REM

Disadvantage 1: Rare Earth Minerals

Green energy sources such as solar and wind require rare earth
metals – the aff increases mining substantially as a result of the
green energy transition they cause (Cho 12)
(Renee Cho is a receiver of the Executive Education Certificate in Conservation and Sustainability from the
Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability and aCommunications Coordinator for Riverkeeper
and the Hudson River environmental organization, Rare Earth Metals: Will We Have Enough?, September
19th 2012, http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-will-we-have-enough/, AG)
Life in the 21st century wouldn’t be the same without rare earth metals. Cell phones, iPads, laptops, televisions, hybrid cars, wind

turbines,solar cells and many more products depend on rare earth metals to
function. Will there be enough for us to continue our high-tech lifestyle and transition to a renewable energy economy? Do
we need to turn to deep seabed or asteroid mining to meet future demand? “To provide most of our

power through renewables would take hundreds of times the

amount of rare earth metals that we are mining today,” said Thomas Graedel,
Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology and professor of geology and geophysics at the Yale School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies. There is no firm definition of rare earth metals, but the term generally refers to metals used in small
quantities. Rare earth metals include: rare earth elements—17 elements in the periodic table, the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and
yttrium; six platinum group elements; and other byproduct metals that occur in copper, gold, uranium, phosphates, iron or zinc ores.
While many rare earth metals are actually quite common, they are seldom found in sufficient amounts to be extracted economically.
According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, world demand for rare earth metals is estimated to be 136,000 tons
per year, and projected to rise to at least 185,000 tons annually by 2015. With continued global growth of the middle class,

renewable energy
especially in China, India and Africa, demand will continue to grow. High-tech products and

technology cannot function without rare earth metals. Neodymium, terbium

and dysprosium are essential ingredients in the magnets of wind turbines and computer hard drives; a number of rare earth metals
are used in nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and many other products; yttrium is necessary
for color TVs, fuel cells and fluorescent lamps; europium is a component of compact fluorescent bulbs and TV and iPhone screens;
cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters; platinum group metals are needed as catalysts in fuel cell technology; and
other rare earth metals are essential for solar cells, cell phones, computer chips, medical imaging, jet engines, defense technology,
and much more. Wind power has grown around 7 percent a year, increasing by a factor of 10 over the last decade, noted Peter
Kelemen, Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Geochemistry at the Earth Institute’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Every megawatt of electricity needs 200 kilograms of

“

neodymium—or 20 percent of one ton,” he said. “So if every big wind turbine
produces one megawatt, five turbines will require one ton of neodymium.
If wind is going to play a major part in replacing fossil fuels, we will need to increase our supply of neodymium.” A recent MIT study
projected that neodymium demand could grow by as much as 700 percent over the next 25 years; demand for dysprosium, also
needed for wind turbines, could increase by 2,600 percent.

REM mining damages the environment and marginalizes and

kills local populations (Klinger 15)
Julie Klinger, Ph.D in Geography from UC Berkeley.
http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Klinger_berkeley_0028E_15409.pdf
 the mining process,
To simplify, there are four primary stages where environmental hazards emerge. The first is

which generates dusts laden with heavy metals and radioactive materials. Then there is the
refining process, where sulfuric or hydrochloric acids are used to separate elements from their parent rock (Hao 2011). The third is
the waste management from the primary processing and beneficiation activities which generate slag that contains high levels of
radioactivity (Wang et al. 2009), and the fourth concerns disposal of rare-earth containing products (Weber 2012, Gullett et al.

2007).All rare earth elements cause organ damage if inhaled or ingested;

several corrode skin; five are so toxic that they must be handled with extreme care to avoid radiation poisoning
or combustion (Krebs 2006). Because rare earths tend to coincide with

radioactive thorium and uranium, mining is also a radioactive

waste management situation (Bai 2001), which is very difficult and expensive to execute effectively.
The ores extracted from Bayan Obo are processed using high-temperature roasting with sulfuric acid. This is actually a thirty-three-
step process through which rare earths are ‘cracked’ out of their parent rock through repeated cycles of acid baths, smelting, rinsing

Every ton of rare earth produced generates approximately

and cooling.

one ton of radioactive wastewater; seventy-five cubic meters of acid wastewater; 9,600 to 12,000
cubic meters of waste gas containing radon, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid; and approximately 8.5 kilos of
fluorine (Hurst 2010). Because of the chemical similarities between rare earths, uranium, and thorium, separation is extremely
difficult and requires high temperatures (above 300 degrees Celsius). The high temperatures convert thorium to a mobile and water-
insoluble form, thorium pyrophosphate, which accumulates in the mine tailings and is difficult to recover or reuse. To be used for
nuclear fuel, thorium must be purified and converted to thorium nitrate, which is difficult to do with thorium pyrophosphate.
Nevertheless, because thorium has the highest melting point of all oxides at 3300 degrees Celsius, it is required for a set of highly
specialized but limited industrial applications (Cardarelli 2008). This is salient for two reasons: one, rare earth processing
concentrates thorium in tailings in forms that are especially mobile and also extremely difficult to work with. And two, given the
limited applications for thorium, there are few incentives to invest in the development of more efficient techniques to recapture
radioactive material. Furthermore, the high cost of thorium storage further discourages initiatives to reprocess the mine tailings in
order to separate out the thorium pyrophosphate, since doing so would in essence create another expensive waste management
problem distinct from the tailings pond (Xin 2006). Separating thorium and uranium from the tailings does not eliminate the
radioactive threat. As Marie Curie discovered, as much as 85% of the radioactivity remains in the host material after the element is
removed (Edwards 1992). Unlike non-radioactive elements, the atoms of radioactive elements are unstable. This means that the
atoms explode and give off two types of highly charged particles known as alpha and beta. It is helpful to think of these particles as
shrapnel. These are not radioactive rays, they are materials that circulate in water, food, and air. The ‘shrapnel’ from these
explosions rips through material at the microscopic level (such as that of cells, nuclei, and DNA) and randomly breaks or burns
chemical bonds. ‘Explosion’ refers to radioactive decay: thorium disintegrates into uranium, which disintegrates into protactinium,
which disintegrates into radium, which disintegrates into radon gas and polonium. Radon gas atoms disintegrate into ‘radon
daughters’, which include another half dozen solid radioactive materials that stick to surfaces such as dust particles and are easily

If inhaled, these particles stick to the airways of the lung and

inhaled. The end result is lead.

increase the risk of developing lung cancer (Agency 1990, Liu 1996). A few
micrograms of radium in the body will cause the bones to go soft,
teeth to fall out, gums to bleed, and cancers of the bone and soft tissues. The hazard of
the tailings is that the bulk of the radioactivity is left behind in the slurry

which continues to generate radon gas (Edwards 1992). This finely pulverized powder

circulates in the air and water, introduced into the wider

environment by wind, rain, leaching, and industrial accidents. Heavy industry
requires water. The industrial geography of Baotou is fundamentally shaped by this imperative. The Bayan Obo mine is located 80
kilometers (50 miles) from the border with Mongolia, and 241 kilometers (150 miles) north of Baotou’s iron and rare earth
processing industry. The processing industry is built around the state-owned enterprise Baotou Iron and Steel, or Baogang for short.
Baogang set up its operations near the abundant waters of the Yellow River, which bends northward through Ordos and Baotou
across the Hetao Plain. Most of the heavy industry, and industrial waste, is concentrated in Baotou, far from the site of extraction
(See Figure 20). Nevertheless, the cancer mortality rate in the Bayan Obo mining district rose from 107.93 per hundred thousand in
1989 - 1990; three times the national average and five times the average for western China, to 155.7 per hundred thousand in 1997
 In the mining district, the three leading causes of
(Liu 1996, Chen 2010a).

death are cancer, unspecified poisoning and accidents, and infant

mortality (Zhang et al. 2001).

