England transport "Indian culture" to their new homeland. A second set of problems raised by the implicit mapping of cultures onto places is to account for cultural differences within a locality. "Multiculturalism" is both a feeble acknowledgment of the fact that cultures have lost their moorings in definite places and an attempt to subsume this plurality of cultures within the framework of a national identity. Similarly, the idea of "subcultures" attempts to preserve the idea of distinct "cultures" while acknowledging the relation of different cultures to a dominant culture within the same geographical and territorial space. Conventional accounts of ethnicity, even when used to describe cultural differences in settings where people from different regions live side by side, rely on an unproblematic link between identity and place.' Although such concepts are suggestive because they endeavor to stretch the naturalized association of culture with place, they fail to interrogate this assumption in a truly fundamental manner. We need to ask how to deal with cultural difference while abandoning received ideas of (localized) culture. Third, there is the important question of postcoloniality. To which places do the hybrid cultures of postcoloniality belong? Does the colonial encounter create a "new culture" in both the colonized and colonizing country, or does it destabilize the notion that nations and cultures are isomorphic? As discussed below, postcoloniality further problematizes the relationship between space and culture. Last, and most important, challenging the ruptured landscape of independent nations and autonomous cultures raises the question of understanding social change and cultural transformation as situated within interconnected spaces. The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power. The inherently fragmented space assumed in the definition of anthropology as the study of cultures (in the plural) may have been one of the reasons behind the long-standing failure to write anthropology's history as the biography of imperialism. For if one begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected, then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking difference through connection. To illustrate, let us examine one powerful model of cultural change that attempts to relate dialectically the local to larger spatial arenas: articulation. Articulation models, whether they come from Marxist structuralism or from "moral economy," posit a primeval state of autonomy (usually labeled "precapitalist"), which is then violated by global capitalism. The result is that both local and larger spatial arenas are transformed, the local more than the global to be sure, but not necessarily in a predetermined direction. This notion of articulation allows one to explore the richly unintended consequences of, say, colonial capitalism, where loss occurs alongside invention. Yet, by taking a preexisting, localized "community" as a given starting point, it fails to examine sufficiently the processes (such as the structures of feeling that pervade the imagining of community) that go into the construction of space as place or locality in the first instance. In other words, instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed. Colonialism, then, represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another. This is not to deny that colonialism, or an expanding capitalism, does indeed have profoundly dislocating effects on existing societies. But by always foregrounding the spatial distribution of hierarchical power relations, we can better understand the process whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place. Keeping in mind that notions of locality or community refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction, we can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a community or locality. The Unites States doesn’t want decolonization.Lafeber 2000, Walter, Cornell History Professor “The American View of Decolonization, 1776–1920: an Ironic Legacy” DOI // Zoey Since 1776, when their Declaration of Independence listed their lengthy grievances against British colonial rule and argued eloquently for self government based on ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’, Americans have professed to lead the world’s decolonization struggle.1 They have professed to do so, and sometimes have actually done so, but at critical junctures in the past two centuries, they have easily sacrificed the principles of decolonization for the practices of imperial conquest and global hegemony. Americans, to paraphrase St Augustine’s famous prayer, have often demanded decolonization, but then added they do not want it quite yet. AT: PessimismThe settler state as unified, immutable, and inevitably dangerous creates a pessimism trap – ensures racist authenticity testing of indigenous organizations that seek co-existence, increased settler violence, and disavows gains like the UN Declaration of Indigenous RightsLightfoot 20—associate professor in First Nations and Indigenous Studies and the Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Ojibwe (Sheryl, “The Pessimism Traps of Indigenous Resurgence,” Pessimism in International Relations, Chapter 9, pp 162-170, SpringerLink)Pessimism Trap 2: The State is Unified, Deliberate and Unchanging in Its Desire to Dispossess Indigenous Peoples and Gain Unfettered Access to Indigenous Lands and ResourcesIn other words, colonialism by settler states is a constant, not a variable, in both outcome and intent. Further, the state is not only intentionally colonial, but it is also unifed in its desire to co-opt Indigenous peoples as a method and means of control. In 2005’s Wasase, Alfred presents the state as unitary, intentional and unchanging in its desire to colonise and oppress Indigenous peoples noting, ‘I think that the only thing that has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have lost heart’.22 Referring to current state policies as a ‘self-termination movement’, Alfred states, ‘It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our deep attachments to land’.23 Alfred’s Peace, Power, Righteousness (2009) also argues that the state is deliberate and unchanging, stating quite plainly that ‘it is still the objective of the Canadian and US governments to remove Indians, or, failing that, to prevent them from