1nc

1
Interpretation and violation - the affirmative should defend the hypothetical
implementation of a topical plan – they don’t.

The text of the resolution calls for debate on hypothetical government action
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The
Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly
different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in
“The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject
of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-
verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental

means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which
would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal
with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to
do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you
propose.

Topic lit context and relevance key -- regs are imposed by the DOE -- their evidence is
wishful while ours is descriptive
Kirwan and Zeppos, 15 – (William E., and Nicholas S., Chancellors of U of Maryland System and
Vanderbilt, enlisted as co-chairs by the senate Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education,
“RECALIBRATING REGULATION OF COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES,”
https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/Regulations_Task_Force_Report_2015_FINAL.pdf)//mba-br/

Scope of Work and Task Force Activities The word “regulation” can be viewed broadly or narrowly . Narrowly defined,
federal regulation means only a requirement imposed on institutions through the Code of Federal
Regulations, the codification of all the regulations promulgated by federal agencies. Considered more
broadly, it means any requirement placed on colleges and universities in order to participate in the federal student
aid program. For the purposes of this Task Force and our report, we use “regulation” in this broader sense. The Task Force engaged in
extensive consultations for this project and solicited insights from higher education associations, campus officials, and other organizations and
stakeholders. To gather input from individuals on campuses who are responsible for implementing regulations, ACE staff conducted extensive
site visits and met with representatives from more than 60 institutions around the country.2 Our aim was not simply to reduce the number of
regulations imposed by the Department of Education , but rather to foster more effective and efficient rules that still meet
federal objectives. To that end, we sought to accomplish these goals: • Summarize the increasing burden of federal regulation on higher
education. • Identify regulations of particular concern to institutions of higher education, explain why they are problematic, and recommend
changes to ameliorate them. • Offer longer-term process improvements that would minimize similar concerns about regulations in the future.
The aff destroys the ability for competitive argumentation
1. Predictable limits- there are virtually infinite amounts of critical thought to be
drawn on that can mixed and matched in any way- that destroys the ability of
the neg to predict and prepare effectively
2. Ground-
a. absent a consistent and stable advocacy statement there is no sufficient
condition for negative victory even if we disprove the 1ac
b. Nontopical affs have a strategic incentive to make descriptive value
statements that can not be proven wrong-
c. The resolution was chosen because of literature controversy, they
arbitrarily pick an area that doesn’t have the same depth of controversy
d. any ground the cite in the 2ac is concessionary, unpredictable and is
beaten by perms- predictable strategies are the only gateway to effective
engagement with the 1ac

The impact is Procedural fairness- debate is a competitive game which loses meaning
without substantive constraints- Everybody comes to debate for different reasons, but
the fact that the other team is here and has presented a 1ac means they not only rely
on fair adjudication of their arguments but also that they have bought into the game.

the ballot can’t solve any of their offense- however the process of clash our
interpretation facilitates internal link turns turns the aff- advocacy tied to the
resolution incentivizes nuanced research and CLASH with a well prepared opponent---
They turn debate into a monologue which means their arguments are presumptively
false until subjected to well-researched scrutiny
 2
First off, fuck theory
Fuck Theory 11/10 Anonymous blogger, writer, and twitter voice commenting on the election based
in New York City, @FuckTheory, November 10, 2016, thread archived at:
https://twitter.com/FuckTheory/status/796702038176464896, accessed November 12, 2016

For at least 20 years, upper-middle class, often tenured academics have been teaching young people
that politics is a futile form of irony. I've watched Ivy League professors with tenure explain to
graduate students with no health insurance that striking for pay is silly . I've heard smug male assholes
with Ph.D.s describe registering voters as the "busywork" of political activity . I've watched Derrideans
and Lacanians who own homes sneer at 19-year-olds who raise their hand to ask what forms of activism
are useful. I've watched ridiculous theory fakers who don't understand the first thing about Foucault
explain to eager kids that society is a prison. I've watched post-Zizek fuckboy Marxists
I've
condescendingly tell young socialists that signification , not class, is the REAL locus of struggle.