If you do the math between these two cards, constructing five

wind turbines causes one ton of radioactive wastewater to be
released into the environment.

Structural violence impacts are A-priori because they are often

ignored (Srikantia 16)
Jessica Srikantia, a Rhodes Scholar and Associate Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of
Policy and Government; “The Structural Violence of Globalization”, critical perspectives on international
business, vol.12 issue 3 p.222-258)//VL

Structural violence has received insufficient attention (Pool and Geissler,

2005; Chapman and Berggren, 2005; Farmer, 1997, 2005; Scheper-Hughes, 1993), and even where the

concept has been invoked, residual hegemonic assumptions

usually curtail its import, most often by focusing only on its local
dimensions while ignoring the influence of broader political and
economic relationships (Scott-Samuel et al., 2009; Nguyen and Peschard, 2003; Roberts, 2009; Pool and
Geissler, 2005; Farmer et al., 2006). In cases in which a broader conception of structural violence is recognized as a primary cause of

public health effects, authors frequently return to individual-level treatments rather than social-level healing and

remediation (Scott-Samuel et al., 2009; Farmer et al., 2006; Winett, 1998; Roberts, 2009; Pool and Geissler, 2005). A recent attempt

to delineate a framework for preventive interventions against political violence that does consider multilevel prevention and

treatment (De Jong, 2010) still fails to account for the many real contexts in which structural violence is occurring through the very

same governments, international institutions and dominant zeitgeists (e.g. “economic development”) that it proposes as sources of

solutions. In contrast, this paper suggests that these dominant institutions and zeitgeists are part of the problem, that invoking them

as the solution will mean bringing the disease as a cure and that authentic solutions require not augmenting the influence of so-

called global institutions but finding ways to restore physical, political and economic space for communities to define and live their

own cosmovisions and lifeways (consonant with Banerjee’s, 2011 notion of the translocal, as well as with explicitly articulated

Scholarly
requests by indigenous nations and Afro-Colombian communities (ONIC, 2011; case example below).

neglect of and/or complicity in structural violence at these levels is

mirrored and compounded by a lack of popular awareness and by
suppression and distortion of media coverage (Stauber and Rampton, 2002). Not surprisingly, business and management literature

barely consider structural violence. A rare exception recognized that: If business is to play a meaningful role in the reduction of

structural violence, an imperative precondition would be that business must explore ways to reduce and eliminate structural

violence within itself (Dubee, 2007, p. 255).

 SetCol K

It is vital in all instances that we prioritize the material violence

against indigenous people. Anything absent this allows for
settlers to ignore their role in violence against Indigeneity (Tuck
& Yang 12)
(Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Young, Decolonization is not a metaphor; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
& Society vol 1 no. 1, 11/8/2012, https://www.latrobe.edu.au/staff-profiles/data/docs/fjcollins.pdf)
We observe that another component of a desire to play Indian is a settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in
face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting (see Tuck and Ree, forthcoming, on mercy and haunting). Directly and
indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight
of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve. In her 1998 Master’s thesis, Janet

Mawhinney analyzed the ways in which white people maintained and

(re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organizations.8 She
examined the role of storytelling and self-confession - which serves to equate stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural
racism and exclusion - and what she terms ‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems
of domination” (p. 17). Mawhinney builds upon Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s (1998) conceptualization of, ‘the race to
innocence’, “the process through which a woman comes to believe her own claim of subordination is the most urgent, and that she

is unimplicated in the subordination of other women” (p. 335). Mawhinney’s thesis theorizes the self-
positioning of white people as simultaneously the oppressed and never an oppressor, and as
having an absence of experience of oppressive power relations (p.
100). This simultaneous self-positioning afforded white people in various purportedly

anti-racist settings to say to people of color, “I don’t experience

the problems you do, so I don’t think about it,” and “tell me what to do, you’re the
experts here” (p. 103). “The commonsense appeal of such statements,” Malwhinney observes, enables white speakers to “utter
them sanguine in [their] appearance of equanimity, is rooted in the normalization of a liberal analysis of power relations” (ibid.). In
the discussion that follows, we will do some work to identify and argue against a series of what we call ‘settler moves to innocence’.

Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that

attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility
without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In
fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet

settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. This discussion
will likely cause discomfort in our settler readers, may embarrass you/us or make us/you feel implicated. Because of the racialized
flights and flows of settler colonial empire described above, settlers are diverse - there are white settlers and brown settlers, and
peoples in both groups make moves to innocence that attempt to deny and deflect their own complicity in settler colonialism. When
it makes sense to do so, we attend to moves to innocence enacted differently by white people and by brown and Black people. In
describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework of excuses, distractions, and diversions from
decolonization. We discuss some of the moves to innocence at greater length than others, mostly because some require less
explanation and because others are more central to our initial argument for the demetaphorization of decolonization. We provide
this framework so that we can be more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and more willing to
press for acts which unsettle innocence, which we discuss in the final section of this article.
REM mining used in the aff’s green tech leads to the violation of
human rights by colonizers and disenfranchises less
economically powerful nations (Bonds & Doney 12)
(Eric Bonds & Liam Downey, University of Mary Washington & University of Colorado at Boulder, ““Green”
Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Ecological
Modernization in the World-System”, http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/482/494,
Summer 2012)

In all of these cases, we demonstrate that the extraction of natural resources used in
“green” technologies in core nations is often accompanied by severe environmental degradation in the periphery or
semi-periphery. In some instances, as in the case of extraction for platinum group metals in South Africa, this environmental
degradation is local. In other instances, as with the extraction of pgm and nickel in Russia or the creation of palm oil plantations in
Malaysia or Indonesia, the environmental destruction is extremely widespread. We further establish that much of the extraction of

natural resources used in “green” automobile technologies is associated with state violence and
abuses of human rights. In some of these instances, the violation of human rights is in the form of
restrictions on travel and free speech, as in Russia. In other instances, the violation of human rights is much more severe—

involving direct violence, dispossession, and sometimes death—as in Indonesia,

South Africa, Malaysia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While documenting associations between the extraction of
natural resources that may be used for “green” technologies in the core and human rights violations and environmental degradation
in peripheral regions of the world does not prove causation, it does provide a useful theoretical exercise that contributes to
understandings of ecologically unequal exchange within the world-systems perspective, while also adding to existing critiques of

The extraction of critical raw materials for “green”

ecological modernization theory.

technologies and their transfer from the relatively poor to the relatively
wealthy constitutes a variety of ecologically unequal exchange. Because core nations have a
privileged position in the world-system due to the strength of their economies, their military power, and the functioning of
international financial institutions and trade agreements, they are able to utilize peripheral and semi-peripheral regions as sources

The structure and operation of the world-system

for raw materials and as pollution “sinks.”

means, therefore, that processes of ecological modernization in the core, which

might result in real domestic environmental improvements as in the case of catalytic converters, can displace

environmental harm onto the people of less economically and politically

powerful regions of the world.
Claims of environmental obligation rely upon a belief that there
is a naturally imbued role of protector of the land by settlers.
This designation normalizes the existence of settlers upon the
land and is predicated on the destruction of Indigenous
populations (Tuck & Yang 12)
(Eve and Wayne, Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, William T Grant Scholar (2015-2020) and was a Ford
Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 2011, and, Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society
vol 1. issue 1, pp. 1-­­40)

The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding
dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric
normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving
than other groups or species. The settler is making a new "home" and that
home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild

people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land
produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of
the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor, which he
cannot provide himself. The chattel slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment would have to

The settler's wealth is land, or a fungible version of it, and so payment

be in the form of property (land).

for labor is impossible.6The settler positions himself as both superior and

normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant[s]

and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural.

