Neg Cards

Topic Links
 1NC Water Protection Link
The plan’s attempt to implement water protection takes place within a land rights
framework that is structured by settler colonialism – water protections only serve to
reinforce the state’s control over Indigenous territories and mask colonial violence.
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes
College, “(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler
Nation State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. 41-48)
From state conceptions of land rights discourse, to Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights, assertions of sovereignty, and legal orders, inside and
outside of the courtrooms, what then is meant by Indigenous water rights? Not unlike Indigenous sovereignty and law, which existed prior to
the imposition of Crown sovereignty, Indigenous water
rights, or more accurately, water responsibilities,17 those included
in various articulations of Indigenous legal orders, have also existed as integral aspects of Indigenous
societies since long before colonial settlement. Indigenous water rights are indeed inherent rights. Water, however, given its
unbounded flow between and across territories, is subject to colonial constraints and impositions in ways that are not entirely the case with
land. Where Indigenous sovereignty claims may see lands demarcated, set aside, or identified as
Indigenous territories, with “Aboriginal title” recognized and affirmed, however limited, Indigenous rights to
water remain subject to source water protections, development upstream and down, and the general
policies of the settler state, which organize and influence Indigenous territories and their waters,
regardless of jurisdictional boundaries . In short, even as it carries the effects of settler colonialism, its policies and pollutants,
water most often disrupts the fixity and certainty of settler colonialism , aiding in resisting the
foreclosure of Indigenous rights in the settler state . It is in this way that water’s flow, its paradoxical and ambivalent fluidity,
reveals the necessity of acknowledging and adhering to the significance of Indigenous water right, relationships, and the legal orders that
uphold them. While the different meanings of water for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will be explored further below, it
is
important to understand the current relationship between Indigenous peoples and water within the
settler state, its institutional, legal, and governance structures . To say the least, Indigenous rights to water, and water
policy more generally in Canada are complex issues. I will not be able to cover the intricate histories and approaches to water management,
governance, and rights across the country and between Indigenous nations and the state; rather, I highlight here some of the important strands
that shape and limit Indigenous water rights in Canada, and which may also offer potential for their reconceptualization.
Since early settlement, water rights have been conceived of in ways similar to that of land rights by colonial
governments, where the rendering of water as property shapes the meaning of Indigenous water rights. As
Kenichi Matsui notes in his text Native Peoples and Water Rights, “Statutory laws that aimed to regulate the use of
natural resources also had the effect of commodifying fish, timbre, and water in colonial lands,
thereby aiding attempts to establish an imperial regime over nature and Indigenous lands. The idea of
water rights,” he continues, “including “Indian water rights,” was derived from such a property-centered
legal perspective” (2009, 10). While the meaning of water rights across Canada developed in slightly different ways between the East, the
West, and eventually the Northern territories, Canadian water rights policy has historically worked to facilitate the “legal transformation of
water into property” (Matsui 28). Whether
through “riparian water rights”18 in the East, transported to the
colonies through English common law, allocating water to those who possess land along its path , or
through “priorappropriation” water rights in the West, wherein the first person to make “beneficial use”
of a water source has the right to continue to use that source for that purpose, water rights in Canada,
and North America more generally, developed under the same logics of possession expressed through
John Locke’s theory of property and Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideals . As Matsui states, “Their ideals laid the
foundation for legal and political authorities to perceive water as property in order to accommodate capitalistic development” (37).
It is within this property-centered framework that Indigenous water rights have been defined and constrained by the state, if they have been
acknowledged at all. Nlaka’pamux lawyer Ardith Walkem writes, “There are several possible sources within Canadian law that deal with the
recognition and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights to, and in, water. These include reserve water rights and Aboriginal title, Aboriginal
rights, and treaty rights” (2011, 304). Where reserve water rights, and specific treaty rights, set aside waters on reserve lands for the use of
Indigenous peoples residing on reserve, Walkem is also careful to note that “despite the fact that reserve lands are federal creations, reserve
water allocations fall under provincial or territorial water regimes” (305), which often neglect or break reserve or treaty rights when it serves
the interests of the provinces or territories. Merrell-Ann Phare similarly suggests, “governments
do not overtly accept that First
Nations have rights to water, which means that First Nations are not “allowed” to exercise an inherent
jurisdiction to manage or use water” (2009, 12). She highlights a “regulatory gap” in First Nations water rights
specifically, where incongruities exist between jurisdictional oversight, protections, and access to clean
drinking water (13). Even when Indigenous peoples have determined specific rights regimes within their
territories, they are rarely consulted on source water protections, and developments upstream that
have direct impacts on their water sources (Phare, 15). For example, “The doctrine of prior appropriation made it possible for
entrepreneurs and government officials to build large-scale dams and irrigation systems” (37), which have had devastating effects on
Indigenous Nations across the country, a matter that will be discussed in greater detail below. Thus,
the colonial water rights
regime continues to shape and construe Indigenous water rights in its image, which hinges on notions
of private property and water as resource. The establishment of this image, which has structured colonial water rights regimes
will be further discussed in chapter one.
As Walkem notes, “Aboriginal rights and title” is also an integral aspect of determining the meaning of Indigenous water rights. As stated above,
these rights must be understood to exist with or without state recognition, as sui generis rights, prior to the formation of the Canadian state
and its imposition of colonial water rights’ frameworks. Walkem writes, Despite
many years of colonization, the destruction
of our territories, and the imposition of foreign laws and values, Indigenous peoples have maintained
awe and reverence for the life-giving force of water and, across generations, have continued to call for
the return of indigenous laws and traditions so that we can protect our peoples, waters, and territories ”
(304). Where “Aboriginal title” remains a contentious and poorly defined issue within the courts, Indigenous law, and water laws specifically,
must play a role in determining the meaning of Indigenous water rights in the settler colonial nation state. Indeed, “constitutional and legal
recognition is hollow if it does not provide and protect jurisdictional space for indigenous laws on lands, waters, and territories that are
constitutive of Aboriginal nationhood and existence” (309).
Currently, however, most assertions of Indigenous water law remain subject to colonial water rights
regimes, wherein co-management or water governance agreements may exist, but always within the
confines of settler government jurisdiction. Some Indigenous nations have maintained important assertions of water
sovereignty within these confines; for example, the Yinka Dene ‘uza’hné from Nadleh Whut’en and Stellat’en in British Columbia, formally
enacted the Yinka Dene ‘Uza’hné Surface Water Management Policy and Yinka Dene ‘Uza’hné Guide to Surface Water Quality Standards in
2016, effectively enacting Indigenous water law in their territories, in accordance with the Yinka Dene legal tradition that have governed these
territories “for thousands of years” (Yinka Dene ‘Uza’hné Surface Water Management Policy 2016, 1). This agreement is significant in settler
colonial nations because it represents the necessity and potential for reckoning with water’s unquestionable relationality and in ways that flow
from the distinct worldviews of Indigenous peoples. It is important to note, however, that the unique context of “Aboriginal title” in British
Columbia makes such an enactment of Indigenous jurisdictional power over water obtainable in ways that may not be possible in other parts of
the country.
Where Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights to waters, and assertions of water law remain negated, there
exists a huge gap in water management and protection for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples
in the settler state. Indeed, in Canada, settler water governance generally is marked by mismanagement and regulatory gaps. Phare
points out that water is, shockingly, not mentioned at all within the Canadian Constitution. She writes, “the lack of reference in the Constitution
was instrumental in creating one of our most challenging ecological, human health and economic issues today: the mythical belief held by
Canadians that we have, and always will have, vast amounts of fresh water available to us” (22); she continues, “We have no national water
policy, no enforceable national standards for drinking water quality, no binding national governmental statements about what we as Canadians
consider to be the minimum water flows needed by all ecosystems. We have a system rife with gaps” (27). Understanding
of water’s
significance and complexity have thus been neglected by the settler state, limited within frameworks
of property rights that do not account for water’s flows and requirements . Canada’s negation of Indigenous water
law marks both an extension of this neglect, and an active disavowal of existing systems of law that foreground water as an integral part of our
health and ecology, requiring respect and responsibility. Reckoning
with the legibility of Indigenous water law, on the
other hand, offers the potential to not only decolonize Indigenous rights in the settler state through the
recognition of Indigenous jurisdictional powers, but also to create the possibilities for an approach to
water that Canada as a nation has largely ignored.
I do not intend, however, to uphold Indigenous legal orders as an idealized solution to Canada’s inadequate water policy. Indeed, this might be
the most natural solution within
a late or neo-liberal Canadian environmentalism that would seek to situate
Indigenous peoples as environmental stewards in a moment of global climate change and governance
structures that have largely divested itself from environmental protections, or, ironically, have only
committed to such protections while simultaneously investing in the very development projects that
perpetuate both climate change and the destruction of Indigenous lands and waters ; this is the
seemingly progressive liberalism that I will discuss and critique further below and in chapter two of this dissertation. Further, as Rey
Chow has cautioned in Ethics After Idealism, there is an idealistic tendency “to relate to alterity through mythification; to imagine the ‘other,’
no matter how prosaic or impoverished, as
essentially different, good, kind, enveloped in a halo, and beyond the
contradictions that constitute our own historical place” (1998, xx). Thus, I do not want to situate Indigenous
water law as a kind of mythic alternative to the perils of Western environmental policy ; however, as
Walkem writes, “Environmental justice for the waters, for indigenous peoples, and for all life requires
fundamentally rethinking the way that we, as humans, interact with the waters that give us life” (313).
Therefore, Indigenous water law is not mobilized as an idealized solution to global climate change, but
as a political necessity for the lives and well-being of Indigenous peoples.
To be sure, there are significant differences between Western water rights policy and the way that
Indigenous legal orders conceptualize water and the responsibilities it requires . These differences have largely not
had the opportunity to proliferate under settler colonialism and the material water worlds it constructs. Clogg et al. write, “Indigenous legal
traditions have a critical role to play in environmental governance in Canada. Indigenous law has governed the territory now known as Canada
for millennia, and Indigenous legal traditions contain a wealth of accumulated knowledge about effective strategies for environmental
governance” (2016, 255). Water’s unquestionable relationality demands a consideration of what alternative
approaches to water could mean for everyone who inhabits these lands and their waterways . Thus, I aim to
both resist the idealization of Indigenous approaches to water, and Indigenous worldviews more generally, while also reading the
expression of these worldviews on their own terms and in ways that might create the conditions for a remade approach
to environmental governance in the settler nation state.
 Federal Decision-Making Link
Empirically, unilateral federal decision making and recognition of water rights has
been accompanied by overt forms of dispossession that threaten Indigenous
sovereignty and ways of life
Krakoff ’13 (Sarah Krakoff, University of Colorado Law School, “Settler Colonialism and Reclamation: Where American
Indian Law and Natural Resources Law Meet”, Conclusion, Law Meet, 24 COLO. NAT. RESOURCES, ENERGY & ENVTL. L. REV. 261
(2013), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/104)
The U.S.' brand of settler colonialism has its own unique combination of harshness and promise . This is evident in the CRIT story,
which includes decades of unilateral federal decision-making, ignorance of tribal cultures and tribal
distinctiveness, and the overriding logic of concentrating as many Indians as possible on as little land
as possible in order to maximize resources for others. Yet in 1908, in the midst of what was the most
oppressive policy period for tribes and Indian people, the Supreme Court recognized a strong version of
tribal reserved rights in Winters. Then again, on the heels of congressional efforts to terminate tribal
status in the 1950s, the Court breathed new life into those reserved rights and upheld a quantification
method that benefits tribes, at least in theory, in Arizona v. California. This is part of our history also, the brighter side
in terms of equity and justice, even if these flickers of judicial enlightenment were quickly snuffed out by subsequent decisions. The 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.
 Legalism Link
Settler colonialism structures all relations to land and water – the affirmative’s legal
protection ultimately fails to challenge the legacy of water as a colonial tool. The
plan’s legal solution feeds into Western common law and private property that are
tools for violating Indigenous sovereignty
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. 1-3)

At the time of writing this dissertation, 80 First Nation communities across Canada south of the 60th parallel are under 31 short-term and 96
long-term Drinking Water Advisories, the latter meaning that the advisory has been in place for more than a year, and in many instances, for
decades (Government of Canada, “Drinking Water Advisories”). Shoal Lake 40 First Nation straddling the border of
Manitoba and Ontario, for example, has been under a boil water advisory for nearly 20 years, the result
of dirty water being diverted away from Winnipeg via a dam that ensures clean water is filtered into the
city on the one side, while contaminated water flows to the residents of Shoal Lake 40 reserve on the other (Lorraine 2016, n.p.). At the
beginning of 2017, the Provincial government finally committed to cleaning up and assessing the full effects of the mercury contamination of
the English Wabigoon River system that flows through Grassy Narrows (Asubpeeschoseewagong) First Nation and White Dog (Wabaseemoong)
Independent Nations in Northern Ontario—a contamination which took place in the 1960s and 70s, affecting generations of the Treaty 3 First
Nations, over 90 percent of which have tested positive for mercury poisoning. South of the border, after
months of one the most
successful peaceful protests in American history, garnering international support and resulting in millions of dollars in
divestment from energy extraction, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and water protectors across North
America were forcibly removed from their camps in Standing Rock, North Dakota, as the Dakota Access
Pipeline pressed forward with plans to drill under the Missouri River, the water source of the Sioux
Standing Rock Reservation and the United States’ longest river system . These are a few examples
among countless, which illustrate the ways in which water carries the evidence of settler colonial
violence, connecting Indigenous territories, reserves, communities, and peoples to the worst by-
products of energy extraction, industrialization, entitlement, and capitalism . Territorial boundaries and
land title mean little in relation to the waters which ensure the effects of pollution are always felt
downstream. Unequal access to clean drinking water, the disproportionate exposure to contaminated
waters and food sources, and the ensuing threats to health and culture, are actively produced and
reproduced under settler colonialism. Water emphasizes these effects, ensuring that they are not
bounded or fixed in place, and that settler colonialism is as fluid and mobile as the waters its policies
and processes effect.
And yet water is a site that should be read as highly ambivalent, with its effects often paradoxically
carrying both the structures of settler colonialism and creating the conditions for the maintenance of
Indigenous cultural knowledge and political resurgence . Indigenous worldviews, legal, and political
orders have consistently highlighted water as an integral aspect of culture, community, health, and
nationhood, not only at the level of materiality, but for its spiritual and political significance and its role
as a co-constituting aspect of Indigenous life, cultural continuance, and for its connections to place and
belonging.1 Despite the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, water remains a key site of Indigenous
culture, politics, and for the assertion of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. In their introduction to a recent
special issue of the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society on Indigenous peoples and the politics of water, editors Melanie
K. Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy assert how in recent years, “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” (2018, 1). From conflicts over the Mississauga Anishinaabe’s wild rice harvesting
rights at Pigeon Lake, to the ongoing struggle of the Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations to
stop the building of the Site C Dam in British Columbia, to the numerous Indigenous nations and their
water sources, in the path of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project between northern Alberta
and southern British Columbia, water is, in many ways, increasingly central to the struggle for
Indigenous rights in Canada and beyond.
With water an ongoing and important site of struggle for Indigenous rights, the Canadian state has acted
to limit interpretations of Indigenous peoples’ rights generally, and their water rights more specifically,
to their legibility under settler common law. At best, Canadian Indigenous rights discourse centers land as a
means of reconciling relationships between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state , attempting to
appease Indigenous rights claims with capital stakes in their own resources and territories. Water,
through its tributaries and run off, its flooding and depletion, however, ensures that land rights in
Canada are never settled, with land-based policies, Western rights discourse, and the laws that uphold
them ultimately inadequate in fully reckoning with the ongoing material dispossession of Indigenous
peoples. Thus, in this dissertation I explore how thinking Indigenous rights through water offers an important lens through which to grasp
the real stakes of settler colonialism in the Canadian nation state.2 To put this another way, foregrounding water, given both its
materiality and cultural and political significance in Indigenous peoples’ self-determination, opens up
possibilities for Indigenous rights in Canada to move beyond the liberal constraints of Western
common law, with its emphasis on fixity, certainty, and private property, and to be grounded instead
within Indigenous conceptions of place , culture, history, peoplehood, and belonging, and the legal
orders that flow from and through these.
 Modeling/Global Follow On Link
Notions of US legal prestige and modeling solidify global inequality by replacing
political violence with legal violence---turns the case because it subordinates effective
domestic systems to predatory rule of law models
Mattei ‘03 (Ugo, Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International and Comparative Law, U.C. Hastings; Professore
Ordinario di Diritto Civile, Università di Torino A Theory of Imperial Law: A Study on U.S. Hegemony and the Latin Resistance,
ic.ucsc.edu/~rlipsch/pol160A/Mattei.pdf)

This essay attempts to develop a theory of imperial law that is able to explain postCold War changes in the general process of
Americanization in legal thinking. My claim is that “imperial law” is now a dominant layer of world-wide legal systems.1 Imperial law is produced, in the interest of
international capital, by a variety of both public and private institutions, all sharing a gap in legitimacy, sometimes called the “democratic deficit.” Imperial law is shaped

by a spectacular process of exaggeration, aimed at building consent for the purpose of hegemonic
domination. Imperial law subordinates local legal arrangements world-wide , reproducing on the global scale the same
phenomenon of legal dualism that thus far has characterized the law of developing countries. Predatory economic globalization is the vehicle, the all-mighty

ally, and the beneficiary of imperial law. Ironically, despite its absolute lack of democratic legitimacy, imperial
law imposes as a natural necessity, by means of discursive practices branded “democracy and the rule of
law,” a reactive legal philosophy that outlaws redistribution of wealth based on social solidarity.2 At the
core of imperial law there is U.S. law , as transformed and adapted after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, in the process of infiltrating the huge
periphery left open after the end of the Cold War. A study of imperial law requires a careful discussion of the factors of penetration of U.S. legal consciousness world-wide, as well as a
careful distinction between the context of production and the context of reception3 of the variety of institutional arrangements that make imperial law. Factors of resistance need to be fully
appreciated as well.

I. AMERICAN LAW: FROM LEADERSHIP TO DOMINANCE The years following the Second World War have shown a dramatic change in the pattern of world hegemony in the law. Leading legal
ideas, once produced in Continental Civilian Europe and exported through the periphery of the world, are now for the first time produced in a common law jurisdiction: the United States.4
There is little question that the present world dominance of the United States has been economic, military, and political first, and legal only in a more recent moment, so that a ready

the relationship
explanation of legal hegemony can be found with a simple Marxist explanation of law as a superstructure of the economy.5 Nevertheless, the question of

between legal, political, and economic hegemony is not likely to be correctly addressed within a cause-
and-effect paradigm.6 Ultimately, addressing this question is a very important area of basic jurisprudential research because it reveals some general aspects about the nature
of law as a device of global governance.

Observing historical patterns of legal hegemony allows us to critique the distinction between two main patterns of governance through the law (and of legal transplants).7 Scholars of legal
transplants have traditionally distinguished two patterns. The first is law as dominance without hegemony, in which the legal system is ultimately a coercive apparatus asserting political and
economic power without consent. This area of inquiry and this model have been used to explain the relationship between the legal system of the motherland and that of the colonies within

a story of consensual voluntary reception by an admiring periphery of legal

imperialistic colonial enterprises. The opposing pattern, telling

models developed and provided for at the center, is usually considered the most important pattern of legal
transplants. It is described by stressing on the idea of consent within a notion of “prestige.”8
Little effort is necessary to challenge the sufficiency of this basic taxonomy in introducing legal transplants. Law is a detailed and complex machinery of social control that cannot function with
any degree of effectiveness without some cooperation from a variety of individuals staffing legal institutions. These individuals usually consist of a professional elite which either already exists
or is created by the hegemonic power. Such an elite provides the degree of consent to the reception of foreign legal ideas that is necessary for any legal transplant to occur. Hence, the
distinction between imperialistic and non-imperialistic transplants is a matter only of degree and not of structure. In order to understand the nature of present legal hegemony, it is necessary
to capture the way in which the law functions to build a degree of consent to the present pattern of international economic and political dominance.9

In this essay I suggest that a

fundamental cultural construct of presumed consent is the rhetoric of democracy and
the rule of law utilized by the imperial model of governance , 10 triumphant worldwide together with the neo-American model of
capitalism developed by the Reagan and Thatcher revolution early in the 1980s. I argue that the last twenty years have produced the triumph in global governance
of reactive, politically irresponsible institutions, such as the courts of law, over proactive politically accountable institutions such as direct administrative
apparatuses of the State.11

This essay attempts to open a radical revision of some accepted modes of thought about the law as they appear today, at what has been called “the end of history.”12 Its aim is to discuss

democracy and the rule of law, in the

some ways in which global legality has been created in the present stage of world-wide legal development. It will show how

present legal landscape, are just another rhetoric of legitimization of a given international dynamic of power . It will also
denounce the present unconscious state in which the law is produced and developed by professional “consent building” elites. The consequences of such unconsciousness are creating a legal

This process results in the development of

landscape in which the law is “naturally” giving up its role of constraining opportunistic behavior of market actors.

faked rules and institutions that are functional to the interests of the great capital and that dramatically
enlarge inequality within society. I predict that such a legal environment is unable to avoid tragic results on a
global scale such as those outlined in the well-known parable of the tragedy of the commons.13
My object of observation is a legal landscape in transition. I wish to analyze this path of transition from one political setting (the local state) to another political setting (world governance) in
which American-framed reactive institutions are asserting themselves as legitimate and legitimating governing bodies, which I call imperial law. Imperial law is the product of a renowned
alliance between state and economic institutions, a cooperative game in which a very limited number of powerful players are at play.14 While in the ages of colonialism such political battles

for international hegemony were mostly carried on with an open use of force and political violence (in such a way that final extensive conflict between superpowers was unavoidable), in
the age of globalization and of economic Empire political violence has been transformed into legal
violence.
 Racial Justice Aff Link – Flint Aff
The affirmative’s politics invest in urban space as Terra Sacer, desecrated and in need
of ecological renewal. This is the dream of settler politics and forwards the logics and
process of indigenous genocide
Paperson ‘14 (La, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, “A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote for settler
environmentalism,” Environmental Education Research 20:1)

Terra sacer is a virulent variation of the setter colonial ideology of terra nullius, the colonial fiction of
‘empty land’ or ‘land not legally belonging to anyone. ’2 Nullius is the justification for the doctrine of discovery: that one can
stab a flag into the earth or a needle into a person’s tissue and claim a colony. It is the founding covenant for settler colonial states. The
problem is that no land is empty.3 It must be made empty forcibly and ideologically. The Americas, under sixteenth to eighteenth century
colonialism, were made terra nullius by declaring Indians uncivilized, the land uncultured, and the relationship between Native people/land as
‘primitively’ unsubscribed to capitalist exploitation. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, terra nullius was reinvented through
frontier violence, military force, removal, Indian boarding schools, land acts, tribal termination, and citizen/naturalization acts that re-raced
Indians into ‘white men’ and ‘white women,’ thereby converting tribal lands into settler commonwealth and private property. The
duality
of land as desecrated, in pain, in need of rescue; and land a s sacred, wild, and preserve-able; are
contemporary discourses that justify re-invasion. They collapse Native land and black space together ,
leading once again to re-settlement. In this futuristic settler vision of land , Land is sacred yet desecrated
– one could say sacredly injured. Indigeneity is metaphorized into the settler’s own adoption of and by the land. Settlers
rewrite them/ourselves as ecological stewards . Re-inhabitation – a sustainable (settler) future – is the
goal. In this ecological dystopia, Indigenous Americans are largely extinct through regrettable genocide,4
or survive spectrally through the settler’s Indian heart . Indigenous vanishing is essential for the twenty-
first century ecological settler to become the new adoptive ‘native’, and thus rightful re-inhabitant of
Native land. Terra sacer is a proxy for settler humanity ; like the land, settlers view them/ourselves as
traumatized yet healable. This is the settler adoption fantasy (see Tuck and Yang 2012) – that they/we can
adopt the land and be adopted by the land – leading Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet, Alexie (1996) to sardonically observe: In the
Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
 Racial Justice Aff Link – Suffering Reps Bad
The aff’s representation of suffering and redress frames their education and political
orientation. These political frames uphold an intensified form of white supremacist
genocide lodged in the cosmopolitan dreams of settler environmentalism.
Paperson ‘14 (La, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, “A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote for settler
environmentalism,” Environmental Education Research 20:1)

terra sacer often under-girds environmental

Urban educators have few tools for engaging settler colonialism because
education in urban schools. Environmental education offers three limited social justice frameworks: environmental racism – a framework
that focuses on pain; green curriculum – a framework that focuses on rescue; and place-based curriculum – a framework that focuses on
Despite their social justice
inclusion, and thus, the replacement of Native land/people with a multicultural immigrant nation.
intentions, and their ecological truths, when strung together, such pedagogies concerning US ghettos
contain a settler colonial teleology. Pain curriculum8 highlights, legitimately, the disproportionate
toxification of air, soil and water in poor, urban, communities of color . However, reducing ghettos to
pain-filled sites of environmental toxicity in need of salvation, echo the settler colonial logics of terra
sacer – wasteland whose inhabitants lack the liberal capitalist insights and technological know-how to
properly occupy a city. Rescue curriculum follows logically from pain curriculum. It presents green
solutions in the form of urban gardens, recycling, clean fuels, etc. It leans explicitly on green
technologies and implicitly on the technologies of government . The hidden curriculum of rescue
naturalizes city planning, urban redevelopment, and de-ghetto-fication as inevitable remedies for
pain. It positions ghettoized communities as wards under settler colonial sovereignty . Rescue curriculum
promotes green cities, a wealth of green consumption through which the multicultural cosmopolitan
citizen earns his/her/our right to be the nouveau settler. Enter place-based curriculum. Place-based curriculum helps write
the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies. Often inclusive, multicultural, and celebratory, such curriculum highlights the
urban as a place of diversity, flavored by communities of color. (And wouldn’t you like to live here too?) Claiming the urban as a contact zone or
multicultural home – whether by people of color, or by white people – violently erases Indigenous understandings of that land and place. If
Native people are mentioned at all, they are almost always only as a premodern population who were pleasantly ‘one with nature,’ or
ecological Indians so few in number that the ecological settler becomes a ‘good neighbor’ or benevolent reinhabitant. Such a representation
inscribes settler colonialism as a done deal, renders urban Native youth as inauthentic Indians, and denies contemporary Native relationships to
The hidden curriculum of place-based pedagogy lies in its teleology. Native
urban land and place (Friedel 2011).
people used to live here. White people settled here; they fled. People of color replaced white people;
they suffer. Coming up, the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace people of color. When the
Great American City is finally built, all the white people will be colorful, and all the colored people will
be gone.
 Settler Environmentalism Link
The 1AC is emblematic of settler environmentalism which is the attempt to redeem
the settler’s position by restoring the Environmental Commons through protections
such as the plan
Paperson ‘12 (La, March, This is an avatar that Wayne Yang uses in certain articles, Dr. Yang’s work transgresses the line
between scholarship and community, as evidenced by his involvement in urban education and community organizing. He was
the co-founder of the Avenues Project, a non-profit youth development organization, and also the co-founder of East Oakland
Community High School., Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies, University of California, Berkeley, professor in the
Department of Ethnic Studies and the Urban Studies & Planning Program at UC San Diego., A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote
for settler environmentalism, Environmental Education Research, Vol 20, No 1, pgs. 121, JKS)

Settler environmentalism describes efforts to redeem the settler as ecological, often focusing on settler
identity and belonging through tropes of Indigenous appropriations – returning to the wildman or
demigoddess, claiming of one’s natural or ‘native’ self and thus the land, again. For example, ‘off the
grid’ does not describe a place, but a set of redemptive behaviors – it is a terra nullius imaginary of a
some- where, nowhere, neverplace where one is no longer a settler . In using the term settler
environmentalism, I am deliberately ambiguous about critical environmentalisms, such as movements in
eco-feminism, deep ecology, and antiracist environmental jus- tice . These are important trajectories in critical
scholarship and activism around environmental justice, and ought to inform any decolonizing framework . However, antiracist,
feminist, and environmental justice work are not automatically the oppo- site of settler colonialism.
Decolonization might be incommensurable with projects more generally thought as social justice ( see
Tuck and Yang 2012). ¶ In the previous ethnographic example, greening the ghetto can mask a neoliberal curriculum of whitening9 the
ghetto with ‘better-educated,’ ecologically ‘responsi- ble,’ global citizens. More radical environmentalisms can also uphold the settler fan- tasy
of sacred ‘wilderness’ – another form of unpeopled land – that must be restored or preserved. Even the
progressive concept of
land as Commons to be occupied, collectively shared and stewarded, may require the negation of
Indigenous sovereignty. ‘The people still speak of the sacredness of places now claimed by the parks ser- vices for instance’ (Goeman
2008, 32). Occupying land for the Commons assumes that all prior, indeed current as well as future
relations between people and land are null and void. ‘In other words,’ writes Sandy Grande, ‘both
Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first
instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all’ (2004, 27).
Social justice endeavors all take place on Native land. In this vein, I now turn to the Occupy movement. ¶ Behind every
great American city is a great crime. Oakland was founded on occupation and land theft. In 1850, a coterie of Yankee businessmen began
building a port in what would become Oakland’s Jack London Square, developing and selling land unbeknownst to landlord Luis Peralta, who
was granted 48,000 acres for his service to the Spanish army. Indeed, the Native Ohlone still lived in the land ‘owned’ by the Peraltas, as well as
Miwok and other Indigenous people who had migrated as a result of historic relationships between tribes and efforts to escape the Mission
system. The Peraltas sued, and in 1856, the US Supreme Court upheld their claim, but maintained that it was too late to reverse – as deeds and
titles had exchanged hands so many times that there was no undoing – and because Oakland was now occupied. ¶ Occupy Oakland, which
began in October of 2011, was an active part of the movements that began with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy itself was a diverse set of
movements and dialogues not reducible to a single name or a campaign. Various queer, people of color and Indigenous groups participated in
or sympathized with Occupy and recognized its importance as a meeting space, a node, for struggle. However, many of these groups had
serious points of difference, most notably in the problematic name, ‘Occupy.’ ¶ On 28 October 2011, a group of Indigenous and non-Native
intellectuals/activists introduced ‘The Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples’ at the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland. ¶
WHEREAS, those participating in ‘Occupy Oakland’ acknowledge that Oakland is already occupied land; Oakland being the historical territory of
the Chochenyo Ohlone people; and... ¶ RESOLVED, that those participating in ‘Occupy Oakland’ seek the genuine and respectful involvement of
indigenous peoples in the rebuilding of a new society on their ancestral lands; andAs a signal to the national ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement
and the indigenous peoples here and there who have felt excluded by the colonialist language of occupation used to name this movement, it
shall be declared that ‘Occupy Oakland’ aspires to ‘Decolonize Oakland’ – to ‘Decolonize Wall Street’ – with the guidance and participation of
indigenous peoples; ¶ The
memorandum points to difference as a modality of organizing, a source of strength
and political possibility rather than as simply a curtailment of common struggle. Most importantly, the
memorandum makes explicit the moral and political leadership of Indigenous peoples in any decolonial
effort in North America. Signifi- cantly, the first signature of memorandum is by Chochenyo Ohlone educator Corrina Gould. ¶ The
memorandum was passed, but not without controversy. One of the signers, Joanne Barker (Lenape) posted in her blog, Tequila Sovereign, that
several people approached the group with serious anxieties about decolonization. ¶ Ultimately,
what they were asking is
whether or not we were asking them, as non- indigenous people, the impossible? Would their solidarity
with us require them to give up their lands , their resources, their ways of life, so that we – who
numbered so few, after all – could have more? Could have it all? ¶ And this is the rub about decolonization: it
forces people to confront their complicity in settler colonialism and the ongoing violence of empire . It
immediately unsettles the utopian vision of wealth redistribution and collectively owned Commons . It
exposes how numerical the conceptualization of social justice remains – the 99% is a ‘deserving’ supermajority that renders Indigenous peoples
(a super-minority) completely illegible. Barker goes on to write, ¶ I have a dream that the people of ‘Occupy Oakland’ will not see the
affirmation of indigenous peoples’ rights to self-government, territorial restoration, and cultural auton- omy as a threat to their own; that they
will see solidarity with indigenous peoples as an affirmation of their humanity and justice. ¶ Barker’s
assertion reflects how
‘sovereignty’ as an Indigenous word is spoken with a different inflection than its cousin in the settler
nation’s lexicon. It echoes the questions posed by Watson, writing from an aboriginal Australian perspective: ¶ Is aboriginal sovereignty to
be feared by Australia in the same way as Aboriginal peo- ple fear white sovereignty and its patriarchal model of the state – one which is
backed by power or force? Or is aboriginal sovereignty different ... for there is not just one sovereign state body but hundreds of different
sovereign aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal sovereignty is different from state sovereignty because it embraces diversity, and focuses on inclusivity
rather than exclusivity. (Watson 2007, 20) ¶ A little over a month later, another proposal came before the General Assembly – to change the
movement’s name to Decolonize Oakland. This time, the proposal did not pass. Christine Cordero (who does not identify as Native) posted on
Facebook a few of her responses to the arguments made against the name change, including ‘Decolonize is divisive.’ To which she responded,
‘Occupy is divisive already and not including whole swaths of people. Decolonize and liberate are TRANSFORMA- TIVE. Difference, diversity, and
change aren’t divisive.’ ¶ Occupy Oakland means to Occupy Ohlone. Because Ohlone is both people and land/place simultaneously, you cannot
occupy Oakland without also trespassing on the bodies and spirits of those who live/d there. Land
is ‘more than a site upon which
humans make history or as a location that accumulates history ’ (Goeman 2008, 24), more than a site to
occupy.
 State Link
The plan reproduces the ontological and political supremacy of the state in water
policy and reinforces settlerist understandings of land rights and private property. The
alt is key to generate a decolonial approach to water and sovereignty that the
affirmative glosses over
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. 4-6)

This dissertation emerges out of the judicial and political limits of Indigenous rights in the settler nation
state. Clogg, Askew, Kung, and Smith write, “When Europeans arrived in what is today Canada, they settled in lands
governed by Indigenous nations according to their own legal traditions, land tenure systems, and
governance structures. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that for long before Europeans arrived in Canada, Indigenous
peoples occupied the land in ‘organized, distinctive societies with their own social and political structures’” (2016, 230). Despite this
recognition at the level of Canada’s highest court, Indigenous rights in Canada remain a battleground for meaning,
interpretation, and legibility. Like many of the Indigenous scholars, writers, and activists I draw from, I
argue, first, that in order for Indigenous rights to be considered in ethical, reconcilable, and decolonized
ways in relation to the settler state, they must be understood beyond the jurisdictional confines of state
sanctioned settler colonial common law with their meaning firmly grounded in the Indigenous
worldviews, relationships, and social relations that arise through long-standing assertions of Indigenous
law and legal orders. If the status quo is not to be reproduced, state interpretations of Indigenous
rights in Canada must contend with the meaning of Indigenous sovereignty, laws, and ontologies, and
the limitations of the state’s own juridical models of sovereignty grounded in Western law, private
property, and presumed ontological supremacy.
Secondly, where Indigenous conceptions of land tenure, governance, and selfdetermination are most
often in opposition to the pre-existing political and judicial terms of engagement so entrenched within
dominant Western liberal discourses of land, ownership, and Western property regimes , I assert that water,
rather than land, offers a fundamental challenge to the attempted delimitation of Indigenous rights
within the terms of the settler colonial nation state . Not only are Indigenous water rights not
adequately addressed through historical and contemporary settler rights-based discourse, but water
rights in the settler state more generally have been glossed-over, mismanaged, and neglected under the
Canadian Constitution, Provincial, and Federal law, illustrating both the prevalence and limitations of land-based
thinking in the settler state (Phare 2009, 21- 23). Where water has been bracketed, neglected, or relegated
to land-based discourse to constitute settler frameworks of land tenure premised on private property
and the legal positivism that upholds them, Indigenous cultural, political, and legal conceptions of
water—all of which are necessarily interconnected— offer vastly different approaches to land tenure
and responsibility. Thinking Indigenous rights through water shakes up selfevident assumptions
embedded in Western legal orders while illustrating the necessity of engagement with Indigenous
peoples’ inherent rights, which stem from their distinct worldviews in which water is a central and living
agent. Water emphasizes both the ways in which settler and Indigenous worlds are intertwined—
connected through the waters that run through them—and also how these waters are ontologically
experienced and made meaningful in different ways. This dissertation explores how water thus serves as the
site through and around which to revisit relationships between settler and Indigenous peoples, and for
the rethinking of approaches to Indigenous rights in Canada.
 Technological Fix Link
Single issue focus tech solutions fail – ignores that ecological crisis is
fundamentally a result of cultural values - only the alternative addresses at this
level
Geus ‘04 (Marius de, assistant professor of Political Science, Universiteit Leiden,
“The environment versus individual
freedom and convenience”, Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism? By M. Wissenburg, pg.
90)

However, as Robyn Eckersley has convincingly pointed out in Environmentalism and Political Theory, a basic message of a
growing number of eco-political writers has been to regard the environmental problem 'not only as a crisis of
participation and survival, but as a crisis of culture in the broadest sense of the term, that is, the total of the
inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the shared basis of social action'
(Eckersley 1992: 19-20). She approaches environmental problems as consequences of our western culture and
character, especially with respect to attitudes towards nature, lifestyles and ways of consumption (Eckersley 1992: 1 7-21). In this
alternative approach the overall structure of needs and lifestyles are questioned and the acquisitive values of
today's consumer society are fundamentally challenged.1 For instance, in The Human Condition* Hannah Arendt has also noted that we live
today essentially in a mass culture society of consumers. The goal of human activities (vita activa) is no longer to be found in sustaining a public
space for political action or in creative work, but in) routine toil and labour, growing economic welfare, abundance and consumption. In her
view, modern animal laborans (humans as labouring animals) use their leisure time for nothing but consumption and the satisfaction of needs.
The more free time the labouring citizens have, the more acquisitive and possessive they become (Arendt 1958: 133). In a different way, deep
ecology philosophers such as Arne Naess, Bill Devall and George Sessions have also noted that our environmental dislocations are inherent to
our culture of limitless expansion and our materialist and consumerist lifestyles (Devall and Sessions 1985; Naess 1989). However, if it is true
that our deeply rooted norms, values, beliefs and aspirations are at the basis of the environmental problem, our
basic problems seem
irremediable by single-issue economic reforms, scientific optimism and technological progress, or mere
changes in rationality in order to prevent free rider behaviour leading to social dilemmas. It may therefore be
concluded that the most urgent task for the future will be to concentrate on cultural renewal, looking
critically and creatively at human needs, overcoming excess consumerism, and formulating an ideal of
'limit1 (also see de Gens 2003: Chs 8 and 9).
 Water Conservation Link
Conservation is a tactic that locks Indigenous populations out of environmental
management and governance – the plan is used as a tactic of colonization
Corson ‘10 (Catherine, the Miller Worley Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Mt. Holyoke College, June 2010,
“Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation,” Antipode, Vol. 42, No. 3, p. 576-602)

As protected area networks spread across the globe,

Accompanying the rise of big conservation is a move within conservation away from engaging local actors.

researchers continue to document new enclosures of common lands under the guise of
a third group of

biodiversity conservation and the associated displacement of local and indigenous peoples (Brockington, Duffy
and Igoe 2008; Brockington, Igoe and Schmidt-Soltau 2006; Chapin 2004). A subset of the aforementioned body of literature looks at the relationship between neoliberal discourse, community conservation, and the
privatization and commercialization of conservation (Dressler and Buscher 2008; King 2009; McCarthy 2005). As Igoe and Brockington (2007:446) aptly summarize:

neoliberalism's emphasis on competition, along with its rolling back of state protection and the social
contract, creates spaces in which local people are not often able to compete effectively in the face
of much more powerful transnational interests.
At its extreme, the turn away from community conservation is evidenced by the call for a return to

exclusionary parks, or what critiques call “fortress conservation”, in which local people are excluded, by force if
necessary, from utilizing resources within park boundaries (for an analysis, see Adams and Hutton 2007; Brechin et al 2002; Wilshusen et al 2002).
Nevertheless, critiques have also contended that ecoregional and transboundary approaches, which aim to extend conservation

beyond parks to landscape scales, have simultaneously furthered the influence of state agencies, international
and national NGOs and private companies in conservation and reduced investment in local communities (Brosius
and Russell 2003; Gezon 2000; Wolmer 2003). Ultimately, this scholarship illuminates how the foreign aid donor politics about which I write manifest on-the-

ground and in people's daily lives. However, while these authors show the enclosures happening as a result of biodiversity
conservation, they have elided how such endeavors are embedded in and productive of power-laden relationships among
financing organizations—a gap that I aim to fill.
 Water Rights/Restoration Link
Their anti-fracking policy reliance on the state is illusion of inclusion that reifies
settlerism
Corntassel ‘12 (Jeff Corntassel, University of Victoria, Canada, “Re-envisioning resurgence: Indigenous pathways to
decolonization and sustainable self-determination”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp.
86-101)

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 world.
 Water Settlements Link – Natives Affs
Water settlements feed into Settler Colonial domination – they are ontological
constructions that divorce water from Indigenous kinship networks and actively harm
Indigenous lifeways
Curley ’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, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00515, ppg., 60-61)

For Diné critics, water settlements were also colonial mechanisms meant to minimize Indigenous
water rights ( Jones 2011; Yazzie 2013). Earlier scholarship on “tribal water rights” characterized these
agreements as a form of colonial dispossession (Back and Taylor 1980; Burton 1991; Wilkinson 1985). More recent work,
however, tends to avoid critique in favor of a realistic tone. Today, lawyers and some scholars, many of whom are not
members of Indigenous nations, suggest that tribes ought to settle water claims in order to avoid
costly litigation and the unpredictability of court rulings (Cornell et al. 2008; Thorson et al. 2006).
Water settlements are also ontological constructions that convert rivers into notions of “acre-feet,”
divorcing water from the land, species, and kinship networks. Indigenous peoples across the world
oppose these kinds of colonial limitations while working to maintain prior resource “jurisdictions”
(Pasternak 2017). Indigenous water governance, which differs from colonial approaches, prioritizes
precapitalist and precolonial knowledge and practices that sustain communities, economies, and life on
the land (Daigle 2018; McGregor 2012; Wilson 2014). In response to Indigenous activism, some colonial states are
starting to recognize Indigenous rights to water that move beyond simple utilitarian logics, including
notions of personhood and nonhuman rights (Bakker 2018; Lightfoot 2016; Ruru 2018; Todd 2018). But state-led
processes of recognition can undermine historic practices associated with the use of water and the
land while concretizing colonial dispossession. Critical Indigenous scholars argue that a politics of recognition
fundamentally undermines Indigenous lifeways (Coulthard 2014). Audra Simpson (2014), for example, shows how Mohawk
communities contest the spatial claims and colonial authorities of Canada and the United States through strategies of refusal. Other Indigenous
critics go further to challenge the authority of tribal governments and their use of “sovereignty” as a continuation of larger processes of
colonization (Alfred 2006). Some suggest that a way toward decolonial practices is through a “resurgence” of
Indigenous lifeways, including worldviews, ethics, and governance (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2012).
Leanne Simpson (2016, 22) writes that “Indigenous resurgence, in its most radical form, is nation building, not
nation-state building, but nation building, again, in the context of grounded normativity by centring,
amplifying, animating, and actualizing the processes of grounded normativity as flight paths or
fugitive escapes from the violences of settler-colonialism.”
 “Water Wars” Link
Water war scenario planning creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of territorial and
reactionary militarization---ensures violent reactions that turn the case and cause
global wars---only the alt solves the root cause
Guslits ‘11 (Bayly Guslits Political Science Department University of Western Ontario “The War on Water: International
Water Security” February 28, 2011http://centreforforeignpolicystudies.dal.ca/pdf/gradsymp11/Guslits.pdf)

The world is facing a water crisis, but there is still much that can be done to address the problems causing the emergency. First,
"securitization" of the water crisis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it is not approached from
a holistic viewpoint that takes into consideration ecological, human and state water security needs. If academics and
policymakers continue to debate over whether the "water wars" scenario will ever come true,
states may take this as a cue to securitize and militarize their water resources, and this will certainly
lead to political and even violent conflict. However, if instead policymakers and government leadership use a holistic and
diplomatic approach to address ecological and human water needs sustainably, international water security can be achieved. Whether this
approach is branded a "post-security" or "environmental security" paradigm, the
ultimate goal lies in changing policy and
practice to address the root causes of water scarcity, and thus ensure water availability for
environmental and anthropogenic purposes.
 “Water Wars” Link
The Rhetoric of water wars sanitizes and legitimizes violence and obscures its
underlying causes
Trottier ‘04 (“Water Wars: the Rise of a hegemonic Concept” World Water Assessment Programme,
http://webworld.unesco.org/water/wwap/pccp/cd/pdf/history_future_shared_water_resources/water_wars_hegemonic_conc
ept.pdf)

The concept of hegemony was developed by Gramsci in order to explain how a state managed to assert its power over a population living
in a given territory. State power, said Gramsci, does not consist only of coercion. The means of repression at the disposal of a state are only
the most visible element of its power. The other fundamental element of state power, and probably the most important one, is persuasion .
A social group can become dominant and gather state power in its hands only if it succeeds in
developing its hegemony within the civil society by persuading the subordinate groups to accept the
values and ideas that it has adopted and by building a network of alliances based on these values
(Simon, 1991, p. 18). The hegemony of the dominant group is therefore very much ideological in nature.
The dominant group generates “common sense ,” the uncritical and partly unconscious way in which people perceive the
world. This common sense is maintained by the relations existing within the civil society , as churches, political
parties, trade unions, mass media, and other institutions propagate it . Gramsci therefore distinguishes the state apparatuses,
which have a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and coercion, from the civil society institutions, which build and maintain the
hegemonic common sense that allows the population to accept the state’s power as legitimate. Gramsci defined civil society as the set of
all institutions that do not belong either to the state or to the realm of economic production. The media, churches, and trade unions all
belonged to this civil society within which hegemonic concepts took root and flourished. He included schools within civil society, on the
basis that the educative relation is essentially a voluntary one even though the state usually subsidizes schools and sets the curriculum
(Gramsci, 1957). Other authors have defined civil society differently, and bodies such as the EU commonly consider private companies to
be part of civil society. Private
enterprises clearly play an important role in propagating hegemonic
concepts that structure the modern common sense concerning water and water wars , and institutions such
as the media are often private enterprises. Their role will therefore be included in this article along with that of the other members of civil
society. Ideologically
hegemonic conceptions provide stabilizing distortions and rationalizations of
complex realities, inconsistent desires, and arbitrary distributions of valued resources. They are presumptions that
exclude outcomes, options, or questions from public consideration; thus they advantage those elites
well positioned to profit from prevailing cleavage patterns and issue definitions . That hegemonic beliefs do
not shift fluidly with changing realities and marginal interest is what makes them important. That they require some correspondence to
“objective” realities and interests is what limits their life and the conditions under which they can be established and maintained. (Lustick,
1993, p. 121) Gramsci paid much attention to what he termed a “war of position.” Such a struggle is subtle and nonviolent. It is conducted
in the press, in educational and religious institutions, and in the political arena (Gramsci, 1957). The outcome of a war of
position is either the persistence of ideologically hegemonic concepts, the destruction of formerly ideologically
hegemonic concepts, or the emergence of new ones. Such wars of position certainly do not imply any kind of conspiracy. Various social
groups promote certain values and certain definitions they wish to become hegemonic. This will in turn affect the resilience of other
hegemonic concepts in an unpredictable manner. Many social groups and many institutions act as vehicles for the propagation of
hegemonic concepts without benefiting from them at all. The example of the female vote in Europe illustrates this very well. The idea of
females voting seemed, at best, preposterous a hundred years ago. In England, a number of suffragettes were sent to Holloway Prison
because of their activism. Their war of position proved successful and no one in the European political landscape now challenges the
legitimacy of the right to vote for women. This successful war of position later affected many other hegemonic concepts concerning
gender, such as the legitimacy of women’s presence in the work force. Whether
or not a social group is successful at
imposing or toppling a hegemonic concept largely hinges on the echo it will find for this idea among
other institutions and social groups. This article will examine the rise of the hegemonic concept concerning water wars. It will
investigate the mechanisms whereby such an idea emerged and was propagated. It will also briefly examine the war of position that is now
being waged against the concept of water wars. 2. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT OF WATER WARS Hegemonic
concepts are
not created in a vacuum. They emerge within a context where other hegemonic concepts have
already taken hold and where other wars of position are being waged . Before examining empirically the
emergence of the concept of water wars, other hegemonic concepts concerning water and concerning war will need to be reviewed.
These, and the accompanying wars of position, are the soil in which the concept of water wars is taking root and is growing. 2.1. Water
Development Theidea according to which “water should be brought where it is needed” has a long
history in western society and has led to the emergence of a hegemonic concept of “water
development.” The water literature is rife with introductory declarations concerning the great quantity of freshwater available on the
planet and the crucial necessity of redistributing this wealth more adequately. “Globally, freshwater is abundant. Each year an average of
more than 7,000 cubic meters per capita enters rivers and aquifers. Unfortunately it does not all arrive in the right place at the right time”
write Turner and Durbourg (1999) in a vein that is very representative of a dominant assumption. Such a statement implies that there is a
right place and a right time for water.
It implies a clear hierarchy of values concerning water users. Some are
deemed to be more deserving than others. Indeed, water will be used wherever it flows, but fish and
algae living in northern Canada rate as less important than human beings in need of drinking water,
food, and sanitation. Such an anthropocentric vision of water is widely shared by most social actors . It
is also coherent with the conservationist trend in environmentalism. Two types of environmentalism can be distinguished: that of
conservationists and that of preservationists. Conservationists want to protect nature as a resource for human use whereas
preservationists seek to protect nature itself from human use (Milton, 1996). It is fair to say that the idea of water as a basic human right is
well entrenched as a hegemonic concept around the planet. The
right of thirst has long been enshrined in Muslim law
and is not questioned in any international forum (Faruqui et al., 2001). It satisfies the essential criteria to
qualify as a hegemonic concept: anyone evoking the possibility of a distribution system that would
not ensure a minimum supply of freshwater and food to every human being would apologize for
mentioning such a thought. Were that person to advocate such an idea, they would be regarded as
monstrous. At best, the person would be laughed at. The organizations that struggle against the construction of big dams always put
forward their adherence to the principle of water as a human right. They demonstrate how such projects, while claiming to bring water
where it is needed, would actually compromise this right for the social group they defend (see for example: Roy, 1999 ).
This first
ideologically hegemonic concept of water and food as basic human rights has provided the
rationalization for what has become another hegemonic concept: “water development.” As humans
have a basic right to food and water, water development would bring clean water to them for their
domestic needs, provide sanitation, and allow the development of irrigation to provide food. Lustick’s reference to hegemonic
concepts rationalizing complex realities and excluding options or questions from public consideration is very relevant here. Transferring
populations from water-scarce areas to water-rich areas could have satisfied the human right to water and food. It could have been
satisfied by populations deciding to prioritize their use of water and resorting to virtual water.1 But
water development came
to signify exactly the opposite: water would be brought to the people for domestic consumption and
for irrigation even if these people elected to settle in the middle of the desert. Which groups, which
“elites” in Lustick’s terms, benefited from such an issue definition? Construction companies appear
as obvious candidates, as they grew out of this version of water development. They clearly
participated in maintaining this belief and in propagating it. But many other groups participated in
the making of water development, as it is understood today .
Non-Topic Links – Policy Affs
 Agriculture Link
The affirmative agricultural reform is not neutral, rather it is based on a territorial
assumption that is essential to the theft of indigenous lands and genocide
Konkle ‘08 (Maureen, Assoc. prof of English @University of Missouri–Columbia (“Indigenous Ownership and the Emergence
of U.S. Liberal Imperialism”, The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 32, Summer, p. 305-8)

By the early nineteenth century, the

idea that indigenous people were exclusively hunters—who therefore,
according to European law, couldn’t claim possession of land over which they merely roamed—and,
moreover, always had been hunters was common. The idea of the Indian as exclusively a hunter was part of a
larger narrative of savagism and civilization , the emergence of which Roy Harvey Pearce marks in the 1770s, with the formation
of the United States. He attributes the rise of this grand, abstract narrative of civilization’s conflict with and conquest of savagery in the United
States in part to the influence of Scottish Enlightenment historiography, which provided the four stages theory of human history. If
Enlightenment history posited progress through the stages of human society from savagery to the culmination of European mercantile
civilization, the Euro-American version of that history read the existence of indigenous people in North America as a kind of usurping of that
order that had to be righted, where the beginning and the end of human society were locked in a battle for the future. Further, while
Enlightenment history provided the frame for a narrative in which the defeat of the past by the future must occur, its incorporation of the
agriculturalist theory of property provided the means of denying the principle of indigenous ownership.
This theory is set out by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he defined indigenous North
Americans as the exemplar of the savage in the state of nature, where property and government by
definition didn’t exist. This theory didn’t affect North American practices in the eighteenth century, but it did gain authority over that
time and permeated discussion about indigenous people by the end of the century, including in historiography. By the early nineteenth
century,
the theory of property that defined indigenous people as incapable of owning land and the grand
narrative of savagery and civilization that contained it provided the means of redefining indigenous
people as hunter-savages with no claim to ownership of land.
While U.S. historians widely acknowledge the agriculturalist theory of property in discussions of North
American colonization, they haven’t had much to say about the theory’s colonial North American
history. Scholars in political philosophy and British colonial history have discussed that context at length, however, such that what historian
David Armitage calls the “‘colonial’ reading of Locke’s political theory” is well established. Locke was, famously, secretary to Lord Shaftesbury
and the lords proprietor of Carolina colony and wrote the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669. He had a fairly extensive knowledge
of the colonies and their operation, amassing a substantial collection of books on the topics of America and colonization and regularly
questioning English settlers about their experiences. He also wrote extensively on the theory and administration of the American colonies. In
working out his theory of property Locke implicitly and explicitly used a North American colonial setting, where
indigenous people served as the embodiment of man in the state of nature.
In chapter 5 of the Second Treatise Locke’s professed object was to justify taking land without the consent of those who were on it: “I shall
endeavour to shew, how Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common, and that without
any express Compact of all the Commoners,” he wrote in the opening paragraph. He then introduced
“the wild Indian” as the
inhabitant of the state of nature, where the products of nature were the common possession of all , “as
[fruits and beasts] are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature,” a phrase that would be associated forever afterward with indigenous
people in North America. Natural man had a property in whatever he could take from the spontaneous hand of
nature in order to subsist, and natural law held that he could take as long as “there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”
Labor, but specifically commercial agriculture, established property in land, which led to written laws
and, ultimately, government. The consent of the commoners for enclosure of commonly held land in the state of nature was not
required, first, because God “commanded [man] to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life,” and, second, because “there was
still enough, and as good left.” Indeed, “he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all.” Those who
protested such an arrangement were disputing God’s will. There was “no room for Controversie about the Title, nor for Incroachment on the
Right of others,” Locke maintained, because “it was useless as well to carve himself too much, or take more than he needed.”
The quarrelling and disputation Locke invoked draws one back to the historical context. With regard to the “good enough” qualification, James
Tully points out that
Locke had to insist that indigenous people/natural men would not be adversely affected
by the taking of their supposedly vacant land , because if they were affected, he would have had to find some means of
incorporating their consent into his theory. His theory depended on the erasure of indigenous ownership and political society in the first
instance, despite the fact that, as Tully notes, he would have been well aware that indigenous people formed political societies. “ As
Families increased, and Industry inlarged their Stocks, their Possessions inlarged with the need of them,”
Locke wrote. “They incorporated, settled themselves together, and built Cities, and then, by consent,
they came in time, to set out the bounds of their distinct Territories, and agree on limits between them
and their Neighbours, and by Laws within themselves, settled the Properties of those of the same
society.” Indians did none of this: as they didn’t desire to engage in commercial agriculture, they didn’t
need written laws or money, and they didn’t form governments. The spontaneous hand of nature was
all they needed or wanted, and they didn’t therefore own any land. This doomed them to an inferiority
of their own making. Because Indians refused to engage in commercial agriculture, they “have not one hundredth part of the Conveniencies we
enjoy: And a King of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.” But
once civilized
Europeans properly used the land, Locke maintained, everyone, including Indians, benefited.
 Agricultural Sustainability Link
Agricultural sustainability is so ideologically charged that it tends to trade off with
other social priorities like racism
Allen ‘93 (Patricia, associate director center agroecology @ uc santa cruz “Food for the future”, ppg.1-2)
Athough the goal of agriculture is first and ultimately sustaining human life, agricultural sustainability has been constructed almost exclusively
in the discourse and domain of nature and the natural sciences. The
effort toward a sustainable reconstruction of
agriculture has privileged environmental priorities and natural science approaches while ignoring social
priorities and approaches, despite the fact that social and ecological problems are insepara bly
connected in food and agriculture systems . Unless we closely examine people’s relations with each
other, in addition to those between people and nature, we foreclose our ability to bring about the deep
structural changes on which sustainable agriculture ultimately depends . This book concentrates on the need to
integrate the "social" with the "natural" in sustainable agriculture. Critics of conventional agriculture in the United States have developed
alternative ideas and practices known collectively as "sustainable agriculture." Sustainability
proponents have called attention
to agricultural resource issues, placed agricultural sustainability on public research and policy agendas,
increased demand for pesticide-free food, and developed conservation-oriented agricultural techniques .
Yet, while the sustainable agriculture move ment has effectively demonstrated conventional agriculture's
problematic treatment of the environment, too often this has been at the expense of attending to
equally pressing social problems. As Carolyn Sachs and I discuss in Part II of this volume, these approaches do not
question inequities such as hunger, poverty, racial oppression, or gender subordination that many
experience in current agrarian structures (e.g., family farms, rural communities, wage labor). In the past decade
"sustainability" has become a central agricultural sym bol, moving from a fringe concern to one that is
becoming institutionalized (Buttel and Gillespie, 1988). New organizations have emerged to advocate sustainability platforms and
established institutions have adopted the mantle of sustainable agriculture. The concept has attracted farmers, consumers, environmentalists,
and agricultural experts alike.1 Since
agricultural sustainability is increasingly embraced as a goal in agriculture
(see Youngberg et at., this volume), yet
has accomplished relatively tittle of major significance (Buttel, this
volume), it is critical that we widen our definition and practice of this concept, for it has great potential
as a transformational toot. A reformulation of its theory and practice is essential to prevent sustainable
agriculture from reproducing the ecological and social problems of current food and agriculture systems,
since agricultural sustainability is a socially constructed, ideologically based discourse that has as its root
a social concept and problem. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the social basis of sustainable agriculture and why
social approaches are required for achieving sustainability.
 “Anthropogenic” Warming Link
The affirmative’s discourse of anthropogenic warming universalizes the blame for
climate change and ignores Western civilization as the colonial engine of climate
destruction. This homogenizing description of warming reproduces environmental
effort that favor Western define humanity and erase the Global South from their
calculus
Wynter ‘07 (Sylvia, Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Romance Languages at Stanford University, “The Human being as
noun? Or being human as praxis? Towards the Autopoietic turn/overturn: A Manifesto,”
otl2.wikispaces.com/file/view/The+Autopoetic+Turn.pdf)

For if, as Time magazine reported in January 2007 (Epigraph 2), a U.N. Intergovernmental panel of Natural Scientists, were soon to release " a
smoking-gun report which confirms that human activities are to blame for global warming " (and thereby for
climate change), and had therefore predicted "catastrophic disruptions by 2100," by April, the issued Report not only confirmed the above,
but also repeated the major contradiction which the Time account had re-echoed. This contradiction, however, has
nothing to do in any way with the rigor, and precision of their natural scientific findings , but rather with the
contradiction referred to by Derrida's question in Epigraph 3—i.e., But who, we? That is, their attribution of the non-natural
factors driving global warming and climate change to, generic human activities, and/or to
"anthropocentric forcings"; with what is, in effect, this mis-attribution then determining the nature of
their policy recommendations to deal with the already ongoing reality of global warming and climate
change, to be ones couched largely in economic terms. That is, in the terms of our present mode of knowledge production,
and its "perceptual categorization system" as elaborated by the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences (or "human sciences") and
which are reciprocally enacting of our present sociogenic genre of being human, as that of the West's Man in its second Liberal or bio-humanist
reinvented form, as homo oeconomicus; as optimally "virtuous Breadwinner, taxpayer, consumer, and as systemically over-represented as if it,
and its behavioral activities were isomorphic with the being of being human, and thereby with activities that would be definable as the human-
as-a-species ones. Consequently, theReport's authors because logically taking such an over-representation as an
empirical fact, given that, as highly trained natural scientists whose domains of inquiry are the physical and (purely) biological levels of
reality, although their own natural-scientific order of cognition with respect to their appropriate non-human domains of inquiry, is an
imperatively self-correcting and therefore, necessarily, a cognitively open/open-ended one, nevertheless, because in order to be
natural scientists, they are therefore necessarily, at the same time, middle class Western or westernized
subjects, initiated 15 as such, by means of our present overall education system and its mode of knowledge
production to be the optimal symbolically encoded embodiment of the West's Man, it its second reinvented bio-humanist homo
oeconomicus, and therefore bourgeois self-conception, over-represented as if it were isomorphic with the being of being human, they also
fall into the trap identified by Derrida in the case of his fellow French philosophers. The trap, that is, of conflating their own
existentially experienced (Western-bourgeois or ethno-class) referent "we," with the "we" of "the
horizon of humanity." This then leading them to attribute the reality of behavioral activities that are
genre-specific to the West's Man in its second reinvented concept/self-conception as homo oeconomicus, ones that are therefore
as such, as a historically originated ensemble of behavioral activitiesas being ostensibly human activities-in-general. This, in spite of the
fact that they do historicize the origin of the processes that were to lead to their recent natural scientific
findings with respect to the reality of the non-naturally caused ongoing acceleration of global warming
and climate change, identifying this process as having begun with the [West's] Industrial Revolution from
about 1750 onwards. That is, therefore, as a process that can be seen to have been correlatedly concomitant in Great Britain, both with the
growing expansion of the largely bourgeois enterprise of factory manufacturing, as well with the first stages of the political and intellectual
struggles the British bourgeoisie who were to spearhead the Industrial Revolution, to displace the then ruling group hegemony of the landed
aristocracy cum gentry, and to do so, by inter alia, the autopoetic reinvention of the earlier homo politicus/virtuous citizen civic humanist
concept of Man, which had served to legitimate the latter's traditionally landed, political, social and economic dominance, in new terms. This
beginning with Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the Enlightenment in the generation before the American, French, and Haitian (slave)
revolutions, as a reinvention tat was to be effected in now specifically bourgeois terms as homo oeconomicus/and virtuous Breadwinner. 116
That is as the now purely secular genre of being human, which although not to be fully (i.e., politically, intellectually, and economically)
institutionalized until the mid-nineteenth century, onwards, when its optimal incarnation came to be actualized in the British and Western
bourgeoisie as the
new ruling class, was, from then on, to generate its prototype specific ensemble of new
behavioral activities, that were to impel both the Industrial Revolution, as well as the West's second
wave of imperial expansion, this based on the colonized incorporation of a large majority of the
world's peoples, all coercively homogenized to serve its own redemptive material telos, the telos
initiating of global warming and climate change. Consequently, if the Report's authors note that about 1950, a steady process
of increasing acceleration of the processes of global warming and climate change, had begun to take place, this was not only to be due to the
Soviet Revolution's (from 1917 onwards) forced march towards industrialization (if in its still homo oeconomicus conception, since a march
spearheaded by the 116 See the already cited essay by J.G.A. Pocock "symbolic capital," education credentials owning and technically skilled
Eastern European bourgeoisie)—as a state-directed form of capitalism, nor indeed by that of Mao's then China, but was to be also due to the
fact that in the wake of the range of successful anti-colonial struggles for political independence, which had accelerated in the wake of the
Second World War, because the new entrepreneurial and academic elites had already been initiated by the Western educational system in
Western terms as homo oeconomicus, they too would see political independence as calling for industrialized development on the "collective
bovarysme "117 model of the Western bourgeoisie. Therefore, with the acceleration of global warming and climate
change gaining even more momentum as all began to industrialize on the model of homo oeconomicus, with the result that by
the time of the Panel's issued April 2007 Report the process was now being driven by a now planetarily
homogenized/standardized transnational "system of material provisioning or mode of techno-industrial
economic production based on the accumulation of capital; as the means of production of ever-increasing economic growth, defined
as "development"; with this calling for a single model of normative behavioral activities, all driven by the now globally (post-colonially
and post-the-1989-collapse-of-the-Soviet Union), homogenized desire of "all men (and women) to," realize themselves/ourselves, in the terms
of homo oeconomicus. In the terms, therefore, of "its single (Western-bourgeois or ethno-class)
understanding" of "man's humanity," over-represented as that of the human ; with the well-being and
common good of its referent "we"—that, not only of the transnational middle classes but even more
optimally, of the corporate multinational business industries and their financial networks , both
indispensable to the securing of the Western -bourgeois conception of the common good, within the overall
terms of the behavior-regulatory redemptive material telos of ever-increasing economic growth, put forward as the
Girardot-type "cure" for the projected Malthusian-Ricardo transumed postulate of a "significant ill" as that, now, ostensibly, of mankind's
threatened subordination to [the trope] of Natural Scarcity, this in the reoccupied place of Christianity of its postulate of that "ill" as that of
enslavement to Original Sin."' With
the result that the very ensemble of behavioral activities indispensable, on
the one hand, to the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a Western and westernized
transnational ruling class, is the same ensemble of behaviors that is directly causal of global worming
and climate change, as they are, on the other, to the continued dynamic enactment and stable
replication of the West's second reinvented concept of Man ; this latter in response to the latter's existential imperative
of guarding against the entropic disintegration of its genre of being human and fictive nation-state mode of kind. Thereby against the possible
bringing to an end, therefore, of the societal order, and autopoetic living Western and westernized macro world system in it bourgeois
configuration, which is reciprocally the former's (i.e., its genre of being human, and fictive modes of kind's condition of realization, at a now
global level. This, therefore, is the cognitive dilemma, one arising directly from the West's hitherto unresolvable aporia of the secular, that has
been precisely captured by Sven Lutticken in a recent essay. Despite, he writes, "the consensus that global warming cannot be ascribed to
normal fluctuations in the earth's temperature... [the]social and political components of this process have been
minimized; man-made nature is re-naturalized, the new (un)natural history presented as fate." And with
this continuing to be so because (within the terms, I shall add, of our present "single understanding of man's humanity" and the
unresolvable aporia which it continues to enact), "[t]he truly terrifying notion is not that [global warming and
climate change] is irreversible, but that it actually might be reversible—at the cost of radically
changing the economic and social order..."119 The changing, thereby, of the now globally hegemonic
biologically absolute answer that we at present give to the question to who we are, and of whose
biohumanist homo oeconomicus symbolic life/death (i.e., naturally selected/dysselected) code's intentionality of dynamic enactment
and stable replication, our present "economic and social order" is itself the empirical actualization.
 “Anthropogenic” Warming Link
“Warming is real, anthropogenic, and accelerating towards catastrophe” attributes
responsibility for climate to change to humanity as a whole – this diverts attention
from inequalities in consumption and reproduces the assumption of Western lifestyles
as an expression of human nature and a universal desire – this reproduces colonialism.
Cuomo ‘11 (Chris Cuomo, Prof. of Philosophy @ Georgia, “Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,” Hypatia vol.
26, no. 4 (Fall 2011)

Who then is responsible for addressing climate change? In some scientific discourses, climate change is described as
anthropogenic, or caused by humans, to distinguish it from other phases of warming and cooling that the planet has experienced
over the billennia (Schmidt and Wolfe 2009). No other animals are directly responsible for the industrial greenhouse
effect, and industrial greenhouse gases are indeed generated by humans, but the implication that
humans as a species have caused climate change is also misleading. Particular people and particular
cultures, nations, industries, and economic systems have caused and contributed to the pollution that
created the industrial greenhouse effect, and we need not take those actors to be representative of the
entire human species. Attributing blame to humans simpliciter diverts attention from the real sources of
the problem and reproduces the narrow view that there is a universal greedy human nature that
inevitably leads toward planetary destruction, and the mistaken assumption that everyone naturally
desires the lifestyles enabled by modern Western colonial development.
 Arctic Link
The aff’s mission to protect the Arctic is not neutral but rather replicates a colonial
legacy of control – the aff uses climate change as a state of exception in order to
justify further territorial control
Shukin ‘15 (Nicole, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, “Materializing climate
change images of exposure, states of exception” in material cultures in canada edited by thomas allen and jennifer blair, google
books)

I call these photographic and filmic productions cultural barometers even though it is a world-historical climate condition, rather than ¶
fluctuations in the weather, that they seek to materialize. The distinction¶ between weather and climate is drawn along temporal lines by ¶
meteorologists as well as by authoritative agencies like NASA. ¶ According to NASA, “the difference between weather and climate is a¶ measure
of time. Weather is what conditions of an atmosphere are over a¶ short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere ‘behaves’ over¶
relatively long periods of time.”1 The temporal distinction between¶ weather and climate will take on an enlarged significance as I¶
comparatively assess the cultural interventions posed by these two so- ¶ called barometers. For
in crystallizing climate change as a
crisis-event¶ within the short time frame of an Arctic excursion, the ice slides of¶ Ackroyd and Harvey
inadvertently bring something else into view as ¶ well: a state of exception excited by a sense of
ecological emergency,¶ one that justifies dramatic efforts to avert a global catastrophe . By¶ contrast,
Qapirangajuq’s engagement with the crisis of climate change¶ complicates the Western cultural and political habit of
pronouncing¶ states of emergency as exceptional time-spaces in which a strong state or ¶ individual
exercises licence to suspend the rule of ordinary life.
The association of the state of exception with a European model of ¶ sovereign power traces back to the German
political theorist Carl¶ Schmitt’s theory of the state and his renowned assertion , “[s]overeign is¶ he who decides on the
exception” (7). Schmitt’s statement has catalyzed ¶ numerous conceptualizations of the state of exception, including Walter ¶ Benjamin’s
counter that “[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that ¶ the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the¶ rule”
(259) as well as numerous reflections by contemporary theorists ¶ such as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Buder. The state of exception
is¶ usually understood in relation to the state’s political or juridical power to ¶ suspend the law, and
relatively little attention has been paid to how ecological crises condition new states of exception in the
late twentieth¶ and early twenty-first centuries .2 More work calls to be done, in¶ particular, tracking how a state of exception
may be culturally declared¶ by ecological subjects who feel justified in mobilizing a set of¶ “emergency powers” that, while
obviously different from those¶ politically executed by a sovereign state, nonetheless replicate its
model¶ of sovereignty through an exercise of strong subjectivity . Paradoxically,¶ as I’ll suggest in my reading of
“ice slides,” such emergency powers are in this instance expressed in the cultural agency and even
hyper-¶ responsibility of the ecological expedition. It may be tempting to view¶ the Cape Farewell expedition as responding
to the call made by¶ Benjamin, who proposes that when the state of emergency becomes the ¶ rule, the task then becomes “to bring
about a real state of emergency”¶ (259; emphasis added). However, I am concerned that the opposite may¶ be the case; that
under the shadow of climate change there arise ¶ ecological citizens who dangerously act as sovereign in
relation to a¶ precarious planet that they territorially undertake to defend. And while ¶ territory, or
space, matters in relation to the Arctic expedition that ¶ launches in the South, time will emerge as even
more crucial to the¶ ecological state of exception that it passionately pronounces.
By contrast, Qapirangajuq visualizes global climate change in a manner that challenges both the model of sovereignty exercised
by¶ European nation-states and its mimicry in those forms of ecological ¶ subjectivity that mobilize
emergency powers through extreme cultural ¶ missions. In materializing images of a very different time and duration of¶
both exposure and observation—that is, in placing climate change within ¶ a longer history of Arctic incursions and
exercises of sovereign power, as¶ well as within a long practice of Inuit environmental attention and ¶
adaptability—Kunuk and Mauro’s documentary refuses to excite the ¶ affect of ecological emergency. Or
to put it another way, in contrast with¶ the Cape Farewell project, Qapirangajuq refuses to culturally declare a¶ state of exception, even as the
film presents moving images of the¶ especially profound impact that climate change is having on the Inuit. By¶ virtue of living in unspectacular,
everyday exposure to the environmental¶ and social effects of global warming on the North, the Inuit in the film ¶ offer a kind of ecological
knowledge and responsibility that makes¶ visible the incongruity of exceptional exercises of environmental ¶ witnessing by liberal-minded, well-
intentioned Southerners. As such, the¶ documentary can be viewed as contributing to Indigenous critiques of sovereignty as a Eurocentric
concept and model of governance—one that¶ is “inappropriate as a political objective for indigenous peoples,” as¶ Taiaiake Alfred puts it (38)—
by throwing into relief a model of ¶ ecological subjectivity that is equally “inappropriate” for those
whose¶ conditions of life are most immediately affected by climate change (38).
The different images of climate change materialized by these two collaborative projects is a biopolitical
matter of considerable significance¶ when one considers that the signs of melting ice in the Arctic are
actively¶ being read not only as a crisis justifying eco-cultural incursions into the ¶ North to witness its
effects first-hand, but as an opportunity for Canada ¶ and other nation-states to capitalize upon warming
Arctic waters. As¶ melting ice formations physically open up new passages for global trade, ¶ countries like
Canada are making increasingly aggressive assertions of ¶ sovereignty over the North. However, it’s not only
political claims to Arctic sovereignty that are excited by the effects of climate change in the ¶ North,
but cultural acts of environmental witness that risk reanimating an ¶ imperial model of European
expeditionizing—and what Lauren Berlant¶ terms a “melodrama” of sovereign subjectivity—as global Southerners¶
seek to actively respond with “the heroic agency a crisis seems already to ¶ have called for” (“Slow” 760).
That these political, economic, and¶ cultural dramas can function as supplementary or complicit ¶
territorializations is suggested by the Canadian government’s recent¶ revival of interest, under the conservative leadership of Stephen
Harper,¶ in Captain John Franklin’s infamous and ill-fated Arctic expedition of¶ 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage. The Harper
government’s¶ investment in this fetishized fragment of its national history through the¶ funding of archaeological searches for Franklin’s lost
ships, the HMS¶ Erebus and the HMS Terror, coincides
with its geopolitical interest in ¶ control over Arctic waters,
bringing into view the long relationship ¶ between the spell of the expedition and the extensions of
sovereignty.3
 Carbon Tax Link
Carbon tax is nothing more than a reform to strengthen settler institutions and co-opt
social justice movements. Even if this has revolutionary potential, It will be absorbed
by elites
Bond ‘08 (Patrick, Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he has directed the Centre for Civil Society since
2004, “The state of the global carbon trade debate,” presented to the Energy Caucus conference in Johannesurg, 9-10,
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Energy%20Caucus%209%20September.pdf)