watched spirited black kids, spirited LGBT kids, spirited poor

kids, show up at college hopeful for action only to be sold
nihilism. I've watched Tim Dean tell young men that ethical gay liberation means filling as many
anonymous assholes with cum as possible. I've watched Lee Edelman tell students with a shit-eating grin
that hope is surrender and that fighting for the future is "heteronormative." Kids who are the first of
their family to go to college. Kids who spent their whole life fighting for a scholarship. Kids who worked full
time while they studied for their SATs rather than having the family tutor come with to the Hamptons every summer. Kids who - like me - grew
up looking with awe at the worn, dog-eared copies of the Communist Manifesto on their grandparents' bookshelves. Kids who - like me - had
the shit kicked out of them for being smart, for being queer, for being brave, for being different. Kids who - like me - were told by adults that
high school is hell but if I can JUST make it to college I'll find intellectual paradise .
The smartest kids. The most determined
kids. The most enthusiastic kids. The kids who needed a concept of ethical politics the most. The kids
who could and in many cases would have gone back to their communities to teach, to write, to lead,
to work. For decades, smug, privileged hypocrites have enjoyed the benefits and social advantages
they discouraged students from fighting for. For decades, a small group of overpaid assholes too blind
to see how lucky they are have been sapping the vigor of an entire generation. They haven't been
pursuing a *different* form of activity. No. They have colluded with nihilism to ideologically devalue
activity as such. For decades, this country's smartest kids have had their entire concept of political
activity reduced to this:

This is not the first time I have said these things. I've been saying them for years. This rotting nihilism,
this political Soylent, is a big part of why I stopped doing "queer theory" and eventually left academia .
This rotting nihilism is behind my commitment to pure positivity, to Spinozan metaphysics, to
Nietzsche's joy and Irigaray's wonder. This rotting nihilism is the reason I wept tears of relief the first
time I read the Ethics, because here, finally, was pure love of being. This isn't the first time I've said
these things. I've been saying them for years. But it has become necessary to say them again. It has
become necessary because we are now bluntly, painfully living the consequences of that vile, pseudo-
political anti-ethics. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the tenured "queer" assholes at NYU and Yale
are actually responsible for Trump. No academic has ever had that much power, as much as they love

But they are directly responsible for the nihilism

to pretend they could.

and irony of a specific, crucial segment of the population who

SHOULD be a vanguard. Yesterday morning, my little segment of the Twitterverse was
troubled by the rancid stench of a dazzlingly dumb and blind Jacobin op-ed. This op-ed announced that
the election result was the fault of "elites" and that the solution to it was "politics." "Elites." That op-ed
was signed by five people...including not one but TWO white, well-educated, heterosexual married
couples. One of those heterosexual men teaches at Princeton. Aaaaand...the other has an MFA in

What was these bold self-

writing from Sarah Lawrence. But yeah. "Elites."

described radicals' proposed solution? "Politics." Not a specific

political orientation. Not a specific plan of political action. Not
a coherent set of principles. "Do politics." Um. OK. Then, this morning,
no less a journalistic thinkfluencer than Hamilton Nolan excitedly announced a new movement.

Again, he doesn't have any particular platform or a specific

political agenda. He just thinks, you know, all things considered maybe politics is something
we should maybe consider starting to do. You'd think at least ONE of these dudes who talk about
politics online for a living might have at least HEARD of @prisonculture, right? I don't mention these
white writers because they or their writing actually matter. I mention them as excellent, convenient
examples. Examples of a specific, crucial segment of the privileged, degree-hoarding elite who have
been bitterly failed by their teachers. Examples of a generation of students, with parents either hard-
working or rich, trained by the handmaidens of late-capitalist automation. A generation of students
who can emit bullshit on command but can't actually write. A generation of students who are

A generation of students
impressed by neologisms but have no grasp of concepts.

who think fully articulating why something can't be done is

more profound than actually doing something . A generation of students
who value novelty more than history and think the phrase "always-already" absolves them of
historicizing. A generation of students who don't care about the coherent of the theory as long as they
can feel superior to those kids from high school. A generation of students who think memes are a form
of political engagement. A generation of students who think Lacan is a psychoanalyst and Zizek is a