This continued exclusion of the native voice results in colonial

genocide (Wolfe 06)
[Patrick Wolfe, researches stuff on genocide and settler colonialis. “Settler colonialism and the elimination
of the native”, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/89.pdf//Rahul]

The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is
life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be— indeed, often are—contests for

life. Yet this is not to say that settler colonialism is simply a form of genocide. In some settler-colonial
sites (one thinks, for instance, of Fiji), native society was able to accommodate—though hardly unscathed—the invaders and the
transformative socioeconomic system that they introduced. Even in sites of wholesale expropriation such as Australia or North
America, settler colonialism’s genocidal outcomes have not manifested evenly across time or space. Native Title in Australia or
Indian sovereignty in the US may have deleterious features, but these are hardly equivalent to the impact of frontier homicide.
Moreover, there can be genocide in the absence of settler colonialism. The best known of all genocides was internal to Europe,
while genocides that have been perpetrated in, for example, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda or (one fears) Darfur do not seem to be
assignable to settler colonialism. In this article, I shall begin to explore, in comparative fashion, the relationship between genocide
and the settler-colonial tendency that I term the logic of elimination.1 I contend that, though the two have converged—which is to

the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as

say,

genocidal—they should be distinguished. Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal. As
practised by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organizing grammar of race. European
xenophobic traditions such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Negrophobia are considerably older than race, which, as many have
shown, became discursively consolidated fairly late in the eighteenth century.2 But the mere fact that race is a social construct does
not of itself tell us very much. As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which
Europeans coerced the populations concerned. For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing
ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy
that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully
racialized in the “one-drop rule,” Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(4), December, 387–409 ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-
9494 online/06=040387-23 # 2006 Research Network in Genocide Studies DOI: 10.1080=14623520601056240 whereby any amount
of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black. For Indians, in stark
contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood
quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people
obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians
straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been
targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting.3 Black people were racialized as
slaves; slavery constituted their blackness. Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized,
assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has
missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are.4 So
far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah Bird Rose

Whatever
has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home.5

settlers may say— and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for
elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory.
Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.
The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with
genocide as Raphae¨l Lemkin characterized it,6 settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives
for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler
colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.7 In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-
colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include
officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child
abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of

these strategies, including frontier homicide,

cognate biocultural assimilations. All

are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than
others.

The alternative is to reject the aff and embrace material and

cultural decolonization – it’s a pre-requisite to any reformism
(Burke 09)
(Nora Butler Burke, 11-25-2009, "Building a “Canadian” Decolonization Movement: Fighting the
Occupation at “Home”," No Publication, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nora-butler-burke-building-
a-canadian-decolonization-movement-fighting-the-occupation-at-home) CH

the first step that we can take in allying ourselves with

Perhaps

Indigenous peoples is to face up to our colonial past and present.

And here I’d like to assert that Canada is not a post-colonial state, nor is it neo-colonial, as is the case in other parts of the world. In
Canada, colonialism dominates [4]. While Aboriginal peoples continue to be forced or excluded from their lands, capitalist interests
rush to invade their territories in attempts to seize resources from it. Indigenous nations remain culturally, economically and
politically under attack within this colonial apparatus — a distinct experience which undoubtedly shares parallels with the
experiences of other racialized and oppressed communities in Canada. Beyond facing up to the past, as a means of owning our
history, we must take responsibility for that history. While many of us are excluded from and denied much of the wealth of the
Canadian state ourselves, those of us who are Canadian citizens none the less benefit from that wealth to some degree. What we
can not take for granted is the fact that much of that wealth was accumulated at the expense of Aboriginal peoples. Therefore, any
movement which seeks to address the injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples must also take into account the positioning

Decolonisation is not a process which entails

of non-native people within this colonial state.

solely the Indigenous nations of this continent. All people living in Canada have been
distorted by colonialism. It affects us all, not only those whom it most severely oppresses. Therefore, a
decolonisation movement cannot be comprised solely of solidarity and support for
Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination. If we are in support of self-determination, we too need
to be self-determining. Unless we exercise our own self-determination and fight our own governments, then we risk reinforcing the
isolation of Indigenous communities and their resistance. A movement for decolonisation must be premised on a parallel process of

self-determination. While Indigenous nations continue to assert their

autonomy and nationhood, we, as non-native settlers, must also assert our own autonomy
within our respective communities, and resist our governments’ attempts to further

consolidate its control over all communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. I think it is clear from what
I am saying here, but I want to take a second to address a common misperception held by non-native people that decolonisation
would require a mass departure of all non-Indigenous peoples from the continent. While I can’t speak for any Indigenous people or
communities, my understanding, based on conversations with and readings by many Indigenous activists, has been that the

fundamental change which North American decolonisation would bring about would be a
change in the nature of the relationship between immigrants and Aboriginal peoples. It would be to bring an end to

our imperialist relationship, and an end to the colonial imposition

of foreign systems, be they governmental, ideological, religious, or otherwise, on the many hundreds of nations
which exist on this continent. Rather than attempting to re-establish the conditions of a pre-colonial North America, many see it as
being much more realistic to abandon the current relationship between native and non-native peoples. The state has long defined
that relationship, one which has been characterized foremost by oppression. It is time to cut the state out of this relationship, and to
replace it with a new relationship, one which is mutually negotiated, and premised on a core respect for autonomy and freedom.
Furthermore, decolonisation means ridding ourselves of the super-states of Canada and the United States. They only serve an elite
few while maintaining a liberal system of economic and social apartheid.

SetCol is the root cause of climate change and environmental

destruction, meaning both that the aff has no solvency and the
alt solves the aff (Whyte 18)
Kyle Whyte, a professor and environmental activist working at Michigan State University (MSU). Settler
Colonialism, Ecology, and the Environment” in Environment & Society 9: 125-44.
https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2019/02/2018-Whyte-Settler-Col-Ecology-
EJ.pdf
One of the most notable cases involves those Indigenous peoples who are among the first groups to make decisions about whether
and how to relocate because of sea level rise in the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, and other places. Moreover,

disproportionate Indigenous suffering is produced by changing environmental

conditions—and once again—the machinations of US set col
tler onialism. Many relocating tribes, for example, are vulnerable
precisely because they were forced to live permanently on tiny areas of land with limited adaptive options. The shrinking of their

lands occurred before today’s climate change ordeal through US military expansion [and] ,

settler oil and gas companies pipelines, public water control infrastructure and food control
measures, and the development of industrial agriculture, among other factors (Maldonado et al. 2013). The climatic

vulnerability of these tribes today is the looping effect of US

strategies to undermine Indigenous qualities of responsibilities through land dispossession/shrinkage and the
pollution/emissions of many industrial activities whose operations

are/were secured through colonial land dispossession/shrinkage. The looping effects

