1NC

Thesis statement Indigenity must be theorized as a ghostly

thing, which requires a rejection of affs lens of bodily
identity that is measurable through the metaphysics of
absence and presence there is no question of the link, all
discourses can only ever possibly name the intransitive
shadows of Indianness
Cornellier 13 -- Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies @
U of Manitoba
(Bruno, The Indian thing: on representation and reality in the liberal settler
colony, Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp. 49-64)
Nevertheless, if in this case it is indeed Canada that makes the Indian its thing, this does not make Canada the
Indian's undisputed master. For making the Indian its thing means having to adhere to its law. Not the law that
governs or regulates the order of things, but the law dictated by

the thing as an implacable

command [or] an insatiable demand .32 For while discourse, by making

the Indian its thing, is not limited by the materiality, corporality, or
existence of the Indian , it is always in the Indian's name that it hears
itself speak (of the Indian). It is, in a word, because discourse has no other choice
but to name the Indian and to give the Indian to ourselves as a thing that the Indian thing imposes
its law. As Scott Lauria Morgensen explains: settler subjects normatively
recall and perform indigeneity as a history they at once incorporate and
transcend, inhabit and defer. Settlers thus are inexplicable apart from
their relationality to Indigenous peoples.33 Len Findlay insists, in a similar vein,
that within the colonial settler state, all communities live as, or in
relation to, Indigenes. [T]here is no hors-Indigene, no geopolitical or psychic
setting, no real or imagined terra nullius free from the satisfactions and
unsettlements of Indigene (pre)occupation.34 Discourse pursues
something that it cannot (or will not) touch, while at the same time remaining
unable ever to free itself completely from the object of this pursuit. So that even if the
thing always slips from the grasp of the discourse or desire that seeks its
presence, it still asks to be pursued incessantly and unsuccessfully. Now
this thing, although it has made this request, says nothing and means nothing. This
means that nothing and no-one can ever guarantee the accuracy or the truth of what is said about it. Because
it neither speaks (to us) nor asks (us) for anything at all, the thing can
be represented only by a desire that cannot not answer, that cannot not
speak for it and in its name , that cannot not command it, forever
unsuccessfully, to exist or to signify someone or something . The silence
of that Indian thing commands

speech. Or, if not speech,

a reaction or a self-

positioning that sometimes commands that we remain silent . So that it is

possible to affirm that the thing does not exist or that the fact of its existence is, at the very least,
not pertinent ; yet, speaking up in its name always produces something. And because the thing, emerging

from the interval born out of the colonial encounter, demands to be spoken of, these speech acts can never be
understood as mere solipsism or pure relativism. For to analyse these statements (or these representations) is also
to analyse a relation of power in which we speak not an act of speaking up for Indians or in one's capacity as an
Indian, but in the name of that Indian thing. Thus, it is through inciting that Indian thing to say something,
although it is forever aphasic, that it becomes possible to produce and visualise Indian (and Canadian) differences
and realities and, consequently, identities. In this way, settlers and Indigenous peoples seek to signify and
appropriate for themselves, within a particular racialcolonial relation of power, the Indianness that exerts the
perplexity of the identities interpellated by settler colonialism. This explains Gerald Vizenor's refusal to
acknowledge that there had ever been an absence of the Native in colonial representation. He invites us, rather, to
observe the eyes and hands in fugitive poses to see the motion of natives, and hear the apophatic narratives of a
continuous presence.35 I reiterate, then, that it is due to the intransigent presence and the eloquent silences of
those who are designated as Indians that the colonial project has to make the Indian its thing. Or rather, the
colonial project's thing, its substance, its challenge, and its outcome are this Indianness the Indianness of these

It is no longer the truth, then,

or the reality of the representation (or the represented) that is at play
here. For reality no longer constitutes the measure of the representation,
but rather its effect. It will be necessary, then, to stop conceiving of a
absolutely other bodies and territories over which Europe folds itself.

real Indian (in the flesh) by virtue of the degree of his or her presence or
absence in representation (whether this representation is colonial,
mainstream, native, or other) or indeed by virtue of a gradient of reality. Rather, it is
henceforth incumbent upon us to affirm and come to terms with the
intransitive shadows 36 neither presence nor absence of the Indian in
all of its representations . The term-concept thing offers us, in this respect, a
way out of the paradigm of the imaginary Indian (or the discursive Indian)
and its demands. That Indian thing escapes the logic of imitation and the moral
demands (or impediments) of truth and/or of the referential Indian. To conceive
of Indianness as a thing is to risk the savage philosophies evoked elsewhere by Bracken, that is,
that desire and taboo of Western metaphysics that enables the sign and
the representation to exist beyond the opposition of presence and
absence, and therefore beyond any and all guarantees of identity .37
Otherness, henceforth projected outside the self, no longer belongs to either the substance or
the body of the other, but rather to the impossible expectation that is
born from the meeting of bodies and subjectivities

that share a certain propinquity.

