1NC Kritik

In 1748, Pittsburgh, centered around the hills just East of

the convergence of the Allegheny and Monongahela
Rivers, in and around what is now Oakland, the same hills
weve walked up and down each morning from the hotel,
was a vibrant American Indian land, home to the Lenape,
Seneca, Shawnee, Mohawks, Mohicans, and six other
tribes. 101 years later, in 1849, Abraham von Ashenberger
wrote:
[Abraham von Ashenberger, July 11th, 1849, Colonization of the Indians,
https://baltimoresung.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/colonization-of-the-indians/]

PITTSBURGH- An entire culture is vanishing . As the westward movement

continues, Indians are being pushed farther and farther to the coast. Starting
with the Lewis and Clark expedition, which began in 1803 and ended in 1806, white
men have been exploring farther west, which has condensed the space in
which Indians previously roamed freely. [1]
When Lewis and Clark first began their journey all the way to the westernmost coast of
the Oregon Country, they set off in Virginia. In a journal entry dated September 15th,
1803, William Clark reveals that the Algonquian tribe had a presence as far
west as Virginia. [2] To think that, just forty-some years ago, the Indian
presence was that far westward boggles the mind, and throws into even harsher
perspective the change that has been forced upon the Indians.

The 1ACs silence on the question of land was paralleled

and eclipsed by their optimism about what we could
accomplish on land: For example, the Matsuda evidence
encourages Asian women to:

Matsuda explains in 2010 <Mari. We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian Americans the Racial
Bourgeoisie? Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader. Rutgers University
Press. 2010. Pgs 558-562>
refuses to abandon communities of black and brown people, choosing
instead to forge alliances with them.

Unfortunately, these coalitions will become absorbed by

white supremacy and settler-colonialism, perpetuating
the ongoing colonial project and ontological exclusion of
the Indian
Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 (EVE TUCK and RUBN A.
GAZTAMBIDE-FERNNDEZ, Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity, Journal of
Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2013, p. 72-89) [m leap]

Natty Bumppo, not savage, and no longer European, is positioned to claim native status, symbolically taking the place of

the last of the mohicans and of all the other vanishing tribes. The figure of the frontiers man who is one with nature
saturates the U.S. cultural imaginary, from the Adirondack backwoodsman and the Order of the Arrow of the Boy Scouts
of America (Alonso Recarte, 2010), to Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves and the most recent expression of the

White settler-becoming-Indian, Johnny Depps characterization of Tonto. Natty Bumppo also

resurfaces within the contentions over colonization and race that mar the
politics of progressive fields such as curriculum studies. Here, the future of the
settler is ensured by the absorption of any and all critiques that
pose a challenge to white supremacy , and the replacement of
anyone who dares to speak against ongoing colonization.
the simultaneously blunt and delicate work of exhuming the ways in which

This article does

curriculum and its history

in the U nited S tates has invested in settler colonialism, and the

permanence of the settler-colonial nation state . In particular, we will describe the
settler colonial curricular project of replacement, which aims to vanish
Indigenous peoples and replace them with settlers , who see
themselves as the rightful claimants to land, and indeed, as indigenous . To do
this, we employ the story of Natty Bumppo, as an extended allegory to understand the ways in which the field of
curriculum has continued to absorb, silence, and replace the nonwhite other , perpetuating white supremacy and settlerhood . As we discuss
in this article, even as multiple responses have evolved to counter how
curriculum continues to enforce colonization and racism, these responses
become refracted and adjusted to be absorbed by the whitestream ,
like the knowledge gained by Natty Bumppo, only to turn to the source and accuse them of
savagery, today through a rhetorical move against identity politics . White
curriculum scholars re-occupy the spaces opened by responses to
racism and colonization in the curriculum , such as multiculturalism and critical race theory,
absorbing the knowledge, but once again displacing the bodies out
to the margins . Thus, we will discuss how various interventions have tried to
dislodge the aims of replacement, including multiculturalism, critical race theory, and browning,
but have been sidelined and reappropriated in ways that reinscribe
settler colonialism and settler futurity .

Land is the only meaningful starting point anything else

is a palliative that was never seriously intended to change
ANYTHING for colonized peoples the violence of invasion
is reasserted each day of occupation
Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 (EVE TUCK and RUBN A.
GAZTAMBIDE-FERNNDEZ, Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity, Journal of
Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2013, p. 72-89) [m leap]

Settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the

colonizer comes to stay, making himself [or herself] the sovereign, and the
arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing . Patrick Wolfe (2006) argues that settler
colonialism destroys to replace, (p. 338) operating with a logic of elimination.
Whatever settlers may sayand they generally have a lot to say, Wolfe observes, the primary

motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to
territory (ibid., parentheses original). The logic of elimination is embedded into
every aspect of the settler colonial structure s and its disciplines it is
in their DNA, in a manner of speaking. Indeed invasion is a structure, not an event (p. 402). The
violence of invasion is not contained to first contact or the unfortunate birthpangs of a new
nation, but is reasserted each day of occupation . Thus, when we write about settler
colonialism in this article, we are writing about it as [is] both an historical and
contemporary matrix of relations and conditions that define life in the
settler colonial nation-state, such as the U nited S tates, Canada, New Zealand, Australia,
Israel, South Africa, Chinese Tibet, and others. In North America, settler colonialism operates
through a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the
Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel slaves who are removed from their
homelands to work stolen land. At the crux of these relationships is
land , highly valued and disputed. For settlers to live on and profit from land, they
must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical,
epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land .
Land, in being settled, becomes property . Settlers must also import
chattel slaves, who must be kept landless, and who also become property, to
be used, abused, and managed.