There are intrinsic, deep-level problems in the new emissions markets , both on their own terms and
with respect to the climate and peoples most vulnerable . What is required is agreement on the strategic orientation and
the kinds of alliances that can move the debate forward. To this end, applied to the debate over market solutions to the climate crisis,
consider the late French sociologist Andre Gorz’s distinction (in his books Strategy for Labour and Socialism and Revolution) 8
between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms ”: 1) Reformist reforms undergird, strengthen
and relegitimise the main institutions and dynamics in the system that cause the climate change
problem, and thus weaken and demobilise environmental and social justice advocacy communities
through co-option; 2) Non-reformist reforms undermine, weaken and delegitimise the climate change
system’s main institutions and dynamics, and consequently strengthen its critics, giving them
momentum and further reason to mobilize. The prior pages allow us to distinguish four market-based
emissions mitigation initiatives along this spectrum: 1) carbon trades without auctions, where pollution permits are grandfathered
in, as in the European Trading Scheme, are now so widely delegitimised, that only US Republican Party candidate John McCain supports them;
2) carbon trades with auctions will increasingly dominate discussions, especially in the US if Barack Obama is elected President in November, in
part because they have the support of many mainstream commentators and large environmental organizations; 3 )
carbon taxes, either
aimed to be revenue-neutral, or to raise funds for renewables and socio-economic transformation, will
continue to be seen as the main progressive alternative to carbon trading, even though such taxes do not address more fundamental power
relations or achieve systematic change required to avert climate disaster; and 4) Greenhouse Development Rights, Contraction-and-
Convergence and other per capita “right to pollute” strategies with a North-South redistributive orientation are also advocated by eloquent
environmentalists and some Third World leaders, and entail a trading component and the property right to emit. Each
strategy has
major disadvantages by virtue of being located within market-based systems , especially during a period of extreme
financial volatility during which energy-related securities (including emissions credits) have been amongst the most unreliable measures of value. As a
result, we can conclude that the first two are reformist reforms, and the latter two have non-reformist possibilities. There are two further non-
reformist alternatives – command-and-control emissions prohibitions and local supply-side strategies (a kind of command-and-control from
below) – that bear consideration once the market-based strategies are briefly reviewed. A central problem is that reformist reforms can be
counterproductive to mitigating climate change. In short, it is possible that an exploitative system becomes even stronger in the wake of an
eco-social change campaign. If campaigners unwittingly adopt the same logic of the system, and turn for change implementation to the kinds of
institutions responsible for exploitative damage, and moreover also restore those institutions’ credibility, the reforms may do more harm than
good. To illustrate, if mainstream environmentalists endorse World Bank strategies to commodify forests through the “Reducing Emissions
From Deforestation and Degradation” (REDD) programme, their co-optation inevitably strengthens the Bank – responsible for vast climate
damage as a major fossil fuel investor – and weakens the work of indigenous people and environmental activists. The reformist-reform logic
appears in the case of a Brazilian meat packing plant in the Amazon that coincides with the Bank’s investments in forest protection. There are,
in such cases, persuasive advocates of reform, such as Dr Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Institute, who accept the basic parameters of
the system’s logic, namely the ongoing exploitation of the Amazon, and who seek to tame that process using World Bank resources: The irony is
that at the same time the World Bank was launching the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, the International Finance Corporation [a World
Bank agency] was 8 making a loan to the Bertin meat-packing plant in the Brazilian Amazon. The loan aims to set up a sustainable supply of beef
for an ecological meat-packing facility in Marab in the state of Para. What upset the protestors was the idea that the same institution would be
accelerating deforestation by expanding the capacity to process meat in the Amazon region as it creates this mechanism for compensating
nations for reducing their emissions. Our own feeling on this is that there comes a point where we have to acknowledge that the region is
undergoing an economic transformation and if we can find a powerful lever for commodifying how this transformation takes place - putting a
premium on legal land-use practices, legal deforestation, the gradual elimination of the use of fire - we should take it. For me that trumps the
negative consequences of setting up increased capacity in the region. In other words, I really do believe that there are many responsible cattle
ranchers and soy farmers in the Amazon who are waiting for some sort of recognition through positive incentives. The incentive could be a very
small mark up - literally a few cents per pound of beef sold - but it would send a signal to these ranchers that if they want to participate in the
new beef economy, they better have their legal forest reserve in order or have compensated for it, maintain or be in the process of restoring
their riparian zone forests, control erosion, and get their cows out of the streams and into artificial watering tanks. There is a whole range of
positive things that can happen once cattle ranchers see that if they do things right they are rewarded. This means that as Brazil moves forward
as the world’s leading exporter of beef - with tremendous potential to expand - we have a way to shape that expansion as it takes place to
reduce the negative ecological impacts. 9 Such logic is also evident in efforts to reform carbon trading by advocating the auctioning of emissions
permits. In opposition to reformist reforms, a coalition of 32 Indigenous Peoples (and environmental allies) lobbied against the REDD
programme: Given the threat to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights that REDD represents, we call on the United Nations Permanent Forum on
Indigenous Issues to recommend strongly to the UNFCCC, the UN Forum of Forests, concerned UN agencies such as UNEP, the World Bank, the
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples and nation states that REDD not be considered as a
strategy to combat Climate Change but, in fact, is in violation of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples. Moreover, we also urge the
Permanent Forum to recommend strongly to the Convention on Biological Diversity that the implementation of the programme of work on
Forests and biodiversity prohibit REDD. We also further urge that Paragraph 5 be amended to remove “clean development mechanism, the
Clean Energy Investment Framework, and the Global Environment Facility”. These initiatives do not demonstrate good examples of partnership
with indigenous peoples. There are many CDM projects that have human rights violations, lack of transparency and have failed to recognize the
principles of Free, Prior and Informed Consent. In contrast to reformist reform initiatives such as REDD, non-reformist reforms are generated by campaigns
that explicitly reject the underlying logic of climate change, i.e., fossil fuel exploitation . Such reforms legitimate the opponents of the system, not the system itself,
and lead to further mobilisation rather than to the movement’s cooptation .
An example is the partially-successful struggle to “keep
the oil in the soil” in the Yasuní National Park waged for several years by the Quito NGO Accion Ecologia
and its Oil Watch allies. The campaign advanced rapidly in 2007, when Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa declared his intent to leave
$12 billion worth of oil reserves untouched in perpetuity, in exchange for anticipated payments from international sources - not as a carbon offset,
but instead to be considered part of the North’s repayment of its “ecological debt” to the South . The aim of the proposal is to provide a creative solution
for the threat posed by the extraction of crude oil in the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha (ITT) oil fields, which are located in the highly vulnerable
area of Yasuní National Park. The proposal would contribute to preserving biodiversity, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and respecting the
rights of indigenous peoples and their way of life. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has stated that the country’s first option is to maintain
the crude oil in the subsoil. The national and international communities would be called on to help the Ecuadorian government implement this
costly decision for the country. The government hopes to recover 50% of the revenues it would obtain by extracting the oil. The procedure
involves the issuing of government bonds for the crude oil that will remain “in situ”, with the double commitment of never extracting this oil
and of protecting Yasuní National Park. It is important to keep in mind that if Ecuador succeeds in receiving the hoped for amount – estimated
at 350 million dollars annually – it would only be for a period of ten years beginning after the sixth year, since production and potential
revenues would progressively decline at the end of that period. A more promising alternative would be a strategy to provide the government
with the 50% of resources in such a way as to provide a consistent income for an indefinite period of time. This resources would be channelled
towards activities that help to free the country from its dependency on exports and imports and to consolidate food sovereignty. The proposal
is framed within the national and international contexts based on the following considerations: 1. halt climate change 2. stop destruction of
biodiversity 3. protect the huaorani people 4. economic transformation of the country. The very notion of an “ecological debt” is also a non-reformist
reform, because although it asserts the calculation of the monetary value of nature, payment on such an obligation would revise such a range of power relationships
that massive structural change would inevitably follow . Such linkages between environmental stewardship and social justice provide the only sure way to generate
political principles that can inform lasting climate mitigation. Prior
to concluding with these movements’ most recent call to
action, we must quickly review the proposals “in between”, and ask, will principles of non-reformist
reformism be adopted by those advocating carbon taxes and per capita emissions rights ? Two crucial
questions emerge which will help determine whether the reforms proposed by carbon tax and per capita
emissions rights advocates do more harm than good . The first is whether the kinds of reforms proposed –
which entail putting a price on carbon and exposing that price (and all manner of related negotiations) to
corporate-dominated national and global-scale “governance” initiatives – can be assured of both
genuinely addressing the climate crisis and also redistributing energy and economic resources from
rich to poor. The “devil is in the details” in relation to both a carbon tax and per capita emissions rights, yet as
noted, the presumptions entailed in taxation (which often has a maldistributive impact, as shown in the
British Columbia gas tax) and allocations of property rights will make a constructive outcome unlikely. Might
non-reformist reform opportunities emerge so that a carbon tax redistributes resources to both
renewable energy investments and to low-income people who, through no fault of their own, are most
vulnerable to higher energy prices? Could a per capita rights mechanism be designed and adopted that move forward the agenda
of the environmental and social justice movements without falling victim to market distortions? These are not impossible
outcomes, but given prevailing power relations are quite unlikely.
 Climate Change Focus Link
To debate climate change IS to debate settler colonialism – indigenous peoples within
settler states have faced hundreds of years of anthropogenic climate changes. The aff
papers over history by obfuscating the violence that brought us here
Whyte ‘16 (Kyle Powys Whyte, Potawatomi and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Timinick Chair in the Humanities,
Michigan State University, “Indigenous Peoples, Climate Change Loss and Damage, and the Responsibility of Settler States”,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/38230977/Whyte_-_Responsibility_of_Settler_States.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1470612219&Signature=zecWIG2AsQG3LC4CbtxvfPKRGxE
%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DIndigenous_Peoples_Climate_Change_Loss_a.pdf)

Indigenous peoples encompass the roughly 370 million persons whose communities governed themselves before a period of invasion and
colonization and live within territories¶ where nations, such as New Zealand or Indonesia, are recognized internationally as the major ¶
sovereigns. Groups who explicitly identify as indigenous peoples usually exercise both cultural¶ and political self-determination through
enacting their own legal and customary systems, rights¶ and governance capacities in the face of ongoing structures of colonialism and their
legacies,¶ including numerous legal, political and bureaucratic barriers imposed by nations, international ¶ organizations, subnational and
municipal governments, corporations, and nonindigenous private¶ citizens (Anaya 2004; Niezen 2003; Larson, Johnson, and Murphy 2008;
Cadena and Starn 2007;¶ Sanders 1977). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples establishes ¶ cultural and political
self-determination as indigenous peoples’ free determination of “their¶ political status,” free pursuit of “their economic, social and cultural
development” (article 3),¶ “right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs,” ¶ (article 4), and “right to
maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social ¶ and cultural institutions...” (article 5) (United Nations General Assembly
2007). Many¶ indigenous peoples neighbor or reside within industrial settler states such as the United States,¶
Australia, and Canada. I use the term settler states to indicate nations whose formation is tied to the establishment of
structures that both erase indigenous peoples (Veracini 2010; Simpson¶ 2014) and facilitate industrial activities
such as subsurface resource extraction (e.g. mining), ¶ landscape-scale degradation (e.g. deforestation), fossil fuel burning
private and public¶ enterprises, and energy intensive consumer lifestyles (LaDuke 1999).¶ For these settler
states, the¶ colonization of indigenous peoples is interconnected with the very industrial activities that
factor¶ importantly into anthropogenic climate change (Cuomo 2011).¶ Growing scientific literatures show
that indigenous peoples, including many of¶ those who neighbor industrial settler states, are threatened by a number of
harmful losses¶ and damages associated with anthropogenic climate change (Bennett et al. 2014; Arctic¶ Climate
Impact Assessment 2004; Larsen et al. 2014; Maldonado, Pandya, and Colombi ¶ 2013). The connection between these harms
and industrial activities raises the issue of ¶ whether there are respects in which certain settler states can
be held morally responsible¶ to many indigenous peoples for abating these harms during adaptation. Here, moral¶
responsibilities will be understood as political responsibilities , or the attitudes and¶ patterns of behavior
that various political parties (e.g. nations, peoples, sovereigns, and¶ the like) are expected to express through the structure and
implementation strategies of¶ political institutions such as treaties and courts, funding programs, and declarations and ¶ mandates. In this essay,
I will identify two
arguments for settler state responsibility , the¶ argument for impending responsibility and
the argument for pending responsibility. ¶ Impending responsibility is incurred by settler states because of
the several key¶ ways in which they are implicated in the anthropogenic factors leading to the climate¶
change impacts that indigenous peoples face now and in the future, i.e. they are¶ impending. Factors include some settler
states’ roles in historic and contemporary¶ industrialization and the development of foundations of international law and policy that¶ exclude
indigenous peoples from having a place at the table as sovereigns. This is an ¶ impending responsibility because it
requires settler
states to live up to the ramifications of ¶ developmental paths that they continue to pursue and that are
at odds with indigenous¶ cultural self-determination and have excluded the participation or consent of
indigenous¶ peoples required for indigenous political self-determination. The idea of impending¶ responsibility is
assumed in the background of moral claims that settler states must create ¶ special funding programs providing relief for indigenous peoples,
greater access to¶ scientific resources for adaptation planning and adaptation policy advisory roles for¶ indigenous leaders that are compatible
with indigenous cultural and political selfdetermination.¶ Impending
responsibility, however, can be considered to only
scratch the surface¶ of settler states’ responsibility when a few things are considered. First, impending¶
responsibility assumes that harmful losses and damages associated with anthropogenic¶ climate change
are new types of threats for indigenous peoples. Yet, in reality, few if any¶ settler states have come to
terms with the ongoing infliction of other forms of ¶ anthropogenic environmental change on indigenous
peoples, such as forced migration¶ spurred by the U.S. in cases of the Trail of Tears, or the massive
deforestation and¶ overharvesting of plants and animals by U.S. citizens in the Great Lakes region. Second,¶ the
very political relations that accentuate indigenous vulnerability can be understood ¶ today as having been
designed precisely to limit indigenous peoples’ capacity to adapt to¶ environmental change. So the current
political relations between certain settler states and ¶ indigenous peoples are ones that were deliberately set
up to prevent various kinds of ¶ 3¶ indigenous adaptation. The second kind of responsibility is that settler
states also—and perhaps¶ most fundamentally—have unsettled, or pending, responsibility to indigenous
peoples that are¶ basically revealed again through the current climate change ordeal associated with
industrial¶ activities. Pending responsibility involves settler states adopting attitudes and patterns of ¶
behavior that acknowledge how current climate change adaptation policy discussions result from¶ persisting
problems in political relations with indigenous peoples that have served to deny¶ Indigenous peoples the capacity to adapt to
environmental change. Settler states have a pending ¶ responsibility to engage in political reconciliation with
indigenous peoples that would radically ¶ restructure political relations, from treaties to formal agreements, in ways
that are flexible¶ enough to facilitate styles of indigenous adaptation that express their cultural and political selfdetermination. ¶ Asserting
pending political responsibility into the sphere of policy about impending¶ political responsibility is
important because it suggests that some settler states cannot plead¶ precisely that climate change is a
current and future problem to which prior colonial regimes ¶ were utterly ignorant of as such. Anthropogenic
environmental change, including anthropogenic¶ climate change, has been built into settler colonial political
relations with indigenous peoples¶ going back to the beginnings of these political relations. For this reason, climate
change is just as¶ much an issue of political reconciliation as it is an issue of relief or reforms to international law¶
and policy (i.e., the impending responsibilities). The exercise of pending responsibility would ¶ arguably promote
renewed political relations with indigenous peoples that are more capable of ¶ fostering adaptation that
is consistent with indigenous cultural and political self-determination.
 Climate Policy Link - Tech
Debates that treat climate policy as a question of simply techno-scientific solutions
forecloses political struggles over alternative understandings of society necessary to
meaningfully address climate change
Pepermans & Maeseele ‘14 (Yves Pepermans, Master in Comparative and European Politics and Researcher at the
Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Antwerp, & Pieter Maeseele Research Professor at the Faculty of
Political and Social Sciences of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, “Democratic Debate and Mediated Discourses on Climate
Change: From Consensus to De/politicization”, Environmental Communication A Journal of Nature and Culture, May, DOI:
10.1080/17524032.2014.906482)

The depoliticization of climate change Geographer Swyngedouw (2010) interrogates the

apparently paradoxical
condition whereby climate change is “politicized” as never before, while a group of increasingly
influential political philosophers insist on how the public sphere has become depoliticized. He takes aim at the
consensual presentation and mainstreaming of climate change as the struggle against rising CO2 concentrations in terms of a global
humanitarian cause for two crucial reasons. First, by
narrowing policy-making to an issue of scientific rationality
claims, making scientific expertise the foundation and guarantee for policy-making, any space for
dissent is eliminated. Second, sustained by apocalyptic imaginaries, climate change is represented as a
universalizing and socially homogenizing threat to humanity, disavowing social conflicts and
antagonisms, and obfuscating a wide range of structural inequalities . Furthermore, this framing of a struggle
of “us” versus “CO2,” the externalized and objectified enemy, forecloses democratic debate and
citizenship since it disassociates climate change from alternative political programs or socio-ecological
futures from which to choose. In the end, climate change becomes a technical problem that needs to be
solved through a particular regime of international climate governance, the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change. This regime revolves around consensus, agreement, participatory negotiation of different
interests, and technocratic decision-making, implying a direct connection between climate science and
climate politics, in the context of a nondisputed management of market-based socioeconomic
organization (Swyngedouw, 2010, p. 227). Similarly, political scientists Methmann and Rothe identified how the dominant framing
of climate change as a global, threatening risk reinforces the existing technocratic risk-management
approach in international climate governance, based on the introduction of market mechanisms and
precautionary adaptation to the consequences of climate change, rather than generating the formation
of alternatives to the status-quo (Methman & Rothe, 2012). Physicist and Science and Technology Studies scholar, Gert Goeminne
(2010, 2012), concurs by arguing that the predominant scientific framing of the debate (with its related believers
and nonbelievers) in terms of battling CO2 conceals the political struggle over alternative visions
regarding the organization of society. In that sense, he interprets the failure of Copenhagen as an opportunity to open
the debate and move away from the consensual focus on the scientifically registered level of CO2 emissions in UN climate
politics to a fundamental questioning of the Western economic development paradigm (e.g. intensive energy and
resource consumption and meat and car production) and its neoliberal foundations. This thesis of the depoliticization of climate
change has been criticized by sociologist John Urry (2011, pp. 90–93), who refers to the many examples of environmental movements and
protest, challenging in various ways the complex connections between capitalism, powerful carbon interests, and social justice.1
Environmental conflict in general and antagonism over climate change has indeed taken many forms,
but the question remains to what extent these challenges and conflicts receive standing in mediated
discourses. However, empirical research on processes of de/politicization regarding climate change in public and media discourses is
currently absent. The above implies that for being able to evaluate public and media discourses on the extent to
which they are found to facilitate or impede democratic debate and citizenship, an analytical framework is
needed in which a conceptual and empirical choice for conflict and politicization is made . Moreover, in this
framework, the politicization of climate change should no longer be interpreted as the problem . To the
contrary, the problem lies in the depoliticization of climate change or its capture in a post-political
consensus, since this conceals “the political” and impedes the develop- ment of legitimate alternatives
to become subject of political identification and debate.
 Economy Link
Focusing on American Economic fluctuations is unethical – requires violence to
Indigenous nations
Byrd ‘11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, pg. xxiii-xxvii)

That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United
States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is
simultaneously obvious within—and yet continually obscured by—what is essentially a settler colony’s
national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy . As the United
States constructs a Manichean allegory of settler democracy through which imperialism can finally be brought humanely and justifiably to the
world through discourses of “fighting them there so we don’t fight them here,” the
status of American Indians as sovereign
nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre.
 Economy Link
Economy advantage is an independent link – injecting economic cost benefit rationale
into ecological context crowds out other ways of knowing/valuing outside of the
discourse of western civilization
Barry ‘04 (John, Reader in Political Theory in the School of Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, ”From environmental politics
to the politics of the environment The pacification and Normalization of environmentalism?”, Liberal Democracy and
Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism? By M. Wissenburg , p.188-9)

In the privilege accorded to science and the 'scientific method' within modern societies, we can find roots of the dominance of economic
forms of reasoning and thinking within contemporary capitalist liberal democratic nation-states. Its predominance as the
central form of knowledge (along with natural science) used by state actors, bureaucracies and leaders to make
decisions, implement policies and propose reforms, while of course not eliminating other forms of knowledge and bases for
making political judgement, has had a profound effect on the environment and social-environmental relations.
As Francis Bacon, one of the founders of the modern scientific method and worldview, noted, 'knowledge is power', and this is particularly true
in respect to the natural sciences and economic science. At the same time, economic forms of thinking do not simply express
themselves within state policy-making, but can also seep into 'ordinary' or 'common sense' modes of
thinking. While the powerful effect of economic reasoning on modern perceptions of the environment and its official (and unofficial)
influence on state decision-making which affects the environment, cannot be overestimated, I will limit my discussion to a few salient points.
Economic forms of reasoning and argumentation heavily influence political debate over environmental
issues within public policy. Precisely because of the dominance of economic considerations in public policy-making,
environmental issues are often translated into 'economic' problems and courses of action pursued on
the basis of the economic costs or benefit s of the environmental issue in question. There is a lot of strategic advantage in using
economic forms of argumentation in advancing the case for environmental protection, since one is speaking a language politicians and policy-
makers understand (see, for example, Pearce 1992: 8).
This is not to deny the importance of economic considerations, but simply to note how an
economic approach to and
understanding of social-environmental problems can (and does) "crowd out1 non-economic forms of
environmental valuation and argumentation . The privileged position occupied by economics in
environmental policy-making has the effect of drowning out other 'voices', other forms of reasoning, valuing
and thinking about the environment . This economistic monologue (as opposed to a genuine dialogue), holds a fortiori, if as noted
in the case above, that environmental decision-making is made in non-deliberative or discursive institutional settings.
Economic reasoning, methodology, rationality and forms of valuing the natural environment can be
regarded as not simply the language of power in policy-making, but the grammar of power . What is meant by
this is that economic theory functions as the dominant way in which environmental policy-making is
debated, thought about and ultimately decided . In this sense it constitutes the very 'rules of the game' in the same way as
grammar has rules for the correct use of language. Thus, those who either do not know or refuse to accept this
particular grammar (such as non-economic arguments for environmental preservation) are at a severe disadvantage in
trying to influence environmental policy-making within the current institutional framework.
 Energy Policy Link
US energy policy is historically paternalistic to Indigenous populations – the plan
replicates these legacies in their use of the state as the starting point for protection
Voggesser ‘12 (Garritt, National Director for Tribal Partnerships, National Wildlife Foundation, “The Evolution of Federal
Energy Policy” in Indian and Energy, pg. 66-68)

More than a decade of conflict culminated in a late 1981 push to rewrite¶ federal policy governing tribal
energy development. The many problems¶ afflicting Indian energy leasing can be summarized in five categories: (1)¶ inadequate tribal
control and poor trust management; (2) inequitable revenues and deficient accounting; (3) lack of alternatives to the standard lease¶ and
inflexibility of lease terms; (4) lack of employment for tribal members;¶ and (5) weak protection for environmental and cultural resources. The
1982¶ passage of the Indian Mineral Development Act (IMDA) offered great hope¶ that tribes would truly govern their
energy resources and determine the¶ future well-being of their people and homelands.3 3¶ Introduced by Senator John Melcher of Montana, the IMDA's
primary¶ goals seemed not all that different from those of the 1938 IMLA. The IMDA¶ aimed to protect and enhance tribal sovereignty and maximize tribal revenues¶ from energy
development. Congress, however, intended the IMDA to¶ broaden tribes' ability to negotiate more favorable energy development¶ agreements. To counteract the poor revenues from low
offers in the competitive¶ bidding process under the standard lease procedure, the IMDA¶ authorized tribes, subject to the secretary of the Interior's approval, to¶ develop joint ventures;

IMDA required the Interior secretary

service contracts; or operating, production sharing,¶ managerial, lease, or other agreements for energy development . The¶

to ensure that each agreement was in the best interest of the tribe by considering potential cultural, environmental,¶
social, and other effects on the tribe and its resources. In short, the¶ IMDA extended much greater control to tribes and significantly changed¶ I
he status q u o . 3 4¶ The IMDA offered tribes new advantages and also risks. Tribes could¶ negotiate alternative agreements, royalty rates, and other financial provisions;¶ acquire an
ownership interest in energy development; and incorporate¶ provisions for environmental protection, tribal member employment,¶ site reclamation, and lease term limitations. More control,
however, introduced¶ potential drawbacks. Agreements could place tribes at greater financial¶ risk, so tribes needed proper internal expertise or outside assistance to¶ make the complex
financial, geological, and environmental decisions¶ related to energy development. The IMDA, as Marjane Ambler argued,¶ posed a risk for tribes by "dramatically limiting the role of the
federal government¶ in protecting them." Nevertheless, this risk seemed minimal compared¶ with the federal "protection" tribes had received for the preceding¶ forty-four years.3 5¶ l ' O G

In 1982
R M A¶ Correcting the deficiencies in federal energy policy for tribal lands¶ required going beyond restructuring the leasing or agreement process¶ addressed by the IMDA.

the Linowes Commission also documented¶ the "gross underpayment, under-reporting, and even
outright¶ theft" of oil and gas.3 6 The federal government had allowed energy companies¶ "to operate
essentially on an honor system" for accounting and reporting of energy production and profits, with
millions of dollars of revenue¶ hanging in the balance. The commission found the record-keeping¶
system for energy royalties in "complete disarray" and so severely lacking¶ that the federal government
could not accurately estimate the amount of¶ underpayments to tribes. Following the scandal, the Department of
the¶ Interior created the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to take over royalty¶ management from the US Geological Survey.3 7¶ In
1983 Congress followed up by passing the Federal Oil and Gas¶ Royalty Management Act (FOGRMA).
Congress intended FOGRMA to¶ meet the federal government's trust responsibility to tribes and "improve¶ royalty collection, management,
and enforcement." FOGRMA required¶ the Interior secretary to account fully for the production of Indian energy¶ resources and track the
collection and remittance of royalties and other¶ payments owed to tribes. FOGRMA also established a process by which the¶ Interior
secretary could form cooperative agreements with tribes to supply¶ them with royalty data and empower them to conduct investigations,¶
audits, and inspections to enforce lease provisions and prompt revenue¶ payment.3 8¶ Predictably, FOGRMA did little to improve
the system. Problems with¶ accounting and royalty collection continued, and the Department of the¶ Interior implemented only a few
cooperative agreements with tribes. Only¶ one year later, a presidential commission on reservation economies
found¶ that federal agencies, particularly the BIA, continued to lack the ability to¶ assist tribes with
economic development. Moreover, the BIA did not have¶ the flexibility to adapt to changing economic conditions or the needs of¶
tribes. Not only did the government fail to meet its trust responsibility, but¶ also it frequently failed to yield to tribal sovereignty. " The
system is¶ designed for paternalistic control," the commission reported, "and it¶ thrives on the
failure of Indian tribes." Within a few years, despite adding¶ staff, the Department of the Interior still could not meet its obligation
to¶ inspect all high-priority leases as required by FOGRMA, conducting annual¶ inspections of only 62 percent of total oil and gas wells on tribal
lands.¶ Some tribes managed to form cooperative agreements for accounting and¶ auditing, but FOGRMA made them responsible for 50
percent of the cost,¶ even though the federal government paid the entire cost when states took¶ over such responsibilities. Nevertheless,
because of FOGRMA's mandate,¶ tribes were able to collect millions of dollars in late payments and lost royalties.¶ More important, both the
IMDA and FOGRMA advanced the efforts¶ tribes initiated in the 1970s to build their capacity to manage energy¶ resource development.3 9
 Environmental Justice Link
Environmental justice fails – reproduces settler colonialism
Benford ‘05 (Robert, “The Half-Life of the Environmental Justice Frame: Innovation, Diffusion, and Stagnation,” in Power,
Justice and the Environment, ed. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, p. 51-52)

On the one hand, the problems diagnosed and attributions proffered by the environmental justice
movement represent a radical critique of entire social systems at the local, regional, national, and global levels. On the
other hand, by framing solutions primarily in terms of “justice” the EJM places its faith in the efficacy of
using extant legislative and judicial systems to remedy problems an ironic commitment to , and
reaffirmation of, the systemic status quo. Audre Lorde, a famous black feminist, eloquently outlined
the pitfalls of seeking to transform such a corrupt system from within: “For the master’s tools will
never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never
enable us to bring about genuine change.” (1984; 112)
By framing the issues primarily in terms of injustice, and in seeking justice through legislative, judicial,
and regulatory systems, the status quo will continue to be reproduced . Lorde’s argument is radical,
even revolutionary. Yet it fits well with current critical legal theory (Kairys 1998), critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic 2000),
feminist jurisprudence theory (Smart 1989), and radical criminological theory (Chambliss 1974; Quinney 1974).15 Those who seek
justice within the extant system presume that the law is a neutral arbiter of disputes between
adversarial parties; this includes both legislative actions (making laws) and court actions (case law).
However, building on Marxist theory, these theorists claim that the law is a site of struggle, which is designed to benefit
the elite. Therefore, to seek justice within this system is to tacitly accept the status quo.
The environmental justice movement’s power lies in its capacity to disrupt the system rather than to
seek to reform it. As Piven and Cloward’s (1979) study of poor people’s movements reveals, one advantage poor people
have over their oppressors is their capacity for mass insurgency. Once a movement accepts a place at
the master’s table, it is doomed to manipulation, cooptation, and perpetual frustration .
 Environmental “Rehabilitation” Link
Attempts at rehabilitation management create more pollution and ecological
destruction, turning case. Nature is reappropriated for different forms of commodity
production, allowing exploitation to be masked and continued in more insidious ways
Luke ‘02 (Timothy W., Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, Aurora Online
Magazine)
The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult. Indeed, the will to manage environments arises from this
wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One
obvious outcome of building and then living around the
satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was pollution of the air, water, and land. As it
continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and wildlife obviously suffered, while soils
and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic growth typically drove these
processes of degradation until markets fell, technologies changed, or the ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture,
business and government leaders, working at the local, regional, and national level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating
people and settlements in industry to start these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and
environmental assets to revitalize their resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation
management
then is about keeping production going in one way or another. Agricultural lands that once
produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water
courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental
rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank accounts. The engagements
of rehabilitation management are to find a commodifiable or at least a valuable possibility in the brown
fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after decades of abuse, there are useful
possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted waterways, and rust belt towns.
Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation. Such
operations can shift agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves , and
retrain workers. But the goals here are not return ecosystems to some pristine natural state. On the
contrary, its agendas are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of course, what will be yielded and at
what levels it is sustained and for which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the one hand, the motives of rehabilitation
management are quite rational, because these moves delay or even cancel the need to sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other
sites. Thus nature is perhaps protected elsewhere or at large by renewing industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some
ongoing project of industrial growth. On the other hand, rehabilitation
managerialism may only shift the loci and
the foci of damage, rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain, while
simply redirecting the inhabitants of these sites to suffer new, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels,
of environmental contamination in other commodity chains. If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been
ruined, one can then perhaps get into restoring it.
 Hegemony Link
Hegemony is a new name for the white man’s burden – decline is inevitable due to
free-riding and it relies on circular logic and ignores its racialized foundation
Hobson 14 (John M Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, October 2014, “Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour
Line,” pp 88-93) gz

A further subliminal strategy has been the normative prescription of a “benign” neo-imperial politics
that also goes by a whitewashed or sanitised name. Thus neorealist hegemonic stability theory (HST)
elevates the exercise of (Anglo-Saxon) hegemony to the implicit status of a civilising mission (e.g. Gilpin
1981), while neoliberal institutionalism does much the same with respect to the role played by Western
international institutions, especially the IFIs (Keohane 1984). In both visions, a major rationale of Western
hegemons and their international institutions is to culturally convert Third World states along Western
civilisational lines: the very essence of the old liberal mantra of the civilising mission. And both
approaches echo the manifest paternalist Eurocentric formula of awarding “pioneering” progressive
agency to the West and “conditional agency” to the East. These two terms refer to the point that for paternalist
forms of Eurocentrism the West is assumed to have the “fully rational” capability to self-generate into
modernity (the “Eurocentric logic of immanence”), while the East is said to be blocked from doing so on account of
its “irrational institutions”. This led to the paternalist-imperial formula in which Eastern development
can occur but only on condition that the rational institutions of the civilised West are delivered
courtesy of the benign-paternalist Western civilising mission. Thus for HST and Keohane’s neoliberal
institutionalism, hegemony and international institutions respectively come to replace the terminology
of the liberal civilising mission, even if these former terms perform the exact same logic as the latter.
The route into this alternative reading of HST lies with the point that in order to celebrate British and American hegemony
Gilpin is forced to suspend some of the cardinal axioms of neorealism. For a key property of hegemony
is that it must secure world order and development for all states but in the process this leads inevitably
to the relative decline of the hegemon via the “free rider problem”. The immediate problem here is that
neorealism, especially in its “offensive” variant that Gilpin supported in the period when he constructed
HST (i.e. 1975 through 1987), 6 asserts that states seek to maximise their relative gains over others (Gilpin 1975, 23,
34 – 6, 85 – 92). But it is clear that in HST this principle applies to all states bar the hegemon . Or, put differently,
in this vision we are treated to a story in which the leading great power not only does not seek to
enhance its relative power over others but instead sacrifices its power for the benefit of others,
thereby contradicting the cardinal realist axiom – that “the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must” . Thus in Gilpin’s HST this cardinal realist axiom is precisely inverted: “The weak
do what they can and the strongest does what it must .”
That the hegemon is exceptional is clear, though why it is so is not explained other than through a
circularity as well as through a structural-functionalist mode of reasoning: specifically, that the
hegemon self-sacrifices because “that is what hegemons do” (i.e. the circularity); and that without the
presence of a hegemon the world economy descends into recession and rising inter-state competition
because the international system requires a hegemon to promote stability and world order (i.e. the
structural-functionalist assertion). But simply asserting that the system “requires” a hegemon for
ensuring world order and stability does not explain why a leading great power chooses to become a
hegemon in the first place, especially as all it can look forward to is its decline relative to those that it
“helps”. In essence, then, there is no recourse within neorealist logic to explain the highly anomalous
altruistic status that HST ascribes to the United States in the 1945-73 period or to Britain in 1845-73 .
Explaining this gap in the theory requires focussing on the presence of a subconscious American
ethnocentrism and subliminal paternalist Eurocentrism which, I want to suggest, lies at the very base
of HST. That is, US hegemony reflects the nineteenth-century discourse of “American exceptionalism” and
its accompanying neo-imperialist idiom of America’s “manifest destiny”, much as “British exceptionalism” and
“manifest destiny” underpinned the idea of the British Empire. For the notion of helping all other states, especially those in
the Third World, conjures up the idiom of the “ civilising mission” and the “white man’s burden”. Thus I
want to suggest that within Gilpin’s theory it is precisely this Eurocentric-imperialist sensibility that underpins
the real explanation for why leading Anglo-Saxon great powers choose to become hegemons and why
they supposedly sacrifice themselves for the good of others.
Still, while my reading thus far is based on logical deduction, nevertheless there is a clear slippage in Gilpin’s “positivist play
of mimetic universalism” where he makes explicit reference to hegemony as a benign imperial civilising
mission. As is well known, Gilpin begins by differentiating hegemons from imperial powers . Although Gilpin argues
that, with the exception of the Soviet Union, the modern world is governed by the progressive non-imperialist politics of liberal hegemons
whereas the pre-modern world was based on the cyclical and stultifying/regressive politics of despotic Eastern empires, this
distinction is
problematised by the obvious point that Britain was the greatest imperial power prior to 1945, as much
as the United States has been the greatest neo-imperial power in the post-1945 era . The critical point
is that Gilpin attempts to circumvent this obvious inconsistency by explicitly resorting, paradoxically, to
the nineteenth-century imperialist trope of the liberal civilising mission. To this end he invokes Karl Marx’s
paternalist civilising mission conception whereby modern European imperial powers transferred capital and technologies to the colonies not to
exploit but to uplift them (Gilpin 1981, 142 – 3); or again, that
the dominant power helps to create challenging powers. Ironically, as Marx himself appreciated, one of the greatest forces for
diffusion has been imperialism…. The imperial power has stimulated the colonized peoples to learn its ways and frequently has
taught them advanced military, political, and economic techniques.
(Gilpin 1981, 176)
Here, then, we encounter the key “paternalist-imperial” civilising mission trope, in which liberal empires
take on the guise of a benevolent father who teaches his children – both directly and by way of
example – to embrace and develop what he has already pioneered so that they can grow up and one
day prosper.
Thus in defending his “non-imperialist” reading of hegemony it seems clear that Gilpin , like Hedley Bull, is
addressing the wrong target. For his assumption is that imperialism is defined by the exploitation of the
weak by the strong. But in Marx’s vision – as well as that of the paternalist Eurocentric liberal – imperialism is conceptualised
as a civilising mission precisely because it entails the West engaging in the “ paternalist uplift”, rather
than the coercive exploitation, of the East.
Post-1945 IR theory and the elision of North-South or East-West relations from world politics
Another generic aspect of subliminal Eurocentric IR theory in the post-1945 era, which stands in marked contrast to the
manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism of the previous era, is a shift in focus away from North/South relations or
East/West relations in favour of a near-exclusive focus on intra-Western relations in which the
provincial West masquerades as the universal. This is indeed a profound and marked change given that the headlining focus
of attention in scientific racist and manifest Eurocentric-institutionalist international theory was precisely a rigid focus on North-South or East-
West relations. One
might assume at first glance that such an elision might be symptomatic of a non-
Eurocentric approach. But the move is entirely consistent with subliminal Eurocentrism given that this
vision presents the West as endowed with hyper-agency while Eastern agency is downgraded, if not
erased altogether. That is, all developments within world politics are explained through Western hyper-
agency, with the West being presented as the universal and Eastern agency blipping off the ontological
radar screen altogether. This is a typical feature of classical realism and Waltzian neorealism and it is to
a certain extent reproduced in neorealist HST. Because of the importance of this ontological strategy
and the centrality that these realist theories have long enjoyed within the discipline of IR, it is useful to
consider this in a little more detail to illustrate my case .
Hegemonic stability theory effectively instructs the student that she can learn all she needs to know
about world politics/economics by simply focussing all her attention on the actions of the Anglo-Saxon
hegemons. Significantly, one of the theory’s prominent advocates replied to a question posed by an audience member (presumably a
Luxembourg national) at the 1990 APSA conference: “Sure, people in Luxembourg have good ideas. But who gives a damn? Luxembourg ain’t
hegemonic” (Stephen Krasner, cited in Hobson 2012, 195). Such a narrow focus necessarily precludes the actions of
small Western states (as in American ethnocentrism) and Third World states (as in paternalist
Eurocentrism). Analogous to “World Series Baseball” that involves only North American teams, so for HST America is the
world, much as Britain was the world in the nineteenth century. This exclusive focus is predicated on the fact that the
hegemon graciously provides the key services to ensure the development of the world economy under
conditions of relative peace and stability. For in the absence of hegemony the world plunges headlong
into certain disaster through a reversion to the Dark Age of the interwar period . Accordingly, the theory
encapsulates perfectly the well-known words of Madeleine Albright, uttered in a 1998 UN speech: “We [the United States] are the
indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” And this in turn propels us back to the point originally made in
Stanley Hoffmann’s famous essay, “An American Social Science: International Relations”, where he pointed out that American students were
drawn to the study of IR because “[t]ostudy United States foreign policy was to study the international system.
To study the international system could not fail to bring one back to the role of the United States ”
(Hoffmann 2001 [1977], 35). Indeed, no other modern theory of IR conforms so closely to this American
ethnocentric and Eurocentric idiom than does HST .
Waltzian neorealism, which has dominated the discipline in one way or another since 1979, is conventionally thought of as
the universalist theory par excellence given that it has supposedly done away with issues concerning civilisational/societal
difference. But if we dig deep beneath the veneered surface of this representation, a number of important
signs of Eurocentrism reappear. First and foremost, Waltzian neorealism elides altogether the agency of
Eastern actors. Kenneth Waltz expressed this idiom thus: “[i]t would be…ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics based on
Malaysia and Costa Rica…. To focus on great powers is not to lose sight of lesser ones. Concern with the latter’s fate requires paying more
attention to the former” (Waltz 1979, 72 – 3). Nor was this some kind of ad hoc one-off statement, for the
elision of Eastern agency
was fundamentally inscribed within the heart of his theory given its exclusive focus on the (Western)
great powers. As Waltz put it,
theory, like the story of international politics, is written in terms of the great power of an era.…. In international politics, as in any
self-help system, the units of greatest capability set the scene of action for others as well as for themselves. In systems theory,
structure is a generative notion, and the structure of a system is generated by the interaction of its principal parts.
(Waltz 1979, 72)
Though this statement avoids deploying the adjective “Western” before great powers, it seems to me that this is what he has in mind; or at
least this is in effect what transpires given that his focus is on the post-1648 era.7 But this
elision of Eastern agency is
problematic for various reasons, all of which in effect disturb the foundations of his theory, both
directly and indirectly.
It is often thought that the end of the Cold War caught Waltz’s theory off guard, revealing its inability to
explain international change on the one hand while simultaneously problematising Waltz’s belief that
Cold War bipolarity was a particularly stable system on the other . But what is usually ignored at this juncture is the
point that some appreciation of Eastern agency is necessary if we are to begin to construct an adequate
explanation of the end of Cold War bipolarity. Such a point is, however, explicitly denied by Waltz. Thus,
writing on the eve of the Second Cold War he announced that
the waning of hegemonic competition in an era of détente and the increased prominence of north-south relations led many to
believe that the world could no longer be defined in bipolar terms. But the waning of American-Russian competition and the
increased importance of third-world problems do not imply the end of bipolarity .
 (Waltz 1979, 204 – my emphasis)
However, while the Second Cold War was initiated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, nevertheless it
was in
Afghanistan that the Soviets experienced their own “Vietnam”, with an exhaustive decade-long war
ending in defeat at the hands of the Mujahideen fighters. While defeat at the hands of “small-scale”
Eastern agents could not in turn wholly account for the end of the Soviet Union, it certainly played a part
in the unfolding drama. Thus the end of bipolarity, which entailed a fundamental change in the
distribution of power in the international system, was at least in part brought about by Eastern agency,
none of which registers on Waltz’s theoretical radar screen .
Equally, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam in the face of intransigent Vietnamese resistance
agency gave rise to the “Vietnam Syndrome”, which in turn significantly affected American military
thinking in the aftermath of 1975 and placed certain limits on potential future US military actions. Critically, that such
Eastern resistance agency has had a profound impact on the American superpower refutes Waltz’s
claim that “[t]he United States need worry little about wayward movements and unwanted events in weak states…. The principal pains of a
great power, if they are not self-inflicted, arise from the effects of policies pursued by other great powers” (Waltz 1979, 202). Thus, we need to
amend Waltz’s various statements that have been cited already so as to factor in Eastern agency. Accordingly, his words could be rephrased to
the effect that “Eastern agents (in part) set the scene of action for the Western superpowers”, and “the structure of the system is partly
generated by the interactions of East and West”. And equally we might amend his earlier claim by stating that “it would be ridiculous to
construct a theory of international politics based exclusively on the United States and the USSR. To focus on small Eastern powers and actors is
not to lose sight of the bigger ones. Concern with the latter’s fate requires paying at least some attention to the former.”
Critically, East-West interactions or North-South relations are obscured in Waltz’s theory. Nevertheless, at this
juncture Waltz might well invoke one of his defensive delimiting arguments – in this case the defence that “interaction relations” should be
ignored when constructing a proper structural theory of international politics. Such
interactions are dismissed as but
irrelevant “unit-level” attributes, the inclusion of which would only blur the strict parsimonious
definition of international structure that he polices with vigilance . As he put it:
Abstracting relations means leaving aside questions about the cultural, economic, political, and military interactions of states…. To
define a structure requires ignoring how units relate with one another (how they interact) and concentrating on how they stand in
relation to one another (how they are arranged or positioned). Interactions … take place at the level of the units.
(Waltz 1979, 80)
While such a move might well enable Waltz to conveniently restrict the parameters of his theory in
order to shield him from such criticism, this does not enable an escape from the Eurocentric charge. For
it is precisely this move that elides or dismisses the many East/West interactions that shape the actions
and the inner constitution of the Western great powers that in turn informs their outward trajectories
(Hobson 2004; 2007). Ignoring this dimension leads to a reified conception of Western great powers as self-
constituting, autonomous entities, whose societies and economies develop entirely independently of
non-Western economic, military, political and cultural interactions – the very leitmotif of Eurocentric
theory.
Nevertheless, the sceptical reader might well object to my overall claim about the dominance of subliminal
Eurocentrism by offering up liberal modernisation theory and dependency/world-systems theory as
examples of theories that focus explicitly on North/South or East/West relations . But they turn out to be
the exceptions that prove the subliminal Eurocentric rule. The Eurocentric cues are found either in the
guise of the reification of Western agency and the erasure of Eastern agency, as in world-systems
theory (Wallerstein 1974; 1984), or in liberal modernisation theory’s vision wherein the East is awarded
“derivative” agency insofar as it can develop but only by replicating the Western development path,
the five stages of which weave a linear line that begins with replicating British industrialisation and
culminates with the American age of high-mass consumption (Rostow 1960). 8 Moreover, the old, manifestly
Eurocentric trope of “civilisation versus barbarism” came to be effectively replaced by the subliminal
Eurocentric tropes of “tradition versus modernity” or “core versus periphery”. I shall take Wallerstein’s approach
by way of illustration since this is clearly a counter-intuitive example.
 Hegemony Link – AT Kagan
Their depiction of United States “benevolent hegemony” is massively ignorant of history and
legitimizes the global violence. Kagan promotes a framework of American universal
American history which terminates the being of all others.
Sardar & Wyn Davies ‘04 (Ziauddin, Visiting Professor, the School of Arts, The City University, London,
Chair – Muslim Institute; Merryl, Welsh Muslim anthropologist; American Terminator: Myths, Movies, and Global
Power pg. 211)

Consider, for example, Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian apologist for American imperialism and
Professor at Harvard University, who describes the American Empire as a new kind of 'burden':
'America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's
burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company , when American corporations
needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new
invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are
free markets, human rights and democracy.' The new burden means that the US is 'the only nation that polices the world
throughout five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier
battle groups on watch in every ocean, guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade
and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires' .
So the empire may now be
'lite', but it is still a universal soldier and does what good old heavy empires always did: occupies
foreign lands, rapes their economies and cripples their minds!
Apart from being 'lite', the empire is also 'benevolent' . In a much-quoted article in Foreign Policy,
Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, declared that
'the truth about America's dominant role in the world is known to most clear-eyed international
observers'. And it is this: 'the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United States is good for a
vast portion of the world's population.' A world without US hegemony, he suggests, would be more violent, more chaotic, less
democratic and economically stagnant. And he spells out 'the unique qualities of American global dominance': despite overwhelming military and economic
superiority, the American people chose not to 'set the crown of world empire on their brows'; instead, they chose a 'strategy to risk nuclear annihilation on
[their] otherwise unthreatened homeland in order to deter attack, either nuclear or conventional, on a European or Asian ally'. Moreover, 'the identification of
the interests of others with its own has been the most striking quality of American foreign and defence policy'. Americans
may be self-
interested, selfish, arrogant, and occasionally ham-handed, 'but excusez-moi'; Kagan asks in a
mocking tone:
“compared with whom? Can anyone believe that were France to possess the power the United
States now has, the French would be less arrogant, less selfish, and less prone to making mistakes?
Little in France's history as a great power, or even as a medium power, justifies such optimism. Nor can one easily imagine power on an
American scale being employed in a more enlightened fashion by China, Germany, Japan, or Russia. And even the leaders of that least
benighted of empires, the British, were more arrogant, more bloodyminded, and, in the end, less capable managers of world affairs than
the inept Americans have so far proved to be. If
there is to be a sole superpower, the world is better off if that
power is the United States." So, what can we expect in this wonderful world of benign American
power? Kagan suggests quite explicitly that America should not hesitate in drawing its mighty
sword and slaying anything and anyone that gets in its way . Like the deranged villain in Universal
Soldier, he laughs out loud at Europe and her multilateralism . A Europe that has achieved integration peacefully
and multilaterally, by negotiations and without militarism, has moved 'beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and
transnational negotiations and cooperation', and thus has no understanding of the brute realism of empire-building. In contrast to Kant's
'Perpetual Peace' that is the lot of Europe, Kagan
suggests in Paradise and Power, the United States is all about
taming an anarchic Hobbesian world where war is a necessity . America is thus ever ready to visit
violence to any corner of the world both to maintain and to expand its empire.'
What both Ignatieff and Kagan amply demonstrate is a monumental ignorance of history . As
Sidney Lens notes in reference to Ignatieff: 'only someone blind to the history of the United States,
its obsessive drive for control of oil, its endless expansion of military bases around the world, its
domination of other countries through its enormous economic power, its violations of the human
rights of millions of people, whether directly or through proxy governments, could make that
statement." Robert Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas in Austin,
describes 'benevolent empire' as the 'third American holocaust' (the first two being the genocide
of Native Americans and slavery), the product of a foreign policy that is 'relentlessly barbaric'." But
something very specific is at work in Ignatieff and Kagan's views; something that we also find in
Paul Berman's notion of 'liberal imperialism's and Stanley Kurtz's 'Democratic Imperialism' ,9 as well as
in the works of a string of right- and left-wing champions of the American Empire."? And that something is the
deterministic re-formulation of history in the universal soldier framework . History - of democracy,
liberalism, cultures, civilisations and great powers - is being presented as universal destiny: the
histories of all nations and peoples, states and empires, merge into the universal narrative of
American history and culminate to produce a global, benevolent American Empire. This is what the
world was created for. This is the sum of all human experience. This is the aggregate of all the
yesterdays of humanity. This is the theory that Philip Bobbitt tries to demonstrate in his monumental study The Shield of
Achilles.1I Subtitled 'War, Peace and the Course of History', the book suggests that all the wars of all histories and all the peaceful states of
the world produced a 'course of history' that ends up with a very special state: a state that is immensely powerful and democratic and
committed to human rights - the global United States of America. It is thus the only power that has not
only might but historic right on its side - and hence, can attack any country it wishes. This historic
imperative, this natural and universal destiny, also gives the US, says Bobbitt, the right to take pre-
emptive action against any nation, and places it above international law. This is the new
'constitutional theory' that Bobbitt wants the rest of the world to embrace.
In its most complete and articulate form, this thesis is expressed by Francis Fukuyama in his The End
of History and the Last Man. Ignatieff, Kagan, Bobbitt and others are simply borrowing a leaf from
Fukuyama, former Deputy Director of the US State Department's Policy Planning Staff and a
signatory to the infamous policy paper 'Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and
Resources for a New Century', cobbled together by the neo-conservative think-tank, The Project for
the New American Century.
Fukuyama developed his thesis immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Cold War, he argues, not only means
the end of Communism, it also signifies the unabashed victory of American economic and political
liberalism. American 'liberal democracy', he suggests, is the 'end point of mankind's ideological
evolution', the 'final form of human government', and as such constitutes the 'end of history'. From
the American Declaration of Independence onwards, there has been a trend towards democratic governance that demonstrates that there
is 'a silent and mysterious inner process at work' underneath the perturbations of history, somewhat similar to the 'invisible hand' of the
market. This suggests that:
“There is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all
human societies - in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal
democracy. The existence of peaks and troughs in this development is undeniable. But to cite the failure of liberal democracy in any
given country, or even in the entire region of the world, as evidence of democracy's overall weakness, reveals a striking narrowness of
view. Cycles and discontinuities in themselves are not incompatible with a history that is directional and universal, just as the existence of
business cycles does not negate the possibility of long-term economic growth.” 13
Thus, for the past 300 years all histories, all cultures have been evolving, by the sheer force of
nature and deterministic history, towards a single goal: to become part and parcel of a universal
American narrative.
“History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political
and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially
different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over
our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end."
All of us are thus as free as we will ever get, and the status quo is the best we can ever hope for.
The United States of America, with its principles of 'Liberty' and 'Democracy', is the apex of human
evolution and all of us are propelled towards the Great Republic. But since 'history' - that is, history
of non-Western culture which Fukuyama has cannibalised - incorporates the worldviews of all other
people, their value systems, their cultures, what we may call their total modes of being, the
termination of history also terminates the very being, the very identities, of all Others. So other
people, quite incidental to American 'Universal History', can now be truly declared dead and
buried: 'it matters little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso', as their
culture is not part of the 'the common ideological heritage of mankind' . Indeed, they are not
people at all!
 Paris Treaty/Carbon Trading Link
Paris fails – doesn’t solve 2 degrees, fossil fuels, or settler colonialism
Hansen ’16 (Terri, “Paris Agreement 1.5° C Climate Limit Denounced by Indigenous as the Red Line to Catastrophe” ,
4/23/16. IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/04/23/paris-agreement-15-c-
climate-limit-denounced-indigenous-red-line-catastrophe-164230)

An alliance of indigenous and global and U.S. grassroots leaders commemorated Earth Day by denouncing the historic Paris Agreement for its
silence on fossil fuel.
“Frontline communities and Indigenous Peoples have been calling for a clear path to solve our climate
crisis,” Cindy Wiesner of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance said in a statement after world leaders
gathered at the United Nations to sign the climate accords reached in Paris in December. Wiesner called
the agreement a “dangerous distraction that leaves common sense, science, human rights, and the
rights of communities on the frontlines of climate change on the negotiating table. ”
"Indigenous peoples know all about treaty agreements rife with empty language, and this Paris agreement is nothing less,” Indigenous
Environmental Network (IEN) organizer Dallas Goldtooth told Indian Country Today Media Network. “The
agreement doesn't
mention fossil fuels. It does not commit countries to keep global temperature rise below two degrees
Celsius. It doesn't even fully recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples and how these rights need to be
accounted for in mitigating climate change. I cannot clap for an agreement that fails to address climate change with the degree
of action required."
Dallas gets his passion for climate justice from his father, IEN Executive Director Tom Goldtooth, who started attending the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 21st Conference of the Parties in 1999. The elder Goldtooth has witnessed Wall Street
and corporate entities, and other financial influences, “gut any real solutions coming out of the negotiations .
As a result, the Paris
Agreement goal of stopping global temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius [a temperature rise of 2.5
degrees Fahrenheit] is not real, because the pledges each country is making will allow emission levels
that will increase global temperature by 3–4 degrees C. An interactive at The New York Times website can help the
interested figure it out.
"This will be catastrophic to the ecosystem of the world, including the ice culture of the Indigenous
Peoples of the Arctic,” Goldtooth said. “The Paris agreement will cook the planet. We, Indigenous
Peoples, are the red line against climate change. We cannot be idle. We have never been idle.
Indigenous voices are rising up globally to demand climate justice for humanity—for human rights and
the rights of Mother Earth."
“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the
word ‘fossil’ is not so much as mentioned in the document,” said Nnimmo Bassey, director of HOME
(Health of Mother Earth) Foundation in Nigeria, in a statement.
“It is shocking that although … scientists tell us that the burning of fossil fuels would have to end by 2030 for there to be a chance of keeping
the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, climate negotiations engage in platitudes rather than going to the core of
the problem,” Bassey said. “The signal we get from the silence on the fossils factor is that oil and coal companies can continue to extract profit
while burning the planet.”
 “Resource Management” Link
Resource management is oriented towards maximizing the supply of raw materials to
feed the economy. The notion of sustained yield paradoxically attempts to realize
maximized production past the point of ecological collapse.
Luke ‘02 (Timothy W., Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Eco-
Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, Aurora Online Magazine)

Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality . While voices in favour of
conservation can be found in Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive establishment of this stance in the United States in
the late 19th century. From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw the closing of the western frontier. And whether one looks at John Muir's
preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there
is a spreading awareness of modern
industry's power to deplete nature's stock of raw materials , which sparks wide-spread worries
about the need to find systems for conserving their supply from such unchecked exploitation. Consequently,
nature's stocks of materials are rendered down to resources, and the presumptions of
resourcification become conceptually and operationally well entrenched in conservationist
philosophies. The fundamental premises of resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best,
this code of practice has only become more formalized in many governments' applications and
legal interpretations. Working with the managerial vision of the second industrial revolution, which tended to empower technical
experts like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one
I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself as they say on producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and
professional managers, one found corporate executives and financial officers in the main office, who are of course trained in business
schools. Put together, resource
managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over nature in
order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision society through national and
international markets. As scientific forestry, range management, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an
ethos of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government
policy. As a result, the operational agendas of what was called sustained yield were what directed
the resource managerialism of the 20th century. In reviewing the enabling legislation of key federal
agencies, one quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their
institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy. As Cortner and Moote observe, the statutory mandates for both
the Forest Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management,
the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield
approach to resource management. More often than not, however, these agencies
adjusted their multiple use concept
to correspond to their primary production objective -- timber in the case of the Forest Service,
grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management . Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the
legislated mandate of agencies such as the National Parks Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for
maximum sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case of the parks, water supply in the case of water resources. So the
ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output system. The
mission statements of sustained yield
pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to
or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-
spread ecological degradation, which leads to the project of rehabilitation managerialism .
 Util/Extinction Focus Link
Large-scale threats of future suffering stake a hegemonic claim to political and moral
urgency that makes the bodily violence of imperialism illegible, endlessly deferring its
priority to an awaited future that will never come. The only response is to interrupt
this temporal blackmail, insisting that the urgent bodies suffering structural violence
across the globe cannot wait any longer.
Olson ‘15 (Elizabeth, prof of geography @ UNC Chapel Hill ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in
Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526)

Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the
body is increasingly
set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted
suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can
distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious
and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to
worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so
high, that they nec essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at
stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the
urgency to secure the
state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of
response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus
requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in
climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially
those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but
may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies
that are currently suffering cannot be urgent,
because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some
future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as
drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation
to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized , the urgent body
is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The
predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’
(Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies . The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one
that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the
West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening
future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal
ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and
bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city. ¶ In short, the
urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse
and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of
urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006)
analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that
people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing
their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency.
In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes
literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If
the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of
urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies.
How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its
purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas
(2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which
matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery
(2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research
with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and
sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial
effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more
ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its
effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting
can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary
possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is
forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected
working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the
possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first
by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or
taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero
(2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is
produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective
effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to
make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).¶ Waiting
can therefore function as a
potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of
governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to
the capture of claims of urgency by the elite , and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of
containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming
urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps ,
geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of
waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi
resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their
own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees
stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that
demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being
that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the
challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also
reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of
struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it
is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked
– by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify
the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful
suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be
instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and
representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated
experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not
touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when
the urgent body is rendered as only waiting , both
materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006).
Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘ usually framed as
private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other
forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait,
has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional
scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate
scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of
urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-
scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This
bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention
center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others,
the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g.
Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral
reasoning is important both because it exposes
normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle
where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still
should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires
a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of
urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning. ¶ I conclude, however, by pulling
together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as
racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the
discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been
stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not
taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an
acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in
creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future
concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption
of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will
certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as
fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.
Non-Topic Link Section – K Affs
 Agamben Link (State of Exception)
Agamben both ignores indigenous struggles by focusing on a narrow view of history
and essentializes their experience in a universalized notion of humanity. Internment
and bare life started with colonialism and indigeneity.
Byrd ‘11 (Jodi is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies and the University of Illinois. “Transit of
Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism”)

Poston, Arizona, functions as a temporal and spatial site within these states of exception not least because it was one of the camps that
represented “the most spectacular violation of civil rights .”
The state of exception as first theorized by Carl Schmitt and
later developed by Agamben depends upon the sovereign’s ability to order space as “not only a ‘taking
of land’ (Landesnahme)—the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an Ordnung and an Ortung)—but above all a
‘taking of the outside,’ an exception (Ausnahme).”17 This ordering of space begs a question, however: Why
doesn’t Agamben theorize the state of exception in relation to American Indians in the first place ? It is
striking, if not unanticipated, that all three of his presidential examples played a significant role in ordering the historical landscape that
stretched beyond the text of Roosevelt’s executive order instituting internment camps that in itself serves as exemplary exception within
Agamben’s text. The Colorado River Indian Reservation was created by an act of Congress signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and on
November 22,1915, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order remapping the boundaries of the CRIR to steal 16,000 acres for
miners and cattlemen in the region.18 In 1933 Roosevelt appointed John Collier to the Office of Indian Affairs to implement the “Indian New
Deal” in the form of the Indian Reorganization Act, and on February 19, 1942, his order set the stage for the Colorado River Indian Reservation
to house an internment camp through which Collier planned to wage his war for democracy in the form of the doctrine of self-governance that
was the basis for his administration over colonized indigenous nations. Linking
Japanese American experiences of the state
of exception that was internment to American Indian history allows us to scrutini ze the theoretical blind
spots within critical philosophy and postcolonial theory and identify the discourses of colonialism that
facilitated the violation of Japanese American civil rights. The bare life that the internment camps reveal
is the life of U.S. colonialism laid bare in all its settler/native dialectical glory . Such an observation allows
for a reordering of the colonial logics that underpin the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans and
locates its source in the prior colonization of indigenous peoples . As both captives and settlers, interned Japanese
Americans are forced to play out in an abridged trajectory the U.S. frontier discourses, in which the only way to become “true”American
citizens is to first go frontier as the site of exception that proves the norm for U.S. colonial democracy and at the same time enacts in
microcosm the progessivist history that leads civilization out of savagery.
 “Anthropocene” Link
The description of the modern climate situation as “the anthropocene” comes from a
Eurocentric lens of evaluation that displaces the historical emergence of the human
Morrison ’15 (Kathleen, Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, “Provincializing the Anthropocence”,
Seminar 637, September 2015, pgs. 75-79)

THE suggestion that we have entered a new geological era, the ‘Anthropocene’, an era in which humans
for the first time must be counted as global agents, or drivers of change, cannot have escaped the
attention of readers of Seminar. The assertion of a new form of agentive force for our species is subject to challenge in empirical
terms, a point I discuss below. Evaluating the empirical sufficiency of the idea that significant human impact on the earth system is relatively
recent is the subject of an ongoing research project to collate and commensurate historical, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental evidence
regarding the actual contours of the global human footprint (that is, a data-based rather than model-based reconstruction). While
empirical sufficiency is important, the form that the Anthropocene debate takes is also of interest. In this
essay, I discuss the somewhat hidden Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene concept . To a surprising extent,
the notion of an Anthropocene – and much of the analytical apparatus surrounding it – represents an
effort to expand (rather homogenized) European historical experiences, frameworks and chronologies
onto the rest of the world . I take the term Eurocentrism here literally, in that existing models tend to
‘build out’ from Europe and from the temperate zones, taking other regions as variants on an unmarked
category. Building out from European history has given the Anthropocene discourse a particular flavour,
not only within the scientific community but also among those who have embraced the concept with the
fervour of the converted, chiefly humanists for whom the idea of global anthropogenic agency is
particularly new and exciting, and hard scientists who have finally managed to naturalize human social
relations into determinative models. I argue here that the concept of the Anthropocene is unnecessary –
not because humans have not changed the earth, but because we have done so throughout the
Holocene. But even beyond this, it is important to note that the concept hides a disturbing extension of colonial
discourse into a postcolonial world. The title of this essay is of course a homage to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
Provincializing Europe, which seeks to dislodge European thought from the centre of the practice of
history, using the study of South Asia as a vehicle for so doing .1 Here I would suggest not only that
European historical experiences and the imagined relationships these imply about human population,
land use, and human impact on the geosphere need to be decentred in analyses of anthropogenic
environmental change, but further that the apparent novelty of a ‘geology of humans’ to both science
and the humanities is just that – apparent. Provincializing the Anthropocene means not only that we no
longer take European agricultural or industrial history as a starting point, or that we stop trying to
project (and retrodict) proposed causal relationships between population and anthropogenic effects
derived from a limited sample of human economic history, but also that we attend to the ways in which
existing ‘western’ structures of thought and disciplinary practice overdetermine modes of agency –
‘human’ and ‘natural’. Thus it is that those disciplines most enthusiastic about declaring an end to the
Holocene, already the briefest geological period we know at ten thousand years, are those who, on the one
hand, never before knew we were in it or, on the other, managed until now to analytically ignore or even
erase human agency. As parallel to Chakrabarty’s work, I offer here an alternative. Historical,
paleoenvironnmental and archaeological research in India, among other places, shows us some of the
limits of models and time markers built on an European base, challenging both the form and substance
of work which directly feeds in to global and local climate models and, as such, to science, policy, and
disciplinary imaginations of the human place in the world. The poser to this issue contends that history
matters for environmental issues in the present, an assertion true in at least two senses. First, it is
empirically true. A rising tide of research is showing that humans have, in fact, been both biological and
even geological agents for a very long time; even the vast Amazonian rainforests once iconic of ‘pristine’
nature have been shown to be products of regrowth.2 This is a complex and variable history whose
contours we must understand better, not only for their own sake, but for the present and the future.
History matters, too, in how we generate and understand evidence about human-environment
interactions. Those of us in fields long dedicated to understanding such engagements know just how difficult it is to elude, for example, the
fundamental nature-culture dichotomy that so pervades both thought and language. The Anthropocene debate, for all its
empirical redundancy and European focus, may thus perhaps be in some ways a useful exercise after all.
It has shown natural and physical scientists that humans can operate as more than simply ‘external’
disturbance factors to ‘natural’ processes, and humanists that they, too, may have a role to play in
addressing the current environmental crisis. Most proposals for an Anthropocene era adopt a rather
limited historical perspective, assuming that significant environmental impact began only with the
(European, and especially British) Industrial Revolution.3 This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy;
consider the evidence on land transformation by humans reviewed in Ramankutty and Foley4 and Hook et al.5 which cover
only the last 300 years. While the significance of recent anthropogenic change is beyond doubt, what is
less clear is how novel such change really is. By shutting out consideration of longer-term change, we
foreclose the possibility that anthropogenic change actually has a longer, more complex, or more
variable trajectory than is generally assumed .
 “Anthropocene” Link
Theorizing about the Anthropocene represents innovation as a result of white
ecological anxieties. The materiality of climate change is an ongoing problem in
indigenous communities that can only be dealt with through decolonization.
Huang ‘16 (Michelle, PhD candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies @ Penn State, M.A. in English @
Penn State, Boundaries of the Human in the Age of Life Sciences Conference, July 4, http://sites.psu.edu/iahboundaries/840-2/)

In my notes from Kyle Whyte’s visit to Penn State, I find a scrawled line: “Anthropocene:
stuff white people like.” A
distillation of one of Whyte’s comments during the Q& A, it succinctly captures a point made in his
Boundaries of the Human lecture—that the current critical turn towards the Anthropocene and climate
fiction invokes an urgency and precarity that Native peoples  are already acutely aware of, because they
have experiencing for centuries. Or, as Whyte writes, “we consider the future from what we believe is
already a dystopia.” 1
The epistemological implications of this vantage point are profound. For starters, as Whyte observes, “If you
look at a lot of the literature on the Anthropocene, it’s not quite as heavy on colonialism as a lot of
indigenous folks would like to see.” 2 In Asian American Studies, one of my own primary fields of study, Whyte’s
words resonate clearly with the “Castle Bravo” t est of March 1, 1954, when the U.S. military conducted its
largest atmospheric nuclear test by dropping a dry fuel hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll. The atoll is part of the Marshall
Islands, a Pacific island country that was colonized by the U.S. military during World War II . Despite Castle Bravo’s
studied erasure from U.S. history and public consciousness, the nuclear test was not an isolated event:
“From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands. If their combined
explosive power was parceled evenly over that 12-year period, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-size explosions  per
day.” 3
Listening to Whyte and reading his work, I was struck by how critical pressure in the academy to “make it new”
often reproduces settler colonial logics that lead to such selective memory about colonial legacies and
violence. In other words, it is incumbent upon non-Native scholars of environmental degradation or
the Anthropocene to recognize that Native scholars have already  developed complex knowledge
systems and frameworks for thinking about ecology and ecosystems, including “a widely respected core
philosophy requiring us to consider the broader impacts of what  we do now on the next seven
generations.” 4 Despite the significant ramifications —and possibilities—of this longue durée perspective for
reconsidering the present’s relationship to the future, this type of ecological or capacious speculative thinking is not
widely accepted as scientific practice, and is instead relegated to the realm of mysticism .
In his discussion of the polar bear, an animal frequently deployed as an indicator species of global warming, Whyte instructively writes:
…while we may embrace the value of species such as the polar bear—even when we may have never interacted with one—it is also true that
we are unlikely to invoke the polar bear in the absence of also invoking the species’ significance to particular human and
nonhuman communities for whom it has long, local, complex, and unique relationships. 5
Like the polar bear, indigenous
people are too often cast by Western scientists as objects to be  observed,
rather than as the subjects or creators of knowledge about climate change. When indigenous
knowledge is reduced to data, its radical potential —its ability to change the questions being asked
and the goals being strived towards—is evacuated. Not only is this approach an impoverished way of
conceptualizing the value of other cultures , the human species’ collective ecologies—both human and
nonhuman, suffer the effects of such critical myopia.
Calling for decolonization from a distance is not enough , either—Whyte works with both scientists and
indigenous movements to bridge the divide between indigenous knowledge and scientific  knowledge. 6
To evidence the concrete effects of this intellectual labor on public policy, Whyte  projected a list of
technical terms that had to be introduced into the U.S. Forest Service in light of a  report he had worked
on: one was “patriarchy,” because as Whyte expounded, “climate change is always a gender issue in tribes.” 7 In an article on
indigenous conservation, he expands on how gender is part and parcel into environmental work through an example of the Women’s
Water Commission, writing:
The explicit goal of the commission includes fostering “the traditional role of the Women in caring for water.” “Traditional,” here, is important
not because of pseudo-factual claims about indigenous women’s roles, but because it indicates that certain kinds of orientation towards water
imply cultural understandings of one’s responsibilities to the earth’s living, non-living, and spiritual beings, as well as criticisms of industrial
settler campaigns in the region that have damaged indigenous systems of stewardship. 8
Such work that challenges the gendered discourse surrounding science, research, and knowledge reminded me of an article by Mark Carey
(University of Oregon) et. al on feminist glaciology, which I encountered because it spurred (in this author’s estimation, spurious) conservative
outrage and controversy over the use of NSF funds. 9 Carey et. al’s article in part levies a criticism of white, individualist, and masculinist
“discovery” narratives about glaciers, which serve to erase indigenous knowledge and stewardship of ice. The authors offer an example that
dovetails with Whyte’s insights on the value of indigenous knowledge:
For instance, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, glacier knowledge of elder indigenous women has both a gendered context and offers alternative
visions of ice compared to Western sciences. Cruikshank (2005) explains for Northwest North America that knowledge of the landscape is
influenced profoundly by culture, gender, age, and the personal experiences of each individual living with glaciers. Additionally, whereas
glaciologists may try to measure glaciers and understand ice physics by studying the glacial ice itself, indigenous accounts do not portray the ice
as passive, to be measured and mastered in a stereotypically masculinist sense. 10
Both Whyte and Carey et. al argue that gender is inextricable from knowledge about the environment, evidenced by the bodies of those who
dwell with glaciers as well as the construction of bodies of knowledge about ice. The incredulity and scorn such claims incite in public
discourse suggests how far U.S. cultural consciousness has to go in acknowledging this fact.
It is settler colonial logic at work
when non-Native people cannot imagine ourselves out of the same logics that  led us to and structure
our contemporary moment. A failure to meaningfully adapt knowledge  systems, including about gender,
will only result in similarly inadequate ways of conceptualizing the  world. Non-Native scholars need to
think differently about how we got here in the first place, and how that shapes where we think we
can go. We must practice what an Uncertain Commons has called “affirmative speculation,” a mode of
critical inquiry that “dares to temporarily materialize  forms not yet realized, forms for…which the
conditions are not yet ripe.” 11 Putting this call together with indigenous history—or as Whyte wryly put it, the
understanding that “[this is] not the first time  this ever happened” 12 —means any future we imagine
must decolonize our inherited epistemological  cartographies, too. Without learning this lesson, the
future will never exceed a doomed cycle of settler colonial violence.
 “Anthropocene” Link
The move to centrally locate the Anthropocene is rooted in the settler move to
innocence that universalizes apocalyptic existence as an impending change, rather
than an ongoing settler colonial process.
Zahara ‘16 (Alex, Masters in Environmental Studies @ Queens University, July 14, Boundaries of the Human in the Age of
Life Sciences Conference, http://sites.psu.edu/iahboundaries/alex-zahara/)

A few months ago, I attended a departmental seminar 1 on the Anthropocene, where the presenter spoke of Donna
Haraway’s ‘plantationocene’ hypothesis. 2 One of the implications of this hypothesis is that the stratigrapher’s
‘golden spike’ of the Anthropocene might appropriately be placed within the mass environmental
changes and social injustices associated with colonization . 3 The highly interdisciplinary and
(not surprisingly) almost exclusively white group of attendees were largely resistant to the  idea—not
because they disagreed that colonization resulted in mass environmental  change and injustice, but
because this proposition challenged what some consider to be the Anthropocene’s promise of
universality. Etched in my notes was a question that seemed to be posed and re-posed by audience members with increasing
frustration: “Isn’t the whole point of the Anthropocene that we’re all on the same page ?”