benefitting, from their ancestral territories’.24 Contemporary states do this, he argues, not through outright violent control but ‘by insidiously promoting a form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal mainstream’.25 According to Alfred, the state ‘relegates indigenous peoples’ rights to the past, and constrains the development of their societies by allowing only those activities that support its own necessary illusion: that indigenous peoples today do not present a serious challenge to its legitimacy’.26 Linking back to the aim of co-option, Alfred argues that while the state’s desire to control Indigenous peoples and lands has never changed, the techniques for doing so have become subtler over time. ‘Recognizing the power of the indigenous challenge and unable to deny it a voice’, due to successful Indigenous resistance over the years, ‘the state has (now) attempted to pull indigenous people closer to it’.27 According to Alfred, the state has outwitted Indigenous leaders and ‘encouraged them to reframe and moderate their nationhood demands to accept the fait accompli of colonization, (and) to collaborate in the development of a “solution” that does not challenge the fundamental imperial lie’.28 In a similar vein, Coulthard’s central argument is centred on his understanding of the dual structure of colonialism. Drawing directly from Fanon, Coulthard finds that colonialism relies on both objective and subjective elements. The objective components involve domination through the political, economic and legal structures of the colonial state. The subjective elements of colonialism involve the creation of ‘colonized subjects’, including a process of internalisation by which colonised subjects come to not only accept the limited forms of ‘misrecognition’ granted through the state but can even come to identify with it.29 Through this dual structure, colonial power now works through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, actively shaping their perspectives in line with state discourses, rather than merely excluding them, as in years past. Therefore, any attempt to seek ‘the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority’.30 Concerning the state in relation to Indigenous peoples on the international level, Corntassel argues that states and global organisations, for years, have been consistently framing Indigenous peoples’ self-determination claims in ways that ‘jeopardize the futures of indigenous communities’.31 He claims that states frst compartmentalise Indigenous self-determination by separating lands and resources from political and legal recognition of a limited autonomy. Second, he notes, states sometimes deny the existence of Indigenous peoples living within their borders. Thirdly, a political and legal entitlement framing by states deemphasises other responsibilities. Finally, he claims that states, through the rights discourse, limit the frameworks through which Indigenous peoples can seek self-determination. Like Alfred and Coulthard, Corntassel has concluded that states are deliberate and never changing in their behaviour. With this move, Corntassel limits and actually demeans Indigenous agency, overlooking the reality that Indigenous organisations themselves chose the human rights framework and rights discourse as a target sphere of action precisely because, as was evident in earlier struggles like slavery, civil rights or women’s rights, these were tools available to them that had a proven track record of opening up new possibilities and shifting previous state positions and behaviour. Indigenous advocates also cleverly realised, by the 1970s, that the anti-discrimination and decolonisation frames could be used together against states. States did, in no way, nefariously impose a rights framework on Indigenous peoples. Rather, Indigenous organisations and savvy Indigenous political actors deliberately chose to frame their self-determination struggles within the human rights framework in order to bring states into a double bind where they could not credibly claim to adhere to human rights and claim that they uphold equality while simultaneously denying Indigenous peoples’ human rights and leaving them with a diminished and unequal right of self-determination. But, because he is caught in the pessimism trap of seeing the state only as unified, deliberate and unchanging, Corntassel overlooks and diminishes the clear story of Indigenous agency and the potential for positive change in advancing self-determination in a multitude of ways.Pessimism Trap 3: Engagement with the Settler State is Futile, if?Not Counter-Productive Since the state always intends to maintain, if not expand, colonial control, and is seeking to co-opt as many Indigenous peoples as possible in order to maintain or expand its dispossession and control, it is therefore futile, at best, and actually dangerous to Indigenous existence to engage with the state. Furthermore, all patterns of engagement will lead to co-optation as the state is cunning and unrelenting in its desire to co-opt Indigenous leaders, academics and professionals in order to gain or maintain control of Indigenous peoples. Alfred argues, in both his 2005 and 2009 books, that any Indigenous engagement with the state, including agreements and negotiations, is not only futile but fundamentally dangerous, as such pathways do not directly challenge the existing colonial structure and ‘to argue on behalf of indigenous nationhood within the dominant Western paradigm is self-defeating’.32 Alfred states that a ‘notion of nationhood or self-government rooted in state institutions and framed within the context of state sovereignty can never satisfy the imperatives of Native American political traditions’33 because the possibility for a true expression of Indigenous self-determination is ‘precluded by the state’s insistence on dominion and its exclusionary notion of sovereignty’.34 Worst of all, according to Alfred, when Indigenous communities frame their struggles in terms of asserting Aboriginal rights and title, but do so within a state framework, rather than resisting the state itself, it ‘represents the culmination of white society’s efforts to assimilate indigenous peoples’.35 Because it is impossible to advance Indigenous self-determination through any sort of engagement with the state, Coulthard also advocates for an Indigenous