The Indian's exclusion from civil society guarantees an

ultimate deferral in which indigenous peoples remain as
grave markers on the roads of empires while support
accrues to other struggles

Byrd 11 [Jodi, The Transit of Empire, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies
and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Chickasaw, preface xiixiii]
Despite scholars' acknowledgments of the coterminous processes of
imperialism and colonialism located along the axes of racism, capitalism ,
and territorial expansion, indigenous peoples, especially in lands now occupied by the United
States, continue to serve primarily as signposts and grave markers along
the roads of empire. At this point, the regrettable colonization and genocide of American
Indians is a truth almost universally acknowledged within postcolonial and American studies,
and simultaneously effaced and deferred, despite the work American Indian and
indigenous scholars have done to change that fact. In the same essay that critiques
exceptionalism and the absence of empire in American studies, Kaplan decenters Perry Millers discussion of the errand
into the American Indian "wilderness" to focus instead on the "jungles" in Africa that serve as Millers crystallization of the
meaning of America even as she notes how- other

scholars tend to erase Indians from

their scope of inquiry altogether . And even as Peter Hulme argues for the inclusion of America
within post- colonial studies because 1492 marked the advent of European settlement in the new world, he writes that " as

a postcolonial nation, the United States continued to colonize North America,

completing the genocide of the Native population begun by the Spanish and the British."17 The
teleological and eschatological narrative of postcolonial theory includes
indigenous peoples as the ultimate deferral that of wilderness as

metonymy for indigenous presence on the one hand and that of past
perfect completion and death on the other. This chapter is my attempt to consider how
and why that might be the case.

Assaults on indigenous populations set the foundation for

intervention and structural violence
Street 4 [Paul, writes on imperialism, racism, and thought control for ZNet, Those
Who Deny the Crimes of the Past, 11 March 2004,
http://www.zcommunications.org/those-who-deny-the-crimes-of-the-past-by-paulstreet]

It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the vicious, often explicitly

genocidal "homeland" assaults on native-Americans, which set foundational
racist and national-narcissist patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery, disproportionately
directed at non-European people of color. The deletion of the real story of the so-called "battle of
Washita" from the official Seventh Cavalry history given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri massacre is revealing.
Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US savagery at

Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the

Philippines, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Korea, the
denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of which (and
all before) has recently encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a
vicious circle of recurrent violence, well known to mental health practitioners who deal with
countless victims of domestic violence living in the dark shadows of the imperial homeland's crippling, stunted, and
indeed itself occupied social and political order. Power-mad US forces deploying the latest

genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that white North American "pioneers" tried to
wipe off the face of the earth (ie, "Apache," "Blackhawk," and "Comanche" helicopters) are walking in bloody
footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and plains to the
leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt
acknowledged as America's "original inhabitants." Racist imperial carnage and its
denial, like charity, begin at home. Those who deny the crimes of the past are
likely to repeat their offenses in the future as long as they retain the means
and motive to do so. It is folly, however, for any nation to think that it can stand above the judgments of
history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for what Ward Churchill calls "imperial arrogance and criminality." Every
new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold numbers of anti-imperial resistance fighters, ready to die and eager to
use the latest available technologies and techniques to kill representatives - even just ordinary citizens - of what they see as
an American Predator state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable return of US power to the
grounds of earth and history. As it accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful choice, full of

potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity and

the earth. It will accept its fall with relief and gratitude, asking for forgiveness, and
making true reparation at home and abroad, consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of
native-American (Keetoowah Cherokee) ancestry, calls "the realities of [its] national history and
the responsibilities that history has bequeathed": goodbye American Exceptionalism and
Woodrow Wilson's guns. Or Americans and the world will face the likely alternative of
permanent imperial war and the construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state,
perpetuated by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance. This savage
barbarism of dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will be defended in the last
wagon-train instance by missiles and bombs loaded with radioactive materials
wrenched from lands once freely roamed by an immeasurably more civilized
people than those who came to destroy .