philosopher and that's exactly what their ideas look like. Most importantly, though: a
generation of students who think "politics" is something you
can CHOOSE to do, can choose to opt in or out of. Because
that? That's the real privilege. Those are the real blinders. That is the real meaning
of "elite": the ability to opt out of doing. The freedom to "do" politics because of an intellectual
curiosity and not because your life and the lives of those you love are in danger. The privilege to
genuinely live life thinking nobody around IS doing politics, and that, oh hey, maybe politics is
something we should do? In 2008 at the huge gender studies conference at Penn, I saw Jose Muñoz and
Lisa fucking Duggan give a talk. I've talked about that moment here before. It left a deep, lasting
impression on me. Because it was so awful and embarrassing. Muñoz and Duggan get on stage and
start talking in a cheery, excited tone about how they were recently having drinks in a West Village
bar. And as they were in this West Village bar drinking, they started to think, "Omg, isn't optimism like,
SO over? Lol eyerolling emoji." "So then we though, like, omg, what if instead of being hopeful and
optimistic all the time, queer people tried being hopeless? Gag! Lol." This, btw, is just a few hours after
Jack Halberstam got up to talk about masochism and Mishima's suicide as models for queer politics. So
they're giving this talk and I am absolutely horrified, not just at the content, but at the Mean Girls-
meets-deconstruction smugness. Then the talk ends and there's a Q&A. A very tall black woman with a
single huge braid gets up to the microphone. She looks at them and says "I'm a black lesbian, and I'm
here to tell you that there is nothing affirming or positive about hopelessness." (All quotations are
approximate but I would wager at least 10-20 of my current followers must have been in that room that
day). You guys, I have never seen two people with confused arguments backpedal so fucking fast. SO
fucking fast. That was the day I stopped calling myself a queer theorist. And that talk is the best
metaphor I have for the blindness I'm talking about. Again, let's not exaggerate the importance of
"theory." Trump didn't win the presidency because Lisa Duggan has her head up her own ass. But
when I look at how (over)educated white people of my generation talk about politics, I see the
indelible smeary residue of that mindset. One of the most painful things about this election - grim
echo of 2000 - is how small the gap was in so many states. And yes, that gap could maybe have been

But
closed if Clinton had been shaking hands in Wisconsin instead of making cameos on Broad City.

maybe it could also have been closed if an extra 5000 white

people with BAs in English or history had sat their parents
down for a talk. Maybe it could have been closed if nobody were actually fucking stupid
enough to think that "accelerationism" is a reason to vote for Trump. Maybe that gap could have been closed if we
had worried more and rolled our eyes less, if we had remembered more or talked to our elders. There are people alive still who survived the
Holocaust. My grandmother is still alive. The one with the scissors. Fascism isn't a fantasy. And I too assumed that Clinton
would win. I too thought I didn't have to do much except shrug and roll my eyes. I was wrong. Many of us were wrong. And we're going to
live with that fact for a long time. ...or maybe just until the tsunamis devour the cities. The brunt of that fact is the realization that more could
But the
and should have been done, somehow, somewhere. And I sympathize with guilt, truly I do. I'm not just Jewish but also a Freudian.
fact that you or I now awake to a new need or new urgency for action does not mean other have not,
ahem, always-already been acting. The work has been happening. People have been fighting. People
have been dying. It is only the bourgeois ideology of insular, self-oriented exceptionalism that makes
you think you need to or even CAN start something new. You're walking into the middle of a memorial
service to tell the people who lost their loved ones that there's a war happening. No. Shit.

Settler colonialism is a system of technologies that is operating in the present tense,

primarily via knowledge institutions that legitimize it, evolve it and spread it. Settler
colonialism is the arrival of settlers in a place come to stay and the terra nullius effect
of emptying the land of original inhabitants and rendering it property. This is the seat
of chattel slavery and biopolitical disposal of indigenous people. Furthermore, settler
colonialism takes land, not just population, as its object of control, making ecocide
possible and inevitable.
Paperson 17 La, also K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of
California, San Diego. “A Third University Is Possible” June 2017.

Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism , contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not
only to seize and exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism
thus complicates the center–periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein
an imperial center, the “metropole,” dominates distant colonies, the “periphery .” Typically, one thinks of
European colonization of Africa, India, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external
colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and human beings are recast as natural
resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt, seeds, genetic material,
chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006.[2] However, the analysis of settler colonialism
is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire.[3] The critical literatures of the
colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in
global arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized
for its diagnoses of anti/colonial violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the
particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For
Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from
settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the
same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and
Indigenous relations.[4] Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to Indigenous people.

This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler colonialism,
their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were
a past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler
colonialism is something that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of
why directs us to think of land tenancy laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial

technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder and disappearance. Property law is a settler
colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the
financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve
and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This separation,
what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/land ” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black

Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal: who will be moved where, who will be
murdered how, who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom .[5] In the
alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law
(protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to
have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness. Moreover, it is not just human beings who
are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a move that first
alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies required to
create and maintain these separations, these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from
nonhuman, land from life.[6] “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms,
not just the motives, of colonization. Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you
might consider settler colonialism as a set of technologies —a frame that could help you to forecast
colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. This chapter proceeds with the following insights. (1) The
settler–native– slave triad does not describe identities. The triad —an analytic mainstay of settler colonial studies—digs a
pitfall of identity that not only chills collaborations but also implies that the racial will be the solution . (2)
Technologies are trafficked. Technologies generate patterns of social relations to land. Technologies
mutate, and so do these relationships. Colonial technologies travel. In tracing technologies’ past and
future trajectories, we can connect how settler colonial and antiblack technologies circulate in
transnational arenas. (3) Land—not just people—is the biopolitical target. [7] The examples are many:
fracking, biopiracy, damming of rivers and flooding of valleys, the carcasses of pigs that die from the
feed additive ractopamine and are allowable for harvest by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support “human” life is a
“biopolitics” well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the
neoliberal disciplining of modern, bourgeois, “human” subject. (4) (Y)our task is to theorize in the break,
that is, to refuse the master narrative that technology is loyal to the master , that (y)our theory has a
Eurocentric origin. Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Othered studies have already made their
breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over assemblages and machines), and
with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation ). (5) Even when they are dangerous, understanding
technologies provides us some pathways for decolonizing work. We can identify projects of
collaboration on decolonial technologies. Colonizing mechanisms are evolving into new forms, and
they might be subverted toward decolonizing operations. The Settler–Native–Slave Triad Does Not Describe Identities One of the
main interventions of settler colonial studies has been to insist that the patterning of social relations is shaped by

colonialism’s thirst for land and thus is shaped to fit modes of empire. Because colonialism is a
perverted affair, our relationships are also warped into complicitous arrangements of violation, trespass,
and collusion with its mechanisms. For Fanon, the psychosis of colonialism arises from the patterning of
violence into the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the
impugned humanity of the native. For Fanon, the supremacist “right” to create settler space that is immune
from violence, and the “right” to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the
spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism. Furthermore, the “humanity” of the settler is
constructed upon his agency over the land and nature. As Maldonado- Torres explains, “I think, therefore I am” is
actually an articulation of “I conquer, therefore I am,” a sense of identity posited upon the harnessing
of nature and its “natural” people.[8] This creates a host of post+colonial problems that have come to
define modernity. Because the humanity of the settler is predicated on his ability to “write the world,” to make history upon and over the natural world,
the colonized is instructed to make her claim to humanity by similarly acting on the world or, more precisely, acting in his. Indeed, for Fanon, it is the

perverse ontology of settler becomings—becoming landowner or becoming property, becoming killable

or becoming a killer—and the mutual implication of tortured and torturer that mark the psychosis of
colonialism. This problem of modernity and colonial psychosis is echoed in Jack Forbes’s writings: Columbus was a wétiko. He was mentally ill or insane, the
carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. . . . The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance
movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko.[9] Un der

Western modernity, becoming “free” means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, “the central
contradiction of modernity is freedom.”[10] Critiques of settler colonialism, therefore, do not offer just another “type” of colonialism to add to
the literature but a mode of analysis that has repercussions for any diagnosis of coloniality and for understanding the modern conditions of freedom. By modern
conditions of freedom, I mean that Western
freedom is a product of colonial modernity , and I mean that such freedom
comes with conditions, with strings attached, most manifest as terms of unfreedom for nonhumans . As
Cindi Mayweather says, “your freedom’s in a bind.”[11]

The affirmative is located in the second university, marked by its investments in

critical theory as radical but sharing the material investments in land as the first.
Paperson 17 La, also K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of
California, San Diego. “A Third University Is Possible” June 2017.

The Second University Critiques Thesecond world university, like Second Cinema, is marked by its investments in critical
theory, that is, the diverse work of the Frankfurt School in critiquing media and capitalist systems in the
“West” that emerged out of World War II. Two threads of critical theory run through academia in the arts and humanities, on one hand, and the social sciences,
on the other. Literary critical theory focuses on the deconstruction of texts for their underlying meanings,

whereas social theory focuses on domination within social systems, usually from a neo-Marxist frame .[15]
At least ideologically, the second world university is committed to the transformation of society through

critique, through a deconstruction of systems of power, and in this way offers fundamental analyses for any third world university
curriculum. Yet its hidden curriculum reflects the material conditions of higher education—fees, degrees,

expertise, and the presumed emancipatory possibilities of the mind—and reinscribes academic
accumulation. Usually, when traditionalists speak with nostalgia for the idealized university of old, the library
counter in the sky where Kant and Hegel and Freire study together, this is the second world university.
We are familiar with it; in the United States, it often houses the Marxist scholars, the ethnic studies formations,