resurgence paradigm that follows both his mentor Taiaiake Alfred but also Anishinaabe feminist theorist Leanne Simpson.36 As Coulthard writes, ‘both Alfred and Simpson start from a position that calls on Indigenous peoples and communities to “turn away” from the assimilative reformism of the liberal recognition approach and to instead build our national liberation efforts on the revitalization of “traditional” political values and practices’.37 Drawing upon the prescriptive approach of these theorists, Coulthard proposes, in his concluding chapter, five theses from his analysis that are intended to build and solidify Indigenous resurgence into the future:1. On the necessity of direct action, meaning that physical forms of Indigenous resistance, like protest and blockades, are very important not only as a reaction to the state but also as a means of protecting the lands that are central to Indigenous peoples’ existence; 2. Capitalism, No More!, meaning the rejection of capitalist forms of economic development in Indigenous communities in favour of land-based Indigenous political-economic alternative approaches; 3. Dispossession and Indigenous Sovereignty in the City, meaning the need for Indigenous resurgence movements ‘to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples’ experiences in both urban and land-based settings’38; 4. Gender Justice and Decolonisation, meaning that decolonisation must also include a shift away from patriarchy and an embrace of gender relations that are non-violent and refective of the centrality of women in traditional forms of Indigenous governance and society; and 5. Beyond the Nation-State. While Coulthard denies that he advocates complete rejection of engagement with the state’s political and legal system, he does assert that ‘our efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed, but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political confgurations of power that we initially sought…to challenge’.39 He therefore advocates expressly for ‘critical self-refection, skepticism, and caution’ in a ‘resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions’.40 Corntassel also demonstrates the third pessimism trap, that all engagement with the state is ultimately futile. For the most part, however, Corntassel’s observation is that the UN system operates like a reverse Keck and Sikkink ‘boomerang model’ and ‘channels the energies of transnational Indigenous networks into the institutional fiefdoms of member countries’, by which an ‘illusion of inclusion’ is created.41 He argues that, in order to be included or their views listened to, Indigenous delegates at the UN must mimic the strategies, language, norms and modes of behaviour of member states and international institutions. Corntassel fnds that ‘what results is a cadre of professionalized Indigenous delegates who demonstrate more allegiance to the UN system than to their own communities’.42 In his final analysis, he charges that the co-optation of international Indigenous political actors is highly ‘effective in challenging the unity of the global Indigenous rights movement and hindering genuine dialogue regarding Indigenous self-determination and justice’.43 Finding that states deliberately co-opt and provide ‘illusions of inclusion’ to Indigenous political actors in UN settings, Corntassel comes to the same conclusion as Alfred concerning the futility of engagement, arguing that because transnational Indigenous networks are ‘channeled’ and ‘blunted’ by colonial state actors, ‘it is a critical time for Indigenous peoples to rethink their approaches to bringing Indigenous rights concerns to global forums’.44 Imagining a Post-Colonial Future: Pessimistic ‘Resurgence’ Versus the?Optimism and?Tenacity of?Indigenous Movements on the Ground All of these writers advocate Indigenous resurgence, through a combination of rejecting the current reconciliation politics of settler colonial states, coupled with a return to land-based Indigenous expressions of governance as the only viable, ‘authentic’ and legitimate path to a better future for Indigenous peoples, which they refer to as decolonisation. While inherently critical in their orientation, these three approaches do make some positive and productive contributions to Indigenous movements. They help shed light on the various and subtle ways that Indigenous leaders and communities can become co-opted into a colonial system. They help us to hold leadership accountable. They also help us keep a strong focus on our traditional, cultural and spiritual values as well as our traditional forms of governance which then also helps us imagine future possibilities. As I have pointed out here, however, all three theorists are also caught in the same three pessimism traps: authenticity versus co-option; a vision of the state as unified, deliberate and never changing in its desire to colonise and control; and a view of engagement with the state as futile, if not dangerous, to Indigenous sovereignty and existence. When combined, these three pessimism traps aim to inhibit Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the state in any process that could potentially re-imagine and re-formulate their current relationship into one that could be transformative and post-colonial, as envisioned by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The pessimism traps together work to foreclose any possibility that there could be credible openings of opportunity to negotiate a fairer and just relationship of co-existence with even the most progressive state government. This pessimistic approach is not innocuous. By overemphasising structure and granting the state an enormous degree of agency as a unitary actor, this pessimistic approach does a remarkable disservice to Indigenous resistance movements by proscribing, from academia, an extremely narrow view of what Indigenous self-determination can and should mean in practice. By overlooking and/or discounting Indigenous agency and not even considering the possibility that Indigenous peoples could themselves be calculating, strategic political actors in their own right, and vis-à-vis states, the pessimistic lens of the resurgence school unnecessarily, unproductively and unjustly limits the field of possibility for Indigenous peoples’ decision-making, thus actually countering and inhibiting expressions of Indigenous