Their Johnson evidence is another link its

disidentification is ultimately a noncommittal, ambiguous
gesture that has zero warrant for how it attacks
structures OR what everyday actions of resistance it
takes. Voting for this becomes a pain soothing,
sentimental, ritual which requires continual repetition and
entextualization, in which survival is slowly recoded as
freedom and necessity is cast as desire
Lauren Berlant 98, Professor of English, University of Chicago, Poor Eliza,
American Literature, 70;3, Jstor

Usually the citation of the Uncle Tom form involves questions about whether intimacy between and among races is possible in the United
States. These questions are frequently played out through love plots in which heterosexual intimacy and gender norms are also deemed
fragile. This casts sexual difference and the conventional hierarchies of value associated with it in the U.S. as vaguely analogous to the scene
of racial difference, wherein visible

corporeal distinctiveness is explained as something

between species and cultural difference. The King and I supplements these conventions and reveals their
e-m- beddedness in economic and imperial relations by having the King and Tuptim imaginatively enter the War between the States
through Lincoln and Stowe. Where they are concerned, the activity of citation

marks a desire for

identification and translation across nations, lexicons, and systems of hierarchy. It
also marks the mobility of categories of privilege and subordination : for example,
the King is imperially vulnerable but sexually strong, while Leonowens's lines of privilege are the inverse. For both figures,

identification across radically different cultures involves a serious ambition

to act courageously, to learn to become something radically different than
one is. But the will to appropriate difference to explicate and
transform the scene of one's own desire necessarily involves
distortion, mistranslation, and misrecognition.

In The King and I, as in Uncle Tom's Cabin

and many other texts of sentimental politics, the play between various matrices of "difference" produces comedy amidst calamity, making a

desire for vernacularization , the making local of a

nonlocal phenomenon, is a serious one as well.3
The political tradition of sentimentality ultimately equates the vernacular
with the human: in its imaginary, crises of the heart and of the body's dignity
produce events that, properly publicized, can topple great nations and other
patriarchal institutions if an effective and redemptive linkage can be
constructed between the privileged and the socially abject . Uncle Tom's Cabin is an
archive people come to out of a political optimism that the revolution in mass subjectivity for
which it stands might be borrowed for the transformation of other unjust social
institutions. The novel's very citation is a sign that an aesthetic work can be powerful enough to move the people who read it into
sort of slapstick of survival. But the

identifying against their own interests. In so doing, the text of sentimental politics figures a radical challenge to the bodies and body politic
hailed by it. The artwork is shown to be as potentially power- ful as a nation or any world-saturating system: it makes and remakes subjects.

Yet the forces of distortion in the world of feeling politics put into
play by the citation of Uncle Tom are as likely to justify ongoing forms of
domination as to give form and language to impulses toward resistance.4 In The King and I, as in many
melodramas, the soundtrack tells this story first, and then the plot follows. Frustrated by the King's imperiousness, Leonowens begins to
think of him as a barbarian. But his head wife, Lady Thiang, sings to her: the King "will not always say, / What you would have him say, /
But now and then he'll say / Something wonderful."5 Because he believes in his "dreams" and makes himself vulnerable through that belief,
he is, it is suggested, worth loving. He is, in that sense, like a woman, and indeed his, patri- archal authoritarianism is revealed as mere
bluster. As a result, the King takes on the sacred aura of a sentimental heroine, complete with sacrificial death. This plot turn marks a classic
moment of politico- sentimental pedagogy. Although he is a tyrant, the King's story de- mands sympathy, and then empathy, from the
women who surround him. Here they become stand-in figures for the audience, witnessing his death as a process of dramatic
detheatricalization. As the play progresses and the King is "humanized" by feeling and therefore put less on display as a body, the narrative
loses focus on the systemic violence of the King's acts. Violence must be taken offstage tactically in order to produce startling and
transformative lines of empathy, but this empathy is mainly directed toward the pain of the privileged for being enslaved by a system of
barbarous power in which they were destined, somehow, to be caught.

contradictions deliberately or inevitably animated

by politically motivated deployments of sentimental rhetoric? Here is a hypothesis:
when sentimentality meets politics, it uses personal stories to tell of
structural effects, but in so doing it risks thwarting its very attempt
Can we say something general, then, about the

to perform rhetorically a scene of pain that must be soothed

politically . Because the ideology of true feeling cannot admit the
nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together and the
ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a civicminded but passive ideal of empathy . The political as a place of acts
oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private
thoughts, leanings, and gestures. Suffering, in this personal-public context, becomes
answered by survival , which is then recoded as freedom .
Meanwhile, we lose the original impulse behind sentimental politics ,
which is to see the individual effects of mass social violence as different
from the causes, which are impersonal and depersonalizing .
entextualization that
sentimental culture promotes as a way of acknowledging and actually exploiting
apparently irreducible social differences to produce a universalism around,
especially, modes of suffering or painful feeling . Two other ways of entering the rhetorical conventions of true
Thus far, I have focused on the general processes of identification through

feeling in the U.S. political sphere also contribute to its symbolic valence: its relation to the feminine and to femininity as a way of living;
and its relation to capitalist culture, both at the juncture where abstract relations of value are sublimated into and represented by particular
kinds of subaltern bodies and at the place where the magical autonomy of the commodity form (the mirror of the stereotype) is positioned
as the disembodied solution to the experience of social negativity or isolation.6 I will return to the commodity in the next section.