And if there is indeed a body or substance that exceeds or precedes the representation, this body is only insofar as

Indians, who also compete in the colonial struggle to

designate that which is truly Indian, can never be constrained by the body that girds
it is given the gift of a presence. This is why I suggest that

them. For it is not bodies but indeed that Indian thing that constitutes
the stakes , the quest, of the racialcolonial relation of power in Qubec and Canada
and this, even though it is the bodies that, in the end, are marked, trod upon, and mobilised by
the physical and epistemic violence of colonialism . This said, while we may be obliged
to acknowledge, with Veracini, that it is indeed a characteristic of settler colonialism that it veils its
own conditions of production by continuously attempting to white out the indelible line separating
the Indian from the settler (or Indianness from nationality), we will have to admit that the most colossal difficulty
the most pessimistic will call it an impossibility that awaits the process of decolonisation in Canada will henceforth
be to conquer and preserve the power, heretofore reserved for the Sovereign, to draw, signify, represent, and
defend this boundary that makes it possible to define Indianness in the face of its exteriority. In other words, the
space that asks to be conquered in the decolonisation effort is this vantage point from which it is possible to lay
claim to a certain authority or sovereignty in pointing one's finger at that thing that truly aligns with Indianness.

what will be primarily at stake in the politics of indigenous

representation, within our liberal modernity, will be this vantage point from which
the Sovereign seeks to regulate and limit access, more often than not, in the name of
In such a context,

defending and preserving democracy and human rights. By presenting itself as a defender of the universal right to

free expression of dissidence and differences, the liberal state generally manages to consolidate its sovereign
power in the face of the actions performed by the dissident bodies that threaten its integrity and its borders. In so

liberalism, sanctioned by the universalist and humanist rhetoric that is its lifeblood, seeks to
reduce representational work in a context of decolonisation or resistance to a
simple exercise of poetic and symbolic expression , if not a political
exercise of pure form or tokenism, at the edges of or alongside (either way, out of reach of) the
doing,

normative authorities of political power. This is why I am affirming that, faced with the insurmountable task of
decolonising settler colonial states, critical studies of film, media, and literary representations of Natives, if they are
to be active participants in the resistance against colonial violence, will henceforth need to make it their duty to
refuse to subscribe to any critical position that would make recognition of the true Indian in an accurate (or
revised, documented) representation a way of better apprehending togetherness across the racialcolonial divide.

we must constantly be reminded that one of the very conditions

of possibility for togetherness, in our liberal democracies, is to prevent Natives from
extirpating themselves from the ascendancy and the power of death of the
Sovereign. Importantly, in the past 15 years, significant scholarly contributions in film and media studies
To that effect,

have emerged that focus on processes of production and/or cultural mediation in Indigenous cinema, thus
complicating such colonial and intercultural narratives of correction, misrepresentation, and liberal reconciliation.38
More recently, other scholars, while not indifferent to questions of appropriate or responsible representation, have
also moved away from discourses that would turn Indigenous media and/or Native self-representation into possible
tokens for transracial discourses of recognition that would make indigenous nationhood commensurate with the
liberal settler state's multicultural economy of presence, identity, and selfhood. For instance, Corinn Columpar's
work focuses instead on a definition of Fourth Cinema understood as an intersubjective nexus in which constant
cultural and economic tensions, as well as the political (and not just cultural) identity of Indigenous communities,
emerge as part of a struggle with the systematic nature of settler colonialism.39 In an analogous manner, Michelle
H. Raheja's recent book describes tactical strategies of reading and making films that are engaging and
deconstructing white-generated representations of indigenous people as part of larger dialogues about Native
American sovereignty.40 And yet, despite such ground-breaking academic contributions, one would be ill-advised to
underestimate the continuous political, cultural, and popular resilience and influence, within journalistic, policymaking, and academic institutions, as well as within the documentary and indigenous film festival circuits, of such
liberal philosophical intuition about the self as presence, absence, and/or re-emergence in representation an
intuition which is also conforming to the NFB's liberal democratic mandate of giving a voice to underrepresented

the critical
usefulness of the Indian thing, as a theoretical concept, is to remove us
from an understanding of Indianness that was amalgamated with certain
dichotomous oppositions absence and presence, imaginary and referentiality,
alienation and identity. However, it will also be important to recall that the Indian thing does
minorities, thus making [them] feel part of this great country.41 Towards this end,

not belong to the exteriority of such dichotomous oppositions. Rather, it is born in the interval of these oppositions.

is that which is designated when, on either side of the racialcolonial

boundary, an attempt is made to identify that which is Indian and that
which is not. Canada and Qubec, because their sovereignty rests on the moral and sovereign guarantee
It

that we are indeed at home in the territory of the other, have no other choice but to constantly make Indianness
say something that makes us possible. The same will hold true for Natives who, in a colonial context as well as in
a context of resistance vis--vis the state, cannot not also take a stand in regard to their Indianness, or, in other
words, in regard to this designation that is born out of the colonial encounter this or that thing that I am in regard

the impossibility of finding a way out of that

Indian thing, I therefore maintain that such cultural and political predicament calls for
alternative strategies of resistance, as part of which, we will no longer
seek to restore an Indian reality that could be apprehended through the
metaphysics of absence and presence supporting the moral and sovereign
architecture of the liberal settler colony. Rather, the task before us will be
to imagine a new textuality and to create political or media-based interventions
that refuse to sanction the State's authority to designate what or who truly corresponds to
that Indian thing or to categorically forbid the State to situate itself within the confines of Indianness.
to you who are not that. Faced with

Importantly, such a proposition does not constitute an abrogation of the firm opposition between that which I am

As a
result, it is the entire edifice of settler colonialism that is made visible or at least,
the possibility of not seeing this edifice no longer becomes an option. With the dramatisation and
constant replotting of the irreducible racialcolonial dividing line that
and who you are you, who are also human rather, it calls for a constant re-delineation of this opposition.

settler colonialism seeks to render invisible, will we thus contribute to

denaturalising the sovereign, humanist discourse of the liberal state . As a
result, we might perhaps be allowed to hope that such a rupture in the relationship between
the nation and that Indian thing might have the potential to force our liberal
democracies to come into a profound, concrete, and consequential awareness of that which
the contemporaneousness of the racial and colonial foundations of our sovereignty
requires in the relationships between the State, Native peoples, and nonNative racialised minorities and this from both political and institutional standpoints. In the
meantime, antiracist and anticolonial efforts must take on the task of keeping
ardent, like an inextinguishable fire, the demands of conflict,
incommunicability, fracture, and opposition if we hope to eschew the
ultimate triumph of settler colonialism: its self-supersession.