of undermining qualities of responsibilities, such as consent or trust, are evident in how climate change also opens up more
Indigenous territories, such as in the Arctic, to pressure from colonial exploitation, as thawing snow and ice create access to
resources, such as oil and other hydrocarbons, that were previously hard to access. is climate-related development, as well as
booms in extractive industries due to other causes, increases detrimental effects already experienced with past extractive industries.
The workers camps, or “man camps,” created to support drilling and mining, intensify sexual and gender violence through increases
in the trafficking of Indigenous women and children (Deer and Nagle 2017; Sweet 2014a, 2014b). Sarah Deer and Mary Kathryn
Nagle describe how “the trafficking of Native women and children is not a new phenomenon. . . . Sexual exploitation of Native
women and children, dating back to the times of the Spanish Conquistadors, often times accompanies the colonial conquest of tribal
lands.” Yet “the Bakken oil boom has created a renewed sense of urgency in areas that have recently experienced a rapid increase in
oil extraction” (2017: 36). Victoria Sweet (2014b) describes how workers in extractive industries often have “no community
accountability,” which presents major problems for Indigenous women and children when workers’ presence increases in a region.
Climate change, then, is part of a looping process that, in conjunction with ongoing colonialism, engenders violence and
environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples.
Extensions
 A2 Perm
Reform DA - Piecemeal reforms are simply appeased by the racist state with no
fundamental change – takes out long term solvency and makes aff harms
inevitable
Woan 11 (Tansy, “the value of resistance in a permanently white Civil Society”, Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State
University of New York, ProQuest Dissertations, p. 17-19 JM

One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one policy at a time? Perhaps one could first
work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It
would not seem entirely implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms
within the government could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself.
However, simply eliminating discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial
institution. Understanding the motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical factor in
determining the success of a movement. While one justification for passing the Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in
favor of equality and exposing racial injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which
is important to the federal government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus, the
government often seeks out ways
to normalize society through eliminating disruptions to preserve order. When those being
denied certain rights grow significantly discontent, they rebel and become disruptions to the
functioning of white, civil society. This can take the form of civil disobedience, such as protests, peaceful
demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or
violently harassing officials to acknowledge the injustices and change policy. All of these measures, however peaceful or violent,
disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or blocking frequently-used road paths, and most
certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis,
those in
power may often compromise and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights to individuals through
changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the disruption (the protests, demonstrations,
etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's argument that these reforms serve more of
a symbolic value rather than functional. If still operating under the racial state, these
piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the original racial injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed
in establishing a new unstable equilibrium, only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems."8 These new problems
will once again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to replicate itself, ensuring the permanence of racism.
Omi and Winant term this cycle of continuous disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This trajectory
even if the racial state mitigates racial disruption over a
supports the treatment of racism as inevitable since
particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race will emerge
triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics.

The ethical rejection of Settler control must come before evaluating truth
claims of 1AC action
Byrd 11 (Jodi A., (Chickasaw), assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of
Colonialism JM
The Transit of Empire has taken as its point of entry the constellating discourses that juridically, culturally, and constitutionally
produce “Indians” as an operational site within U.S. expansionism. “Indianness” circulates within poststructural, postcolonial, critical
race, and queer theories as both sign and event; as a process of signification and exception, “Indianness” starts, stops, and
reboots the colonialist discourses that spread along lines of flight that repeatedly challenge the
multicultural liberal settler state to remediate freedom despite the fact that such colonializing
liberalisms established themselves through force, violence, and genocide in order to make
freedom available for some and not others. As the liberal state and its supporters and critics
struggle over the meaning of pluralism, habitation, inclusion, and enfranchisement, indigenous peoples
and nations, who provide the ontological and literal ground for such debates, are continually
deferred into a past that never happened and a future that will never come. And as a system
dependent upon difference and differentiation to enact the governmentality of biopolitics, the deferred “Indian” that transits U.S.
empire over continents and oceans is recycled and reproduced so that empire might cohere and consolidate subject and object, self
and other, within those transits. In the process, racialization replaces colonization as the site of critique, and the structuring logics of
dispossession are displaced onto settlers and arrivants who substitute for and as indigenous in order to consolidate control and
borders at that site of differentiation. Indigenous peoples are rendered unactionable in the present as their colonization is deferred
along the transits that seek new lands, resources, and peoples to feed capitalistic consumption. For the Chickasaw, who have
negotiated and survived such a system for over four hundred and fifty years, the intersubstantiations of sovereignty and relationship
that connect community to ancestral place and belonging arise from the ontologies of reciprocal complementarity, Upper and Lower
Worlds, that inflect and shape this world through balance and haksuba. Movement across land and time was tied to the night sky
and a deep awareness of the celestial order of spiral galaxies even as that movement traversed rivers and mountain ranges on
ceremonial cycles of death and rebirth. Sovereignty, in the context of such philosophies, is an act of interpretation as much as it is a
political assertion of power, control, and exception. That interpretation is an act of sovereignty is something well known and
practiced by the imperial hegemon that uses juridical, military, and ontological force to police interpretation and interpellate what is
and is not seen, what can and cannot be said. Indigenous critical theory stands in the parallax gap created when U.S. empire transits
itself in the stretch between perceptions of the real to interpret and will against the signifying systems that render “Indianness” as
the radical alterity of the real laid bare.

Their permutation is a settler move to innocence. Voting neg is necessary to

produce settler discomfort---anything less allows for settler recuperation
Tuck & Yang 12
(Eve, Unangax;SUNY-New Paltz, and K. Wayne, UC-San Diego, “Decolonization is not a
metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 9-10,
http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554 DH)

We observe that another component of a desire to play Indian isa settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or
relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting (see Tuck and Ree, forthcoming, on mercy and
haunting). Directly and indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous

peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve. In
her 1998 Master’s thesis, Janet Mawhinney analyzed the ways in which white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-

defined anti-racist settings and organizations.8 She examined the role of storytelling and self-confession - which serves
to equate stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural racism and exclusion
- and what she terms ‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination” (p. 17). Mawhinney builds upon Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s
(1998) conceptualization of, ‘the race to innocence’, “the process through which a woman comes to believe her own claim of subordination is the most urgent, and that she is unimplicated in the

subordination of other women” (p. 335). Mawhinney’s thesis theorizes the self-positioning of white people as simultaneously the
oppressed and never an oppressor, and as having an absence of experience of oppressive power relations (p. 100). This simultaneous self-positioning
afforded white people in various purportedly anti-racist settings to say to people of color, “I don’t experience the problems you do, so I

don’t think about it,” and “tell me what to do, you’re the experts here” (p. 103). “The commonsense
appeal of such statements,” Malwhinney observes, enables white speakers to “utter them sanguine in [their]
appearance of equanimity, is rooted in the normalization of a liberal analysis of
power relations” (ibid.). In the discussion that follows, we will do some work to identify and argue against a series of what we call ‘settler moves to innocence’. Settler
moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt
or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to
change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their
reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are
hollow, they only serve the settler. This discussion will likely cause discomfort in our settler readers, may embarrass you/us or make us/you feel
implicated. Because of the racialized flights and flows of settler colonial empire described above, settlers are diverse - there are white settlers and brown settlers, and peoples in both groups make moves

When it makes sense to do so, we attend to

to innocence that attempt to deny and deflect their own complicity in settler colonialism.

moves to innocence enacted differently by white people and by brown and Black
people. In describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework
of excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization. We discuss some of the
moves to innocence at greater length than others, mostly because some require less
explanation and because others are more central to our initial argument for the
demetaphorization of decolonization. We provide this framework so that we can be
more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and
more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence, which we discuss in the final section of this article.
 Link Backfilling:

The aff increases REM mining, encouraging and legitimizing

China’s violent colonization of Mongolia and Tibet (Bonds &
Doney 12)
(Eric Bonds & Liam Downey, University of Mary Washington & University of Colorado at Boulder, ““Green”
Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Ecological
Modernization in the World-System”, http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/482/494,
Summer 2012)
It is important to note that we are not claiming that the violence associated with copper mining in Indonesia and Ecuador, and with
nickel mining in Indonesia, New Caledonia, and Guatemala, is necessarily connected with hybrid vehicle production. However,
because hybrid vehicles currently use much larger quantities of these minerals compared to conventional vehicles, the large-scale
replacement of conventional autos with hybrids will increase demand and likely exacerbate the environmental destruction and
violence associated with copper and nickel mining. The large-scale production of hybrids may increase demand for other minerals as
well, raising similar concerns. For instance, hybrid cars currently utilize an estimated 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of rare earth minerals
for the rechargeable battery pack alone, far more than that used in conventional vehicles (National Research Council 2008).