Since then, I’ve found myself contrasting this audience’s response with what postcolonial and Indigenous
studies scholars have been writing about the Anthropocene . While reading and listening to Kyle Powys Whyte work, I’m
reminded of Métis scholar Zoe Todd’s discussion on the appropriateness of the Anthropocene as a
concept, and its potential role in highlighting or even naturalizing settler histories. Here, she reflects
on the cyclical events of environmental change that have been experienced by Indigenous  people:
What does it mean to have a reciprocal discourse on catastrophic end times and  apocalyptic
environmental change in a place where, over the last five hundred years, Indigenous peoples faced
(and face) the end of 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? 4
Since settler colonialism very physically and violently uprooted Indigenous people and  families, changed
environments and patterns of human/nonhuman/inhuman relation, Indigenous communities might be
considered, as Whyte puts it, among “the first climate change relocation survivors.” 5 In this way, it makes little
sense to argue in favour of universality in the context of climate change . Both Todd and Whyte argue that
achieving climate justice for and by Indigenous people requires addressing the ways in which global
environmental change is intimately connected with— and in fact is predicated upon— practices of
settler colonialism. Placing decolonization at the fore of environmental governance, then, involves not
only re-thinking Anthropocene temporalities (when did the Anthropocene start, and for who?) but also questioning
and challenging the ethics and practices embedded in dominant environmental management  practices
—one of the many Boundaries this speaker series seeks to address.
In his talk, ‘Living our Ancestor’s Dystopia’, Whyte
describes settler colonialism as “an attack on our adaptive
capacity” 6 . Colonization was (and is) a naturalizing effort by  settlers to “erase the landscapes that were
necessary for our cultures and political societies to flourish.” 7 Within my own discipline of waste studies,
I think of anthropologist Traci Brynne Voyles’s recent work on a process that she refers to
as ‘wastelanding’ 8 . Here, she describes the ways in which settlers (including missionaries, mining prospectors, and settler
governments) framed Indigenous landscapes as ‘empty  except for Indians’, or as spaces amenable to
mineral and natural resource extraction, and  ultimately to the disposal of toxic wastes. As a result,
wastelanding “rendered an environment and the bodies that inhabit it as pollutable”, violently
altering how Indigenous communities are able to live with and adapt to changing
environmental landscapes. Relatedly, Whyte asserts that the contemporary ‘vulnerability’ of
Indigenous communities to climate change (the effects of rising coastal waters, human, plant and  animal
migrations, and so on) should not be considered as simple ‘bad luck’— or the consequence of two
unfortunate histories (colonization on the one hand, and climate  change on the other) 9 — but implicit to
the very structures and practices that have created  the Anthropocene to begin with. Just as Voyles
argues that “decolonization cannot be imagined outside of environmental justice ” 10 , Whyte showcases
the ways in which Indigenous activism and conservation practices involve “grasping the full impact
of systems (or structures) of settler-colonialism on Indigenous living today and into the future.” 11 Doing
so is as much about politics and ethics, as it is about temporality.
As Whyte demonstrates through various examples of Anishinaabek conservation practices (with a focus on sturgeon, wild rice, and more),
placing decolonization at the fore of how climate change is addressed is not only necessary for
Indigenous self- determination, but alters the way climatic change is understood and responded to.
This has become a key difference between how many ‘Western’ organizations, such as the  IPCC and
some environmental groups, and Indigenous communities have started  responding to climate change.
Whyte writes:
Our conservation and restoration projects are not only about whether to conserve or let go of certain species. Rather, they are about what
relationships between humans and certain plants and animals we should focus on in response to the challenges we face, given that we have
already lost so many plants and animals that matter to our societies. 12
While many environmentalist groups have focused on saving charismatic species, such as polar bears, Whyte suggests that Indigenous
conservation efforts differ in practice:
We are unlikely to invoke the polar bear in the absence of also invoking the species’ significance to particular human and nonhuman
communities for whom it has long, local, complex, and unique relationships. 13
Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous conservation efforts involve shaping the biology and sociality of ecosystems, though often they do so in
the context of different ethical commitments, understandings of history, and end goals. Indigenous
conservation efforts that aim
to address climate adaptation through the resurgence of ‘traditional’ Indigenous cultural practices,
should not be understood as Indigenous communities relegating  themselves to some pure or ‘imagined’
past, but as Whyte makes clear, involve a variety of technologies and practices (including but not limited to
Western scientific knowledge, advocacy, and activism) aimed at securing Indigenous politics and
governance. 14
A key takeaway of Kyle Powys Whyte’s work is that the Anthropocene (if one exists) is often experienced and
understood differently—and in important ways— by settler and  Indigenous people. Accordingly, when I think
back to the seminar mentioned earlier in this response, I wonder whether some of the pushback given by the audience
stemmed from a continued reluctance by some (settler) academics to rethink our
Anthropocene histories—a process that involves questioning how climate change is discussed,
through whose knowledge systems, and on what terms . But doing so, as Whyte’s work shows, matters both
materially and ethically, influencing what bodies and patterns of relation are  prioritized, how, and for
what purpose. Despite the Anthropocene’s homogenizing claims and the persistence of settler
colonialism, Whyte’s work highlights the ways in which Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing
are actively shaping environmental management practices in the present—a process that is, for some,
necessarily unsettling.
 Anti-Blackness Link
Starting with slavery absent an explicit analysis of colonialism effaces the violence
committed against the Natives, allows the continuation of colonialist violence against
them and makes sovereignty impossible
Moreton-Robinson ‘08 (Aileen, Queensland University Prof of Indigenous Studies, Transnational Whiteness Matters) KH
Despite the colonial history of the United States and racializing Native Americans in popular culture, as the embodiment of ' redness,' the
whiteness literature makes a racial demarcation between African Americans and Native Americans. That is by making blackness synonymous
with 'race' African Americans are placed in a reified position within the literature. This binary understanding of 'race' places the literature in one
sense Qut of colonial history. That is the theorizing
about whiteness does not begin with nor center the
appropriation of Indigenous peoples' lands and the continuing sovereignty struggles with the US
nation state. They are, but they are marginalized within the theories of race and whiteness offered by
whiteness studies despite
its political commitment to and epistemological engagement with white race privilege and
power. The conceptual links between the privileges and benefits that flow from American citizenship to
Native American dispossession remains invisible. Instead slavery, war and migration are the narratives
by which the historically contingent positionality of whiteness unfolds. This reflects a failure to
address the sociodiscursive way that white possession functions to produce racism . The racism attending the
sociodiscursive nature of white possession informed the establishment of the Advisory Board of Race in 1997. President Clinton established
this Board to counsel and inform him about race and racial reconciliation couching the terms of reference within a civil rights framework.44 No
Native American representative was appointed to the Board even though they are the only racial group required to carry a blood quantum card
as proof of tribal membership.45 This exclusion was the catalyst for numerous protests by different Native American groups. They stated that
while Native Americans shared with other racial groups the need for improving their socioeconomic and legal conditions, there were other
conditions not shared. They argued that their position within the USA was unique because of their sovereignties and treating with the Nation
State. The racism that they experience is predicated on this relationship. Native American sovereignty is constantly under threat by the Nation
State and its various mechanisms of governance such as the Plenary Powers of the United States Congress. Within their daily lives they
experience the effects of broken treaties, loss of land and cultural rights, genocide and breaches of fiduciary duty. They are confronted by the
constant battle with Congressmen and State Governors who wish to diminish their rights by framing "the economic and political empowerment
of Indigenous tribes as evidence of a threatening tribal movement to transgress the temporal and spatial boundaries of colonial rule, consume
American property and colonise the American political system."46 Resisting and diminishing Native American sovereignties also includes tactics
such as positioning their claims outside racism which serves to protect and reinscribe possessive investments in the nation as a white
possession. Some twelve months after its establishment, President Clinton was invited to discuss his Race Advisory Board with a panel of eight
people on a PBS broadcast. One member of the panel was Native American Sherman Alexie. The panel discussed with Clinton a number of race
issues including affirmative action. During the show Clinton did not address Native American sovereignty claims but tried to connect with Alexie
by informing him that his grandmother was one-quarter Cherokee. Later in the program Alexie was asked if he was often engaged by others in
discussions about race to which he replied that a dialogue often takes place when he is approached by people who "tell me they're
Cherokee."41 In other words people do not talk about racism to Alexie unless they claim some form of Indigeneity. Alexie's comment serves to
illustrate how Clinton tries to capitalize on a Native American ancestry by staking a possessive claim to a subject position that is not purely
white in order to connect with his native brother while having excluded Native Americans from the Race Committee. Clinton can stake a
possessive claim to Cherokee descent because there is no threat to his investment in his white identity, which carries a great deal of cultural
capital enabling him to make the claim on biological grounds outside of Cherokee sovereignty. What Clinton was also signifying to the audience
was that race does not matter: even a person of Cherokee descent can be President of the United States because this is the land of freedom,
liberty and equality. A similar rhetorical strategy was also deployed in March 2008 by Barack Obama in his speech on race in Philadelphia, which
was framed by the black/white binary operationalizing narratives of slavery and migration. Obama
declared that slavery was
the original sin in the making of the nation and it is the African American experience that dominates
his speech though he acknowledges Latinos, Hispanics and refers to Native Americans once . His narrative
on migration is reserved for white working and middle class people who he says feel they have not been privileged by their race, they have
worked hard to build their dream but are now victims of globalization. Obama
stakes a possessive claim to whiteness
throughout this speech by discursively operationalizing an American dream which is beyond race. He
stages this through an appeal to Christian principles, civil rights, patnotlsm, citizenship, liberty, freedom and equality noting that the
Declaration of Independence was developed by men who "travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution."48 The tyranny and
persecution inflicted upon Native Americans and slaves by white male possessors who framed the constitution is disavowed by Obama, who
epitomizes them as the bearers of freedom and liberty. Clinton's executive and personal actions and Obama's speech serve[s] to
negate Native American claims that race and racism were operating, when Indigenous peoples were
dispossessed, and they continue to mark their everyday lives and sovereignty claims. The genealogy of racism toward Native Americans
can be traced back to "Greek and Roman myths of warlike, barbarian tribes and biblical accounts of wild men cursed by God" which informed
renaissance-era travel narratives describing them as the embodiment of primitive human savagery.49 Enlightenment theorists such as Locke
and Hobbes developed their ideas of the state of nature utilizing the American Indian as the quintessential example of "humanity living in its
pure, unadulterated savage state." These ideas operated discursively to inform theories about the rights of man within the context of the rise of
democracy relegating Indigenous people to a state of nature without any sovereign rights. They continue to circulate preventing Indigenous
sovereignties from gaining recognition as relevant and alternative visions of differently constituted modemities and global futures .
The
exclusion of Native Americans from the Race Committee correlates with their invisibility within the
whiteness literature. Native Americans are located outside 'racism' because United States' status as a
former colony and its current mode of colonization is separated from its historical narrative as being the
land of liberty, freedom and equality. CONCLUSION I have shown that white possession operates discursively within the
whiteness literature shaping analyses about its social construction and morphology which are
divorced from its colonial history and colonizing present. Tropes of migration and slavery become the
dominant narratives that inform analyses. The historical amnesia within the literature is tied to what white possession
promises - migrants can become white and blacks can achieve racial equality. The selective historical amnesia mitigates the fear of opening
oneself up epistemologically and onto logically to being a disoriented, displaced and diasporic racialized subject whose existence within the
nation state is predicated on the continuing divestment of Indigenous people's sovereign rights. Instead
it is the black/white
binary that becomes the parameter for the constitution of whiteness by operationalizing blackness as
an epistemological possession. Indigenous sovereignties within the USA are excluded from the whiteness literature because
analyses of 'race' and ' whiteness' are sociodiscursively constituted by the racial contract and white possession which enable, constrain and
discipline subjects in various ways within and outside the academy. White possession sets the limits of knowledge about the black/white binary
disappearing beyond or behind the invention of this knowledge mediated through the racial contract. These
practices of knowledge
production work to deny Indigenous sovereignties as they reinforce the power , control and authority
of the nation as a white possession. The work produced in the field of whiteness studies within the United States of America is
written on and yet over the sovereign ground of Native Americans and Indigenous people from its other territories. While this literature does
produce knowledge about whiteness and racism, there are powerful vested interests in not knowing Indigenous sovereignties and continuing to
know Indigeneity in ways that confine it to a specialist domain of ethnographic expertise. The
failure of this literature to address
the explicit colonial and continuing imperialism of the nation state results in the writing off of
Indigenous sovereignties in the service of white possession. This servicing produces a particular way
of being racialized within the United States of America and is fundamental both to its establishment
and to its continued existence.
 Communism/Marxism Link
Aff relies on European theoretical tradition of abstraction and despiritualization is the
foundation of genocidal exploitation
Means ‘80 (Russell, an American Oglala Lakota activist, the following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several
thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South
Dakota. It is Russell Means’s most famous speech, 1980 “For America to Live, Europe Must Die”)

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my
people. There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is
being rejected as European in origin–which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of
Lakota–or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc.–and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal
names.(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus
washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492.
Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met “Indio,” from the Italian in dio, meaning “in God.”)It takes a strong effort
on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the
traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book
or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master’s degree in “Indian Studies” or in
“education” or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into
a mental European, an outsider. I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of
Europeans or mental Europeans, I’m not allowing for false distinctions. I’m
not saying that on the one hand there are the
by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development
which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which
is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in
general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European
intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.The process began much earlier. Newton, for example,
“revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear
mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with
economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into
code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the
“scholars” like to say–and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an
expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality
even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it
with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer ! This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind.
Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment–that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one–is
considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth” changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such
a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical
models and keep them (the models) alive. Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke
and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology–and that is put in his own terms–he
secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put
Hegel’s philosophy in terms of “materialism,” which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel ’s work altogether.
Again, this is in Marx’ own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as
revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between
being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx’–
and his followers’–links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others. Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining
is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual
process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of
false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views
at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let’s look at a major implication of this; it is
not merely an intellectual debate. The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe
is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems
most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn
to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit
murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to
the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And
what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to
kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, “Thou shalt not
kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can
proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue. In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental
process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development
are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the
dehumanization process.
 Communism/Marxism Link
Role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best disrupts settler colonialism – the
desirability of the Aff should be judged by its effect on non-European peoples.
Capitalism is not the root cause, it’s European culture
Means 80 (Russell, an American Oglala Lakota activist, the following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several
thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South
Dakota. It is Russell Means’s most famous speech, 1980 “For America to Live, Europe Must Die”)

For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total,
permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be
“developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open–in the European view–to this sort of insanity. Most
important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their
philosophers have
despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a
people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel,
and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the
indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools. But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world.
Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood–a replenishable, natural
item–as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel,
as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to
provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major
fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody
yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there’s an “energy crisis,”
and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel. Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at
the rate which they can show a good profit. That’s their ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other
hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it’s the most
“efficient” production fuel available. That’s their ethic, and I fail to see where it’s preferable. Like I said,
Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It’s the same old song. There’s a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You
cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to
make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-
European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s
tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy
anyone to point out an example where this is not true . So now we, as American Indian people, are
asked to believe that a “new” European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the
negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again,
and that’s supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean? Right now, today,
we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a “National Sacrifice Area.” What this means is that
we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material. The cheapest, most
efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging
sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever. This is considered by the
industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development. Along the
way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly
uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and
Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under
reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue. We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area. We are
resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium
here and drain the water table–no more, no less. Now let’s suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have).
Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the
European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian
people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes. But, as
I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and
perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to “redistribute” the results–the
money, maybe–of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it
around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within
European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-
Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed
from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society
changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can
see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It’s the same old song.
Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in
relation to industry–maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the
American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us “precapitalists”
and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have
always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could
participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers,
or “proletarians,” as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution
could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial
system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society. I think there’s a problem with language here. Christians,
capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean
is continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs. Like germs,
European culture goes through occasional convulsions, even divisions within itself, in order to go on
living and growing. This isn’t a revolution we’re talking about, but a means to continue what already
exists. An amoeba is still an amoeba after it reproduces. But maybe comparing European culture to an
amoeba isn’t really fair to the amoeba. Maybe cancer cells are a more accurate comparison because
European culture has historically destroyed everything around it; and it will eventually destroy itself .
So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the
national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become
industrialized and Europeanized.At this point, I’ve got to stop and ask myself whether I’m being too harsh. Marxism has something
of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that
these Marxists have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it
in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they have
been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as “the National Question,” the question of whether the
tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the
industrial needs. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists
imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people. I hear the leading Soviet
scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant
abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I
see China exploding nuclear
bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit
the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It’s the same old
song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time. The statement of the Soviet scientist is very interesting. Does he know what
this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction
of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these things will be
controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will
find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists
and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that
non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a
I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American
Marxist society.
Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition; European culture itself is
responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with
Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost. There is another way. There is
the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade
Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or
the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans–the Europeans’ arrogance of acting as
though they were beyond the nature of all related things–can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans
down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary
theory to bring this about; it’s beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory
is an abstract; our knowledge is real. Distilled to its basic terms, European faith–including the new faith in science–equals a belief that man is
God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American
Indians know this to be totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh
that we may live. Humans are able to survive only through the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food
through the use of fang and claw.But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other
creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our
thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior.
After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.All
European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have
been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will
retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my
people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.
 Heidegger Link
Heidegger’s position is profoundly Eurocentric and racist
Maldonado-Torres ‘04 (Nelson, ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, “The topology of being and the geopolitics of
knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality”, City, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21-56)
There were antecedents to the Nazi and the Heideggerean gesture towards Europe. Through the late 16th to the 19th centuries, the French and the English had established a line between northern Europe and southern Europe.16

The French and the

The difference gradually emerged through the propagation of the Black Legend, the prestige of technological advancement, and assertion of imperial control in Africa and South-East Asia.

Industrial Revolutions provided additional justifications for the marginalization of Spain and Portugal
from the story of modernity. The appearance of new disciplines in the modern Western university in the
19th century and their continued expansion in the 20th only came to cement the subalternized position
of southern Europe. Heidegger’s linguistic turn repeats some of these patterns. The difference is that where others put the north of
Europe and south of Europe divide, he and other conservative German thinkers posit the metaphysics of Mitteleuropa. For

Heidegger the new beginning is in the middle. And the middle is precisely what is being threatened first by French
ideals and then by foreign forces. German conservative thinkers insisted early on the threat of France’s Zivilization to Germany’s Kultur. As Bambach points out, Heidegger not
only shared this position, but also called attention to the threat of two emerging powers: the Soviet Union on the one

hand, and the USA on the other. The Soviet Union had become a major political force since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. After Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles in the 1930s, France
made a pact with the Soviet Union. The goal, to be sure, was to isolate Germany in the centre. Perceiving the alliance between the rootless cosmopolitan

France and the Asiatic Soviet Union Heidegger stated in 1936: “Our historical Dasein experiences with
increasing distress and clarity that its future is tantamount to a naked either/or: either Europe’s rescue
or its destruction. The possibility of rescue, however, demands two things: 1. The preservation of the
European Völker against the Asiatic. 2. The overcoming of their own deracination and fragmentation.
Without this overcoming such preservation cannot be realized. ”17 Although Heidegger maintained his
Germancentrism until the end, he translated some of the core ideas of this position into the more
widespread form of Eurocentrism. His Eurocentrism, to be sure, still presupposed a strong Germancentrism. In some way, the defence of Europe became
an extension of his diatribe with French thought over who owned the legacy of Europe. France’s pact with the Soviet
Union indicated just how un-European they could be. Very disconcerting here is that it was France’s reaction to Hitler’s violation of

the Treaty of Versailles, and not Hitler’s anti-semitism and imperial policies, that represented the more
dangerous threat to Europe for Heidegger. Heidegger was very clear about the threat of the USA as well.
In 1942, after the American entry into the Second World War, he wrote: “we know today that the Anglo- Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat], and that means: the
commencement of the Western World”.18 Bambach summarizes Heidegger’s view of America as follows: “Leaning on the staple of pronouncements from Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Scheler, Jünger, Rilke, and others,

Heidegger deemed America (by which he meant the United States ) a land without history, a culture
without roots, a people held in the deadening grip of total mobilization, preoccupied by size, expansion,
magnitude, and quantity . . . Read within the context of his geo-philosophical account of Mitteleuropa,
Americanism symbolizes rootlessness, deracination, the loss of autochthony and of any meaningful
connection to the earth.”19 Heidegger’s philosophical geopolitics were ambitious, grand and racist. As
Bambach notes, while Heidegger opposed the biological racism of Nazi ideologues, he still sustained a form of

racism nonetheless.20 His racism is not biological, nor cultural, but epistemic. As all forms of racism, epistemic
racism is linked with politics and sociality. Epistemic racism disregards the epistemic capacity of
certain groups of people. It may be based on metaphysics or ontology but its results are nonetheless the same: the evasion of the recognition of
others as fully human beings. Heidegger’s racism was very clear in his perception of the Jews and the Hebraic tradition. In a letter to a colleague in 1929 Heidegger states: “I would like to say
more clearly what I could only hint at indirectly in my report. At stake is nothing less than the pressing consideration that we stand before a choice: either to provide our German spiritual life once more with genuine forces and

Heidegger’s views of the Jews were grounded on the

educators rooted in the native and indigenous or to deliver it over ultimately to increasing Judification.”21

nationalistic ontology of the homeland (Heimat). The experience of exodus and diaspora made the Jews
inherently rootless subjects for him.22 He considered Jews to be a threat to the homeland. They have
an urban, rather than a rural identity. These wanderers defy the Athenian principle of autochthony. For
this reason, even those Jews who speak German still represented a threat to the German Völk. That Heidegger owed gratitude to his teacher Edmund

Husserl does not represent an exception from this. Heidegger was not concerned so much about
individuals per se, but about “increasing Judification” , which has to do, not with his relationship with any one Jew in particular, but with his attitude regarding their
overall collective influence in Germany. Heidegger’s epistemic racism certainly did not go unchallenged. One of Heidegger’s most virulent critics, if not the most, was a former student of Edmund Husserl in Freiburg who also
attended Heidegger’s lectures: Emmanuel L´evinas. All of L´evinas’s mature work attempts to subvert Heidegger’s thought. In his first great work, Totality and Infinity, L´evinas describes ontology as a philosophy of power.23 Against
Heideggerean ontology L´evinas proposed ethics as first philosophy. And this ethics was strongly based precisely in what Heidegger could not find any value: the Hebraic tradition. While Heidegger’s criticism of the West is based on
the alleged forgetfulness of Being, L´evinas criticism rather lies on the forgetfulness of the Hebraic in Western thought. L´evinas found in Jewish sources the possibility of articulating an ethical metaphysics that put limits to the
Christian and liberal ideas regarding the autonomy of the subject. Jewish sources also provided L´evinas clues to develop an account of corporality very different from Nazi racial logics.24
 Post-Modernism Link
Postmodern notions of fluidity and relativity are parasitic on Indigenous land
and increase colonialism
Grande ‘04 (Sandy, PhD, Associate Professor at Connecticut College, “Red Pedagogy”, pg. 112-113)
In view of the above, it is clear to see how postmodernism—the notion of¶ fluid boundaries, the relativizing of difference and
negation of grand narratives—¶ primarily serves whitestream America. The multiphrenia of postmodern¶ plurality,
its "world of simulation" and obliteration of any sense of objective ¶ reality, has given rise to a frenetic
search for the "authentic" led by¶ culture vultures and capitalist bandits fraught with "imperialist
nostalgia."2 5¶ In response, American Indian communities have restricted access to the discursive¶ spaces of American Indian culture and identity and the nondiscursive¶ borders of American Indian communities. In
short, the notion of fluidity has ¶ never worked to the advantage of indigenous peoples. Federal agencies

have¶ invoked the language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for dismantling ¶ the structures
of tribal life. Whitestream America has seized upon ¶ the message of relativism to declare open season
on Indians, and whitestream¶ academics have employed the language of signification and simulation to ¶
transmute centuries of war between indigenous peoples and their respective ¶ nation-states into a
"genetic and cultural dialogue" (Valle and Torres 1995,¶ 141). Thus, in spite of its "democratic" promise, postmodernism
and its ludic¶ theories of identity fail to provide indigenous communities the theoretical ¶ grounding for
asserting their claims as colonized peoples, and, more important, ¶ impede construction of
transcendent emancipatory theories.¶ Despite the pressures of cultural encroachment and cultural imperialism,¶ however, indigenous communities
continue to evolve as sites of political contestation and cultural empowerment. They manage to survive the dangers of ¶ colonialist forces by employing

proactive strategies, which emphasize education, ¶ empowerment, and self-determination, and

defensive tactics that protect¶ (gains! unfettered economic and political encroachment. Thus, whatever else¶ ilu borders of indigenous communities
may or may not demarcate, they continue¶ to serve as potent geographic filters of all that is non-Indian
—dividing¶ between the real and metaphoric spaces that differentiate Indian country from ¶ the rest of
whitestream America.¶ Pedagogical Implications of Postmodern Theories¶ As students learn to navigate the plurality of difference, it is equally important¶ to avoid falling into the (postmodern) trap of
relativism. A postmodern¶ theory of difference that insists on impartiality masks the power and privilege ¶ that

underpins whitestream culture and perspectives. In other words, American Indian students do not enter into a social space in which
identities compete with equal power for legitimacy; rather, they are infused into a political ¶ terrain that presumes their inferiority. For example,

postmodern musings of¶ subjectivity as disembodied and free-floating ignore the fact that American¶ Indian students,
along with other indigenous peoples, are "engaged with the¶ laic in a complex relationship in which there are varying degrees of

interdependency¶ at play" (Alfred 1 9 9 9 , 85). As such, American Indian students are¶ neither free to "reinvent"
themselves nor able to liberally "transgress" borders ¶ "I difference, but, rather, remain captive to the
determined spaces of colonialist¶ rule. These students experience the binds of the paradox inherent to ¶
'current modes of identity theory and it becomes increasingly evident that ¶ neither the cold linearity of
blood-quantum nor the tortured weakness of ¶ self-identification" (both systems designed and
legitimated by the state) will¶ provide them any relief (Alfred 1 9 9 9 , 84). Thus, while postmodern theorists¶ rightly
question the whole notion of origins and work to disrupt the grand narrative of modernism, its
hyperelastic and all-inclusive categories offer little to¶ provide protection against the colonialist forces
of cultural encroachment and capitalist¶ commodification.
 Post-Modernism Link
Postmodernism destroys Indigenous existence – prevents struggle around stable
identity markers
Grande ‘04 (Sandy, PhD, Associate Professor at Connecticut College, “Red Pedagogy”,”, pg. 99-100)
The above indicators position American Indians in a wholly unique and¶ paradoxical relationship to the United States. They also illuminate the
inherent¶ contradictions of modern American Indian existence: the paradox of having¶ to prove "authenticity" to gain legitimacy as a
"recognized" tribe, while¶ simultaneously having to negotiate a postmodern world in which all claims to¶ authenticity are dismissed as
essentialist (if not racist). This reality not only¶ conscripts American Indians to a gravely dangerous and precarious space but¶ also points to the
gross insufficiency of models that treat American Indians as¶ simply another ethnic minority group.¶ Specifically, the
identity paradox
of American Indians deeply problematizes the postmodern insistence that we move beyond concretized
categories¶ and disrupt the "myth" of prima facie indicators of identity. For American¶ Indians, such notions
only reflect whitestream reality. For instance, it currently¶ remains a fundamental truth of Indian reality —
no matter how you¶ define it —that the titles to Indian land remain in the hands of the U. S.
government.¶ Moreover, the U.S. government—not tribes—retains the right¶ to confer "federal recognition" and therefore the power to
enable selfdetermination.¶ Indeed, the criteria required for federal recognition are constructed¶ to protect the rights and interests of the
government and not those¶ of Indian tribes. According to the Indian Definition Study (1980), the inner¶ contradictions of the current criteria
create the following impossible paradox¶ for tribes:¶ 1. An American Indian is a member of any federally recognized tribe. To be¶ federally
recognized, an Indian tribe must be comprised of American Indians. ¶ 2. To gain federal recognition, an Indian tribe must have a land base. To
secure¶ a land base, an Indian tribe must be federally recognized." ¶ So, five
hundred years after the European invasion,
"recognized" and "unrecognized"¶ American Indian communities repeatedly find themselves engaged ¶ in
absurd efforts to prove (in whitestream courts) their existence over ¶ time as stable and distinct groups
of people. Thus, contrary to postmodern rhetoric, there are in fact, stable markers and¶ prima facie
indicators of what it means to be Indian in American society .¶ Within this context, indigenous scholars
cannot afford to perceive essentialism ¶ as a mere theoretical construct and may , in fact, be justified in
their understanding¶ of it as the last line of defense against capitalistic encroachment¶ and last available
means for retaining cultural integrity and tribal sovereignt y.¶ The question therefore remains whether contemporary
theories of identity are¶ able to provide any valuable insights to the paradox of American Indian identity¶ formation.
 “Racialization” Link
The affirmative’s conflation of colonization as merely a symptom of racialization
erases the distinct nature of settlerism and is bound to reproduce a liberal politics of
inclusion
Byrd 11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism,
pg. xxiii-xxvii)

When these two historical processes are so enmeshed that racialization in the United States now often evokes
colonization as a metonym, such discursive elisions obfuscate the distinctions between the two systems
of dominance and the coerced complicities amid both .15 The generally accepted theorizations of racialization in the
United States have, in the pursuit of equal rights and enfranchisements, tended to be sited along the axis of
inclusion/exclusion as the affective critique of the larger project of liberal multiculturalism . When the
remediation of the colonization of American Indians is framed through discourses of racialization that
can be redressed by further inclusion into the nation-state, there is a significant failure to grapple with
the fact that such discourses further reinscribe the original colonial injury .16 As Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kehaulani
Kauanui, White Earth Ojibwe scholar Jean M. O’Brien, and other indigenous scholars have noted, the conflation of racialization into
colonization and indigeneity into racial categories dependent upon blood logics underwrites the
institutions of settler colonialism when they proffer assimilation into the colonizing nation as reparation
for genocide and theft of lands and nations.17 But the larger concern is that this conflation masks the
territoriality of conquest by assigning colonization to the racialized body , which is then policed in its
degrees from whiteness. Under this paradigm, American Indian national assertions of sovereignty, self-
determination, and land rights disappear into U.S. terrioriality as indigenous identity becomes a racial
identity and citizens of colonized indigenous nations become internal ethnic minorities within the
colonizing nation-state. As civil rights, queer rights, and other rights struggles have often cathected
liberal democracy as the best possible avenue to redress the historical violences of and exclusions from
the state, scholars and activists committed to social justice have been left with impossible choices: to
articulate freedom at the expense of another, to seek power and recognition in the hopes that we might
avoid the syllogisms of democracy created through colonialism. Lisa Lowe provides a useful caution as she reminds us
that “the affirmation of the desire for freedom is so inhabited by the forgetting of its condition of
possibility that every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its burial, by the violence of
forgetting.”18 The ethical moment before us is to comprehend “the particular loss of the intimacies of
four continents, to engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism as a conjunction, as an actively
acknowledged loss within the present. ”19 In attempting to people the intimacies of four continents, Lowe activates the
Chinese indentured laborer in the Caribbean just after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 as the
affective entry point into “a range of connections, the global intimacies out of which emerged not only
modern humanism but a modern racialized division of labo r.”20 Her turn to the colonial racialized labor force
in the Americas helps to reveal the degree to which intimacy—here tracked through the spheres of spatial
proximity, privacy, and volatility —among Africa, Asia, and Europe in the Americas has served as the
forgotten and disavowed constitutive means through which liberal humanism defines freedom, family,
equality, and humanity. In fact, liberal humanism, according to Lowe, depends upon the “ economy of
affirmation and forgetting’” not just of particular streams of human history, but of the loss of their
geographies, histories, and subjectivities .21 In the indeterminacies between and among freedom,
enslavement, indentureship, interior, and exterior, the recovered Asian contract laborer, functioning as
historical site for Lowe, can reveal the processes through which and sexuality) causes the primary
violences of U.S. politics in national and international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself
with settler colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of
dominance through investments in colorblind equality. Simply put, prevailing understandings of race and
racialization within U.S. postcolonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the
conquest of indigenous peoples. Further, these framings have forgotten, as Moreton-Robinson has argued, that “the question of
how anyone came to be white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and the assumption
of white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and diasporic queer
communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the ongoing conditions of
settler colonialism o f indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved , if not
redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars. liberalism asserts freedom and forgets enslavement as the condition of
possibility for what constitutes “the human.” “Freedom was,” Lowe stresses, “constituted through a narrative dialectic that
rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or
contradiction. The ‘overcoming’ of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within the modern Western political sphere through displacement
and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas.”22 But what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in
Lowe’s important figuration of the history of labor in “the intimacies of four continents,” is the settler colonialism that such labor underwrites.
Asia, Africa, and Europe all meet in the Americas to labor over the dialectics of free and unfree, but what of the Americas themselves and the
prior peoples upon whom that labor took place? Lowe includes “native peoples” in her figurations as an addendum when she writes that she
hopes “to evoke the political economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas,
who with native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe
and North America.”2'1 By positioning the conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas as coeval
contradictions through which Western freedom affirms and resolves itself, and then by collapsing the
indigenous Americas into slavery, the fourth continent of settler colonialism through which such
intimacy is made to labor is not just forgotten or elided; it becomes the very ground through which the
other three continents struggle intimately for freedom, justice, and equality. Within Lowes formulation, the
native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery; their only role within the disavowed
intimacies of racialization is either one equivalent to that of African slaves or their ability to die so
imported labor can make use of their lands. Thus, within the “intimacies of four continents,” indigenous
peoples in the new world cannot, in this system, give rise to any historical agency or status within the
“economy of affirmation and forgetting,” because they are the transit through which the dialectic of
subject and object occurs. In many ways, then, this book argues for a critical reevaluation of the elaboration of these historical
processes of oppression within postcolonial, critical race, queer, and American studies at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. By
foundationally accepting the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking
oppressions of class, gender,vand sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and
international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing
the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through investments in colorblind
equality. Simply put, prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. postcolonial, area, and
queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples . Further, these
framings have forgotten, as Moreton-Robinson has argued, that “the question of how anyone came to
be white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and
the assumption of white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant,
and diasporic queer communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the
ongoing conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North
America resolved, if not redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars . Haksuba, Cacophony, and Other Headaches
Given all these difficulties, how might we place the arrivals of peoples through choice and by force into historical relationship with indigenous
peoples and theorize those arrivals in ways that are legible but still attuned to the conditions of settler colonialism? These questions confront
indigenous peoples still engaged in anticolonial projects of resistance. Colonialism brought the world, its peoples, and their own structures of
power and hegemony to indigenous lands. Our contemporary challenge is to theorize alternative methodologies to address the problems
imperialism continues to create. The conflation of racialization and colonization makes such distinctions difficult precisely because discourses of
humanism, enfranchisement, and freedom are so compelling within the smooth narrative curves through which the state promises increasing
liberty through pluralization. Just as Indianness serves as a transit of empire, analyses of competing oppressions reproduce colonialist
discourses even when they attempt to disrupt and transform participatory democracy away from its origins in slavery, genocide, and
indentureship. Onereason why a “postracial” and just democratic society is a lost cause in the United States
is that it is always already conceived through the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of
indigenous lands that cannot be ended by further inclusion or more participation .251 hope to disrupt this
dilemma by placing indige-nous phenomenologies into conversation with critical theory in order to identify indigenous transits and consider
possible alternative strategies for legibility.
 Western Feminism Link
Western Feminism centered around humanist notions of equity and freedom, sustains
colonialism and white supremacy even in attempts at diversity
Grande ‘04 (Sandy, Associate Professor of Education at Connecticut College, Ph.D., “Red Pedagogy”, pg. 124-126)
I feel compelled to begin by stating: I am not a feminist. Rather, I am indigena} ¶ While, like other indigenous women, I recognize the invaluable
contributions¶ that feminists have made to both critical theory and praxis in education,¶ I also believe the well-documented failure of
whitestream feminists to¶ engage race and acknowledge the complicity of white women in the history ¶ of domination positions it alongside
other colonialist discourses. Indeed the¶
colonialist project could not have flourished without the active
participation¶ of white women; therefore, as Annette M. Jaimes notes (1992, 311-344),¶ some American Indian women continue to
hold white women in disdain as¶ they are first and foremost perceived as constituents of the same white ¶ supremacy and colonialism that
oppresses all Indians. Thus, in
contrast to¶ dominant modes of feminist critique that locate women's oppression
in the¶ structures of patriarchy, this analysis is premised on the understanding that ¶ the collective
oppression of indigenous women is primarily an effect of ¶ colonialism—a multidimensional force
underwritten by Western Christianity, ¶ defined by white supremacy, and fueled by global capitalism. ¶ To
begin, it is necessary to map the complex and contradictory terrain of¶ both feminist theory and indigenous women. Just as the political space
of¶ feminism is multifarious, so is the sociocultural space occupied by women¶ who identify as "American Indian." As Devon Mihesuah (1998)
notes, American¶ Indian women differ in everything from blood-quantum to skin color,¶ and from religious affiliation to "opinions about what it
means to be Indian."¶ Interfaced with such diversity, however, Indian women share commonalities ¶ that extend beyond their gender—most
significantly, the struggles against¶ genocide, cultural imperialism, and assimilation. ¶ While these common experiences do not constitute a
shared American Indian¶ history or contemporary reality, nor does the heterogeneity of experience ¶ preclude the power and existence of grand
narratives (e.g., colonization, capitalism,¶ the Enlightenment). Critical scholar Henry Giroux (1997) maintains ¶ that "grand
narratives"
interface with the heterogeneity of experience, providing ¶ for the historical and relational placement of
different groups within¶ some "common project." In other words, while indigenous women may indeed¶ differ in everything "from blood-quantum to skin color," their shared experience¶ as
"conquered peoples" historically and relationally places them¶ within the "common project" of colonization (Mihesuah 1998, 38). Furthermore,¶ it is this placement that connects the lives and experiences of indigenous¶ women (the colonized) to each other while it distinguishes them
from¶ white women (the colonizers).¶ Generally speaking, such "binaries" (colonizer/colonized) are anathema to¶ "mainstream" feminism, dismissed as everything from essentialist and universalizing¶ to masculinist and coercive (Lather 1998). Insofar as this dismissal erases their lived
experience, indigenous women view it as a rhetorical¶ device that not only relativizes difference but also conveniently allows¶ white women to deny their complicity in the colonialist project. Indeed,¶ "mainstream" feminists have been widely critiqued for failing to acknowledge¶ their
privilege and the historical significance of racial and class differences¶ among women. Women of color, in particular, have taken issue with¶ their presumptions of a universal "sisterhood" and unproblematized patriarchy.¶ On this point, bell hooks (1989, 19-20) is worth quoting at
length:¶ Ideologically, thinking in this direction enables Western women, especially privileged¶ white women, to suggest that racism and class exploitation are merely an¶ offspring of the parent system: patriarchy. Within the feminist movement in the¶ West, this has led to the
assumption of resisting patriarchal domination as a¶ more legitimate feminist action than resisting racism and other forms of domination.¶ Such thinking prevails despite radical critiques made by black women¶ and women of color who question this proposition. To speculate that an
oppositional¶ division between men and women existed in early human communities is¶ to impose on the past, on these non-white groups, a worldview that fits all too¶ neatly within contemporary feminist paradigms that name man as the enemy and¶ woman as the victim.¶ hooks's
critique resonates deeply for indigenous women who continue to assert¶ the historical-material "difference" of their experiences. Indeed, this¶ analysis joins the voices of indigenous with African-American and other "labeled¶ women" working to create awareness of the interlocking
systems of¶ domination, particularly those forces that have empowered white women "to¶ act as exploiters and oppressors" (hooks 1989, 603).¶ The historical divide between white and subaltern women suggests that¶ what has long passed as "mainstream" feminism is actually

Currently,
whitestream¶ feminism,2 that is, a feminist discourse that is not only dominated by white¶ women but also principally structured on the basis of white, middle-class¶ experience, serving their ethnopolitical interests and capital investments.¶

however, the critique of feminism as a whitestream discourse is ¶ viewed as "passe," a "well-rehearsed

argument" that no longer holds validity .¶ 3 While women of color and other marginalized women have
long critiqued¶ the racist underpinnings of whitestream feminism, I am not convinced ¶ that the discourse
has fundamentally changed. Thus, on some level,¶ this analysis serves as a test of my own doubts about this supposed
transformation.¶ There is no mistaking that the contemporary terrain of feminism is broadly ¶ diverse." Even a
cursory examination of the field reveals a multiplicity of contemporary ¶ feminisms: liberal, postmodern, post-structural, Marxist, critical race,
socialist, lesbian, womanist, and transnational feminisms. Upon
closer examination,¶ however, it becomes apparent that
there is little if any intersection¶ among these feminisms. In other words, women of color tend be the
ones writing¶ about race and feminism, lesbi-bi-transgendered women about sexuality¶ and feminism, working-class women
about class and feminism, and middleclass¶ heterosexual women about a depoliticized feminism. Thus, it isn't that the¶ feminist
discourse has intrinsically diversified, but rather has simply evolved to ¶ be more pluralistic, "inviting"
different voices at the same time the existing ¶ axes of power are retained. More pointedly,
contemporary feminism is a ghettoized¶ terrain, marked by an uneven playing field wherein whitestream
feminists¶ commandeer "the center," and subaltern women, the margins. This reality ¶ calls into question
the self-proclaimed death of whitestream feminism, ¶ (re)inviting examinations of the field from a variety
of perspectives.
Impact Section
 1NC Ontology Impact
Settlement is not an event, but a structuring ontological logic of elimination constantly
manifest in everyday reiteration of the very modes of spatial inhabitance and
subjective modes of being – distinct from racial violences
Rifkin ‘14 (Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro (Mark, ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and
Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance,’ pp. 7-10)

If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and
associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its
effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of
inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a
system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the
elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay— invasion
is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and
sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to
expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that
“elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded)
occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of
elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial
society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the domination and
displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal
white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation as a white
possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “ At an ontological level the structure of subjective
possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will,
thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white
subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler
colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to
be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures
of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as
Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and manage- ment: “the
Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire
orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground
through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix).
 D-Rule/Ontology Impact
Settler colonialism is a-priori – Indianness is the ontological antithesis to settler
society
Byrd ‘11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, pg. xvii)
There is more than one way to frame the concerns of The Transit of Empire and more than one way to enter into the possibilities that transit
might allow for comparative studies. On the one hand, I am seeking to join ongoing conversations about sovereignty, power, and indigeneity—
and the epistemological debates that each of these terms engender—within and across disparate and at times incommensurable disciplines
American studies, queer studies, postc
and geographies. olonial studies, American Indian studies, and
area studies have all attempted to apprehend injury and redress, melancholy and grief that exist in the
distances and sutures of state recognitions and belongings . Those distances and sutures of recognitions and belongings,
melancholy and grief, take this book from the worlds of Southeastern Indians to Hawai'i, from the Poston War Relocation Center to Jonestown,
Guyana, in order to consider how ideas of “Indianness” have created conditions of possibility for U. S.
empire to manifest its intent. As liberal multicultural settler colonialism attempts to flex the exceptions
and exclusions that first constituted the United States to now provisionally include those people othered
and abjected from the nation-states origins, it instead creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to
deflect progressive and transformative activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism
that continue to make the United States a desired state formation within which to be included. That
cacophony of competing struggles for hegemony within and outside institutions of power, no matter
how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race, class, gender, and sexuality, serves to
misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the United
States possible as oppressor in the first place . As a result, the cacophony produced through U.S. colonialism
and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial
minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism . This book, on the other hand, is also interested in
the quandaries poststructuralism has left us: the traces of indigenous savagery and “Indianness ” that stand a priori
prior to theorizations of origin, history, freedom, constraint, and difference .3 These traces of
“Indianness” are vitally important to understanding how power and domination have been articulated
and practiced by empire, and yet because they are traces, they have often remained deactivated as a
point of critical inquiry as theory has transited across disciplines and schools. Indianness can be felt and intuited as
a presence, and yet apprehending it as a process is difficult, if not impossible, precisely because Indianness has served as the field
through which structures have always already been produced. Within the matrix of critical theory,
Indianness moves not through absence but through reiteration , through meme, as theories circulate and
fracture, quote and build. The prior ontological concerns that interpellate Indianness and savagery as
ethnographic evidence and example, lamentable and tragic loss, are deferred through repetitions . How we have come to
know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon
discourses of indigenous displacements that remain within the present everydayness of settler
colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony and even as its oppressive
logics are expanded to contain more and more historical experiences . 1 hope to show through the juridical, cultural,
and literary readings within this book that indigenous critical theory provides alternatives to the entanglements of
race and colonialism, intimacy and relationship that continue to preoccupy poststructuralist and
postcolonial studies.
 Endless War Impact
Settler colonialism causes endless wars – turns case
Byrd ‘11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism,
pg. xviii-xix)

The stakes could not be greater, given that currently U .S. empire has manifested its face to the world as
a war machine that strips life even as it demands racialized and gendered normativities. The post-9/11
national rhetorics of grief, homeland, pain, terrorism, and security have given rise to what Judith Butler
describes as a process through which the Other becomes unreal. “The derealization of the‘Other’” Butler
writes, “means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that
imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in
relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy , regardless of whether or not there are established grounds
to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.”4 But this process of derealization that Butler marks in the post-
9/11 grief that swept the United States, one could argue, has been functioning in Atlantic and Pacific “New Worlds”
since 1492. As Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, discourses of security are “deployed in response to a
perceived threat of invasion and dispossession from Indigenous people,” and in the process, paranoid
patriarchal white sovereignty manages its anxiety over dispossession and threat through a “pathological
relationship to indigenous sovereignty.”5 In the United States, the Indian is the original enemy
combatant who cannot be grieved. Within dominant discourses of postracial identity that depend on the derealization of the
Other, desires for amnesty and security from the contradictory and violent occupations of colonialist
wars exist in a world where, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, “metropolitan multiculturalism—the latter
phase of dominant postcolonialism—precomprehends U.S. manifest destiny as transformed asylum for
the rest of the world.”6 As a result, the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological
premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself. The Transit of Empire, then, might best
be understood as a series of preliminary reflections on how ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological
ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself as settler imperialism at this crucial moment
in history when everything appears to be headed towards collapse.
 Extinction Impact – Climate Change
Settler colonialism disallows native adaptation to climate change and locks us all into
a cycle doomed for extinction.
Davis 16 (Heather, Postdoctoral scholar @ the Institute for the Arts and Humanities @ PSU, PhD @ Concordia, Boundaries of
the Human in the Age of Life Sciences Conference, April 18 http://sites.psu.edu/iahboundaries/heather-davis-5/)

We live in a land of multiple, conflicting time scales. In the dominant imaginary of America, history begins after the invasion of colonial settlers
from 1492 onwards. But for indigenous peoples living in what is now known as the United States, history extends far back, and also reaches far
into the future, where this “great nation” is merely a blip in a much longer narrative. These two narratives speak to the history of erasure and
conflict within the structures of settler colonialism. This erasure is manifest not only in this deliberate historical amnesia, but in the settler
colonial project itself, insofar as it is tied to the eradication of indigenous peoples and their ways of life through genocide, forced assimilation,
and—most importantly for Kyle White’s purposes in this talk—through the complete transformation of the landscape. The damming of rivers,
clear-cutting of forests, and importation of plants and animals remade the worlds of North America into the vision of a displaced Europe,
fundamentally altering the climate and ecosystems. Settler colonialism, in North America and elsewhere, is marked by this process of
terraforming. As Whyte argues, “industrial settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and
nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies.”1 The entwinement of
indigenous governance systems and entire ways of life with particular fish, animals, and plants meant that these displacements and
transformations of the landscape had drastic effects on people’s ability to continue to practice their culture and way of life. Further, the forced
displacement that many tribal communities suffered through the trail of tears and trail of death involved adaptation to entirely new
environments, to new climates. These processes of environmental transformation and forced displacement can be understood as
climate change. And so, as Whyte makes clear, the
current climate disruptions can be viewed as a continuation of,
rather than a break from, previous eras that begin with colonialism and extend  through advanced
capitalism.
In this light climate change, and the uneven impacts on the global poor, can be understood not just as an
unfortunate coincidence or accident, but rather as a deliberate extension of colonial logic. As Whyte writes,
“Thinking about climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is like thinking back to  the future. For
climate injustice against Indigenous [people] is a cyclical course of history that is situated within the
larger struggle of anthropogenic environmental change brought about by  colonialism, industrialism and
capitalism—not two unfortunately converging courses of history .”2. Therefore, in order to adequately
address climate change, we also need to seriously think through  and enact processes of
decolonization. This involves self-governance for indigenous peoples, but it also fundamentally
questions the bounds and the legitimacy of the nation-state structure . As we are already seeing around the world,
people will not simply sit still in the face of ecological destruction, but will move, adapt, and try to find ways of recomposing with their
companion species. The adaptability of many indigenous peoples and their semi-nomadic ways of life meant that their societies were incredibly
resilient in the face of climate disruptions. However, as
a result of settler colonialism and the attendant nation-state
structures, borders and treaties bind people inside a given territory. This means that people will not
necessarily continue to have access to the animals, plants,  rocks and waters that they rely upon and are
entwined within. If wild rice, for example, begins to move further and further north due to warming
weather patterns, the people who care for those  plants, and who are in turn cared for by wild rice,
cannot necessarily follow. “Indigenous peoples cannot practically plan to shift their seasonal subsistence and economic activities if a
valuable plant’s or animal’s habitat moves outside of a treaty area or crosses a transnational border.”3 And the links to particular ecological
systems are not incidental, as they are often viewed within western, industrialized nations where our ways of life systematically divorce us from
and deny our implication within ecologies. Instead, governance systems, cultural practices, and gendered roles are all tied to relations with
particular plants, animals, skies, rocks, waters. “Kenny Pheasant, an elder, says ‘Decline of the sturgeon has corresponded with decline in
sturgeon clan families.’”4 Similarly, the resiliency
of people across the world for collective continuance is
dependent upon this freedom of movement which is systematically denied by the state forms of
governance we currently have in  place.
What is truly terrifying about the times we live in is not only the cyclical recurrence of climate  change. It
is not the fact that white people and people with power are now having to face what indigenous
peoples, black people descended from the horrors of slavery, and others have faced for the past five
hundred years – that could be considered some kind of perverted justice. But the scale of the destruction has increased
exponentially, while our governance systems often work against efforts to sustain liveable climates
and the abilities of people to adapt. As Ta-nehisi Coates writes, “Once, the Dream’s parameters were
caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and  wind. But the Dreamers have improved
themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the  extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food,
have enabled an expansion in plunder with no  known precedent. And this revolution has freed the
Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of  humans but the body of the Earth itself.” 5 Industrialized
capitalism might make us forget our  entwined relations and dependency on this body of the Earth, but
we are surrounded by rich traditions and many people that have not forgotten this vital lesson and if we
are to adapt with any grace to what is coming, we would all do well to begin to listen to those voices.
 Turns Case- Climate Change
Only the alt challenges climate change – environmental destruction is a direct result of
racial hierarchies that incentivize increased consumption
Mandell ’08 (Bekah, * A.B., Vassar College; J.D., Boston College Law School, “RACIAL REIFICATION AND GLOBAL WARMING:
A TRULY INCONVENIENT TRUTH”, Boston Thrid World Law Journal, Spring 2008, p. 3-5)

The unsustainable land-use and consumption that define the American dream--an inherently white ideal--create
cultural and racial hierarchies by setting up two classes of citizens in American society : those who can
consume space and those who cannot. Representative Nydia M. Velazquez, who represents in Congress a predominantly poor urban district of New York, points
out, [*296] the simple fact is that our current unsustainable "more-is-better" culture undermines any hope of

achieving justice--at home or abroad. We often hear about how the United States consumes a vastly
disproportionate amount of resources relative to the rest of the world. Americans are building bigger houses, driving bigger cars, consuming more and more of
everything than just about anyone else anywhere. This is certainly true, and the long-term environmental effects of this overconsumption may well prove disastrous . . . . . . . [A]nd one thing is
for sure--Americans are not doing all this overconsuming in congressional districts like the one I represent.... In my district, crime is high, test scores are low, schools are crumbling, and the

"American Dream"--however you choose to define it--is very, very difficult to attain.Those who currently enjoy the privileges of consumption
fear losing the bigger houses, bigger cars, and the economic power to consume, not only because they
provide material comforts, but because they have become the signifiers of wealth, power, and
whiteness in American society. As Professor Farley stated, "The system of property [and all of its trappings] is white-over-black." Those material comforts that identify
whiteness do so in dialectic opposition to the high crime, low test scores, and crumbling schools that mark blackness in American society. [*297] Fear of eroding the

hierarchies that define race explains why politicians and other elites have consistently championed
ineffectual "market-based approaches" to global warming. By focusing public and private energy on relatively insignificant individual behavior
changes, the Bush administration and other privileged elites are able to maintain the racial hierarchy that consolidates their economic and social power. Politicians know that

"[w]ithout white-over-black the state withers away. " Therefore, they have a profound incentive to
maintain the racial hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, "because these elites accrue social and economic benefits by
maintaining the status quo, they inevitably do." This white consensus to maintain the spatial and mobility
hierarchies that reify race is possible because, "[w]hite privilege thrives in highly racialized societies that
espouse racial equality, but in which whites will not tolerate being either inconvenienced in order to
achieve racial equality . . . or being denied the full benefits of their whiteness . . . ." With so much white privilege to lose, it
becomes clear why even most passionate environmental advocates are far more willing to call for, and make, small non-structural changes in their behavior

to ameliorate [*298] global warming, but are unwilling to embrace significant or meaningful actions to address the crisis. Even

as global warming is starting to become the subject of increasing media coverage and as more environmental groups call for action to halt the crisis, most activism is limited to

changes that maintain the existing spatial, social, economic and legal framework that defines American
society. Despite knowing for decades that we have been living unsustainable lifestyles, and "hav[ing] had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, . . . aside
from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it." Greenhouse emissions reduction challenges have
cropped up on websites across the country, encouraging Americans to change their light bulbs, inflate their tires to the proper tire pressure to ensure optimal gas mileage, switch to hybrid

popular emissions challenge web sites are not

cars, run dishwashers only when full, telecommute, or buy more efficient washers and dryers. However,

suggesting that Americans give up their cars, move into smaller homes in more densely populated urban
neighborhoods near public transportation, or take other substantive actions to mitigate the global
climate crisis. Even Al Gore, [*299] the most famous voice in the climate change movement, reminds his fellow Americans that "[l]ittle things matter . . . buy a hybrid if you can, buy
a flex-fuel car if you can. Get a higher mileage car that's comfortable for your needs." "[M]any yuppie progressive 'greens' are the [*300] ones who drove their SUVs to environmental rallies
and, even worse, made their homes at the far exurban fringe, requiring massive car dependence in their daily lives," taking residential segregation and racial and spacial hierarchies to

previously unimagined dimensions. This focus on maintaining one's privileged lifestyle while making minimal changes
reflects the power of the underlying structural impediments blocking a comprehensive response to
global climate change in the United States . It is not just political inaction that prevents a meaningful response. Millions of Americans do not demand a
change in environmental policy because, just as with political elites, it is against the interests of those enjoying white privilege to take genuine steps to combat climate change. Real

climate action would ultimately require relinquishing the spatial, social, and economic markers that
have created and protected whiteness and the privilege it confers. Although "we too often fail to appreciate how important race
remains as a system for amassing and defending wealth and privilege," the painfully slow reaction of the American public to the growing

dangers of global warming highlights just how important racial privilege remains and how reluctant its
beneficiaries are to give it up. Elite reformists make meaningful change even more remote as they push for behaviors to tweak, but not to change the existing social,
economic, and legal hierarchy in the face of [*301] "problems, [like global warming] that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.
 Turns Case – Environment
The K turns case – the aff’s quick fix thinking is only capable of seeing the environment
as a means to an end ensuring exploitation and destruction of the earth
James ‘02 (Simon, Heidegger and the Role of the Body in Environmental Virtue Simon James, is Leverhulme Research Fellow
in Philosophy at the University of Durham, UK. http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/viewFile/117/124)

Briefly put, Heidegger's account of technology is this: In the modern world, we are increasingly finding that, to the extent that they reveal
themselves as things at all, things reveal themselves “technologically," which is to say that they reveal themselves as resources for human ends,
or as Heidegger puts it, as “standing-reserve." 3 Revealed
technologically, dandelions become weeds , old-growth
forest becomes timber, a wild wooded valley becomes a tourist attraction, a stretch of meadow
becomes a convenient site for a bypass, and so on. Heidegger laments the fact that in the midst of this
all-engulfing instrumentalism, things increasingly reveal themselves not as worthy of attention in
themselves, but only insofar as they provide the means to some end. As the cliché’ has it, technological man does not
appreciate his journey to work, the motorway is there only to convey him from A to B. His computer keyboard is not like a treasured fountain
pen it has no value in itself, but is merely an interface, a means for him to input information. 4 For Heidegger, the
technological world
is a world in which things no longer disclose themselves as things, but a world in which they have
evaporated into a groundless, constantly shifting matrix of instrumental relations.
 AT Util/Extinction Outweighs
Large-scale threats of future suffering stake a hegemonic claim to political and moral
urgency that makes the bodily violence of imperialism illegible, endlessly deferring its
priority to an awaited future that will never come. The only response is to interrupt
this temporal blackmail, insisting that the urgent bodies suffering structural violence
across the globe cannot wait any longer.
This card is in the link section, as well as the general blocks section. Don’t read it twice.
Olson ‘15 (Elizabeth, prof of geography @ UNC Chapel Hill ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in
Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526)

Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the
body is increasingly
set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted
suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can
distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious
and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to
worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so
high, that they nec essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at
stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the
urgency to secure the
state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of
response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus
requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in
climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially
those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but
may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies
that are currently suffering cannot be urgent,
because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some
future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as
drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation
to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized , the urgent body
is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The
predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’
(Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies . The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one
that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the
West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening
future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal
ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and
bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city. ¶ In short, the
urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse
and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of
urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006)
analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that
people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing
their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency.
In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes
literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If
the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of
urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies.
How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its
purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas
(2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting
… produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which
matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery
(2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research
with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and
sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial
effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more
ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its
effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting
can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary
possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is
forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected
working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the
possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first
by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or
taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero
(2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is
produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective
effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to
make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).¶ Waiting
can therefore function as a
potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of
governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to
the capture of claims of urgency by the elite , and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of
containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming
urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps ,
geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of
waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi
resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their
own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees
stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that
demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being
that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the
challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also
reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of
struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it
is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked
– by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify
the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful
suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be
instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and
representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated
experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not
touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when
the urgent body is rendered as only waiting , both
materially and discursively, it
is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006).
Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘ usually framed as
private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other
forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait,
has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional
scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate
scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of
urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-
scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This
bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention
center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others,
the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g.
Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral
reasoning is important both because it exposes
normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle
where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still
should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires
a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of
urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning. ¶ I conclude, however, by pulling
together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as
racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the
discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been
stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not
taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an
acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in
creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future
concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption
of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will
certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as
fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.
 AT Util – Water Specific K
Refuse utilitarianism in the context of settler colonialism and water control – their
impact framing prioritizes a Western humanist lens that devalues Indigenous lifeways.
None of their generic defenses of util assume our topic specific K of their impact
arguments
Curley ’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, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00515, pg. 61)

Water settlements are also ontological constructions that convert rivers into notions of “acre-feet,”
divorcing water from the land, species, and kinship networks. Indigenous peoples across the world
oppose these kinds of colonial limitations while working to maintain prior resource “jurisdictions”
(Pasternak 2017). Indigenous water governance, which differs from colonial approaches, prioritizes
precapitalist and precolonial knowledge and practices that sustain communities , economies, and life on
the land (Daigle 2018; McGregor 2012; Wilson 2014). In response to Indigenous activism, some colonial states are
starting to recognize Indigenous rights to water that move beyond simple utilitarian logics, including
notions of personhood and nonhuman rights (Bakker 2018; Lightfoot 2016; Ruru 2018; Todd 2018). But state-led
processes of recognition can undermine historic practices associated with the use of water and the land
while concretizing colonial dispossession. Critical Indigenous scholars argue that a politics of recognition
fundamentally undermines Indigenous lifeways (Coulthard 2014). Audra Simpson (2014), for example, shows how Mohawk
communities contest the spatial claims and colonial authorities of Canada and the United States through strategies of refusal. Other Indigenous
critics go further to challenge the authority of tribal governments and their use of “sovereignty” as a continuation of larger processes of
colonization (Alfred 2006). Some suggest that a way toward decolonial practices is through a “resurgence” of
Indigenous lifeways, including worldviews, ethics, and governance (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2012).
Leanne Simpson (2016, 22) writes that “Indigenous resurgence, in its most radical form, is nation building, not
nation-state building, but nation building, again, in the context of grounded normativity by centring,
amplifying, animating, and actualizing the processes of grounded normativity as flight paths or fugitive
escapes from the violences of settler-colonialism .”
Topic Alt/Framework Cards
 1NC Incommensurability Alt
Vote neg to reject the 1ac in favor of an ethic of incommensurability that pursues
decolonization in every instance. The aff is a compromise with the settler state over
water protection that leaves indigenous demands for sovereignty off the table. Voting
neg exposes the aff’s ontological commitments that uphold the settler state and opens
up new possibilities for decolonial world-making
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. 6-12)