self-determination. By condemning—writ large—all Indigenous peoples and organisations that wish to seek peaceful co-existence with the state, negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with the state, and/or who have advocated on the international level for a set of standards that can provide a positive guiding framework for Indigenous-state relations, the pessimistic lens of resurgence forecloses much potential for new and improved relations, in any form, and is very likely to lead to deeper conflicts between states and Indigenous peoples, and potentially, even violent action, which Fanon indicated was the necessary outcome. The pessimism traps of the resurgence school are therefore, likely self-defeating for all but the most remote and isolated Indigenous communities. Further, this approach is quite out of step with the actions and vision of many Indigenous resistance movements on the ground who have been working for decades to advance Indigenous self-determination, both domestically and globally, in ways that transform the colonial state into something more just and may eventually present creative alternatives to the Westphalian state form in ways that could respect and accommodate Indigenous nations. Rather, it aims to shame and blame those who wish to explore creative and innovative post-colonial resolutions to the colonial condition.The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Declaration or UN Declaration) was adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 after 25 years of development. The Declaration is ground-breaking, given the key leadership roles Indigenous peoples played in negotiating and achieving this agreement.45 Additionally, for the first time in UN history, the rights holders, Indigenous peoples, worked with states to develop an instrument that would serve to promote, protect and affirm Indigenous rights, both globally and in individual domestic contexts.46 Many Indigenous organisations and movements, from dozens of countries around the world, were involved in drafting and negotiating the UN Declaration and are now advocating for its full implementation, both internationally and in domestic and regional contexts. In Canada, some of the key organisational players—the Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee), the Assembly of First Nations, and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, or their predecessor organisations—were involved in the drafting and lengthy negotiations of the UN Declaration during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, organisations like the American Indian Law Alliance and the Native American Rights Fund have been involved as well as the Navajo Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who represent themselves as Indigenous peoples’ governing institutions. From Scandinavia, the Saami Council and the Sami Parliaments all play a key role in advancing Indigenous rights. In Latin America, organisations like the Confederación de Nationalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Consejo Indio de Sud America (CISA) advocate for implementation of the UN Declaration. The three, major transnational Indigenous organisations— the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the International Indian Treaty Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Council—were all key members of the drafting and negotiating team for the UN Declaration, and the latter two, which are still in existence, continue their strong advocacy for its full implementation. Implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires fundamental and significant change, on both the international and domestic levels. Because implementation of Indigenous rights essentially calls for a complete and fundamental restructuring of Indigenous-state relationships, it expects states to enact and implement a signifcant body of legal, constitutional, legislative and policy changes that can accommodate such things as Indigenous land rights, free, prior and informed consent, redress and a variety of self-government, autonomy and other such arrangements. States are not going to implement this multifaceted and complex set of changes on their own, however. They will require significant political and moral pressure to hold them accountable to the rhetorical commitments they have made to support this level of change. They will also require ongoing conversation and negotiation with Indigenous peoples along the way, lest the process becomes problematically one-sided. Such processes ultimately require sustained political will, commitment and engagement over the long term, to reach the end result of radical systemic change and Indigenous state relationships grounded in mutual respect, co-existence and reciprocity. This type of fundamental change requires creative thinking, careful diplomacy, tenacity, and above all, optimistic vision, on the part of Indigenous peoples. The pessimistic approaches of the resurgence school are ultimately of little use in these efforts, other than as a cautionary tale against state power, of which the organisational players are already keenly aware. Further, by dismissing and discouraging all efforts at engagement with states, and especially with the blanket accusations that all who engage in such efforts are ‘co-opted’ and not ‘authentically’ Indigenous, the resurgence school actually creates unnecessary negative feelings and divisions amongst Indigenous movements who should be pooling limited resources and working together towards better futuresAT: Settler-Native AntagonismNarrativizing a settler-native antagonism reinforces colonial violence – assumes economic migrants are settlers, justifies disposability based on connection to land – atomizes resistance Sharma 15—Director, International Cultural Studies Program, University of Hawai’i Manoa (Nandita, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization,” Sylvia Wynter: Being Human as Praxis, Chapter 7, pg 170-180, Emerging in the post–World War II era, indigeneity is a relatively recent mode of representation, one that encompasses very diverse people across the Americas, indeed across the world, often under a single, shared subjective understanding of being the “first” to live in any particular place.22 Being indigenous is a form of co- identification among people who previously did not see any connection with one another. It is also