women’s studies, gender studies, and American studies. To borrow some rhetoric from Gayatri Spivak, it is the house of
the hegemonic radical, the postcolonial ghetto neighborhood within the university metropolis. One of
the tautological traps of the second world university is mistaking its personalized pedagogy of self-
actualization for decolonial transformation. When people say “another university is possible,” they are
more precisely saying that “a second university is possible,” and they are often imagining second world
utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal
knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are. Their assumption is that people will “naturally”
produce freedom, and freedom’s doppelganger is critical consciousness. They are rarely talking about a
university that rematriates land, that disciplines scholar-warriors rather than “liberating” its students,
that repurposes the industrial machinery, that supports insurrectionary nationalisms as problematic
antidotes to imperialist nationalism, that acts upon financial systems rather than just critiquing them,
that helps in the accumulation of third world power rather than simply disavowing first world power ,
that is a school-to-community pipeline, not a community-to-school pipeline . In short, “another
university is possible,” so far, hasn’t made possible a third world university. The second world university
announces itself through nostalgia. Sara Ahmed describes this as “an academic world [that] can be idealised in
being mourned as a lost object; a world where dons get to decide things; a world imagined as
democracy, as untroubled by the whims and wishes of generations to come .”[16] This nostalgia can be
futuristic, indeed, the dons are imagining themselves a permanent future in a white academic
pantheon. This is similar to settler futurity, which is always nostalgic for its own current power, fearful
that it may come to pass. The second world university is a pedagogical utopia. Its horizons are still total
in that its end goal is a utopia that everyone should and can attend . This liberal expansion rests
materially on the continued accumulation of fees, debt, and land by its big baby turned big baby
daddy, the first world university.

The frontier has always been defined by a chaotic blurring of borders both physical
and not – the aff is the M.O. of settler colonialism

Young 2013 [Alex Trimble, graduate student at the University of Southern California. He is at work on a dissertation on the use of
frontier rhetoric and the origins of postmodernism in the post-1945 countercultural literatures of the United States, “Settler Sovereignty and
the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies,” Western American Literature, Volume 48, Numbers 1 & 2,
Spring/Summer]

While discussion of Weizman’s work on the Israeli military’s use of A Thousand Plateaus has almost become a commonplace in contemporary
critiques of Deleuze and Guattari, his less-discussed work on the spatial forms that Israeli settlers have employed in their efforts to colonize the
West Bank since 1967 offers an equally important analysis of the relationship of rhizomatic assemblages to settler state power. In a chapter
titled “Frontier Architecture” in his 2007 monograph Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Weizman tracks the growth of a single
Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the “illegal” outpost of Migron. In Weizman’s description of the “elastic geography” of the development of
this Israeli frontier, the rhetorical parallels to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome are striking: The
frontiers of the
Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather, they are elastic, and in constant
transformation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political
spatiality of the nation state has splintered into a multitude of … border-synonyms. … These borders are
dynamic, constantly shifting, ebbing, and flowing. … The anarchic geography of the frontier is an
evolving image of transformation. Like so many settler colonies on the United States’ nineteenth-
century western frontier (the Deadwood camp perhaps being the most familiar example), the rhizomatic nature of Israel’s
frontier outposts often defies containment by its juridical order: the founding of Migron was not
sanctioned by the arborescent power structure of the state. That said, the pioneers of this frontier, “equally
influenced by the myth of rough and rugged Western heroes as by the Israeli myth of the pioneering Zionist settlers of the early twentieth
while acting outside the law, could hardly be said to be acting in a manner contrary to the
century,”
interests of the expanding settler society itself (4). The Israeli state has long cast a blind eye on the expansion of illegal
settlements such as Migron, and many once-illegal frontier outposts have been incorporated into Israel’s legally sanctioned network of West
the plenary power of the Israeli state is , in fact, extended by the rhizomatic
Bank settlements.14 Weizman argues that
nature of frontier settlement even as the letter of Israeli law condemns it. This “selective absence of
government intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession” (5), in which the
erratic and unpredictable nature of the frontier is exploited by the government. Chaos has its peculiar
structural advantages. It supports one of Israel’s foremost strategies of obfuscation: the promotion of
complexity—geographical, legal, or linguistic. Sometimes, following a terminology pioneered by Henry Kissinger, this
strategy is openly referred to as “constructive blurring.” This strategy seeks simultaneously to
obfuscate and naturalize the facts of domination . Across the frontiers of the West Bank it is undertaken
by simultaneously unleashing processes that would create conditions too complex and illogical to make
any territorial solution in the form of partition possible. Through this process of “constructive blurring,”
settler sovereignty is not established through a “gridding” process of rationalizing space but rather
through chaotic and often extralegal acts of expansion: settlers follow “lines of flight” made possible by the “smoothing”
of indigenous space.
The alternative is material, pragmatic resistance to settler colonialism.
NoiseCat 11/26 Julian Brave NoiseCat, enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British
Columbia and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Oxford, “The Indigenous
Revolution,” Jacobin, November 26, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-
dakota-access-pipeline-obama/