Rare earth minerals are mined almost exclusively in Inner

Mongolia and Southeastern China. Inner Mongolia is a mineral-
rich area colonized by China, where pastoral Mongolians have long
been targeted by government repression (Sneath 2000) and, more recently, have been
forcibly moved from their land and resettled (York 2008). In Southeastern China, rare
earth mines are “some of most environmentally damaging in the country,”
producing toxic and radioactive waste that contaminates water
and soils, destroying rice and aquiculture production (Bradsher 2009).
Furthermore, hybrid vehicle manufacturers may increasingly use lithium-ion batteries, which are lighter-weight and have greater

increased demand might

energy-storage capacities compared to nickelcadmium batteries. But here too

mean increased environmental degradation and state violence,

given that some of the world’s largest lithium reserves are found in
Chinese-occupied Tibet (Ladurantaye 2008). Colonized people rarely passively accept the extraction of
wealth from land they claim as their historic right, nor do they often passively accept the environmental degradation that

accompanies it (Geddicks 1992; Klare 2002). The presence of large amounts of lithium in Tibet
then, combined with the Chinese state’s willingness to utilize

violence to extract mineral resources, means that the widespread commercialization of hybrid
vehicles may pose increased hardships for the people of that region. Taken together, these cases

suggest that increasing demand for hybrid cars and, as a result, increasing demand for certain

minerals critical to their production will result in the displacement

of environmental harm across nations from the core to the periphery. If hybrid vehicles
largely replaced conventional vehicles in car-dependent wealthy nations, these nations may produce less air pollution and
greenhouse gas emissions. It is no simple accounting practice to determine if these gains outweigh the increased environmental
degradation and human rights abuses people living near copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earth mineral deposits would likely face.
The case of hybrid vehicle technology underscores the importance of placing inequality and aspects of uneven development at the
center of any analysis of the possible benefits and harms of the widespread adoption of “green” technologies in the world-system.

Indigenous people are always barred from debate over climate change because
their advocacy doesn’t mirror that of other groups who are able to provide
economic and geopolitical incentives for their voices to be heard.
Walsh ’16 (Elizabeth Walsh is a journalist based in New York and Paris. She graduated from
the University of Virginia in 2010 with degrees in English and Studies in Women and Gender and
is currently completing a masters in international affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. “Why We Need
Intersectionality to Understand Climate Change”, https://intercontinentalcry.org/need-
intersectionality-understand-climate-change/)//NoWa