a way of laying claim to particular lands (or, more accurately, territories) on the basis of having (or having once had) specialized knowledge of that place. Yet, this mode of representation, however new or potentially expansive, remains particularistic. Indigeneity is a form of subjectivity that emerged because of the devastation wrought in the aftermath of 1492. Moreover, it is a form of subjectivity that interpellates people into efforts to gain national sovereignty within the global system of national states. Indigenous, then, as a mode of representation includes the often unacknowledged elision between native as a colonial state category of subjugation and indigenous as a category of resistance. Indigenous conceptualized as such retains two interrelated problems that ensure that the kinds of unequal relationships organized in the aftermath of 1492 are reproduced. First, by denying the social constitution of the category of indigenous, it disavows people’s now-long history of connectivity across (and sometimes against) this category. Because this connectivity challenges the particularistic nature of indigeneity, recognition of interrelationality is itself represented as a threat. Second, by continuing to limit the criteria of membership of each nos, each is unable to accept as co-specifics those who are rendered as always-already oppositional others. Indeed, in making any particularistic nos, the significance of omitting certain others cannot be underestimated. The category of indigenous, thus, does a sort of political work. It produces a particular nos (and thus a particular Other-to-indigenous nos).23 For some (though certainly not all) of those currently constituted as indigenous, it seems that one of the consequences of the enormously uneven Columbian exchange is the denunciation of the process of exchange itself. Today, the movement of life, plants, humans, and other animals is often cited as the cause for the devastation wrought on their native equivalent.24 Rather than focus on the hierarchical and exploitative relations of the Columbian exchange, some assume that the cause of the problem was / is mobility itself. Within such a worldview, that which moves is consequently denounced as inherently polluting, and, in an idiom that is gaining in popularity, movement and migration are posited as inherently colonizing. An understanding of mobility as always colonizing is evident in the expansion of the term “settler colonist” to include all those deemed nonnative in any given space. Recently, within both indigenous studies and social movements for indigenous rights, the historical distinctions between the voyages of Columbus (and other colonizers) and those of slaves who survived the Middle Passage, indentured workers recruited in the wake of slavery’s abolition, and present- day migrants captured in a variety of state categories ranging from illegal to immigrant, have been collapsed. All, it is claimed, are agents of colonialism. It seems, then, that as there has been an expansion in the subjective understanding of people as indigenous, there has been a subsequent expansion in their other. Put differently, within some indigenous systems of belonging, all past and present people constituted as migrants are situated as colonizers. In our present “great age” of migration, how did “colonizer” become a meaningful way to describe people who move across space?25 Indeed, how did “colonizer” come to be an increasingly dominant mode of representing indigenous people’s others, others who were once understood as cocolonized people or, at least, not as an oppositional other? Is there a relationship between these particularistic modes of representation and the false separation and hierarchical ranking of different but related experiences of colonization, such as the processes of expropriation and people’s displacement across space? The answers to these questions lie within the logics of autochthonous systems of representation and the ways in which claims to indigeneity bring to life discourses of alienness or foreignness. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff argue, by “elevating to a first-principle the ineffable interests and connections, at once material and moral, that flow from ‘native’ rootedness, and special rights, in a place of birth,” autochthonous discourses place those constituted as natives at the top of a hierarchy of the exploited, oppressed, and colonized and insist on the centrality of the claims of natives for the realization of either decolonization or justice.26 Within the negative duality of natives and nonnatives that such discourses put into play, origins (and, in some contexts, claims of original, versus later, human discovery or inhabitation) become the key determinant of who belongs in any given space today—and who does not. The quintessential alien or foreigner within autochthonous discourses is the figure of the migrant. This is because the hegemonic understanding of what it means to be a migrant in today’s world is one where migration is seen as movement away from one’s native land. Thus, migrants come to stand as the ultimate nonnative. Such a move works to shift the focus from a dialectics of colonialism—where the key historical dynamic is one of expropriation and exploitation, and the key relationship is one between the colonizers and the colonized—to one where the dichotomy between native and nonnative becomes central to both analysis and politics. Patrick Wolfe, a historian of Australia, captures this perspective well in his claim that “the fundamental social divide is not the color line. It is not ethnicity, minority status, or even class. The primary line is the one distinguishing Natives from settlers—that is, from everyone else. Only the Native is not a settler. Only the Native is truly local. Only the Native will free the Native. One is either native or not.”27 From such an autochthonous perspective, being native is both spatially and temporally dependent. Temporally, migrants may be identified as natives at some point in time and in some given space, but once having moved away from the spaces where such representations may be claimed, they become nonnatives. Spatially, migrants remain native but only to the places they no longer live in. Thus, some argue that migrants can continue to claim native rights to places they have moved from if they are able