My inquiry is premised on two fundamental and interrelated questions: I ask, how

can Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights,
and specifically their inherent rights to water, be made legible in the context of the settler state—that is
within the state powers, legal, political, educational, and cultural institutions, and the worldviews and
discursive structures that it encompasses ? By extension, how might thinking of Indigenous rights issues
through water shift the terrain, the terms of negotiation, and the social relations that structure the
readability of Indigenous rights in Canada? What kind of pressures does thinking with and through water put on taken for granted
discourses of land tenure and what alternatives does this thinking offer in highlighting the impetus for the
legibility Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights? Here, I mean legible, in terms of that which is
“comprehensible,” intelligible,” and has a “readily discernable nature or significance”— that which can be read (Oxford English
Dictionary). I do not intend to imply, however, that this legibility necessarily come easily or naturally to the settler state, its institutions, and
actors. Further, my use of legible here is also not synonymous with that which is inevitably translatable into the dominant settler language or
order. Speaking on translation and its function in relation to differently positioned worldviews, John Law suggests that “to translate is to make
two worlds equivalent”; however, he notes that “since no two worlds are equivalent, translation also implies betrayal” (2009, y144). In
other
words, a translation always implies an uneven relation wherein attempts are made to translate one
language into the language of the other. But because translation is premised on the relationality between the different sites of
translation—because it is “about making equivalent” but also “about shifting . . . about moving terms around, about linking and changing them”
(144)—Law importantly notes, “translation is always insecure, a process susceptible to failure. Disorder –
or other orders – are only precariously kept at bay” (145). To make Indigenous rights legible on their own
terms is thus to encounter, unsettle, and undermine the translative coercion of the settler state,
revealing its insecurities and failures.
Legibility implies a committed reading, rather than a simple translation. The question of legibility pivots on the related
question of how the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples can be read and understood on their own
terms in the settler state— and in ways which are often incommensurable with or irreconcilable to a
Western liberal interpretation of rights. This means making legible the very incongruences between
Western rights discourse and Indigenous peoples’ interpretation of their inherent rights. It also means
making legible the potential illegibility of inherent rights under state judicial constraints, as inherent
rights flow from Indigenous peoples’ distinct worldviews and legal orders that often exist in opposition
to state rights discourse. Legibility—to learn to read, and to recognize the limits of one’s own reading practice—implies a
commitment to unlearning and relearning, to reconceptualising, respecting boundaries, and seeing
the limits of one’s own epistemology and ontology.
Legibility, however, is not only about misreading, or misunderstanding; it is also about power and legitimacy, and the settler
state’s power to make Indigenous rights illegible and thus illegitimate . As I will explore through my sites of conflict
below, to render Indigenous rights and relations to water as illegible is to contain them or negate them;
it is to re-interpret them or romanticize them as mere cultural expression ; it is to subordinate them,
construct them as inferior, to make them illegal, or actively disavow and destroy them . Significantly
then, to engage with the problem of legibility in the settler state also means reading and reckoning
with the necessity of the jurisdictional powers of Indigenous law and governance over their waters and
also over waters that are necessarily shared; it means reckoning with what the settler state and settler
subjects must give up or relinquish in order to decolonize water on Turtle Island.3 Engagement with the
problem of legibility moves us away from a liberal politics of recognition , wherein Indigenous rights must be made
recognizable, or translatable to Canadian common law, and instead calls for the readability of Indigenous rights as they
have emerged through “their own legal traditions, land tenure systems, and governance structures ”
(Askew, Kung, and Smith 2016, 230). What could be called the problem of legibility thus becomes a task for the settler state, and for non-
Indigenous people in Canada as they reckon with the nature and significance of Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights, reconciling themselves,
their worldviews, and their own legal orders with the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples.
My concern with legibility here is closely aligned with Eve Tuck and Edward Yang’s notion of
incommensurability in their pivotal essay, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”; however, my use of legibility marks,
perhaps, a different kind of project than that outlined by Tuck and Yang. Tuck and Yang write, “To fully enact an ethic of
incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity , abandoning the hope that settlers may one
day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas,
apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and
underwrite settler innocence” (2012, 36). The authors further write, drawing on Fanon, “Incommensurability is an
acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world ” (36). For Tuck and
Yang, “decolonization is not a metaphor . . . it is not a metonym for social justice, but a change in the
material conditions that undergird the settler state and their ongoing colonization of Indigenous
people’s lands, waters, and ways of life” (21).
I follow Tuck and Yang’s emphasis on the importance of incommensurability within decolonizing projects—on “what is
irreconcilable within settler colonial relations” rather than on that which is reconcilable (4). Like Tuck and Yang,
I am interested in a break in the organizing logics and material conditions of settler colonialism, rather than
a kind of compromise. But where water demands a consideration of that which is relational between Indigenous and settler worlds, I
remain committed to understanding how this relation itself might be decolonized . While I do not intend to affirm a
“settler futurity,” which Tuck and Yang assert is incommensurable with Indigenous decolonial projects, I undertake here what I identify as a
decolonial thought experiment in order to consider how to live relationally with water now within lands
where we are already “living within Indigenous sovereignty,” but which are overdetermined by the
jurisdictional constraints of the settler state (Nicoll 2004, qtd. in Mackey 2016, 129). Legibility returns me to the demand of the
relation, what Dorries and Ruddick, drawing on Bignall, call “the problematic unity of coexistence” (2018, 6). While incommensurability remains
an important consideration for this relation, it is the relation itself where I ultimately aim to locate decolonial potential. Where legibility is
produced and delimited through systems of power, water
forces a reckoning with legibility across settler and
Indigenous water worlds—its relational presence demands the readability of Indigenous peoples’
inherent rights, their hydrosocial relations and legal orders, and the pressures they put on waters that
necessarily flow in relation between Indigenous and settler worlds.
My second and related question, then, is what it has meant and what it could mean to live relationally with water in a settler colonial nation
state such as Canada? At the heart of both of these questions is what it means to exist relationally in a settler state, in law, and with rights when
worldviews are incommensurable in ways that often lead to violence and dispossession. What does it mean to exist relationally in a place where
legibility is confined to a matter of cultural difference, and at worst violently erased? While
I will expand on the concept of
“worlding” below, my research questions prompt me to consider the distinct worlds— the complex
ontological perspectives—that are comprised by and through our different engagements with water and
the system of rights that arise through these engagements . How do certain interpretations of rights
around water and the laws that uphold them construct material worlds in their image? How have they limited,
and in many instances, actively worked to undermine and even destroy the possibility for the enactment, making, and remaking of Indigenous
worlds? What worlds have been and could be possible through reckoning with the legibility of the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples,
Indigenous legal orders, and assertions of sovereignty, particularly as they pertain to water? In raising these questions about legibility and
relationality, I am fundamentally concerned with the question of what is and what could be legible as law on lands that are both
overdetermined by settler colonialism, and where enactments of Indigenous land and water tenure are actively being remade within and
against these constraints.
Through an interdisciplinary analysis of selected discursive articulations of land, water, law, and Indigenous
rights in Canada, I explore the production of and relationship between Indigenous and settler water worlds
as they are made and remade within and against the confines of the settler colonial nation state . As land
and its settlement continues to play such a fundamental role in the development of the nation , I explore how
water has been figured within the settler state and its settler subjectifications. I ask, what are the ways in which water has been relegated to a
simplified extension of land-based discourse within Canadian Indigenous rights policy and what are the effects of this? What are the ways that
settler subjects have enacted and amplified these land-based limitations? Subjective
dynamics, the logics of settler
possession and their corresponding elements of settler desire and self-delusion are integral in
understanding the subjective processes underpinning the enactment and perpetuation of settler colonial
water worlds—for understanding how settler colonial water worlds are embodied and projected on the ground by settler subjects in
distinct historical moments. In this project’s commitment to critique, I attempt to account for the structural,
institutional, the large-scale historical processes, as well as their extension into the waters of Turtle at
the subjective level—the subjective dimensions that are often complicit in their well-meaning intentions, and
which make settler colonial water worlds so hard to alter or unmake . Alternatively, by exploring the
historical, political, and legal perspectives of specific Indigenous nations, communities, and writers, I
examine how water has been figured in Indigenous cultural, political, and legal thought, practice, and
community action. How do Indigenous legal orders and sovereignty claims frame water rights for Indigenous peoples and what kind of
material worlds does this reframing aim to construct?
Cree/Gitxsan legal scholar Val Napoleon asserts that we “cannot assume that there are fully functioning Indigenous laws around us that will
spring to life by mere recognition. Instead, what is required is rebuilding” (Napoleon 2013). Following Napoleon’s comments here, my aim in
this dissertation is ultimately to explore some of the conditions required to begin rebuilding or remaking Indigenous water worlds in the settler
colonial context. Put another way, if
state interpretations of Indigenous rights discourse, those which are rooted
in Western property regimes, and colonial common law have actively unmade Indigenous water
worlds, correspondingly limiting the legibility of Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights and the legal orders
from which these inherent rights are derived, what kinds of conditions are required for their remaking ?
What are the ways in which Indigenous peoples have resisted the imposition of settler colonial water worlds? And what is the potential to
constitute these distinct, often oppositional worlds relationally? While I do not intend to circumscribe what this remaking has and will look like,
as each of my sites of analysis show, it
involves the fostering of the conditions for the assertion and resurgence of
the Indigenous legal orders and hydrosocial relations that give meaning to Indigenous peoples’ inherent
rights to and self-determination over their waters. Tuck and Yang assert that “decolonization in the settler colonial context
must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently
understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically” (7). To be clear, my focus on a decolonial relationality in this project
is not simply a call for the recognition and respect of an ontological plurality on colonized lands. Rather, my project is concerned
with
what this repatriation is up against under the
jurisdictional powers of the settler state, the concrete and
material shift in power that it would require, and what this might look like in relation to the waters that
flow between Indigenous and settler understandings and enactments.
 Alt Prereq to Water Justice
Historical analysis that takes into account the structural nature of settler colonialism is
a prerequisite to crafting water policy that emphasizes Indigenous sovereignty. The aff
and perm are moves to settler innocence that guarantee error replication
Krakoff ’13 (Sarah Krakoff, University of Colorado Law School, “Settler Colonialism and Reclamation: Where American
Indian Law and Natural Resources Law Meet”, Law Meet, 24 COLO. NAT. RESOURCES, ENERGY & ENVTL. L. REV. 261 (2013),
available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/104)
Today, conflicts over land policies, endangered species, and water characterize the West. There is every reason to
believe that these conflicts will become sharper in the coming years. Climate change predictions for the Southwest in particular include higher temperatures, more
prolonged periods of drought, and changing patterns of precipitation. In these increasingly uncertain times, it will be tempting to ignore our history. History
is
not convenient. It includes the unseemly beginnings of non-Indian acquisition of water, land, and other
natural resources. If taken seriously, however, this history might help us think about contemporary and
imminent conflicts in new ways. Below is a brief sketch of how taking our settler-colonial past into account might
allow us to reframe some of these issues .
In the water context, resource managers, state engineers, and water lawyers throughout the region
could be forgiven if they walked around in a constant state of anxiety . The forecasts for the West's water supplies are
not promising, and at the same time the region's population continues to grow. 1 34 Worse still, as water experts and all Colorado River
Compact stakeholders have known for some time, the Compact's estimates of the Colorado River's average flow were based on several
unusually high water years. 135 To make matters even more nettlesome, many
tribes have yet to quantify their reserved
water rights. For example, the Navajo Nation, which has the largest land base of any tribe in the country, is
still litigating and negotiating its rights to water in several different cases.136 As we head into water-
challenged times, there are many reasons to be nervous.
One response to tribes' contemporary efforts to assert their Winters rights is to see them as untimely efforts to
unsettle what are already precarious and overburdened schemes of allocation. Another way, if we take the CRIT
story seriously, is to see that the history of non-Indian settlement of the West is hopelessly intertwined with tribal histories, and in particular
the federal government's bi-polar approach of, on one hand, attempting
to coerce tribes to use the land in ways that
would settle their claims and make them fit into the mythical (and quixotic) "yeoman farmer of the
desert" mold, and on the other, threatening them with divestment of those same lands (and
accompanying rights to water), if they did not occupy them densely enough. In short, instead of punishing tribes
for being "Johnny-come-lately" to our water allocation schemes, stakeholders could see tribes as equals, coming to the table as governments
finally able to assert their interests after decades of attempts to marginalize them.
In particular, in response to the thorny questions mentioned above about how tribes
should be able both to quantify and use
their water today, answers should be consistent with the goal of unraveling our settler-colonial past .
Such answers would allow tribes maximum flexibility to define their homelands as living places with
ancient yet evolving cultures, and contemporary economies . The purposes of their reservations should be construed
generously, to allow for survival based on treaty and statutory promises, but also based on understandings of tribes as modem governments,
rather than relics created with the hope that they would fade away. Interestingly, it may well be that a PIA standard, irrespective of its musty
agriculture-in-the-desert origin, is a perfectly fine measure for just quantification along these lines. A more contemporary homeland standard
could be up to the task as well, so long as decision makers refrain from using it to conclude that tribes warrant less water than the cities,
irrigation districts, industrial farms, and others who managed to grab the wet water first. Then, after decisions about the appropriate standard
for quantifications, questions will remain about how tribes can actually use their quantified water. Given the heightened demands for water to
preserve species, to meet the needs of urban areas, and to provide for at least some agricultural products, flexibility is warranted here as well.
If tribes were permitted, for example, to use traditional agricultural methods that are less water
intensive than industrial-scale irrigation, they should not be penalized for it. If they want to keep the rest
of their water in the stream for ecological or cultural reasons, on one hand, or market their surplus on
the other, they would be meeting the region's larger needs in either case. Rather than cultivating
resentment of tribes for taking water away from non-Indians, just quantifications coupled with flexible
options for application and marketing could allow other users to have the certainty they seek, as well as
complement basin-wide efforts to ensure that there is enough water for a homeland for all of us moving
forward.
 Decolonization Alt – Water
The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of an unflinching commitment to
decolonization. Refusing water settlements such as the plan are necessary to develop
a structural critique of settler colonial theft and pursuing Indigenous water justice
outside of the framework of the nation-state
Curley ’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, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00515, ppg. 57-59)

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
building.
 Decol Key – Warming
Processes have to prioritize Native needs in order to address climate change and
create lays of living sustainably with the land
Byrd ‘11 (Jodi is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies and the University of Illinois. “Transit of
Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism”)

This book has tried to detail how the United States transits itself transoceanically and transhemispherically through cacophonous
representations that arise as the real is stretched through the distortive parallactic effects of empire and collapsed into competing struggles for
hegemony. Indianness, within
critical, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, exists on the threshold
between past and present, life and death , and continues—even as it decomposes into an overfilled blank monstrosity of Caliban
becoming–zombie—to inflect the metonymic narrative of the U.S. imperial torture state. As apocalyptic narratives of cannibalistic retribution
rise to the fore in the early decades of the twenty-first century,
the challenge for American Indian and indigenous
scholars is to find ways to unmap the logics of conquest that underpin sovereign power conceptualized
as the taking of space. The “Indian without ancestry” within Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus stops the world through the
asignifying Indian Event that is death ; and that asignifying “Indianness,” reframed through indigenous
critical theory, provides conditions of possibility for radical resistance to state formulations. Theorizing
against the critical inquiry disrupts the corpus nullius juricides that have used Indianness as the cultural and legal precedent to police
normativity at the threshold of making the living, dead. Indigenous scholars
engaged in indigenous critical theories that
draw from the intellectual traditions of their own histories and communities to contravene in, respond
to, and redirect European philosophies can offer crucial new ways of conceptualizing an after to empire
that does not reside within the obliteration of indigenous lives, resources, and lands . Indians, as the
originary necropolitical affect of the living dead brought back to haunt cosmopolitan colonialism , serve as
the deferred melancholia of a lingering sense of retribution that hovers over a nation that forever strives to make native the foreign through an
abandonment of the native to the foreign. If, as Donald E. Pease suggests, the state of exception repositions U.S. citizens “within the equivalent
to that exceptional space that Justice Marshall had called a ‘domestic dependent nation,’” then American
Indians may be able to
provide some insights into survivability, livability, and alternatives to the nativist sovereignty that carves
U.S. homelands out of Indian territory and positions diasporic arrivals as zombie terrorists seeking to consume the proprietary
domains of a forever threatened and embattled whiteness.18 The generic and juridical conventions of terror, which affectively draw upon the
deeply engrained colonialist discourses of what Jean M. O’Brien identifies as firsting and lasting, cannot stand in the face of the mnemonics of
land, repentance, survivance, differentiation, kinship, and haksuba that writers like Wilson Harris, Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, Karen Tei
Yamashita, and LeAnne Howe among many others deploy to rewrite the story of the Americas from the other side .
Rather than framing
justice for American Indians as the fourth horseman accompanying the apocalyptic “plague, pestilence,
and famine,” it is time to imagine indigenous decolonization as a process that restores life and allows
settler, arrivant, and native to apprehend and grieve together the violences of U.S. empire.
 Epistemology Key – Climate Change
Affirm indigenous epistemologies -those actually open spaces to address climate
change
Saranillio ‘15 (Dean Itsuji, assistant professor of Asian/Pacific/American studies in the Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis at New York University, “The Insurrection of Subjugated Futures”, American Quarterly > Volume 67, Number 3,
September)

As such, both
Hawai‘i and Manahatta exemplify how settler colonialism often functions as a historically
created system of power that expropriates Indigenous territories and eliminates modes of production in
order to replace Indigenous peoples with settlers who are discursively constituted as superior and thus
more deserving of these contested lands and resources . In this way, primitivism sets the ideological
conditions for primitive accumulation and its seemingly permanent structure, a kind of settler
accumulation by Native dispossession.21 In other words, primitivism creates a settler alibi for a particular mode of production, a
particular Indigenous way to organize society, to be determined as an outmoded economy and destined for dissolution and elimination.22
This takes place often through the targeting for elimination of one or more sets of human to nonhuman
relations, in many Indigenous epistemologies described as genealogical relations. And all along, in the
death of these relations, is the birth of capitalism, the particular mode of production [End Page 640] whose
processes have evolved to set the current environmental conditions of climate crisis and the Anthropocene.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, however, warns against thinking of ourselves as merely a geophysical force with no
deliberate agency and thus urges us all to refuse the invitation of the Anthropocene . This refusal of the
conditions of anthropogenic climate change can be understood in relation to Audra Simpson’s theorizing around a
politics of refusal. In her book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, Simpson argues: “They refuse the
‘gifts’ of American citizenship; they insist upon the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance.”23 And thus in this moment of the
Anthropocene perhaps, a deep engagement with abolishing a political economy of settler colonialism
actually opens settlers to a range of human and nonhuman relations that are often foreclosed.
Naomi Klein argues in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate that in talking with climate activists in Bolivia, she began to consider
that climate change could be a “galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are
safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”24 By
imagining ways to use settler colonialism against itself , many
Indigenous movements aim to set the conditions for cultivating noncapitalist relations and planting the
seeds for Indigenous economies to reemerge in new ways .25 This is accomplished by building affinities between
communities, as well as with nonhuman but genealogically related species—in Hawai‘i this is the taro, or kalo, the ancestor of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi that
enclosure aimed to eliminate. In urban Honolulu, for instance, a school named Hālau Kū Māna uses Indigenous knowledge to structure a
curriculum that, among other things, teaches its secondary students how to grow and prepare their own food. In her powerful book The Seeds
We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School, Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, a parent, educator, and one of the school’s founders,
explains that students are taught to challenge a notion that only a “globalized market economy dominated by transnational corporations can
provide for our needs.”26 Teachers and students together restored ‘auwai (intricate irrigation systems) and lo‘i kalo (stone-terraced taro farms)
in an area named ‘Aihualama. The original stoned walls of the lo‘i were still present, and Kumu Danny Bishop, who was a key visionary in
regenerating the lo‘i, uses this living space to imagine with students other worlds of possibilities. By having students track the hours required to
maintain one lo‘i to harvest, students learn that the lo‘i is a “low maintenance with a high yield agricultural system,” requiring fifteen to twenty-
five hours of work per month to feed oneself. Kumu Trevor Atkins, a math teacher, further asks, if this were to include [End Page 641] loko i‘a
(fishponds), how much land would be required to feed all of Hawai‘i? After a year of work, the number they come up with is sixteen thousand
acres, only 1.6 percent of the so-called ceded lands, the lands seized by white settlers during the 1893 US military–backed overthrow and
currently held in trust by the state of Hawai‘i on behalf of Kanaka ‘Oiwi and the general public.27
Such imaginings are especially powerful considering that, besides being occupied by the United States, Hawai‘i also imports 85–90 percent of its
food, a dangerous precedent, since it is twenty-five hundred miles away from the US West Coast, and especially as extreme weather patterns
increase. Vandana Shiva points out that 40 percent of all greenhouse gases contributing to anthropogenic climate change are caused by
industrial agricultural models, which require transporting foods across long distances and increasingly transporting genetically engineered seeds
to farmers.28 These practices are all the more critical, since besides being one of the most militarized places in the world, Hawai‘i is also the
genetically modified organism, or GMO, capital of the world, and the two are absolutely intertwined and buttressed by the settler state. Mark
Phillipson, an executive of Syngenta, states that “almost any corn seed sold in the U.S. touches Hawaii somewhere.”29 Shiva argues that GMO
crops and pesticides are themselves produced by a militarized food industry: “War and agriculture came together when the chemicals that
were produced for chemical warfare lost their markets in war, and the industry organized itself to sell those chemicals as agrochemicals.”30
The famed navigator Nainoa Thompson of the Hōkūle‘a says about the worldwide voyage: “We’re not going to change the world, but we’re
going to go and build a network of people around the earth who are going to change it. And our job is to help them be successful.”31 It is
ironic that the size and strength of extreme weather patterns are described as “unthinkable and
unprecedented” at the same time that moves to create alternative economies to counter climate crisis
are also disqualified as “unthinkable and unprecedented. ” Is it any wonder, then, that at a time when
alternatives to global capitalism are most needed, and Indigenous economies possess such alternatives,
that Indigenous knowledges are often disqualified from being seen as such? By taking seriously
Indigenous knowledges and economies, we can create another future, and in the creation of an
alternative future, I believe that we create worlds that are not yet thinkable to come to fruition. [End Page
642]
 Relationality Alt
Voting neg is key to reclaim water as a site of relationality – investigating the
connections between water and settler colonialism is key to enacting decolonial
politics. The aff’s refusal to investigate the spatial dynamics of water policy upholds
colonial relations
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. Xiii-xv)

The fact of water’s consumption, however, is that we do not ingest water merely through the act of
drinking. We do not experience a water shed simply through swimming in it, or submerging ourselves in its depth. What I realize now, what
a turn to water has allowed me to think through, is the fact that I was always a part of the Grand River watershed. Its waters were in the
air I breathed for 18 years. It was the clouds that swelled and rained on my home, that soaked my
clothes, pooled in our backyard. My body has to be at least some part, Grand River. While I don’t want to overstate
water as a metaphor for connection and relationality —yet, as the textual examples I draw from show, this is a metaphor we
can rarely avoid—I cannot deny the interconnection incited by water’s presence , its flow, and consumption.
Water is the always already of relationality. Always already relational; always already connected and
connecting.
And while I shy away from this thinking and its risk of further abstraction from the watershed and the politics that surround it, this is perhaps a
useful place to begin.
I have been concerned with the land rights issues, the conflicts and disputes that
demarcate relations between Six Nations and the surrounding settler communities , namely my hometown of
Caledonia, since these issues hit a boiling point in 2006, when Six Nations reclaimed a parcel of land on the border of Caledonia, and residents
of Caledonia responded with anger, protests, and often-times, racism. Since the beginning of my university education in 2007, I have had the
privilege of investigating these issues—those xiii that I had initially been ignorant of—through a critical lens, and with the guidance of
Haudenosaunee Elders-in-residence and Indigenous Studies faculty at McMaster University. With this help, I came to learn about the
complicated histories of my hometown and the perspectives of the Haudenosaunee, those which have
largely been negated by settler society, and which necessitated their land reclamation . Education incites
a new found passion for politics, and the impetus for change and attention to these complicated
histories; but my disassociation from the town in which I grew up, a place I never quite felt a part of, and certainly after the responses I
witnessed to the 2006 land reclamation by many residents, a place I did not want to be a part of, ensured that I was always able to
distance myself from these histories, and the relationships that have transpired in this territory.
My attention to water in recent years returns me to this territory in undeniable ways. The Grand River watershed is the
watershed that I come from. It is the river that implicates me in the histories and ongoing relations of this region. I once viewed the river largely
as the space that separated the lands of my hometown from those of the Haudenosaunee, a space that I could traverse intellectually but which
also excluded me from too deep of an involvement in the contentious histories and politics that I wished to disassociate myself from. In
turning to water, in using it as a lens to investigate a number of distinct conflicts between Indigenous
peoples, the settler state, and settler society, I am beginning to understand that the water between my
community and Six Nations is not a space that can be glossed over; it is the space that implicates us in an
ongoing relationship with one another; it is the space that demands attention to both how we engage
with this space itself and what that engagement means for our relationships to each other. It is the space
that I am undeniably apart of, and which necessitates my attention and responsibility.
This project is largely about investigating
the various ways that this space, and spaces like it, have been
constructed and organized under the conditions of settler colonialism , and how this construction and
organization has affected the rights of Indigenous peoples, their relationships to water, and their
abilities to govern themselves within their watersheds, and in ways that stem from their distinct
worldviews. Notably, and as my project turns to the settler subjectifications that perpetuate the enactment of
settler colonial constructions of Indigenous waterways , it is also about how these constructions and the
forms of subjective identification they give rise to foreclose upon the meaning of settler relations to
water, limiting settler worldviews as well, and what water can mean under the conditions of the settler
state. This project is importantly about how Indigenous theorists, authors, politicians, and artists have understood this space, and resisted
settler colonial constructions of Indigenous waters. But at its core, this project is interested in what the space of water
demands of settler and Indigenous peoples alike— the relationality that it fosters, and that cannot be
denied no matter how hard we try, or how different we conceive of it . And so at the most personal level, this project
is really about how I understand my own responsibilities to water and to the people I share it with, about learning how to navigate the complex
differences of this space, learning how to read and understand different approaches to water, or to reckon with my own misunderstandings and
misreadings. Andso in beginning this project with the question of “why water?” the simplest answer is
because water makes the demand of this engagement— water is both the site of investigation and the
site that demands investigation, the site of relationality , and the site the demands attention to
relationality. While I am largely, but not entirely, absent from the chapters that follow, I begin here, with the Grand River, with water, and
with myself, in an effort to respond to this demand.
Non-Topic Alt/FW Cards
 1NC Generic Alt - Ontology
The central question of this debate is that the exclusion of the indigenous provides the
ontological grounding for modern sovereignty - any analysis which fails to foreground
these histories is doomed to reproduce the horrors of colonialism
Also makes an indict of security rhetoric; war allows the sovereign colonizer to continue its violent imposition

Byrd ‘11 (Jodi, Chickasaaw and Asst. Prof of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critics of Colonialism, p. xvii-xxi)

The Transit of Empire begins with a network of conflicting definitions to reflect upon the cultural and
political modes of "Indianness" regulated and produced by U.S. settler imperialism née colonialism. Primarily,
this book is essayistic, provisional, and some of its readings and conclusions often defy the expected affective common sense of liberal
multiculturalism invested in acknowledgements, recognitions, equality, and equivalences. Transit is slightly provocative, an incomplete point of
entry, and its provenance might be more suited to diaspora studies and border-crossings than to a notion such as indigeneity that is often taken
as rooted and static, located in a discrete place. Steven Salaita's The Holy Land in Transit denotes transit alternately as the function of an
alliance between United States and Israeli settler colonialisms that map old world sacred names onto new world sacred sites, a comparative
approach to American Indian and Palestinian literatures, and finally a gesture towards the ways in which peoples have been forced to move and
relocate.' Gerald Vizenor's work offers another way to frame modes of indigeneity in his concept of transmotion that he defines as a "sense of
native motion and an active presence (that) is sui generis sovereignty. Native
transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of
nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty . Native stories of survivance are the creases of
transmotion and sovereignty." Those creases, according to Vizenor, are apprehended in the complementarities of stories,
associations, intimacies, and reincarnations that resist absence and possession. 2 The Chickasaws have a migration story that we tell. In search
of a new homeland, twin brothers, Chikasah and Chatah, were charged with leading the people as they traveled across the land. Ababinili had
given them a sacred pole, the lrohta falaya, that would point the way. After each day of travel, Chikasah would plant the long pole in the earth,
and each morning the brothers would rise to find the pole leaning eastward in the directionthey needed to travelled by a white dog and the
Milky Way, the brothers and the people traveled for years, always following the direction of the pole. Until one morning. At sunrise, the
brothers awoke to find the pole standing almost straight upright. Chatah insisted that the pole confirmed that their travels were done, but
Chikasah disagreed and argued that the pole still leaned, that there was still further to go. After continued debate, the question was put to the
people-those who agreed with Chatah would stay and make a life there as Choctaws, in the lands that would become central Mississippi and
those who sided with Chikasah would travel further east to finally live in what is now northern Mississippi. Chickasaw sovereignty is, according
to our national motto, unconquered and unconquerable. It is contrary and stubborn. But the creases of Chickasaw movement demonstrate how
sovereignty is found in diplomacy and disagreement, through relation, kinship, and intimacy. And in an act of interpretation. To be in transit is
to be active presence in a world of relational move ments and countermovements. To be in transit is to exist relationally, multiply. There is
more than one way to frame the concerns of The Transit of Empire and more than one way to enter into the possibilities that transit might
allow for comparative studies. On the one hand, I am seeking to join ongoing conversations about sovereignty, power, and indigeneity—and the
epistemological debates that each of these terms engender—within and across disparate and at times incommensurable disciplines and
geographies. American studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, American Indian studies, and area studies have all attempted to apprehend
injury and redress, melancholy and grief that exist in the distances and sutures of state recognitions and belongings. Those distances and
sutures of recognitions and belongings, melancholy and grief, take this book from the worlds of Southeastern Indians to Hawai’i. from the
Poston War Relocation Center to Jonestown. Guyana, in order to consider how ideas of “Indianness” have created conditions of possibility for
U.S. empire to manifest its intent. Asliberal multicultural settler colonialism attempts to flex the exceptions and
exclusions that first constituted the U nited States to now provisionally indude those people othered and
abjected from the nation-state's origins, it instead creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to
deflect progressive and transformative activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism
that continue to make the United States a desired state formation within which to be included. That
cacophony of competing struggles for hegemony within and outside institutions of power, no matter
how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race, class, gender, and sexuality, serves
to misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the
United States possible as oppressor in the first place. As a result, the cacophony produced through U.S.
colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial
minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism. This book, on the other hand, is also interested in
the quandaries poststructuralism has left us: the traces of indigenous savagery and "Indianness" that stand a priori
prior to theorizations of origin, history, freedom, constraint, and difference. ' These traces of
"Indianness" are vitally important to understanding how power and domination have been articulated
and practiced by empire, and yet because they are traces, they have often remained deactivated as a point of critical inquiry as theory
has transited across disciplines and schools. Indianness can be felt and intuited as a presence, and yet apprehending it as a process is difficult, if
not impossible, precisely because Indianness has served as the field through which structures have always
already been produced. Within the matrix of critical theory, lndianness moves not through absence but through reiteration, through
meme, as theories circulate and fracture, quote and build. The prior ontological concerns that interpellate Indianness
and savagery as ethnographic evidence and example, lamentable and tragic loss, are deferred through
repetitions. How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon
discourses of indigenous displacements that remain within the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been
naturalized by hegemony and even as its oppressive logics are expanded to contain more and more historical experiences. I hope to show
through the juridical, cultural, and literary readings within this book that indigenous critical theory provides alternatives to the entanglements
of race and colonialism, intimacy and relationship that continue to preoccupy poststructuralist and postcolonial studies. The
stakes could
not be greater, given that currently U.S. empire has manifested its face to the world as a war machine
that strips life even as it demands racialized and gendered normativities. The post-9/11 national rhetorics of grief,
homeland, pain, terrorism, and security have given rise to what Judith Butler describes as a process through which the Other becomes unreal.
“The derealization of the
‘Other’” Butler writes, “means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably
spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one
that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are
established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.”4 But this process of derealization that Butler marks in
the post-9/11 grief that swept the United States, one could argue, has been functioning in Atlantic and
Pacific "New Worlds" since 1492. As Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, discourses of security are
"deployed in response to a perceived threat of invasion and dispossession from Indigenous people; and
in the process, paranoid patriarchal white sovereignty manages its anxiety over dispossession and threat
through a “pathological relationship to indigenous sovereignty.” In the United States, the Indian is the original
enemy combatant who cannot be grieved. Within dominant discourses of postracial identity that depend on the derealization
of the Other, desires for amnesty and security from the contradictory and violent occupations of colonialist wars exist in a
world where, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, "metropolitan multiculturalism-the latter phase of dominant
postcolonialism-precomprehends U.S. manifest destiny as transformed asylum for the rest of the
world."6 As a result, the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines,
and critiques itself. The Transit of Empire, then, might best be understood as a series of preliminary reflections on how ideas of Indians and
Indianness have served as the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself as settler imperialism at this crucial
moment in history when everything appears to be headed towards collapse.
 Decol Not Reform Alt
The alternative is unyielding decolonization—reject any and all attempts at reformism
and assimilation
Walia ‘12 (Harsha, South Asian organizer and writer based in Vancouver Coast Salish Territories, “Moving Beyond a Politics
of Solidarity Towards a Practice of Decolonization,” Jan 5, www.peopleofcolororganize.com/analysis/theory/moving-beyond-
politics-solidarity-practice-decolonization/) ***We don’t endorse ableist language.

Decolonization is as much a process as a goal. It requires a profound re-centring of Indigenous worldviews in our
movements for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships, and the development of an
economic system that serves rather than threatens our collective life on this planet . As stated by Toronto-
based activist Syed Hussan “Decolonization is a dramatic re-imagining of relationships with land, people and the
state. Much of this requires study, it requires conversation, it is a practice, it is an unlearning.” It is a positive sign that a
growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self- determination must become the foundation
for all our broader social-justice mobilizing . Indigenous peoples are the most impacted by the pillage of
lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are over-represented in statistics of
missing and murdered women, and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in
the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of
demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism,
poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women, and environmental justice.
Intersectional approaches can, however, subordinate and compartmentalize Indigenous struggle within
the machinery of existing Leftist narratives: anarchists point to the anti-authoritarian tendencies within Indigenous
communities, environmentalists highlight the connection to land that Indigenous communities have, anti-racists subsume Indigenous people
into the broader discourse about systemic oppression, and women’s organizations point to relentless violence borne by Indigenous women in
discussions about patriarchy. We
have to be cautious to avoid replicating the state’s assimilationist model of
liberal pluralism, whereby Indigenous identities are forced to fit within our existing groups and
narratives. The inherent right to traditional lands and to self-determination is expressed collectively and should
not be subsumed within the discourse of individual or human rights. Furthermore, it is imperative to understand being
Indigenous as not just an identity but a way of life, which is intricately connected to Indigenous people’s relationship to the land and all its
inhabitants. Indigenous struggle cannot simply be accommodated within other struggles; it demands
solidarity on its own terms.
 Everyday Practices Alt
You should be willing to make intervention against settler colonial practices- not
matter their purported triviality. The ongoing battle against settler colonial logic is
constant.
Veracini ‘15 (Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, The Settler Colonial Present, p.
95-6)

Mark Rifkin recently issued a powerful call to unravel a pervasive settler ‘common sense’ .1 Rifkin convincingly alerts
us to the unreflexive settler colonial ‘structures of feeling’ that ‘saturate’ quotidian life. Settler colonialism remains, to
use Rifkin’s formulation, ‘vital in the ongoing performance of quotidian modes of inhabitance and selfhood’.2 By definition, common
sense is what goes unsaid, what remains unmarked . To mark and to observe its operation in various iterations,
we should focus on the ideological processes that accompanied its historical consolidation . How did this
particular ‘sense’ become ‘common’? Another ‘common sense’ comes to mind: Thomas Paine’s. Considering the specific circumstances in which
it was issued, it could indeed be seen as a particularly powerful iteration of a settler common sense. Except that, paradoxically, Paine asserted a
settler common sense then to make it evident when it had not yet been naturalised.3 Then, during a revolutionary crisis, the settler common
sense had to be proclaimed and defended against another. As such, by definition, it was not yet unmarked; it was not yet ‘common’ (even if
Paine programmatically endeavoured to establish the conditions of possibility for it to become so). Today ,
Rifkin invites us to attend
to the ‘geographies of everyday non-Native occupancy’ .4 In other words, we also need to assert the settler common sense,
even if now this should be for the opposite reason.
Settler colonial relationships to place and between peoples are now completely naturalised , and we are going
through no revolutionary crisis. We live in the long aftermath of the global ‘settler revolution’. Belich does not focus on ideology, but
it seems important to note that the ‘settler revolution’, has had, like all revolutions, important ideological consequences, including the
legitimation of a settler hegemony and its naturalisation.
The hegemony of a settler ideology aims to place settler
colonial relationships beyond the realm of human intervention . Yet again, an intervention is possible. In this
context, Rifkin’s focus on ‘structures of feeling’ and ‘everyday practices’ is especially valuable : if the
common sense is to be made evident, it is at this level, where it is most naturalised and therefore least visible,
that it should be retrieved. If vampire stories are settler colonial stories, this is when we let the sunrays streaming through and bring
in the garlic.
Rifkin’s analysis is about seemingly inconsequential practices but the ultimate prize is sovereignty because
the settler hegemony is premised on the global settler revolution and the possibility of a post-settler
passage is necessarily premised on undoing it. Thus, highlighting and undermining our commitments to a
settler colonial view of the world as it is expressed in everyday normalised practices is important
decolonising work. It is this critique that will produce the processes of ‘disorientation’ and
‘reorientation’ that will allow nonindigenous individuals to become conscious of structures of feeling
they could not have questioned before.5 Piercing the ostensible homogeneity of a metaphorical ‘biomat’, Rifkin’s
‘archaeological’ work is especially important.
 Embrace Exile Alt
Decolonization must emanate from the embrace of exile and subsequent subversion
of settler sovereign power. It is only through this subversion that the unsettling of
indigenous territory becomes possible.
Veracini ‘15 (Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, The Settler Colonial Present, p.
104 - 9)

If, as Carole Pateman has explained, the settler 'contract' cannot be amended, it must be dissolved .38 Ethnic, racial and
gender exclu- sions could be approached by amending the 'settler contract' (these were literal amendments, and it was through a succession of
numbered 'amendments' to the US constitutional text, for example, that reform was eventually brought about). No such amendment was ever
approved in relation to indigenous peoples anywhere. The futility of current pro- posals regarding the inclusion of a preamble recognising
indigenous people to the Australian constitution comes to mind - to
be effective, reform promoting the inclusion of
indigenous peoples must operate outside of the 'settler contract' .39 The position of indigenous people is
ultimately unassimilable within settler colonial political regimes: settler colonialism defines 'rights' not
without indigenous peoples, a move that could be amended via a successive inclusion, but against
indigenous peo- ples, a move that can only be amended through a (settler) decolonising act.40
Dissolving the 'settler contract' sounds dramatic, but one way of dissolving any contract, of course, is to replace it with another. This can be
done. The Treaty of Waitangi, for example, was in many ways progressively (re)'invented' and enacted as a post-settler constitutional covenant
(sometimes not having a written constitution can help). While the risk of reinforcing settler colonial relationships persists, estab- lishing treaty-
making traditions can become a decolonising practice.41 Transitional justice may offer another important avenue for settler decolonising
practices that operate beyond an original settler contract.42
More generally, there is by now an established constitutional practice where, at times, indigenous peoples and settler states have managed to
establish decolonising relationships.43 Erich Steinman has produced an historical narrative of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement that
emphasises what is in fact a decolonial project. Identifying the strategies of the Indian Sovereignty Movement and analysing ‘within and outside
the state field’, Steinman outlines how tribal leaders acting as ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ sought to establish acceptance of their sovereign
nationhood [...] not by seeking to directly or indirectly put public pressure on policy makers, or by using legal rights ‘as a club’ but by three
linked types of strategic action. First, in response to bureaucratic paternalism and aided by federal funds, tribal leaders mobilized
‘infrastructural power’ by boldly declaring jurisdiction on reservation lands and dramatically increasing tribes’ governmental capacity. Second,
tribal entrepreneurs tirelessly transposed affirmations of tribal sovereignty across substate fields in order to transform the discourse applied to
tribes. This second type of action directly challenged the default racial-ethnic classification of tribes. Third, in the context of policy ambiguity
regarding tribes in the wake of the discrediting of the assimilationist termination policy, tribal leaders made a pragmatic claim to state offi- cials
and sought to establish intergovernmental collaborations with non-Indian governments and agencies. In place of long-standing animosity and
litigation fueled by common constructions of Indians and Americans as a binary opposition, they asserted that tribal and state officials shared
governmental interests that could be more effectively addressed through the functional acceptance of tribal governments.44
The conclusion was that as a result of the gains of the indigenous sovereignty movement, it now appears that we have a union of states and
tribes, in which tribes hold collective, albeit limited, rights, making the United States something akin to a layered multinational democracy
rather than merely a multicultural society.45
This was a type of decolonisation that can only be understood if the focus of the analysis is shifted from the state to diffused governmental
practices, or, in Steinman’s words, in a ‘multi-institutional politics framework’. But it was decolonising nonetheless.
If settler colonialism is premised on displacement and domination, the solution may be to turn ‘the first against the second’.46 The foundational
displacement of settlers could become a weapon against their ongoing ability to dominate indigenous alterities. First, a reminder of the original
settler displacement can help arguing settler illegitimacy. No accomplished settler indigenisation is ever possible unless settler domination is not
previously undone. Secondly, the presence of settler constituencies genuinely interested in a post-settler passage can give power to
indigenous–nonindigenous alliances.47 For the purpose of constituting a post-settler passage, nonindigenous constituencies can be an asset.
Thirdly, displacement without domination, the migrant or the ‘transmigrant’ experience, can help thinking nonsovereign forms of belonging.48
Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis have proposed to ‘decentre the white heart’ of settler societies by renarrating ‘settlement’ as migrancy, and by
replacing one foundational narrative with a multiplicity of narratives involving multiple departures and arrivals.49 They call for imagining ‘self’
and ‘other’ as always in ‘transit’. This is promising, but let’s be aware of the risks: the settler routinely hides behind the ‘migrant’ to obscure
relationships of domination.50 Mamdani’s critique of Michael Walzer’s approach to US exceptionalism, a lecture this book has begun with,
drives home this point: ‘Taking as normal the perspective of the European majority in America, Walzer sees the state as neutral and society as
comprising of immigrants, rather than settlers, slaves and natives.’ Mamdani then proceeds to demonstrate how a focus on immigration
necessarily obscures historical conquest as well as the ongoing settler colonial character of the state: ‘Treated by organs of government as a
perpetually colonized population, the fate of Native Americans is testimony that the U.S., the world’s first settler-colonial state, continues to
function as one’, he concludes.51
To undo settler colonialism, we need to break the relationship between its two fundamental
components. As settler colonialism is characterised by permanent movement and sovereign capacity , the interaction of
two variables produces four categorical possibilities.52 They can be heuristically plotted on a semiotic square (see Figure 2).
Contrary to what the settler common sense may assert, settler colonial ways of belonging are not
inevitable or natural; they are merely one possibility among many. There are those who have a sovereign capacity but do not intend to stay,
those who do not have a sovereign capacity and do not intend to stay, and those who do not have a sovereign capacity and intend to stay.
Migrants may not be expected to eventually assimilate to a normalised settler standard, and settlers may be compelled to reconsider
themselves as guests. Avril Bell has perceptively analysed the ‘discourse of hospitality’ and the relationship between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’
that is established in discussions about immigration. Bell’s intervention is specifically focused on the nature of this discourse in a settler society.
Citing Jacques Derrida, she compellingly alerts us to the sovereign charge that is inherent in an offer (or indeed in the denial) of hospitality.53
Derrida’s work on hospitality, on the ways in which conditional hospitality marks a relationship in which the host is sovereign, is indeed crucial
in this context. For Derrida, without sovereignty there can be no hospitality, and no space from which a welcome or an invitation may be
issued.54 For him, hospitality also involves displacement and domination. Derrida does not focus on settlers, but according to his authoritative
definition, a settler collective that permanently displaces and is endowed with an inherent sovereign charge cannot be anything but a collective
of usurpers (true, Derrida suggests that ultimately all welcomes are acts of appropriation, but in the case of the settler this is immediately so). If
the act of welcome necessitates a spatialised power relationship between host and guest, settler colonialism fundamentally upturns that
relationship. It is not by chance, perhaps, that much of the repression of indigeneity in Canada and the US was premised on the criminalisation
of Potlaches. A settler sovereignty is fundamentally predicated on making indigenous welcomes impossible. For Mireille Rosello, hospitality is
necessarily situational and cannot be permanent.55 But settlers ‘come to stay’, and while Rosello talks about ‘parasitism’ or ‘charity’ as possible
degenerations of hospitality, settler colonialism should be seen as yet another such degeneration. The settlers are the suitors of Penelope, the
Procis. Penelope was playing hostess to her own suitors and on returning Odysseus pretended to be a beggar, someone worthy of hospitality.
The suitors refused to act as host and ridiculed him; their failure to extend hospitality definitely proved their ultimate illegitimacy.56
Considering how foundational the Odyssey story remains, and the way in which the Procis end up in that story, that settlers are generally wary
of indigenous ‘returns’ should not come as a surprise.
That is why I am somewhat sceptical of Australian and New Zealand ‘indigenous welcomes to country’ and their officially sanctioned
proliferation.57 The problem, of course, is not the politically correct content of these welcomes; it is with the sovereign arrogation that is
inherent in the ability to stage them. It is not a matter of what they express, but a matter of who expresses them and on whose behalf: a well-
meaning settler, a settler that must recognise the people of the land in compliance with a settler-approved protocol, or, even more ominously,
an indigenous person that is compelled to utter them on some settler’s behalf. (It is a completely different matter when it is local indigenous
peoples that arrogate the sovereign right to welcome for themselves; but this stance is characteristically unwelcomed by settler constituencies.)
But if an ability to welcome is always the expression of a sovereign capacity, there cannot be any indigenous welcome to a country without a
prior recognition of an indigenous sovereignty. And this is the point: turning settler collectives into receivers of that same hospitality would
recognise indigenous prerogatives and simultaneously constitute a fundamental marker of a post-settler dispensation. There is nothing more
unsettling than returning the settler ‘welcome’ word for word: ‘where do you come from?’58 If this was a vampire story, this would be when a
well-prepared wooden stake made of the appropriate timber is finally produced.
There are two ways out of a settler colonial way of being. One is undoing the settler’s permanence ; turning
him into a colonial sojourner that will return ‘home’, often to a ‘home’ he would have never visited. With reference to the semiotic table
represented in Figure 2, we could call it the lateral way. We know how settler exoduses look like. There were collective ones, like the
exodus/evacuations from Algeria, the Sinai, and Gaza, and piecemeal ones, like those from post-Apartheid South Africa, and, earlier, from
Zimbabwe. The other way out is to undo the settler’s sovereign charge . With reference to the semiotic table represented
in Figure 2, we could call this second option the way ‘down’. It is the embrace of exile; the moment when, even if the original bicycle is not
returned, indigenous people get the sovereign right to ride again. If exile is fundamentally characterised by displacement and disempowerment,
then all promises of sovereignty elsewhere, that is, all settler colonialisms, are a negation of exile. In this sense, rather than an outlier, Zionism
as the ‘negation of exile’ is indeed the most explicitly settler colonial of movements.59 The decolonisation of settler colonialism,
on the contrary, should be construed as an embrace of exile. Developing nonsovereign-nonindigenous
belonging (note the negative definition) could be a ‘constituent’ moment of settler decolonisation . Settler
constituencies, after all, are not new to such ‘moments’.60 Indeed, they are defined by an inherent constituent capacity. But there is more : it
is important to note that the settler negation of exile – a coherent and long-lasting political tradition
that adopts displacement as method, what Gabi Piterberg and I define elsewhere as ‘the world turned inside out’ – is also a
negation of revolution.61 An embrace of exile brings the prospect of radical renewal to the fore . Indeed,
as it supersedes settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, a post-settler passage must
inevitably be a moment of radical transformation .
At the same time, we should assume that the search for one decolonizing solution might prove elusive . Since the indigenous-settler
relationship in a post-settler dispensation is finally imagined as ongoing, decolonisation will not be a
solution but a practice. Can settler colonial studies as heuristics help in this quest? I believe so. Rather than
proclaiming settler colonialism’s inevitable triumph, settler
colonial studies has aimed to simultaneously and
dialectically attend to narratives of indigenous defeat and loss as well as narratives emphasising continuing
sovereign capacities. Similarly, it can sustain experiments in settler nonsovereign transformation .
 Refusal Alt
The alt refuses the aff’s settler colonial investments. The link debate is a process of
unsettling hope in the aff that leaves open potential for decolonial politics
Dyer ‘12 (Herbert Dyer Jr. is an African American writer in Chicago with a masters degree from Governors State University in
Political & Justice Studies, April 28, “Redemption of the White Liberal”, Dissident Voice,
http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/04/redemption-of-the-white-liberal/)

The foremost reality that white liberals must understand and then deal with is that every square inch of
land, every lake, river and stream, every mountain, field, every blade of grass or grain of desert sand
that they proudly refer to as the “United States of America” is stolen property – stolen from a people who rarely, if
ever, warrant even a back-handed mention in today’s socio-economic and political discourse. This terrible reality lies at the bottom of a

continent-wide and unimaginably deep sea of red blood which separates the two blue eastern and western oceans. By now they
must be aware of the magnitude and meaning of such an unconscionable atrocity. Hell, at some level they’ve always known; but do

they care? White liberals must go further, though. They must understand that the reason Chicago, New
York City, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, St. Louis, etc., ad infinitum, sport such
high and gleaming alters to capitalism is because the raw materials and laborers used in their
construction were ripped from the soil and souls of Black, Brown, Red and Yellow peoples not only here
but from throughout the world. The white liberal must understand that those villages, countries, nations and nation-states are labeled and defined
by them as “Third World”, “underdeveloped”, “developing” because it was and remains white supremacy and their embrace thereof that put and keep them there.
Appalling numbers of white liberals are in deep denial of the unfathomable pain, suffering, and death
that the pursuit of white supremacy has wrought . Yes, their denial is appalling but completely understandable. They labor under a grand
form of “cognitive dissonance” which exquisitely defines the term. I have wondered often that had I been born “white”, how utterly impossible it would be, must
be, to simply look into a mirror knowing how much innocent blood lay behind my reflection, my history. Absolute denial and rejection of that blood, of that
reflection and history would be the only means of maintaining even a semblance of sanity. On another level, though, many, perhaps a majority, of white liberals
appreciate quite clearly what they have done. Indeed, they celebrate and gleefully swim in that bloody sea of denial, ever thankful for their whiteness and their
conscientious and well-meaning liberalism. This set of white liberals eagerly embraces their unearned privileges and power and protect themselves and their
whiteness behind world-destroying weapons, multi-million-man armies – or “gated” enclaves. Their fear is understandable as well for they have much to fear, going
all the way back to, and starting with, Indian attack and slave revolt. Black folks know very well that all white people are not knowingly white supremacist in their
worldview and daily lives. That is, there are now and always have been some “good” white folks – those few who fought and died alongside Blacks at various stages
of history against white supremacy. The problem is, however, that the good have never outnumbered the bad. The “good” white people have never constituted the
majority of white people. And, somehow it seems that when it comes to Black folks, some sort of “compromise” must always be made in order that white
supremacy remains supreme. Finally, what can and must white liberals do to redeem themselves, their people? The
time has long passed for any more perfunctory “national discussion of race ” between whites and Blacks. There is
nothing more to talk about. White people, including white liberals, invented “race”, racism and white
supremacy. They must begin the redemption process by disavowing and denouncing the validity,
legitimacy of each of these self-serving and pernicious concepts and ideologies. They must first acknowledge, recognize
and accept their guilt. Then repent. Repentance can take many forms, but it must be holistic, all encompassing, just

as holistic and encompassing as the past 500 years of white supremacy have been. White liberals must teach each
other and their children the unvarnished history of this nation-state. They must begin and see through to the end the hard work

of dismantling all of the covert and overt institutional structures and scaffolds which have framed and
perpetuated a white racial consciousness and its attendant white supremacist practices for the last 25
generations. They must teach themselves and their children that the number one problem in the world has been, is, and

remains Europe’s and America’s Original Sin: white supremacy – not global warming nor environmental
degradation, not the national debt/deficit, not gay rights, not the energy crisis, and not women’s liberation – but white
supremacy. In doing so, they will discover that these other “issues” are but symptoms and
byproducts of the most debilitating disease that has afflicted the whole of mankind since those first Europeans began rampaging across the seas circa
1444.
Block Cards
 AT Alt Fails – Economic Rationality
Appeals to economic rationality are an attempt to order and manage the natural
world – this is another link to the K
Joronen ‘10 (Mikko, Doctoral candidate in Human Geography @ The University of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space
Planetary System of Ordering, 2010 http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf?
sequence=1)

Under such colonization of calculable price mechanism, the

whole globe eventually becomes an area of
domination: the metaphysical essence of markets is to bring all beings into a quasi-Darwinian struggle
for survival between the powers of business calculation. It is precisely because this survival is based
on successful accumulation and efficient commodification of beings , that under the contemporary
global capitalism the whole globe becomes conquered for its market . Under such economic malleability
everything is established as producible products and hence delivered to the markets in terms of growing efficiency and
competitiveness. Out of the colossal competition between the figures of calculation and machination, globalization turns into a struggle
between different technological worldviews (Heidegger 1977d:134–135; See also Joronen 2008; Moisio 2008:89–90). Globalization –
growing giganticism fuelled by the competition between powers of efficient manipulation – and survival – a struggle to maximize the
utility and control of beings under the pre-delineating framework of gigantic calculation – are both manifestations of the operational logic
of technological Gestell. Consequently, economic
survival struggle and the glorification of competitiveness
hide the fact that they aim at massive ordering , thus admiring the megalomania of endless growth
and expansion. By penetrating and spreading, and hence, by turning all beings under the logic of technological manipulation, the
techno-capitalist logic of optimization of productivity and competitiveness that constantly seeks
to open new markets by turning things into products of profit making eventually present one of the ontic
realities that have accelerated the globalization of Gestell.
 AT Alt Fails – Water Protest Solves
Empirically Indigenous activism and refusal of water settlements has produced
decolonial challenges to state resource control
Curley ’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, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00515, ppg., 59-62)

Everyday Diné people challenged the terms of the water settlement because they felt it undermined a
collective sense of inherent Diné “winters’ rights,” a reference to the now famous 1908 US Supreme Court decision that is the legal
basis for quantifying “reserved” “Indian” water rights. Winters’ limited water to the “purpose” of the reservation under

colonial water law. It was not, as some characterize, a recognition of inherent rights to water . It was a much
narrower guarantee of water for lands that the Supreme Court considered (and still considers) federal territory (Shurts 2000). It spoke to terms of

treaties and not inherent Indigenous rights. In their activism, Diné organizers and community members
transmuted this legal reference into a rallying cry. They claimed that Diné people ought to have rights under existing water laws that
respect their historic occupancy and relationship with the environment. Diné activists reworked the meaning of winters’ to refer

to both legal-political recognition of rights and a way to decolonize systems of water governance . In
other words, Diné water activists sought to gain the maximum rights within existing water regimes while
acknowledging the colonial origins of the law .
Single mothers, part-time students, community organizers , and both unemployed and underemployed
Diné people traveled hundreds of miles from where they worked and lived to where lawmakers held
community forums on the terms of the settlement in order to express this sentiment . In my observations of the
water hearings, I saw that members of the Diné public showed skepticism, worry, frustration, and cynicism concerning the actions of the tribal
government. In
public testimony and private conversations, they expressed concern about what water
would remain for the future in a settlement that preserved colonial inequalities . For Diné proponents of the
settlement, most who worked for the tribal government, the allocation of the Little Colorado River would have secured desperately needed
water and infrastructure for reservation communities. It would have helped to fulfill the purpose of the reservation under existing legal
requirements and might have contributed to the improved well-being of Diné communities.
For Diné critics, water settlements were also colonial mechanisms meant to minimize Indigenous water rights ( Jones 2011; Yazzie 2013). Earlier
scholarship on “tribal water rights” characterized these agreements as a form of colonial dispossession (Back and Taylor 1980; Burton 1991;
Wilkinson 1985). More recent work, however, tends to avoid critique in favor of a realistic tone. Today, lawyers and some scholars, many of
whom are not members of Indigenous nations, suggest that tribes ought to settle water claims in order to avoid costly litigation and the
unpredictability of court rulings (Cornell et al. 2008; Thorson et al. 2006).

Water settlements are also ontological constructions that convert rivers into notions of “acre-feet,” divorcing water from the land, species, and
kinship networks. Indigenous peoples across the world oppose these kinds of colonial limitations while working to maintain prior resource
“jurisdictions” (Pasternak 2017). Indigenous water governance, which differs from colonial approaches, prioritizes precapitalist and precolonial
knowledge and practices that sustain communities, economies, and life on the land (Daigle 2018; McGregor 2012; Wilson 2014). In response to
Indigenous activism, some colonial states are starting to recognize Indigenous rights to water that move beyond simple utilitarian logics,
including notions of personhood and nonhuman rights (Bakker 2018; Lightfoot 2016; Ruru 2018; Todd 2018). But state-led processes of
recognition can undermine historic practices associated with the use of water and the land while concretizing colonial dispossession. Critical
Indigenous scholars argue that a politics of recognition fundamentally undermines Indigenous lifeways (Coulthard
2014). Audra Simpson (2014), for example, shows how Mohawk communities contest the spatial claims and colonial authorities of Canada and
the United States through strategies of refusal. Other Indigenous critics go further to challenge the authority of tribal governments and their
use of “sovereignty” as a continuation of larger processes of colonization (Alfred 2006). Some
suggest that a way toward
decolonial practices is through a “resurgence” of Indigenous lifeways , including worldviews, ethics, and
governance (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2012). Leanne Simpson (2016, 22) writes that “Indigenous resurgence, in its
most radical form, is nation building, not nation-state building, but nation building, again, in the context
of grounded normativity by centring, amplifying, animating, and actualizing the processes of grounded
normativity as flight paths or fugitive escapes from the violences of settler-colonialism .”
In the United States, Indigenous resurgence and notions of cultural renewal have inevitably interlinked,
intersected, and become “entangled” in practices of nation-state building (Cornell 1988; Dennison 2012; Nagel
1997; Lambert 2007). In some cases, “resurgence” works through and against colonial structures. It can be a way to expand ideas of sovereignty
and incorporate Indigenous ontologies into institutions of governance. For more than thirty years, the Navajo Nation has worked to inscribe
notions of “fundamental law” into the governing structures of the Navajo Nation (Austin 2009; Lee 2013). Navajo
Nation lawmakers
have also embedded unique Diné governing ethics, traditions, and principles into Navajo statutory law,
despite the colonial origins of this law and system of government. These form contradictory “politics of
tradition” that can be as reactionary as they can be liberating (Denetdale 2006). Today, the authority of the Navajo
Nation and the decisions it makes are the arenas of government and nongovernmental politics and protest (Powell 2017; Powell and Curley
2008). Dinéactivists challenge the policies of the tribal government while promoting traditional
understandings of water and land (Lister and Curley 2017; Powell 2015). In 2012, opposition to the Little Colorado
River Settlement called for the tribe to use its authority to reject the agreement. Although the council’s
authority has colonial origins, the Navajo Nation Council eventually voted down the settlement in
response to the protests documented here.3 This resource colonialism was successfully challenged and rejected by Diné
people defending their rights to water. The settlement died in Congress from inaction.
 AT Contingency – History Key
Our historical tracing of settler colonialism accesses all of their contingency good
arguments. Reading history key – this is how settler colonialism sustains itself
Dunbar-Ortiz ‘15 (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has
been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and
international social justice issues, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward,
and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Kindle location
148 – 217)

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—“from California ... to the Gulf Stream
waters”—are¶ interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians .1 They cry out for their
stories to be heard through their¶ descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. ¶
It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western¶
Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed
and destruction.2¶ Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself— the
moment in which we now live and die as our planet¶ shrivels, over-heated. To learn and know this
history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all ¶ parties.
What historian David Chang has written about the land that became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: “Nation, race, and class
converged in land.”2 Everything in US history is about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters,¶ maintained its wildlife; who
invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity ("real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold¶ 011 the market.
US 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¶ writes, "The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism .
Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for¶ life.”2
The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism— the founding of a state based on the
ideology of white¶ supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and
land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat¶ ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that
such a conclusion is not visible, not even in¶ utopian dreams of a better society.
Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual national
narrative. That¶ narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the
myth we’ve been taught is an¶ embrace of settler colonialism and genocide . The myth persists, not for a
lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an¶ absence of motivation to ask questions that
challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging¶ the reality of
US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues.
 AT Framework - Reps Shape Reality – Water
Investigating the aff’s discursive commitments is a prerequisite to forming water
policy that does not replicate settler colonialism
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg 16-21)

Given the breadth and diversity of my sites of analysis, I engage several research methods in order to deconstruct and interpret what could
broadly be defined as a provisional cultural history of water in Canada as it relates to settler colonialism and Indigenous rights. Mobilizing
an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on discursive analysis, critical historiography, and an
engagement with Indigenous methods allows me to read life-writing, public policy, land rights decisions,
and settler and Indigenous legal assertions and literatures alongside one another . I mobilize these mixed
methods in order to understand how figures and genres of narrative, such as fiction, non-fiction, and creation stories
are at work, informing law, policy, activism, and ultimately the material constructions of both settler
and Indigenous water worlds. Building on extensive work in Settler Colonial, Indigenous, and Literary Studies, with strands of
Cultural Studies, Critical Geography and Political Ecology, I investigate the various and varied ways my textual sites work toward the
formation of certain kinds of worlds, how they shape and constrain subjective and collective identities, and
how the formation of these identities upholds or challenge material worlds and the political
assumptions that support them. Further, I am interested in how different discursive forms and sites of analysis
work toward, engage, or further obfuscate the problem of legibility in relation to Indigenous rights , legal
orders, and hydrosocial relations.
Foucauldian discourse analysis serves as my primary method of engagement, allowing me to examine the discursive regularities across different
forms, subject positions, and truth procedures in order to analyze the various and varied ways that water is registered, inhabited, and
understood in settler Canada. Discourse analysis allows me to make linkages between representation and practices in the settler state.
Specifically, Foucault’s notion of discourse helps me to understand the ways by which social
systems produce particular forms
of knowledge within historical contexts, and how these forms of knowledge have the power to render
other forms of knowledge as illegible, unintelligible, and illegitimate . I am specifically interested in the material
effects of discourse—how discourse produces “practices that systematically form the objects of which they
speak” (Foucault 1981, 135-140). Dominant discourse around the meaning of rights in a settler state produces
and organizes knowledge in material ways that demarcate the “constitution of social (and
progressively global) relations through the collective understanding of the discursive logic and the
acceptance of the discourse as social fact” (Adams 2017, n.p.). Rachel Adams elaborates, writing, “For Foucault, the logic
produced by a discourse is structurally related to the broader episteme (structure of knowledge) of the historical period in which it arises.”
“However,” she continues, “discourses are produced by effects of power within a social order, and this power prescribes particular rules and
categories which define the criteria for legitimating knowledge and truth within the discursive order” (2017, n.p.). Understanding how discourse
works thus helps me deconstruct the taken for granted logics that have come to constitute the “social fact” of Indigenous rights in Canada.
My engagement with Indigenous paradigms—the worldviews, philosophies, legal assertions, and cultural perspectives of Indigenous peoples as
they are asserted in opposition to and despite the discursive construction of settler colonial Indigenous rights regimes helps me to destabilize,
particularize, and defamiliarize the solidification of these discursive constructions. However,
given the integral role of
Indigenous theory and 18 storytelling in this dissertation, discursive analysis, especially as a tool of
deconstruction, may not always be appropriate for engaging these unique modes of representation. I thus
also aim to engage what Margaret Kovach (2009) and Shawn Wilson (2008), among others, have referred to as critical Indigenous
methodologies. While
Indigenous methodologies encompass a wide range of nation and discipline specific
methodological approaches, they generally foreground the significance of story, relationality , and
relational accountability as ethical standards for research, and stem from Tribal and community-
centered knowledges (Wilson 2008, 6). Further, Indigenous research methodologies emphasize the integral connections
between “knowing, story, and research ,” wherein Indigenous storytelling is centered as an important
means of knowledge production, and thus serves a valuable site of research and
epistemological/ontological understanding (Kovach, p.18). Indigenous storytelling, through literature, creation stories, and
community narratives, helps me to understand and engage with the parameters of Indigenous water worlds, for example. Jo-Ann Archibald’s
conception of Indigenous “storywork” is an integral component of many Indigenous methodologies and
situates storytelling and story-listening as fundamental to research with Indigenous peoples and on
Indigenous issues (2008). I draw on Indigenous creation stories, literary and cultural production, and community-action, in order to
understand how Indigenous narratives world the world in particular ways—how these narratives construct and perpetuate
Indigenous water worlds, give voice to and express Indigenous legal orders and hydrosocial relations,
and give meaning to Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights to and self-determination over their waters.
More specifically, I deploy Indigenous methodologies of critical place inquiry (Tuck and McKenzie 2015), and Mishuana
Goeman’s feminist discursive method of “(re)mapping ” (2013). The aim of Goeman’s (re)mapping method is
to “unsettle imperial and colonial geographies by refuting how these geographies organize land,
bodies, and social and political landscapes (Tuck and McKenzie, 134). Emphasizing the parenthesized “re” of
(re)mapping in a way not dissimilar to my notion of “(re)making” in relation to the (re)making of
Indigenous water worlds, Goeman writes, The labour of Native authors and the communities they write within and about undertake in
the simultaneously metaphoric and material capacities of map making, to generate new possibilities. The framing of “re” within parenthesis
connotes the fact that in (re)mapping, Native women employ traditional and new tribal stories as a means of continuation or what Gerald
Vizenor aptly calls stories of survivance. (2013, 3) Goeman explores the ways that Indigenous women in particular have defined Indigeneity,
their communities, and themselves by challenging colonial spatializing practices, and especially through Indigenous women’s literary production
(Goeman 2013; Tuck and McKenzie 135). I follow Goeman’s notion of (re)mapping as a method of analysis as I
examine my sites of Indigenous resistance—the majority of which are indeed authored by or centre
Indigenous women; I analyze these literary, cultural, and political texts for the ways they resist the
discursive dominance of settler liberal rights discourse, and the alternative hydrosocial relations they
offer. Ultimately, I consider the ways that Indigenous spatializing practices , their literary and discursive
(re)mapping, give meaning to the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples—how they contribute to the
material remaking of Indigenous water worlds.
Indigenous methodologies work as an important amendment to discourse analysis in the sense that
discourse analysis is largely about deconstructing the taken for granted 20 discourses that form the
world as we know it—to “disrupt its pretended continuity,” in Foucault’s terms. As I will show, in relation to my
sites of analysis, this coherence and continuity has been constructed as a settler water world that attempts
to totalize itself, its approaches to and treatment of water, water rights, and the legibility of other’s
interactions with waters in the settler state (Foucault 1977, 154). To approach Indigenous texts through some of the storying
and relational tenets that comprise Indigenous methodologies, on the other hand, is to emphasize the “re” of Indigenous legal
and political orders, worldviews, and the water worlds they express —the (re)making, the ( re)mapping,
and the general (re)building of worlds subjugated to an aggressive settler colonialism and its dominant
liberal ordering practices established in the waterways of Turtle Island . To be sure, I cannot adopt or apply
Indigenous methodologies in absolute or simple terms; indeed to truly engage with the community and tribal contexts integral to Indigenous
methodologies might mean that I read Cree texts with an understanding of Cree storying practices, Anishinaabe, with Anishinaabe storying
practices, and so forth. Within the context of this project, these are understandings that I have access to only through the Indigenous theorists
who inform my readings. Rather, in attending to this methodological engagement as best as I can, I hope to demonstrate how this dissertation,
in some small way, is contributing to the kind of remaking I discuss throughout—how it is attempting to do
some of the work of
settler decolonial engagement, in learning how to read and understand, how to reckon with the
problem of legibility and illegibility, and how to live relationally with Indigenous water worlds without
overdetermining their meaning. Importantly, as Goeman notes, the task here is not to recover a static past, but
rather to “acknowledge the power of Native epistemologies in defining our moves toward spatial
decolonization” (135). In short, Indigenous methodologies ensure that negative critique is supplemented by decolonial modes of inquiry
that aim to rebuild and bolster, rather than merely deconstruct and destabilize.
 AT Framework/Alt Fails- Ontology
Analyzing the ontological connections between settlerism and water policy is key to
enact decolonial politics – the alt is a prerequisite to aff solvency
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. Ii-iii)

This dissertation examines several sites of conflict between Indigenous and nonIndigenous peoples over water
and water rights in Canada, from the 19th century up to current articulations of environmental policy and
land rights. Through examination of a selection of public policy, land rights decisions, grassroots activism, and Canadian and Indigenous
fiction and non-fiction, I probe relationships to water that have structured and limited the legibility of Indigenous
rights in Canada. I track a history of settler colonialism through the lens of wate r, querying whether water
offers a productive site that might challenge the current land-based constraints of colonial legal and
policy frameworks that have led to what are often irreconcilable relationships between the settler state
and Indigenous peoples.
Through Indigenous legal orders, social, cultural, and political expression , as well as strands of materialist and
environmentalist Western philosophy that focus on water, ontology, and narrative , I explore the limits and
potential for decolonial approaches to water governance that might better support the inherent rights
of Indigenous peoples. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I read public policy and land rights
decisions in dialogue with settler and Indigenous literatures and community action in order to
understand the often-competing worlding practices that materially, socially, subjectively, and
figuratively construct settler and Indigenous approaches to water —what I am calling settler and
Indigenous water worlds. Specifically, I analyze four sites of conflict and their various representations where competing laws,
philosophies, and social registers of water come up against one another: the 19th century establishment of a liberal order in the Trent Severn
Waterway, and its expression in early settler life writing and environmental policy; the mercury pollution of the English-Wabigoon River
Systems in Treaty 3 Anishinaabe territory, and
the ironic representation of late liberal environmentalism in M.T. Kelly’s A
Dream Like Mine; the James Bay Hydroelectric conflict, and
the political response of the Grand Council of the Crees, as
well as the conflict’s figurative reimagining in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms; and Haudenosaunee and
settler relations in Grand River territory in Southern Ontario, and the impetus to engage these relations
through the historic treaty, the Two Row Wampum.
 AT Framework – Red Pedagogy
This debate is a setting in which you should deploy Red Pedagogy – that is, an
educational praxis which foregrounds Native intellectualism to resist settler
knowledge production. Red pedagogy allows us agitate toward a decolonized space
and activates political agency - turns all of their framework arguments
Grande ‘08 (Sandy, Associate Professor of Education at Connecticut College, Ph.D., Kent State University, Fellow in the Holleran Center for
Community Action and Public Policy, member of the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council’s Indigenous People’s Work Group,
“Red Pedagogy” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, pg. 242-3)

From the standpoint of Red pedagogy, the primary lesson in all of this is pedagogical. In other words, as
we are poised to raise yet
another generation in a nation at war and at risk, we must consider how emerging conceptions of
citizenship, sovereignty, and democracy will affect the (re)formation of our national identity, particularly
among young people in schools. As Mitchell (2001) notes, "The production of democracy, the practice of
education, and the constitution of the nation-state" have always been interminably bound together. The
imperative before us as citizens is to engage a process of unthinking our colonial roots and rethinking
democracy. For teachers and students, this means that we must be willing to act as agents of
transgression, posing critical questions and engaging dangerous discourse . Such is the basis of Red pedagogy. In
particular, Red pedagogy offers the following seven precepts as a way of thinking our way around and through the
challenges facing American education in the 21st century and our mutual need to define decolonizing
pedagogies: 1. Red pedagogy is primarily a pedagogical project. In this context, pedagogy is understood as being
inherently political, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual .¶ 2. Red pedagogy is fundamentally rooted in
indigenous knowledge and praxis. It is particularly interested in knowledge that furthers understanding
and analysis of the forces of colonization. ¶ 3. Red pedagogy is informed by critical theories of education.
A Red pedagogy searches for ways it can both deepen and be deepened by engagement with critical and
revolutionary theories and praxis.¶ 4. Red pedagogy promotes an education for decolonization. Within
Red pedagogy, the root metaphors of decolonization are articulated as equity, emancipation,
sovereignty, and balance. In this sense, an education for decolonization makes no claim to political
neutrality but rather engages a method of analysis and social inquiry that troubles the capitalist-
imperialist aims of unfettered 5. Red pedagogy is a project that interrogates both democracy and
indigenous sovereignty. In this context, sovereignty is broadly defined as "a people's right to rebuild its demand
to exist and present its gifts to the world... an adamant refusal to dissociate culture, identity, and power
from the land" (Lyons, 2000).¶ 6. Red pedagogy actively cultivates praxis of collective agency. That is, Red
pedagogy aims to build transcultural and transnational solidarities among indigenous peoples and
others committed to reimagining a sovereign space free of imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist
exploitation.¶ 7. Red pedagogy is grounded in hope.
This is, however, not the future-centered hope of the Western imagination but rather a hope that lives in
contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors, the power
of traditional knowledge, and the possibilities of new understandings .¶In the end, a Red pedagogy is about
engaging the development of "community-based power" in the interest of "a responsible political,
economic and spiritual society. "That is, the power to live out "active presences and survivances rather
than an illusionary democracy." Vizenor's (1993) notion of survivance signifies a state of being beyond
"survival, endurance, or a mere response to colonization " and of moving toward "an active presence ...
and active repudiation of dominance, tragedy and victimry." In these post-Katrina times, I find the notion of
survivance—particularly as it relates to colonized peoples—to be poignant and powerful. It speaks to our collective need to
decolonize, to push back against empire , and to reclaim what it means to be a people of sovereign mind
and body. The peoples of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans serve as a reminder to all of us that just as the specter of colonialism
continues to haunt the collective soul of America, so too does the more hopeful spirit of indigeneity .
 AT Land Return Fails
Evaluate the alt using IMPOSSIBLE REALISM – It Provides uniqueness for our links and
resolves ALL their impacts – It’s a question of sequencing—we can only resolve the
ethical questions of the aff after returning the land
Churchill ‘96 (Ward, former professor of ethnic studies at university of colorado, boulder, “i am indigenist,” from a native
son pgs 89-94)