Their deviancy method is another link one way they

describes themselves as deviants is by representing
certain types of sexual behavior. That representation
colludes with disciplinary techniques that police identity
because it demarcates CERTAIN sexual postures or ideals
as deviant and certain ones as not, reifying the script
imposed upon queer bodies in the first place. That means
the 1AC is ultimately just therapy at th expense of politics
Duong 12 [What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about Intersectionality? Duong, Kevin,
Cornell University. Politics & Gender 8.3 (Sep 2012): 370-386]
There are conceptual shortcomings with each paradigm that pose significant
challenges to our research practice. For example, and without denying the political purchase of this
tactic for feminists in the past, the trope of making invisible people visible that is typical
of work in the descriptive paradigm is underwritten by the notion--the political commitment, even-that the inclusion of marginalized or invisible perspectives will serve as an
important corrective to our social scientific vision. Descriptive
representation demands from us that we form a more complete and objective field of
vision by including in our work a previously excluded perspective. Or, alternately, it tasks us with
reconciling the parallax perspectives of the researcher and the subject - that is,
identity as an object of research ("objective") and identity as lived experience ("subjective"). 6 In either case,

descriptive work construes the problem of exclusion to be one of myopic

vision, a partiality we need to rectify by representing and making visible

those forms of living and being disavowed and erased . There are dangers for this
approach. For his part, Foucault indicates in The History of Sexuality that the figuration of medical categories of
sexuality, far from being beneficent acts of extending visibility to the
previously marginalized, worked to naturalize a constellation of deviant
social practices and peoples as pathological, thus justifying them as targets
for the state's moral, scientific, and legal administration. It is sadly the case that, historically,
efforts to make public or " visible" deviant practices and peoples often
functioned as a pretense for sustaining the operative system of discipline
that classified such deviance as deviance in the first place. 7 We see this
elsewhere: in the American apocalyptic depiction of the AIDS public-health crisis as
representing a queer sexual threat (Bersani 1987; Watney 1987); in today's efforts to
"include" queer Americans in U.S. nationalist imaginations by making
visible--even dramatizing as a spectacle--the perverse racialized and eroticized "queer
terrorist of elsewhere" as someone whose existence secures our nationalist
schema of good and bad queers (Puar 2007); 8 and in the feud between queer
politics and "mainstream" lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics regarding
the latter's fixation on marriage and what many queer activists see as their reactionary and conservative fantasy of
"really" being normal, effectively dropping the critique of normalcy altogether (Halperin 2003; Warner 1999). So
descriptive representation, responding to the political problem of exclusion ,

is often insufficient for dislodging the governing system of representation that

makes available these very categories that are subsequently included or excluded. When
a group's emergent visibility is staged in relation to the representational status quo
uncritically, visibility colludes with the policing of identity . For sexual
politics more generally, " representing" deviance has consolidated
modern disciplinary regimes

(Butler 2004); served

as a pretense to invest in

and relive our wounded identities in a reactionary politics possessed by

the past (Brown 1995); or narcissistically hypostatized trauma into an inner
moral truth that ends up naturalizing those very moral regimes against
which queer activism has historically struggled (Berlant 2002). 9 These are all
serious pitfalls given that sexual politics in the United States have struggled
tirelessly to revolutionize our prevailing schemas for representing
normal/deviant sex and sex practice, and to avoid settling for
enfranchising us onto the side of "normal" folk. Polemically stated, we must be
wary of rendering visible marginality and deviance for inadvertent
therapeutic purposes . Many of these shortcomings are allayed in the critical approach. Because the
units of analysis for critical intersectionality are dynamic structures , researchers
working in this paradigm are better equipped to attend to the normative ordering of material and ideological systems. At
its best, critical intersectionality maps out the complexity of identity as a way of

diagnosing these larger world-historical structural contexts . But if the political

problem, to which critical intersectionality arose as an answer, is the socially objective character of identity (that is, its
reification), then we need to specify how the identifications of these structural

conditions of possibility can lead to an adequate political response. Obviously,

critical intersectionality research continues to provide us a map of our difficult terrain. But much of it is unable
to specify of what the relationship between critical, intersectional, empirical
research and feminist politics consists. We feminists often leave the relation
between knowledge and politics unspecified, implicitly operating on the
assumption that empirical knowledge of socially objective structures and

causal complexity will diminish their seeming immutability. Or, dangerously, we

venerate knowledge of complexity (" intelligibility ") for its own sake. McCall (2005) writes
tellingly in an essay that is otherwise exemplary of the "critical" genre of scholarship: " All three [ways of dealing with
categorical complexity that McCall outlines in her essay] attempt to satisfy the demand for
complexity and, as a result, face the need to manage complexity, if for no other reason than to
attain intelligibility" (2005, 1773; emphasis added).

Theyre not the only deviants in the room, but perhaps a

more meaningful pattern for queers to align with is not to
flip scripts, but rather build pedagogy aimed explicitly at
specific structural analysis of political economy
Byrd 14 [A Return to the South, Jodi A. Byrd, From: American Quarterly, Volume 66,
Number 3, September 2014]