Many Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders believe that indigenous people are long gone and defeated.
Inheritors of the imperial myth of “Manifest Destiny,” they presume the colonizers’ victory was inevitable and even

predetermined. This racist myth has led empires and states to underestimate indigenous power.¶ Global
histories of indigenous resistance, survival, and resurgence tell another story . On these Oceti Sakowin
plains in 1876, a cocksure General Custer rushed into the Battle of the Little Bighorn only to be
soundly defeated by allied Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces. Dalrymple appears poised to
repeat Custer’s mistake.¶ Countless indigenous communities, nations, and confederacies from the Americas to Australasia, and South Africa to Siberia, including
Aboriginal Australians, Apache, Arapaho, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chukchi, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Diné, Hawaiian, Haudenosaunee, Kiowa, Maori, Modoc, Nez Perce, Pueblo, Salish, Sauk,
Seminole, Shawnee, Tasmans, Tlingit, Ute, Xhosa, Yakima, Zulu, and others have resisted imperial powers and industrial states and prevailed.¶ Before defeating Custer, the Oceti Sakowin had a
long history of settler handling. In 1862, the Dakota pushed thousands of settlers off the Minnesota frontier. Six years later, the Lakota defeated the United States Army in Red Cloud’s War.¶

Retribution followed many indigenous victories . In California, entire communities were hunted like animals. After taking dozens of
Dakota men as prisoners of war following the uprising of 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed an order to
execute thirty-eight of them — the largest mass execution in American history . Later in 1890, the United States Army gunned
down three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee.¶ This history continues to devastate . Indigenous people remain the poorest

of the poor and the most likely to be killed by law enforcement . Four of the fifteen most impoverished counties in the United States
include Lakota reservations in South Dakota. The two poorest, Oglala Lakota and Todd County, lie entirely within the Pine

Ridge and Rosebud reservations, where half of all residents live in poverty . In Ziebach County, which includes parts of the Standing
Rock and Cheyenne River reservations, 45 percent of the population lives at or below the poverty line.¶ Elsewhere in the United States , Canada, Australia, and New

Zealand, indigenous people are among the poorest, most oppressed, and least visible . They are

overrepresented in prisons and underrepresented in universities. Their economic realities are bleak.
Their pain is intergenerational.¶ In short, colonialism endures.¶ Yet these same communities are uniquely
positioned to resist unjust systems and force them to retreat. We must hold these two seemingly
contradictory realities of devastation and resilience in our minds at the same time . The Fourth World
lives in devastation. The Fourth World is unconquered and on the rise.¶ Since the 1970s, indigenous people in
the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have danced impressive victories. They have compelled states
to forego assimilationist policies like the involuntary removal of indigenous children to abusive
residential schools and the relocation of indigenous workers to cities. Overtly coercive policies have
been slowly and steadily replaced with policies that recognize indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction,
and sovereignty. Gains are limited, but they are still gains.¶ At certain times over the past thirty years,
indigenous claims have prevented corporations from exploiting natural resources . In New Zealand in the
1980s, Maori claims under the Treaty of Waitangi stopped a state drive to privatize fisheries and
hydroelectric power. In Canada and Australia, from the 1990s to the present, aboriginal claims have increased risk for prospective investors in extractive industries.¶ But the
dance with the state can be perilous. In recent decades, some indigenous groups mistook neoliberals who denounced “big government” for allies. They accepted land claims settlements,
treaty agreements, and business deals that enabled states to slash social services for the most vulnerable while restructuring indigenous communities as junior corporate partners in the global

economy.¶ As Trump prepares to take power in the US and Brexit changes the economic calculus in Britain
and across the world, it is clear that the dance with the state is entering a new age.¶ The New Colonialism¶ The new
age has precedents.¶ Any Howard Zinn reader knows that the United States is built on stolen land with stolen