The question which inevitably arises with regard to indigenous land claims, especially in the United States, is
whether they are “realistic.” The answer, of course is, “No, they aren’t.” Further, no form of decolonization
has ever been realistic when viewed within the construct of a colonialist paradigm. It wasn’t realistic at the time
to expect George Washington’s rag-tag militia to defeat the British military during the American Revolution. Just ask the British. It wasn’t realistic, as the French
could tell you, that the Vietnamese should be able to defeat U.S.-backed France in 1954, or that the Algerians would shortly be able to follow in their footsteps.
Surely, it wasn’t reasonable to predict that Fidel Castro’s pitiful handful of guerillas would overcome Batista’s regime in Cuba, another U.S. client, after only a few
years in the mountains. And the Sandinistas, to be sure, had no prayer of attaining victory over Somoza 20 years later. Henry Kissinger, among others, knew that for
a fact. The point is that in
each case, in order to begin their struggles at all, anti-colonial fighters around the
world have had to abandon orthodox realism in favor of what they knew to be right. To paraphrase Bendit, they
accepted as their agenda, a redefinition of reality in terms deemed quite impossible within the
conventional wisdom of their oppressors. And in each case, they succeeded in their immediate quest for
liberation. The fact that all but one (Cuba) of the examples used subsequently turned out to hold colonizing pretensions of its own does not alter the truth of
this—or alter the appropriateness of their efforts to decolonize themselves—in the least. It simply means that decolonization has yet to run its course, that much
remains to be done. The
battles waged by native nations in North America to free themselves, and the lands
upon which they depend for ongoing existence as discernible peoples, from the grip of U.S. (and Canadian)
internal colonialism are plainly part of this process of liberation. Given that their very survival depends
upon their perseverance in the face of all apparent odds, American Indians have no real alternative but
to carry on. They must struggle, and where there is struggle here is always hope. Moreover, the
unrealistic or “romantic” dimensions of our aspiration to quite literally dismantle the territorial corpus of
the U.S. state begin to erode when one considers that federal domination of Native North America is
utterly contingent upon maintenance of a perceived confluence of interests between prevailing
governmental/corporate elites and common non-Indian citizens. Herein lies the prospect of long-term success. It is
entirely possibly that the consensus of opinion concerning non-Indian “rights” to exploit the land and
resources of indigenous nations can be eroded, and that large numbers of non-Indians will join in the
struggle to decolonize Native North America. Few nonIndians wish to identify with or defend the naziesque characteristics of US history.
To the contrary most seek to deny it in rather vociferous fashion. All things being equal, they are uncomfortable with many of the resulting attributes of federal
postures and actively oppose one or more of these, so long as such politics do not intrude into a certain range of closely guarded self- interests. This is where the
crunch comes in the realm of Indian rights issues. Most non-Indians (of all races and ethnicities, and both genders) have
been indoctrinated
to believe the officially contrived notion that, in the event “the Indians get their land back,” or even if
the extent of present federal domination is relaxed, native people will do unto their occupiers exactly as
has been done to them; mass dispossession and eviction of non-Indians, especially Euro-Americans is
expected to ensue. Hence even progressives who are most eloquently inclined to condemn US
imperialism abroad and/or the functions of racism and sexism at home tend to deliver a blank stare or
profess open “disinterest” when indigenous land rights are metioned. Instead of attempting to come to
grips with this most fundamental of all issues the more sophisticated among them seek to divert
discussions into “higher priority” or “more important” topics like “issues of class and gender equality” in
which “justice” becomes synonymous with a redistribution of power and loot deriving from the
occupation of Native North America even while occupation continues. Sometimes, Indians are even
slated to receive “their fair share” in the division of spoils accruing from expropriation of their resources.
Always, such things are couched in terms of some “greater good” than decolonizing the .6 percent of the U.S. population which is indigenous. Some Marxist and
environmentalist groups have taken the argument so far as to deny that Indians possess any rights distinguishable from those of their conquerors. AIM leader
Russell Means snapped the picture into sharp focus when he observed n 1987 that: so-called progressives in the United States claiming that Indians are obligated to
give up their rights because a much larger group of non-Indians “need” their resources is exactly the same as Ronald Reagan and Elliot Abrams asserting that the
rights of 250 million North Americans outweigh the rights of a couple million Nicaraguans. Leaving aside the pronounced and pervasive hypocrisy permeating these
positions, which add up to a phenomenon elsewhere described as “settler state colonialism,” the fact is that the specter driving even most radical non-Indians into
lockstep with the federal government on questions of native land rights is largely illusory. The alternative reality posed by native liberation struggles is actually much
different: While government propagandists are wont to trumpet—as they did during the Maine and Black Hills land disputes of the 1970s—that an Indian win would
mean individual non-Indian property owners losing everything, the native position has always been the exact opposite. Overwhelmingly, the lands sought for actual
recovery have been governmentally and corporately held. Eviction of small land owners has been pursued only in instances where they have banded together—as
they have during certain of the Iroquois claims cases—to prevent Indians from recovering any land at all, and to otherwise deny native rights. Official sources
contend this is inconsistent with the fact that all non-Indian title to any portion of North America could be called into question. Once “the dike is breached,” they
argue, it’s just a matter of time before “everybody has to start swimming back to Europe, or Africa or wherever.” Although there is considerable technical accuracy
to admissions that all non-Indian title to North America is illegitimate, Indians have by and large indicated they would be content to honor the cession agreements
entered into by their ancestors, even though the United States has long since defaulted. This would leave somewhere close to two-thirds of the continental United
States in non-Indian hands, with the real rather than pretended consent of native people. The remaining one-third, the areas delineated in Map II to which the
United States never acquired title at all would be recovered by its rightful owners. The government holds that even at that there is no longer sufficient land available
for unceded lands, or their equivalent, to be returned. In fact, the government itself still directly controls more than one-third of the total U.S. land area, about 770
million acres. Each of the states also “owns” large tracts, totaling about 78 million acres. It is thus quite possible—and always has been—for all native claims to be
met in full without the loss to non-Indians of a single acre of privately held land. When it is considered that 250 million-odd acres of the “privately” held total are
now in the hands of major corporate entities, the real dimension of the “threat” to small land holders (or more accurately, lack of it) stands revealed. Government
spokespersons have pointed out that the disposition of public lands does not always conform to treaty areas. While this is true, it in no way precludes some process
of negotiated land exchange wherein the boundaries of indigenous nations are redrawn by mutual consent to an exact, or at least a much closer conformity. All that
is needed is an honest, open, and binding forum—such as a new bilateral treaty process—with which to proceed. In fact, numerous native peoples have, for a long
time, repeatedly and in a variety of ways, expressed a desire to participate in just such a process. Nonetheless, it is argued, there will still be at least some non-
Indians “trapped” within such restored areas. Actually, they would not be trapped at all. The federally imposed genetic criteria of “Indian –ness” discussed
elsewhere in this book notwithstanding, indigenous nations have the same rights as any other to define citizenry by allegiance (naturalization) rather than by race.
NonIndians could apply for citizenship, or for some form of landed alien status which would allow them to retain their property until they die. In the event they
could not reconcile themselves to living under any jurisdiction other than that of the United States, they would obviously have the right to leace, and they should
have the right to compensation from their own government (which got them into the mess in the first place). Finally, and one suspects this is the real crux of things
from the government/corporate perspective, any such restoration
of land and attendant sovereign prerogatives to native nations
would result in a truly massive loss of “domestic” resources to the United States , thereby impairing the country’s
economic and military capacities (see “Radioactive Colonialism” essay for details). For everyone who queued up to wave flags and tie on yellow
ribbons during the United States’ recent imperial adventure in the Persian Gulf, this prospect may induce a certain psychic trauma. But, for progressives at least, it
should be precisely the point. When you think about these issues in this way, the
great mass of non-Indians in North America really
have much to gain and almost nothing to lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim
the land which is rightfully ours. The tangible diminishment of US material power which is integral to our
victories in this sphere stands to pave the way for realization of most other agendas from anti-
imperialism to environmentalism, from African American liberation to feminism, from gay rights to the
ending of class privilege – pursued by progressive on this continent. Conversely, succeeding with any or
even all of these other agendas would still represent an inherently oppressive situation in their
realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of Native North America without the consent of
Indian people. Any North American revolution which failed to free indigenous territory from non-Indian
domination would be simply a continuation of colonialism in another form. Regardless of the angle from which you view
liberation of Native North America, liberation of the land first and foremost, is the key
the matter, the

to fundamental and positive social changes of many other sorts . One thing they say, leads to another.
The question has always been, of course, which “thing” is to the first in the sequence. A preliminary
formulation for those serious about achieving (rather than endlessly theorizing and debating), radical
change in the United States might be “First Priority to First Americans” Put another way this would
mean, “US out of Indian Country.” Inevitably, the logic leads to what we’ve all been so desperately
seeking: The United States – at least what we’ve come to know it – out of North America altogether.
From there it can be permanently banished from the planet. In its stead, surely we can join hands to
create something new and infinitely better. That’s our vision of “ impossible realism.” Isn’t it time we all
went to work on attaining it?
 AT Perm – Critical Cartography - Water
The perm independently fails. It reduces decolonization to a symbolic action. The alt’s
Critical cartography is a refusal of the affirmative’s mapping through an interrogation
of the plan’s spatial relationship to land and water we are able to disrupt the
mundane repetition of colonial knowledge
Paperson ‘14 (La Paperson, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego, “A ghetto land pedagogy: an
antidote for settler environmentalism”, Environmental Education Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, 115-130,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.865115)

Critical cartography is the mapping of structural oppression, as well as the cri-tique of mapping as an
exercise of power. Although it uses tools from traditional cartography, it also redirects our gaze back onto
the master narrative of maps. Mapping creates taxonomies of land, water, and peoples. It generates false territories
and also false temporalities, as land becomes property in a linear history of shifting ownerships.
Mapping is knowledge generated in the service of empire. Thus, maps are not in themselves critical,
even if they document social injustice . It is the surrounding narrative, the story that is told about maps,
that may be critical. In other published work (Paperson 2010), I explored maps of Oakland - homicides, liquor stores,
grocery stores, and other indicators of violence - as a way of examining how violence is spatialized
within the ghetto, and also how the master stories (using the same maps!) advocate for managing violence
through the eradication of the ghetto. Critical cartography is an essential method for understanding
the coloniality of space.
However, critical cartography is not by itself a decolonizing method, just as de-constructing coloniality is
not the same as decolonization (Tuck and Yang 2012). A decolonizing methodology (Smith 1999)
repatriates Indigeneous land and life as they have survived before, during, and beyond colonialism .
Decolonization is not just symbolic; its material core is repatriation of Native life and land, which may
be incommensurable with settler re-inhabitation of Native land. It is not a stance that grants an easy
solidarity with more inclusive social justice projects - even if they are antiracist, feminist, or
environmentalist.
Land is not generalizable the way space and place are generalizable. Land is both people and place, that
is, Native people constitute and are constituted by Native land. You was where you lived. Indigenous
place-based education is land education. Place-based education, from a settler perspective, is far more
inclusive - place becomes something everyone can claim, can tell a story about. Place-based education
leads to restorying and re-inhabitation, whereas land education leads towards repatriation.
Storied land moves place back, between, and beyond to Native land, providing a transhistorical analysis
that unroots settler maps and settler time (Goeman 2008). It offers a method that is temporal and
spatial. As an illustration, storying the land and waters of San Francisco Bay disrupts the settler maps as
well as settler time.
 AT Perm/Reform good
The perm/link turn invests in a dangerous notion of colonial progress. The false
distinction between good and bad policies is one to justify the current colonial
ordering. Myths of inclusion only put a happy face on a deeply violent settler colonial
existence.
Macoun and Strakoschb ‘13 (Alissa Macoun, Indigenous Studies Research Network, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia & Elizabeth Strakoschb, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, “The
ethical demands of settler colonial theory”, Settler Colonial Studies, 3:3-4, 426-443, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.810695)

This apparent reluctance to identify as colonizers, and tendency to see ourselves instead as either ‘colonized
subject: settler indigene’ or inheritor of a painful past constitutes a ‘strategic disavowal of the colonizing
act’. 37 As settlers, we retain a profound interest in being and making ourselves postcolonial without
leaving or relinquishing control; this state represents settler triumph where expulsion represents settler
failure (settler colonialism countenances only these two endings to its story, an issue discussed below).38 SCT, as it becomes more widely
used, tangles up settler scholars in their attempts to maintain a postcolonial identity in the context of an
ongoing and unbroken colonial relationship. Many accounts imply that settler policy strategies which are
exclusionary or obviously coercive are more colonizing than those which operate through inclusion.
They maintain this normative distinction even though SCT shows that both strategies ultimately seek the
same goal of settler sovereignty untrammelled by Indigenous political difference.
This tendency is also reflected in the fact that SCT is more often used to analyse exclusionary, conservative
settler policies than inclusionary approaches. The theory has been used elegantly and persuasively to
identify the settler colonial dynamics animating the NT intervention. However, it has been much less widely used
to analyse the preceding decade of neoliberal governance, or the current ‘Close the Gap’ policy which
operates through a language of Indigenous deficit (this approach enabled a welfarist framing of the second phase of
the NT intervention despite the retention and occasional extension of coercive and explicitly racialized measures).39 While a critical
analysis of the colonizing function of the intervention is vital, existing progressive frameworks already identify the
intervention as racist, exclusionary and colonizing. SCT has the potential to also make visible the
complex and subtle colonizing movements of progressive inclusion – and to demonstrate the continuities
between these strategies and more overt exclusionary tactics.
Even with the rise of SCT, current academic debates therefore retain a distinction between good and bad settler
colonial strategies, and a strong investment in progressive teleologies. The story of the journey away from
settlerness is powerful: Settler colonial narrative orders often display a special narrative form emphasizing
the decline from settler colonial to inordinately non-settler, a narrative order opposed to the traditional
“from rough frontier to civilized settled life” paradigm … whether they envisage a progressive movement
or identify a degenerative tendency.40
Many of us continue to tell this story in our academic work. In doing this, we hold onto and reinforce the
narrative of temporal change which SCT exposes as a political technology . While settler colonialism is
presented as a structuring force which underlies history, the focus on conservative policies suggests that
it can be suppressed and overcome through particular benevolent settler actions (although it always threatens to
reappear). As Nicoll notes,41 deep investments in progressive anti-racist identities can make it difficult for
non-Indigenous scholars to hear and accept critical feedback from Indigenous people. By dissolving the
distinction between good colonists and bad colonists, SCT can help us to fully acknowledge our
implication within settler structures. This problematizes the progressive retreat to unilateral virtuous settler
action, and emphasizes the centrality of our political engagements with Indigenous people.
 AT Perm/Reform Good
Piecemeal reforms are simply appeased by the racist state with no fundamental
change – takes out long term solvency and makes aff harms inevitable
Woan ‘11 (Tansy, “the value of resistance in a permanently white Civil Society”, Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York,
ProQuest Dissertations, p. 17-19)

One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one policy at a time ? Perhaps one could first work to
gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It would not
seem entirely implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms within the
government could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself . However, simply
eliminating discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial institution.
Understanding the motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical factor in determining the success of a
movement. While one justification for passing the Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of equality and exposing racial
injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which is important to the federal government and its
ability to run smoothly. Thus, the
government often seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating
disruptions to preserve order. When those being denied certain rights grow significantly discontent,
they rebel and become disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society . This can take the form of civil
disobedience, such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more revolutionary measures, such as
damaging government offices or violently harassing officials to acknowledge the injustices and change policy.
All of these measures, however peaceful or violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or
blocking frequently-used road paths, and most certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are being lit on fire. Thus, in
order to return
to the desired homeostasis, those in power may often compromise and offer to rectify the situation at
hand by granting rights to individuals through changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the
disruption (the protests, demonstrations, etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's argument that these
reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than functional. If still operating under the racial state,
these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the original racial injustices in the long term, as they will only
succeed in establishing a new unstable equilibrium , only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems."8 These
new problems will once again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to replicate itself, ensuring the permanence of
racism. Omi and Winant term this cycle of continuous disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This
trajectory supports the treatment of racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates racial
disruption over a particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race
will emerge triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics.
 AT Perm – Water Law
The perm encapsulates water law within settler institutions and reproduces the state’s
control of resources – the alt’s ontological examination of the aff is a prereq
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Footnote number 2, pg.
4)
2I use this preposition ‘in’ as ‘in the settler state ,’ or ‘in the context of the settler state,’ throughout this
dissertation, not to reinforce the confines or powers of settler colonialism, but to acknowledge that this
project is predominately about grappling with the ways that Indigenous water law is often enclosed and
encapsulated by the settler state-as-institutions-of-law-and-governance . While this project is also
attentive to questions of legibility, ontology, and the possibilities for a decolonial future as it relates to
the re-making and re-assertion of Indigenous water laws, it is largely concerned with how these water
worlds might emerge, and how they are emerging now, despite the constraints of settler colonialism .
Further, by marking the current reality in which we indeed are ‘in’ the context of the settler nation state, I hope to open this project
up to questions of relationality, and the relational worlding of water that might happen despite this
overdetermining context.
 AT Perm – Environment/Warming Aff
Permutation fails. The affirmative’s approach to environmental reform relies upon
conventional knowledge regimes and can’t escape from corporate and state
manipulation
Luke ‘96 (Timothy W., Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Generating
Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation, 1996)

This investigation's approach to some specific environmental discourses circulating through modern research
universities may offend some in the academy because it asks how involved, and in what ways have academicians
become implicated, in causing the current ecological crisis, even though they might believe
themselves to be ameliorating it. The cultural politics of environmental discourse, however, can be
studied most effectively by following the actors back to their sites of professional-technical training
at schools of environmental studies or colleges of natural resources. This is where the heterogeneous
engineering cultures of mainstream environmentalists--or conventional understandings manifest in the acts and artifacts of
these social groups--are both produced and reproduced. As this discussion illustrates, here is where one can discover how
and why environmental studies are shaped by its disciplines of heterogeneous engineering as every environmental professional gets his or
her education to protect and manage the Earth. A few may be engaged, on the one hand, by dreams of preservationist restoration ecology,
but most others are devoted, on the other hand, to vast projects of conservationist eco-rationalization in
which Nature's forests, lands, and waters technocratically are to be reengineered as vast terrestrial
infrastructures for resource/risk/recreationist managers to administer.62 There are limitations to this
analytical approach. On one level, it cannot delve beneath the manifest intentions of such schools and
colleges as they portray themselves in their own literature . One must assume that they are what they profess to be,
and actually do what their documents promise. On a second level, it cannot catch any resistances or all deviations
from the official institutional line, which clearly are always afoot in any academic institution. Many courses carry bland
descriptions of totally conformist approaches, but their instructors and students may very well follow none of them when their classes
actually convene. And, on a third level, it
does not consider how state or corporate power centers, in the last
analysis, often will ignore or belittle academic knowledge, because its guidance contradicts what
their organizational powers can, or will, in fact, do against all informed advice to act otherwise . So
well-trained professionals, even when armed with sound science, can be flouted to serve the expedient goals of
far more naked power agendas. Nonetheless, even this very tentative survey of the professional-technical practices fostered at
schools of environmental studies discloses a great deal about how technoscience discourses frame regimes of discipline in the everyday
workings of governmentality. Power and knowledge are pervasive forces whose agents often move in quite different channels sometimes
tied to interlocked, but at other times not thoroughly networked, social structures. Universities provide an unusual opportunity to view
them working more in unison and out in the open as the formal knowledges needed by power centers are imparted to new generations in
the ruling, owing, knowing, or controlling elites; and, at the same time, those specific power agendas required to define, implement or
reproduce knowledges and their truth systems quickly get adopted through university programs of study and research. Therefore, this
analysis has only begun the examination of discursive frames and conceptual definitions for common theoretical notions, like "the
environment," "environmental studies," or "environmental sciences." Nonetheless, contemporary American universities
are giving Nature a new look as "the environment" by transforming their formal knowledges about
its workings into the professional-technical practices of a managerialistic "environmentality" in
their schools of the environment or colleges of natural resources. The heterogeneous engineers
behind fast capitalism's environmentalizing regime must advance eco-knowledges to activate their
command over geo-power as well as operationalize a measure of operational discipline over environmental resources, risks, and
recreationists in their reconstruction of contemporary governmentality as environmentality. Like governmentality, the disciplinary
articulations of environmentality now center upon establishing and enforcing "the right disposition
of things" by policing humanity's "conduct of conduct" in Nature and Society. Nature loses any
transcendent aura, however, as its stuff appears preprocessed in the academy as mere
"environments" full of exploitable, but also protectable, "natural resources" that university faculty
and post-graduate students study continuously in order to rationalize how particular research-
oriented and management-oriented applied sciences can get down to the business of
administering their geo-power processes as terrestrial fast capitalism's "natural resource systems ."
 AT Perm – Tech DA
Tech Focus DA – the perm fails – Its Anti-consumeristaction is still rooted in
technological thinking – it tries to reason with our current situation and doesn’t pose
the question as a problem of thinking.
Dreyfus ‘93 (UC Berkeley Philosophy Professor, “Cambridge Campaign to Heidegge”r, Ed. Guignon)
Such quotes make it seem Heidegger is a Luddite who would like to return from consumerism, the exploitation of the earth, and mass media to
the world of the pre-Socratic Greeks or the good old Schwarzwald peasants. Nevertheless, although Heidegger does not deny that technology
presents us with serious problems, as his thinking develops he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that focusing on loss and
destruction is still technological: "All
attempts to reckon existing reality... in terms of decline and loss , in terms of
fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior " (QCT 48; TK 45-46). Seeing our
situation as posing a problem that must be solved by appropriate action is technological too : "The
instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. ... The will to mas-
tery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control " (QCT 5,
VA 14-15)- Heidegger is clear this approach will not work. "No single [person ], no group of men," he tells
us, "no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and techni cians, no conference of leaders of
commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the atomic age " [GENDER
PARAPHRASED]
 AT Sexton – K of Sovereignty
Sexton is wrong---Anti-blackness as the root of all oppression is self-referential and requires
ignoring mass evidence to the contrary---critique’s of multiculturalism are a reason to be
weary of it’s dangers, not a reason to focus on blackness to the exclusion of other forms of
violence
Paul Spickard 9, University of California, Santa Barbara, Amalgamation Schemes:
Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume 50,
Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127
One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical
perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around
the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge
mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as
eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis
Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great
deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to
wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan
Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension
between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black.
If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is
trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that
the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the
grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing
is abstract, referential, and at key points vague.
For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are
other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the
ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese
have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and
Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his
insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that
as a political choice, but toinsist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human
experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. Sexton does point
out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes
them to the whole movement and to the subject of study, and that is not a fair assessment. The main problem is that
Sexton argues from conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around. That is, he begins with
the conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his
conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature.
When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by
doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life
(such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main
writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes
Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves . It is a pretty
tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the
multiracial movement. He might even have opened up a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several
observations that are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this is not
that book.
 AT Sovereignty Bad
Their critiques of sovereignty are mis-framings of the alternative – indigenous
sovereignty is not static and challenges Western liberal notions of ownership and
recognition. Complete rejection of sovereignty erases Indigenous spiritual and
relational connections to land and thus replicates settler colonial logics
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg, 30-34)
Before moving on to Indigenous water rights, it is further useful to understand what is meant by
Indigenous law and sovereignty throughout this dissertation, and how the inherent rights that are derived
through Indigenous law and sovereignty come to bear on Indigenous rights discourse in the settler state.
While I cannot contend with the breadth of Indigenous legal orders and conceptions of sovereignty, I highlight and mobilize
common theories and assertions in order to, first, illustrate the often-well established Indigenous legal
orders that challenge Western liberal rights-based approaches to land tenure, and secondly, to query
how water can work as the central catalyst for rethinking Indigenous rights in the settler colonial nation
state. As a settler scholar, I follow the self-positioning of Eva Mackey, and others, who “do not proceed by critically assessing and evaluating
Indigenous sovereignty claims” (Mackey 2016, 13). Rather, as Anishinaabe scholar Dale Turner notes, “the
meaning of Aboriginal
sovereignty in all its diversity is best understood by listening to the myriad voices of Aboriginal peoples
themselves” (Turner 2006, 59). Where ideologies of colonial legal positivism suggest that Indigenous peoples
cannot make sovereignty claims within the confines of the Canadian state, or that these claims must be reconcilable with the
judicial sovereignty of Canadian common law,10 I look to various and varied assertions of Indigenous
sovereignty, derived from Indigenous legal orders and which work to challenge, and in some instances,
which are mobilized in conjunction with existing Canadian legal and political frameworks without being
subservient to them (Dorries 2012; Henderson 2002).
Assertions of Indigenous sovereignty carry different meanings depending on different contexts of
engagement. For some they mean acknowledgment of Indigenous law and interpretation of treaties
under the banner of the Canadian Constitution, or in relation to the Canadian state (Henderson 2006, 2014;
Borrows 2010); for others, they mean a sharp turn from forms of state recognition and a return to land-
based practices, where self-determination, or the concept of Indigenous resurgence, may be
understood to better serve the interests of Indigenous peoples, rather than the discourse of
sovereignty with its Western political-legal connotations (Alfred 1999; Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2008;
Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2014). I try to hold both interpretations in my mind throughout this dissertation, and recognize that my own interest
in considering the limitations and potential of land and water rights in relation to the settler state may limit interpretations of sovereignty that
diverge from all forms of state engagement.
Dorries, for example, illustrates the limits of Indigenous sovereignty within the confines of state recognition,
writing, “The emphasis on rights within a legal framework limits the possibilities for decolonization to
the legal remedies offered by the western legal system ” (11). Drawing on Corntassel, she continues, “rights-based
discourse has separated questions of access to land and natural resources from those of political
autonomy” (11). While there is no doubt that “rights-based discourse ,” at least in so far as it is
overdetermined by the state, is limiting to Indigenous peoples’ political autonomy, there are numerous
Indigenous legal scholars who seek to alter the meaning of Indigenous rights within state engagement .
Indeed, if “Aboriginal rights” exist, as both Indigenous peoples and the Canadian constitution assert, and if these rights are “sui generis,” and
not in fact granted by the state, then there needs to be room within state political and legal engagement for the assertion of these rights from
the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. Turner suggests, “As a matter of survival, Aboriginal intellectuals must engage the non-Aboriginal
intellectual landscapes from which their political rights and sovereignty are articulated and put to use in Aboriginal communities”; he continues,
“Aboriginal intellectuals must develop a community of practitioners within the existing dominant legal and political intellectual communities,
while remaining an essential part of a thriving Indigenous intellectual community” (2006, 90, emphasis in original). While the “intellectual
landscapes” that Turner highlights are inherently and historically colonial, and while there are important critiques of this kind of engagement
(Alfred 1999; Coulthard 2014; Lawrence 2012), the negotiation and assertion of Indigenous rights within the Canadian legal system has been an
important means for the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in numerous and significant Indigenous rights disputes.
Henderson offers a robust definition of Indigenous sovereignty which works to reconcile the sometimes-
divergent views between state-engagement and the refusal of a “politics of recognition ”: In aboriginal thought,
sovereignty is not about absolute power; rather, it is about the subtle art of generating and sustaining
relationships. It is a distinct vision about the way humans live together and behave in kinship and an
ecosystem, a distinct tradition of philosophies and humanities. It is a distinct philosophy of justice and legal traditions
based on spiritual and ecological understandings, as well as linguistic conventions that are
interconnected with these. It operates as an implicit, inherent, epistemic, unwritten, and living concept.
(2010, 30) Understanding sovereignty as a “living concept” allows for its mobilization in various contexts and
modes of engagement, whether it be through the sometimes-necessary assertion of Indigenous
sovereignty within state engagement over Indigenous rights, or articulations of Indigenous sovereignty
that are community-facing, and focused on cultural and political resurgence from within . Drawing from
different Indigenous perspectives on the meaning and enactment of Indigenous sovereignty, I proceed on the basis of the assumption that
challenging the rights-based discourse that emerges from the state and foregrounding Indigenous resurgence within communities themselves
are not mutually exclusive decolonial projects. Rather, I assert in this dissertation that a crucial problem of state engagement with the inherent
rights of Indigenous peoples is the state’s persistence in framing Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights as illegible under colonial jurisdiction.
To be sure, where ideologies of legal positivism mark the colonial development of the Canadian nation, numerous
assertions of
Indigenous sovereignty and legal orders have disrupted these fixed notions of colonial jurisprudence on
multiple fronts, expanding and reinterpreting what is meant by Indigenous rights .11 From Chief Deskaheh’s
assertion of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and law nationally and internationally at Six Nations of the Grand River, in London, England, and at the
League of Nations in Geneva throughout the 1920s,12 to the inclusion of Section 35 under the Canadian Constitution, which some view as the
“converg(ing) of Aboriginal jurisprudence” toward an “emergent postcolonial nation” (Henderson 2006, ix), to innumerable other assertions of
Indigenous law and sovereignty “developed
across countless generations by Elders, knowledge keepers,
performers, and storytellers through their covenants, worldviews, experiences, and accumulated
wisdom” (Henderson 2006, ix-x), Indigenous sovereignty is a living, robust, complex, and integral concept
that the state must reckon with. As Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson states, “Indian sovereignty is real;
it is not a moral language game or a matter to be debated in ahistorical terms. It is what they have . . .
and thus it should be upheld and understood robustly—especially as Indians work within, against, and
beyond . . . existing frameworks” (qtd in Mackey 2016, 14). Building upon Simpson, Mackey adds, “[Indigenous]
sovereignty is central to their individual and collective lives, identities, spirituality and politics and, as a
separate matter, to negotiating nation-to-nation relationships with settlers and the settler state” (15).
Drawing from these scholars, I approach issues of Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights, sovereignty, self-determination, and legal orders
throughout this dissertation from the place, nation, and communityspecific contexts from which they emerge, recognizing and grappling with
the unique and multifaceted iterations of Indigenous assertions of sovereignty that are produced variously across Turtle Island.
Aff Cards
AT Framework Debate
 2AC Framework – Water Policy
Debating the details of water policy is able to facilitate pragmatic education that can
challenge environmental destruction and status quo ecological sovereignty
Gerlack ’08 (Andrea Gerlack, University of Arizona, “Today’s Pragmatic Water Policy: Restoration, Collaboration, and
Adaptive Management Along U.S. Rivers”, Society & Natural Resources, 21:6, ppg. 540-541)

Today’s water policy is characterized by more pragmatic intergovernmental relatio ns. It mirrors the pragmatism
of John Dewey that has been revived in recent years by philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars (Rorty 1999; Evans 2000, 312; Box
2002; Foucault 1991; Farber 1999; Karkkainen 2003; Morales 2003). For Dewey, every
social policy is ‘‘logically, and should
be actually, of the nature of an experiment’’ to be tested (Dewey 1938, 508–509). It is attuned to problems
and the development of solutions. The art of government today entails an emphasis on developing
competencies and capacities to better solve societal problems as opposed to an older effort of
legitimating sovereign rule (Foucault 1991).
Pragmatic approaches are a response to the hyperpluralism, excessive litigation, and broad public
support for environmental and restoration values that have come to characterize water policy (Gerlak
2005). No one event or piece of legislation captures the pragmatic federalism of today’s water policy
exclusively. Rather, they are place-based, collaborative, and experimental. They are unique to their
circumstances—geographic, ecological, political, and social. The division of authority or locus of
decision-making is less important. Water attorney John E. Thorson calls it the ‘‘new pragmatism’’ or ‘‘contingency
management’’—‘‘a return to practicality—whatever works!’’ (Thorson 2003, 358–359).
Although there is not an established governing philosophy or policy per se, one can discern some particular characteristics of current water
policy by taking a sweeping look at modern water-related activities and programs around rivers. Today’s
water policy is
characterized by a pragmatism that emphasizes (1) restoration efforts, (2) collaborative institutional
arrangements, and (3) adaptive management strategies. These characteristics are not applied uniformly
within water systems or geographic locations, nor do they exist in all systems or watersheds.
Increasingly, decision makers and environmental organizations are emphasizing the restoration of
streams and rivers in the United States . In 1992 the National Research Council (NRC) recommended the restoration of
ecologically altered rivers and streams in the United States (NRC 1992). It is estimated that more than $1 billion is being spent on river and
stream restoration projects nationwide today, with the number of projects increasing by six times over the past 10 years (Bernhardt et al. 2005,
636–637). Thereare a range of restoration efforts underway including reclamation efforts, dam removals,
restoration of habitat, and simulation of natural flows (Lowry 2003, 61–62; Clark 2004). The Comprehensive Everglades
Restoration Plan passed by Congress in 2000 is considered to be the largest ecosystem restoration project in human history (Clarke and
Dalrymple 2003, 541). The objective of the plan is the restoration of the ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region,
including water supply and flood protection (U.S. Army Corps and South Florida Water Management District [SFWMD] 2003).
As in the case of the Everglades, other restoration efforts also aim to integrate ecosystem restoration goals with engineering and development
strategies. For example, the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, dating back to the late 1980s, is designed to both
recover endangered Colorado River basin fish and provide for future water deliveries for agricultural, municipal, and hydroelectric uses (U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service [USFWS] 2005). In April 2005, after nine years of planning, implementation began on the Lower Colorado River
MultiSpecies Conservation Program. This
multi-agency coordinated effort aims to ‘‘conserve and recover
endangered species and to protect and maintain wildlife habitat on the lower Colorado River’’ (U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation [USBR] 2005). There are also restoration efforts underway on the Upper Mississippi. An active
coalition of environmental and representative committees plan and implement habitat restoration along
the river and improve governmental coordination and research activities (Northeast Midwest Institute 2005). Efforts
are even underway to devise a way to restore the Los Angeles River, a system thought to have become the ‘‘world’s largest storm drain’’
(Millions 2005; Hyman 2005).
In response to growing political pressure, federal natural resource agencies have expanded their
missions to incorporate environmental restoration values. For example, the Bureau of Reclamation announced a policy of
‘‘no new dams’’ in 1987, changing its mission from water developer to water manager. Under the Clinton Administration, the Army Corps of
Engineers began its transition to ‘‘environmental protector,’’ moving from a water development mission to a water management one (Clarke
and McCool 1996, 45).
Despite the rise of restoration strategies in recent years, there is little agreement on what constitutes successful river restoration efforts today
(Palmer et al. 2005, 208). Moreover, not all participants in a particular restoration effort may even define it or see it the same way (Woolley and
McGinnis 2000, 340; Connelley and Knuth 2002). Some scientists have raised concerns that there is not enough monitoring of restoration
projects (Bash and Ryan 2002).
 2AC Framework – Fiat/Legal Details Good
Debate is imperfect, but only our interpretation can harness legal education to
understand the law’s strategic reversibility paired with intellectual survival skills that
help us navigate and contest violent structures. This is the most plausible internal link
from debate to meaningful social and political agitation for social justice.
Archer ‘18 (Deborah N., Associate Professor of Clinical Law @ NYU School of Law, “POLITICAL LAWYERING FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY,” draft, pp. 1-43) *Edited*

Many law students are overwhelmed by injustice. When faced with the reality of systemic inequities, even
the most committed students may surrender to hopelessness, despair, and inaction. This is not because they
have stopped caring about injustice, but because they cannot envision a path from injustice to justice . Many do
not have the tools to navigate systemic injustice or respond to interwoven legal and social ills. This article
contends that although clinical legal education provides an excellent opportunity to offer students the skills, experience, perspective, and
confidence to grapple with today’s complex social justice issues, it has not sufficiently responded to the changing
educational needs of our students by teaching law students how to most effectively utilize litigation
alongside other tools of systemic reform advocacy.
How can clinical education prepare law students to navigate issues of systemic discrimination and injustice? Clinical teaching’s signature
pedagogical vehicle involves students providing direct representation of individual clients in straightforward, manageable cases in which
students focus on discrete legal issues, take full ownership of the case, and see it through from beginning to end.1 These cases
train
students to be creative problem solvers for individual clients. However, this model does not effectively
prepare students to address and combat structural or chronic inequality. The individualized model also
provides relatively limited opportunities for students to address the intellectual and skills-based
challenges of lawyering on a larger scale. 2 Complex cases allow students to explore the complicated relationship between
justice, law, and politics.3 They introduce students to many of the skills needed to integrate rebellious or political lawyering
into their practice, including working with others to brainstorm, design, and execute an advocacy strategy;
helping to build and participate in a coalition; engaging in integrated advocacy; and analyzing the
outside forces that help shape outcomes, including organizational capacity, challenges of enforcement,
and potential political backlash.4
There is a longstanding and ongoing debate within the clinical legal education community about the relative merits of small, individual cases
versus larger impact advocacy matters.5 The parameters of this debate, coupled with an influential body of clinical scholarship criticizing impact
litigation and the lawyers who bring it,6 have led the clinical teaching community to overreact to these critiques by moving farther away from
impact advocacy and strategic litigation rather than working to reconcile the legitimate concerns with the critical importance of impact
advocacy as a tool for both systemic social change and legal education. Law schools also face internal and external pressures that affect their
willingness to engage students in strategic litigation. The result is that important benefits of impact advocacy and strategic litigation have
gotten lost or minimized.
Twenty years ago, social justice advocates rallied around political lawyering as a tool for more effective
advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities.7 Political lawyering employs a systemic reform lens
in case selection, advocacy strategy, and lawyering process, with a focus on legal work done in service
to both individual and collective goals.8 While litigation is central to political lawyering, political lawyers
recognize that litigation, interdisciplinary collaboration, policy reform, and community organization
must to proceed together. Litigation is just one piece of a complex advocacy puzzle. However, clinical law
professors have never fully grappled with how to employ this model.9
Law professors today seeking to train the next generation of social justice advocates should expose
students to the transformational potential of integrated advocacy —strategic litigation, community organizing, direct
action, media strategies, and interdisciplinary collaboration proceeding together— in the fight for social change. Political
lawyering can serve as a model. The NAACP strategy of building comprehensive advocacy campaigns to
challenge racial and economic injustice helped to launch the political lawyering movement in the last
century.10 But political lawyering in the 21st century needs to do more. It needs to re-embrace and update the
concept of integrated advocacy to help lawyers leverage a broad range of tools and perspectives to
generate effective approaches to issues of injustice, both nascent and chronic. Charles Hamilton Houston, the
architect of the strategy to challenge the racialized policy of “separate but equal,” whose life work challenged racial injustice in novel ways,
famously explained that “a lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society,” defining social engineer as a “highly skilled,
perceptive, sensitive lawyer who understood the Constitution of the United States and knew how to explore its uses in the solving of problems
of local communities and in bettering the conditions of the underprivileged citizens.”11 Law schools should set as an ambition teaching
students to push boundaries in diagnosing and tackling the most pressing problems facing society.
The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I discusses political lawyering and explores its potential to serve as a framework to teach students the legal and extra-legal advocacy skills necessary to tackle the complex challenges of
systemic injustice and inequity. Part I also discusses the institutional barriers that limit the ability and willingness of legal educators to exploit the pedagogical potential of a political lawyering framework, including the idea that
litigation is often harmful to the cause of justice because it puts the lawyer ahead of the community being served. Part I then examines whether the choice that clinical legal education makes to teach through small, single-issue
cases rather than through more complex vehicles offers students sufficient opportunities to develop the array of skills needed for integrated advocacy. Part II describes the ways that clinical legal education can reframe political
lawyering as political justice lawyering, both to adapt to the current environment—complicated by the current partisan political climate—and the contemporary challenges of social justice advocacy. It also explores pedagogic
strategies that clinical legal educators can employ to train effective 21st century social justice lawyers. Finally, Part III presents a case study from my own teaching to elucidate the opportunities and challenges inherent in this
approach to clinical teaching.
I. POLITICAL LAWYERING AS A FRAMEWORK FOR LEGAL EDUCATION
“Social vision is part of the operating ethos of self-conscious law practice. The fact that most law practice is not done self-consciously is simply a function of the degree to which most law practice serves the status quo. Self-
conscious practice appears to be less important, and is always less destabilizing, when it serves what is, rather than what ought to be.”
- Gary Bellow12
In 1996, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review published a symposium on “political lawyering”: a model of social justice advocacy that integrates legal advocacy and political mobilization by linking courtroom advocacy
to community education, mobilization, and organizing.13 The symposium, honoring Gary Bellow, a leading political lawyer of the time and one of the architects of clinical legal education, explored the potential for political
lawyering to respond to the social justice challenges of the moment.14 At the time of the symposium, progressive scholars and activists believed that America was in a period of retrenchment on civil rights and were in search of
sources of hope.15 In the face of waning public support for the poor and disenfranchised, both financially and philosophically, one of the biggest dangers social justice advocates faced was despair about the possibility of
progress.16 Bellow contended that the nation’s ideological reconfiguration created a potentially debilitating doubt among lawyer-activists who, faced with declining avenues for change, had “embraced a far too constricted
definition of both the possible and desirable in law-oriented interventions than is, in fact, dictated by the rightward turn of national and local politics.”17 With victory harder to achieve, he insisted that lawyers who embraced and
reimagined political lawyering would advance the fight for equality more effectively.
The purpose of political lawyering is not to advance a particular partisan agenda: It is to represent disenfranchised communities against the forces of oppression.18 While difficult to define precisely, political lawyers take a
politicized and value-oriented approach to legal work done in service to both individual and collective goals,19 embracing “politics” in the classical sense as a concern “with what it means to be human; what is the best life for a
human being; and . . . the ways in which we can order our living together so that good human lives will emerge.”20 Practically, political lawyers use a systemic reform lens in decisions about case selection, advocacy strategy, and
the lawyering process. Political lawyers think about the relationship between law, politics, and justice21 and use the law to animate fundamental change in society, to alter the allocation of power and opportunity, and to enable
those individuals and communities with little power to claim and enjoy their rights.22 Political lawyers also take advantage of opportunities to influence the perceptions and behaviors of those in power.23 Finally, political lawyers
empower individuals and communities by providing them with competent legal advocacy,24 but do not confine themselves to one mode of advocacy in their quest for structural change. Instead, political lawyers use integrated
advocacy strategies, including litigation, legislative advocacy, public education, media, and social science research, assessing the efficacy and impact of each tool in service to a long-term visions of equality and solidarity.25
A. A ROLE FOR POLITICAL LAWYERING IN CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
In his essay, Gary Bellow described several examples of his experience as a political lawyer.26 He reflected that:
Certainly, if one focuses on the strategies employed in these examples, few uniformities emerge. In some of the efforts, we sought rule changes or injunctive relief against a particular practice on behalf of an identified class. In
other situations, we pursued aggregate results by filing large numbers of individual cases. Some strategies are carried out in the courts. At other times we ignored litigation entirely in favor of bureaucratic maneuvering and
community and union organizing. Even when pursuing litigation, we often placed far greater emphasis on mobilizing and educating clients, or strengthening the entities and organizations that represented them, than on judicial
outcomes. And always, we employed the lawsuit, whether pushed to conclusion or not, as a vehicle for gathering information, positioning adversaries, asserting bargaining leverage, and adding to the continuing process of
definition and designation that occurs in any conflict.27

The parallels between the challenges social justice lawyers faced in the 1980s and 1990s and those that
law students committed to social justice 28 face today are evident. As discussed earlier, law students’ own despair
about the enormity of the fight for justice can compromise their ability to recognize and tackle chronic
injustice. Like the earlier generation of political lawyers Bellow described, many law students today find it difficult to believe in
the possibility of change let alone its likelihood. Inexperience challenging systemic legal problems
exacerbates their skepticism. They recognize that the advocacy tools they have learned are insufficient to solve today’s problems,
which fuels their sense of doubt.
To help expand their understanding of what may be possible, law students, particularly those interested in continuing the fight
for racial justice, should be taught to understand and embrace the goals, strategies, and tools of political
lawyering—re-imagined for current times. Clinical professors need not adopt political lawyering wholesale as the only or primary approach
to teaching lawyering skills and legal advocacy. Indeed, one of the challenges social justice advocates face is unnecessarily limiting the
understanding of what it means to be a good lawyer. Rather, clinical professors should explore political lawyering as one framework they can
use to help struggling law students find direction and inspiration, as well as to create a sense of connection to the work of the social justice
lawyers who preceded them. As Gary Bellow wrote:
Doubt and defeatism, the sense of overly pessimistic assessments of action possibilities, are recurrent experiences in oppositional
politics, whomever the political actors may be. They require hard-headed assessments of what works and why ; a
willingness to relinquish strategies and goals born of different possibilities and particularities. . . . Doubt and defeatism produce
powerful spirals that can only be broken by acts of will and leaps of faith.29
To be an effective political lawyer, an advocate must have a “profound willingness and ability to learn about and respond to the complexity of
real human beings in ever-shifting legal, economic, and social worlds.”30 So, while political lawyering is certainly grounded in effective legal
advocacy, it demands more than conventional legal skills. The political lawyer values deep personal involvement as a necessary component in
addressing and tackling legal issues. That personal engagement can take many forms, but, at a minimum, involves countless conversations,
collaborative brainstorming, comparing shared experiences, and adding empathy and commonality to enhance the legal analysis and political
judgment.31 It also requires lawyers to advocate with a clear vision of what justice looks like because effective
political lawyering “reache[s] not only across large numbers of people, but from the present into some altered version of the future.”32
Learning to combine savvy legal analysis with broad engagement, a deeper understanding of the
complexity of the problems faced by impacted communities, and envisioning an altered and more just future can
help lead to real solutions and overcome passivity and paralysis.33
The Civil Rights Movement, with its blended advocacy strategies, pulling a variety of levers to enable immediate or systemic change,
offers one example of political lawyering. Visionary leaders helped give voice to the frustrations and demands of the community, while
other leaders acted as tacticians to devise, plan, and coordinate the strategy.34 There were sustained and strategic protests to draw public
attention to injustices, demand change, and apply political pressure. The
strategic use of litigation led gradually to the
establishment of the building blocks for systemic change. Finally, civil rights lawyers worked to enshrine
litigation victories in legislation.35
While the goal of political lawyering is to empower and advance the rights of disadvantaged communities, the lawyers who engage in it also reap significant benefits. One scholar effectively articulated some of these benefits
utilizing religious terms, asserting that political lawyering can provide hope and direction to advocates by providing a “faith”—“a story, an account of a rational hope that provides people with an image and principles for realizing
the sort of lives they ought to live.”36 Political lawyering can also provide what Christians refer to as a “gospel”—a story that explains and inspires.37 The faith and gospel of political lawyering can help lead law students who are
overwhelmed by injustice to a place of deeper understanding and more effective advocacy. But law students must learn how to understand, articulate, and deploy that faith and gospel in service of others.
B. INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON POLITICAL LAWYERING

Complex social justice problems offer robust opportunities to teach students about the law and
lawyering, and legal clinics serve as an important vehicle to bring that set of issues and experiences into the
classroom.38 As law schools reevaluate the nature and function of legal education in light of market forces,39 they should also give
attention to the role of justice in the curriculum and the potential for law school clinics to be centers for incubation of new and evolving models
of lawyering. By embracing political lawyering and encouraging engagement on complex and novel social justice issues, clinical legal education
can operate as a “generator of new visions for legal practice” on behalf of poor and marginalized communities.40 Of course, that choice is not
without hurdles or concern.
1. Ideological, Financial, and Pedagogical Pressures
When clinical and experiential learning programs have moved away from an access to justice model—with a focus on the immediate challenges facing individual clients—to a broader social justice model focused on systemic reform
and community empowerment, they have often encountered criticism from inside and outside of the legal academy.41 First, critics have raised concerns that integrated advocacy in support of systemic reform may elevate the
profile of faculty and law schools but detract from an appropriate focus on the educational goals of individual students.42 Others have identified the potential for violating the separation between pedagogy and partisan politics.43
And still other critics have identified a risk that faculty will impose their personal political perspectives on their students.44 As discussed in more detail below, integrated advocacy strategies can, in fact, serve as valuable clinical
teaching tools that promote broader student learning and support important pedagogical goals. By contrast, exclusive reliance on individual representation offers limited opportunities to teach essential lawyering skills, including
the skills critical to identifying and challenging systemic injustice.45
Every clinical program makes a political decision in deciding which cases to take or not to take, as each decision has political implications.46 Accepting cases in criminal justice, immigration, environmental justice, and international
human rights, for example, involves political choices, regardless of whether the issues are addressed through individual representation or systemic reform efforts.47 Clinics will continue to represent individual clients who are the
victims of poverty, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. These cases do not suddenly become inappropriate teaching tools because the lawyer aggregates those claims and utilizes complementary strategies to seek systemic,
community-wide redress. Lawyers must be free to use all available means to challenge the marginalization of their clients, including strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and other advocacy strategies designed to achieve
systemic reform. If law schools intend to fulfill their promise to prepare law students to tackle urgent and pressing challenges, then they must teach students to identify and address interlocking legal and social problems.
Still, while law schools have educational ambitions, they also face financial demands that might affect their educational choices. In fact, those financial realities may motivate schools to avoid disputes that expose them to financial
risk and to a potential loss of good will that a clinic’s involvement in controversial cases might occasion.48 While that institutional concern certainly has merit, it is not unique to political lawyering on behalf of clients. Whenever a
law school chooses to represent clients, there is the potential for someone to take issue with the school’s choice of side or client. Similarly, law schools may experience external pressures from government, private entities, donors,
and alumni to prevent the use of law school resources to challenge powerful corporate or government interests.49 These critiques evoke the successful challenge to Legal Services Corporations engaging in class action litigation on
behalf of their clients50 and the long history of efforts to limit the means through which clinics can represent their clients.51 History is replete with examples of external attacks on law schools’ clinical efforts. From the 1968 attack
by state legislators on the clinical program at the University of Mississippi School of Law over its involvement in a school desegregation suit,52 to the early 1980s threats to limit the activities of the University of Connecticut’s
criminal defense clinic after the clinic successfully challenged a provision of the state’s death penalty statute,53 to the 2017 decision of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to defund the law school’s Center for Civil
Rights’ work to challenge systemic and racialized barriers to equality, law schools have experienced public scrutiny and scorn for their client and case selection decisions.
A clinical faculty member’s case selection decisions should not be without limits or guidelines. For example, limited resources and specific pedagogical objectives will necessarily dictate which cases will be considered appropriate.
However, making case selection decisions on the basis of pedagogical choices differs fundamentally from decisions based on ideological pressure from outside forces. The latter raises fundamental questions of academic freedom
and other professional responsibilities.54 Clinical faculty members must maintain some independence to choose cases and clients that meet that clinic’s educational and public service goals.55
2. The Anti-Litigation Bias
Political lawyers have long embraced litigation’s potential to achieve “radical extensions of democracy, equality, and racial justice” in addition to structural and cultural change.56 Law reform and structural change are important
aspects of political lawyering.57 Accordingly, impact litigation on behalf of marginalized people and communities has long been an important tool for political lawyers.58 Indeed, the NAACP’s fight against racial segregation and
inequality in the 1940s and 1950s represents an early example of political lawyering that strategically deployed litigation as part of
a comprehensive effort to resist oppression and advance equality.59 Political lawyering never embraced an exaggerated belief that litigation should be the centerpiece of the fight for equality.60 Instead, like the advocates at the
heart of the NAACP’s desegregation strategy, political lawyers “recognized that litigation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community organization had to proceed together.”61
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, political and cultural shifts affected the strategies many political lawyers employed. New federal restrictions on the use of impact litigation and legislative advocacy by legal services lawyers were a
cause of significant concern.62 Where impact litigation remained a possibility, many political lawyers worried that litigation offered a dangerous path. Although federal courts, in particular, had proved supportive in the fight for
racial justice in the 1960s, progressive lawyers in later years worried that a more conservative judiciary was just as likely, if not more inclined, to set back progressive movements.63 This concern proved correct, particularly in the
area of racial justice. Decades of conservative appointments to the federal bench64 led to a series of legal setbacks65 that effectively limited the federal courts as a venue for the redress of illegal discrimination.66 Many advocates
also believed that while progressive lawyers were toiling away in the courtroom and achieving only minor success, conservative advocacy groups had mastered the more efficacious strategy of building powerful grassroots
constituencies.67
As courts increased their hostility to civil rights and racial justice, making victory and progress more difficult, political lawyers turned away from litigation and began focusing on alternative methods to fight for social change.68
While the labels have changed, the fundamental purpose of the work remained the same. Political lawyering gave way to rebellious lawyering, community lawyering, and movement lawyering.69 These models of advocacy
embrace different visions of advocacy that may vary in the emphasis placed on the law’s comparative advantage relative to other strategic methodologies and tools.70 But, they all acknowledge the bond that joins client,
community, and lawyer together in a common enterprise: empowering those without power and fighting for justice and equality. The de-emphasis on strategic litigation brought real benefits. It encouraged lawyers to work as
members of a team, and challenged lawyers to ensure that those marginalized by injustice played a central role both as the focus of the advocacy and as participants in the advocacy, a positive turn regardless of the motivation.71
This evolution came at a cost. What began as a tactical de-emphasis on litigation evolved into a philosophical bias against litigation as a social justice advocacy tool.72 Initially, social justice lawyers turned away from impact
litigation because they feared that an increasingly conservative judiciary would use these cases as an opportunity to further roll back prior gains. However, with time, the reluctance to pursue litigation became less a reaction to
circumstance and more a matter of principle. Some writers argued that litigation is a tool through which lawyers usurp the authority of already marginalized clients by setting their priorities for them.73 And, they claimed that
litigation disempowers communities because of the unbalanced power dynamics between social justice lawyers and marginalized clients.74 An example is the dialogue around rebellious lawyering, one of the most prominent
models for social change advocacy. Gerald López conceptualized rebellious lawyering as an advocacy model that would empower poor clients through grassroots, community-based advocacy that was facilitated by lawyers.75
Rebellious lawyering emphasizes concepts of community organization, mobilization, and “deprofessionalization.”76 It calls on lawyers to reflect on critical elements of the attorney-client relationship that may further oppress
members of marginalized communities.77 Through rebellious lawyering, Professor López advances the belief that although lawyers should help solve problems facing the poor, lawyers are not the preeminent problem solvers in
that relationship and should defer to clients and communities.78 Gerald López prefers that lawyers focus on “teaching self-help and lay lawyering” to empower communities to help themselves.79
Professor López espoused his positive vision of rebellious lawyering as an alternative to what he calls regnant lawyering.80 Professor López asserts that regnant lawyers are convinced that they need to be the primary and active
leaders in their representation of poor people. Regnant lawyers find community education and empowerment to be of only marginal importance.81 The result is that the regnant lawyer dominates the attorney-client relationship,
giving little voice to the needs or concerns of the client. Finally, Professor López also believes that regnant lawyers have little practical understanding of legal, political, and social structures.82
Rebellious lawyering raised important questions about the role litigation should play in social justice movements. Gerald Lopez was certainly skeptical that “legal technicians” could make a meaningful contribution83 and
questioned whether lawyers turned to litigation because it was best for the client or because the lawyer wanted to play “hero.”84 All political lawyers should ask themselves these questions when considering impact litigation as
part of integrated advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities.85 But, over time, commentators began to equate regnant lawyering with impact litigation.86 Some social justice advocates argued that impact litigation
perpetuated racism because white lawyers used it as a tool to impose their views on communities of color.87 Others advanced images of litigators as outsiders who used poor communities as guinea pigs in their social justice
experiments, warning that “practicing law in the community is not a tourist adventure and, therefore, we must eschew the routine of the autonomous, interloping advocate who dreams up cases in the home office and then tests
them on the community.”88 Litigation, and systemic reform litigation in particular, became synonymous with regnant lawyering: an “enemy” of social justice and not a tool fit for people committed to fighting for enduring social
change.
Derrick Bell
advanced one of the most prominent and influential critiques of litigation. 89 Although he
acknowledged the success of the first decade of school desegregation litigation, Professor Bell questioned the lack
of lawyer accountability to marginalized communities. According to Professor Bell, NAACP lawyers continued to employ an
advocacy strategy that focused on structural school desegregation, even while many members of the Black community preferred a strategy that
would have focused on building quality, though segregated, neighborhood schools.90 He cautioned that social justice advocates failed to
acknowledge growing conflicts between what they believed were the long-range goals for their clients and the client’s evolving interests and
needs.91 In the end, many members of the impacted community were left feeling marginalized. Professor Bell also suggested that “civil rights
lawyers, like their more candid poverty law colleagues, are making decisions, setting priorities, and undertaking responsibilities that should be
determined by their clients and shaped by the community.”92
Certainly, many lawyers who use litigation as a tool for social change are regnant and paternalistic, but
these qualities are not inherent in litigators working with marginalized communities.93 Social justice advocates
should have a healthy skepticism about the ability of the law, standing alone, to achieve lasting social
change.94 They should always engage in advocacy that moves the client from the margins to the
center.95 But, advocates should also resist pressure to narrow the definition of what it means to be a
great lawyer. The discussion of social justice advocacy far too often collapses the framework not only of
political lawyering, but all advocacy on behalf of poor and marginalized individuals and communities ,
into one that largely rejects the important role that strategic litigation has played and can continue to
play in the fight for social justice. The ubiquity of the anti-litigation narrative encourages progressive
law students—and many clinical law professors—to dismiss litigation and its potential for challenging bias and
discrimination. Many progressive law students are afraid to become the professionals they envisioned
they would be.96 They do not want to become the discrimination tourist derided in the literature.
In response to the critique of social justice litigation, there is a growing body of scholarship supporting the conclusion
that litigation is a key strategy for protecting and expanding the rights of marginalized communities. 97
This body of scholarship acknowledges that litigation has played a critical role in the struggle for justice
and equality, and that it continues to be “an imperfect but indispensable strategy of social change.”98
Finally, these scholars examine social justice litigation in the context of the tradeoffs of different forms of activism, evaluating its potential in
relation to available alternatives and revealing a new understanding of the link between law and social justice reform.99
The demonization of strategic litigation that persists in many progressive lawyering circles not only
contributes to student paralysis, it gives them a false sense of what it means to engage in systemic
reform litigation on behalf of clients and the community. Many prominent critiques of impact litigation neither
provide an accurate depiction of the potential of that litigation, nor educate students on how to apply
principles of political lawyering to that litigation. Indeed, while Derrick Bell prominently critiqued the role of strategic litigation in
social justice movements, he also believed that litigation
can be an important means of calling attention to perceived injustice ; more important, . . . litigation presents
opportunities for improving the weak economic and political position which renders the black community vulnerable to the specific injustices
the litigation is intended to correct. Litigation can and should serve lawyer and client, as a community-organizing tool, an educational forum, a
means of obtaining data, a method of exercising political leverage, and a rallying point for public support.100
Law students should be taught that lawyers who engage in systemic reform litigation, just like any other lawyer, can and should work with and
on behalf of those victimized by discrimination. Indeed, despite the one- dimensional picture often painted for law students, not all progressive
lawyers believe that “self-help” should be the focus of lawyering on behalf of poor or marginalized communities.101 Moreover, despite
the image of the “interloping advocate who dreams up cases in the home office and then tests them on
the community,” not all progressive lawyers believe that it is inappropriate for lawyers to independently
analyze social justice issues and develop ideas about ways to use the law to bring society closer to
justice. Indeed, “it is artificially constricting to conceive of lawyers as exclusively or primarily problem-
solvers. [Lawyers] are not only social mechanics who wait in [their] shops for people to come to [them] with problems to be fixed.
[Lawyers] should sometimes create problems. [Lawyers] should sometimes deliver problems by translating
people’s anger and hurt and insistence on justice into political as well as legal action.”102 Many great
advocacy ideas bubble up from the community , but equally valid ideas can come from advocates who
have been working with and for those communities (or are members of the community themselves). Progressive advocates
must be prepared to provide legal assistance to clients even when those clients do not wish to be active participants in the advocacy. That is
embracing the core meaning of client-centered lawyering. Rather
than being taught to avoid litigation at all costs,
progressive law students need to learn how they can partner with victims of discrimination and be
accountable to those victims in the context of litigation. They need to learn the skills of collaborative leadership in law.103
Advocates should also be careful about advancing a one-size-fits-all model of advocacy,104 lumping
everything together under the “social justice advocacy” moniker or work on behalf of the “poor and
disadvantaged” and assuming that one advocacy approach will work to solve all problems. Sometimes using
“social justice” to refer to all of the work being done on behalf of poor and marginalized communities is the right thing to do—it unifies all of
those who are fighting injustice on varying fronts. But, it can be harmful when discussing what advocacy tools will be most effective. Given
the many forms that discrimination takes and the many communities subject to discrimination, law professors
should caution students to be suspicious about broad generalizations about what clients always need or
do not need, and what lawyers always should or should not do. There is no universal theory about how
to represent disadvantaged or marginalized people. What works in the fight for economic justice may
not be the best strategy to achieving racial justice.105 And what may be appropriate to help one victim
of racial discrimination may not work for another. There is room for all types of advocates and
advocacy.106 All advocates can be a part of the circle of human concern.107
3. The Preferred Model: Individual Representation
Representing individual clients in small, manageable cases where students retain primary control has long been the preferred vehicle for teaching students to effectively address their clients’ legal problems.108 But many clinical
programs focused on representing individual clients are not providing opportunities for students to learn how to utilize the law effectively to challenge systemic discrimination. In addition to teaching foundational lawyering skills
like client interviewing, counseling, and fact investigation, clinics should also provide opportunities to teach complex and multi- dimensional lawyering skills.109 As this Section demonstrates, the clinical community’s
disproportionate focus on micro-lawyering skills may be hampering the ability of students to focus on the political and social functions of the law and the structural dimensions of the problems facing client communities.110
The founding goals of clinical legal education were to provide law students the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to practice law and provide quality legal services to the poor.111 These origins closely shaped the
development of clinical pedagogy and its current emphasis on individual representation.112 Small cases allow law students to have the primary relationship with the client, manage the case from beginning to end, and analyze
relatively straightforward legal issues—all core principles of clinical pedagogy.113 The reliance on small cases also provides students with the invaluable opportunity to reflect deeply on the choices advocates make in creating and
maintaining lawyer-client relationships.114
In the early years of the clinical legal education movement, most clinical law professors came from legal services organizations and brought with them a preference for the individual client representation that dominated legal
services practice.115 Clinical professors embody their learning objectives in their case selection116 and must prioritize some lawyering skills over others because there are limits to what can be learned in a single clinical course.117
In focusing on small cases, early clinicians understandably prioritized the skills they knew to be critical to their own work on behalf of poor individuals.
Today, clinical professors come to teaching from a broader array of professional backgrounds, and unsurprisingly want to bring their experiences into the classroom. They should be encouraged to make clinic design choices and set
educational goals for their students based on the skills and knowledge they know to be necessary for success in their own practice areas. To many, the approaches clinical professors adopted at the beginning of the clinical legal
education movement are not the answers to the questions and challenges our students face today. An exclusive reliance on small cases, though they are extremely valuable teaching tools, fails many students because small cases
offer limited opportunities to teach a broad array of lawyering skills, including the skills critical to challenging systemic injustice.118 Of course, small cases have value—for the client and student both. But, in the new normal, they
are often not enough to carry the weight of change.
“Social justice work is rarely easy, clean, or pretty.”119 It can be downright messy and clinics should not shield students from its messiness. Working on larger, more complex cases exposes students to more of the skills necessary
to fight for structural change.120 They can learn to exercise intellectual autonomy and to integrate conceptual thinking in their advocacy.121 They teach students how to achieve client objectives while also advancing broader social
justice goals. Finally, in complex cases where litigation is a viable option, students are exposed to fundamental questions such as what claims to assert, where to file, who to represent, and who to sue. Students cannot be practice
ready without some exposure to these skills.
Some clinical legal educators have questioned the traditional model of clinical education, arguing instead for engaging in work with a broader social justice impact.122 One basis for this argument, for example, is that “case-
centered clinics are primarily accountable to students and law school administrators, rather than clients, and fail to serve political collectives.”123 In this conception, clinics prioritize student interests over community interests by
accepting only those cases over which students will have full responsibility and reject more complex cases where the students’ limited skills would make that impossible. This is done even when the communities’ interests—and
thus the cause of social justice—would be better served by the more complex cases.124 While this critique is framed in terms of benefits to students versus losses to social justice, there is indeed a loss to students as well.
Clinical legal educators who are teaching the next generation of social and racial justice advocates should help students understand the current legal framework for equality, and develop the ability to utilize that framework
creatively on behalf of their clients. But, students also have to learn to transcend and reimagine current institutional frames, to conceptualize avenues for relief, create new narratives, and pull together the building blocks of a new
legal framework to establish rights that did not exist before. Indeed, many of the challenges facing America today require reimagining justice from the ground up. Future social justice advocates must have social vision—“vision-
making work is fundamental to the activist strategies political lawyering inevitably embodies.”125
Charles Hamilton Houston not only taught his law students to conceive that separate can never be equal, he taught them how to develop a legal theory in support of that idea and then to develop an integrated advocacy strategy,
including complex litigation, to give that theory legal effect. “The process of linking strategy to political vision always requires adaptation and a detailed understanding of particular contexts for its effectiveness.”126 Moreover, as
students move from theory to legal reality, they have to understand the skills required to genuinely engage the community. Indeed, “it is no simple matter to reconcile commitment to both clients and a larger social vision or to
navigate the boundary between the insider and outsider communities in which political lawyers work.”127
There are, of course, trade-offs involved in engaging clinical students in impact advocacy, both for the student and the teacher.128 Many clinical faculty have expressed concerns that systemic reform work and complex vocacy
matters require too high a cost to core pedagogical goals.129 There is a sense that “big cases” may achieve important social justice goals, but use student tuition to finance political goals without attendant benefits to the students’
education.130 According to this line of critique, if the fundamental goal of clinical legal education is the education of students, clinical education needs to continue to focus on small cases that allow for complete student ownership,
with a student seeing the case through from beginning to end.131 Many clinicians believe that complete student ownership from beginning to end is critical to an effective clinical experience, and that this level of student
ownership is not possible in big cases.132
The problem with this argument is that giving clinic students sole control of a case from beginning to end is not the only way to maximize student learning. Close collaboration with clinical educators, fellow students, clients, and
other collaborators offers rich opportunities for student learning. Working with those collaborators to evaluate a complex problem, consider whether a litigation strategy is appropriate, and implementing that strategy, is precisely
the kind of experience students will need to master in political lawyering practice. If clinical programs want to ensure that social justice students develop the skills and values necessary to be responsible and effective lawyers before
they graduate, students should have the opportunity to be exposed to advocacy models beyond individual client representation. Otherwise, clinics are missing an opportunity to teach students to embrace and engage in social
justice work broadly.
II. REFRAMING POLITICAL LAWYERING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Modern social problems present new challenges for political lawyers. As such, political lawyers must evaluate the tools an earlier generation of political lawyers used to determine how to employ them in light of changed
conditions. Social justice advocates have destabilized the dominant understanding of lawyering.133 Modern political lawyering must continue that process of destabilization, exploring alternatives to the way lawyers marshal social
and economic capital, make strategic decisions, and transgress current structures and constraints.134 Political lawyering advocates should also question attempts to constrict the understanding of what lawyering tools can be
employed in service to communities and in furtherance of justice.
A. Expanding the Advocacy Perspective

At the core of Derrick Bell’s critique of the latter stages of the campaign to desegregate public education is the divergence he
saw between the interests of NAACP lawyers and those of certain segments of the Black community that evolved after the launch of the
school desegregation campaign.135 In many ways, this divergence was the result of a failure to communicate. To effectively engage in
the integrated advocacy central to political lawyering , those engaged in individual representation, strategic litigation,
legislative advocacy, community organizing, public education, direct action, and other forms of advocacy must remain in constant conversation.
They must also use
their work to facilitate a constant dialogue between the community, courts,
government agencies, and legislatures at the local, state, and national levels.
 Empiricism Good - Realism
AT Empiricism - Adopting a prescriptive realist theory as a guide for foreign policy is
critical to correct policy errors and minimize violence
Rosato and Schuessler ‘11 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame AND Assistant Professor of
Strategy and International Security at the Air War College (Sebastian and John, “A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States”, Perspectives on
Politics December 2011 Vol. 9 No. 4)

With these requirements in mind, we describe and defend a prescriptive realist theory of foreign policy to guide
American decision makers as they navigate the current environment. Briefly, the theory says that if they want to ensure their
security, great powers such as the United States should balance against other great powers and also against hostile
minor powers that inhabit strategically important regions of the world. We then show that had the great powers followed our
theory’s prescriptions, some of the most important wars of the past century might have been averted .
Specifically, the world wars might not have occurred, and the United States might not have gone to war in either Vietnam or Iraq. In other
words, realism as we conceive it offers the prospect of security without war. Our argument is likely to be controversial
because few observers think that a realist foreign policy can minimize the chances of war. Indeed, the
main reason that “no one
loves a political realist” arises from the intimate association that realism is thought to have with war. 13 The
criticism takes several forms: some argue that realism is a license for aggression; others that it perpetuates
competitive behavior; still others that it advances few ideas on how to overcome interstate conflict, thus
foreclosing possibilities for progressive change. 14 As a result, most analysts consider realism an inappropriate guide to
current US foreign policy. Liberals have been quite outspoken in leveling these kinds of charges, claiming that realism
neglects transformative developments such as globalization, democratization, and the proliferation of international institutions,
all of which offer the possibility of an enduring peace. 15 Robert Keohane observes that realism “is better at telling us why we are in such
trouble than how to get out of it.” 16 Realism, that is, may explain why international politics is conflictual, but provides little guidance for
overcoming that conflict peacefully. For Keohane, such complacency is morally unacceptable, leading him to conclude that “no serious thinker
could . . . be satisfied with Realism as the correct theory of world politics.” He advises scholars to focus on international institutions instead:
“Unlike Realism, theories that attempt to explain rules, norms, and institutions help us to understand how to create patterns of cooperation
that could be essential to our survival.” 17 Bruce Russett adopts a similar tack in his defense of democratic peace theory. Realism, he notes,
“has no place for an expectation that democracies will not fight each other.” 18 This is important because understanding the sources of the
democratic peace can have the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By adopting a skeptical attitude toward the democratic peace, then, realists
are at least indirectly diminishing the prospects for a world without war. 19 The constructivist charge
is that realist discourse
perpetuates the very competition for power that realists purport to explain. Anarchy, after all, is what states
make of it; so if realists describe international politics as competitive, then states are more likely to act in
precisely that way. 20 This is, in fact, Alexander Wendt’s critique in his seminal statement of constructivism. The problem with realism,
he argues, is that it refuses to acknowledge that international politics can be anything but Hobbesian and in doing so impedes progress. In
Wendt’s own words, “Realism’s commitment to self-interest participates in creating and reifying self-help worlds in international politics. To
that extent Realism is taking an at least implicit stand not only on what international life is, but on what it should be; it becomes a normative as
well as a positive theory.” 21 Critics have zeroed in on modern realism, the branch of the tradition that informs our theory. 22 Classical realism
has recently undergone a revival among realism’s critics. Classical
realists are described as being less fixated on narrow
power considerations than their successors and more attuned to transformative developments in world politics.
They therefore have more to contribute to the cause of peace. Richard Ned Lebow has been a forceful advocate of this
position, lamenting that the structural turn in realism has led to a vicious circle: “The language of classical realism, with all its subtlety,
commitment to caution and respect for conventions, has been replaced by the cruder language of modern realism and its emphasis on power
and expediency. These maxims, which have become conventional wisdom, guide policymakers, and their behavior in turn appears to confirm
the assumptions of the modern realist discourse.” Lebow concedes that many realists opposed the Iraq War and cannot be held responsible for
the failures of US foreign policy, but in the same breath warns that modern realist discourse “has the potential to turn American hegemony into
another tragedy.” 23 Michael Williams has joined the debate in a similar fashion, reconstructing a “wilful” realist tradition from the writings of
Hobbes, Rousseau, and Morgenthau. For him, “wilful Realism is deeply concerned that a recognition of the centrality of power in politics does
not result in the reduction of politics to pure power, and particularly to the capacity to wield violence. It seeks, on the contrary, a politics of
limits that recognizes the destructive and productive dimensions of politics, and that maximizes its positive possibilities while minimizing its
destructive potential.” 24 Williams is explicit that his “wilful” variant stands in stark contrast to most understandings of realism today, implying
that modern realists do reduce politics to power maximization and eschew any limits on the exercise of that power, with destructive
consequences. We dispute the conventional characterization of realism. Our position is that it
is possible to develop a prescriptive
realist theory—one derived from the core assumptions of modern realism—that meets a state’s security
needs while minimizing the likelihood of war. 25 Our case proceeds as follows. We begin by describing our prescriptive realist
theory of foreign policy. Next we describe an alternative liberal approach that promises perpetual peace rather than the mere stability implied
by our theory. We then suggest that had
the great powers behaved as our theory advises, some of the most
important wars of the past century might have been avoided. At the same time, we show that liberalism was at
least partially to blame for the outbreak of these wars. We conclude by us[e]ing our theory to outline a foreign
policy for the United States, one that we argue should make the US secure, while simultaneously minimizing
the likelihood that it will become embroiled in future wars .
 Experts/Evidence Good
Engaging in experts and technocracy is the best way to challenge it
Jiménez-Aleixandre 2, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and Pereiro-
Muñoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain) (Maria-Pilar and Cristina, “Knowledge producers or knowledge
consumers? Argumentation and decision making about environmental management,” International
Journal of Science Education Vol. 24, No. 11, p. 1171–1190)

If science education and environmental education have as a goal to develop critical thinking and to promote decision
making, it seems that the acknowledgement of a variety of experts and expertise is of relevance to both.
Otherwise citizens could be unable to challenge a common view that places economical issues and technical
features over other types of values or concerns. As McGinn and Roth (1999) argue, citizens should be prepared to
participate in scientific practice, to be involved in situations where science is , if not created, at least used. The
assessment of environmental management is, in our opinion, one of these, and citizens do not need to possess all the technical knowledge to
be able to examine the positive and negative impacts and to weigh them up. The identification of instances of scientific practice in classroom
discourse is difficult especially if this practice is viewed as a complex process, not as fixed ‘steps’. Several instances were identified when it
could be said that students acted as a knowledge-producing community in spite of the fact that the students ,
particularly at the beginning of the sequence, expressed doubts about their capacities to assess a project written by
experts and endorsed by a government office. Perhaps these doubts relate to the nature of the project, a ‘real life’ object that made its way
into the classroom, into the ‘school life’. As Brown et al. (1989) point out, there is usually a difference between practitioners’ tasks and
stereotyped school tasks and, it could be added, students are not used to being confronted with the complexity of ‘life-size’ problems.
However, as the sequence proceeded, the students assumed the role of experts , exposing inconsistencies
in the project, offering alternatives and discussing it with one of its authors. The issue of expertise is worthy of attention and it
needs to be explored in different contexts where the relationships among technical expertise, values hierarchies and possible biases caused by
the subject matter could be unravelled. One
of the objectives of environmental education is to empower people
with the capacity of decision making ; for this purpose the acknowledging of multiple expertise is
crucial.
 Scenario Planning Good
Simulating scenarios is vital to prevent them – breaks down biases and opens up
possibility for imagining new worlds
Baum et al. ‘18 (Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. 2018. “A Model for the Probability of Nuclear War.” SSRN Electronic
Journal. Crossref, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3137081.)