What follows is not a history. Nor is it a geographic study, an ethnographic recovery, or an assertion of purity, though at
times, colonialisms and their resistances have certainly conjured such modes, critiques, desires, and refusals. What I offer
here instead are a series of reflections toward thinking through the challenges that indigeneity, as both a mode of being
and as a reading practice, poses to the past, to regionalism, to the nation-state, and to the bio- and geopolitical governance
structures that have forced peoples, lands, and histories into the cacophonous entanglements that forged the Amricas out
of the new world event. At stake is an interpretative frame of reference, a turn against the common sense of hegemony,
and a thinking through what we might be allowed to imagine within and against the normative structures
that have

disciplined our affective historical understandings into the stories

that we repeat about the past and its role in shaping our present. Regardless of methodological
approach, indigeneity is a matter of orientation, a manner of being placed, and an
active presence in the act of interpretation. In speaking to what is queer
about her work now, Lauren Berlant recently observed in an interview with David Seitz that
queer theory is fundamentally about not presuming your object but
understanding that what sexuality is, is a set of patterns that align you to the
world in a particular way. What your object [End Page 614] is, is a patterning, a set of patternings.18
Berlants notion of patterning , of understanding an object as a cluster of promises to you, that
you produce kinds of patterns in relation to it that are fundamentally ambivalent and improvisatory,

captures

not just a queer mode of attachment and resistance to the normative

state and scales of desire but speaks to the conjunctive intimacies
produced within the ongoing US colonization of indigenous peoples and
lands. To read indigenously is not the same as reading queerly, but the
continual return of patterns and patternings as symptomatic of exegesis
speaks to the disruptive enunciations that the queer and the indigenous
pose to habituated expectations of liberal rights predicated on
inclusions, recognitions, and tolerance . Similarly, the quotidian function of the
ongoing colonization of the Amricas underwrites normative dominance
within the United States and continually reorients the world into ambivalent and
improvisatory patternings that realign ones relationality into maintaining
and replicating colonialisms modes of dominance . In other words, it turns
patternings against us as misdirections and distractions to deflect and defer
attention away from the reality of the bargain that has conditioned our
desired expectations and hoped-for outcomes within a condition of
possibility always already predicated on the site of indigenous

dispossession . Finally, and at its most basic level, colonialism patterns itself in the new
world through systemic processes of extractive , interventionist,
bureaucratic, white supremacist, and eliminationist modes of domination to literally
strip lands, cultures, languages, and resources away from indigenous peoples.
Indigeneity not only produces a set of patternings to align in certain ways within and against
colonialism but provides the backdrop through which patterns make sens e. In
trying to consider such formal elements of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe notes that settler colonialism is
a structure rather than an event.19 Such an observation takes its quotational and enunciative power
from its resonances with the work that women of color feminists have done to consistently critique the structural and
systemic formations of violence at the intersectional sites of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Racism, classism,

and settler colonialism are each and all structures and not events; the
masters tools will never dismantle the masters house, Audre Lorde has cautioned.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine
change.20 While it is important to think about houses and other structures in the formal analysis of colonialisms that
erect themselves as permanent throughout the new world at the operational sites of gender, sexuality, class, race, labor,
and territoriality, it is important to not lose the other side of the formulation . I want,
then, to turn this a slightly different direction to [End Page 615] emphasize that colonialism is also

simultaneously an event, a series of events, quasi-events, and nonevents, that must be narratively and
affectively repeated through time to make those events legible as the interpretive patterning through which colonialism
sublimates itself to the point of illegibility. Such an understanding of colonialism and

indigeneity as coterminous eventful and structural patternings imbricated

within the larger articulations of empire throughout the Amricas is
indebted to Elizabeth Povinellis theorization of the governance of the prior and to White Earth Ojibwe
historian Jean M. OBriens discussion of firstings and lastings that have served as the logics through which
settlers and arrivants have asserted dominion over indigenous lands. For Povinelli, the tensing of late liberalism depends
on the social embodiment of what she identifies as the priority of the prior. A function of governance and social division
developed in Europe in the fifteenth century, the priority of the prior person is framed as a natural right of all persons
and the people as such emerged as an impediment to the previous logics of kingly seizure and to the emergent logic of
colonial governance. This notion that there might be prior rights against the seizure of lands that exceed and precede
those of the monarch and the state translated into the settler colonial relationalities that used indigenization as a process
of claiming priority in lands that were not theirs. Articulating itself as a creole state, a negative projection of the
metropolitan state, Povinelli writes, Americans could claim and experience themselves as the prior occupant of the
Americas: projecting itself against the metropole, the settler state constituted itself as prior to it. But in acceding to the
logic of the priority of the prior as the legitimate foundation of governance, the settler state projected the previous
inhabitants as spatially, socially and temporally before it as the ultimate horizon of its own legitimacy.21

Discussions of Asian struggles in America like the 1AC

must begin from a starting point of complicity in
colonialism
Kahina 13 [Indigenous Settler? Decolonization and the Politics of Exile, Nuunja Kahina
May 28, 2013 https://intercontinentalcry.org/indigenous-settler-decolonization-andthe-politics-of-exile/]
Settlers of color, like their white counterparts, engage in the oppression of
Indigenous peoples. Even the successes of people of color in the United States or
Canada such as assimilating into dominant capitalist structures, as CEOs or other executives happen at the
expense of American Indians by further entrenching settler colonialism.
Instead of working to attain success by joining and normalizing dominant settler society, people of color
must work towards justice through decolonization and reflect on their own
status in a settler colony built on violence against Indigenous peoples . As an