Settlement is an everyday process, constituted not only by the

initial clearing of the land but the ideological reiteration of the
geopolitical and spatial self-evidence of the terrain on which
political struggle occurs disorientation is necessary, a
political strategy that makes this space alien to us
Rifkin 13 Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNCGreensboro
(Mark, Settler common sense, Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 322340)
As opposed to the sense of withdrawal into a space divorced from contemporary political economy, the text also
proposes a reframing of perspective, altering the physical sense of relation to one's surroundings via a suspension

Ahmed suggests, If orientation is about making the

strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then
disorientation occurs when that extension fails (11). These moments in the text
of their givenness. In this vein,

the self can become the site for an imaginative break with
routine that produces a sensuous reorientation (getting turned round). The
critical project of the text appears here less as locating a space apart in which to
discover the fullness of the self than as the making alien of an already
suggest how

occupied place , such that we should not recognize it . The act of turning round, of
shifting one's orientation and redirecting the momentum by which one previously was impelled,
offers possibilities for perceiving differently, for seeing and engaging in
ways that less take for granted the jurisdictional matrix of the state and in
which contemporary Native peoples can be acknowledged as themselves important inhabitants of New England
whose indigeneity compels a reconceptualization of the terms of occupancy for everyone.

Becoming

conscious of the everyday enactment of settlement involves

relinquishing the notion of an autonomous, extra-political selfhood
existing in a place apart, instead opening onto a recognition not only of
enduring Native presence within contemporary political economy but of
the effaced history of imperial superintendence and displacement that
provides the continuing condition of possibility for the sense of settler escape
into the wilderness. To be clear, the absence of a declared set of imperial
commitments does not suggest non-Natives' exoneration from continuing

histories of violence perpetrated and perpetuated by the settler-state.

Returning from a different direction to Nicoll's critique discussed earlier, there may be an absence of
sentiments hostile to Native peoples in non-Natives' speech or writing, or
non-Natives may adopt a particular viewpoint supportive of Indigenous
sovereignty on delimited plots of land when considering Native peoples as such. However,
that absence of malice or declaration of support does not address the
ways quotidian experiences of space
and subjectivity

(with respect to jurisdiction, occupancy, and ownership)

(as modular, self-identical, and extralegal)

affectively register and

iterate settler sovereignty in ways that shape the generation of, for example,
political projects that do not take Native nations, voices, and
lands as their direct object. While arguments about the structural quality of settler colonialism its
ethics, ideals, and

scale, density, duration, and centrality to US life remain important, their very insistence on its pervasive and
systemic operation can create the impression of an integrated whole. However, as Latour observes, if the body
politic is taken to be virtual, total, and always already there, then the practical means to compose it are no
longer traceable; if it's total, the practical means to totalize it are no longer visible; if it's virtual, the practical means

How is the settler body

politic composed, collected, and realized in everyday ways through the
experiences, perceptions, associations, emplacements, and trajectories of
non-Native bodies? How do settler jurisdiction and governmentality shape the material possibilities
to realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view (1623).

available to non-Natives in scenes and sites apparently disconnected from Native peoples and Indian policy, and

how do non-Natives in their quotidian feelings and interactions (and the cultural
productions for which ordinary sensation serves as background) actualize the political and legal
geographies of the settler-state? Attending to settler common sense in this way
does not so much bracket Indigenous self-determination as draw on it as ethical inspiration to investigate the ways
it is deferred through ordinary action whose aim is not such but whose effect is
to reiterate the self-evidence of settler geopolitics . Reciprocally, such analysis
also seeks to suggest how non-Natives might disorient and reorient
themselves, how they might come to understand not only that Indigenous peoples
remain part of the social landscape of life in the US but that the very terrain non-Natives
inhabit as given has never ceased to be a site of political struggle.

Indigenity cannot be theorized through the affirmatives lens

of racial identity geopolitics, not biopolitics, is the critical
factor that grounds the metapolitical authority of the settler
state to determine what counts as a political issue and what is
self-evidently natural settler colonialism transcends racial
violence of individual bare lives and fosters a generalized state
of bare habitance
Rifkin 9 Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNCGreensboro
(Mark, Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the Peculiar
Status of Native Peoples, Cultural Critique, Number 73, pp. 88-124)
In using Agambens work to address U.S. Indian policy, though, it needs to be reworked. In particular, his

emphasis on biopolitics tends to come at the expense of a discussion of

geopolitics, the production of race supplanting the production of space as
a way of envisioning the work of

the

sovereignty

he critiques, and while his concept of

such
accounts largely have left aside discussion of Indigenous peoples.
Attending to Native peoples position within settler-state sovereignties
requires investigating and adjusting three aspects of Agambens thinking: the
the exception has been immensely influential in contemporary scholar- ship and cultural criticism,

persistent inside/outside tropology he uses to address the exception, specifically the ways it serves as a metaphor

the notion of bare life as the basis of the exception, especially

the individualizing ways that he uses that concept; and the implicit depiction of sovereignty as a
self-confident exercise of authority free from anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions.5 Such revision
allows for a reconsideration of the zone of indistinction produced by and within
sovereignty, opening up analysis of the ways settler-states regulate not
divorced from territoriality;

only proper kinds of embodiment (bare life) but also legitimate modes
of collectivity and occupancy what I will call bare habitance . If the overriding
sovereignty of the United States is predicated on the creation of a state of exception, then the struggle for
sovereignty by Native peoples can be envisioned as less about control of
particular policy domains than of metapolitical authority the ability to
define the content and scope of law and politics. Such a shift draws
attention away from critiques of the particular rhetorics used to justify
the states