For as
long as some states possess nuclear weapons, there will be some chance that these weapons will be
used in war. How high of a chance this is—the ongoing rate of nuclear war, or its probability over some time period—is an
important factor in several major policy issues. However, there have been few attempts to model or quantify this probability.
This paper presents a detailed model of nuclear war that can be used to understand and quantify the probability of nuclear war. This paper
stops short of quantifying the probability because that would require more detailed analysis than one paper can provide. However, some
important conclusions are nonetheless obtainable. First and foremost, the probability of nuclear war can be modeled and
quantified. Attempting to do so is not doomed to hopeless guesswork. This paper presents one approach to
doing so, drawing on prior studies by Hellman (2008), Barrett et al. (2013), and Barrett (2016). The approach is based on identifying
and modeling nuclear war scenarios, i.e. the range of ways that nuclear war can occur. Scenario
modeling is attractive because it breaks the probability of nuclear war into smaller, more manageable
parts, many of which can be informed by historical incidents. Scenario modeling is valuable both for
quantifying the probability and for helping people understand how nuclear war is likely to occur.
Scenario modeling provides quantitative and qualitative insights that are valuable for crafting policies to
efficiently and effectively reduce the probability of nuclear war. This paper models fourteen different nuclear war
scenarios. Six scenarios occur when a nuclear-armed state intentionally makes a first-strike nuclear attack: three involving intentional escalation
and three involving inadvertent escalation. Eight scenarios occur when a nuclear32 armed state falsely believes that a nuclear attack has
already occurred and makes what it believes is a retaliatory nuclear attack. The three intentional escalation scenarios are the traditional focus
of nuclear weapons debates. These are the scenarios for which nuclear deterrence should be most effective. The other eleven scenarios all
involve some sort of mistake, either in inadvertent escalation or in the false perception of a threat. The preponderance of inadvertent and false-
belief scenarios raises questions about the reliability of nuclear deterrence. Exactly how reliable nuclear deterrence is requires quantification of
the probabilities of the various scenarios, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Several
factors cut across all fourteen
scenarios. One is the severity of geopolitical tensions felt by nuclear-armed states. Higher tensions make states
more inclined to use nuclear weapons. Wars and crises are more likely to commence and to escalate.
Non-war nuclear detonations are more likely to be blamed on other states. False alarms are more likely
to be mistaken as real attacks. Reducing tensions and improving relations with nuclear-armed states is a
clear means of reducing the probability of nuclear war, and it could be an especially effective one. Another cross-
cutting factor is the strength of the norm against nuclear weapons use. This norm appears to have
played a role in the avoidance of nuclear war since WWII (e.g., Tannenwald 1999). It works by raising the
threshold required for states to decide to use nuclear weapons. The higher the threshold, the less likely
some incident will cross it. This holds for incidents across all fourteen scenarios, though it may hold to a lesser extent for the four
scenarios involving non-war nuclear detonations, because in these scenarios, the norm has already been broken. Efforts that strengthen the
norm against nuclear weapons use, such as the recent humanitarian initiative to stigmatize nuclear weapons (e.g., Borrie and Caughley 2013),
could be another effective means of reducing the probability of nuclear war. Strengthening the norm against nuclear weapons use may be an
underappreciated benefit of the humanitarian initiative. A
third cross-cutting factor is the reliability of nuclear weapons
systems. This includes the weapons themselves and the technologies and people who use them. It also
includes everything from systems for monitoring for incoming attacks to systems for launching and
detonating the weapons. The more reliable they are, the less probable nuclear war is , especially for the eight
false-belief scenarios.
AT Link Debate
 AT Fiat Bad Link
Debate is imperfect, but only our interpretation can harness legal education to
understand the law’s strategic reversibility paired with intellectual survival skills that
help us navigate and contest violent structures. This is the most plausible internal link
from debate to meaningful social and political agitation for social justice.
Archer ‘18 (Deborah N., Associate Professor of Clinical Law @ NYU School of Law, “POLITICAL LAWYERING FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY,” draft, pp. 1-43) *Edited*

Many law students are overwhelmed by injustice. When faced with the reality of systemic inequities, even
the most committed students may surrender to hopelessness, despair, and inaction. This is not because they
have stopped caring about injustice, but because they cannot envision a path from injustice to justice . Many do
not have the tools to navigate systemic injustice or respond to interwoven legal and social ills. This article
contends that although clinical legal education provides an excellent opportunity to offer students the skills, experience, perspective, and
confidence to grapple with today’s complex social justice issues, it has not sufficiently responded to the changing
educational needs of our students by teaching law students how to most effectively utilize litigation
alongside other tools of systemic reform advocacy.
How can clinical education prepare law students to navigate issues of systemic discrimination and injustice? Clinical teaching’s signature
pedagogical vehicle involves students providing direct representation of individual clients in straightforward, manageable cases in which
students focus on discrete legal issues, take full ownership of the case, and see it through from beginning to end.1 These cases
train
students to be creative problem solvers for individual clients. However, this model does not effectively
prepare students to address and combat structural or chronic inequality. The individualized model also
provides relatively limited opportunities for students to address the intellectual and skills-based
challenges of lawyering on a larger scale. 2 Complex cases allow students to explore the complicated relationship between
justice, law, and politics.3 They introduce students to many of the skills needed to integrate rebellious or political lawyering
into their practice, including working with others to brainstorm, design, and execute an advocacy strategy;
helping to build and participate in a coalition; engaging in integrated advocacy; and analyzing the
outside forces that help shape outcomes, including organizational capacity, challenges of enforcement,
and potential political backlash.4
There is a longstanding and ongoing debate within the clinical legal education community about the relative merits of small, individual cases
versus larger impact advocacy matters.5 The parameters of this debate, coupled with an influential body of clinical scholarship criticizing impact
litigation and the lawyers who bring it,6 have led the clinical teaching community to overreact to these critiques by moving farther away from
impact advocacy and strategic litigation rather than working to reconcile the legitimate concerns with the critical importance of impact
advocacy as a tool for both systemic social change and legal education. Law schools also face internal and external pressures that affect their
willingness to engage students in strategic litigation. The result is that important benefits of impact advocacy and strategic litigation have
gotten lost or minimized.
Twenty years ago, social justice advocates rallied around political lawyering as a tool for more effective
advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities.7 Political lawyering employs a systemic reform lens
in case selection, advocacy strategy, and lawyering process, with a focus on legal work done in service
to both individual and collective goals.8 While litigation is central to political lawyering, political lawyers
recognize that litigation, interdisciplinary collaboration, policy reform, and community organization
must to proceed together. Litigation is just one piece of a complex advocacy puzzle. However, clinical law
professors have never fully grappled with how to employ this model.9
Law professors today seeking to train the next generation of social justice advocates should expose
students to the transformational potential of integrated advocacy —strategic litigation, community organizing, direct
action, media strategies, and interdisciplinary collaboration proceeding together— in the fight for social change. Political
lawyering can serve as a model. The NAACP strategy of building comprehensive advocacy campaigns to
challenge racial and economic injustice helped to launch the political lawyering movement in the last
century.10 But political lawyering in the 21st century needs to do more. It needs to re-embrace and update the
concept of integrated advocacy to help lawyers leverage a broad range of tools and perspectives to
generate effective approaches to issues of injustice, both nascent and chronic. Charles Hamilton Houston, the
architect of the strategy to challenge the racialized policy of “separate but equal,” whose life work challenged racial injustice in novel ways,
famously explained that “a lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society,” defining social engineer as a “highly skilled,
perceptive, sensitive lawyer who understood the Constitution of the United States and knew how to explore its uses in the solving of problems
of local communities and in bettering the conditions of the underprivileged citizens.”11 Law schools should set as an ambition teaching
students to push boundaries in diagnosing and tackling the most pressing problems facing society.
The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I discusses political lawyering and explores its potential to serve as a framework to teach students the legal and extra-legal advocacy skills necessary to tackle the complex challenges of
systemic injustice and inequity. Part I also discusses the institutional barriers that limit the ability and willingness of legal educators to exploit the pedagogical potential of a political lawyering framework, including the idea that
litigation is often harmful to the cause of justice because it puts the lawyer ahead of the community being served. Part I then examines whether the choice that clinical legal education makes to teach through small, single-issue
cases rather than through more complex vehicles offers students sufficient opportunities to develop the array of skills needed for integrated advocacy. Part II describes the ways that clinical legal education can reframe political
lawyering as political justice lawyering, both to adapt to the current environment—complicated by the current partisan political climate—and the contemporary challenges of social justice advocacy. It also explores pedagogic
strategies that clinical legal educators can employ to train effective 21st century social justice lawyers. Finally, Part III presents a case study from my own teaching to elucidate the opportunities and challenges inherent in this
approach to clinical teaching.
I. POLITICAL LAWYERING AS A FRAMEWORK FOR LEGAL EDUCATION
“Social vision is part of the operating ethos of self-conscious law practice. The fact that most law practice is not done self-consciously is simply a function of the degree to which most law practice serves the status quo. Self-
conscious practice appears to be less important, and is always less destabilizing, when it serves what is, rather than what ought to be.”
- Gary Bellow12
In 1996, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review published a symposium on “political lawyering”: a model of social justice advocacy that integrates legal advocacy and political mobilization by linking courtroom advocacy
to community education, mobilization, and organizing.13 The symposium, honoring Gary Bellow, a leading political lawyer of the time and one of the architects of clinical legal education, explored the potential for political
lawyering to respond to the social justice challenges of the moment.14 At the time of the symposium, progressive scholars and activists believed that America was in a period of retrenchment on civil rights and were in search of
sources of hope.15 In the face of waning public support for the poor and disenfranchised, both financially and philosophically, one of the biggest dangers social justice advocates faced was despair about the possibility of
progress.16 Bellow contended that the nation’s ideological reconfiguration created a potentially debilitating doubt among lawyer-activists who, faced with declining avenues for change, had “embraced a far too constricted
definition of both the possible and desirable in law-oriented interventions than is, in fact, dictated by the rightward turn of national and local politics.”17 With victory harder to achieve, he insisted that lawyers who embraced and
reimagined political lawyering would advance the fight for equality more effectively.
The purpose of political lawyering is not to advance a particular partisan agenda: It is to represent disenfranchised communities against the forces of oppression.18 While difficult to define precisely, political lawyers take a
politicized and value-oriented approach to legal work done in service to both individual and collective goals,19 embracing “politics” in the classical sense as a concern “with what it means to be human; what is the best life for a
human being; and . . . the ways in which we can order our living together so that good human lives will emerge.”20 Practically, political lawyers use a systemic reform lens in decisions about case selection, advocacy strategy, and
the lawyering process. Political lawyers think about the relationship between law, politics, and justice21 and use the law to animate fundamental change in society, to alter the allocation of power and opportunity, and to enable
those individuals and communities with little power to claim and enjoy their rights.22 Political lawyers also take advantage of opportunities to influence the perceptions and behaviors of those in power.23 Finally, political lawyers
empower individuals and communities by providing them with competent legal advocacy,24 but do not confine themselves to one mode of advocacy in their quest for structural change. Instead, political lawyers use integrated
advocacy strategies, including litigation, legislative advocacy, public education, media, and social science research, assessing the efficacy and impact of each tool in service to a long-term visions of equality and solidarity.25
A. A ROLE FOR POLITICAL LAWYERING IN CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
In his essay, Gary Bellow described several examples of his experience as a political lawyer.26 He reflected that:
Certainly, if one focuses on the strategies employed in these examples, few uniformities emerge. In some of the efforts, we sought rule changes or injunctive relief against a particular practice on behalf of an identified class. In
other situations, we pursued aggregate results by filing large numbers of individual cases. Some strategies are carried out in the courts. At other times we ignored litigation entirely in favor of bureaucratic maneuvering and
community and union organizing. Even when pursuing litigation, we often placed far greater emphasis on mobilizing and educating clients, or strengthening the entities and organizations that represented them, than on judicial
outcomes. And always, we employed the lawsuit, whether pushed to conclusion or not, as a vehicle for gathering information, positioning adversaries, asserting bargaining leverage, and adding to the continuing process of
definition and designation that occurs in any conflict.27

The parallels between the challenges social justice lawyers faced in the 1980s and 1990s and those that
law students committed to social justice 28 face today are evident. As discussed earlier, law students’ own despair
about the enormity of the fight for justice can compromise their ability to recognize and tackle chronic
injustice. Like the earlier generation of political lawyers Bellow described, many law students today find it difficult to believe in
the possibility of change let alone its likelihood. Inexperience challenging systemic legal problems
exacerbates their skepticism. They recognize that the advocacy tools they have learned are insufficient to solve today’s problems,
which fuels their sense of doubt.
To help expand their understanding of what may be possible, law students, particularly those interested in continuing the fight
for racial justice, should be taught to understand and embrace the goals, strategies, and tools of political
lawyering—re-imagined for current times. Clinical professors need not adopt political lawyering wholesale as the only or primary approach
to teaching lawyering skills and legal advocacy. Indeed, one of the challenges social justice advocates face is unnecessarily limiting the
understanding of what it means to be a good lawyer. Rather, clinical professors should explore political lawyering as one framework they can
use to help struggling law students find direction and inspiration, as well as to create a sense of connection to the work of the social justice
lawyers who preceded them. As Gary Bellow wrote:
Doubt and defeatism, the sense of overly pessimistic assessments of action possibilities, are recurrent experiences in oppositional
politics, whomever the political actors may be. They require hard-headed assessments of what works and why ; a
willingness to relinquish strategies and goals born of different possibilities and particularities. . . . Doubt and defeatism produce
powerful spirals that can only be broken by acts of will and leaps of faith.29
To be an effective political lawyer, an advocate must have a “profound willingness and ability to learn about and respond to the complexity of
real human beings in ever-shifting legal, economic, and social worlds.”30 So, while political lawyering is certainly grounded in effective legal
advocacy, it demands more than conventional legal skills. The political lawyer values deep personal involvement as a necessary component in
addressing and tackling legal issues. That personal engagement can take many forms, but, at a minimum, involves countless conversations,
collaborative brainstorming, comparing shared experiences, and adding empathy and commonality to enhance the legal analysis and political
judgment.31 It also requires lawyers to advocate with a clear vision of what justice looks like because effective
political lawyering “reache[s] not only across large numbers of people, but from the present into some altered version of the future.”32
Learning to combine savvy legal analysis with broad engagement, a deeper understanding of the
complexity of the problems faced by impacted communities, and envisioning an altered and more just future can
help lead to real solutions and overcome passivity and paralysis.33
The Civil Rights Movement, with its blended advocacy strategies, pulling a variety of levers to enable immediate or systemic change,
offers one example of political lawyering. Visionary leaders helped give voice to the frustrations and demands of the community, while
other leaders acted as tacticians to devise, plan, and coordinate the strategy.34 There were sustained and strategic protests to draw public
attention to injustices, demand change, and apply political pressure. The
strategic use of litigation led gradually to the
establishment of the building blocks for systemic change. Finally, civil rights lawyers worked to enshrine
litigation victories in legislation.35
While the goal of political lawyering is to empower and advance the rights of disadvantaged communities, the lawyers who engage in it also reap significant benefits. One scholar effectively articulated some of these benefits
utilizing religious terms, asserting that political lawyering can provide hope and direction to advocates by providing a “faith”—“a story, an account of a rational hope that provides people with an image and principles for realizing
the sort of lives they ought to live.”36 Political lawyering can also provide what Christians refer to as a “gospel”—a story that explains and inspires.37 The faith and gospel of political lawyering can help lead law students who are
overwhelmed by injustice to a place of deeper understanding and more effective advocacy. But law students must learn how to understand, articulate, and deploy that faith and gospel in service of others.
B. INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON POLITICAL LAWYERING

Complex social justice problems offer robust opportunities to teach students about the law and
lawyering, and legal clinics serve as an important vehicle to bring that set of issues and experiences into the
classroom.38 As law schools reevaluate the nature and function of legal education in light of market forces,39 they should also give
attention to the role of justice in the curriculum and the potential for law school clinics to be centers for incubation of new and evolving models
of lawyering. By embracing political lawyering and encouraging engagement on complex and novel social justice issues, clinical legal education
can operate as a “generator of new visions for legal practice” on behalf of poor and marginalized communities.40 Of course, that choice is not
without hurdles or concern.
1. Ideological, Financial, and Pedagogical Pressures
When clinical and experiential learning programs have moved away from an access to justice model—with a focus on the immediate challenges facing individual clients—to a broader social justice model focused on systemic reform
and community empowerment, they have often encountered criticism from inside and outside of the legal academy.41 First, critics have raised concerns that integrated advocacy in support of systemic reform may elevate the
profile of faculty and law schools but detract from an appropriate focus on the educational goals of individual students.42 Others have identified the potential for violating the separation between pedagogy and partisan politics.43
And still other critics have identified a risk that faculty will impose their personal political perspectives on their students.44 As discussed in more detail below, integrated advocacy strategies can, in fact, serve as valuable clinical
teaching tools that promote broader student learning and support important pedagogical goals. By contrast, exclusive reliance on individual representation offers limited opportunities to teach essential lawyering skills, including
the skills critical to identifying and challenging systemic injustice.45
Every clinical program makes a political decision in deciding which cases to take or not to take, as each decision has political implications.46 Accepting cases in criminal justice, immigration, environmental justice, and international
human rights, for example, involves political choices, regardless of whether the issues are addressed through individual representation or systemic reform efforts.47 Clinics will continue to represent individual clients who are the
victims of poverty, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. These cases do not suddenly become inappropriate teaching tools because the lawyer aggregates those claims and utilizes complementary strategies to seek systemic,
community-wide redress. Lawyers must be free to use all available means to challenge the marginalization of their clients, including strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and other advocacy strategies designed to achieve
systemic reform. If law schools intend to fulfill their promise to prepare law students to tackle urgent and pressing challenges, then they must teach students to identify and address interlocking legal and social problems.
Still, while law schools have educational ambitions, they also face financial demands that might affect their educational choices. In fact, those financial realities may motivate schools to avoid disputes that expose them to financial
risk and to a potential loss of good will that a clinic’s involvement in controversial cases might occasion.48 While that institutional concern certainly has merit, it is not unique to political lawyering on behalf of clients. Whenever a
law school chooses to represent clients, there is the potential for someone to take issue with the school’s choice of side or client. Similarly, law schools may experience external pressures from government, private entities, donors,
and alumni to prevent the use of law school resources to challenge powerful corporate or government interests.49 These critiques evoke the successful challenge to Legal Services Corporations engaging in class action litigation on
behalf of their clients50 and the long history of efforts to limit the means through which clinics can represent their clients.51 History is replete with examples of external attacks on law schools’ clinical efforts. From the 1968 attack
by state legislators on the clinical program at the University of Mississippi School of Law over its involvement in a school desegregation suit,52 to the early 1980s threats to limit the activities of the University of Connecticut’s
criminal defense clinic after the clinic successfully challenged a provision of the state’s death penalty statute,53 to the 2017 decision of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to defund the law school’s Center for Civil
Rights’ work to challenge systemic and racialized barriers to equality, law schools have experienced public scrutiny and scorn for their client and case selection decisions.
A clinical faculty member’s case selection decisions should not be without limits or guidelines. For example, limited resources and specific pedagogical objectives will necessarily dictate which cases will be considered appropriate.
However, making case selection decisions on the basis of pedagogical choices differs fundamentally from decisions based on ideological pressure from outside forces. The latter raises fundamental questions of academic freedom
and other professional responsibilities.54 Clinical faculty members must maintain some independence to choose cases and clients that meet that clinic’s educational and public service goals.55
2. The Anti-Litigation Bias
Political lawyers have long embraced litigation’s potential to achieve “radical extensions of democracy, equality, and racial justice” in addition to structural and cultural change.56 Law reform and structural change are important
aspects of political lawyering.57 Accordingly, impact litigation on behalf of marginalized people and communities has long been an important tool for political lawyers.58 Indeed, the NAACP’s fight against racial segregation and
inequality in the 1940s and 1950s represents an early example of political lawyering that strategically deployed litigation as part of
a comprehensive effort to resist oppression and advance equality.59 Political lawyering never embraced an exaggerated belief that litigation should be the centerpiece of the fight for equality.60 Instead, like the advocates at the
heart of the NAACP’s desegregation strategy, political lawyers “recognized that litigation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community organization had to proceed together.”61
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, political and cultural shifts affected the strategies many political lawyers employed. New federal restrictions on the use of impact litigation and legislative advocacy by legal services lawyers were a
cause of significant concern.62 Where impact litigation remained a possibility, many political lawyers worried that litigation offered a dangerous path. Although federal courts, in particular, had proved supportive in the fight for
racial justice in the 1960s, progressive lawyers in later years worried that a more conservative judiciary was just as likely, if not more inclined, to set back progressive movements.63 This concern proved correct, particularly in the
area of racial justice. Decades of conservative appointments to the federal bench64 led to a series of legal setbacks65 that effectively limited the federal courts as a venue for the redress of illegal discrimination.66 Many advocates
also believed that while progressive lawyers were toiling away in the courtroom and achieving only minor success, conservative advocacy groups had mastered the more efficacious strategy of building powerful grassroots
constituencies.67
As courts increased their hostility to civil rights and racial justice, making victory and progress more difficult, political lawyers turned away from litigation and began focusing on alternative methods to fight for social change.68
While the labels have changed, the fundamental purpose of the work remained the same. Political lawyering gave way to rebellious lawyering, community lawyering, and movement lawyering.69 These models of advocacy
embrace different visions of advocacy that may vary in the emphasis placed on the law’s comparative advantage relative to other strategic methodologies and tools.70 But, they all acknowledge the bond that joins client,
community, and lawyer together in a common enterprise: empowering those without power and fighting for justice and equality. The de-emphasis on strategic litigation brought real benefits. It encouraged lawyers to work as
members of a team, and challenged lawyers to ensure that those marginalized by injustice played a central role both as the focus of the advocacy and as participants in the advocacy, a positive turn regardless of the motivation.71
This evolution came at a cost. What began as a tactical de-emphasis on litigation evolved into a philosophical bias against litigation as a social justice advocacy tool.72 Initially, social justice lawyers turned away from impact
litigation because they feared that an increasingly conservative judiciary would use these cases as an opportunity to further roll back prior gains. However, with time, the reluctance to pursue litigation became less a reaction to
circumstance and more a matter of principle. Some writers argued that litigation is a tool through which lawyers usurp the authority of already marginalized clients by setting their priorities for them.73 And, they claimed that
litigation disempowers communities because of the unbalanced power dynamics between social justice lawyers and marginalized clients.74 An example is the dialogue around rebellious lawyering, one of the most prominent
models for social change advocacy. Gerald López conceptualized rebellious lawyering as an advocacy model that would empower poor clients through grassroots, community-based advocacy that was facilitated by lawyers.75
Rebellious lawyering emphasizes concepts of community organization, mobilization, and “deprofessionalization.”76 It calls on lawyers to reflect on critical elements of the attorney-client relationship that may further oppress
members of marginalized communities.77 Through rebellious lawyering, Professor López advances the belief that although lawyers should help solve problems facing the poor, lawyers are not the preeminent problem solvers in
that relationship and should defer to clients and communities.78 Gerald López prefers that lawyers focus on “teaching self-help and lay lawyering” to empower communities to help themselves.79
Professor López espoused his positive vision of rebellious lawyering as an alternative to what he calls regnant lawyering.80 Professor López asserts that regnant lawyers are convinced that they need to be the primary and active
leaders in their representation of poor people. Regnant lawyers find community education and empowerment to be of only marginal importance.81 The result is that the regnant lawyer dominates the attorney-client relationship,
giving little voice to the needs or concerns of the client. Finally, Professor López also believes that regnant lawyers have little practical understanding of legal, political, and social structures.82
Rebellious lawyering raised important questions about the role litigation should play in social justice movements. Gerald Lopez was certainly skeptical that “legal technicians” could make a meaningful contribution83 and
questioned whether lawyers turned to litigation because it was best for the client or because the lawyer wanted to play “hero.”84 All political lawyers should ask themselves these questions when considering impact litigation as
part of integrated advocacy on behalf of marginalized communities.85 But, over time, commentators began to equate regnant lawyering with impact litigation.86 Some social justice advocates argued that impact litigation
perpetuated racism because white lawyers used it as a tool to impose their views on communities of color.87 Others advanced images of litigators as outsiders who used poor communities as guinea pigs in their social justice
experiments, warning that “practicing law in the community is not a tourist adventure and, therefore, we must eschew the routine of the autonomous, interloping advocate who dreams up cases in the home office and then tests
them on the community.”88 Litigation, and systemic reform litigation in particular, became synonymous with regnant lawyering: an “enemy” of social justice and not a tool fit for people committed to fighting for enduring social
change.
Derrick Bell
advanced one of the most prominent and influential critiques of litigation. 89 Although he
acknowledged the success of the first decade of school desegregation litigation, Professor Bell questioned the lack
of lawyer accountability to marginalized communities. According to Professor Bell, NAACP lawyers continued to employ an
advocacy strategy that focused on structural school desegregation, even while many members of the Black community preferred a strategy that
would have focused on building quality, though segregated, neighborhood schools.90 He cautioned that social justice advocates failed to
acknowledge growing conflicts between what they believed were the long-range goals for their clients and the client’s evolving interests and
needs.91 In the end, many members of the impacted community were left feeling marginalized. Professor Bell also suggested that “civil rights
lawyers, like their more candid poverty law colleagues, are making decisions, setting priorities, and undertaking responsibilities that should be
determined by their clients and shaped by the community.”92
Certainly, many lawyers who use litigation as a tool for social change are regnant and paternalistic, but
these qualities are not inherent in litigators working with marginalized communities.93 Social justice advocates
should have a healthy skepticism about the ability of the law, standing alone, to achieve lasting social
change.94 They should always engage in advocacy that moves the client from the margins to the
center.95 But, advocates should also resist pressure to narrow the definition of what it means to be a
great lawyer. The discussion of social justice advocacy far too often collapses the framework not only of
political lawyering, but all advocacy on behalf of poor and marginalized individuals and communities ,
into one that largely rejects the important role that strategic litigation has played and can continue to
play in the fight for social justice. The ubiquity of the anti-litigation narrative encourages progressive
law students—and many clinical law professors—to dismiss litigation and its potential for challenging bias and
discrimination. Many progressive law students are afraid to become the professionals they envisioned
they would be.96 They do not want to become the discrimination tourist derided in the literature.
In response to the critique of social justice litigation, there is a growing body of scholarship supporting the conclusion
that litigation is a key strategy for protecting and expanding the rights of marginalized communities. 97
This body of scholarship acknowledges that litigation has played a critical role in the struggle for justice
and equality, and that it continues to be “an imperfect but indispensable strategy of social change.”98
Finally, these scholars examine social justice litigation in the context of the tradeoffs of different forms of activism, evaluating its potential in
relation to available alternatives and revealing a new understanding of the link between law and social justice reform.99
The demonization of strategic litigation that persists in many progressive lawyering circles not only
contributes to student paralysis, it gives them a false sense of what it means to engage in systemic
reform litigation on behalf of clients and the community. Many prominent critiques of impact litigation neither
provide an accurate depiction of the potential of that litigation, nor educate students on how to apply
principles of political lawyering to that litigation. Indeed, while Derrick Bell prominently critiqued the role of strategic litigation in
social justice movements, he also believed that litigation
can be an important means of calling attention to perceived injustice ; more important, . . . litigation presents
opportunities for improving the weak economic and political position which renders the black community vulnerable to the specific injustices
the litigation is intended to correct. Litigation can and should serve lawyer and client, as a community-organizing tool, an educational forum, a
means of obtaining data, a method of exercising political leverage, and a rallying point for public support.100
Law students should be taught that lawyers who engage in systemic reform litigation, just like any other lawyer, can and should work with and
on behalf of those victimized by discrimination. Indeed, despite the one- dimensional picture often painted for law students, not all progressive
lawyers believe that “self-help” should be the focus of lawyering on behalf of poor or marginalized communities.101 Moreover, despite
the image of the “interloping advocate who dreams up cases in the home office and then tests them on
the community,” not all progressive lawyers believe that it is inappropriate for lawyers to independently
analyze social justice issues and develop ideas about ways to use the law to bring society closer to
justice. Indeed, “it is artificially constricting to conceive of lawyers as exclusively or primarily problem-
solvers. [Lawyers] are not only social mechanics who wait in [their] shops for people to come to [them] with problems to be fixed.
[Lawyers] should sometimes create problems. [Lawyers] should sometimes deliver problems by translating
people’s anger and hurt and insistence on justice into political as well as legal action.”102 Many great
advocacy ideas bubble up from the community , but equally valid ideas can come from advocates who
have been working with and for those communities (or are members of the community themselves). Progressive advocates
must be prepared to provide legal assistance to clients even when those clients do not wish to be active participants in the advocacy. That is
embracing the core meaning of client-centered lawyering. Rather
than being taught to avoid litigation at all costs,
progressive law students need to learn how they can partner with victims of discrimination and be
accountable to those victims in the context of litigation. They need to learn the skills of collaborative leadership in law.103
Advocates should also be careful about advancing a one-size-fits-all model of advocacy,104 lumping
everything together under the “social justice advocacy” moniker or work on behalf of the “poor and
disadvantaged” and assuming that one advocacy approach will work to solve all problems. Sometimes using
“social justice” to refer to all of the work being done on behalf of poor and marginalized communities is the right thing to do—it unifies all of
those who are fighting injustice on varying fronts. But, it can be harmful when discussing what advocacy tools will be most effective. Given
the many forms that discrimination takes and the many communities subject to discrimination, law professors
should caution students to be suspicious about broad generalizations about what clients always need or
do not need, and what lawyers always should or should not do. There is no universal theory about how
to represent disadvantaged or marginalized people. What works in the fight for economic justice may
not be the best strategy to achieving racial justice.105 And what may be appropriate to help one victim
of racial discrimination may not work for another. There is room for all types of advocates and
advocacy.106 All advocates can be a part of the circle of human concern.107
3. The Preferred Model: Individual Representation
Representing individual clients in small, manageable cases where students retain primary control has long been the preferred vehicle for teaching students to effectively address their clients’ legal problems.108 But many clinical
programs focused on representing individual clients are not providing opportunities for students to learn how to utilize the law effectively to challenge systemic discrimination. In addition to teaching foundational lawyering skills
like client interviewing, counseling, and fact investigation, clinics should also provide opportunities to teach complex and multi- dimensional lawyering skills.109 As this Section demonstrates, the clinical community’s
disproportionate focus on micro-lawyering skills may be hampering the ability of students to focus on the political and social functions of the law and the structural dimensions of the problems facing client communities.110
The founding goals of clinical legal education were to provide law students the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to practice law and provide quality legal services to the poor.111 These origins closely shaped the
development of clinical pedagogy and its current emphasis on individual representation.112 Small cases allow law students to have the primary relationship with the client, manage the case from beginning to end, and analyze
relatively straightforward legal issues—all core principles of clinical pedagogy.113 The reliance on small cases also provides students with the invaluable opportunity to reflect deeply on the choices advocates make in creating and
maintaining lawyer-client relationships.114
In the early years of the clinical legal education movement, most clinical law professors came from legal services organizations and brought with them a preference for the individual client representation that dominated legal
services practice.115 Clinical professors embody their learning objectives in their case selection116 and must prioritize some lawyering skills over others because there are limits to what can be learned in a single clinical course.117
In focusing on small cases, early clinicians understandably prioritized the skills they knew to be critical to their own work on behalf of poor individuals.
Today, clinical professors come to teaching from a broader array of professional backgrounds, and unsurprisingly want to bring their experiences into the classroom. They should be encouraged to make clinic design choices and set
educational goals for their students based on the skills and knowledge they know to be necessary for success in their own practice areas. To many, the approaches clinical professors adopted at the beginning of the clinical legal
education movement are not the answers to the questions and challenges our students face today. An exclusive reliance on small cases, though they are extremely valuable teaching tools, fails many students because small cases
offer limited opportunities to teach a broad array of lawyering skills, including the skills critical to challenging systemic injustice.118 Of course, small cases have value—for the client and student both. But, in the new normal, they
are often not enough to carry the weight of change.
“Social justice work is rarely easy, clean, or pretty.”119 It can be downright messy and clinics should not shield students from its messiness. Working on larger, more complex cases exposes students to more of the skills necessary
to fight for structural change.120 They can learn to exercise intellectual autonomy and to integrate conceptual thinking in their advocacy.121 They teach students how to achieve client objectives while also advancing broader social
justice goals. Finally, in complex cases where litigation is a viable option, students are exposed to fundamental questions such as what claims to assert, where to file, who to represent, and who to sue. Students cannot be practice
ready without some exposure to these skills.
Some clinical legal educators have questioned the traditional model of clinical education, arguing instead for engaging in work with a broader social justice impact.122 One basis for this argument, for example, is that “case-
centered clinics are primarily accountable to students and law school administrators, rather than clients, and fail to serve political collectives.”123 In this conception, clinics prioritize student interests over community interests by
accepting only those cases over which students will have full responsibility and reject more complex cases where the students’ limited skills would make that impossible. This is done even when the communities’ interests—and
thus the cause of social justice—would be better served by the more complex cases.124 While this critique is framed in terms of benefits to students versus losses to social justice, there is indeed a loss to students as well.
Clinical legal educators who are teaching the next generation of social and racial justice advocates should help students understand the current legal framework for equality, and develop the ability to utilize that framework
creatively on behalf of their clients. But, students also have to learn to transcend and reimagine current institutional frames, to conceptualize avenues for relief, create new narratives, and pull together the building blocks of a new
legal framework to establish rights that did not exist before. Indeed, many of the challenges facing America today require reimagining justice from the ground up. Future social justice advocates must have social vision—“vision-
making work is fundamental to the activist strategies political lawyering inevitably embodies.”125
Charles Hamilton Houston not only taught his law students to conceive that separate can never be equal, he taught them how to develop a legal theory in support of that idea and then to develop an integrated advocacy strategy,
including complex litigation, to give that theory legal effect. “The process of linking strategy to political vision always requires adaptation and a detailed understanding of particular contexts for its effectiveness.”126 Moreover, as
students move from theory to legal reality, they have to understand the skills required to genuinely engage the community. Indeed, “it is no simple matter to reconcile commitment to both clients and a larger social vision or to
navigate the boundary between the insider and outsider communities in which political lawyers work.”127
There are, of course, trade-offs involved in engaging clinical students in impact advocacy, both for the student and the teacher.128 Many clinical faculty have expressed concerns that systemic reform work and complex vocacy
matters require too high a cost to core pedagogical goals.129 There is a sense that “big cases” may achieve important social justice goals, but use student tuition to finance political goals without attendant benefits to the students’
education.130 According to this line of critique, if the fundamental goal of clinical legal education is the education of students, clinical education needs to continue to focus on small cases that allow for complete student ownership,
with a student seeing the case through from beginning to end.131 Many clinicians believe that complete student ownership from beginning to end is critical to an effective clinical experience, and that this level of student
ownership is not possible in big cases.132
The problem with this argument is that giving clinic students sole control of a case from beginning to end is not the only way to maximize student learning. Close collaboration with clinical educators, fellow students, clients, and
other collaborators offers rich opportunities for student learning. Working with those collaborators to evaluate a complex problem, consider whether a litigation strategy is appropriate, and implementing that strategy, is precisely
the kind of experience students will need to master in political lawyering practice. If clinical programs want to ensure that social justice students develop the skills and values necessary to be responsible and effective lawyers before
they graduate, students should have the opportunity to be exposed to advocacy models beyond individual client representation. Otherwise, clinics are missing an opportunity to teach students to embrace and engage in social
justice work broadly.
II. REFRAMING POLITICAL LAWYERING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Modern social problems present new challenges for political lawyers. As such, political lawyers must evaluate the tools an earlier generation of political lawyers used to determine how to employ them in light of changed
conditions. Social justice advocates have destabilized the dominant understanding of lawyering.133 Modern political lawyering must continue that process of destabilization, exploring alternatives to the way lawyers marshal social
and economic capital, make strategic decisions, and transgress current structures and constraints.134 Political lawyering advocates should also question attempts to constrict the understanding of what lawyering tools can be
employed in service to communities and in furtherance of justice.
A. Expanding the Advocacy Perspective

At the core of Derrick Bell’s critique of the latter stages of the campaign to desegregate public education is the divergence he
saw between the interests of NAACP lawyers and those of certain segments of the Black community that evolved after the launch of the
school desegregation campaign.135 In many ways, this divergence was the result of a failure to communicate. To effectively engage in
the integrated advocacy central to political lawyering , those engaged in individual representation, strategic litigation,
legislative advocacy, community organizing, public education, direct action, and other forms of advocacy must remain in constant conversation.
They must also use
their work to facilitate a constant dialogue between the community, courts,
government agencies, and legislatures at the local, state, and national levels.
 AT Hegemony Bad Link
No alternative to interest-based competition in the short term – it stops escalation
and lays the groundwork for cooperation
Miller, professor of IR – University of Haifa, ’10 (Benjamin, “Contrasting Explanations for Peace: Realism vs. Liberalism in
Europe and the Middle East,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 31, Iss. 1)

In what follows, I initially differentiate among types

of regional security outcomes: hot/cold war and cold/warm peace. The
task then is to examine what the different approaches suggest on the avenue to accomplishing peace in
general and durable ‘warm’ peace in particular. Following a conceptual discussion of the realist approaches, I apply them to Europe and to the
Middle East. In the next section I analyse the liberal conceptions of peace and security and then apply them to the two regions. On the whole, I
show that the successful application of all four approaches brought regional peace to Europe – the realist strategies producing initially cold
peace and then the liberal ones elevating it to warm peace. In contrast, only the realist strategies were effective in the Middle
East, but much later than in Europe, and even then only partially, thus producing at best a fragile and partial cold peace.
In order to bring about peace to the Middle East, first of all the realist mechanisms have to be implemented
more forcefully under an intensive hegemonic leadership. This leadership should be able to provide an effective
security umbrella to the regional states taking part in the peace process against common revisionist threats. This
leadership has then to focus on mediating key regional conflicts, but together with other international players and the
regional actors, it should also focus on helping state-building and nation-building processes in the region. Only then the liberal
mechanisms can be effective and warm and stabilize the regional peace as was the case in post-1945 Western Europe.
Hot war is a situation of actual use of force aimed to destroy the military capabilities of the adversaries. The Middle East is among the
most violent-prone regions in the post-WWII international system. Thus, major examples for hot war come from this
region including the Arab–Israeli wars (1948–1999, 1956, 1967, 1969–1970, 1973, 1982 and most recently the Second Lebanon War
of 2006 and the Cast Lead Operation of 2008–2009), the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War of 1990–1991.
Cold war is a situation of negative peace1 – a mere absence of hot war in which hostilities may break out any time. It is
characterized by recurrent military crises and a considerable likelihood of escalation to war, either premeditated or inadvertent.2
The parties may succeed in managing the crises, avoiding escalation to wars while protecting their vital interests,3 but they do not attempt
seriously to resolve the fundamental issues in dispute between them. As to means employed by the parties, a coldwar is
characterized by the use of military forces for show-of-force purposes such as influencing the intentions of the regional rivals through
deterrence and compellence.4 Diplomacy plays an important role in the parties' relations, but it is largely a diplomacy of
violence – the use of military means for diplomatic ends – for signaling, crisis management, and to clarify interests ,
commitments, and ‘red lines’. An important component of cold war situations is the diplomacy of regional hot war termination,
manifested in the establishment of cease-fires or armistices.5 The presence of enduring rivalries in the region is a key indicator of a cold war
there.6 Examples include the periods between the hot wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours, namely, 1949–1956, 1957–1967, 1968–
1973, etc.
Cold peace is a situation characterized by formal agreements among the parties and the maintenance of diplomatic relations among them. The underlying issues of
the regional conflict are in the process of being moderated and reduced, but are still far from being resolved. The danger of the use of force is
thus unlikely in the near future, but it still looms in the background, and is possible in the longer run if changes in the international or regional
environment occur. In one or more of the regional states there are still significant groups hostile to the other states, and thus the possible coming to power of
belligerent opposition groups in these states may also lead to renewed hostilities or a return to cold war. The parties still feel threatened by
increases in each other's power, and are concerned with relative gains .7
Military force is not used in the relations between the parties, not even for signalling and show-of-force purposes. Rather, the
focus is on
diplomatic means for the purposes of conflict reduction or mitigation,8 and the parties seriously attempt to
moderate the level of the conflict through negotiations and crisis-prevention regimes.9 These efforts, however,
stop short of a full-blown reconciliation among the parties. Foreign relations among the regional parties are conducted almost exclusively
through intergovernmental diplomacy, and there are limitations on transnational activity which involves non-governmental players. The parties
still develop contingency plans that take into account the possibility of war among them. Such plans include force structure, defence spending,
training, type of weapons, fortifications, military doctrine, and war planning.
Examples include the Israeli–Egyptian peace since 1979 and the Israeli–Jordanian peace since 1994. Intergovernmental negotiations
succeeded to reach formal peace agreements between them. These peace
accords have reduced the level of conflict
between Israel and these two Arab neighbours. Especially critical is the peace between Israel and Egypt as
the relations between them are the key strategic relations in the Arab–Israeli context. Since they have
moved to the cold peace level, the likelihood of the eruption of a major inter-state Arab–Israeli hot war has drastically
declined.
 AT Liberalism Bad Link
Liberalism not pervasive – contestation is still possible which proves violence is caused
by contingent factors
Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Law, Economic and Political
Sciences, ‘14 (“Towards a Regime of Post-political Biopower? Dispatches from Greece, 2010–2012,” Theory, Culture &
Society January 2014 vol. 31 no. 1 143-158)

The concepts of post-politics and biopower may be helpful in theorizing the current mutations of
neoliberal power but they are not fully up to the task. They have been rightly castigated for
constructing an overly rigid and all-encompassing regime of power which lies beyond challenge and
change. As Bonnie Honig (2009: xv, 66–7, 88) makes clear, the apocalyptic image of the state of emergency and biopower in
Agamben rules out the possibility of democratic response and cements ‘emergency’s closures’. It postulates an all-
too solid, omnipotent, top-down sovereignty which takes exception to the law and cannot be resisted, covering
over remaining fissures, opportunities, drives and invitations to collective mobilization. Modern sovereignty
could be thought, instead, ‘as a contingent formation that might get relocated or redistributed in
contests over whether a state of exception should be instituted, in what such a state should consist’ (Honig, 2009: 88). In
contemporary globalized capitalism, sovereignty appears to be a multipolar circuit of forces, ‘displaced from national to international territories
and reconstituted for the benefit of financial capital’ (Saskia Sassen in Dean, 2009: 131–2). People’s
power in collective action or
electoral politics remains often a variable component in this mobile, complex and uneven constellation
of forces, at least where liberal democracy has not been fully torn apart.
Likewise, the ‘post-political’ qualification of biopower has attracted incisive criticisms . Jodi Dean argues that left-
wing laments about the rise of technocratic expert rule, the declining significance of democratic politics under the compulsions of the markets,
the disappearance of the ‘political’ as radical antagonism are apt but partial descriptions of our state of affairs. They
obfuscate the
surviving sites of politics and politicization and the real energies of democratic agency when they are taken
as full and comprehensive accounts. In this case, the emphasis on post-politics ‘cedes in advance key terrains of activism and struggle’ (Dean,
2009: 12). Talk
of post-politics fails thus to recognize and to engage with the terms of political games which
are actually being played, and it stops short of supporting emerging instances of democratic agency,
producing a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies .
Biopower and post-politics apply demonstrably well to key facets of the contemporary rule of capital in
flagging democracies. But they tend to acquire an implausibly totalitarian ring with de-politicizing effects
when they are not duly qualified through the exposition of their cracks, imbalances and internal challenges. These do not only
restore some common sense and motion to the picture. They provide openings through which politics is in play again and some hope of change can glimmer. So, in the Greek state of exception
in 2010–12, effective sovereignty was unevenly shared among the ruling elites of the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the potent financial interests weighing on these
institutions, the national government and the political establishment in the country. Although power was asymmetrically distributed in this constellation of forces, it remained partly mobile
and reversible. The insistence of Εurozone leaders on binding any future government to the new loan agreement ahead of the general elections in May 2012 (see Pylas, 2012) signalled how the
national government retained in effect considerable elements of independent sovereignty which could severely impact on the entire constellation. And, of course, the general elections in May
and June 2012, which brought about seismic shifts in the party-political landscape of the last 30 years, catapulting a radical left-wing party to a dominant position, have triggered unpredictable
political developments, disclosing the instability of the hegemonic bloc of power and how even electoral politics can still make a difference.

The international components of this nexus of power do not make up a solid compound , as indicated by the
dissonant dispositions of the new French president. The national constituents of the hegemonic constellation provide

further sources of disquiet and potential disruption . For so long as electoral politics are not fully
abolished, the ‘popular will’ can affect the dominant circuits of sovereignty through such formal
channels, giving the lie to any closed, totalizing depiction of the current state of emergency.
But what keeps alive and kicking the ‘political’ in the mode of radical intervention , deep antagonism and
reversal of hegemonic closures is the locus classicus of democratic agency : massive popular mobilization,
the rise of a demos as a collective agent with sovereign rights. If liberalism’s cultural hold were total and seamless
and the spread of a narcissistic individualism devoid of collective concerns were fully verified, the re-
emergence of massive demotic politics would have the status of a true miracle. The Rousseauian paradox – how
to institute a self-governing people out of a dispersed crowd of politically ignorant and apathetic individuals – would appear as irresolvable as
ever (for the paradox, see Honig, 2009: 13–20). And yet the
spring and the summer of 2011 witnessed unprecedented
manifestations of grassroots democratic agency on many streets and squares across the country, belying any
totalistic account of biopower and liberalism’s empire (for this mobilization and its features see, among others, Douzinas,
2011; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011). The singular feature of this collective movement, which brought together hundreds of thousands
of people in its heydays from May to July, is that it did not confine itself to reclaiming some space for people’s power and voice within the
dominant nexus of sovereignty. For the first time since the restoration of representative democracy in 1974, after the fall of the colonels’ junta,
a large multiplicity of citizens did not simply protest or press demands on the political establishment. By contrast, they
asserted
themselves as the collective subject of a real and direct democracy to be enacted here and now and to
embrace the entire country in order to institute an effective alternative to a defunct political system in
chronic malaise.
 AT Ontology Links – Reform Good
You should adopt a contingent understanding of decolonial possibilities –
understanding colonial violence as something that transcends state-based reforms
naturalizes settler colonial power and renders resistance impossible
Corntassel 14 (Jeff, Tsalagi (Cherokee), University of Victoria; Corey Snelgrove, University of British
Columbia; Rita Kaur Dhamoon, University of Victoria; “Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and
politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society Vol. 3, No. 2, 2014, pp. 1-32)

Discussion

Rita: We need to problematize the

question of solidarity because it separates issues, as if Indigenous issues are
distinctly separate from migration issues, issues around temporary foreign workers, violence against
women, etc. in two ways. One, it suggests that the white settler nation doesn’t need to maneuver
different bodies – Indigenous bodies, white bodies, bodies of colour, male, female, trans, queer, poor,
disabled, religious, secular, citizens, noncitizen workers, refugees – differently. And also, in my case, people of
colour are also structurally implicated in dispossession , whether that’s our choice or not. So it posits that
‘your’ issues of Indigenous land are not separate from ‘my’ issues if I care about racism , sexism, and that
I must think about the ways they are related to settler colonialism . Jeff: I guess for me ‘solidarity’ gets away from the
direct accountability, the trust elements that are embedded in any relationship that you have. So that trust and accountability are ongoing
feedback loops, if you will, that you have to constantly renegotiate or reinterpret in order to act in solidarity, or act in concert, or act in
camaraderie. But I think these terms mask the messiness of that overall process. Corey: I agree with both your critiques. Solidarity does
sometimes seem to imply a distinctness that, like you state Rita, ignores relations and complicity between. And like you state Jeff, there does
seem to be an underlying conceptualization of solidarity as temporal event. Jeff: And in terms of the temporal, at what point does forgetfulness
become a problem? A Tsalagi saying, “Live in a longer ‘now’— learn your history and culture and understand it is what you are now,” urges us
to consider that notions of time are fluid and flexible. After all, the Tsalagi word for “I am forgetting” is agikewsga, which literally means I am
blind or am unable to see something that happened in the past (Altman and Belt, 2012, p. 232). To live in a longer ‘now’, it becomes one’s
responsibility to live in tohi, or a process of balance and according to the pace of the natural world (p. 227). In this sense, 'the longer now'
implies not just a different time scale but also future generational responsibilities. So there is a different sense of Indigenous place-based and
living histories that should be understood by folks proposing to act in solidarity. If someone is just simply saying ‘I’m a Canadian, and I don’t
know my history’, how useful is that to deepening solidarity? Maybe that forgetfulness… is also sort of convenient. You haven’t done the hard
work to uncover your role, or your family’s role in, whether it’s direct colonial actions or just settling here. Corey: This not knowing, this
forgetting of our own histories, just supports the claiming of space and place. These histories too are obviously entangled and complex. For
instance, my great-great grandfather and his family were settlers in Ohio, eventually becoming a doctor and Christian missionary in the interior
of China. This side of my family stayed in China – over time, transitioning from Christian missionaries to foreign capitalists – until the Second
World War, when my great-grandfather was interned and my grandmother with her mother and brother came to Canada. So my own ancestral
history is entangled with the global structures of settler colonialism, capitalism, christianity, white supremacy and imperialism. And how does
this affect my own approaches and thoughts to solidarity? If I’m responsible to Indigenous peoples who have been and continue to be displaced
and dispossessed by myself and my ancestors, and thus accountable to the structures and practices of settler colonialism and ultimately their
destruction, am I not also responsible for my ancestors who served as missionaries and capitalists in China, and thus accountable to the
structures and practices undergirding those acts? How does this longer, entangled, complex history contribute to solidarity practices with
Indigenous peoples, and (in combination and/or isolation) amongst settlers ourselves? Rita: It is a challenge to know what it means to be ‘fully
grounded’, in a social and political sense. Growing up in the UK as a brown person in the 1970s and 1980s, during the era of overt police racism,
the rise of the National Front, the antiimmigrant stance of Margaret Thatcher, I recall noting that there was a battlefield and that I was in
solidarity with nonwhites. When I first arrived in Canada, the terrain shifted. I remember a series of racist incidences my family and I
experienced. One of them was when my brother went to apply for a job as a bar tender and, in the window it said, ‘No dogs allowed, no Indians
allowed’. He was mad when he got home, we were all angry. It took us a few months to realize that the notice was about Indigenous peoples,
not us as peoples from India. But the connections and differences started to form in my mind. I find it helpful when I think of the history of
colonialisms, of my family, and my role in Canada now to use ‘settler colonialism’ because it centres the dispossession of land as a distinguishing
and ongoing colonial feature. Colonial assemblages certainly exist in India today too, such as in the road or education system but this is not
government by a colonial body. The challenge is when we see colonialisms and racisms as separate, because the dispossession of Indigenous
peoples lands is related to the history of British and European imperialism in India, Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world, and also
continuing. And these are patriarchal, heteronormative, ablest, and capitalist imperial formations that remain relevant today. Corey: This
relational, interdependent focus is also important amongst settlers ourselves – perhaps as a way to counter the flattening of differences that
occurs amongst settlers, particularly in solidarity work. Settlers
obviously need to be doing our own work and
challenging ‘our’ institutions and practices that serve to protect or further colonization. But we can’t do
this if we flatten the differences and ignore the inequalities and power relationships that exist within
settler society. Not only does such flattening prevent much needed alliances but flattening itself can
actually work to protect certain elements of settler colonialism . For instance, white supremacy works to naturalize
white settler presence. In terms of solidarity then, I find it problematic for myself, as a white, class privileged, cis-hetero, and able bodied male
(as well as people like me) to demand other peoples to act in solidarity, while also not holding myself (and others like me) responsible and
accountable to other forms of violence that may be a contributing factor to the further reification of structures that support settler colonialism,
like the State. Now I’m not arguing for the continued eschewal of Indigenous governance and legal orders
because others experience violence, but rather, that the substantive recognition of Indigenous
governance and legal orders also requires a dismantling of other, related forms of domination . This latter
dismantling I see as necessary but also insufficient for the dismantling of settler colonialism. These sites and spaces of domination
and resistance are distinct, but also connected dialectically. This seems to be something that settlers, white settlers
specifically, have yet to articulate and take up, critique and act against. And this is perhaps most evident in how settlers seem to be
continuously waiting for instruction from Indigenous peoples on how to act. Rita: I wonder if this relational
approach is a more useful direction for settler colonial studies, not unlike the kind of work you do Jeff, in thinking about
colonialism in a global, comparative context. Jeff: And I think, the more you can make those links, the British occupation of
Maori territory is directly related to HBC’s strategy to begin treaty making here… All those things are interrelated. They are shared, and they are
seen as shared strategies. The other thing I see is this impulse to delocalize it… it’s always that kind of Free Tibet Syndrome… the further away
acts of genocide are from your location, the more outrage expressed at these injustices. It’s a way of avoiding complicity, but it’s also a way of
recasting the gaze. It’s like, ‘We’re not going to look right here, because this appears to be fairly peaceful’ And so it’s always that sort of re-
directing away from localized responsibility, and almost magnifying impacts farther away. Rita: So what settler colonial studies does do, is help
us relocate to locality, which is helpful. You mention the HBC. I wonder what was the relationship between the Hudson Bay Company in Canada
and the East India Company or the East Africa Company? If we’re thinking about settler colonialism as a structure, how is it related to other
modalities of gendered and sexualized white supremacy? How are the logics of State sovereignty and authority over nonwhite bodies
connected? If we’re thinking about it, as non-Indigenous peoples being ‘in solidarity’, part of that is locating, attacking the whole structure of
imperialism that is deeply gendered and homonationalist, that depends on neo-liberal projects of prioritizing able-bodied workers who can
serve capitalism. Corey: Part of this, I think, what we’ve been discussing here, relates to what I sometimes see as the
framing of ‘settler’
as event, rather than structure – where we are perhaps overly focused on the question of ‘who’ at the
expense of the ‘how’. If we don’t understand how settlers are produced we run the risk of representing settlers as some sort of
transhistorical subject with transhistorical practices. So I’m worried that while in one moment the term ‘settler’
denaturalizes our – that is all non-Indigenous peoples – presence on Indigenous lands , in the next, and through
this construction of the ‘settler’ as transhistorical, we renaturalize it. In short, we go from a disavowal of
colonization, to its representation as inevitable. Here is where I think a historical materialist or genealogical
approach to the production of settler subjects may be useful in showing how this production is
conditioned by but also contingent on a number of factors – white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy,
capitalism, colonization, the eschewal of Indigenous governance and legal orders, environmental
degradation, etc. Now this is also not to say that the binary of Indigenous/Settler isn’t accurate. I think its fundamental. Rather, I think it is
possible and important to recognize that there have been, and are, individuals (or even collectives) that might be referred to as something
other than settlers by Indigenous peoples, perhaps as cousins. Or in a similar vein, that there have been and are practices by settlers that aren’t
colonial (and here is where centering Indigenous peoples’ accounts of Indigenous-settler relations, as well as their own governance, legal and
diplomatic orders is crucial). But I think it’s just as important to recognize that these relations have and do not occur despite settler colonial and
imperial logics, and thus outside of the binary. Rather, such relations occur in the face of it. The binary then is fundamental as the logics that
uphold the binary cannot be ignored due to the existence of possiblly good relations as the logics that uphold the binary threaten those
relations through the pursuit of the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Rita: Yet, how do we act in light of these entanglements, and with,
rather than overcoming differences? Corey: Tuck and Yang (2012) had this really great article, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” In it, they
talk about the importance of an ethics of incommensurability – a recognition of how anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles are
incommensurable with decolonization. But what I’ve been thinking about recently is whether these struggles are incompatible. For example, in
the Indigenous resurgence literature, there is a turn away, but it’s also not an outright rejection. It also demands settlers to change. Yet
recognizing that settlers are (re)produced, the change demanded is not just an individual
transformation, but one connected to broader social, economic, and political justice . There are then, it
seems, potential lines of affinity between decolonization and others , though incommensurable, struggles. And
in order to sustain this compatibility in the face of incommensurability, relationships are essential in order to maintain accountability and to
resist repeating colonial and other relations of domination, as well as, in very strategic terms, in supporting each other’s resistance. Rita: As
some anti-racist and Indigenous feminists have long argued, it’s not possible for people of colour to confront different racisms without thinking
about sexism, capitalist exploitation, homophobia and transphobia, Indigenous struggles – they are tied to one another. There is an affinity
between decolonization and other struggles. Differently positioned people of colour and Indigenous peoples are not operating with the same
kinds or degrees of authority as whites or each other, but nonetheless we are not outside of these relations and forces of power. Jeff: I like
building off Tuck and Yang too. It’s a way of showing the linkages across these movements, but also how they can be tighter. How can we
deepen them and focus on the everyday acts of resurgence that Indigenous peoples engage in? Rita: What you say reminds me Corey about a
question you have raised in another context on temporal and spatial solidarities. Corey: In June 2013, at Congress, you both were on a panel
titled “Solidarities, Territorialities, and Embodiments.” At this panel, Jeff, you seemed to be challenging Rita’s notion of “temporary solidarities”
by emphasizing the importance of relationship grounded in place. So I first would question how useful ‘temporary solidarities’ as a concept is.
Second, I’m wondering about the importance of bringing the role of territorialities within these discussions of solidarity themselves. Maybe,
Jeff, what you were talking about at Congress and in conversations you and I have had, is a gesturing towards what we could potentially call
‘spatial solidarities’ – or bringing spatiality into discussions of solidarity. Jeff: As the late Vine Deloria, Jr. (2001) has said, “power and place
produce personality.” In this sense, place-based relationships are personal and anything approaching spatial solidarity would entail the
regeneration of Indigenous languages, ceremonial life, living histories, and nationhood. For this reason, spatial solidarities can be a way to
localize struggles for Indigenous resurgence. While the “Idle No More” movement, which began in 2012 in Canada as a response to proposed
legislation by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government that undermined Indigenous protections of land and water, tapped into an ongoing
and collective Indigenous struggle for land, culture and community, the settler support for it was predominantly temporally driven and
performative rather than localized and land-based. I find that the most powerful mobilization for change happens when the spatial and
temporal intersect. Rita: This centering of land strikes me as constitutive to any kind of political work with Indigenous peoples. Can you give an
example Jeff? Jeff: One example might be how settlers are welcomed onto Indigenous homelands among Native nations in Australia. Beginning
in the 1980’s, Tasmanian activist and lawyer, Michael Mansell, issued ‘Aboriginal Passports’ to an Indigenous delegation visiting Libya in 1988.
More recently, Aboriginal Passports have been issued to non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous homelands. Someone visiting Indigenous
homelands in Australia can apply for an Aboriginal Passport and sign a pledge stating that, “We do not support the colonial occupation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands” (Aboriginal Passport Ceremony, 2012). This innovative strategy challenges the authority of the
Australian government to regulate the travel of visitors onto Indigenous homelands and raises awareness of contemporary struggles of
Indigenous peoples in order to build solidarity for future movements. Rita: Corey, your question is helpful, and Jeff’s response also helps me
think through the movement between time-situated and place-based practices of ‘solidarity’ and ways of thinking about these situated
practices in terms of an ethos of ‘unsettled solidarities’ that moves across time and space, that is a way of being in the world, a set of ongoing
relations. Where I, where we, are never outside of struggle, everyone is ‘structurally implicated’ in the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Everyone is differentially structurally implicated, where the ideology of presumed consent underlies settler colonialism. Jeff: I would add that
living on another Indigenous nation’s territory also carries an obligation to support those defending their homelands. Cheryl Bryce from
Songhees First Nation started the “Community Tool Shed” in 2009 to generate support for the restoration of Lekwungen food systems. The
Community Tool Shed in Victoria, British Columbia, is where settlers and Indigenous peoples can come
together to rid the land of invasive species , such as Scottish Broom, and to revitalize traditional plants
such as kwetlal or camas. Cheryl’s focus for this informal group is on reclaiming traditional place names, educating people about the
destructiveness of invasive species, and reinstating Lekwungen food systems. The tool shed meets once per month to pull invasive species on
places that have been managed by Cheryl’s family for generations, such as Meegan (aka, Beacon Hill Park), and Sitchamalth (Willows Beach). To
a ‘resident’ of Lekwungen homelands, the above-mentioned places are public lands. This demonstrates the urgency of reclaiming Indigenous
place names in tandem with the restoration of Indigenous foodscapes and landscapes. The May 22, 2013 reclamation of the name PKOLS
(formerly known as Mount Douglas) is one of many examples where communities can come together to demand representation on their own
terms. These are everyday acts of resurgence that highlight the terrain of Indigenous struggles to restore and reconnect a place-based
existence. Corey: And both examples you highlighted Jeff do not foreclose a wide-range of participants. The
PKOLS reclamation led
by the W̱ SÁNEĆ peoples, involved participation from Indigenous peoples across Vancouver Island and
across Turtle Island, it involved the university through the Indigenous Governance program, and it
involved local, non-Indigenous, activist groups, most notably Social Coast . The Community Tool Shed, a project that
I’ve also been involved in for the past two years, does something similar. What I find really interesting in this work is that settlers and
Indigenous peoples challenge our environmentally degraded and colonial present simultaneously. Yet, there is still attention paid to the
different roles and responsibilities in this work. For instance, non-Lekwungen
people in removing invasive species , and
Lekwungen people in managing these lands and in harvesting plants such as camas. So unlike other
stewardship groups around Victoria, those participating are not seeking to depoliticize this work, nor do
they argue that this work erases their complicity or their potential complicity in colonization. In supporting
Cheryl’s assertion of her roles and responsibilities, they aren’t seeking to restore land in order to claim it for themselves. They aren’t Locke
redux. And, given the nature and extent of Broom here – you find it pretty much everywhere around Southern Vancouver Island, something like
18,000 seeds are produced in a single plant, and those seeds can lie dormant for up to thirty years – pulling broom one time really does not
mean much. So there is a demand for longterm work, which itself can help build accountability through such
place-based relationships. And since land is the irreducible element of settler colonialism, and that
environmental degradation has often proceeded through and in support of settler colonialism, it
provides an example of non-Indigenous practices with the land that aren’t necessarily colonial . Now I’m
not saying that this is an example of decolonization or that those involved are somehow not settlers . After
all, decolonization and the transformation of settlers requires subjective and objective transformations. Rather it’s a practice that does
not reify colonization, and thus challenges settler colonial studies construction of settler colonialism as
inevitable and transhistorical.