In 1992, nation states

around the world signed an international treaty known as the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to begin addressing the problem of
climate change. Since 1995, parties to the convention have met annually in Conferences of the Parties (COP) to assess and
strategize around the issue. The UNFCCC is generally understood to be more open to NGO participation than most other
international issues, however, as Caniglia, Brulle and Szasz, observe in Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives, a
hierarchy within climate change’s civil society nonetheless persists. The authors refer to Peter Newell’s
classification, a table of which has been reproduced here (emphases added): As the table demonstrates, indigenous activists
(as well as indigenous organizations, governments, and their representatives) are categorized as “Outside-Outsiders.”
Beyond a label that indicates their marginalization, the table reveals broader implications for the type of access that Indigenous
Peoples have to the negotiations. Compare this to “Inside-Insiders,” who not only get access to and
support from delegations, but they are also granted an ability to directly influence the
negotiations, and form collaborative relationships with governments and the private sector. “Inside-Outsiders,”
meanwhile, are able to make ample use of the media and can reasonably expect some response
from international and regional institutions. These are the partnerships that allow civil society to
exercise power in the public sphere, and for “Outside-Outsiders,” they are unavailable.
Moreover, as Caniglia et al point out, the structure of international conferences is biased to favor
northern, industrialized norms. In order to understand the repercussions of this outsider squared status, we ought to
turn to intersectionality theory and deliberative politics. In Women’s Rights in Democratizing States: Just Debate and Gender Justice
in the Public Sphere, Denise Walsh uses a definition of civil
society that is limited to social movements,
organizations and associations that are engaged in public debate, with an emphasis on public debate.
Thus, those areas of civil society that provide opportunities for debate are most important. As
Neera Chandhoke argues, “global civil society actors engage in practices that can possibly reshape the ‘architecture’ of international
politics by denying the primacy of states or of their sovereign rights.” To put the two together: public
debate can subvert,
to an extent, states’ monopolies on international policy. But Indigenous Peoples have limited
access to civil society due to the very nature by which it is constructed. This is where intersectionality
comes into play. Intersectionality is a concept from feminist theory that “treats social positions as relational, and it makes visible the
multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it.” It is about “the complex,
irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic,
subjective and experimental – intersect in historically specific contexts” (Dhamoon quoting Brah and Phoenix, 231). Thus, “where
the roads intersect, there is a double, triple, multiple, and many-layered blanket of oppression.” Dhamoon goes on to cite Foucault,
explaining that ultimately the focus of analysis is about “techniques of power” (Dhamoon 231). Therefore, we need to think
of Indigenous Peoples’ relationship to the climate change agenda in terms of multiple outsider
statuses: collective versus individual rights, minority versus majority, ethnicity, race, class, regional location, rural versus urban,
etc. I would like to push this even further and emphasize that the
outsider status to which Indigenous Peoples
and civil society actors are relegated within international policy-making creates yet another
piece of the intersectionality puzzle, contributing to a complex and multi-layered system of
oppression. To return then to Chandhoke, the question is how these multiple systems of oppression prevent
Indigenous Peoples from engaging in practices to reshape the architecture of international
politics. Or, to draw on Walsh’s theory, in what ways are Indigenous Peoples refused the opportunity to participate in public
debate? The way in which we conceptualize the climate change debate reinforces the
dominance of both the state and the market: it ensures that we continue to think of power
inequalities in terms of national boundaries, and it defines these inequalities in terms of economics; at COP21, the
main concern with regards to inequality usually had to do with the division of “developed” versus “developing” countries. Which
countries will be allowed to emit? Which ones must reduce? These are primarily market-driven questions that reinforce a system
that is categorized on the basis of capitalism and nationhood. Because
climate change is discussed in terms of
state responsibility and market effects, this international relations rhetoric sustains both the
state and the market as the two most powerful and important avenues for change and
accountability. And as discussed, the most open channel for Indigenous Peoples to secure change at national,
regional, and international levels is through civil society – which is distinct from both state and
market. This is less of a problem for other interest groups that use civil society as only one
avenue to advance their agendas; some of their other needs may in fact be met by the state or the market. For
example, someone who pushes for radical environmental politics through an Outside-Outsider NGO receives human rights
guarantees from her state in other areas. Yet for
Indigenous Peoples, this is infrequently, if ever, the case;
their rights in all areas are tied to climate change policy. There was no nation to advance the indigenous
agenda at COP21. There was no private corporation to ensure that their economic interests were
safeguarded, and capitalism is one of the primary causes of poverty for indigenous populations. When we understand these
dynamics from the perspective of intersectionality, it makes more sense to insist that all participants in the climate change debate
are aware of these forces. Policymakers who decide the future of climate change are not only making decisions with economic and
environmental repercussions, but also with human rights outcomes for some 5000 distinct societies in 90 countries around the
world. The
recourses for managing the interests of indigenous nations and peoples are fewer
and more challenging given the nature of a system that is biased to respond to nation-states
and the free market. As a result, the stakes at the international level for these groups are much higher than policy makers,
scientists, and other actors either recognize or are willing to admit. How do we address this problem of compounding inequality? At
the very least, IndigenousPeoples’ obstacles should be formally recognized and given priority so
that they are not always kept within the margin as “Outside-Outsider” members of civil
society. Countries must adopt and legislate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and
actively refer to it in future COP documents and negotiations. On May 10, 2016, Canada formally adopted the declaration, bringing
an end to years of official opposition. This, combined with Canada’s renewed and powerful commitment to climate change should
provide a precedent for other countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand to do the same. Finally, instead of
thinking of climate change inequality in terms of north-south, we need to instead “examine
the processes of globalization that have produced groups in different places all over the world
with unequal access to political, economic or social resources.” This means re-examining the processes of
the climate change debate at the international and regional levels, which I explore in my interview with Tom Goldtooth. Actors are
no strangers to needing to revise the process; failures at previous COPs have necessitated this, and I would contend that COP21 was
a failure in this regard, the effects of which will be realized in years to come unless change comes to the climate change regime. The
system needs to adjust accordingly. Because Indigenous Peoples are uniquely placed in society, experiencing a range of overlapping
inequalities, they are in fact great advocates to combat climate change not only in terms of their traditional knowledge and
propensity towards conservation, but also because of their unique political status. When our system treats a large sector of society
that holds 65% of the Earth’s land area as Outside-Outsiders, it is the system that must change.
 A2 Anti-blackness
Settler-colonial and anti-black subjectivities are co-constitutive, which sustains
their systems of power that are exported, fueling imperialist wars and systemic
violence.
Leroy 16 (Justin, Assistant Professor of History at University of California – Davis, “Black History
in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism,” Theory &
Event, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2016 JM
These black men and women reported being pursued by their former masters and subjected to tremendous violence. What are we
to make of the fact that black slaves petitioned a government actively hostile to the interests of their enslavers in pursuit of a form
of freedom that indigenous studies scholars might call complicit with the ideology of settlement? How do we make sense of the fact
that indigenous people used any means at their disposal, up to and including murder, to prevent black encroachment into lands
already under assault by the federal government? As
the United States used black freedom to justify indigenous
displacement, it relegated slavery and its meanings to the past, and produced a myth about
modern US nationhood in which both Indians and slaves were absent. It is easy to see the ways that
the US government exploited tensions surrounding emancipation in Native nations to set up these encounters
between Natives and freedpeople. More difficult is working through the meaning of such encounters without invoking
the exceptionalism of either slavery or colonialism to justify the actions of any set of actors. The historical complexities of state
colonial power cannot be captured simply by asserting that the freedmen’s status as slaves entitled them to pursue freedom despite
strengthening Native dispossession, or that the sovereignty claims of the Chickasaw and Choctaw entitled them to maintain racial
slavery to defy the power of the United States. These complexities should, instead, emphasize the fact that freedom articulated
through colonialism is not robust freedom, or that sovereignty expressed through racial slavery is not a useful model of sovereignty.
In an earlier period, the United States pursued expansion to further racial slavery. After the Civil War, black freedom became a ruse
to justify the continued erosion of Native sovereignty. The projects of slavery and colonialism have never
been concerned with which came first, or which is more elemental—they have in fact thrived on the
slippages and ambiguities of their relationship to one another. Iyko Day has cautioned against “the
pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from
the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism.”18 The United States emerged as a racial
capitalist settler state through the simultaneous operation of colonialism and anti-blackness. For all their
differences, settler colonialism and slavery are violent justifications for extermination—of bodies, of
sovereignty, of self-possession. Suspending claims to exceptionalism allows us to see how such forms of
extermination blend into one another. But these blended forms did not exhaust themselves in fraught nineteenth-
century encounters between black and Native people. The U nited S tates has exported the dual logic of
colonialism and racism through its own imperial ventures as well as through its political and cultural
relationships to other settler states. This export process has been crucial to the overlapping influence of
ideas about settlement and blackness even in colonial situations that may lack a clear indigenous
population or a history of slavery, as is the case in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US expansion into
the Pacific and Middle East. As important as it is to be mindful of the dangers posed by collapsing the distinction between
slavery and settler colonialism, any theory that holds the two apart or attempts to establish primacy between
them cannot account for the interlocked histories that inform colonialism and its resistance.
Suturing indigenous dispossession to US imperial projects writ large, Byrd has argued that “the United States has used
executive, legislative, and juridical means to make ‘Indian’ those peoples and nations who stand in the
way of US military and economic desires.”19 Byrd’s claim is important for understanding not only how
settler colonialism is ongoing in the United States itself, but also how its structure travels, fueling ideas behind non-
settler forms of colonialism and warfare. Byrd challenges the long-standing historiographical distinction between
continental expansion and overseas empire, and allows us to see why, for
example, Henry Dawes thought Indian
policy would be an apt template for governing the new acquisition of the Philippines. Dawes, who
infamously brought about the end of collective tribal land ownership, once opined in the Atlantic Monthly that when it came to the
Philippines, “our policy with the Indians becomes an object lesson worthy of careful and candid study.”20 Supreme Court decisions
concerning Natives in 1831 (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia) and 1845 (United States v. William Rogers) produced the legal status of
“dependent state” without citizenship; imperialists of the late nineteenth century relied on this case law to theorize potential
solutions to the problem of how to incorporate non-white races under American control without granting them citizenship rights.21
It is also worth noting that it was precisely the history of emancipation, which culminated in the Equal Protections Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment, that necessitated these intellectual gymnastics—citizenship with unequal rights based on race could no
longer be legally countenanced. When critics of expansion raised the concern that the annexation the Philippines would mean
providing citizenship to its inhabitants, imperialists countered that the United States’ history with Indians proved such claims false,
paving the way for an empire composed of a white citizenry. A
similar pattern followed US imperial wars
throughout the twentieth century. For example, in his classic work on frontier mythology, Richard Slotkin
described the Vietnam War as the “last great Indian war.”22 And the metaphor of “Indian
Country” as a frontier to be civilized has persisted into the contemporary era of imperial warfare in
Afghanistan and Iraq.23 But twentieth-century colonial formations depended too on policing
blackness and the legacies of slavery. One of the major consequences of US empire has been the export of anti-black
racism. Amy Kaplan argues, “During the era of Jim Crow, white supremacists did battle on two related fronts: the foreign wars
against Spain and its colonies aspiring for national independence, and the domestic struggle against African Americans fighting to
achieve civil and political rights.” American empire gave white supremacy new life, making it the conduit through which North and
South reconciled after the devastation of the Civil War. White supremacy was, in her words, the “definition of modern American
nationhood in the global arena.”24 Expansion
functioned as a way of conquering darker races abroad at
the very moment that the dark race at home was forgetting its proper place in the American racial hierarchy.
Many black
Americans identified similarities between their own treatment and that of colonial subjects, and
adopted an anti-imperial critique. Others, no doubt recalling tales of black soldiers fighting for emancipation three
decades earlier, were seduced by the idea of proving their fitness for equal citizenship by becoming foot soldiers for empire.25 Even
the most hopeful, however, would soon learn that American imperialism meant bringing American racism
abroad.