Indigenous person who is not Native to the Americas but has an active consciousness of indigeneity, my situation is
somewhat different from other settlers of color. The struggle Im engaged in for my people, the Imazighen, is opposing the
processes of Arab colonialism entrenched in North, yet Im doing this work from a settler colony . I certainly

didnt choose to come to the United States, but I directly benefit from the
dispossession of American Indian nations. I am able to attain an education

and pursue my goals including activism for the Amazigh nation because I live in a
Western settler colony built on the genocide(s) of American Indian
peoples. From this position, I have greater power and more opportunities
for activism, such as a degree of political safety. Problematizing this
relationship as both Indigenous and settler is necessary if I am going to
claim any sort of solidarity with Indigenous nations in the Americas.
Indigenous dispossession, genocide, and resistance in the Americas cannot
be just convenient analogies for me to use in explaining the struggle of my
own people. I have heard other Imazighen living in the United States express solidarity with American Indians,
namely that our situation and struggle against colonialism is similar. We have not, unfortunately, moved beyond that
discourse to question our own complicity in colonialism. The late settler colony allows certain privileges and advantages
even to the North African exile: opportunities to prosper if one assimilates, to participate equally in the destruction of
Indigenous lands, and achieve material gains from Indigenous dispossession. As we consider the politics

of exile as Edward Said, for example, has written about as a Palestinian-American we must step
outside ourselves to question: where are we in exile, and on whose backs?
Said writes that modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles , migrs,
refugees in a fascinating passage offering support for the conception of the
American melting pot, a poetic multiculturalism in a land supposedly espousing freedom and liberty for all.
All, that is, except the Indigenous nations who continue to face systematic
marginalization and disempowerment, colonialism and genocide. For there to be
an American melting pot, there must be an American settler state. Other diasporans, such as the Oromo scholar Asafa
Jalata, have written about promoting social justice from the position of the exile and use the language of Indigenous
rights. Yet once again, there is no critical reflection of ones own role in reproducing and supporting the settler colonial
state, the state which allowed him to pursue his own fight for freedom. In many ways, I think we are simply so engaged in
our own struggles that we have become unwilling to accept our own role in violent colonial processes. What does it mean if
I invoke the platform of Indigenous rights to achieve justice for my people if I do nothing to fight for those whose
homeland I have no right to live upon? There are clear and concrete ways in which settlers, including

settlers of color and exiles, can work for justice alongside Indigenous
peoples in settler colonies such as the United States. We can work for decolonization
on Indigenous terms, being responsive to feedback and guidance. According to
Dakota scholar Waziyatawin, this begins with truth-telling and the recognition of our
role in the destruction of Indigenous lands , sovereignty, and livelihoods.

Prioritize indigenous epistemology through the 1ncs

enjambment. The genocidal effacement of the radical
alterity of the Indian is at the heart of settler
colonialism's governance over life and death.

Byrd 11 [Jodi, The Transit of Empire, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies
and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Chickasaw, preface xiixiii]
This book, then, is a journey of sorts, its method mnemonic as it places
seemingly disparate histories, temporalities, and geographies into conversation in
the hopes that, through enjambment , it might be possible to perceive how
Indianness functions as a transit within empire. My method here
suggests a reading praxis inspired by Blackfeet novelist Stephen Graham
Jones's Demon Theory, in which he delineates genre as mnemonic device in order to
retell the Medea story through horror narrative.' The story of the new world is horror,
the story of America a crime. To read mnemonically is to connect the violences
and genocides of colonization to cultural productions and political
movements in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal

democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that

birthed settler colonialism through inclusion. Such a reading practice
understands indigeneity as radical alterity and uses remembrance as a
means through which to read counter to the stories empire tells itself.
Lumbee scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. has argued that "the American
Indian emerges as a distinct problem in Western legal thought," but I
contend here that ideas of the Indian and Indiannessthe contagion
through which U.S. empire orders the place of peoples within its purview
emerge as distinct problems for critical and postcolonial theories.' As a
transit, Indianness becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and replicates
itself by transforming those to be colonized into "Indians" through continual reiterations
of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or the Middle East. The
familiarity of "Indianness" is salve for the liberal multicultural democracy within the
settler societies that serve as empire's constituency. In the wake of this transit, and
indeed as its quality as colonialist practice, one finds discordant and competing
representations of diasporic arrivals and native lived experienceswhat I call cacophony
throughout this bookthat vie for hegemony within the discursive, cultural,
and political processes of representation and identity that form the basis for
what Wendy Brown has identified as the states of injury and Foucault and
others have termed biopolitics. Bringing indigeneity and Indians front
and center to discussions of U.S. empire as it has traversed across Atlantic
and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical moment,
precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures , enjambments, and
repetitions of Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial,
restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability.