plenary

power and toward a macrological effort to contest the

overriding assertion of a right to exert control over Native polities. My

argument, then, explores the limits of forms of analysis organized around
the critique of the settler-states employment of racialized discourses of
savagery and the emphasis on cultural distinctions between Euramerican and
Indigenous modes of governance. Both of these strategies within Indigenous political theory treat
sovereignty as a particular kind of political content that can be juxtaposed
with a substantively differentmore Native-friendly or Indigenouscenteredcontent, but by contrast, I suggest that discourses of racial
difference and equality as well as of cultural recognition are deployed by the state in ways that
reaffirm its geopolitical self-evidence and its authority to determine what
issues, processes, and statuses will count as meaningful within the
political system. While arguments about Euramerican racism and the disjunctions
be- tween Native traditions and imposed structures of governance can be quite powerful in
challenging aspects of settler-state policy, they cannot account for the
structuring violence performed by the figure of sovereignty . Drawing on
Agamben, I will argue that sovereignty functions as a placeholder that has no determinate content.6 The
state has been described as an entity that exercises a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence, and what
I am suggesting is that the state of exception produced through Indian policy creates a
monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive
uncontestable right to define what will count as a viable legal or political
form(ul)ation. That fundamentally circular and self-validating , as well as anxious
and fraught, performance grounds the legitimacy of state rule on nothing more
than the axiomatic negation of Native peoples authority to determine or adjudicate for
themselves the normative principles by which they will be governed. Through Agambens theory of the exception,

the supposedly underlying sovereignty of the U.S. settlerstate is a retrospective projection generated by, and dependent on , the
peculiar-ization of Native peoples.
then, I will explore how

Settler colonialism is integral to the formation of slavery and

its afterlifeanti-black racism is an inadequate frame absent
understanding the role of colonialism
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE
AND SETTLER COLONIAL LANDSCAPES, PhD Dissertation]

Settler colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life,

specifically slavery and its afterlife in America. While slavery and antiBlack racism should be active and robust analytic frames that guide Black Studies and
help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also structures
Black life. The genocide of Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler
space and Settler subjectivityas unfettered self actualizationdo not immediately stop
existing as forms of power when they run into Black bodies. The way that
settler colonial power looks and manifests itself just changes; it does not
We must consider that

stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless discourse, is a form of productive power that

touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30 Though it touches and
shapes everyones life it does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler
colonialisms normalizing power enacts genocide against Native peoples
(disappears Native people) but it also shapes and structures antiBlack racism. The
ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the Slave are still
alive and well however, settler colonial power intersects with, works through
and structures the repressive and productive power that makes the Black
captive fungible and socially dead . Throughout, In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways does
settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project ultimately argues that

slavery and

anti-Black racism are not adequate to fully understand the material and
discursive processes that create Blackness in all of its embodied genres
in North America . Slavery and anti-Black racism are also not the only
repressive powers that make the Black body abject, fungible and situated
at the outer limits of being-ness. Both slavery and settler colonialism
structure modernity and need to be fully conceptualized as forms of
power that help constitute Blackness . Conceptualizing the ways that
settler colonialism and slavery co-constitute one another is an essential
component of this dissertation.

Thus, a methodological bracketing of the dominant centrality

of the black/white binary is necessary in order to grapple with
settler colonialism the binary reduces indigenity to merely
racial identity, erasing the originary and ongoing moment of
displacement instead of the traditional frame of race as
cultural or bodily identity, we must theorize settler colonialism
through the social structures by which possession of
indigenous lands is made ordinary
Rifkin 14 Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNCGreensboro
(Mark, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the
American Renaissance, pp. 19-25)
Over the past twenty years, scholars have given greater prominence to
slavery and its legacies and the intertwined processes of (re)producing blackness and
whiteness as ubiquitous features of U.S. history, politics, and culture, understanding these dynamics as
pervading all aspects of national life. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison asks the

landmark ques- tion of how the presence of black people and the practices and legacies of enslavement might be
registered in texts that do not foreground either, pro- viding the very manner by which American literature
distinguishes itself as a coherent entity (6). She demonstrates how texts illustrate the impact of racism on those
who perpetuate it (11), even, and especially, when American texts are not about Africanist presences or
characters or narra- tive or idiom (46).26 This conceptual and methodological turn helps pro- pel the emergence of
immensely rich and important developments within nineteenth-century Americanist scholarship, enabling a
centering of slavery and its legacies, blackness as a mode of racialization and anti-black racism, and African
American experience within the field as a whole by indicating their relevance across the entire spectrum of U.S.

While Settler Common Sense owes an

immeasur- able debt to this set of conceptual and methodological
innovations, these salutary developments also have had the effect of
reaffirming what has been characterized as the black/white binary.27 Even more
than taking the specifics of one vector of racialization and the modes of oppression
that sustain it (and that it sustains) and potentially generalizing them to all forms of
racialization in ways that may ill-fit other histories, the black/white binary
tends to foreground citizenship, rights, and belonging to the nation, miscast ing Indigenous selfpolitical economy, cultural production, and social life.

representations and political aims in ways that make them illegible . 28

From a perspective organized around bondage, emancipation, labor, polit- ical
participation, and formal versus substantive freedom, Native articulations of peoplehood,
sovereignty, and collective landedness can appear confusing at best and at
worst are taken as indicative of an investment in a form of reactionary
ethnic nationalism. As Byrd argues in The Transit of Empire, 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. . . . When the remediation of the coloniza- tion 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 (xxiii). More than simply leaving out
Indigenous political aims, the substitution of racialization for colonization
masks the territoriality of conquest by assigning colonization to the
racialized body

. . . [;]

land rights disappear

into U.S. territoriality

as indigenous

identity becomes a racial identity and citizens of colonized indigenous

nations become internal ethnic minorities
process of making racial what is international (125).29

within the colonizing nation-state (xxiv), a

Such conflation, confusion,

obfuscation results in a tendency in American studies to treat Native presence

and violence against Native peoples as a kind of originary sin of white
supremacy that can be quickly noted on the way to a discussion of other
apparently more significant and enduring modes of racial domination.