to show genealogical descendance from those with native status in that space.28 Candace Fujikane, in dismissing Asian claims to belong in the United States, puts it this way: “Indigenous people are differentiated from settlers by their genealogical, familial relationship with specific land bases that are ancestors to them. One is either indigenous to a particular land base or one is not. Asian Americans are undeniably settlers in the United States because we cannot claim any genealogy to the land we occupy, no matter how many lifetimes Asian settlers work on the land, or how many Asian immigrants have been killed through racist persecution and hate crimes, or how brutal the political or colonial regimes that occasioned Asians’ exodus from their homelands.”29 In this logic, indigeneity is racialized/ethnicized, and in the process, land—or more accurately, territory—is as well. Natives, it is assumed, belong in “their” native land and only there. Further, who can be recognized as native is dependent upon ancestry, thereby adding blood to the discourse of soil. Descent becomes of further importance in this distinction, for many indigenous people are, of course, also Asian (and European and African and so on) as well as vice versa. It is one’s ability to claim some indigenous ancestor that can allow one to be seen as indigenous today. While such claims can be social and not biological, many indigenous groups, following from certain governments’ own categorical recognition of indigeneity, rely on some form of blood quantum rule that requires a minimal indigenous lineage. Not surprisingly, such criteria for belonging (and for the rights and entitlements of membership) have not always worked for those subordinated through other axes of oppression and exploitation. Thus, many women have found that their claims to native status are often the first to be discounted.30 In this, there is an ironic historical continuity of autochthonous ideas and practices of belonging and the underlying logics of the colonial (and, in some places, postcolonial) state. Indeed, the meaning of native was one that was used to distinguish the colonized from the colonizer so that the natives could be represented as less human and, therefore, as legitimately colonized. Being native, then, was a signifier of being colonized and the ultimate signifier of abjectness. Nativeness as a mode of representation, then, was designed to institutionalize the new racist orders implemented by different colonial empires. Importantly, all colonized people were variously identified as “the” natives in order to signal their lack of membership in the propter nos of the colonizers.31In the post–World War II era of postcolonialism, when, through much struggle, colonial empires were removed from the list of legitimate forms of political rule, the right to claim rights within and to any given space came, increasingly, to be seen as belonging to “the” natives. After all, we were told, the anticolonial project was often posited as fighting for the rule of the natives for the natives. Not surprisingly, then, the battle over resources and over place has, thus, increasingly become one about the meaning of nativeness. In this way, autochthonous modes of belonging are significant in advancing particular nationalized regimes of rights, for the national subject is often defined through an exclusive racialized / ethnicized criteria through which political rights and rights to property, especially social property rights in land and natural resources, are to be apportioned within any claimed national space. Contemporary, postcolonial forms of racism are often based on ideas of autochthony. All those who are said to have migrated to the places where they live (or who cannot prove their prior inhabitance) are increasingly viewed as agents of (instead of co- victims of) colonial projects. The ruling ideology of nationalism has provided an explanation for belonging and has come to be a key way to distinguish between who is properly native to any given place and who is not. Today, the rhetoric of autochthony is evident throughout the world, including diverse sites in Europe, southern Africa, Central Africa, Latin America, North America, and the Pacific. Significantly, such a discourse spans the political spectrum from the Right to the Left. Here, I focus on the emergence of autochthonous discourses in indigenous nationalist politics (engaged in by both natives and nonnatives) in the territories claimed by Canada and the United States, with a particular focus on the Hawaiian archipelago, where this discourse is well rehearsed. The position that all migrants are settler colonists has been advanced in a number of recent scholarly works in Canada and the United States. In the context of Hawai’i, it has been argued that “Asians” in Hawai’i (most of whom are the descendants of contractually indentured plantation laborers who began arriving in the mid- 1800s) are “settler colonists,” active in the colonization of native Hawaiians due to their nonnative status.32 The main distinction between the two groups, they argue, is that native Hawaiian claims are based on rights of national sovereignty over “their land, water, and other economic and legal rights,” while Asians, because they are not native, have no right to make such claims.33 In a Canadian context, Bonita Lawrence’s and Enakshi Dua’s article “Decolonizing Antiracism” (2005) in Social Justice makes some of the same arguments made by the contributors to the special issue of Amerasia Journal on “Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i.”34 Like them, Lawrence and Dua also focus on those nonnatives who are nonwhite. They contend that the antiracist praxis of nonwhites has “contribute[d] to the active colonization of Aboriginal peoples.”35 Indeed, they contend that “antiracism is premised on an ongoing colonial project” and on “a colonizing social formation.”36 Postcolonial critiques of national liberation strategies, social constructivist critiques of the naturalness of races or nations, and arguments against ethnic absolutism, such as those made by Stuart Hall, become, for them, examples of how antiracism is a colonial practice.37 Lawrence and Dua maintain that these kinds of analyses colonize indigenous people by “contribut[ing] to the ongoing delegitimization of Indigenous nationhood.”38 In these essays, then, critiques