Conclusion

Decontextualized conceptions of settler colonial studies, ‘settler’, and solidarity risk further eschewing
Indigenous peoples and thereby reifying the stolen land each of the above is founded upon . Perhaps, most
centrally, this is done through de-centering Indigenous peoples own articulations of Indigenous-settler
relations, their governance, legal, and diplomatic orders, and the transformative visions entailed within
Indigenous political thought. Such de-centering has the potential to present settler colonialism as
complete or transhistorical, as inevitable, rather than conditioned and contingent. This failure to attend
to the conditions and contingency of settler colonialism can also be traced to the marginalization of how
colonization actually proceeds across time and space . That is, as entangled with other relations of
domination, and not only through structures, but also practices that serve as , what Paige Raibmon (2008) refers to,
“microtechniques of dispossession.” Those who critique settler colonialism through transhistorical
representations are then able to feel good and satisfied about their criticisms , despite their ahistoricism
and decontextualization, and thus their own role in actually sustaining colonial power by failing to
attend to its conditions and contingency We ask: what good is it to analyze settler colonialism if that
analysis does not shed light on sites of contradiction and weakness, the conditions for its reproduction ,
or the spaces and practices of resistance to it? What is the purpose of deploying ‘settler’ without
attention to its utility, to what it alludes to or eludes from? What good is solidarity if it cannot attend to
the literal (and stolen) ground on which people stand and come together upon? In this paper, we have argued for a
contextual approach to the questions of settler colonialism, settlers, and solidarity. It is ultimately about accountability to each other, as the
Tsalagi word, digadatsele’i suggests, and treating Indigenous resurgence as a process that cannot occur in isolation. This, as argued
throughout this paper, demands a
centering of and support for Indigenous resurgences, and a shift from a one-
dimensional to a relational approach to settler colonial analyses that is connected to the issue of other
Others. This also demands place-based solidarities – that is, relationships and practices – that center both
Indigenous resurgences and more relational approaches to settler colonial power . After all, settler
colonialism will not be undone by analysis alone , but through lived and contentious engagement with the literal and stolen
ground on which people stand and come together upon.
 AT Ontology Links – Contingency Good
Their understanding of the state as unified, immutable, and inevitably dangerous to
Indigenous actors creates a pessimism trap that stifles Indigenous agency and
activism.
Lightfoot, 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, dml)

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 Resources
In 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 futures.
 Perm – Environmental Reform
Challenging environmental injustice through state engagement is key – that includes
action through the court
NoiseCat 16 (Julian Brave - enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia
where he was nominated to run for Chief in 2014 AND a graduate of Columbia University and the
University of Oxford, “The Indigenous Revolution,” 11/24/16,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/)

Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy, financial systems, policing, and
work will be of particular importance to indigenous people. Fossil fuel divestment and the “Keep It in
the Ground” movement can weaken and even undermine companies seeking to exploit fossil fuels on
indigenous lands. Regulations that dismantle financial instruments and policies that profit from natural
resource speculation could divert and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition of mass incarceration would
loosen the death grip of prisons and police on indigenous communities. Unions can turn individual workers into collective forces of resistance,
helping drive up costs for developers and protect laborers from unsafe working conditions. Long-term efforts to reimagine work through full
automation and a universal basic income could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous work in the first place. As Standing Rock
has shown, indigenous nations that use their unique standing to advocate for viable alternatives to unjust
systems will gain supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and forests
that capital exploits with abandon. Our resistance — to the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that cut
through our lands and communities — has greater potential than yet realized. Ours is a powerful voice
envisioning a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the natural world rooted in the
resurgence of indigenous sovereignty. As long as indigenous people continue to make this argument, we
are positioned to win policies, court decisions, and international agreements that protect and enlarge
our sovereignty and jurisdiction. As our jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will have more power to
stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist, and colonial infrastructure. When the Justice Department
halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they would begin looking into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. This is a minimal
first step, and we must hold them to it. Longstanding
alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to
our success. In the United States, Native people have worked with Democratic elected officials like Bernie
Sanders and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills like the Save Oak Flat Act, which aimed to stop an
international mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache sacred site in Arizona. In Canada, First Nations
have supported the New Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance with the Labour
Party that stretches back to the 1930s. Some indigenous leaders, such as outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a Labour senator
for Western Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties. This does not mean, of course, that we should pay deference to elected
officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he travelled to Standing Rock. His visit
was historically symbolic and emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop DAPL, indigenous people should renounce him. Politicians are
helpful when they change policies and outcomes. We cannot and should not settle for symbolic victories. If there is to be an enduring
indigenous-left coalition, the Left must support indigenous demands for land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. At their core, these demands
undermine the imperial cut-and-paste model of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the present, which insists that there is room for
just one sovereign entity in the state apparatus. Thomas Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax implies an international governance structure to
levy such a tax. He pushes us
to think beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous demands for lands, jurisdiction,
and sovereignty imply that we must think beneath it. As the Fourth World continues to push states to recognize our
inherent, constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot remain neutral. To remain neutral is to perpetuate a long history
of colonization. To remain neutral is to lose a valuable, organized, and powerful ally.
 Perm – Indigenous Legal Scholars
Perm do both – indigenous legal scholarship provides a site for combining decolonial
demands with state action such as the plan
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, ppg. 36-40)
I follow the Indigenous legal scholarship of Val Napoleon, as well as that of Jessica Clogg, Hannah Askew, Eugene Kung, and
Gavin Smith, and use the term “Indigenous legal orders” to “broadly encompass various Indigenous legal orders
(structure and organization of laws) and Indigenous laws within those orders” (Clogg, Askew, Kung, and Smith,
231). As Napoleon explains, the term “legal system” describes a state-centered legal system wherein law is
managed by legal professionals in and through legal institutions that are often separate from other
social and political organizations. Alternatively, the term “legal order” may be used to describe law that is embedded throughout
social, political, economic, and spiritual institutions (Clogg, Askew, Kung, and Smith, 231). Indigenous legal orders are
exceptionally diverse, sharing common themes, but are fundamentally community, nation, and
relationship based (Craft 2014; Henderson 2006; Borrows 2010b). Not unlike Canadian common or civil law, Indigenous law is that which
is common to a given Indigenous society, nation, or community (Borrows 2010b). In his book Drawing Out Law (2010a), Borrows, for example,
draws from community experience, oral traditions, dreams, familial relations, and interactions within the Western legal system to express the
“ancient, rich, contemporary but nevertheless still developing Anishinabek legal perspective” (xi). In its companion book, Canada’s Indigenous
Constitutionalism (2010b), Borrows offers several concrete examples of Indigenous legal traditions, from the Mi’kmaq, to the Cree, Métis, and
Inuit, in order to show how “the underpinnings of Indigenous law are entwined with the social, historical,
political, biological, economic, and spiritual circumstances of each group,” and also how these
circumstances must be recognized as legitimate inside and outside of Canadian legal frameworks (23-24).
Borrows goes to great lengths to outline how Indigenous legal orders can be categorized in ways that make them
more legible to the Western legal framework ,13 and which ensures they are not relegated to simplified
versions of “customary law”;14 alternatively, while some Indigenous legal orders may be legible within
the confines of settler legal frameworks, others are expressed through complex assertions of culture and
lived relationships, which foreground the structuring of Indigenous societies, rather than their
relationship to the state, and which thus far have not been legible under the discursive structures of
Indigenous rights in Canada. In a 2013 community-based study with Anishinaabe Elders at Roseau River, Manitoba, for example,
Aimée Craft explores the Elders’ understanding of Anishinaabe nibi inaakonigewin (Anishinaabe Water Law);15 Craft writes, “The Elders spoke
of different types of law, using terms such as spiritual law, the Creator’s law, the Great Binding Law, natural law, customary law and human law.
Generally, the laws fell into four categories: sacred, natural, customary and deliberative. Sacred law was most referred to and other forms of
law were said to flow from sacred law” (2014, 12). The Elders describe Anishinaabe law generally, as “a way of life,” and distinguish its
principles from those of Western law: “Western law tells us what to do, not what is there. It doesn’t let us make up our own minds about what
to do. Western law tells us exactly how to act; Anishinaabe law will not. Anishinaabe law acts as a guide and tells us what is” (Craft 2014, 22).
The Great Law of Peace, the organizing law of the Haudenosaunee people, represents another complex example of an Indigenous legal order,
and one which is not easily made legible in terms recognizable to the Canadian state. Haudenosaunee
worldviews that stem
from their understanding and retelling of the Great Law represent perspectives grounded in culture and
ontological experience that non-Haudenosaunee people simply may not have access to. Just as
interpretation of Western law is so often relegated to the domain of specialized experts, lawyers, and
judges, the Great Law forces a shift in the question of legibility, reorienting the impetus to read and
understand the law from a distinctly Haudenosaunee perspective . If non-Indigenous peoples were to adhere to the
Great Law of Peace in Haudenosaunee territory—a point I will return to in my final chapter—what is required, then, is deference to Indigenous
legal orders on behalf of nonIndigenous peoples and the settler state. As numerous landmark Indigenous rights cases have illustrated,
assertions of Indigenous legal orders represent not the need for Indigenous peoples to speak in a language recognizable by the courts, but “the
need for the court[s] to learn how to listen to the evidence” as it is presented from Indigenous perspectives and through Indigenous assertions
of law (McCall 2011, 138).16 Indeed, Indigenous legal orders represent modes of articulating and representing
Indigenous conceptions of land and water tenure and responsibility outside of the narrow definitions
prescribed through Canadian common law. When these legal orders are brought into Indigenous rights
discourse at the state level, their goal is to shift the terms of negotiation, expand the meaning of
evidence, history and title, and to reconfigure how the very nature of land tenure is constituted within
the Canadian nation state.
To address Indigenous law in this dissertation in a comprehensive way would be akin to exploring the history, operation, and interpretation of
British common law— surely an impossible task for a dissertation not solely concerned with the law in and of itself. Indeed, the task would be
even greater given my position as a settler scholar who does not have access to the culturally specific complexity, let alone the languages that
make up the legal orders of any particular Indigenous nation. Relatedly, I
do not aim to express a legal ethnography of the
Indigenous nations related to or involved in my sites of analysis—this work must be community-based,
and as such, I draw my understanding from important pre-existing studies of that nature . While I mobilize
Indigenous legal orders in both broad and specific ways throughout this dissertation, attempting to address them in their various manifestations
and articulations, I am largely concerned with the potential for and problem of their legibility in relation to Indigenous water rights in a general
sense. I do not, however, intend to treat Indigenous law symbolically, or as an empty signifier. While the specificity of the enactment of
Indigenous law is more clear in some communities than in others, where it may be undergoing a resurgence, or is expressed in less demarcated
terms, I follow Napoleon in her assertion that in concrete terms “Indigenous
law is about building citizenship,
responsibility and governance, challenging internal and external oppressions, safety and protection,
lands and resources, and external political relations with other Indigenous peoples and the state ” (2007,
2). This is to say that Indigenous law must be understood as a persistent and active force . As the scholars I
draw on illustrate, Indigenous legal orders instruct relationships, outline values, influence social change,
enforce social norms, and regulate relationships between Indigenous peoples and their environment
(Borrows 2010a, 2010b, Craft 2014; Henderson 2010; Napoleon 2007, 2013). Indigenous legal orders distribute authority, and its legibility must
be reckoned with in both specific and general ways. I thus look to how these laws are used and articulated, produced and understood within
their given contexts in order to explore the conditions for their legibility within Indigenous rights discourse. Given my sites of analysis, my
discussion of Indigenous legal orders will mostly be limited to that of the Anishinaabe, Cree, and Haudenosaunee, with even these nations
representing a far greater diversity of Indigenous legal orders, histories, and worldviews than I can capture in this dissertation. My goal is not to
make specific Indigenous legal orders legible to state conceptions of Indigenous rights, but to explore the problem of their legibility more
generally, and how this is a problem that must be reckoned with in order for the remaking Indigenous water worlds in the settler state.
 Perm – Non-Reformist Reforms
Perm do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alternative - Not all
moves by settler institutions produce colonial violence – their anti-institutional
reading of settler colonialism crushes resistance to material aspects of colonialism by
reducing all movements to a binary
Snelgrove et al. 14 (Corey, University of British Columbia; Rita Kaur Dhamoon, University of Victoria; and Jeff Corntassel,
University of Victoria, 2014, “Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous
nations,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 1-32,
http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/21166/17970)

Corey: This relational, interdependent focus is also important amongst settlers ourselves – perhaps as a way to
counter the flattening of differences that occurs amongst settlers, particularly in solidarity work. Settlers
obviously need to be doing our own work and challenging ‘our’ institutions and practices that serve to protect or
further colonization. But we can’t do this if we flatten the differences and ignore the inequalities and
power relationships that exist within settler society. Not only does such flattening prevent much needed
alliances but flattening itself can actually work to protect certain elements of settler colonialism. For instance, white
supremacy works to naturalize white settler presence. In terms of solidarity then, I find it problematic for myself, as a white, class privileged,
cis-hetero, and able bodied male (as well as people like me) to demand other peoples to act in solidarity, while also not holding myself (and
others like me) responsible and accountable to other forms of violence that may be a contributing factor to the further reification of structures
that support settler colonialism, like the State. Now I’m not arguing for the continued eschewal of Indigenous governance and legal orders
because others experience violence, but rather, that the substantive recognition of Indigenous governance and legal
orders also requires a dismantling of other, related forms of domination . This latter dismantling I see as necessary
but also insufficient for the dismantling of settler colonialism. These sites and spaces of domination and resistance are
distinct, but also connected dialectically. This seems to be something that settlers, white settlers
specifically, have yet to articulate and take up, critique and act against . And this is perhaps most evident in
how settlers seem to be continuously waiting for instruction from Indigenous peoples on how to act . Rita:
I wonder if this relational approach is a more useful direction for settler colonial studies, not unlike the kind of work you do Jeff, in thinking
about colonialism in a global, comparative context. Jeff: And I think, the more you can make those links, the British occupation of Maori
territory is directly related to HBC’s strategy to begin treaty making here... All those things are interrelated. They are shared, and they are seen
as shared strategies. The other thing I see is this impulse to delocalize it... it’s always that kind of Free Tibet Syndrome... the further away acts
of genocide are from your location, the more outrage expressed at these injustices. It’s a way of avoiding complicity, but it’s also a way of
recasting the gaze. It’s like, ‘We’re not going to look right here, because this appears to be fairly peaceful’ And so it’s always that sort of re-
directing away from localized responsibility, and almost magnifying impacts farther away. Rita: So what settler colonial studies does do, is help
us relocate to locality, which is helpful. You mention the HBC. I wonder what was the relationship between the Hudson Bay Company in Canada
and the East India Company or the East Africa Company? Ifwe’re thinking about settler colonialism as a structure, how
is it related to other modalities of gendered and sexualized white supremacy? How are the logics of State
sovereignty and authority over nonwhite bodies connected? If we’re thinking about it, as non-Indigenous peoples being
‘in solidarity’, part of that is locating, attacking the whole structure of imperialism that is deeply
gendered and homonationalist, that depends on neo-liberal projects of prioritizing able-bodied workers
who can serve capitalism. Corey: Part of this, I think, what we’ve been discussing here, relates to what I sometimes see as
the framing of ‘settler’ as event, rather than structure – where we are perhaps overly focused on the
question of ‘who’ at the expense of the ‘how’. If we don’t understand how settlers are produced we run
the risk of represent ing settlers as some sort of transhistorical subject with transhistorical practices. So
I’m worried that while in one moment the term ‘settler’ denaturalizes our – that is all non-Indigenous peoples –
presence on Indigenous lands, in the next, and through this construction of the ‘settler’ as transhistorical, we
renaturalize it. In short, we go from a disavowal of colonization, to its representation as inevitable. Here is
where I think a historical materialist or genealogical approach to the production of settler subjects may be
useful in showing how this production is conditioned by but also contingent on a number of factors –
white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, the eschewal of Indigenous governance
and legal orders, environmental degradation, etc. Now this is also not to say that the binary of Indigenous/Settler isn’t
accurate. I think its fundamental. Rather, I think it is possible and important to recognize that there have been, and are,
individuals (or even collectives) that might be referred to as something other than settlers by Indigenous
peoples, perhaps as cousins. Or in a similar vein, that there have been and are practices by settlers that aren’t
colonial (and here is where centering Indigenous peoples’ accounts of Indigenous-settler relations, as
well as their own governance, legal and diplomatic orders is crucial ). But I think it’s just as important to
recognize that these relations have and do not occur despite settler colonial and imperial logics, and thus
outside of the binary. Rather, such relations occur in the face of it. The binary then is fundamental as the logics that
uphold the binary cannot be ignored due to the existence of possiblly good relations as the logics that uphold the binary threaten those
relations through the pursuit of the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Rita: Yet, how do we act in light of these entanglements, and with,
rather than overcoming differences? Corey: Tuck and Yang (2012) had this really great article, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” In it, they
talk about the importance of an ethics of incommensurability – a recognition of how anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles are
incommensurable with decolonization. But what I’ve been thinking about recently is whether these struggles are incompatible. For example, in
the Indigenous resurgence literature, there is a turn away, but it’s also not an outright rejection. It also demands settlers to change. Yet
recognizing that settlers are (re)produced, the change demanded is not just an individual
transformation, but one connected to broader social, economic, and political justice . There are then, it
seems, potential lines of affinity between decolonization and others , though incommensurable, struggles. And in
order to sustain this compatibility in the face of incommensurability, relationships are essential in order to maintain
accountability and to resist repeating colonial and other relations of domination, as well as, in very strategic
terms, in supporting each other’s resistance .
 Perm – Theory and Praxis
The perm is key - the aff fails to bridge the divide between theory and praxis and
remains trapped on the bookshelf-
Sium et al ‘12 (Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, Eric Ritskes, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto,
Sium identifies as being Tigrinya, indigenous, African, and Eritrean, Ritskes is Zhaganash, Towards the ‘tangible unknown’:
Decolonization and the Indigenous future, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society ¶ Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. I-XIII, JKS)

One of the greatest challenges in looking to understand decolonization in complex ways is bridging the
divide of action vs. theory. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (this issue) remind us that “settler colonialism and its decolonization
implicates and unsettles everyone” (p. 7). They go on to explore how there is no room for settlers to claim innocence in the
ongoing colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous land. Importantly, however, we each also
have the agency to participate in this violence (or resist it) through morally differentiated positions,
levels of complicity, points of impact, and consequence . For this reason, what knowledge we choose to
produce has everything to do with who we are and how we choose to act in the world . Transformative
praxis can be measured by our ability to show scholarly courage and imagination in taking our ideas
off the bookshelf and acting on them. Decolonization does not simply suggest that we refrain from
becoming spectators to the knowledge we produce; it demands it . As Fanon ¶ (1967) clearly laid out, “It’s no
longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it ” (p. 1). ¶ It is this transformative action that Waziyatawin
(in this issue) displays great imagination in outlining in the “endgame of empire,” asking what kind of world
Indigenous resurgence hopes to bring about after it is gone . She encourages her readers to peek behind
the colonial curtain to see that a central “facet of the colonial picture is an illusion of permanency and
inevitability” (p. 76). Importantly, she also encourages her readers to recognize that there is life beyond colonialism; that a certain degree
of hope, in both theory and practice, is necessary in defeating it. Colonialism may actively work to shape the world but it
can also be made malleable, forced to show the cracks in its walls, and forced to retreat through
struggle against it. As we witness the death throes of global capitalism and its insatiable appetite for
Indigenous land and resources, we must also understand that, like a cornered animal, it will fight until
the last breath in defending the privileges of colonial governments and extractive industry . According to
Waziyatawin, this is the paradox of Indigenous resurgence at the end of empire: “while we have an
opportunity to realize its emancipatory potential, if we do not succeed soon, the chances for the
survival of all life will severely diminish” (p. 82). For this reason both decolonization theory and action
are time sensitive.
 AT Reform Fails
The struggle by indigenous groups against state and corporate violence has produced
important victories – decades of empirical examples disprove the narrative that state-
based reforms are useless
NoiseCat ‘17 (Julian Brave - enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia
where he was nominated to run for Chief in 2014 AND a graduate of Columbia University and the
University of Oxford, “When the Indians Defeat the Cowboys,” 1/15/17,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/standing-rock-indigenous-american-progress/)

Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies: “Settler
Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a
clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars, Wolfe described the invasion of
indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument was that settler colonialism — a form of
colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands — requires the elimination of Native people and societies to
access and occupy their land. As Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged
out of the ongoing “History Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of
Aborigines should be considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and
Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights,
reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to win the
History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus from determining
the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and around the world. Settler
colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant
intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires, colonies, states, and territories of ongoing
settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and
Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But
Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United States are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how
do we explain the survival, resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the
global emergence of policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various
forms? Are these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in
cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing Rock?
Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys over Indians — a
reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us demands more. Explaining
Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy
is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old
scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser,
the Cowboy is a winner. At Standing Rock, generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put
it in the Guardian, the Standing Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a
moment when the Left is struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as
both a surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have
indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful movements of
late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various voices have risen to offer answers.
Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial coalition united against
neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action
and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing
Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the
water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the
world a template for resistance,” Erdrich concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective
explanations for the Standing Rock victory are insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not
explain what made this movement and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and
episodic victory, these writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods,
social welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over these
same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At the same time
workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous rights. Credit for
these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous movements that unswervingly
pushed for similar goals across decades and even centuries: return of indigenous lands, restoration of
indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous peoples. From the time their lands were seized in
the nineteenth century and even before, indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal,
regional, and national coalitions and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands
taken from them to recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive
governments determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the
laboring class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to
then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and
unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of
this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. In moments of global political and
economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During
the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the
1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of 1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and
political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s, termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further
devastated indigenous communities. Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced
from their homelands and dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were
subjected to sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the
stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence
endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called
“Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and restored a
measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the Red Power
movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to adopt policies based
on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori Renaissance in Aotearoa/New
Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won similar gains. These movements often
found unlikely allies in neoconservatives, neoliberals, and their predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from
the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce
indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-
determination. He outlined his commitment to the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the
goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy
without threatening his sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of
his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that
Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and
Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential inherent in the
restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a facade to restructure tribes
as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming, Alaska Native Corporations, corporate
iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural
resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous
people have coopted conservative forces as agents
of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while other Left and progressive movements gained little
and often lost ground, indigenous people moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their
interests. Self-determination is now the established framework for indigenous policy in the United
States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered
through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the
dispossession, marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable
victories. At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have been
forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a prior age they
would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not anticipate that indigenous people
would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative
political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to common sense, could never win. The future that is now our
present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for
indigenous people precisely because they had been underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people
emerge as cunning, courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto
their lands and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by
simultaneously pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting
concessions bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations
with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver devastating
blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism, which threaten the future of
indigenous communities, lands, and waters and all who share these with them. This dynamic revealed itself most
vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents
to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in 2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal
Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional
cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“Help us stop this pipeline. Stick true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a
moving message to the president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar
dynamic is unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First
Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in the forces
aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral suasion. They also identified
pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable target. Trenches cannot be dug where
people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market
than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad
headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians, controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your
objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives
and their supporters are pushing investors to divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a
massive banner at an NFL game, even as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve
Dakota Access, divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing
Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL, delivering a
crippling blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be completed is to again underestimate
the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled old scores. They danced inside and outside the
lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As
capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged
as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the
Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when
and where the networks and infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and
global systems. It shows that movements
must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take
decades to achieve. Politics is a long game. Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that
effective resistance is strategic. And strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle
and cunning forms of persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so
must out-strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially
revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice
Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation.
Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other indigenous struggles
as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and thinking about indigenous issues
alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark
times lie ahead for the first people of this land and all
who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor, has threatened to approve the pipeline
and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation, devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer
higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the
Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination” policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is
turning. In an unforeseen and previously unimaginable twist, it is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their
right hand, they clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many
chapters is the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With
their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience against
capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.
 AT Reform Fails
Numerous other examples prove institutional engagement works
Powell ‘10 (Dana E, Assistant Professor of Anthropology @Appalacian State University, “LANDSCAPES OF POWER: AN
ETHNOGRAPHY OF ENERGY DEVELOPMENT ON THE NAVAJO NATION”, dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010m https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:90579a78-0db7-427b-a53c-f6e52578d752)
Today, webs of a political economy of energy development crisscross indigenous territories, placing Native Nations in difficult positions concerning their “rights” to develop their own

resources. Many Native Nations are directly confronting what they consider colonial (or neo-colonial) practices of energy
development, not limited to underpaid, un-paid, and overdue mineral royalties, non-ownership of projects, corporate and federal exploitation, and regulatory confusion, among
other issues. Given these challenges, Native Nations are striving to create development schemes on their own terms , negotiating

between conventional and emerging technologies and models. This is perhaps best understood in the realm of energy development, where some Native Nations long dependent on fossil
fuel and mineral extraction continue to wrestle with the economic potential and ethical significance of becoming leaders in extractive industries and renewable energy. From small-scale tribal

tribally-owned gas stations on the Choctaw Nation (Lambert 2007) to commercial-scale endeavors
energy projects like

like wind projects on the Nambé Pueblo in New Mexico, Rosebud Tribe in South Dakota, and on land that the Campo
Kumeyaay (in California) lease for two dozen wind turbines thatpower 35,000 homes in San Diego County, Native
Nations are becoming players in energy politics on a national scale. However, many barriers to full participation
remain. With these transformations, new and seemingly unlikely alliances are forming: tribal governments aligning with
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Tribal Energy Program; a Council of Energy Resource Tribes building political power in Washington; involvement in energy
issues by long-standing pan-Indian organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians; and
networks of attorneys offering annual seminars for tribal leaders, tribal members, entrepreneurs, and engineers on tribal energy development.
19 Given the urgency to find new methods of mitigating and responding to the global climate change crisis, many

American Indian Native Nations and broadly networked indigenous communities are asserting leadership in re-thinking the

cultural politics and prevailing knowledge of energy development paradigms. National and transnational indigenous non-
governmental organizations have emerged as leaders in this reformulation, infusing funding, strategic
support, new discourses of development, and broader geographic networks into particular tribal communities.
 AT Redress Bad
Indigenous redress is good can only be accomplished through comprehensive legal
reform that moves beyond replacing history with restoration of land that necessitates
dialogue thus offering the best form of hope
Bradford ‘02 (William Bradford, Assistant Professor of Law at Miami University, LLM from Harvard University,
Chiricahua Apache, With a Very Great Blame on Our Hearts": Reparations, Reconciliation, and an American Indian
Plea for Peace with Justice”, American Indian Law Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2002/2003), pp. 1-175, https://www-
jstor-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/20070688.pdf)

Nevertheless, even if the non-Indian majority would reject the American Myth in the interest of mending national fences, the path to Indian redress winds
through terrain unmapped heretofore. Compensation and apologies, gestures potentially part of an
amicable settlement, are not germane to the resolution of Indian claims for injustices that cannot be
remedied save by reinvestiture of lands and sovereignty in self-determining Indian tribes. 70 This requires
not merely an abstract acknowledgment of the value of pluralism but a comprehensive program of legal
reform that dispenses with doctrines and precedents perpetuating the denial of the human rights of
Indian tribes and people.71 As law, more than any other social variable, has (reproduced the subordination of Indians in the United States,72 legal reform
occupies a central position in the claim for Indian redress. In short, proponents of Indian redress must not
only displace a flawed version of history: they must articulate a proposal for remediation that transports
the American people far beyond the strictures of existing law to enable the peaceful restoration of
Indian lands and powers of self-government.74 Such a transformative mission cannot be accomplished by
positing Indians and the non-Indian majority as adversaries, as would reparations; rather, redress of
Indian claims and the healing of the American nation —crucial foci of the drive toward perfection—
necessitate dialogue, reconciliation, and joint authorship of a future history of peace, harmony, and
justice.75 Part II of this Article offers a disquieting version of U.S-Indian history that accelerates erosion of the American Myth and acquaints the non-Indian majority with the necessary
factual predicate to Indian redress. Parts HI and IV contrast the assumptions, procedures, and remedies that distinguish reparations and reconciliation,76 the dominant contending models of

because it offers the best hope for a peaceful American

redress available to group victims of human injustice, and demonstrate that,

coexistence marked by mutual respect for sovereignty, reconciliation is a more appropriate avenue to
Indian redress. Several preliminary proposals, including the introduction of traditional tribal peacemaking as perhaps the most appropriate form of reconciliation, will be offered to
stimulate thinking.
 AT “Rights” Link – Water Rights Good
Their generic K of Rights discourse does not assume the specificity of the link turn –
the discourse of rights is specifically good for Indigenous water advocacy
Stevenson ’18 (Shaun A. Stevenson, full-time Faculty Member in the University Studies Program at Northern Lakes College,
“(Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation
State”, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Bookmark 17, pg. 41)
A great deal of scholarship on Indigenous water rights suggests that water rights are best conceptualized
as water responsibilities. See for example Cave and McKay 2016; Craft, 2014; King 2007. While I will explore the potential
to conceive of rights as responsibilities in subsequent chapters, I continue to mobilize the concept of
rights, given its history and significance in the Canadian context and globally. The continued calls for
the implementation of UNDRIP further illustrates the significance of speaking in the language of
rights. Rather than reproduce the necessity of Western liberal rights discourse, my aim is ultimately to
present the requirements for expanded conceptions of rights as they related to Indigenous peoples.
 AT State Link – State Inevitable
The state is inevitable in the long term but abdicating a discussion of the intricacies of
the state forecloses the knowledge necessary to combat the state.
Turner ‘06 (Dale – member of the Temagami First Nation and Associate Professor of Government and Native American
Studies @ Dartmouth College, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, p. 113-114)

I do not agree that law does not have a role to play in securing a political relationship that will allow
indigenous communities to thrive, but Monture is right to point towards indigenous philosophy as the source of our future well-
being as indigenous peoples. Her work highlights another important point about indigenous intellectual communities: we must resolve our own
societal problems, and in our own ways, but we cannot do so while we are still held in a legal and political straitjacket by the Canadian state.
Her experiences as a law professor show how hostile the dominant intellectual culture can be, but it does not follow from this hostility that
indigenous peoples must riot participate in these agonic communities. Regardless, Monture has travelled a rough road and continues to be an
important and active voice in Canadian indigenous intellectual culture. Indigenous intellectuals, then - at least those who explicitly engage the
legal and political discourses of the state - need to engage in three kinds of overlapping activities. First, they must engage colonialism in its
physical and intellectual contexts and in the process strive to overcome the colonial mindset in both indigenous and non-indigenous
communities. Second, they must protect and defend our 'indigeneity'; that is, they must work to ensure that indigenous ways of knowing the
world are not devalued, marginalized, or ridiculed in the marketplace of ideas. Third and finally, an
indigenous intellectual
community must assert and defend the integrity of indigenous political rights in the legal and political
discourses of the state. This is no easy task, but I see hope in many of the young indigenous and non-
indigenous people who seek justice for indigenous peoples . Still, there is much intellectual work to be done. Alfred,
Borrows, and Monture are not philosophers - that is, philosophers trained in the European tradition. Which leads one to ask: What can an
indigenous person who is trained in European philosophy do to play a more effective role in the relationship between the indigenous political
leadership, which finds its roots in indigenous philosophy, and the European intellectual tradition, which is used in articulating the content of
Aboriginal rights discourse in Canada? 40 I believe there are two important roles a philosopher can play. The first is pedagogical. From my own
experience, I have seen too many indigenous students
come into university resisting the idea that learning European
forms of knowledge, never mind critiquing European ways of thinking, is important for their intellectual
development. Don't get me wrong - there are very good reasons for this resistance, and I don't think every person, indigenous or non-
indigenous, is suited to this kind of intellectual journey. Indigenous professors are obligated to guide their students through complex
intellectual landscapes so that they can begin to think for themselves how ideas relate to their indigeneity. Like all students, indigenous
students need to learn bodies of knowledge in order to be able to think effectively; and if indigenous
students leave university without at least knowing the social, legal, and political history of the Indian-
white relationship, they have failed to receive a good education and their chances of becoming effective
indigenous intellectuals are severely limited . But 'thinking about thinking' is the philosopher's intellectual domain, and
indigenous philosophy professors can explicitly weave the third intellectual project into their teaching. As I stated earlier: indigenous
intellectuals engage European ideas both as a philosophical exercise and as a political activity. It
is not enough to simply engage
European thought on its own terms; indigenous intellectuals need to critically engage European ideas,
methodologies, and theories to show how they have marginalized, distorted, and ignored indigenous
voices. In order to do this effectively, we must first come to understand , as best we can, the European history
of ideas on its own terms.41 This means we need to understand how normative language - that is, the language that makes
substantive claims about 'what is the case' - is put to use in a particular way of perceiving the world. Once we do understand, we can assess
whether this normative language is useful for us as indigenous intellectuals.
 AT State Link – Details Good
Understanding the intricacies of the state is a necessary component of dismantling it
and ensuring the self-determining status of indigenous peoples as international
nations.
Turner ‘06 (Dale – member of the Temagami First Nation and Associate Professor of Government and Native American
Studies @ Dartmouth College, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, p. 9-11)

These three projects, as a whole, will create what I call a 'critical indigenous philosophy.' The division of intellectual labour gives rise to both
practical and philosophical problems. First, very few indigenous intellectuals are able - or even permitted - to undertake the first philosophical
project: indigenous philosophies are highly specialized forms of knowledge, and not every indigenous intellectual has the right to know and
articulate them. Second, there
are few indigenous philosophers, and even fewer indigenous intellectuals,
effectively engaging the Western European history of ideas. Word warriors explicitly engage the second and third
projects, but ought to do so guided by their understandings of indigenous philosophy.12 At this time in our development as an intellectual
culture (as part of mainstream intellectual culture), our numbers are small - to the dominant culture almost insignificant – which means that we
must make our intellectual labour count – we need to be effective in engaging the existing legal and political
discourses of the state. For us to make any successful inroads into mainstream intellectual culture, we
will have to be very careful about how our ways of knowing the world are talked about, written about,
and ultimately put to use in legal and political practices (such as Supreme Court decisions and public
policies). Yet the 'our' I am referring to can be misleading. There is a great diversity of indigenous knowledge in the world, so we must
consider making these intellectual inroads into the dominant culture as a community of indigenous intellectuals. In other words, our critical
indigenous intellectual community would consist of intellectuals from many nations, all of them in
dialogue with one another. Once our ways of thinking about the world are up for 'negotiation' in the
legal and political discourses of states, we will be in the position of having to defend our world views as
legal and political arguments. Sound arguments evolve from a series of propositions that can be shown to be true, and an indigenous
intellectual community must construct these arguments so that they are coherent and most of all convincing. This imperative may be
unjust, but our survival as independent and self-determining nations demands that we bow to it. However,
this reality check is met with an indigenous imperative: indigenous peoples are not going away, and they will always
claim that they own their homelands. Let me return to my earlier claim: If Aboriginal peoples want to assert that they possess
different world views, and that these differences ought to matter in the political relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian
state, they must engage the Canadian state's legal and political discourses in more effective ways. The sources of these differences lie in
indigenous philosophies. Word warriors must protect these forms of knowledge from exploitation by indigenous and non-indigenous peoples,
and must do so mainly by engaging Western European intellectual culture. Yet at the same time they must retain strong connections to their
communities. If we want the indigenous intellectual community to benefit indigenous peoples, we must know what we are talking about in the
political dialogue, and we must be clear about what we are doing in the process. There
are no guarantees that what
indigenous intellectuals do will ultimately bring about a higher quality of life for their communities. That
said, indigenous peoples cannot allow the dominant culture to continue to dictate their legal and
political realities. Greater participation in the state's legal and political practices is vital to our survival as
indigenous peoples, but at this time in history it is by no means clear how we ought to participate.
 AT Transnational Focus Bad
Our method of opinion forming and advocacy of particular response to particular
problems is a useful template for pragmatically solving transnational problems,
without prescribing a formula for all decision-making—eschews state-centrism and
outweighs co-option risks
Bray ‘09 (Daniel, The University of Melbourne International Politics and Political Theory Lecturer, Ph.D., Pragmatic
Cosmopolitanism: A Deweyan Approach to Democracy beyond the Nation-State, Millennium, 37.3)

In keeping with pragmatist tenets, my approach to the problem of practical institutionalisation is a context-
sensitive one that does not impose an a priori ‘direct’ or ‘representative’ template for the political
institutionalisation of democracy, which may require more or less degrees of mediation and delegation
depending on the particular problematic situation. As Saward points out, different democratic mechanisms may be
called for depending on whether they require permanent structures or temporary measures and on whether
they are undertaken by governments or by non-governmental actors.103 Thus, one may have a normative
preference for minimising the degree of mediation and delegation in any democratic regime, but these features of
democratic practice should not be viewed as inherent bads . Indeed, given the scale and complexity of modern
politics, transnational democratic publics are likely to require significant levels of mediation and delegation if
they are to be effective actors in global politics .
The key response of pragmatic cosmopolitanism here is to see transnational publics as institutions of critical inquiry
that are formed when associated individuals work collectively to address problems presented by
transnational consequences. As Molly Cochran points out, in Deweyan terms these publics exist on a continuum from ‘weak’ publics
that are understood to involve associated activity that is only informally organised (like a neighbourhood group) or narrowly focused on a single
issue (like the control and prevention of AIDS104), to stronger publics that have political agencies invested with public authority that are
capable of issuing binding decisions for a societal group (an international regime, say, or a more densely articulated public we commonly regard
as a political ‘state’).105 Today,
in the absence of adequately responsive global institutions, most transnational
associations take contestation rather than popular control as their fundamental political purpose.106 When they
seek to provide alternative sites for deliberation where dominators are not present they form what Nancy
Fraser calls ‘subaltern counterpublics’ that attempt to indirectly influence formal organisations by mobilising broader public
opinion.107 These oppositional networks and movements can only be conceived as transnational public institutions,
however, when their efforts are directed at shifting authority away from states and their agents by making their
own concerns authoritative in the decisionmaking that takes place where international public authority
exists in global politics – international law, regimes, the United Nations and in the broader bilateral and multilateral relations
between states.108 In the view of pragmatic cosmopolitanism, this process constitutes the core dynamic of
democratic reconstruction in international institutions .
It is this perspective that highlights the key difference between the pragmatist and deliberative approaches to the institutionalisation of
transnational democracy. Instead of seeing publics as constituted by responsible citizens who reason publicly on the
basis of a distinctive form of communication, pragmatists see responsible action as emerging from publics
constituted by persons who recognise a need for social cooperation in resolving common problematic
situations. In the pragmatist view, publics are developing ‘the traits of a state’ when they develop strong organisational and decision-making
capabilities and seek to make their concerns authoritative in global politics. Pragmatism therefore does not hold to the strict
state–civil society separation that fundamentally shapes the deliberative approach. Beyond nation-states with sharply defined
constitutional structures, the desire to maintain a strict separation between opinion-formation in the public
sphere and will-formation in formal representative institutions seems to neglect the requirement for
some kind of connective tissue between them, or at least assumes that the translation of opinions into
decision-making will occur through a n underlying discursive shift that changes the context in which formal
decisions are reached. Deliberative democrats thus privilege informal procedures of truth-seeking (that are never
power-free or completely non-strategic) over political voice in formal institutions. Dryzek is obviously concerned about
the co-option of oppositional civil society – which is certainly an ever-present threat and one to be taken seriously – but in
many global and transnational contexts this threat tends to be overstated and fails to acknowledge the
strategic character of ‘publics’ themselves. As Cochran points out, despite the blurring of the state–society
divide, co-option is unlikely to be ever fixed or complete .109 Additionally, not all weak publics seek permanent or even
minimal levels of inclusion in existing formal institutions, preferring to focus on contestation or developing alternative forums. Ultimately,
pragmatic cosmopolitanism argues that in many contexts of contemporary global politics the need to
realise change through access to formal decision-making outweighs the risk of co-option . One such context I
discussed earlier centres on the contemporary climate change negotiations, where a wide variety of nongovernmental actors attempt
to influence states in formal institutions by ‘channelling up’ the concerns of excluded publics , while at the same
time monitoring the negotiations and ‘channelling down’ information to broader transnational and domestic
constituencies.110
Aff Impact Framing
 Extinction First
Vote AFF if the plan reduces existential risk---It’s a prerequisite to any other impact
and scope neglect results in ignoring true risks
Seth D. Baum & Anthony M. Barrett 18. Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. 2018. “Global Catastrophes:
The Most Extreme Risks.” Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing,
edited by Vicki Bier, Routledge, pp. 174–184.

2. What Is GCR And Why Is It Important? Taken

literally, a global catastrophe can be any event that is in some way
catastrophic across the globe. This suggests a rather low threshold for what counts as a global catastrophe. An event
causing just one death on each continent (say, from a jet-setting assassin) could rate as a global catastrophe, because surely these deaths would
be catastrophic for the deceased and their loved ones. However, in common usage, a global catastrophe would be
catastrophic for a significant portion of the globe. Minimum thresholds have variously been set around ten thousand to ten
million deaths or $10 billion to $10 trillion in damages (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008), or death of one quarter of the human population (Atkinson
1999; Hempsell 2004). Others have emphasized catastrophes that cause long-term declines in the trajectory
of human civilization (Beckstead 2013), that human civilization does not recover from (Maher and Baum 2013), that
drastically reduce humanity’s potential for future achievements (Bostrom 2002, using the term
“existential risk”), or that result in human extinction (Matheny 2007; Posner 2004). A common theme across all
these treatments of GCR is that some catastrophes are vastly more important than others. Carl Sagan was
perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear winter (Sagan 1983). Without nuclear winter, a global nuclear
war might kill several hundred million people. This is obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would
presumably carry on. However, with nuclear winter, per Sagan, humanity could go extinct. The loss would
be not just an additional four billion or so deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan,
the loss would be billions and billions of lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming
humanity would continue for ten million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful species.
Sagan’s 500 trillion number may even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous turn, hinging on the
evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of contemporary humans
may no longer be recognizably “human”. The issue then is whether the descendants are still worth caring about, whatever they are. If they are,
then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe, Earth will remain habitable for about one billion
more years 2 until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists) the multiverse
will remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin 1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there. An
open question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the descendants of humanity to continue living
for an infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length of time (see e.g.
Ćirković 2002; Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger than the loss of
500 trillion lives. Debates about the infinite vs. the merely astronomical are of theoretical interest (Ng
1991; Bossert et al. 2007), but they have limited practical significance. This can be seen when evaluating GCRs
from a standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives
estimate, it follows that reducing the probability of global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion
chance is of the same significance as saving one human life. Phrased differently, society should try 500
trillion times harder to prevent a global catastrophe than it should to save a person’s life. Or,
preventing one million deaths is equivalent to a one-in500-million reduction in the probability of global
catastrophe. This suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR reduction, at the
expense of virtually all other objectives. Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner
2004). Posner used $50,000 as the value of a statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world
population); he describes both figures as significant underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of
preventing global catastrophe. For comparison, the United States government typically uses a VSL of around one to ten million dollars
(Robinson 2007). Multiplying a $10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5x1021 as the value of preventing global catastrophe. But even
using “just" $600 trillion, society should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global catastrophe, which converts to
being willing to spend at least $1 million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global
catastrophe. Thus while reasonable disagreement exists on how large of a VSL to use and how much to
count future generations, even low-end positions suggest vast resource allocations should be redirected
to reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the astronomical size of the
stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of the standard
riskequals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny GCR reductions merit
significant effort. This point holds especially strongly for risks of catastrophes that would cause
permanent harm to global human civilization. The discussion thus far has assumed that all human lives
are valued equally. This assumption is not universally held. People often value some people more than
others, favoring themselves, their family and friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others whom they identify with. Great
debates rage on across moral philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people should
value others who are distant in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This debate is
crucial for all valuations of risk, including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global catastrophes may not
be especially important, and we probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them. While everyone has the
right to their own views and feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely held position
that all human lives should be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United States Declaration of
Independence, updated in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and 3 women are created
equal”. Philosophers speak of an agent-neutral, objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a “veil of
ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in which each person considers what is best for society irrespective of which
member of society they happen to be. Such a perspective suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless
of who they are or where or when they live. This in turn suggests a very high value for reducing GCR, or
a high degree of priority for GCR reduction efforts.
 Extinction First
Extinction should be prioritized
Cerutti ‘14 - Professor of Political Philosophy emeritus at the University of Florence and Adjunct Professor at the Scuola
superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. In the last fifteen years, Cerutti has been aVisiting Professor at Harvard, the Universit´e de Paris 8,
the Humboldt Universit ¨at zu Berlin, the London School of Economics and Political Science,(China Foreign Affairs University),
Beijing, and Stanford University in Florence. Beyond the publications quoted in this article, Cerutti has written widely on the
political identity of the Europeans and the legitimacy of the European Union (last publication: Debating Political Identity and
Legitimacy in the European Union, ed. with S. Lucarelli and V. Schmidt, Routledge: London 2011). Also, his MOOC ‘Political
Philosophy: An Introduction’ is accessible on the platform <iversity.org>.

(Furio “Humankind’s First Fundamental Right: Survival,” Constellations)

This article’s main thesis1 is that, given

the existence of at least two global threats, nuclear weapons and climate change, which
endanger the life of humankind as a civ- ilized species, its right to survive should be asserted as its first
human or rather fundamental right . The sense of this assertion is not just philosophical but legal as well.¶ To
substantiate this thesis, I shall go through six argumentative steps:¶ 1. Why begin with global threats.¶ 2. Why survival is the leading category in
this field, and¶ how it interplays with justice.¶ 3. What interest humankind has in its survival, and why¶ it should be protected as a right.¶ 4.
Why regard “humankind” rather than “all indi-¶ viduals” as a possible actor.¶ 5. Why speak of a fundamental rather than human¶ right, and
how to constitutionalize this right.¶ 6. How two developments in international law after 1945 can contribute to support the argument I have ¶
been sketching.¶ **¶ 1. If philosophical thinking starts with being amazed at something in the world (Plato’s θαυμα ́ζειν), my in- terest in the
present matter2 was first stimulated by the pre-philosophical amazement I always felt in seeing that in the now enormous human rights
discourse (both in politics and academia) so much care is dedicated to the single individuals, and so wide-ranging designs of a cos- mopolis to
nobody seems to take note that the life of all present and futur e individuals
come are based on their rights. Yet
could be annihilated by a nuclear war or up- set by catastrophic developments of climate change. It is like insisting on first
debating the rights of a ship’s third- class passengers 3 instead of taking action in the light of the fact that
the ship is already taking in seawater from a leak (climate change is already happening) and also risks to hit a mine that is
floating around and would send it along with all passengers and crew straight to the ocean depths (by thinking and acting timely, leaks can be
filled, mines detected and swept away, all ac- tions that would put the care for third-class passengers ¶ on a firmer ground). These dangers
are philosophically significant because they tell something about human beings , the only ones who have become
able to destroy their own race, as well as about modernity: the possibil- ity of self-destruction sets an end to this era, opens a new one, which
can only vaguely be termed post-modern,4 and requires an updated rewriting of the Dialectics of the Enlightenment. It is also politically
significant as it challenges present politics to restructure itself by ex- tending its attention to the far future, something which is not possible
within the boundaries of modern politics because of its narrow time structure.5 In a more precise language, I term challenges
like
nuclear weapons (con- sidered in themselves, while nuclear proliferation is but a subphenomenon) and climate change global (in
a very specific sense) because they are lethal and planet-wide, can hit approximately everybody on earth and can be reasonably
addressed only by the near totality of coun- tries and peoples. They would not wipe out biologically humankind, although this cannot be
excluded in case of an all-out nuclear war; but they would destroy human civilization :6 not a set of values, but the set of
material and cultural tools (agriculture, communications, trans- portation and trade) that allow unspecialized animals like the humans to
survive and to thrive.¶ It is clear that my thesis presupposes a revised scale of relevance among the issues requiring and stimulat- ing theoretical
investigations: in my philosophical view global threats have a greater relevance and are intellec- tually more challenging than the issues
suggested by the media’s headlines (present wars, terrorism, group and minority rights in the US, multiculturalism in Canada or Australia,
immigrants in Europe, or, more recently, the crisis of the global economic system). As a reflection upon the deeper longue dure ́e determinants
of human- ity’s fate, political philosophy should not necessarily espouse the agenda suggested by current politics and journalism and, instead,
seek its own independent as- sessment of the state of the world as part of its business; this is a critical attitude that cannot be implemented
without a philosophical view on history (not to be con- fused with a revival of the “grand narratives”). Besides, the
shifting of most of
Critical Theory to pure normativity has favored the emergence not just of worldviews based on the predominance of Sollen, but
also of an exclusive attention on intersubjectivity and its troubles; as if challenges to politics and civilization
caused by systemic imperatives (such as the nuclear threat and¶ climate change) were beyond the grasp
of critical inquiry. What I am attempting in this article is to address an issue such as human rights that is typical of the self-
centered normative approach mentioned and to show how it should be restructured to address the challenges
for humankind’s survival.¶ In this attempt I am driven by the intent to debunk the layer of denial (or repression in pshychoanalyti- cal
sense) that, more intensely after the end of the Cold War, has removed the nuclear threat from the philosoph- ical reflection on modernity and
has later prevented cli- mate change from entering the main agenda of Critical Theory. There is also an epistemological aspect in this: a critical
Zeitdiagnose, or an informed assessment of where history has taken us to in our post-modern times is not possible without first taking what
hard science has to say about the threats for humankind very seriously.7 With rare exceptions, critical
theorists seem to be
reluctant to address the philosophical issues raised by global challenges , not to mention their complete
denial beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno in the Fifties and Sixties (when Mutual Assured Destruction became a real possibility) of the
meaning of nuclear weapons. It is as if Critical Theory , despite its claim to be a gen- eral assessment of our civilization, had
accepted a tacit division of labor in which its competence is restricted to social justice (in continuation of its
original being rooted in the Marxian critique of political economy) and the “damaged”8 subjectivity. The rest of the real world is left
to a purely Hobbesian (and later Luhmannian) reading, or to the perception of side-figures such as Karl Jaspers or Gu ̈nther Anders. ¶ A last
epistemological remark: startingfrom problems and threats that, however socially generated, come up as physical
events and are accounted for by hard science has the advantage that philosophy can work on them
without first engaging in a complicate and doubt- ful theorizing about how the world should be
reshaped according to a general normative theory. This ad hoc theorizing shows the ability or inability of a philosoph- ical view to come to
terms with problems that are of paramount importance to everybody, not just to the prac- titioners of Schulphilosophie. ¶ 2. I have explained
elsewhere9why survival rather than justice is the leading category of a philosophy of global threats. The now thriving literature
on
justice and climate change misses the point that before we look for ways to establish justice between generations, we have
to motivate our interest in their existence and wellbeing, or rather in the existence and wellbeing of humankind.10 While survival
of humankind is what best defines our problematic situation, when it comes to the normative aspect I believe that we should assume
responsibility for future generations rather than do justice to them; talking responsibility I move from its most elementary¶
manifestation, the responsibility parents take on for their children. Justice as fairness comes in when we have to fight back “generational
nepotism:” it is wrong for any generation to spoil the environment without regard to the consequences in the future, far that it may be, that is
not just out of respect for those that may harm our children and children’s children. Out of elementary fairness, as expressed in the Golden
Rule, we cannot deny parents of the, say, twenty-fifth century the chance to bear and educate their children in decent conditions. ¶ Now,
survival is a Hobbesian category, as such it sounds like an anathema to critical thinking, just as most categories stemming from the tradition of
politi- cal realism do. Since under global threats present and future humankind is really endangered in its survival, it is however hard to see the
rationale of denying the fact because the name comes from the enemy’s vocabu- lary. More importantly, there is an essential difference:
Hobbes’ survival regards the individual and is there- fore self-centered and adversarial (in common parlance, mors tua vita mea), while
humankind’s survival as a moral and political goal is by its own definition an uni- versalistic feature. More on this later.¶ A much talked-about
issue in this context is the so- called identity problem, which I am however inclined to dismiss. If it means the doubtfulness of any engagement
in favor of future generations because we do not know if they will exist (we could decide to stop procreating), the problem is surrounded by an
air of futility: there is no imaginable decision process that could effectively lead to a total procreation stop. On the other hand, if only a few
humans were alive in the far future, this would be enough of a reason for our engagement. Of course future humanity could never be born
because meanwhile the planet may have been burnt out by an asteroid (natural precariousness of human life) or an all-out nuclear war (man-
made precariousness). Neither type of precarious- ness can however be a reason not to endorse the interest of future generations in survival,
because reducing that precariousness is exactly the engagement’s telos. The other aspect of the identity problem — the non-identity of
posterity’s values and preferences with our own, or their indeterminacy — is not relevant to our case, be- cause the goal for whose attainment
we are called to save or sacrifice something for their survival has to do with their sheer survival (in an indispensably civilized framework, as
explained above) rather than with our own and the posterity’s moral configuration; in other words, there is no paternalistic attitude in it. ¶ In a
fairly different meaning, closer to social rather than moral (analytical) theory, identity comes up in an- other sense. Assuming responsibility for
(or, for that matter, being fair to) future generations is not just an altruistic attitude. Not in the sense that we can do as well do so by acting on
egoistic grounds: were this the¶ main reason to take action, we were justified to limit our effort to the less costly adaptation policies instead of
funding the restructuring of the economy necessary for mitigation, the only way-out from global warming for generations of the far future. To
be true, addressing the limitation of global warming or the neutralization of nuclear weapons requires wide-ranging undertakings that can be
justified only on grounds of a moral attitude towards future generations rather than of our enlight- ened self-interest. But doing
what we
can for the survival of humankind can give ourselves reassurance that our individual life (also seen in the
context of our gen- eration’s) is meaningful beyond the limits of our own existence on earth, because doing so helps us shed
our isolation as single individuals or single generation and become partners in a wider transgenerational
covenant of solidarity.¶ 3. That the interest to live and to raise children in de- cent conditions we attribute to future generations ought
to be translated into a right is not self-evident. It is not simply that we should abstain from transforming every reasonable claim into a right, and
instead reserve this category for the essentials that make the associated life of individuals in the polity possible and acceptable ac- cording to
each evolutionary stage.11 More importantly, doubts may also arise as to whether it is wise to translate any goal of social and political struggles
into a right, that is to “juridify” it instead of focusing on the underlying conflict dynamics and the participation of the conflict- ing parties. In
general I share this preoccupation, and have misgivings at any inflationary expansion of the hu- man rights catalogue. On the other hand, moral
rights that do not translate into legal rights12 are politically pointless or at least much less significant than the rights enshrined in a legal order.
Also, our case is different, and the issues we are confronted with are more radi- cal than the worries with ‘juridification;’ this is all the truer,
since the establishment of a right to survival for humankind would require a long and fierce political and intellectual battle in the first place. ¶
First of all, does the right of humanity to survival qualify as a (basic or human) right? Before we proceed, let us note that humankind’s survival is
not a good like civil liberties, which is completely at the disposal of human beings; instead, it can depend on the orbits of asteroids and other
NEOs.13 The “right of humankind to survival” should therefore be read as a short for “the right of humankind, including future people, to have
all previous generations doing their best to ensure their sur- vival and protect them from man-made threats.” In this version, we are clearly afar
from the confusion between rights and goals criticized by Dworkin14 (§3.1 in the chapter on Difficult cases), the causation of the good at stake
(survival) being elusive, or not completely nor (in the case of climate change) undoubtedly human; also ¶ the content of the right is not a
physical state, but rather the behavior influencing it. In a manifest way, this also identifies the right’s indispensable correlate, that is the duty of
the relevant actors (individuals and institutions) to refrain from behaviors that are likely to cause harm to that good. ¶ Whether or not this claim
can translate into a right should be investigated from two points of view, those of its structure (a) and its bearer (b). ¶ a. As for structure, three
of Feinberg’s15 four crite- ria for being a right are already met (to have a content, a holder and an addressee). The fourth, the ‘source of
validation,’ gradually emerges from the argument I am unfolding. Frydman and Haarscher also list four condi- tions, of which three are already
present (titulaire, objet, opposabilite ́) – even if more remains to be said about the first one; while the fourth condition (sanction) shall be
discussed below in the framework of the constitu- tionalization problem.16 Finally, let us look at the stan- dard distinction of negative and
positive rights, which Shue rightly believes to be substantially untenable. This is also true in our case, because the ‘behavior’ of in- dividuals and
institutions, which humanity is entitled to expect, according to the new right, can be imple- mented either by abstaining in single cases from
using or possessing nuclear weapons and emitting excessive GHGs or by establishing new institutions (a global En- vironmental Protection
Agency, say) and strategies (for example, technology transfer from advanced to develop- ing countries to help the latter rein in global warming).
What would be acknowledged would be the right, not the policies that according to time and circumstances are devised for its realization. ¶
Does this new right share with the other fundamental or human rights the need to be founded in a conception of the human, such as those
focused by Donnelly on dignity, by Meyers on moral agency and by Frydman and Haarscher on autonomy?17 Not properly, or not di- rectly.
Humanity’s right to survival is a meta-right rather than being the first right and sharing the same founda- tion with the others.18 Therefore, its
foundation is for- mal rather than rooted in a substantive view of what is human: acknowledging this right is the pre-condition
for making all other rights possible . It is their Bedingung der Mo ̈glichkeit, to put it as Kant might have done. Not only in the trivial
but sturdy physical sense that human rights can only apply to a living humankind , but not to a ”republic of
insects and grass” (Jonathan Schell on the state of the earth after a large nuclear war19). The meta-right as a pre-condition
has rather to be un- derstood in the moral sense: no foundation of morality or legality (except in a totally positivistic
view of the latter) makes sense if it cannot rely on the respect of the fundamental rights of those (poor
populations al- ready affected by global warming, future generations ¶ as victims of nuclear war or extreme climate change) harmed by our
acts and omissions. Here I mean moral- ity at large, regardless of its being based on a conception of the right or the good. In other
words, the two global challenges, which have received so little attention in the mainstream philosophy of the
last decades, have indeed philosophical implications capable of undermining the business-as-usual attitude
in moral and political theory; I mean the attitude to think of the foundations of moral- ity and polity as if the man-made (modern)
world in which they operate had not been substantially altered by humankind’s newly achieved capability to destroy itself and/or the planet. ¶
Let us make a further step on the road that leads to uncouple, as far as it goes, the foundation of a new right of paramount importance from a
substantive conception of the human – an effort aimed at protecting it from the uncertain or frail fate of such conceptions. On the one hand, as
a meta-right to individual-only human rights, the right to survival does not imply a choice among substantive values; this right does not refer to
a partic- ular conception of what is good for future generations, as it only wants to ensure for them existential condi- tions that are an
indispensable basis for their members to pursue whatever idea of the good, of liberty and self- realization they may choose. On the other hand,
survival is indeed referred not to the mere biological fact, but to the survival of humankind in decent, civilized condi- tions, taking civilization in
the meaning explained in §1. Alone, as I explained above, this qualification is not an added axiological component (civilization as a sys- tem of
values), as it rather relies on the analytical view that some technical and cultural features of civilization are essential to the life of the human
species.¶ There is a last aspect to be examined with regard to the structure or nature of this right: its emergence not from a shift in the doctrine
of human rights, but as a response to a new situation in world history, in which survival goods (a livable atmosphere in the first place) that were
so far tacitly taken for granted turn out to be no longer guaranteed, but more and more endangered. As such, this new right reconnects to what
we know about individual human rights, that is that they come up as a response to “perceived threats” and build an “evolving whole”.20 ¶ b. Let
us now come to the question of the right’s bearer. It is humankind, defined as the generality of the living individuals along with those who will
be born. There are three possible objections to this proposition. ¶ First, it seems to be self-evident that the notion of a human right for the so
defined humankind cannot be subject to the classical liberal objection that bearers of such rights are individuals, not groups.21 Humankind is
not an exclusive and self-contained group opposed to others (at least until we do not have our first contact with ¶ dwellers of other regions of
the universe), nor is it meant here to represent particular sets of values. Between the two meanings of “humanity” — as species (Artbegriff) and
as regulative notion of a community cemented by shared values and goals (Zielbegriff)22 — I am referring to the first one; it is now becoming
philosophically sig- nificant because not even its biological existence can be taken for granted under man-made threats. Humankind is not a
hypostasis detached from the individuals, as in the case of ‘the community’ or ‘das Volk,’ as it rather means the totality of the living individuals
of any given generation including (a) their potential to generate fur- ther human beings and generations and (b) their knowl- edge that the
latter will exist and probably suffer. This reflexive notion of humankind raises a problem, but remains open to different ethical choices:
indifference towards future generations, responsibility for them, and obligations assumed in their favor. ¶ 4. A second question is: why should
we speak of humankind instead of limiting ourselves to the more sober expression “all present and future individuals?” There is first a
lexicological advantage, in as much as we thus use one word instead of connecting two by an “and.” This better conveys the sense that the
bond of solidarity based on the responsibility for the elementary living conditions of posterity makes present and future individuals one
community – in this sole, thin sense in- deed, which does not try to conceal the deep fractures existing between contemporaries within the
present and the successive generations of this community. The very inclusion of future people into humankind is not an act of inclusive
kindness towards them, but is rather made compelling by the lethal threats that past and present people have projected into the life of
posterity, in an amount unprecedented in history. Lastly, introducing humankind as a bearer of rights highlights that the right of the individuals
to be alive and free can be enjoyed only in the middle of a larger community, which makes the claim of human rights possible and helps to im-
plement them. In times of economic globalization and global threats, we have come to know that this com- munity is the whole humankind, not
just nations. All this however does not alter the truth that who is entitled to vindicate the right to survival is not humanity as a hypostasis, but
every individual either living or not yet born – very much like what happens with individual human rights, whose constitutional formulation
makes them enjoyable for every citizen who will in the future be born under the same Constitution. ¶ Third comes the standard objection: it
does not make sense to endorse obligation towards future people, since, if men and women agree to stop reproduction, those people might
never be born. I have already dismissed this as a futile mental experiment. It could further be argued, though, that future generations might
turn out¶ to have moral standards totally different from ours. Yet, the possibility that posterity will be not amenable to our moral world is not
huge enough to release us from any responsibility towards them. We can still under- stand, and to an extent share, the moral problems raised
by the Bible or the Greek classical tragedy of millen- nia ago and should not easily assume that our fellow humans of the year 3000, dwellers of
a planet spoiled by global warming, will be morally so hugely different from us.¶ Finally, let me anticipate here one of the legal con- siderations
that will be developed later on. Any right- establishing text (but I am now referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR 1948)
works with the basic formula “everyone has the right to etc.”23 The validity of the claims is limited only by the spatial ex- tension of the law: a
right established by the French Constitution may be thought to be valid universally, but is legally protected only on French territory, while the
rights mentioned in the UDHR apply by definition to the entire world where humans live. This can be dubbed spa- tial universalism, while
establishing a right of present and future humanity to survive is tantamount to adding a time universalism. In other words, this makes explicit
that the right of everyone to a just international order (UDHR 1948, Art. 28; more below) also holds for the ‘everyones’ of the year 3000. This
may have always been tacitly intended by the law, the only time limit ly- ing in the possibility that the law is at some point in the future
dismissed by another law canceling or expand- ing those rights. In a present like ours, in which it has become known that the future is no longer
guaranteed to be essentially homogeneous (with no radical change in the physical and anthropological life conditions) to the present and the
past, it has become necessary to openly establish a linkage between our obligations and the rights of future generations, as far as existential
issues are concerned; a link that will likewise apply to them as soon as they become the present generation. ¶ So far, I have clarified the moral
and, to a lesser extent, legal reasons for introducing the notion of hu- mankind as right bearer. I will now stress that the hu- mankind discourse
in this article remains political rather than moral.¶ It is not necessary here to rerun the history of the humankind/humanity notion; it is enough
to remember that its denial has been a stronghold in the battle of value nihilists (Nietzsche) and realist thinkers (Oswald Spen- gler, who
dismissed it as a “zoological notion,” and more extensively Carl Schmitt in Schmitt 1976, particularly §6). As self-contained units (such as the
Westphalian system states) were deemed to be the only sustainable and legitimate polities, any reference to humanity was seen as toothless or
manipulative, as a noble universalis- tic alibi for particularistic interests.24 Setting aside this¶ sort of criticism, which mistakes the ideological
use of the term for its very substance, we know that humanity, as a good-will aspiration of philosophers, poets and re- ligious men, could not be
regarded as a political notion because only non-voluntaristic communities can be re- garded as political. They alone allow for binding and
effective decisions, whereas any partner can at any time and according to its convenience withdraw from mem- bership in “humanity” or other
large associations based on just good will. ¶ This can now be expected to change, because planetary
lethal threats such as nuclear
war or disastrous climate change have the potential strength to forge all relevant political actors into
one community, not unlike Hobbes’ individuals, who received the push to unite from the threats to their life and
limbs: first because they are all put in danger, and second because they have to act jointly if they really want to
fight back those dangers. This is a possibility, not an actual and inevitable process, as there are enough counter-forces that
impede those ‘Hobbesian’ threats to fully make hu- mankind one political community: fear, the protecting passion, does no longer work as
smoothly as in Hobbes’ model of Leviathan.25 Nor is the potential contained in global challenges supposed to generate a world state as its only
outcome: practicing survival policies, who- ever the actors may be, is more important than a uni- fied state-like structure in charge of doing so.
Nonethe- less all this is enough to use ‘humankind’ in a political sense , as something that is a potential constituency rather
than a fragmented multiplicity of individuals and states.¶ 5. Why a fundamental rather than a human right? The distinction between human and
fundamental is not univocally worked out in the literature.26 In the vocab- ulary I am using here, human rights are seen as a philo- sophical
concept and a moral (deontological) precept, while fundamental rights are those positively acknowl- edged in a legal order, entrusted to
political and institu- tional processes for their implementation, and claimable in courts – this last feature being more problematic. Putting on
humankind’s survival the label of a funda- mental right avoids leaving it in a philosophical limbo as a regulative idea,27 and gives it a better
defined political and legal nature; this is more adequate to the character- istic of survival as something endangered by political decisions (or the
lack thereof) and requesting a political solution by a given deadline (the next few years if we want to try to keep the temperature increase
expected by 2100 under two degrees).¶ If humankind’s survival is acknowledged as a funda- mental right, it follows that it should be
constitutional- ized, that is inserted in new and old (and aptly modified) Constitutions as well as in a new version of the Univer- sal Declaration
of Human Rights; as such, it could be referred to as highest guidance in international treaties aimed at implementing it – rather than being
enshrined in a specific ‘survival’ treaty. In constitutional law, a development in this sense is already taking place, in as much as either the rights
of future generations to a safe environment or our responsibility towards them in this regard or the imperative to preserve the environ- ment
(without mention of the future generations, but implicitly to their benefit) have been affirmed in consti- tutional amendments of the last two
decades in countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland, but also Burkina Faso and Burundi. Having rights or being protected by the legally
defined responsibility of the previous gener- ations is however not the same thing, and with regard to humankind’s survival I would point at its
stronger formulation as a right: it is more binding, while the ob- jections against endowing future generations with rights can be easily argued
against. Just because it is conceived in favor of those who cannot yet uphold their interest, this right should be protected against cancellation
by a sort of Ewigkeitsklausel as in Art. 79.3 of the German Grundgesetz.28 A right to survival is more specific and more stringent than the right
to a safe environment be- cause it derives from lethal and global challenges that affect the very core of the polity, protection, rather than from
a generic care for a balanced relationship to na- ture or from a diffuse feeling of benevolence for the posterity. ¶ In national or regional
Constitutions, the acknowl- edgment of this right could be accompanied by the establishment of corresponding institutions, promoting the
implementation of the new right; it could be for example an ombudsman29 for future generation as a (countermajoritarian)30 authority
protecting their inter- ests against damages resulting from new legislation, and endowed with the power to send it back to the legislative rather
than to veto it straight away.31 Not to be underes- timated are the difficulties that would arise in striking a very delicate balance on two levels:
in general between the interests of present and future generations,32 but also between parliaments or executives, which act under the
pressure of their constituencies, and the members of the ombudsman authority, who remain nonetheless contem- poraries of the former
rather than being appointed by the latter – for all too natural reasons. ¶ The same difficulty would affect the national courts in which the new
fundamental right, as jus cogens principle, should be made claimable at the initiative of institutions such as the ombudsman or of advocacy
groups representing a significative number of citizens in a referendum-like counting procedure. In international courts,33 the interest of future
generations should be represented by an ombudsman to be established at the UN as well as at regional associations of states such as the EU or
Mercosur. A point however that remains¶ open to further discussion has been raised in the de- bate on socio-economic or solidarity rights,
which may have some affinity with the right to survival: theoreti- cally, Frank Michelman has made clear that the status of a norm as
constitutional law ought not to be con- flated with the question of its availability for judicial enforcement.34 In practice, conflicts are easily
possi- ble between the courts sentencing on the states’ failure to implement those rights and “the vain or overbearing nature of these
sentences” on a matter that is political rather than judicial. 35 This is true in our case as well: the attainment of a new international order
without national possession of nuclear arms or a carbon-free reordering of the world economy are goals for policy-making, not something that
can be attained in courts. In this frame- work, however, courts are not jobless: sentencing the nuclear-armed states for their failure in
implementing art.VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),36 or the US of the Bush years for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol and
failing to cut emissions is a typical judicial matter, as the two cases would regard the break of treaty obligations or the failure to cease doing
some- thing harmful, not to bring about something good.37¶ Finally, two more fundamental objections could be raised against the idea of a
legal protection of the inter- est of future generations. It could be argued that what would be represented (in a time-universalistic mode) is not
the interest of future generations, but rather the interest of a particular fraction of the present ones, dis- guising itself as standard bearer of
those people to come. On the one hand this should be taken into account as critical point of view in the public debate on those inter- ests. On
the other hand, this criticism, strictly speaking, would also delegitimize such an ancient principle of Roman and Western law as the protection
of the child. In morality it would affirm a radical skepticism that denies the possibility of slipping into another person’s clothes and acting from a
non-egoistic stance. This can be obviously upheld, but at the price of the disappear- ance of morality as well as of the polity, which is – in any
case and among other things – a solidaristic association.¶ A second problem, which is more difficult to deal with, is that we do not know as a
general piece of knowl- edge what the interest of future generations is; whereas in the case of legal protection of the child we share a generally
accepted knowledge of his or her future in- terest (to remain healthy, to get sufficient education, to be free to make the best of him/herself).
What the real life conditions and the presumable vital interests of fu- ture generations will be can only be tentatively argued from what the
several branches of natural and economic (e.g. demography) science are able to tell us about what is likely to remain constant in physical and
cultural anthropology and what is likely to be most endangered.¶ As such, it is important that moral and political theory renew their
relationship to the natural sciences after a time of reciprocal disdain between the two. While sci- ence cannot by itself draw an encompassing
picture of future life under global threats, philosophy should learn from science what those future problems are likely to be and elaborate on
them, instead of reflecting on the future of humanity by just moving from the doctrines of past philosophers or relying on the hearsay about it
based on media reports or the philosopher’s personal divinations. ¶ 6. My philosophical proposal to fill a hole in human rights discourse and
legislation by introducing a first or meta-fundamental right of humankind to survival and positivizing it in national, international and world
law38 resonates with two legal developments. The first related to ‘humanity’, the second to ‘human rights.’ The latter resonates with the
novelties in constitutional law men- tioned in §5.¶ The first one began in 1970 as the UN General As- sembly adopted Resolution 2749, the
Declaration of Principles Governing the Seabed and Ocean Floor, con- taining the notion of a “common heritage of mankind”; it was originally
introduced to protect the seabed and ocean floor and later the “moon and other celestial bod- ies” from exploitation by powerful countries
against the interest of the developing ones.39 In the 1990s, the competing and “thinner” concept of “common concern of mankind” emerged,
as in the Convention on Bio- diversity of 1992; nonetheless it can be said that hu- mankind has become a notion contained in binding in-
ternational law and referred to indivisible (climate) and divisible (seabed, ocean floor, moon) objects, and that this has happened as an answer
to problems and chances generated by huge technological advancement. ¶ In another corner of legal development, it could be argued that the
logical structure, so to speak the norma- tive algorithm of the UDHR norms — the aforemen- tioned ‘everyone has the right . . . ’ — implies that
hu- mankind, not just single individuals, is to be the bearer of those rights, even if the collective singular is not used. Turning to a more
substantive level, we could go as far as to say that the legal protection of humankind’s survival was implicitly enshrined as early as 1948 in the
UDHR and later in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as the In- ternational Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both of 1966. Art. 28 UDHR (“ev- eryone has the right to a social and international order in which the rights and
freedoms set forth in this Decla- ration can be fully realized”) could be rethought in the direction of institutions bound to implement for every-
one, now and in the future, the right to life (Art.3 UDHR, Art. 6 ICCPR), the right to an adequate standard of liv- ing incl. adequate food (Art.11
ICESRC)40 as well as¶ the right of the family to be protected (Art.10 ICESRC), a right that would be denied to families of the posterity bound to
live under insufferable environmental condi- tions (cf. above the notion of a transgenerational chain of parents). While the different binding
strength of the several legal formulations (treaty, covenant, convention, declaration) cannot be ignored , it remains clear that le-
gal documents do not advance by themselves the cause of humankind’s survival, except if they can be effec- tively referred to in a court of
justice; but they
create an appropriate and stable environment for what can really bring about a change,
that is educational and political struggles, the former aiming at a change in the political culture.¶ To sum up, (hu)mankind
has thus ceased to be just a concept used by philosophers and theologians, whose presence in international law was
merely philo- sophical, if not rhetorical, as in the Preamble to the UN Charter of 1945. Though not explicitly endowed with rights in the
documents quoted above, the humankind of the “common heritage” doctrine is an important prece- dent in the direction, suggested by this
article, of in- troducing this new legal actor. When looking at the implementation of the rights that can be attributed to it, the other legal
novelty of the “common but dif- ferentiated responsibility”41 of individual actors, such as countries, should also be brought to bear. This is
important when it comes to distributing the burden of the duties corresponding to those rights – which is in- deed one of the major issues in
the debate following the Copenhagen Accord on Climate Change of 2009. In any case, the legal acknowledgment of a “common responsibility”
for the global commons is a further step in designing humankind as a juridical notion.¶ This article is policy-oriented in the peculiar sense of a
constitutional policy that will require decades, if ever, to become the subject of debate and even longer to be legally implemented. Impulses in
this direction are cer- tainly not be expected from the world of politics, but rather from the scientific community (provided a now utopian
sounding collaboration of physics, philosophy and legal theory materializes) or from scattered sen- tences of national and international courts,
particularly in environmental matter.42 Support from civil society would help.¶ Finally, the author’s suggestion as to how to read
this proposal: it has a clearly cosmopolitan (or better: cosmopolitical) character, not however in the sense of cosmopolitanism as a general
doctrine of government/ governance. It is rather generated by tools coming from realist thought: new threats as source of new rights, and
lethal and planetary threats to the survival of hu- mankind’s civilization as drivers towards a new level of legal protection.
 Nuke War Turns Structural Violence
Ignoring the impact of nuclear conflict is paternalistic whitewashing---even a small
nuclear exchange would intensify structural violence – the aff turns the K
Thompson 18 (Nicole Akoukou, Chicago-based creative writer. 4-6-2018. "Why I will not allow the fear of a nuclear attack
to be white-washed." RaceBaitR. http://racebaitr.com/2018/04/06/2087/#)

I couldn’t spare empathy for a white woman whose biggest fear was something that hadn’t happened yet
and might not. Meanwhile, my most significant fears were in motion: women and men dying in cells after
being wrongly imprisoned, choked out for peddling cigarettes, or shot to death during ‘routine’ traffic stops. I twitch when
my partner is late, worried that a cantankerous cop has brutalized or shot him because he wouldn’t prostrate himself. As a women of
color, I am aware of the multiple types of violence that threaten me currently—not theoretically. Street
harassment, excessively affecting me as a Black woman, has blindsided me since I was eleven. A premature body meant being
catcalled before I’d discussed the birds and the bees. It meant being followed, whistled at, or groped. As an adult, while
navigating through neighborhoods with extinguished street lights, I noticed the correlation between women’s safety and street lighting—as
well as the fact that Black and brown neighborhoods were never as brightly lit as those with a more significant white population. I move quickly
through those unlit spaces, never comforted by the inevitable whirl of red and blue sirens. In fact, it’s always been the contrary. Ever so often,
cops approach me in their vehicle’s encouraging me to “Hurry along,” “Stay on the sidewalk,” or “Have a good night.” My spine stiffening, I
never believed they endorsed my safety. Instead, I worried that I’d be accused of an unnamed accusation, corned by a cop who preys on Black
women, or worse. A majority of my 50-minute bus ride from the southside of Chicago to the north to join these women for the birthday
celebration was spent reading articles about citywide shootings. I began with a Chicago Tribute piece titled “33 people shot, seven fatally, in 13
hours,” then toppled into a barrage of RIP posts on Facebook and ended with angry posts about police brutality on Tumblr. You might guess, by
the time I arrived to dinner I wasn’t in the mood for the “I can’t believe we’re all going to die because Trump is an idiot” shit. I shook my head,
willing the meal to be over, and was grateful when the check arrived just as someone was asking me about my hair. My thinking wasn’t all too
different from Michael Harriot’s ‘Why Black America Isn’t Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust.” While the meal was partly
pleasant, I departed thinking, “fear of nuclear demolition is just some white shit.” Sadly, that thought would not last
long. I still vibe with Harriot’s statement, “ Black people have lived under the specter of having our
existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped on to the shore at Jamestown Landing.” However, a
friend—a Black friend—ignited my nuclear paranoia by sharing theories about when it might happen and who faced the greatest threat. In an
attempt to ease my friend’s fear, I leaned in to listen but accidentally toppled down the rabbit hole too. I forked through curated news feeds. I
sifted through “fake news,” “actual news,” and foreign news sources. Suddenly, an idea took root: nuclear
strike would
disproportionately impact Black people, brown people, and low-income individuals. North Korea won’t
target the plain sight racists of Portland, Oregon, the violently microaggressive liberals of the rural
Northwest, or the white-hooded klansmen of Diamondhead, Mississippi. No, under the instruction of the
supreme leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea will likely strike densely populated urban areas, such as Los
Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. These locations stand-out as targets for a nuclear strike because
they are densely populated U.S. population centers. Attacking the heart of the nation or populous cities would
translate to more casualties. With that in mind, it’s not lost on me that the most populous cities in the United States
boast sizeable diverse populations, or more plainly put: Black populations. This shit stresses me out! There’s a
creeping chill that follows me, a silent alarm that rings each time my Google alert chimes letting me know that Donald Trump has yet again
provoked Kim Jong-Un, a man who allegedly killed his very own uncle. I’ve grown so pressed by the idea of nuclear holocaust that my partner
and I started gathering non-perishables, candlesticks, a hand-crank radio, and other must-buy items that can be banked in a shopping cart.
The practice of preparing for a nuclear holocaust sometimes feels comical, particularly when
acknowledging that there has long been a war on Black people in this country. Blackness is bittersweet in flavor.
We are blessed with the melanized skin, the MacGyver-like inventiveness of our foremothers, and our blinding brightness—but the anti-
blackness that we experience is also blinding as well as stifling. We
are stuck by rigged systems, punished with the prison
industrial complex, housing discrimination, pay discrimination, and worse. We get side-eyes from
strangers when we’re “loitering,” and the police will pull us over for driving “too fast” in a residential neighborhood.
We get murdered for holding cell phones while standing in our grandmother’s backyard. The racism that strung up
our ancestors, kept them sequestered to the back of the bus and kept them in separate and unequal
schools still lives. It lives, and it’s more palpable than dormant. To me, this means one thing: Trump’s America
isn’t an unfortunate circumstance, it’s a homecoming event that’s hundreds of years in the making, no matter how
many times my white friends’ say, “He’s not my president.” In light of this homecoming, we now flirt
with a new, larger fear of a Black genocide. America has always worked towards Black eradication
through a steady stream of life-threatening inequality, but nuclear war on American soil would be
swift. And for this reason I’ve grown tired of whiteness being at the center of the nuclear conversation .
The race-neutral approach to the dialogue, and a tendency to continue to promote the idea that
missiles will land in suburban and rural backyards, instead of inner-city playgrounds, is false. “The Day
After,” the iconic, highest-rated television film in history, aired November 20, 1983. More than 100 million people tuned in to watch a film
postulating a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film, which would go on to affect President Ronald Reagan and
policymakers’ nuclear intentions, shows the “true effects of nuclear war on average American citizens.” The Soviet-targeted areas featured in
the film include Higginsville, Kansas City, Sedalia, Missouri, as well as El Dorado Springs, Missouri. They depict the destruction of the central
United States, and viewers watch as full-scale nuclear war transforms middle America into a burned wasteland. Yet unsurprisingly, the
devastation from the attack is completely white-washed, leaving out the more likely victims which are
the more densely populated (Black) areas. Death tolls would be high for white populations, yes, but
large-scale losses of Black and brown folks would outpace that number, due to placement and poverty.
That number would be pushed higher by limited access to premium health care, wealth, and resources.
The effects of radiation sickness, burns, compounded injuries, and malnutrition would throttle Black and
brown communities and would mark us for generations. It’s for that reason that we have to do more to
foster disaster preparedness among Black people where we can. Black people deserve the space to
explore nuclear unease, even if we have competing threats, anxieties, and worries. Jacqui Patterson, Director
of the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, once stated: African American communities are disproportionately
vulnerable to and impacted by natural (and unnatural) catastrophes. Our socio-economic vulnerability is
based on multiple factors including our lack of wealth to cushion us, our disproportionate
representation in lower quality housing stock, and our relative lack of mobility, etc.
 AT Root Cause
No root cause---particulars of each case must be accounted for
Azar Gat ‘09, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, “So Why Do People Fight? So Why Do People
Fight? Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of War”, European Journal of International Relations 2009 15: 571-599