Byrd

observes that American studies often sees it as enough to challenge the wilderness as anything but vacant while
then relegat[ing] American Indians to the site of the already-doneness that begins to linger as unwelcome guests

a critical and historical lens developed to examine

modes of racializationa form of study itself overdetermined by the black/white
to the future (20). She suggests that

binary not only cannot grasp the contours and stakes of indigeneity but
translates it in ways that redouble colonial incorporation .30 Scholarship
within nineteenth-century American literary studies that has sought to consider both
settlement and slavery often displaces the former on the way to the
latter in ways that leave aside the question of the self- determination of
Indigenous peoples, as well as the process by which the occupation of Native lands
comes to be lived and represented as the ready made of everyday
nonnative possibility . In Captivity and Sentiment, Michelle Burnham suggests that the popularity of
narratives of captivity from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (including slave narratives) can be
understood in terms of the ways they worked to manage the resis- tant and unrecuperable surplus of cultural
difference always left over by the process of cultural exchange (9): The experience of captivity across cul- tural
boundaries transports them [captives, the texts produced by and about them, and the readers of such narratives] to
interstitial zones of contact, where dominant values, standards, and modes of representation fail, alter, or are

Characterizing boundaries as cultural makes space

and zone almost entirely metaphorical, delinked from actual places,
brought to crisis (170).

land claims, and modes of occupancy , abstracting from the particular kinds of sociopolitical
mappings at play in different instances in order to place them in the same analytic frame.

comes to mark the difference of nonwhiteness

per se

Culture

rather than indexing

the normalization of specific formations of residence, land tenure, and

political belonging . Ezra Tawils The Making of Racial Sentiment similarly enfolds American Indians into a
critical narrative that defers questions of Native sovereignty, reading rep- resentations of settlerIndigenous conflict
as a coded way of addressing slavery. He explores the attribution of certain qualities of character and emotion to
race, which he characterizes as racial sentiment (11): In the most general terms, it stands to reason that the
Indian and the slave could operate at times as analogous figures in Anglo-American political discourse. Both could
be represented as members of alien populations that vexed the smooth operation of Anglo-American power on the
continent (59). He later indicates that the thematics of Indian dispossession was one aspect of a contemporary
discussion about property conflict in which the politics of slavery, no less than Indian land ownership, was at stake
(86), naming Native dispossession as a struggle around property in ways that allow the contested geopolitics of
sovereignty to be cast as similar in kind (analo- gous) to the slavery debate. In Fugitive Empire, Andy Doolen
observes that the books title invokes the heretofore hidden imperialism . . . that shaped our culture and
institutions in Americas formative years while then indicating that he seeks to attend to the histories of slaves
and the insti- tutions of slavery (xiii). For Doolen, U.S. imperialism refers to a logic of racial domination that
shapes the American rhetoric of equality (xvi), as opposed to indicating a territorial project of
expansion/incorporation in which governmental and jurisdictional authority is exerted over nonmem- ber polities
who do not seek such belonging, and from this perspective, Native political projects (such as that of Mashpees in
the 1830s, which I discuss in chapter 3) appear as the pursuit of cultural autonomy within the broader

If an existing analytics of race produces

distortion, what is the alternative? Or, approached from a slightly different angle, in addressing
achievement of civil rights (16268).

the implicit operation and reproduction of settler legalities in quotidian geographies of lived nonnative experience,
what happens to the notion of whiteness? Work within Indigenous studies coming out of Anglophone settler-states

other than the United States has foregrounded the role of whiteness as a principal mode through which settlement
is realized and naturalized.31 In White- ness, Epistemology, and Indigenous Representation, Moreton-Robinson
distinguishes between a racialised subject position and the power and knowledge effects of racialised discourse,

whiteness not simply as a particular embodied social location but

as a means of naming the structure through which Indigenous territory
positioning

comes to be understood as possessable by nonnatives and by which that

logic of expropriation/ownership by

given

the settler nation comes to be experienced as

(84). However, in the context of the United States, in which the de facto racial divide is not white/ Native

but white/black, can whiteness provide the principal means of naming the operation of everyday formations and
sensations of settlement? Moreton- Robinson suggests as much in Writing off Treaties, which addresses how
whiteness studies in the United States takes the black/white binary as given in ways that efface settler colonialism
and Indigenous dislocation: The USA as a white nation state cannot exist without land and clearly defined borders,
it is the legally defined and asserted territorial sovereignty that provides the context for national identifications of