of nationalisms or of the naturalization of social categories are tantamount to attacks against indigenous people. It is in such assertions that we can find the ideological character of autochthonous discourses. In arguing for the theoretical and political centrality of nativeness, there is an effort to depoliticize native nationalisms. By insisting that any critique of nationalism is tantamount to a colonial practice, the nationalist assumptions and politics of native nationalisms are taken out of the realm of that which can be contested. Consequently, native nationalisms are posited as the only strategy for decolonization. It is precisely the nationalism inherent within autochthonous discourses that helps to explain not only why all nonnatives are conceptualized as colonizers but also why the (varied) critics of nationalism (or those who argue for the social basis for ideas of race and ethnic purity, or those who uncover a politics of solidarity across such lines) are also colonizers. Negatively racialized persons, in this logic of nationalized self- determinacy, are relegated to being mere minorities of various nations and their existing or hoped- for national sovereign states. Thus, because they are not a people / nation as defined by hegemonic doctrines of self- determinancy, Asians, for example, in Hawai’i, or elsewhere in the United States and Canada, are represented as not- colonized and, therefore, in the dualistic mode of autochthonous representations, as colonizers. Within autochthonous discourses one can only be colonized if they “belong” or are indigenous to that space itself. In this view, the colonization that people experience supposedly ends once one moves away from the colony (or, now, the postcolony). Instead, these migrants come to be represented as colonizers. Because a key aspect of the subjective understanding of indigenous is being a colonized person, only other colonized persons can be seen to be co-specifics. Neither those constituted as migrants nor their struggles can be perceived as part of anticolonial struggles. As such, they cannot be included as commensurate human beings within any colonial or postcolonial space. This view imagines the space of colonialism as finite. It fails to see the broader field of power that processes of colonialism opened up. More specifically, it fails to see migration as a part of the colonial experience. The world as seen through an autochthonous lens is one of discrete, disconnected spaces, each belonging to its native people. This is the autochthonous view of the world prior to colonization and of the ideal decolonized space. It thus appears that as borders and relationships begin to realign to allow for new forms of subjective understanding and conspecificity, some scholars and activists are actively working to re- fix borders and territories through particularistic strategies of identification. The new mode of representation of indigeneity, which, ostensibly, appears to be an expansion in subjective understanding, creates a Manichaean dualism of native and nonnative. Such a logics of representation assumes that all past and present processes of exchange are inherently destructive. Colonialism, from such a view, was (and remains) about people moving about and that it was / is in this process of moving away from where they are native to places where they are not that has caused the enormous destruction of life. By casting all human mobility as colonial acts, autochthonous modes of representation, ironically, empty out from the meaning of colonialism the enormous violence that has been done by colonizers. It also minimalizes—or even denies—the violence done to people who moved and who move today. Borders, including the borders between natives and nonnatives, although seemingly about the physical separation of those in the national nos from its foreign others, then, are primarily concerned with making differences within the same space that the nos and its others both live in. Because we—and, with Sylvia Wynter, I use “we” in all the fullness of the term “humans”—have long lived in a world that is connected across now-demarcated spaces, making claims to land, to livelihoods, and to belonging on the basis of particularistic claims, such as a racialized national membership, only works to ensure that the oppressions and exploitations wrought in the aftermath of 1492 are maintained, albeit in new guises. Conclusion Autochthonous discourses present the Columbian exchange as a zerosum game between putative “groups” of natives and nonnatives. Neglected within such discursive modes of representation is the fact that the gross inequalities engendered by this exchange were structured not by some inherent struggle between natives and nonnatives but by a set of struggles between expropriators and the expropriated, the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressors and the oppressed. Tragically, these struggles were won by those who cemented their victory in a set of social relations that institutionalized private property, an ever- expanding capitalist mode of production, colonial, and then national, state power, and an interlocking web of ranked hierarchies formed around ideologies of the noncommensurability of humans through ideas of “race,” gender, “nation,” and citizenship. Each of these has been normalized to the extent that even (some of) the expropriated, exploited, and oppressed people on earth have come to identify with these ideologies instead of with each other. However, if we understand the New World not simply as a mistaken formulation of Columbus imagining himself in the western part of India but one that brought the four hemispheres together in a global field of power, we come to see that the New World was made in and across multiple geographic sites. The moments of New World invention necessarily involved people across the planet and came into being not suddenly, in 1492, but over a longer period through which “European” elites expanded the territories they controlled and responded to the incredible consolidation and spread of capitalism. Indeed, as Sylvia Wynter well shows, the shorthand of “1492” does not capture the fact that the processes leading to the colonization of people in the Caribbean and Americas were begun by much earlier imperial ventures in the Middle East, western Mediterranean, eastern Atlantic