Using capitalism as a frame to view decolonization is a settler move to

innocence that equivocates different forms of oppression.
Tuck, Toronto, Critical Race and Indigenous Studies, Associate Professor, and Yang, University of
California, Department of Ethnic Studies, Associate professor, 12, [Eve and K. Wayne,
“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No.1,
pg. 1-40, Accessed 7/10/17, GDI-GFerrer-Falto]

A more nuanced move to innocence is the homogenizing of various experiences of oppression as

colonization. Calling different groups ‘colonized’ without describing their relationship to settler
colonialism is an equivocation, “the fallacy of using a word in different senses at different stages of
the reasoning" (Etymonline, 2001). In particular, describing all struggles against imperialism as
‘decolonizing’ creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work,
especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler nation-
state. ‘We are all colonized,’ may be a true statement but is deceptively embracive and vague, its
inference: ‘None of us are settlers.’ Equivocation, or calling everything by the same name, is a
move towards innocence that is especially vogue in coalition politics among people of color.
People of color who enter/are brought into the settler colonial nation-state also enter the triad
of relations between settler-native-slave. We are referring here to the colonial pathways that
are usually described as ‘immigration’ and how the refugee/immigrant/migrant is invited to be a
settler in some scenarios, given the appropriate investments in whiteness, or is made an illegal,
criminal presence in other scenarios. Ghetto colonialism, prisons, and under resourced compulsory
schooling are specializations of settler colonialism in North America; they are produced by the
collapsing of internal, external, and settler colonialisms, into new blended categories15. This triad of
settler-native-slave and its selective collapsibility seems to be unique to settler colonial nations. For
example, all Aleut people on the Aleutian Islands were collected and placed in internment camps for
four years after the bombing of Dutch Harbor; the stated rationale was the protection of the people
but another likely reason was that the U.S. Government feared the Aleuts would become allies with
the Japanese and/or be difficult to differentiate from potential Japanese spies. White people who
lived on the Aleutian Islands at that same time were not interned. Internment in abandoned
warehouses and canneries in Southeast Alaska was the cause of significant numbers of death of
children and elders, physical injury, and illness among Aleut people. Aleut internment during WWII
is largely ignored as part of U.S. history. The shuffling of Indigenous people between Native,
enslavable Other, and Orientalized Other16 shows how settler colonialism constructs and
collapses its triad of categories. This colonizing trick explains why certain minorities can at times
become model and quasi-assimilable (as exemplified by Asian settler colonialism, civil rights, model
minority discourse, and the use of ‘hispanic’ as an ethnic category to mean both white and non-
white) yet, in times of crisis, revert to the status of foreign contagions (as exemplified by Japanese
Internment, Islamophobia, Chinese Exclusion, Red Scare, anti-Irish nativism, WWII antisemitism,
and anti-Mexican-immigration). This is why ‘labor’ or ‘workers’ as an agential political class fails
to activate the decolonizing project. “[S]hifting lines of the international division of labor” (Spivak,
1985, p. 84) bisect the very category of labor into caste-like bodies built for work on one hand and
rewardable citizen-workers on the other. Some labor becomes settler, while excess labor
becomes enslavable, criminal, murderable. The impossibility of fully becoming a white settler - in
this case, white referring to an exceptionalized position with assumed rights to invulnerability
and legal supremacy - as articulated by minority literature preoccupied with “glass ceilings” and
“forever foreign” status and “myth of the model minority”, offers a strong critique of the myth
of the democratic nationstate. However, its logical endpoint, the attainment of equal legal and
cultural entitlements, is actually an investment in settler colonialism. Indeed, even the ability
to be a minority citizen in the settler nation means an option to become a brown settler. For
many people of color, becoming a subordinate settler is an option even when becoming white is
not. “Following stolen resources” is a phrase that Wayne has encountered, used to describe
Filipino overseas labor (over 10% of the population of the Philippines is working abroad) and
other migrations from colony to metropole. This phrase is an important anti-colonial framing of a
colonial situation. However an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework;
anti-colonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges
from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn’t strive to undo colonialism but
rather to remake it and subvert it. Seeking stolen resources is entangled with settler colonialism
because those resources were nature/Native first, then enlisted into the service of settlement and
thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land. Furthermore, the postcolonial
pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and
plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the
empowered postcolonial subject. Equivocation is the vague equating of colonialisms that erases the
sweeping scope of land as the basis of wealth, power, law in settler nation-states. Vocalizing a
‘muliticultural’ approach to oppressions, or remaining silent on settler colonialism while talking
about colonialisms, or tacking on a gesture towards Indigenous people without addressing
Indigenous sovereignty or rights, or forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to
unsettling/deoccupying land, are equivocations. That is, they ambiguously avoid engaging with
settler colonialism; they are ambivalent about minority / people of color / colonized Others as
settlers; they are cryptic about Indigenous land rights in spaces inhabited by people of color.

Capitalism is a result of colonialism – everything is produced with the

Western man in mind – only decolonization can effectively resist capitalism
Grosfoguel, assoc. prof. Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 2006

(Ramon, “Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Review 29.2 [Fernand Braudel
Center], pp. 169-174.)