Native American dispossession indelibly marks

configurations of white national identity (85). If racializing attributions of Indianness work as
whiteness. In this way I argue

a way of displacing indigeneity, does that dynamic make settlement equiv- alent to whiteness or identification with
it? Moreton-Robinson observes that the sovereignty claims of Indigenous peoples are different from other
minority rights at the center of the struggle for racial equality, because their sovereignty is not epistemologically
and ontologically grounded in the citizenship of the white liberal subject of modernity (87). Describing Native
dispossession as marking white national identity, though, need not be the same as characterizing whiteness as

whiteness
in the United States conventionally has signified in terms of a racial hierarchy through
which populations access to citizenship rights and social wealth are managed,
but given that all positions in that hierarchy are predicated on the
the primary vehicle through which Indigenous sovereignty claims are disowned. In other words,

continued existence of the settler- state , settlement may be

conceptualized less as a function of whiteness than

whiteness may be understood

as

expressing a particular privileged position within the allocation of Native

lands and resources

among nonnatives. As Scott Morgensen suggests, Racialization under white

supremacy will grant non-Natives distinct, often mutually exclusive, abilities to represent or enact settler colonial
power. But all non-Natives still will differ in their experiences of settler colonialism from the experiences of Native

if whiteness names the mechanisms by which

settler land tenure and jurisdiction are legitimized, it may not be the
peoples (21).32 Put a little differently,

same whiteness as that of the black/white binary, even if both are lived in
the same body, such that people of color may enact and aspire to whitenessas-settlement while still contesting whiteness-as-allocation-ofentitlements-within-citizenship.33 Moreover, settlement may itself not depend
on a routing through whiteness. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona Jackson addresses the
dynamics of belonging in Guyana, analyzing how black subjects make themselves
native in the process of emancipation and producing a postcolonial national
identity. Jackson suggests that engaging with the history of the Caribbean requires the diffi- cult assessing of
Creoles as themselves settlers, adding that we must begin to address the ways in which ,
in the Caribbean and even within settler states like the United States. . . , those brought in as
forced labor (racialized capital) now contribute to the disenfranchisement
of Indigenous Peoples (3). Specifically, casting labor as nationalizing and nativizing allows formerly
enslaved people to be narrated as having an intimate connection to the place of the state, a belonging made
possible by the ongoing settlement of Native lands. Jackson argues, [L]abor by formerly enslaved and indentured
people is precisely what they are able to make into and reify as the new prior time of their belonging[,] . . . with

Doing so reaffirms the legitimacy and

inevitability of the nation-states existence, which itself depends on the translation and effacement of
which they supplant the prior time of Indige- nous peoples (69).

Native governments and geographies . Yet, in Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean,

For
these reasons, it may analytically be more productive to refer to the
process of settlement in other terms than as whiteness, especially in
the U.S. context in which the latter de facto is understood as referring to a
struggle within the nation-state rather than as one over the nationarticulations of national identity come from majority non- white populations, largely of African descent.

states domestication of Indigenous peoples and territories.34 The

operation of the United States as a settler-state cannot be under- stood in
isolation from the naturalization of racial identities and racialized access to resources, particularly
inasmuch as the privileging of whiteness shapes nonnatives experience of possession and personhood.

However, for the reasons sketched above, I do not foreground race as the
primary modality through which to conceptualize processes of settlement
and the dynamics of settler phenomenology, even as I address the (racial) coding
of Native people(s) as Indians as part of how nonnatives edit out indigeneity and
settler occupation from their sensation of the ordinary.35 I seek to address the ways that the
legalities of the settler-state shape everyday experiences of givenness
for all nonnatives , such that antiracist projects (along with other
articulations of opposition, as in the texts I address) can recycle those lived grids
of intelligibility as a basis for their alternative imaginings . In addition,
bracketing the methodological centrality of race , while still engaging with
dynamics of racialization, works as a way of forestalling the gravitational
pull of

citizenship and

analogy with African Americans as the means for

approaching settler colonialism , while also potentially opening up my analyses to a comparative

frame that addresses settler-states in which whites are not predominant.

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 @ UNCGreensboro
(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

recent attempts to theorize settler

colonialism have sought to shift attention from its effects on Indigenous
kinds of meanings and associa- tions they bear,

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 settlercolonial society (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinsons 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 Writing Off Treaties, she suggests,

At an ontological level the structure of subjective

possession occurs through the imposition of ones 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

(8384). 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).

the negatives alternative is criticism of the aff through settler

colonial theory, a strategy that reveals settlers investments in
the ongoing project of settlement as settlers, we cannot
delude ourselves with the colonial fantasy that we can fully
comprehend and thus control our relationships with
Indigenous peoples it is necessary to instead unknow the
settler position, unwork settler colonial frames of reference
that create the naturalized teleology of settlement
Strakosch & Macoun 13 researcher @ Indigenous Studies
Research Network; Institute for Culture and Society
(Elizabeth & Alissa, The ethical demands of settler colonial theory, Settler Colonial
Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 426-443)
For many decades, postcolonial theory has shaped global scholarship of colonialism, and this has
tended to obscure the ongoing hierarchies of settler states.1 However, building on

the theoretical contributions of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, increasing numbers of scholars are beginning to
think about settler colonialism as a specific political formation. Importantly, this work draws a distinction between

postcolonial does not

mean the same thing as post-settler colonial.2 While this movement may be animated
by and in sympathy with major developments in critical Indigenous theory
and global Indigenous activism,3 settler colonial theory (SCT) remains a
largely White attempt to think through contemporary colonial
settler states and formally decolonized societies, and acknowledges that

relationships. Like us, most settlers who use the theoretical framework are
concerned to disturb rather than re-enact colonial hierarchies, and seek to
contribute to Indigenous political struggles. However, Indigenous scholars
have not always embraced the theory and it has been met with scepticism
by some engaged in challenging colonialism.4 This article seeks to make explicit SCTs
current location as a primarily settler framework , and to explore its strengths
and limitations in this context . While we do not suggest that SCT can only
ever be used by settlers, we frame our discussion in relation to the
current political and theoretical dynamics of its use. In the Australian context, SCT is
an appealing interpretive framework for academics seeking to understand the states increasingly coercive
approach to Indigenous people. It has had a particularly significant presence in Australian academic debates over
the Commonwealth governments Northern Territory (NT) Emergency Response (widely known as the intervention).
Adopted with bipartisan support in 2007 following allegations of widespread abuse of children in remote Aboriginal
communities, the intervention involves the imposition of controversial and coercive measures such as racially based
welfare quarantining, alcohol and pornography bans, and the imposition of compulsory leases over Aboriginal land.
The policy essentially understands Aboriginal communities as insufficiently colonised zones,5 and its introduction
required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. This pathologizing of Aboriginal communities links
Aboriginality to child abuse, prescribes additional interaction with the state and mainstream economy, and
establishes a political debate about the nature and future of Aboriginality in which Indigenous perspectives are