The epistemological prioritization of decolonialization

must come first. Only that can liberates theory from its
parasitism on indigineity
Byrd 11 [Jodi, The Transit of Empire, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies
and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Chickasaw, preface xiixiii]
As Sankaran Krishna illustrates, the problem of postcolonialism for in-digenous
peoples has real world consequences: "If identities such as the nation or
ethnicity, or notions such as 'traditional homelands' of native peoples, can be shown
to be historical and social constructions or fictions, governments and elites
can use such ideas to deny their responsibility for past crimes or to oppose
current claims for reparation or redress."4' From the other side, Gaurav Desai cautions
that the politics of indigeneity and autochthony seem defensible enoughhow can one
reasonably deny the rights of indigenous peoples who have been colonized
to the fruits of their own labor and land? On the other hand, in a world that has
seen mass migrations across continents over a long period of time, is it reasonable to
allow for a strictly regulated indigenous politics, which in its most exclusionary stance
can lead to ethnic strife, mass expulsions, civil wars, and genocide?44
If anything, bringing indigenous and tribal voices to the fore within postcolonial theory may help us elucidate how liberal colonialist discourses

depend upon sublimating indigenous cultures and histories into fictive

hybridities and social constructions as they simultaneously trap
indigenous peoples within the dialectics of genocide , where the only
conditions of possibility imagined are either that indigenous peoples will die
through genocidal policies of colonial settler states (thus making room for more
open and liberatorv societies) or that they will commit heinous genocides in
defense of lands and nations.49
Methodologically, an indigenous-centric approach to critical theoryhelps to identify the processes that have kept indigenous peoples as a
necessary pre-conditional presence within theories of colonialism and its
"post."50 To engage this point, I read moments of cacophony in political, literary, and
cultural productions. Identifying the competing interpretations of geographical
spatialities and historicities that inform racial and decolonial identities
depends upon an act of interpretation that decenters the vertical
interactions of colonizer and colonized and recenters the horizontal
struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions.
Those vertical interactions continually foreground the arrival of Europeans as
the defining event within settler societies, consistently place horizontal
histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony, and distract
from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities
for anticolonial action that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean
allegories that define oppression. Of particular interest to this book, then, is
the development of a more detailed analysis of how cultural, literary, and
political assemblages in the United States depend upon a desire to reconcile
through deferment the colonization of indigenous peoples within the
horizontal scope of settler/arrivant colonialism, racism, homophobia, and
sexism, a desire that implicates all those who reside on colonized indigenous
lands. The significance, I hope, for both postcolonial studies and American
Indian studies as disciplines, and for the nascent indigenous critical theory arising
from the work of native scholars grounded in the knowledges of their communities, is to
take seriously the lessons of the past and other struggles for decolonization
and to then transform how we approach these issues through academic
engagement so that our work and research questions reflect the best
of our governance and diplomatic traditions .

Affirm a decolonial pedagogy which situates land return

as our first political priority.
Malott 8 [Curry, faculty member in Professional and Secondary Education at West
Chester University, A Call to Action: An Introduction to Education, Philosophy, and
Native North America, p. 88-91]

While the similarities between a Marxist and an Indigenous dialectical (relational) study of human affairs are not hard to
discern, there is one area of contestation less easily resolved, which brings us back to the central focus of this chapter:
land, which also tends to be presented dualistically by Native scholars and activists. For example, Winona LaDuke (1992)
describes industrial society, the result of primitive accumulation, as synthetic because it has been disconnected from the
natural organic connection between people and the land where the settler-community represents the violent imposition of
the inorganic. At the end of Chapter Ten, I put it like this: can the subordinate classes of the settler-community conceive of
a way to liberate themselves from the grip of their own ruling class (the same ruling class that has exploited the labor
power of the settler community in not only putting them to work in production, but as slaughterers and wealth extractors
of everyone from American Indians to Iraqis) without continuing to deny Native Americans their Native American
ancestral lands? Or, will a liberated settler-community working class continue to occupy 99% of Native land? Because
North America's working class seems far from liberating itself from its ruling class, the cause of which has been associated
with many interconnected factors including whiteness (see McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005), such a consideration is a

moot point. What is not a moot point, however, is how to work together. Winona LaDuke (1992) has addressed this issue
situating the solution within a process of collective relearning and collaboration: I would argue that Americans of

"foreign" descent must become Americans. That is not to become a patriot of the
United States, a patriot of the flag, but a patriot to the land of this continent ... You were
born here, you will not likely go away, or live anywhere else, and there are simply no
more frontiers to follow. We must all relearn a way of thinking, a state of mind that
is from this common ground ... If we are in this together, we must rebuild,
redevelop, and reclaim an understanding/analysis which is uniquely ours. (p. 1)
What this has, does, and could look like in practice is explored in detail here and in Chapter Four. Ultimately, LaDuke is
challenging all of us to rethink the philosophies that inform the way we read the world and subsequently the choices we
make in the world, which, for educators, translates into curriculum and pedagogy (what we teach and the way we teach it).
For Churchill (2002), LaDuke's "common ground" is a unified (settlers and Natives)

movement against the colonialist governments of the United States and Canada in support
of Native land reclamation as dictated by international law. Churchill (2002) notes that fully one
third of the United States is unceded Native land and thus proposes a land base that would not
disrupt the financial heart of the U.S. that could be the new Native North America. The new Native America
would of course be governed under Native law, which Churchill (2002) argues is, in its
pre-Columbian state, inherently environmentalist, antiracist,
anticapitalist/economic inequality, anti-homophobic and anti-sexist, in short,
democratic, and would therefore probably be appealing to many people from the settlercommunity, who, contrary to popular opinion, would not be expected to give up their
homes or small businesses if located on Native land. Aware of the erosive effect the
colonizers' system of indoctrination has had on these egalitarian Native values, Churchill (2002) notes that "the extent to
which these realities do not now pertain in native societies is exactly the extent to which Indians have been subordinated
to the mores of the invading, dominating culture" (p. 379). Because the process of colonization has perverted traditional
ways contributing to deep philosophical divisions among Native communities, where none were before, suggesting that
land reclamation would result in an automatic return to traditional ways is, at best, romantic and nave. However, this is
not to suggest current arrangements are satisfactory. The fact that Native peoples, as a whole, based on
every social indicator of oppression, such as poverty, are by far the most oppressed group in North America