labor. However, this is an observation too imprecise to help us understand and predict the trajectory of a
global political economy steered and shaped by the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage. If you squint hard enough, Jack
Dalrymple might look like a young George Custer, but that does not make him so.¶ To prevail, indigenous people and the Left must fully
understand the precise ways that emerging systems will dispossess indigenous communities . In the
nineteenth century, the United States Army incarcerated indigenous people on reservations, claimed
land for homesteaders, protected prospectors, and cleared the way for railroad barons. In the 1960s, a
different set of historical, political, and economic forces erected the Lake Oahe Dam on the Missouri
River, flooding two hundred thousand acres of the Standing Rock reservation to provide power to
suburban homeowners.¶ Today, the drive for independence from OPEC sees a solution in hydraulic
fracturing technology. North American oil fields and infrastructure are funded by a financial system that
encourages speculation, drives massive inequality, and fails to account for costs associated with human
and environmental risks — passing these very real risks and consequences on to communities, workers,
and indigenous nations. Inherently unaccountable capitalists are paid big money for being even more
unaccountable, and indigenous dispossession continues on new frontiers. ¶ Preliminary post-election forecasts indicate that
Trump’s victory and Brexit will redirect capital back toward the American West and the British Commonwealth.¶ In particular, Trump — a DAPL investor himself

— will expedite completion of DAPL and similar projects. He will push to reopen and complete the Keystone XL Pipeline. If
he keeps his campaign promises, he will support infrastructure projects and extractive industries, including coal and fracking, in indigenous homelands across the American hinterlands.¶ At the

a conservative Supreme Court, an Interior Department led by Sarah Palin or oil baron Lucas
same time,

Forrest, and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions means limited but hard-won Native rights will be
rolled back. If this gang of reactionary appointees can’t figure out how to dismantle complex legal precedents, they can just cut funding to essential
services like housing, schools, and health care that are already woefully underfunded, putting tribes in a
stranglehold of austerity. Native resistance will be policed by Orwellian surveillance systems finely tuned by the Obama administration. Militarized law
enforcement will find reinforcements in the booming private security and prison industries.¶ Surveillance, state law
enforcement, and private security will drive mass arrests, as we’re seeing at Standing Rock. Law enforcement will have more power than ever to quash protesters and silence dissent.¶ In the
former British Wests of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the right-wing populist revolution has yet to take hold in the same way, suppression of indigenous resistance may be less
visibly coercive — perhaps with the exception of skyrocketing policing, incarceration, and deaths-in-custody of indigenous people, particularly Aboriginal Australians (the “most imprisoned
people in the world”).¶ Politicians in the Commonwealth will look to roll back or restructure indigenous rights won over the last three decades in ways that are favorable to capital.¶
Governments, like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada, are already abandoning campaign promises to indigenous people, opting instead to grab land and resources (as seen in the ham-fisted
effort to force through the Site C Dam against indigenous opposition). Trudeau’s minister of natural resources has already stated that Canada will no longer ask First Nations for consent before
going forward with lucrative natural resource projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion project and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipelines.¶ In Australia, the government is
steamrolling the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ Native Title claims in order to move forward with the massive Carmichael Coalmine in Queensland.¶ With the Commonwealth clamoring to
cash in on opportunities created by Brexit, new free trade deals with the United Kingdom will be struck, resuscitating and rebuilding the capital networks of the former British Empire,
previously weakened by globalization and the European Single Market. The Tory dream of a revived Anglosphere, long derided as fanciful, nostalgic, and bad business by Liberals, may even
emerge as a legitimate principle and framework of international relations and trade. It will compete with increasingly powerful Chinese and Indian capital throughout the Commonwealth, as
already witnessed in the Canadian tar sands, Australian coalmines, and New Zealand real estate and dairy.¶ Combined with the rise of China and India, this will bring new waves of exploitive
capital into indigenous homelands, along with increased policing and the dismantling of indigenous rights.¶ Renewed colonial and capitalist pressure on indigenous people means that the
Fourth World’s adversarial relationship with the state will become more central to the struggle to transform political and economic systems for all If the history of the indigenous dance with
.

The Left must stand

the state is any indication, the Fourth World will suffer tremendously while at the same time standing athwart the forces of capitalism and exploitation.¶