Given the policys articulation through language of stabilizing and normalizing Aboriginal
policies of segregation and
assimilation, it is not surprising that a range of scholars have found
settler colonialism to be a compelling framework for analysis.8 The
intervention has also sparked debate about the role of non-Indigenous
problematized.6

communities,7 as well as obvious resonances with previous

academics , and the ethical and political implications of contributions by

outsiders to questions concerning the experiences and futures of Aboriginal people.9 In this paper, we draw
on recent Australian academic debates surrounding the NT intervention to assess the contributions of SCT and to

SCT makes major

contributions to current mainstream scholarship, but that its analytic and
explanatory power also presents a range of political and ethical risks .
Exposing colonization as a structure not an event10 confronts settlers
with an account of contemporary colonialism that is difficult to avoid , exposing
investigate some of the ethical and political implications of its use. We contend that

underlying similarities between conservative and progressive approaches to contemporary Indigenous policy and

revealing intimate connections between settler emotions, practices, knowledges

and institutions . However, emphasizing continuities in colonial relationships between
the past and the present can tend to construct existing political relationships
as inevitable and unchanging. When deployed with a neutral descriptive
authority , SCT can also re-inscribe

settler academics political authority and reenact

the

foundational settler fantasy that we constitute, comprehend and control the

whole political space of our relationships with Indigenous people. In order
to counter this potential, we suggest that while settler ways of thinking
structure and dominate much of our contemporary reality, they are not equivalent
to it. SCT makes visible our own frames of reference , thus revealing possibilities
and political visions that lie outside them. From this standpoint, the fact that settler
colonialism struggles to narrate its own ending does not mean that it cannot
end . Ultimately, we contend that this approach has the potential to facilitate
new conversations and relationships with Indigenous people but, in order
to unlock this transformative potential, settler scholars must remain attentive

to our own positions within colonial relationships . The strengths of SCT Australian debates
about the NT intervention demonstrate the strength and potential of SCT. Highlighting the contemporary nature of
colonialism disrupts familiar temporal political narratives and emphasizes the partisan nature of settler institutions,
and this is a crucial contribution in the context of the NT intervention. The intervention policy framework depends
for its coherence on framings of the settler state as innocent, benign and neutral, with Indigenous peoples
perspectives constructed as overtly politicized and illegitimate.11 Scholars have used SCT to critically unravel this
discourse and raise broader questions about sovereignty and Indigenous settler relations.12 In this section we
argue that SCT evidences a range of other important analytical and political strengths in the contemporary
Australian context. It reveals the state to be part of a broader settler performance of sovereign legitimacy, and this

In
foregrounding the partiality of the state, SCT supplements other critical
insight has the potential to problematize both conservative and progressive policy approaches.

approaches to race by analytically integrating the structural and personal

nature of settler domination. Ultimately, in identifying the underlying
logics of settler colonial ventures and the way that these are expressed
at all levels of settler societies SCT reveals the entwinement of settler
institutions, knowledges, emotions and selves.

Settler colonial theory provides settlers with a challenging

unsettling account of our own structural subject positionality
this demand for disoccupation of the settlers ontological
sovereignty creates space for the work of imagining imagining
and thus making possible alternative Indigenous futures
committed to a radical reorientation of the status quos violent
cohabitation
Strakosch & Macoun 13 researcher @ Indigenous Studies
Research Network; Institute for Culture and Society
(Elizabeth & Alissa, The ethical demands of settler colonial
theory, Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 426443)
SCT is most usefully understood as providing non-Indigenous people in
settler states with a better account of ourselves rather than as an
account of the entire settlerIndigenous relationship. It explains more of who we are than
previous approaches, but it is not coincident with all that we are, and is not able to explain the entire
encounter between Indigenous and settler peoples. Most clearly of all, it
does not account for Indigenous lives the assertion that it could do so is
itself allied to the settler colonial impulse to erase Indigenous life and assert settler control
of this discursive space. Settler logics, political priorities and processes have structured much of the
settler- Indigenous relationship in the past and present. For this reason,
settler colonialism must be studied as an historical and empirical
phenomenon as well as a conceptual framework. However, settler
processes do not constitute these relationships in their entirety , and
more importantly, they do not necessarily determine the range of
possibilities available in our futures . It is crucial that we continue to challenge the politically convenient
conflation of settler desires and reality and of the political present and the future, asking always whose interests are served by this new

decolonization of settler
colonialism needs to be imagined before it is practised , and this has
and more sophisticated settler colonial fantasy. Veracini rightly observes that the

proved especially challenging .89 However, we do not need to imagine this

process on our own. SCT can show us our own frames of reference and this
by implication assists us to understand and engage with what lies outside them . Settler
colonialism posits that two political societies cannot exist in one place through time, and that one must necessarily replace the other
either by settlers extinguishing Aboriginal difference or by Aboriginal people expelling settlers (an option rarely countenanced). It
imagines that two societies remaining together must always be an inherently problematic state, leading those within it to seek an end.