and West Africa.39 Encounters here established a specific pattern of relations that were to be extended not only to the Caribbean and Americas but, importantly, within the space of what we now call Europe. The New World, then, was forged through processes that people across space and time would be able to recognize. Marcus Rediker calls these processes the “four violences”: the expropriation of the commons both in Europe and in the Americas; African slavery and the Middle Passage; the exploitation and the institution of wage labor; and the repression organized through prisons and the criminal justice system.40 Silvia Federici adds to our understanding of these shared experiences by showing that the persecution of women and the containment of their liberty (especially during various and ongoing hunts for witches) were crucial elements in the Columbian exchange.41People’s shared experience of the terror of expropriation, exploitation, and oppression led to their shared resistance, something, unfortunately, left unexamined within Wynter’s oeuvre.42 Neither the ruling- class version of colonization- as- progress nor the autochthonous view that colonization was caused by “foreigners” entering native spaces tells us this story. Recent work by social historians, such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, or political theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, however, show that there was indeed a serious struggle over the terms of what is now (too ahistorically and uniformly) often called “modernity.”43 That capitalists were victorious in this struggle should not blind us to the fact that they did not instigate the revolution (or the “root expansion in thought” that Sylvia Wynter discusses in relation to Columbus’s challenging of medieval European notions of space). The bourgeoisie, instead, were part of the counterrevolution against those actively challenging extant forms of ruling in Europe, including challenges to the medieval idea of transcendent power of all sorts (church, God, king / queen). The actual revolutionaries were derisively called the multitude or the motley crew and were composed of the rural commoners, urban rioters, fishers, market women, weavers, and many others who mobilized countless rebellions to realize their immanent demand that producers fully realize the fruits of their labor, and do so on earth.44 As the spread of ruling relations moved across the planet, so too did communities committed to revolution. When the imperial elites in Europe expanded their territorial claims—and processes of expropriation and exploitation to the Caribbean, the Americas, and the rest of the planet—new communities of resistance across these spaces were formed on the basis of radical solidarities. Revolutionaries from spaces now imagined separately as Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific encountered one another and, in many cases, saw in each other’s experiences a desire for their own common emancipation. The motley crew, then, was very much a cluster of new world formations—new world because they stretched across the entire global field of power of expanding imperial states. They explicitly challenged emergent discourses of their innate noncommensurability, be it racialized, nationalized, or gendered lines of difference. As a result, as Linebaugh and Rediker uncover, these solidarities were considered as the greatest threat against the aspirations of the newly emerging elites—the traders, ship owners, slave owners, plantation owners, and leaders of imperial states. Significantly, it was ideas—and subjective identifications—of nation, race, and gender that severely weakened this “many-headed hydra” and set back its revolution. It is precisely this revolution, this “root expansion in thought,” that Sylvia Wynter ignites with her call for a human species–wide sense of conspecificity. In her essay “1492: A New World View,” Sylvia Wynter creates an imaginative space for a new and expansive subjective understanding of who “we” are so that we can undo the continued exclusionary, uneven, and purposefully divisive legacy of 1492. While those who shamelessly celebrate the aftermath of 1492 continue to believe that they can act unilaterally and with impunity against groups they have identified as native and migrants with no consequence to their own lives, and while some native nationalists believe that the nos of natives is a liberatory one that will lead to a postcolonial state of their own, Wynter’s “new world view” allows us to see that both partial perspectives are ideological. Neither reflects the lived experiences of people the world over, which are organized through both shared experience and tangible connection. As a result, neither is able to seize the revolutionary promise of an expansion in our empathic and affective ties with those with whom we live our lives. Wynter, by defining humanness as a social, historical, and discursive coproduction rather than merely a biological one, urges us to become cognitive revolutionaries, to see our potential to forge social relationships with one another—relationships that recognize not only the massive changes wrought by the events following Columbus’s voyage of 1492 but also the possibility of what we can do with these changes. The New World produced new social formations, and it is within these social formations that struggles for decolonization have taken place and continue to and need to take place. This does not mean that we must make a choice between the celebrants’ universality, which is little but a parochial concern of elites, or the alternative of dissidents that romanticizes an essentialized “community” set in battle against its others. Rather, we can, if we choose, reject both views and reorient ourselves—and respatialize ourselves—with one afforded to us by the world that we have inherited, a world wrought with strife and inequality but a single world, nonetheless. This project is and always has been, by necessity, a shared one. Indeed, the making of new social bodies is not an epistemological problem but an ontological one. It is in the ontological unity of our human intra-actions that we can come into being what we already are: a species of humans, one, no less, that is intimately involved with all other life on our shared planet. ................
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