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms, and world-systems analysis with only a few
exceptions have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic cri-
tique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through
ethnic studies and women's studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western
man "point zero" god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize
global capitalism and the "world-system." These concepts are in need of decolonization and this
can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes the geopolitics and
body-politics of knowledge as points of departure. The following examples illustrate this point.¶ If
we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, we get a picture in
which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system are primarily produced by inter-imperial
competition in Europe. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East,
which led accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish colonization of the
Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system was primarily an economic system
that determined the behavior of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as
manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital on a world-
scale. Moreover, the concept of capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations
over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a
new class structure typical of capitalism as opposed to other social systems and other forms of
domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other power
relations.¶ Without denying the importance of the ceaseless accumulation of capital on a world
scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, I raise the following
epistemic question: How would the world-system look if we move the locus of enunciation from
a European man to an Indigenous woman in the Americas, to, say Rigoberta Menchu in
Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? I do not pretend here to speak for or represent the perspective
of these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these
paradigms are made. The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what ar-
rived in the Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital
and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was a
crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled "package." What arrived in the
Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist
perspective of the world-system is unable to account for. From the structural location of an
indigenous woman in the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what
political-economy paradigms and world-systems analysis portray. A European/ capitalist/military/
Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/ male arrived in the Americas and established
simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies, which for purposes of
clarity I will list below as if they were separate from each other:¶ An international division of labor of
core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian
forms (Wallerstein, 1974);¶ An interstate system of politico-military organizations controlled by
European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein, 1979);¶ A global
racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileged European people over non-European people (Quijano, 1993;
2000);¶ A global gender hierarchy that privileged males over females and European patriarchy over
other forms of gender relations (Spivak, 1988; Enloe, 1990);¶ A sexual hierarchy that privileged
heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous
peoples in the Americas did not consider homosexuality among males a pathological behavior and
have no homophobic ideology);¶ A spiritual hierarchy that privileged Christian over non-
Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Roman
Catholic and later Protestant) church;¶ An epistemic hierarchy that privileged Western knowledge
and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global
university system (Mignolo, 1995; 2000; Quijano, 1991).¶ A linguistic hierarchy between European
languages and non-European languages that privileged communication and knowledge/ theoretical
production in the former and subalternized the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not
of knowledge/theory (Mignolo, 2000).¶ It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-
system, from the perspective of the South, will question its traditional conceptualizations produced
by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano (1991; 1998; 2000), we
could conceptualize the present world-system as an historical-structural heterogeneous totality
with a specific power matrix that he calls a "colonial power matrix" (patron de poder
colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority,
subjectivity, and labor (Quijano, 2000). The sixteenth century initiated a new global colonial
power matrix that by the late nineteenth century covered the whole planet. Going a step further
from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement of multiple and
heterogeneous hierarchies ("heterarchies") of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual,
linguistic, and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the
European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all other global power structures. What is
new in the "coloniality of power" perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the
organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (Quijano,
1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation on
a world scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive (or cheap) labor is done by
non-European people in the periphery, and "free wage labor" in the core. The global gender
hierarchy is also affected by race: Some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access
to resources than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world's
population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing
principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the
Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive
elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an
integral, entangled, and constitutive part of the broad entangled "package" called the European
modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel, 2002). European patriarchy and
European notions of sexuality, epistemology, and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world
through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify, and pathologize the rest
of the world's population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.¶ This conceptualization has
enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here:¶ The old Eurocentric idea that societies
develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from
precapitalist to capitalist is overcome. We are all encompassed within a capitalist world-
system that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the
world's population (Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2002).¶ The old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure
and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous structure (Quijano, 2000), or
a "heterarchy" (Kontopoulos, 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple hierarchies, in
which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but constitutive of the structures of
the world-system (Grosfoguel, 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not
superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are
constitutive of capitalist accumulation on a world-scale. The "colonial power matrix" is an
organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of
social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of
knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano, 2000).¶ The old division between culture
and political economy as expressed in postcolonial studies and political-economy approaches is
overcome (Grosfoguel, 2002). Postcolonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as
constituted primarily by culture, while political economy places the primary determination on
economic relations. In the "coloniality of power" approach, what comes first, "culture or the
economy," is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscures the complexity of the capitalist
world-system (Grosfoguel, 2002).¶ Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative
from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin.
In the same way as the European Industrial Revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced
forms of labor in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as
nation-states, citizenship, and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and
domination/exploitation of, non-Western people.¶ To call the present world-system "capitalist" is,
to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric "common sense," the moment we
use the word "capitalism" people immediately think that we are talking about the "economy."
However, "capitalism" is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of power of the
"European modern/colonial capitalist/ patriarchal world-system." It is an important one, but not the
only one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects
of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present world-system. To transform
this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural heterogeneous totality called
the "colonial power matrix" of the "world-system."¶ Anticapitalist decolonization and liberation
cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. This requires a broader transformation
of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic, and racial
hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The "coloniality of power" perspective challenges
us to think about social change and social transformation in a non-reductionist way.

Without the current colonial structures capitalism cannot exist, only

decolonization can ensure the eradication of cap.
Claire 2009
(September 2009, Anarchist Organizer, Mirroring Colonial Power Structures in Radical Organizing:
Rape Culture as Colonization and Community Accountability, Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and
Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality, pp. 94-95,
https://unsettlingminnesota.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/unsettling-minnesota-
sourcebook1point0.pdf, accessed 7/27/15) CH

Capitalist and colonialist powers are dependent upon oppressive systems of hierarchical value. They
work to ensure the power and privilege of some at the expense of the rest. Capitalism could not
exist without colonialist systems and structures that rank and oppress human life in terms of value,
rendering most as crucially exploitable and expendable in order to privilege the desires and power of
few over the needs of many. As Andrea Smith discusses in Conquest, our societal and governmental
infrastructures were built on the principle that indigenous peoples and their lands are violable (12).
White settlers asserted that indigenous peoples were savage, primitive, less than human, and thus
claimed for themselves a righteous legitimacy to the conquest and colonization of indigenous
peoples and lands. These principles and beliefs remain firmly rooted in the makeup of our colonialist
society and government of today. The US as an imperial and colonial power: is dependent on the
continued understanding that the land we occupy today (speaking as a settler) remains rightfully
and justifiably ours. The genocide and ongoing displacement and oppression of indigenous peoples
are understood as legitimate and necessary in order to maintain our settler claim to this land. Smith
writes that the continued claim of the United States to land and power necessitates that indigenous
people must always be in a state of disappearance, or a “permanent ‘present absence’ in the US
colonial imagination” in order for US colonial ownership to feign legitimacy (Conquest, 9). In order
to maintain this constant eradication of indigenous peoples, indigenous identity was, and continues
to be, criminalized. This has historically been practiced through methods such as the genocide and
forced removal of indigenous peoples from their homelands, placing bounties to encourage and
condone mass murder of indigenous peoples, forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing through
boarding schools, and the forced sterilization of indigenous women. Currently, the continued
displacement and forced removal of indigenous peoples from their homelands, the continued
occupation of these homelands, the criminalization of indigenous cultural practices, targeted
harassment and violence by law enforcement, mass imprisonment of native peoples, and
systematic sexual assault of indigenous women are just some of the many ways that native identity
continues to be criminalized and eradicated today. White supremacy, as another infrastructural
anchor of colonialist and capitalist power, allows for hierarchical rankings of human value so that
certain lives become socially significant and meaningful, while others are considered expendable
and exploitable. US society ultimately serves to ensure the safety and protection of white
settlers. US society could not have been built without white supremacy in that it allowed for the
justification of the genocide of indigenous peoples as well as the continued denial of genocide
having ever occurred, and that it voraciously relied on the kidnapping and enslavement of people of
color for the purpose of building the US colonial empire. Colonial and capitalist powers remain
dependent on white supremacist hierarchies of human value in order to ensure an exploitable labor
force. Furthermore, white supremacy creates the understanding that non-white people and land are
ultimately white settler property, or, that US society functions and exists for the benefit of white
settlers (not ignoring the role of hetero-normative, patriarchal and class privilege as determining
factors of beneficence). This includes the continued exploitation of people of color through the
prison-industrial-complex, the militarization of borders and criminalization of certain ethnic
groups. Colonialist and capitalist powers work together to create the over-representation of people
of color in prisons as colonialist power renders people of color as expendable property, thus creating
a cheap and exploitable labor force for the benefit of capitalism through the prison system. The
prison-industrial-complex also works to thwart the strength of organizing in communities of color as
this ultimately threatens colonialist infrastructure. Sexual violence and rape culture are
indispensable to the strength and function of US colonialist and capitalist power in that they work to
ensure all structural systems of oppression. Rape culture means that US society is a culture in which
sexual violence is encouraged, condoned and perpetuated as a tool of gender oppression. Hetero-
normativity means US society forces compliance within binary concepts of gender (either male or
female) and seeks to normalize patriarchal gender oppression. US colonialist rationality naturalizes
binary concepts of gender and patriarchal gender oppression. Smith shows us how colonizers used
the oppression of women and patriarchy as a tool in subjugating indigenous nations, “Native
peoples needed to learn the value of hierarchy, the role of physical abuse in maintaining that
hierarchy, and the importance of women remaining submissive to men…Thus in order to colonize a
people whose society was not hierarchical, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through
instituting patriarchy” (Conquest, 23). Through imposing the values of hetero-normativity and
hierarchical gender oppression, patriarchy is presented as natural and was a successful tool in
colonizing and instituting other hierarchical oppressions.