Settler colonialism assumes the inevitability of its own colonizing actions in such a
circumstance. But even within Western traditions, it is possible to imagine other ways that two
societies might behave and be in one place . If we decide to look outside our own frameworks, and engage
with Indigenous people and ideas, we might find even richer political possibilities. SCT provides us with a number of insights and resources
that enable us to use it well. It reveals our own partiality and investments , and traces
connections between our individual identities as scholars and broader
colonial processes . SCT

cannot substitute for an engagement with Indigenous people or for an awareness of our own

complicities, but it can help us towards these goals. It

explains and exposes the operation of colonial

dynamics and processes where these are routinely obscured or denied . In

identifying and naming these systems, SCT provides us with a range of important
opportunities including the capacity to name and contest settler
interests, challenge the problematization of Indigenous peoples, and identify prospects for different
kinds of resistance. The moment that SCT reveals colonization as ongoing is not necessarily the moment we must give up
hope of change. It could, in fact, be the moment that settler colonialism is revealed as one, very limited, way of understanding and
organizing our reality.

2NC
The affirmatives positing of slavery as the contradiction
through which humanism affirms itself collapse indigeneity
into slavery and turns settler colonialism into the very ground
by which their analytic gains force
Byrd 2011 [Jodi, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, The Transit of
Empire: Indigenous Critique of Colonialism]

what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in Lowes important

figuration of the history of labor in the intimacies of four continents, is the settler
But

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.23 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 twenty-first century. By foundationally accepting the general premise
that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking oppressions of class, gender, 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

prevailing understandings of race and

racialization within U.S. post-colonial, 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
investments in colorblind equality. Simply put,

conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in

North America resolved, if not redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars.

mapping and understanding structures of settler colonialism

important
Brown 14 prof of American Indian Studies @ U Illinois UrbanaChampaign
(Nicholas, The logic of settler accumulation in a landscape of perpetual vanishing,
Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 1-26)

Referencing Part Eight of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume One, entitled So-called Primitive Accumulation, geographer
Jim Glassman argues, The so-called primitive accumulation is no longer primitive. As much recent scholarship has
recognized, the founding events that Marx saw as enabling capitalist accumulation proper (i.e. the process of
expanded reproduction) are not just preconditions of capitalism but ongoing conditions of its existence.12 Writing

settler colonialism, on the other hand, Alyosha Goldstein argues, [It] is not so
much an event or a static relationship as a condition of possibility that
about

remains formative while also changing over time.13 Elsewhere, he writes, Settler
colonialism in North America is not a relic of the past but a historical condition
remade at particular moments of conflict in the service of securing
certain privileges.14 The similarity between Glassman's account of primitive accumulation and
Goldstein's description of settler colonialism is striking. Indeed, the terms could almost be substituted for another,
which raises the question: Given these analogous trajectories, what is the difference between primitive
accumulation and settler colonialism? Do they seek to explain the same things? In addition, we might ask: What is
the value of these concepts as analytical and strategic tools? And does that value increase when we consider them
in tandem as intersecting or mutually reinforcing processes or as organically linked partners in a dialectical
dance of exploitation and oppression?15 Related to this ongoing or continuous character, both primitive

Patrick Wolfe, for example,

argues that settler colonialism as a complex social formation and as a
continuity through time is a structure rather than an event. The
accumulation and settler colonialism are increasingly theorized as structures.
famously

logic of elimination, Wolfe suggests, is the organizing principle of settlercolonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence .16 In
short, settler colonialism destroys to replace and settler colonizers come to stay.17 Like settler
colonialism, today primitive accumulation, more often than not, is theorized as a structure, not an event. As
an ongoing process, clearly it cannot be relegated to a pre-capitalist past . In this
regard, primitive accumulation might well be described as an organizing
principle that also destroys to replace and comes to stay.18 Primitive accumulation, philosopher
Jason Read argues, serves as the name not only for an event but also for a process :
the expropriation and legislation necessary to destroy other economic and social relations to make them productive
for capital. Primitive accumulation, he continues, is the process of the separation of labor from the means of
production and reproduction of its existence. Thus primitive accumulation becomes not only a cause of the

settler
colonialism, as hegemonic organizing principles or conditions of
possibility, efface their own readability as structures and naturalize
capitalist mode of production but also its effect.19 Critical theory aside, primitive accumulation and

themselves

as events.20 Thus, as Marx observes, [P]rimitive accumulation plays approximately the same

role in political economy as original sin does in theology.21 In contrast, Jodi Byrd argues, [D]iscourses of
racialization [] consolidated into the predominant and original sin of the United States that evacuated
colonization as a process.22 Despite these similarities, recent theories of primitive accumulation and settler
colonialism diverge in significant ways as well. Taking similarity as a starting point, then, sheds light on the

It helps us to map structures . And to understand, in the

most basic sense, what is meant by the term structure, and if/how this
differs, for instance, from what Elizabeth Povinelli calls an event, quasi-event, or eventfulness.23
specificity of difference.

By focusing on the relationship between primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, the conventional meaning

of the former (within political economic theory) is modified by the latter. And it is modified, I suggest, in ways that

Indigenous critical theory, in other

words, allows us to consider the specific means by which primitive
accumulation functions within settler-colonial contexts . As geographer Cole Harris
notes, It is important to identify the powers in the settler colonial arsenal,
make political economy more relevant to anti-colonial struggle.

map their positions, and sort out some of their linkages . The geography of
dispossession, he continues, is explained more precisely when the powers that effected it are disaggregated.24
One of my goals, therefore, in examining this relationship is to disaggregate processes that are often conflated or
subsumed.25