warrants serious attention and major changes, as does the suffering of many other
groups in North America (and throughout the world, the focus of Chapter Four) such as African
Americans, or Africans in America as Europeans are in America but not of America, as only those indigenous
to the land can be. As this seems to be a simple "fact," deciphering who is European, who is
African and who is "Indian" is not so clear-cut after five hundred years of
intermingling. With these complexities in mind, as alluded to above by LaDuke, what is needed in
this day and age are workable pedagogies of unity and accompanying philosophies of
praxis. While land reclamation is undoubtedly part of the solution, alone, it is not
enough. A radical social education is also needed for everyone, Native and
non-Native alike. Such an education, outlined in Chapter Four, following critical pedagogy and
Native American-conceived and -controlled tribal education systems, should be designed to facilitate
the development of critical multicultural citizens, able to not only read the word, but their world as
well, and therefore endowed with a land-centered revolutionary consciousness
complete with the sense of empowerment needed to put it into action, that is, the restoration of dignity, justice, selfdetermination, and humanization generally in North America, both philosophically and geographically, and the possibility
of a utopian future. Providing a more concrete place of departure for considering what the

settler-Left's role might look in this process, through summarizing what he understands is the general sentiment of
Native Nations engaged in land reclamation regarding non-native progressives and radicals, Churchill (2002) notes:
...When Indigenist movements like AIM advance slogans like "U.S. Out of North American," non-Indian radicals should
not react defensively. They should cheer. They should see what they might do to help. When they respond defensively to
sentiments like those expressed by AIM, what they are ultimately defending is the very government, the very order they
claim to oppose so resolutely. And if they manifest this contradiction often enough, consistently enough, pathologically
enough, then we have no alternative but to take them on their word: that they really are at some deep level or another
aligned, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, with the mentality that endorses our permanent dispossession
and disenfranchisement, our continuing oppression, our ultimate genocidal obliteration as self-defining and selfdetermining peoples. In other words, they make themselves part of the problem rather than becoming part of the solution.
(p. 383) As Churchill alludes, the heart of the antagonistic relationship between settlers

and communities Native to North America is control of ancestral lands . The

significance of these land issues lies within the fact that settler/colonizer

populations have
an agenda of replacing the Native philosophies with
foreign conceptions of land. While aware of the complexities that emerge when entire civilizations are
overwhelmingly pursued

brought together under dubious circumstances, addressed in the second half of this chapter, we continue by considering
the two poles of perception (immigrant and Native) when considering land in post-Columbian North America and the
historical development of the two in context.

Our critical indigenous reading engages settler ideology by

starting at the point of place which allows us to deconstruct
violent colonialism to affirm what should have always been
known there are 565 sovereign nations on Turtle Island.
Byrd 11 [Jodi, Transit of Empire, 2011, Pg. xxix xxx]
Although the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples have resisted defining indigenous peoples in order to prevent nation-states from policing the
category as a site of exception, Jeft Corntassel (Cherokee) and Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnawake Mohawk) provide a useful
provisional definition in their essay Being Indigenous: Indigenousness is an identity

constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The
communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that:
Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the
colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire. It
is this oppositional, place based existence, along with the consciousness of
being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign
peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the
world.32 In their definition there emerges a contentious, oppositional identity and existence to confront imperialism and
colonialism. Indigenousness also hinges, in Alfred and Corntassel, on certain Manichean allegories of foreign/native and
colonizer/colonized within reclamations of placebased existence, and these can, at times, tip into a formulation that
does not challenge neoliberalism as much as it mirrors it. But despite these potential pitfalls,

critical theory

could be said to

indigenous

exist in its best form when it centers itself

within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities

and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European
philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the
allied tools available. Steeped in anticolonial consciousness that deconstructs
and confronts the colonial logics of settler states carved out of

and on top of

indigenous usual and accustomed lands , indigenous critical theory has the
potential in this mode to offer a transformative accountability. From this
vantage, indigenous critical theory might, then, provide a diagnostic way of
reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin cultural,
intellectual, and political discourses. But it asks that settler, native , and
arrivant each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then
reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism and its
resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure. Within the continental
United States, it means imagining an entirely different map and understanding
of territory and space: a map constituted by over 565 sovereign
indigenous nations , with their own borders and boundaries, that transgress what has
been naturalized as contiguous territory divided into 48 states.33 There is
always, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes of indigenous peoples incommensurablity within the
postcolonizing settler society, a subject position that can be thought of as fixed in its
inalienable relation to land. This subject position cannot be erased by
colonizing processes which seek to position the indigenous as object,

inferior, other and its origins are not tied to migration.34