This article’s contribution is two-pronged: it argues that IR theory regarding the causes of conflict and war is deeply flawed, locked for
decades in ultimately futile debates over narrow, misconstrued concepts ; this conceptual confusion is untangled and the
debate is transcended once a broader, comprehensive, and evolutionarily informed perspective is adopted. Thus attempts to find the root cause

of war in the nature of either the individual, the state, or the international system are fundamentally misplaced. In all these ‘levels’ there
are necessary but not sufficient causes for war, and the whole cannot be broken into pieces.13 People’s
needs and desires — which may be pursued violently — as well as the resulting quest for power and the state of
mutual apprehension which fuel the security dilemma are all molded in human nature (some of them existing
only as options, potentials, and skills in a behavioral ‘tool kit’) ; they are so molded because of strong evolutionary pressures

that have shaped humans in their struggle for survival over geological times , when all the above literally constituted
matters of life and death. The violent option of human competition has been largely curbed within states , yet is

occasionally taken up on a large scale between states because of the anarchic nature of the inter-state
system. However, returning to step one, international anarchy in and of itself would not be an explanation for war were it not
for the potential for violence in a fundamental state of competition over scarce resources that is
imbedded in reality and, consequently, in human nature. The necessary and sufficient causes of war — that obviously
have to be filled with the particulars of the case in any specific war — are thus as follows: politically organized
actors that operate in an environment where no superior authority effectively monopolizes power
resort to violence when they assess it to be their most cost-effective option for winning and/or defending
evolution-shaped objects of desire, and/or their power in the system that can help them win and/or defend those desired goods.
 AT “Settler Futurity”
Our reps identified a shared threat stemming from the settler present, the avoidance
of which opens plural futures for the making---which is good
Joseph J. Z. Weiss 15. Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology, University of Chicago. December 2015. “Unsettling
Futures: Haida Future-Making, Politics and Mobility in the Settler Colonial Present.” p.216-232,
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/bitstream/handle/11417/1121/Weiss_uchicago_0330D_13139.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Conclusion: “What’s next? Just guess.” Signs of the Future One of the more recent additions to the socio-landscape of Old Massett, which I noticed on a return visit
in 2014, was a series of blue signs that had appeared in many of the lawns on reserve and a good few uptown. The sign was a good two feet high and emblazoned
with capitalized text: UNITED AGAINST ENBRIDGE. Below the text was a picture of a salmon. The salmon and the first word, “UNITED,” were in stark, attention-
grabbing white, while the other text was in black. The signs, I later discovered, were distributed for five dollars each by the “Friends of Wild Salmon,” a coalition of
northern British Columbia residents – including both First Nations and non-First Nations members – working together to oppose the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline
Project.1 Perhaps appropriately, then, I noticed the sign on the lawns of both Haida and non-Haida, in Old Massett, (New) Masset, and out by Towtown. The signs
may have been new, but their message is one that should have become familiar to us at this point: The
people of Haida Gwaii oppose
“Enbridge;” that is, The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Project . The project, first proposed in the mid-2000s, seeks to
construct two pipelines to transport crude oil and condensate from northern Alberta to Kitimat on the coast of British Columbia.2 The oil would then be transported
via “super-tanker” from the coast, through the Hecate Straight that passes between the west coast and the islands of Haida Gwaii before being exported to other
nations (particularly China). Enbridge has received heavy support for the project from Canada’s current Conservative government, headed by Prime Minister
Stephen Harper, and in 2013 the Enbridge Joint-Review Panel – despite the words of hippies and Haida alike, alongside fierce opposition from all over the northwest
coast - approved the pipelines, albeit with 209 required conditions.3 As a partnership between Canadian federal and corporate interests, the Enbridge Pipelines
Project promises a future horizon of economic prosperity, one that unequivocally justifies any environmental risk in the present. On
Haida Gwaii,
Enbridge presages a rather different future, one in which the unpredictable waters of the Hecade
Straight all but guarantee a tanker spill. Such a spill would devastate the waters and lands of the islands
and the neighbouring coastline of British Columbia, destroying the fish and poisoning the plants that
currently draw on ocean waters and the animals that feed thereon . Neither eagles nor ravens could survive, living as they do
on a diet that consists primarily of marine life, a fact which all but guarantees the disappearance of Eagles and Ravens, the

Haida people whose lifeways as such are so fundamentally tied to the islands of Haida Gwaii. Haida
Gwaii could no longer be home. A song recorded in protest again Enbridge by Aboriginal artist Kinnie Starr and animated as a music video by
Haidawood, a team of Haida and non-Haida stop-motion artists and animators, makes this threat explicit,

asking in its opening lines “Who will save these waters, save them for our great granddaughters, save them for our great grand-daughter’s sons,
[…] save them before all is dead and gone? ”4 This nightmare future, this future that is no future, is one

that looms large over the whole of this dissertation. It is familiar because it is a reiteration of the horror
of ecological cataclysm that the CHN formed itself in opposition against, that the “hippies” risk
metonymically bringing about by taking from the lands and waters without respect. But it is also familiar
because in a broader sense it is the future that settler colonialism attempted to give to Native peoples;
indeed, to render as their already given destiny. This is the future of indigenous erasure, of ultimate
disappearance, of a closed temporality which can only end in “ all dead and gone.” As I have also hopefully shown in
each of my chapters, however, the future of “no future” is never taken as inevitable or already determined by

Haida people. The work of future-making instead always acts to ward off the nightmare future of Haida
erasure, always puts in its place instead multiple possible futures in which Haida people continue. Take the
blue signs on the lawns of the Masset(t)s, Old and New, implicitly answering Kinnie Starr’s question with the bold declaration that the islands (will) stand “UNITED”
against Enbridge. But
the social significances of these futures are never encompassed solely by the ways in
which they respond to the threat of nightmare futures . As we saw in Chapter 3, for instance, the production of a
future of Haida and non-Haida unity is considerably more complicated than the declaration of shared
solidarity, speaking back to a particular history of Haida and settler relations and fantasy schemas,
looking forward towards finding productive ways in which non-Haida can be integrated into Haida
systems of sociality and responsibility. To speak of a future united against Enbridge is thus necessarily to
speak of many other things, just as it is the case when speaking of a future of Haida return, a future of
care-full leadership, or a future of traditional authority. Larger social worlds unfold out of the
constitution of particular futures. This is why, more than anything, I want to make clear in the final, concluding chapter of this dissertation that
the political (if not the existential) significance of Haida future-making does not lie simply in the specific
ways in which individual futures respond to particular dilemmas of the settler colonial present.
Rather, what is most crucial about future-making as a way of thinking out from within the temporal
brackets of settler colonialism’s deferred erasure is simply the fact of future-making itself. What
matters the most is the capacity to say, as Haida rapper Ja$e ElNino does in a guest appearance in Starr’s song, “Now expect the best from the
northwest/ What’s next? Just guess.” ElNino asserts the openness of the future , challenging his listeners to even attempt to
predict the field of possibilities still to come. This does not mean, though, that this openness is unmoored. Quite the opposite, ElNino asks us to “expect the best of
the northwest,” in response to the threat of Enbridge and, I think, more generally. In this spirit, in what follows I highlight the significance of location to indigenous
futurity, exploring how Old Massett, its neighbouring communities along Masset Inlet, and the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii act as locations around which the
very openness of Haida futures can be articulated. My discussion will be largely synthetic, reading together my previous chapters to attempt to arrive at a few
conclusions for this dissertation at a whole. I begin with a discussion of Haida Gwaii, once again, as “home,” asking what it means to consider the islands as a Haida
homeland (and one that requires “care” as such) in the light of the futures I have sketched out. I then draw on this to pose a few suggestions for the political
anthropology of indigenous peoples and its abiding contemporary concern with sovereign rights and territoriality. Finally, I conclude by drawing out the multiple
meanings of my titular phrase, “unsettling futures,” in the context of Haida futuremaking. Homeland Haida Gwaii is in at least some sense at the center of each of
the futures I have discussed in this dissertation. It is the home to which Haida are expected (and expect) to return, the “cornucopia” of off-the-grid fantasy, the
ongoing historical space of complex social and material relations that these fantasies elide, the perpetually at risk ecological landscape which demands (and
authorizes) the CHN’s care and respect. And, as we have seen, these
various futures for the islands are not isolated from one
another. Quite the opposite, futures proliferate in response to each other. The potential for non-Haida
homing necessitates strategic forms of future-oriented social integration to bring these new arrivals into
respectful relations with the Haida world, the nightmare non-future of ecological collapse is warded off
by the attempt to constitute care-full futures under Haida control. What all these Haida futures have in
common – at least as they relate to the islands - is that they work to preserve Haida Gwaii , and the community of
Old Massett in particular, as spaces in which Haida futures remain possible . This fact, as I have already begun to suggest in Chapter 2,

might help us to resolve some of James Clifford’s dilemmas in relation to indigenous mobility . As I pointed towards then, the

notion that “place” is significant to indigenous peoples – politically, socially, affectively, culturally – has
become one of the essential components of how “indigeneity” is understood as a global phenomenon
and a strategic identity from which rights claims can be advanced . Take Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise
occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard (Assembly
2007:10, emphasis mine). But what precisely does it mean to have a “distinctive, spiritual relationship” to a place, and who determines what might constitute that
relationship? Here one of the perils of Povinelli’s “cunning of recognition,” as indigenous rights to territory become conflated with - and evaluated against -
essentialized settler notions of Native ecological spirituality and/or emplacedness (cf: Raibmon 2005; Nadasdy 2003). If indigeneity thereby takes on the significance
of being “rooted” in a particular place, of having certain identifiably “distinctive” cultural relationships to that place that others might lack, then the fact of
indigenous mobility would indeed pose a profound dilemma for the category of indigeneity on the one hand and the capacity to make claims to territorial rights qua
one’s indigeneity on the other. But there is a remarkable temporal shallowness to all this. To give a representative example, the Australian state criteria for what
constitutes “cultural rights to territory” that Povinelli interrogates function solely in the past and the present, mandating that Aboriginal people show continuity of
occupation and of the cultural practices associated with “Aboriginal occupation” in the mind of the court in order to be recognized as possessing a rightful claim to
their home territories (Povinelli 2002). Erased
in this is the possibility that a territory could be the site of departure
and return, that it could have a future horizon that is flexible, subject to transformation alongside the
transformations of the people(s) who call it home, without thereby necessarily losing its integrity as a
rightful space of indigenous occupation. Such a possibility is not controversial for my Haida interlocutors.
Rather, it has the status of an already-given certainty, community common sense - though there is
without doubt much social work that goes into the production of that certainty . What makes indigenous mobility
fraught, then, might have rather more to do with the constitution of settler polities than it does with the actual practices of indigenous peoples. Consider the
various ways in which we have already seen colonial authorities attempt to control Haida movement, from the forced expulsions of 19th century Victoria to the
removal of Haida children from the islands for residential schools less than a century later. Consider too the manufacture of the reserves themselves, the fixing of
two Haida “Bands” with their own federally determined territories, beyond which Haida people could claim no rights over land, waters, or resources (cf: Harris
2002). This is a logic of containment, of isolation. In leaving their assigned spaces, Native peoples were assumed by colonial authorities to be leaving the space of
their Nativeness behind, assimilating into settler society on its terms. Indeed, this was the motivating logic of the residential schools program, which took as its
premise the idea that “Indians” could always “backslide” into “savage customs” as long as they remained in their homes and with their families. Aboriginal children
thus had to be brought somewhere else to learn how to join “civilized,” that is, white Christian, society (Miller 1996). Reserves could thus be rendered as the last
bastions of a “weird and waning race,” to quote Scott, their inhabitants temporally foreclosed and spatially fixed. The notion that indigenous people could move
without ceasing to be (or ceasing to fight for their rights to self-determination and Title to their lands) unsettles this narrative, just as does the intertwined
possibility of indigenous futurity. The relationship to Haida Gwaii that we’ve seen sketched out by the Haida futures explored in this dissertation does not preclude
the possibility of “distinctive spiritual relationships” between Haida and their home territories. Quite the opposite, the ineffable quality of homing alone suggests
that many of my interlocutors feel a connection to their home that goes beyond the kinds of practices that are only possible on the islands, their beauty or their
history. Indeed, when considered as home, when considered as a site that requires care, there is little doubt that Haida Gwaii can encompass a wide range of
phenomenological, affective, social, and cultural ways of relating to its lands and waters by Haida people (and their neighbours, at times for good, at times for ill).
But it is not these relations as such that encompass the totality of Haida Gwaii’s significance. Rather, what is of greatest concern to my interlocutors is the
continuing future possibility that relations like that could be formed, that people could continue to be called home to Haida Gwaii once they’ve fully explored the
world off-island, that the qualities that precisely make Haida Gwaii home could be preserved. This is what it means, I think, to “take care” of Haida Gwaii, to allow it
to continue as a homeland for uncounted future generations. Thoughthey certainly emphasize the need for Haida Gwaii to be
maintained as a location for Haida futurity, this does not mean that the futures we have seen expend all
the possible ways in which such future forms of Haida social, material, ecological, and relational life
could be formed. Recall Ja$e ElNino’s challenge of a future so open that its possible contents can only be guessed at. What Haida future-
making demonstrates is that there are a set of potentialities which are worth protecting so that Haida
people can continue to access them, to come home to them, even as continuing forms of mobility and
political processes can also shape and reshape Haida social and cultural life on and off the islands . Homeland
is not a regimented place where Haida people must always live in order to be authentically Haida. Rather, it is a location where they should always be able to, in
their own (necessarily multiple, often contested, sometimes even contradictory) terms. Sovereignty At
the same time, there is an
inescapably political dimension to the attempt to render Haida Gwaii as the homeland of a still open
Haida future. The assertion of the (located) openness of the future does not necessarily make it so. As I noted in the first part of this dissertation, the
flow of Haida departures and returns unfold in the broader context of the settler, capitalist state;
indeed, they are made necessary in part by the current absence of economic opportunity on island, just as
the arrival of potentially threatening strangers is a result of their privileged position in the very capitalist
economy they seek to escape. Constituting futures in which Haida people have the freedom to engage
with that economy (and settler society more generally) as they see fit while retaining the capacity to
come home (complicated as that process might be) also reiterates the inescapability of some form of
engagement with that socio-economy. Likewise, the notion of Haida Gwaii as Haida homeland cannot be separated from current Haida
struggles to assert their rights to the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii, the resources found therein, and their sovereign capacity to govern themselves and the
islands in the ways they find appropriate. This is, recall, the very crux of the CHN’s own commitment to the assurance of futurity, as it is only by positioning itself as
the rightful, sovereign government of the Haida Nation and its homeland of Haida Gwaii that it can adequately care for the islands and protect them from external
threat. And the continuing advance of the Enbridge project despite fierce opposition from CHN, the Old Massett
Village Council, their Haida constituents, and the non-Haida actors with whom they are “united against
Enbridge” (and this alongside protest all over the northwest coast) gives the nightmare futures of environmental collapse –
pushed through by corporate interests and Canadian politicians - a frightening immanence. The
assertion of the openness of the future is made, in short, in (and against) a context in which closures
remain endemic. 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 . It is no
coincidence that we find this in the midst of a struggle over sovereignty. And this not just in the sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s ongoing assertion of its
sovereign right to govern the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii on behalf of all Haida people, as we saw in Chapter 5. Rather, as Joanne Barker has argued, over the
course of the latter half of the twentieth century sovereignty has emerged as a: particularly valued term within indigenous scholarship and social movements and
through the media of cultural production. It [is] a term around which analyses of indigenous histories and cultures were organized and whereby indigenous activists
articulate their agendas for social change (Barker 2005:18). Through the assertion of sovereignty, indigenous political leaders, activists and scholars refute “the
dominant notion that indigenous people [are] merely one among many ‘minority groups’ under the administration of state social service and welfare programs.”
Instead, “sovereignty defines indigenous people with concrete rights to self-government, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy under international law” (18).
The trouble is, of course, that indigenous claims to sovereignty are always made within the context of colonial nation-states, ones whose own legitimacy is put at
considerably risk both by the prospect of self-determining indigenous Nations (re)-emerging within their boundaries and the troubling of their own historical
narratives of sovereign rights (cf: Comaroff and Comaroff 2003b). (One of these narratives, which reinterpreted indigenous lands as terra nullius and thus open to
occupation, we’ve encountered already in Chapter 3). Thus, while sovereignty might indeed “define” indigenous peoples with concrete rights to territorial Title and
self-determination, in theory equal under international law to the states who also lay claim to their territories, that definition does not in and of itself make possible
the practice of this sovereignty. In this regard settler states such as Canada have shifted in their response to First Peoples’ sovereignty claims from outright rejection
to a set of policies of selective recognition,5 but even the latter still positions Native nations as being subject to the authority and oversight (if not the structural
forms) of the state. This means, as we have seen in Chapter 5, that indigenous governments such as the Council of the Haida Nation are in a precarious position,
attempting to constitute their own sovereign authority without access to many of the conventional means of sovereignty in Western political thought – e.g., the
monopoly on legitimate violence (Weber 1946), decisive authority to make and enact law (Schmitt 2005), or exclusive territorial control (Brown 2010; cf: Hobbes
1994). Alongside this precarity is the equally anxious question of whether or not sovereignty is even an appropriate analytical to center indigenous rights around
precisely because it is historically a Western concept, one that had been drawn on to dispossess indigenous peoples over the course of settler colonial history
(Barker 2005:18–19). (Indeed, the very next essay in Barker’s edited volume, by Mohawk scholar Taiake Alfred, categorically rejects sovereignty as an inappropriate
tool for indigenous political assertions for these reasons and, also, because it draws attention away from developing and furthering “genuinely” Aboriginal political
modes of thought (Alfred 2005; cf: Alfred 2009). The fact that sovereignty remains such a preeminent concept in the struggle for indigenous rights even though it is
both epistemologically problematic and politically constrained has meant that there has been a recent push in both anthropology and indigenous studies to “widen”
the definition of sovereignty, so that it might encompass multiple forms of indigenous social, political and legal practice outside of the conventional purview of
“sovereign power” (e.g. Cattelino 2008; Richland 2011; Simpson 2000; Simpson 2014). Or, as Joanne Barker puts it: There is no fixed meaning for what sovereignty is
– what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, nation, or indigenous law. Sovereignty – and its
related histories, perspectives, and identities – is embedded within the specific social relations in which it is invoked and given meaning. How and when it emerges
and functions are determined by the “located” political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do
a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation. It is no more possible to stabilize what sovereignty means and how it matters to those who invoke it
than it is to forget the historical and cultural embeddedness of indigenous peoples’ multiple and contradictory political perspectives and agendas for empowerment,
decolonization, and social justice (Barker 2005:21, emphasis original). The opening up of sovereignty as flexible, multiple, and subject to all manner of diverse
rearticulations carries particular weight (and, perhaps, ambiguity) since, as a historical concept in Western political theory, sovereignty was overwhelmingly
concerned with closure. As Wendy Brown argues in her Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, the classic vision of sovereign power rests in the capacity to divide the
inside from the outside, to make borders around a people – a “nation” – and separate that people from those outside it. Thus Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction,
for instance, or even John Locke’s consistent preoccupation with fences as a way of marking the existence of territory (Brown 2010; cf: Schmitt 1996; Locke 1988).
The historical conditions of indigenous sovereignty claims in the context of settler colonialism make such absolute closures impossible for indigenous peoples. We
might add, though, that their persistent presence also challenges the closure of the settler nation-state. Indeed, this is part of Brown’s point. The very fact that we
see ever more spectacular performances of sovereign power on the part of contemporary nation-states – e.g., the titular “walls” that are being constructed along
the borders of an increasing number of states - is a sign of the very insecurity of their political authority (Brown 2010).6 The
conditions of settler
colonial sovereignty, in other words, may be rather more “open,” and thus closer to those of indigenous
“nation-within-nations,” then they may at first appear. If this means, in turn, that the future of settler
political life is becoming as uncertain as the future for indigenous life has always been since the advent
of settlement, then this means only what we have already begun to see: the dilemmas that Haida
people confront in their future-making practices are also the dilemmas facing settler society . Take Chapter 4,
in which the absence of any “one” definitive governing entity compels the constitution of an aspirational framework of accountability which could, were it realized,
render navigable Haida relations to the many governments that claim their loyalties. As I hinted at there, such dilemmas are not restricted to the Haida sociopolitical
world; rather, they may in fact be endemic to contemporary democratic societies and the multiple forms of governance (licit and otherwise) that emerge therein.
In suggesting that there are Haida ways of refiguring a shared Haida-settler set of contemporary
problematics, we might think of Haida future-making as simultaneously an instantiation of the multiple,
flexible and always contingently located practices of sovereignty to which Barker points and a different way of
thinking about indigenous political potentiality. In the former sense, Haida future-making is without
doubt concerned with carving out spaces in which Haida existence can continue, expand, and change
without losing the capacity to reproduce itself as, precisely, Haida existence . Thus the processes of homecoming we
explored in Chapter 2, or Chapter 5’s explicitly political attempts to establish control over the islands for future generations. If the absence of indigenous
sovereignty is the absence of the capacity of an indigenous people to (self)-determine their own futures, then the constitution of Haida futures can be seen exactly
as sovereign work, whether in the overt sense of the Council of the Haida Nation’s assertions or the somewhat more implicit mode of Alice Stevens’ proposed mass
adoptions. Significant
here, though, is the fact that these acts of future-making carry meanings beyond
their status as “responses” to the social and political dilemmas of contemporary Haida life . Thus Alice
Stevens’ adoptions bring “hippie” children into the framework of Haida kinship relations, in one sense neutralizing their potential threat, but also
constituting a complex new network of social relations between Haida and non-Haida whose potential
significances go well beyond the protection of Haida territory and resources ; thus the Council of the Haida Nation
emerges as a “state-like” governing entity through its authorizing promise to “take care” of the islands, but in so doing takes on a series of new roles in Haida
political life whose full consequences remain to be seen. If
it is a sovereign action to envision an opening of possible futures
for Haida people, then this very openness might also exceed the boundaries of sovereignty as a
problematic for indigenous people even as it responds to them. Which is also, perhaps, why Haida
futures seem so consistently to sketch out social, ecological, and political fields that encompass non-
Haida; more, that are futures for Canada as well as for the Haida people living within the nation-state’s
borders. Or, at least, futures that have the capacity to be so . What would it mean to figure an indigenous
sovereignty that speaks beyond itself, one that promises to invert the order of settler domination
through reconfiguring the shared futures of indigenous and settler peoples ? This would not be a
sovereignty premised on territorial closure, or even absolute political autonomy. It would, however,
decisively overturn any settler colonial anticipations of the inevitable erasure of Native peoples. Quite
the opposite, it would position indigenous practices of anticipation, aspiration, certainty, and anxiety at
the forefront of contemporary modes of political imagination . Unsettling Futures A question remains, however.
Could such a refiguring of the temporal and political horizon of settler and indigenous relationships
remain possible even if the futures that indigenous people work to constitute remain unrealized in the
settler colonial present? Or, put another way, we must always be careful not to conflate a capacity to form new futures for settler nation-states with
the actual materializations of these futures. The Haida futures that I have discussed, even as they promise possible ways

of navigating – of restructuring, even – the settler-Haida present, remain firmly bound by the colonial
constraints of this present. But perhaps the stakes here have never been about overthrowing the Canadian
colonial order outright. Rather, what I hope this dissertation has shown is that Haida future-making has the capacity to
unsettle the settler colonial present, to challenge its received categories and demonstrate how, slowly,
gradually, Haida people are reconfiguring its terms through the work of producing the future . Certainly, the
sheer fact of Haida futurity should put to the lie any further notion that Haida people exist only to replicate their past or live only in the deferral of their eventual
disappearance. The future is alive and well in Old Massett, although this does not meant that it is not also a site of profound anxieties. In
working to ward
off those anxieties through the juxtaposition of nightmare futures against their more desirable
alternatives, then, Haida people unsettle the epistemological foundations of the forms of settler
colonialism and liberalism against which Byrd and Povinelli write. At the same time (if you’ll pardon the pun), I think we can see the
social work that futuremaking does iteratively, as a gradual reshaping of the actual conditions of Canadian
society. Here I borrow Judith Butler’s suggestion, following Foucault, that the regulatory norms of society function only through their consistent and unstable
reiteration (and materialization) in everyday social life.7 From this perspective, the ways in which Haida people work within and

even reiterate the constraints and demands of Canadian settler mainstream society can also slowly and
strategically shift those very constraints and demands, materializing a HaidaCanadian future that might in
fact be quite different from the present even as it does not ever fully “escape” from its dilemmas.
Perhaps the most unsettling potential of all here lies simply in the ways in which Haida people incorporate
the conditions of the settler colonial present as being paths towards Haida futures. Not vanished, or
vanquished. Ongoing.
 AT Value to Life Outweighs
There’s always a possibility for value – it’s subjective and life is a prerequisite. Prefer
extinction.
Tännsjö ‘11 (Torbjörn, The Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University. 2011. “Shalt Thou
Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing.”
https://www.philosophy.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.126012.1361890813!/menu/standard/file/thoushalt-inprogress.doc)

I suppose it is correct to say that, if

Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to
utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that,
each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should
be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide.
Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth
living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself.
It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if
some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living , their future lives will be
better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology,
it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill
oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known
from psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do. ¶ My strong belief is that most of
us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at
least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic. ¶ Let us just for the
sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we
should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one
of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will
suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt
are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize
that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads
to rage, loneliness, and awareness of
vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of
suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning , if they do, does not mean that others will follow my
example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have
an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I
avoid (in my life).
AT Alt Debate
 AT Affect
Affect is just a question of socialization – our theory is compatible with that
Martin ‘13 (Emily, “The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory,” Current Anthropology: Vol. 54, No. S7)
Many scholars in the humanities have recently engaged with research in neuroscience to posit a view of a
precognitive, preindividual stage of human perception that promises unrealized dimensions of
potentiality. Here are some descriptions of affect in the words of two theorists from quite different disciplines. Nigel Thrift, a geographer, writes, In this paper
I want to think about affect in cities and about affective cities … and, above all, about what the political consequences of thinking more explicitly about these topics
might be—once it is accepted that the political decision is itself produced by a series of inhuman or pre-subjective forces and intensities. (Thrift 2004:58) Eric
Shouse, a cultural critic, states, An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity ; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured
potential. … Affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness. (Shouse 2005) There are a number of importantly different varieties of affect theory. Some are
indebted to Silvan Tomkins’s (2008) writing and others to Francisco Varela’s work on open systems, often in the style of Deleuze and Guatarri (1987; Varela 1999).
But taking into account their differences, historian Ruth Leys (2011) summarizes some of the main assumptions they hold in common: “For the theorists in question,
affects are ‘inhuman,’ ‘pre-subjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be
meant by the terms affect and emotion … the affects must be non-cognitive, corporeal processes or states” (437).7 For such theorists, affect is, as Brian Massumi
(2002) asserts, “irreducibly bodily and autonomic” (28). Other enthusiastic contributors to affect theory from a wide range of fields, include Eve Sedgwick, Patricia
Clough, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosie Braidotti, Kathleen Stewart, Lawrence Grossberg, Elizabeth Wilson, and Antonio Damasio.8 This work relates directly
to the theme of potentiality. Massumi, one of the most widely read writers on affect theory, stresses its connection with “potential” in a chapter called “Autonomy
of Affect.” Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing
crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded and
sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life). (Massumi 2002:30–31; italics in original) The definition Massumi gives to the concept of
potential here seems to be “unlimited.” In particular, the affective realm is not limited by what he sees as the constraints of sociolinguistic meaning. What

motivates these scholars? They do not all agree on every point, and I will be glossing over their differences here, but Leys identifies some common
motivations. Centrally, they claim that the role of reason and rationality in politics, ethics, and aesthetics has been

overvalued. It is too disembodied and “unlayered” an account of the way people actually form opinions (Leys 2011:436). Given this, they adopt the
position that humans are corporeal creatures with important subliminal affective intensities and
resonances that are decisive in the way we form opinions and beliefs. They share an insistence that we ignore affects at our
peril because they can be manipulated deliberately and because they contain the potential for creativity and transformation. In sum, the affects are

independent of and before language . They are before “intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs”; they are “non-signifying, autonomic
processes that take place below the level of conscious awareness and meaning”; they are “‘inhuman,’ ‘pre-subjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces that influence our thinking
and judgments” even though they are noncognitive and corporeal (Leys 2011:437, 443). Among the affects, at the physiological level, categories that are cognitively
separate (such as sad or pleasant) get connected, and this is one way the affects are thought to open up new and creative potential (Massumi 2002:29). Massumi—
following Deleuze—considers that the affects are characterized by “intensity” rather than content. Affective states, characterized by intensity, are nonsemantic,
nonlinear, autonomous, vital, singular, indeterminate, and disruptive of fixed (conventional) meanings. Hence the affects provide a rich reservoir of unpredictable
potentiality. All this means there is a gap between the signifying order (content, meaning, convention) and the affective order. What exactly is the gap? According to
Leys (2011), there is “a constitutive disjunction between our emotions on the one hand and our knowledge of what causes and maintains them on the other,
because … affect and cognition are two separate systems” (437). These theorists generally argue that affect is independent of meaning and signification; they deny
the role of intentionality and meaning at the affective level (Leys 2011:450). There
is a gap or “radical dichotomy between the ‘real’
causes of affect and the individual’s own interpretation of these causes” (Tomkins, quoted in Leys 2011:437). In Tomkins’s
view, affects are “phylogenetically old, automatic responses of the organism that have evolved for survival purposes and lack the cognitive characteristics of the
higher-order mental processes and are separate from them” (Leys 2011:437). The affects are located subcortically in the brain, in the part of the brain that
processes universal, natural kinds (such as the so-called basic emotions). The “basic emotions” or “ affect
programs” are genetically
hardwired responses, products of human evolution, that are expressed in autonomic behavioral patterns (such as characteristic
facial expressions for fear or disgust) (Damasio 1994; Leys 2011:438–439; Sedgwick 2003). There is one part of affect theory that relates directly to the theme of
potentiality. This is the supposition that there is no way to include both mind and body in an account of meaning, making it necessary to posit a level below the gap
where bodily aspects of affect go on; it is the unformed, precognitive aspects of the lower level of the affects that make them seem filled with potential. This move
separates intentionality or meaning from affect and assumes that intentionality and meaning are purely mental or cognitive. There
are many points
at which this argument can be criticized.9 Some critics have shown in detail how the psychological
evidence that is the basis for the tenets of affect theory is questionable and out of date (Leys 2010). Others have
detailed the ways affect theorists sometimes misread biological and psychological research (Papoulias and Callard 2010). For
example, in a 1985 experiment by Benjamin Libet, subjects were asked to decide to flex a finger at will and to note the exact time they made the decision. The
experimenters also measured the exact time of any rise in the subject’s brain activity and the exact time of the subject’s finger flexing. The results showed that there
was a 0.2-second delay between the brain’s activity spike and the subject’s decision, then a 0.3-second delay between the subject’s decision and his finger flexing. In
all, there seemed to be a half-second delay between the subject’s brain’s initial activity and the subject’s finger actually flexing (Libet 1985). This half-second gap
provides Massumi (2002:29) with the evidence of a gap between (lower) brain activity and (higher) decision ,
intentionality and action. He concludes that material processes of the brain generate our thoughts; conscious thoughts, decisions, and intentions
come too late to be very significant. At most they are reflections after the fact . No one would doubt that the brain is

necessary for thought and action. But Massumi and other affect theorists place too much weight on this experimental evidence. Other studies
have shown that Libet’s evidence is open to contrary interpretations from its publication in 1985 up until the present (Banks and Isham 2009, 2010; Gomes 1998). At
the very least, before drawing such far-reaching conclusions, one would hope scholars of cultural phenomena would consider the experimental structures that
generate psychological data. As I noted earlier, the psychological subject becomes a particular kind of stripped down entity, a data-emitting being whose subjective
experience is outside the frame of the experiment. Perhaps this is not the most adequate model for understanding human intentionality. The
mistakes
and confusions in this position are laid bare by the approach pioneered in the Cambridge Expedition and
later pursued in Wittgenstein’s account of intention, remembering, and other psychological terms. That
account argues that our criteria for whether they have happened are normative and conventional. These criteria are located in use, not in the

interior psyche. Saying that criteria for meaning are normative and conventional does not mean that everyone must agree, that there is harmony, or that
there is not conflict or change. It means that criteria for meaning cannot arise from the mind of a single, isolated individual or from a primitive part of the brain.
Drawing on Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe argued for a social account of intentional actions. Anscombe was arguing against the common-sense view of an
intention as composed of an action plus an interior mental state. Looking at the ways we speak of an action as done “intentionally,” she concluded that “intention”
in everyday language means something done as an action of a whole person, a moral agent, “under a description.” The relevant description would include the past
and present social contexts relevant to the person as much as his or her interior states (Anscombe 1957). What
is at stake is whether we
understand intentional human action as gaining its meaning in an interior, hidden, and thus socially
inaccessible space instead of in the light of social experience. Anscombe worked in a Wittgensteinian mode to move
intentionality away from the private interiority of the mind into the space of social interaction, where meaning in language is constituted. Wittgenstein conveyed
this message through many homely examples: I
tell someone: “I’m going to whistle you the theme …” It is my intention to
whistle it, and I already know what I am going to whistle. It is my intention to whistle this theme: have I
then already, in some sense, whistled it in thought? (Wittgenstein 1967:2e) One would like to ask: “Would someone who could look
into your mind have been able to see that you meant to say that?” Suppose I had written my intention down on a slip of paper, then someone else could have read
it there. And can I imagine that he might in some way have found it out more surely than that? Certainly not. (Wittgenstein 1967:8e; italics in original) The point is
that intentionality emerges from the whole structure of events from the inception of the notion to the execution of the action. We
decide whether
someone had a certain intention not by referring to an event or template in the mind but by whether his
or her gestures, postures, words, and actions fit with a socially defined notion of being about to whistle a

tune or meaning to say something. Sometimes a mental event (whistling the tune or saying the words in one’s head) might
precede the action and sometimes not, but in any case, that interior event could not constitute a usable
criterion for whether someone was intending to whistle or meaning to speak. Removing any interest in
intentionality—conceived as a social process, as affect theory does—removes socially produced contexts of use as a
necessary and sufficient basis for what actions and words mean to people. Tackling mathematics, the realm of symbolic
life perhaps most difficult to regard as contingent on social norms, Wittgenstein commented that people found the idea that numbers rested on conventional social
understandings “unbearable” (Rhees 1970). Why is there resistance to allowing the meaning of human acts to rest on
social understandings all the way down? Why such an idea is unbearable returns us to the Cambridge Expedition. Rivers and the others thought that
plunging into a different social and physical environment would make them different people, comparable in many ways to the islanders. In this view there is a vast
reservoir of potential for change and creative adaption. But this view also entails that there are limits to human experience set by whatever social contexts are
relevant. It does not compare with Massumi’s (2002) virtual realm, the “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies” (30). Perhaps it is any limitation that seems
unbearable in the present era, where the drumbeat of the necessity for constant growth is heard and felt everywhere. Saying that social context limits what is
relevant does not close off experiences that are unconscious, inchoate, or unspeakable. Anthropologists and sociolinguists have long found ways to address the
entirely social meanings of things that are repressed from speech or action but nonetheless contain powerful kinds of potentiality. Years ago Gayle Rubin (1975)
analyzed the “sex/gender system” as a “set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity” (159). More
recently, in Brainstorm, Jordan-Young (2010) rephrases this: “Gender … is a social effect, rather than the result of human biology. Sex in this regard is conceived as
the remainder—the material body, and those bodily interactions that are necessary to reproduce it” (13). Borrowing from this way of putting it, we could say that
like the sex/gender system, the
affect/intentionality system is a set of arrangements by which a society
transforms neurological processes into products of human activity . Affects are a social effect rather
than the result of human biology. Intentions in this regard are conceived as the remainder —the material
brain and those neurological interactions that are necessary to reproduce it.
 AT Decolonization Alt – Decol Fails
Placing land return as the only solution enhances the subjugation of indigenous
peoples – at best it’s impossible
Busbridge ‘17 (Rachel, Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in Institut für Islamwissenschaft (Institute of Islamic
Studies), Freie Universität Berlin [“Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,”
Theory, Culture & Society, First Published: January 23, 2017, p. 1-25)

The prescription for decolonization – that is, a normative project committed to the liberation of the colonized and the overturning of colonial
relationships of power (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 3) – is indeed one of the most counter-hegemonic implications of the settler colonial
paradigm as applied to Israel-Palestine, 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 and Snow, 2000: 616). What, however, does the settler colonial paradigm offer by way of
envisioning decolonization? 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 decolonization (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 decolonization. While Veracini
(2007) relates this deficit to a matter of conceptualization, 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 decolonization 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 decolonization –
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 settlernative 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 the
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 decolonization is revealing of the difficulties
that come along with this zero-sum perspective . It is significant to note that beyond settler evacuation (which
may decolonize territory, he cautions, but not necessarily relationships) the picture he paints is a
relatively bleak one. For Veracini (2011: 5), claims for decolonization from indigenous peoples in settler societies can take two broad
forms: an ‘anti-colonial 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)
 AT Decolonization Alt
The alt can’t solve material decolonization OR cause their impacts.
Laing ‘15 (Anna Frances, Ph.D. candidate, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, College of Science and Engineering,
University of Glasgow, “Territory, resistance and struggles for the plurinational state: the spatial politics of the TIPNIS Conflict,”
Ph.D. thesis, January 2015, p.215-216, http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5974/7/2015laingphd.pdf)
The use of indigeneity as a common signifier has fostered mobilisation across different ethnic groups. This process has been aided by NGOs and técnicos (technical
experts) that accompanied the Eighth and Ninth Marches. NGO representatives facilitated meetings, provided training, funded activities and constructed written
announcements and texts. These mediatory actors therefore helped to re-articulate the grievances of the marchers under the banner of indigenous rights. This
could be seen in the writing of open letters to the government during both the Eighth and Ninth Marches, made possible through the aid of technical experts from
one of the principle legal organisations defending indigenous rights in Bolivia CEJIS (Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social; Centre of Legal Studies and
Social Investigation). Therefore, in
order to ‘speak’ and be heard, the indigenous peoples have to undergo a process
of representation through the language of legal rights. They therefore remain ‘subaltern’ because their
attempts at self-representation fall outside the ‘the lines laid down by the official institutional structures
of representation’ (Spivak 1996: 306). Thus, Glenn (2011) contends that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is ironic since it
seeks the recognition of alternative epistemologies through civic institutions that have homogenising
and universalising tendencies. However , as Fabricant notes in her work with the Landless Peasants Movement in Bolivia, movements ‘take
NGO ideas and meld them with their own creative strategies to come up with solutions that will work for their communities’ (2012: 120). Moreover, Gustafson
(2009b) offers a balanced interpretation of the ways that NGOs offer a language and model for politicising alternative worldviews. The
indigenous
movement consciously reifies certain strategic essentialisms whilst at other times actively resisting
them. Indeed, indigenous knowledges do not exist outside of other knowledge forms (Walsh 2002). As Walsh
argues ‘[t]he efficacy of the movement in fact derives from its ability to construct and use the

correspondences among various contemporary knowledge positions […] in order to exercise political
tactics and strategies’ (2002: 71). A politics of refusal is unlikely to advance indigenous demands . As such,
Hale suggests an analytical framework based on the Gramscian notion of articulation to ask: will the subjugated knowledge and practices be articulated within the
dominant, and neutralised? Or will they occupy the space opened from above while resisting its built in logic, connect with others, toward ‘transformative’ cultural-
political alternatives that still cannot be fully imagined? (2002: 499). Indeed, there
is the danger that identifying under a single
indigenous label risks losing the complexities and processes that permeate the heterogeneous inter-
ethnic collectivity of the lowland indigenous movement. This acts to disembody the identity claims from some of the more radical
tangents of the movement. Mexican anthropologist Miguel Alberto Bartolomé argues that indigenous autonomy

should contemplate ‘new modes of [interethnic, inter-cultural] social articulation that are more
egalitarian than existing [ones]’ and that a multi-ethnic state ‘ should explore all possible paths in the
search for novel forms of conviviality between culturally distinct groups’ (2005: 146 cited in Gustafson 2009a: 998). Escobar
similarly calls for a decolonisation that ‘can be started in earnest from a deessentialized perspective’ (2008:

305). Indeed, the movement seeks the recognition of plurality without the homogenisation of indigenous

cultures or ideologies or the ranking of difference that necessarily works to subordinate some cultures
and let others dominate. This project of emancipatory societal transformation is an on-going challenge for the lowland indigenous movement.
 AT: Fugitivity Alt
Fugitivity can’t always escape -- instead we should recognize our institutional role in
the reconfiguration of existing structures.
Love 15 – R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Heather, R.
Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “Doing Being Deviant:
Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary,” differences Vol. 26.1, pp. 89-91)

Today, queer studies—prestigious but unevenly institutionalized—still signals absolute refusal or

criticality—all anti- and no normativity. In their influential 2004 essay, “The University and the Undercommons” (and in the 2013 book that followed from it),
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney rely on such an understanding of queer (as well as concepts borrowed from black studies,
feminism, ethnic studies, and anticolonial thought). They call for betrayal, refusal, theft, and marronage as modes of resisting

the iron grip of the academy, pointing to an uncharted, underground, and collective space they call the
undercommons. “To enter this space,” they write, “is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons
that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the
stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the
refuge gives commons” (103). Moten and Harney speculate whether the “thought of the outside” (105) is possible inside the
university and suggest that if there is an outside, it is along the margins and at the bottom. Yet their imagination of
that outside is indebted to the inside, in particular to the conception of deviance produced within sociology. Their account of the undercommons reads

like a rap sheet, a list of the traditional topics of deviance studies: theft, homosexuality, prostitution,
incarceration. Moten and Harney do not describe the undercommons, but rather ask their readers to join it, to participate in active revolt against professional and disciplinary
protocols. To offer an objective account of the social position of radical academics would be to further

business as usual in the academy; dwelling in the undercommons requires giving up on the usual
protocols of description. Moten and Harney argue against the traditional role of the “critical academic” (105), which they see as just another turn of the professional
screw, since work that opposes the academy does not challenge its basic structure or everyday operations. They argue that “to be a critical academic in

the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it
and to be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of the internal outside, that unassimilated
underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions” (105). In contrast to
the figure of the critical academic, they forward the image of the “ subversive intellectual” who is “in but not of” the academy (101). Without
dismissing the galvanizing effect of such a call to the undercommons, it is important to consider the limits of the refusal of objectification as a strategy. To be unlocatable, to be nowhere, to be

Objectification—recognition, description, critique—

in permanent revolt: Moten and Harney describe the path that queer inquiry laid out for itself.

can be a way to reinforce the status quo, but it is also a way of acknowledging one’s institutional
position and the real differences between inside and outside. Even the most subversive intellectuals in the academy are “on the stroll” in a
metaphorical but not a material sense. The fate of those who came “under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love” (101), if they survive, is to become

“superordinates” in Becker’s sense. Whose side are we on? Can we hold onto the critical and polemical energy of queer studies as well as its radical experiments
in style and thought while acknowledging our implication in systems of power, management, and control? Will a more explicit avowal of disciplinary affiliations and methods snuff out the

To date, both the political and the methodological

utopian energies of a field that sees itself as a radical outsider in the university?

antinormativity of queer studies have made it difficult to address our implication in the violence of
knowledge production, pedagogy, and social inequality. Such violence is inevitable, and critical histories of the disciplines—and the production
of knowledge about social deviance—are essential. Undertaking such work, however, will not allow escape into a radically

different relation to our objects because we are (as Moten and Harney also argue) part of that history—we are its contemporary
instantiation. To imagine a social world in which those relations are transformed —in what Moten and Harney

refer to as the “prophetic organization” (102)—may be crucial for the achievement of social justice, but
to deny our own implication in existing structures is also a form of violence. The Queer Ordinary I have tried to suggest that a
return to deviance studies will allow access to the ordinariness of homosexuality and of scholarship. A turn to the ordinary may not be particularly inspiring in a moment characterized by
widespread normalization and the decline of queer ways of life; however, the field of queer studies has been riven almost from the beginning by gendered debates about the relationship
 Radical anti-
between antinormativity and the ordinary. Biddy Martin’s critique of queer theory was grounded in an embrace of the ordinariness of existence. In 1993, she wrote: “

normativity throws out a lot of babies with a lot of bathwater […]. Implicit in these constructions of
queerness, I fear, is the lure of an existence without limit, without bodies or psyches, and certainly
without mothers […]. An enormous fear of ordinariness or normalcy results in superficial accounts of the
complex imbrication of sexuality with other aspects of social and psychic life, and in far too little
attention to the dilemmas of the average people we also are ” (70). In a recent account of the everyday intimacies between women in
Jamaica Kincaid’s fiction, Keja L. Valens argues that her work “ pluralizes the normal” (90) rather than opposing it. In a reading of the way that the normal
“repeats with a difference” in At the Bottom of the River, Valens argues that Kincaid’s attention to the “range of things that can be normal demonstrates the pervasiveness of the normal as
much as it shows its mutability” (90). Intimacies between women have a privileged place in the elaboration of the concept of a queer ordinary, a fact that Sharon Marcus addresses directly in
her account of the importance of female same-sex intimacies in Victorian England, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Marcus argues against what she
calls the “deviance paradigm of homosexuality” (31) dominant in queer studies and suggests that women have appeared in such accounts “only to the extent that they illustrate the reach of
medical discourses of difference” (14). Marcus writes, “The focus on secrecy, shame, oppression, and transgression in queer studies has led theories, historians, and literary critics alike to

Marcus offers an alternative

downplay or refuse the equally powerful ways that same-sex bonds have been acknowledged by the bourgeois public sphere” (13).

method for analyzing female same-sex intimacies in the Victorian period that she calls “just reading”:
seeing what is represented in literature and the historical record rather than what is absent, hidden, or
repressed. While Marcus refers to this view of sexuality as the “ deviance paradigm” (266–67n31), I think
it might be better understood as the “ antinormativity paradigm of homosexuality.” A recognition of
queer studies’ debt to sociological studies of deviance as well as its commitments to humanistic
methods (or antimethods) can help to extend such critiques of the heroic antinormative. It can also help us to
objectify our own situation as scholars. Such a call for objectification may not appeal to critics trained to refuse it at all

cost; however, while the critique of objectification addresses important forms of epistemological and
material violence in the history of the disciplines, it can also serve as a romantic disavowal of our
position as scholars. Objectification may be a blunt instrument , but it is necessary if we are to account for
our objects and our relations to them. While academics may also identify as social deviants and as
activists, in our role as professional knowledge workers we not only do battle with dominant social
norms, we also study them and profit from their transgression (by extracting knowledge from the
situation of marginal subjects). Extreme self-reflexivity and deep questioning of the prerogatives that
allow scholars to speak about others were crucial to the development of queer inquiry in revolt against
the othering and objectifying history of the study of homosexuality. While we might avoid some of the more direct violence of
aversion therapy or nonconsensual studies of homosexuality through such approaches, the conditions of inequality—epistemological and social—that frame research on homosexuality still
apply, even when we study our “own” communities. If we are in, we are also of. This situation may be mitigated but not overcome through extreme self-reflexivity; to deny its reality is to
perpetrate a different form of violence. In his 1970 lecture, “On Doing ‘Being Ordinary,’ ” Harvey Sacks considers the work it takes to transform potentially overwhelming or disconcerting
experience into unexceptionable and banal accounts. Influenced by the tradition of interactionist sociology that tracked the complexities of everyday experience, Sacks emphasizes the fact
that “you live in a world much more finely organized than you imagine” (215). To see the labor that goes into the work of sustaining social organization requires a shift in perspective: “[A]n
initial shift,” Sacks writes, “is not to think of an ‘ordinary person’ as some person, but as somebody having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing ‘being ordinary.’ It’s not that

Sacks distinguishes between the

somebody is ordinary, it’s perhaps that that’s what their business is. And it does take work, as any other business does” (216).

ordinary and the natural, suggesting that there are not ordinary and extraordinary kinds of people.
Instead, ordinariness is a job, something that everyone has to work at. Recalling the emphasis on the
everyday quality of homosexuality, Sacks suggests that even extreme or illegitimate experience is readily
routinized: “When you have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc., you find that it’s been the
usual experience that others who’ve done it have had” (219). Sacks does not suggest that there is no
extraordinary experience or that rupture with ordinary ways of life is impossible; instead, he argues that
ordinariness is a widespread and unacknowledged form of labor—and an achievement. Not everyone
has access to that achievement: he points to the example of the inmate engaged in the unusual activity
of examining every crack in the wall of his cell. Some refuse it. “[I]f one were to pick up the notebooks of poets, writers, novelists,” Sacks
writes, “you’re likely to find elaborated studies of small real objects,” but this is because the job of
novelists is to “make distinctive observations about the world,” not to be ordinary (217). Just what the job
of queer critics should be in a moment when the lines between ordinary and extraordinary, legitimate
and illegitimate, insider and outsider are shifting is not clear, although the wholesale refusal of
normativity seems less and less viable as a guiding principle for the field . Given the complexity and unevenness of the
contemporary landscape of lgbt existence, we can find a model in the work of postwar scholars who engaged in unusually

fine and extended observation of the business of doing being deviant.

 AT Ontology Alt
Ontology as prior is meaningless and turns their K – prefer the specific small-t truth
claims of the affirmative
Grossberg ‘15 (Morris Davis Distinguished Professor University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Lawrence, We All Want to
Change the World, http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/we_all_want_to_change_the_world.pdf)

Thus, for me, the real problem is the way ontology itself is deployed , not as a set of possibly useful tools, but as a
new claim to certainty and universality. The turn away from Enlightenment rationality returns to its
most problematic commitment: the assertion of a universally true philosophy . Even the philosophies of failure, insofar as
they claim that failure is ontologically guaranteed, are forms of universalism and certainty. The critique of the various commitments of
the Enlightenment, and of the ways they are defined and related in different formations, especially in the Kantian hyper-humanist
versions of relationality and constructionism, is absolutely vital for the intellectual challenges the left faces; but it should make
intellectuals more humble and uncertain. Instead, the effort to ground some faith in the possibility of
small—contextual—truths becomes the universalist ap peal to an ontological materialism , etc. It appears as
if every investigation must now be ontological—the ontology of derivatives, of television, of the state—
although I have to admit that I am often at a loss to know what work the term is doing or what meaning is being

assigned to it. Too often, it seems to refer to claims to understand the (universal) essence of some
phenomenon, whether through appeals to science and/or materialism, and to lay claim to an unearned certainty.29 Such appeals
can only shut down the possibilities of intellectual-political conversation .30 This explosion of theory and the
turn to ontology has enabled voices that have been silenced or ignored to be heard, but perhaps not as many or as richly as one might
hope. While it has questioned taken for granted assumptions, it has also enabled schools and theorists instant visibility
without much in the way of rigorous definition, differentiation, debate or judgment. While it has enabled
critical intellectuals to think about the multiplicity of discursive effects beyond signification and representation, it has done so often by refusing
the reality of representation itself.31 While it has expanded and even, to some extent, displaced the notion of agency beyond the human, it has
sometimes denied the very possibility of human agency. While it offers a conceptual vocabulary for thinking through the contextuality of
reality, it often ends up conflating ontological processes with historical actualities, so that the latter become little more than evidence of
ontological assertions and the former become assumed descriptions of actual realities. Thus, somehow, rather magically I fear, the
statement of an ontology of materialism (as corporealities, affect, etc.) or of an ontology of structures (as networks, assemblages, etc.) is
taken to be sufficient to diagnose the concrete conditions and contradictions of the lived context, as if
nothing stood between the universal and the concrete. Operating on the highly abstract levels of ontology, which are often (re-)presented as if
they were the most concrete materialist claims, the
ontological turn has deconstructed the universal humanism of
the European Enlightenment, only to establish a new universalism , one that is at least as absolute
and fundamental as Enlightenment metaphysics (which, as Hume saw, often ended up with the necessity of appealing to
common sense to avoid skepticism). These contradictions and paradoxes result from the new ontologies' erasure, in historically specific ways,
of their own historical specificity, in much the same way that Marx critiqued classic political economy. That is to say, like postmodernism before
it, it lays claim to concepts capable of grasping the universal Truth of reality, forgetting both Heidegger's lesson—that there are only historically
determined ontologies, and Marx's—that the path from the concept to the real is measured by complex mediations and determinations.32 If
one is interested in ontology's bearing on the analytics and politics of concrete, social existence, it
requires the empirical and conceptual work of moving from one level of abstraction to another, from the universal
to the concrete. This challenge is too easily displaced by the claim that the universal is being derived
from the particular.
 AT Refusal Alt
Refusal won’t transform the world—the role of scholars should be to facilitate change
that promotes better material conditions for indigenous populations
Snelgrove ‘14 (University of British Columbia, Corey, Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers,
and solidarity with Indigenous nation, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 3, No. 2, 2014, pp. 1-32)

In spite of this worldly reflection, it is not the world that I want to live in. Thus, the
term “settler” and the reason for its use, which
brings forth the intimate and affective relationships to ancestral, social, cultural, economic, and political
histories and presents which shape this world , necessarily leads not to pride, but rather to shame, frustration, alienation, and
anger towards myself, other settlers, as well as the structures of settler colonialism. These feelings though also potentially
signal an opening, a recognition of an un(der)realized interdependence . However, alone, these feelings
are not sufficient. After all, I cannot just critique or declare that this world falls short of my desires and
expect it to transform itself. Nor can I ignore the power differentials between settlers, as such willful
acts risk stalling the decolonial engine . Instead, if these desires and simultaneous feelings of shame, frustration,
alienation, and anger are to be at all transformative, they must be accompanied by thought and practice attentive
to their respective sources; they must be guided by accountability and respect, care and renewal, with urgency and insurgency, to
address and destroy the parasitical relations that exist between and among settlers and Indigenous
peoples, as well as to support those (potentially) good relations that already exist, and those that we
wish to establish between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples.
 AT Refusal Alt/Epistemology
Calls for refusal reproduce the colonial academic ways of knowing they criticize – the
1AC reinforces the status quo and produces academic distancing which merely
masquerades as personal accountability
Love ‘15, (Heather, R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “Doing Being Deviant:
Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary”, differences 2015 Volume 26, Number 1: 74-95)

Today, queer studies—prestigious but unevenly institutionalized—still signals absolute refusal or criticality—all anti- and no normativity. In their
influential 2004 essay, “The University and the Undercommons” (and in the 2013 book that followed from it), Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney rely on such an understanding of queer (as well as concepts borrowed from black studies, feminism, ethnic studies, and anticolonial
thought). They call for betrayal, refusal, theft, and marronage as modes of resisting the iron grip of the
academy, pointing to an uncharted, underground, and collective space they call the undercommons. “To enter this space,” they
write, “is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer,
in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the
refuge gives commons” (103). Moten and Harney speculate whether the “thought of the outside” (105) is possible inside the university and
suggest that if there is an outside, it is along the margins and at the bottom. Yet their
imagination of that outside is indebted
to the inside, in particular to the conception of deviance produced within sociology. Their account of
the undercommons reads like a rap sheet, a list of the traditional topics of deviance studies: theft,
homosexuality, prostitution, incarceration. Moten and Harney do not describe the undercommons , but rather ask
their readers to join it, to participate in active revolt against professional and disciplinary protocols . To
offer an objective account of the social position of radical academics would be to further business as usual in the academy; dwelling in the
undercommons requires giving up on the usual protocols of description. Moten
and Harney argue against the traditional
role of the “critical academic” (105), which they see as just another turn of the professional screw, since work that opposes
the academy does not challenge its basic structure or everyday operations . They argue that “to be a critical
academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and to be recognized by it,
and to institute the negligence of the internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the
basis of the professions” (105). In contrast to the figure of the critical academic, they forward the image of the “subversive
intellectual” who is “in but not of” the academy (101). Without dismissing the galvanizing effect of such a call to the
undercommons, it is important to consider the limits of the refusal of objectification as a strategy . To be
unlocatable, to be nowhere, to be in permanent revolt: Moten and Harney describe the path that queer
inquiry laid out for itself. Objectification—recognition, description, critique— can be a way to reinforce the
status quo, but it is also a way of acknowledging one’s institutional position and the real differences
between inside and outside. Even the most subversive intellectuals in the academy are “ on the stroll” in
a metaphorical but not a material sense. The fate of those who came “under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of
love” (101), if they survive, is to become “superordinates” in Becker’s sense. Whose side are we on? Can we hold onto the
critical and polemical energy of queer studies as well as its radical experiments in style and thought while acknowledging our implication in
systems of power, management, and control? Will a more explicit avowal of disciplinary affiliations and methods snuff out the utopian energies
of a field that sees itself as a radical outsider in the university? To date, both the political and the methodological antinormativity of queer
studies have made it difficult to address our implication in the violence of knowledge production, pedagogy, and social inequality. Such violence
is inevitable, and critical histories of the disciplines—and the production of knowledge about social deviance—are essential. Undertaking
such work, however, will not allow escape into a radically different relation to our objects because we are
(as Moten and Harney also argue) part of that history—we are its contemporary instantiation. To
imagine a social world in which those relations are transformed —in what Moten and Harney refer to as the “prophetic
organization” (102)—may be crucial for the achievement of social justice, but to deny our own implication in
existing structures is also a form of violence.
 AT: Reject Settler Thought
“Rejecting settler thinking” conceives of a singular, collective settler agency—this is
false. Prefer an interpretation of shifting, contingent structures of colonial violence.
Rowse ‘14, (Tim, former Professorial Fellow in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and is Emeritus Professor
in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University [“Indigenous Heterogeneity,” Australian Historical Studies,
Vol. 45, No. 3, 2014, p. 297-310])

My third point has to do with the evocation of settler colonial collective agency as tactical, shape-shifting,
never absent, but variously manifest. There seem to be two quite different versions of this settler
colonial agency. On the one hand, one evokes its adaptive fluidity, as the structure of settler colonial
society somehow finds and invents the agents that perform the myriad tasks of elimination, erasure and
repressive recognition; the settler colonial structure is always tactically resourceful in the agencies of its deployment. On the other
hand, settler colonial agency is evoked as a collective agent , an enduring national psyche that is anxious, divided,
ambivalent, troubled by unresolvable tensions within its project. The attribution of affect to the settler colonial mentality
or archive preserves the idea of a singular collective settler agency, as if settler colonies were persons .
It would be easy to exaggerate the idea that settler colonial ambivalence can be narrated as ‘anxiety’. While I have no doubt that there have
been anxious agents, the characterisation of particular settler colonial agents as ‘anxious’ is not easy to support empirically, and as a reader I
have often had the feeling that the writer depicting ‘anxiety’ is ‘presentist’: ‘From the standpoint of my values, what you did and said back then
should have made you anxious’. A more impersonal analysis enables us to move from anxious agents to contending structures. It is more
productive, I suggest, to account more impersonally for ‘settler colonial society’, to evoke it in terms of structures and tendencies to which
agents get recruited; I am sympathetic to Wolfe’s structuralism. However, Iam not persuaded by his presentation of a
singular structure’s relentless consistency, its inexorable logic (of ‘elimination’ or of anything else). Wolfe’s
emplotment of settler colonialism interpellates the historian/reader in a compact of epistemological and
political certainty: we know what’s going to happen because it always does . My contrary preference is
to see history as less predictable, messier, more surprising and occasionally more hopeful. The recent
contention of ‘Indigeneities’ has invigorated my uncertainties. Settler colonial projects give rise to many different kinds of
institutions and ethical cultures, and in the duration and physical size of settler colonies (particularly Australia,
a vast space whose colonial occupation remains a work in progress) there are many opportunities for diverse settler
colonial formations to co-exist. I emphasise ‘contending structures’ in order to distance my approach
from the search for the single ‘structure’ that seems to drive Patrick Wolfe towards seeing so many
different phenomena as manifestations of the structure of elimination . The tensions structured within
the settler colonial project interest me because they seem to me to offer a better chance of
understanding historically the diverse ‘Indigeneities’ that we now can see .
 Sexton K of Sovereignty – Antiblackness Turn
It’s not just a question of western or national sovereignty but the category of
sovereign capacity as such – the potential for cartographic articulation or treaty
brokerage presupposes a mode of historical currency based in antiblackness and the
professionalization of native studies – indigenous legal interdictions into sovereignty
empirically fuel black suffering
*Don’t read this unless you are reading an aff that focuses on anti-blackness/draws from
afropessimism*

Sexton ‘16 (Jared Sexton, associate professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine, associate professor of Film and
Media Studies at UC Irvine, PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, July 2016, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the
Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology Volume 42 Numbers 4-5, footnote 18 included in curly braces) gz

There is by now a literature on the historical relations between black and native peoples in the Americas ,
including, in the US context, the award-winning work of Tiya Miles (2006, 2010) and the signal contributions of Barbara Krauthamer
(2013).18 {18. These titles demonstrate not only the continuity between white and native forms of racial
slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, but also the centrality of native slavery to the history of racial
slavery as such. Centrality is indicated here not as a measure of empirical preponderance, but rather of
legal and political significance.} But Frank B. Wilderson, III’s Red, White and Black may be the first sustained attempt to theorize, at
the highest level of abstraction, the structural positions of European colonists, Indigenous peoples, and African slaves in the ‘New World’
encounter and to think about how the conflicts and antagonisms that give rise to those positions in the historic instance establish the
contemporary parameters of our political ontology. At this writing, Wilderson’s text has not been taken up in the field of Native Studies, despite
dedicating fully 100 pages to addressing directly the machinations of settler colonialism and the history of genocide and to critically reading a
range of indigenous thinking on politics, cosmology, and sovereignty. This is not a brief in favor of Wilderson’s project as resolution or answer.
The upshot of Red, White and Black is a provocation to new critical discourse and just such an invitation is offered midway, even as it
acknowledges the grand impediment: ‘What,
we might ask, inhibits this analytic and political dream of a
“Savage”/Slave encounter? Is it a matter of the Native theorist’s need to preserve the constituent
elements of sovereignty, or is there such a thing as “Savage” Negrophobia? Are the two related’ (Wilderson, 2010:
182)?
We might understand something else about the historical relations between black and native peoples if we bear in mind that the
dynamics
of Negrophobia are animated, in part, by a preoccupation with sovereignty. We have learned already that settler
colonialism is governed by a genocidal commandment and that, as a direct result, survival becomes central to indigenous movements for settler
decolonization. We
have also learned that sovereignty, even disarticulated from the state-form, is the
heading for thinking about this survival as a matter of politics.19 Yet, in its struggle against settler
colonialism, the claim of native sovereignty – emerging in contradiction to the imposition of the imperial
sovereignty of Euro-American polities20 – ‘fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America [or
Canada or …] as a coherent (albeit genocidal) idea, because treaties are forms of articulation, discussions
brokered between two groups presumed to possess the same kind of historical currency: sovereignty’
(Wilderson, 2003: 236).
This point is not mitigated by the fact that native sovereignty is qualitatively different from, not simply
rival to, the sovereignty of nation-states. What links these statements discursively is an ‘ethico-onto-
epistemological’ (Barad, 2007) point of contact: ‘At every scale – the soul, the body, the group, the land, and
the universe – they can both practice cartography, and although at every scale their maps are radically
incompatible, their respective “mapness” is never in question’ (Wilderson, 2010: 181).21 Capacity for
coherence makes more than likely a commitment ‘to preserve the constituent elements of
sovereignty’ (2010: 182) and a pursuit of the concept of ‘freedom as self-determination’.22 The political de-
escalation of antagonism to the level of conflict is mirrored by a conceptual domestication at work in
the field of Native Studies, namely, that settler colonialism is something already known and
understood by its practitioners. The political-intellectual challenge on this count is to refine this
knowledge and to impart it. The intervention of Native Studies involves bringing into general awareness
a critical knowledge of settler colonialism.
 AT Structural Analysis Good
Reject settler colonialism as a structural analytic---it propagates a false consciousness
that pacifies people out of improving lived conditions.
Manu Vimalassery 16, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College, Juliana Pegues,
Alyosha Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing”, Theory & Event, 19(4),
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633283

The theorization of “settler colonialism” is indicative of these tensions. Activists and academics have increasingly taken up
settler colonialism as an analytic to address the particular ways in which colonialism operates and persists in places such as Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, as well as Israel/Palestine. To a considerable extent, much of the work that has recently become
associated with settler colonial studies has already been underway in Native American and Indigenous studies, as well as other fields including
ethnic studies and colonial discourse studies. Our contention is that the particular ways in which settler colonialism has
assumed predominance as an analytic risks obscuring or eliding as much as it does to distinguish
significant features of the present conjuncture .22 Indeed, we suggest that when settler colonialism is deployed
as a stand-alone analytic it potentially reproduces precisely the effects and enactments of colonial unknowing that
we are theorizing in this introduction. Approaches to the analysis of settler colonialism, as isolated from
imperialism and differential modes of racialization , are consequences of the institutionalization of this work as a distinct
subfield, which is claimed and consolidated through analytic tendencies that foreclose or bracket out interconnections and
relational possibilities. Settler colonial histories, conditions, practices, and logics of dispossession and power must necessarily be
understood as relationally constituted to other modes of imperialism, racial capitalism, and historical formations of social difference. The key
insights of settler colonial studies into the particularity of settlement as a manner of colonial power have also led to a tendency to focus
on this distinction as constituting a discrete and modular form or ensemble of practices — such as Patrick Wolfe’s often
cited contention that “settler colonialism destroys to replace”23—that can be applied across differences of geography or time. As such,
settler colonialism appears as a self-contained type rather than a situatedly specific formation that is co-
constituted with other forms and histories of colonialism, counter-claims, and relations of power. For
instance, in the U.S. context, settler colonialism as a singular manner of colonialism entirely misses the ways in which the abduction and
enslavement of Africans and their descendants was a colonial practice that, while changing in its intensities and modes of organization over
time, was co-constitutive of colonialism as a project of settlement rather than a supplement that demonstrates the taking of land and labor as
distinct endeavors. Wolfe’s description
of settler colonialism as a structure, and not an event, has by now
achieved the status of a truism in analyses of settler colonialism.24 Wolfe’s work has been crucial in bringing further attention to the
fact that colonialism is an ongoing fact of life for indigenous peoples more than fifty years after the advent of the so-called era of
decolonization. His scholarship insightfully underscored historical continuities in the shifting regimes and policies of settler states in relation to
indigenous peoples, and challenged a certain produced ignorance about the “post” colonial character of societies like the U.S., Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand.25 Yet drawing an absolute distinction between structure and event, and as a result,
discarding a focus on the historicity of settler colonialism, neglects some of the ways Wolfe distinguishes
between the binary terms structure/event in the service of further analysis. For example, Wolfe emphasizes how
settler colonialism is a “complex social formation” with “structural complexity” that emerges through process.26 When taken up as a
modular analytic that travels without regard to the specificities of location or social and material relations, a
categorical event/structure binary banishes deeply engaged historical knowledge from the landscape, turning
away from historical materialism, devolving into a scholastic debate over identities and standpoints that are
reduced to structural essences and divorced from politics or contingency. Emphasizing structure over
event also limits the analysis of settler colonialism itself into a descriptive typology, orienting our vision narrowly
within the technical perspective of colonial power (in the white Commonwealth countries), away from geographies from below,
such as a hemispheric perspective of the Americas, with their multiple and distinct modes of colonialism ,
thus replicating the conditions of unknowing.27 Foregrounding structure against event might also divert attention away
from imperialism. This binary perpetuates taking what Lisa Lowe calls the “colonial divisions of humanity” as given. Situating this
compartmentalization as a consequence of imperial formations calls attention to how, as Lowe writes, “The operations that pronounce colonial
divisions of humanity—settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriations of many kinds—are
imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct now as yet
concluded.”28 If the analytic project is reduced to naming and delimiting settler colonialism as a distinct structure of power that exists in
specific places, primarily the settler peripheries of Anglo imperium, we lose focus on the Caribbean and the Americas as the grounds of modern
imperialism, abdicating the hard-won horizon of anti-imperialism. An emphasis on structure over event is symptomatic of the stabilization of
colonial unknowing through binaries and schematic modes of thought. As Wolfe writes, “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible
element.”29 However, Wolfe’s cartographic model is that of the frontier, in which “the primary social division was encompassed in the relation
between natives and invaders.”30 The frontier is a linear model, a binary opposition between civilization and savagery, reflecting both a
colonizing subjectivity and its state form. What
socio-spatial imaginaries, and concomitant critical models, might
become visible if we thought from other spatial forms, such as circles or spirals, spatial forms that are often more relevant
to indigenous epistemologies than straight lines? If we remapped the colonial condition through circular or spiraling forms, what new insights
might we gain on the decolonial imperative? For one, we
might be able to better grasp colonial, racial, and imperial
simultaneities, as well as positions that do not easily fit into a settler/native binary . As Wolfe writes, “Settler-
colonists came to stay. In the main, they did not send their children back to British schools or retire ‘home’ before old age could spoil the
illusion of their superhumanity. National independence did not entail their departure.”31 Moreover, to inflect these insights through the lens of
negritude produces a considerably more complex set of possibilities, where the verbs come and stay do not carry any simple or easily
recoverable trace of agency or consent.32 As Iyko Day writes, “the logic of antiblackness complicates a settler colonial binary framed around a
central Indigenous/settler opposition.”33