with the Fourth World in our collective struggle.¶ The Fourth World and a Fourth Way¶ On November 14, the Army Corps of
Engineers temporarily halted DAPL’s progress, stating that “the history of the Great Sioux Nation’s
dispossessions of lands” and the United States’ “government-to-government” relationship with
indigenous nations demanded that the route of the proposed pipeline be reassessed . The Army told
Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building DAPL, that construction beneath the Missouri
River required explicit approval, and asked the Standing Rock Sioux to negotiate conditions for the
pipeline to cross tribal territory . Faced with a momentary victory for Standing Rock, Kelcy Warren, Dallas
billionaire and CEO of ETP, denounced the decision as “motivated purely by politics at the expense of a
company that has done nothing but play by the rules.” ¶ Warren was right. Had it not been for thousands
of people mobilizing behind an indigenous-led coalition, DAPL would have been business as usual . ETP
would have desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors unimpeded . Workers, lured by relatively
high wages, would have taken on toxic and insecure work. The tribe’s hunting and fishing grounds
would have been jeopardized, and if the pipeline leaked, Standing Rock and its downstream
communities would have been poisoned. Environmental degradation and runaway climate change
would have pressed ahead unabated . Carbon dependency would have become even more deeply engrained in our political economy. Eventually, ETP and their
investors would have cashed out, and future generations would have been robbed.¶ And all of this still will happen if President Obama doesn’t heed the water protectors and instead sides
with ETP.¶ ETP spent $1.2 million over the last five years paying politicians to legislate in its favor. Warren personally donated $103,000 to the Trump campaign. But when indigenous people
 DAPL is just one chapter in
organized, turning to direct action and the law to pressure elected officials and government systems, they wrested power from ETP’s hands.¶

a much longer story of indigenous resistance to, and victories against, pipelines across North America.
In 2015, the Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, yielding to pressure from the Cowboy Indian Alliance. In Minnesota, Enbridge shelved plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, after
encountering tribal opposition. The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has held out against numerous proposed pipelines through their territory, building a space where indigenous

The American and Canadian oil industries are more

sovereignty stands tall on lands defined by industry as an “energy corridor.”¶

vulnerable than we realize. Fracked oil from the Bakken and Tar Sands is expensive to extract and refine.
Meanwhile, OPEC is pumping at breakneck speed, driving down global oil prices. Oil infrastructure is
costly, not only for indigenous people, workers, and the environment, but for investors too. Canadian oil
producers have sold crude at a loss. The North Dakota and Tar Sands oil booms have busted. Indigenous
opposition to pipelines through their territories has made investors uneasy.¶ ETP was concerned that their $3.7 billion
pipeline would be cancelled. Just this week, Warren used another one of his companies, Sunoco, to buy ETP for $20 billion in order to cut his losses. The move will lowerprofits for shareholders
of ETP in order to protect profits for Energy Transfer Equities (ETE), the DAPL umbrella company in which Warren owns more than 10 percent of shares. Simply put, in the face of massive

The show of force against

opposition, the Dallas billionaire reshuffled his companies at shareholders’ expense in order to safeguard and grow his own vast fortune.¶

indigenous protesters, however brutal, is an act of desperation to protect his infinitely deep pockets . If
DAPL is not moving oil by the New Year, shipping contractors can cancel their transportation
agreements. Warren’s time is running out.¶ Standing Rock, on the other hand, is the future. Populism is killing the “Third Way”
politics advocated by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and their equivalents around the world. This is the
Fourth Way.¶ The Fourth Way will harness the power and strategic location of indigenous people,
exploiting pressure points beyond the workplace to oppose and transform unjust, unequal, and
undemocratic systems.¶ Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy, financial
systems, policing, and work will be of particular importance to indigenous people. Fossil fuel
divestment and the “Keep It in the Ground” movement can weaken and even undermine companies
seeking to exploit fossil fuels on indigenous lands . Regulations that dismantle financial instruments and policies that profit from natural resource
speculation could divert and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition of mass incarceration would loosen the death grip of

prisons and police on indigenous communities . Unions can turn individual workers into collective forces
of resistance, helping drive up costs for developers and protect laborers from unsafe working
conditions. Long-term efforts to reimagine work through full automation and a universal basic income
could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous work in the first place .¶ As Standing Rock
has shown, indigenous nations that use their unique standing to advocate for viable alternatives to
unjust systems will gain supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and
forests that capital exploits with abandon . Our resistance — to the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that
cut through our lands and communities — has greater potential than yet realized . Ours is a powerful
voice envisioning a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the natural world rooted in
the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty.¶ As long as indigenous people continue to make this
argument, we are positioned to win policies, court decisions, and international agreements that
protect and enlarge our sovereignty and jurisdiction. As our jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will
have more power to stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist, and colonial infrastructure .
When the Justice Department halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they would begin looking into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. This is a minimal first step, and we

Longstanding alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to our success . In
must hold them to it.¶

the United States, Native people have worked with Democratic elected officials like Bernie Sanders
and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills like the Save Oak Flat Act, which aimed to stop an international
mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache sacred site in Arizona. In Canada, First Nations have supported the New
Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance with the Labour Party that stretches back to the 1930s. Some indigenous leaders, such as
outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a Labour senator for Western Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties.¶ This does not mean, of course, that we should pay
deference to elected officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he travelled to Standing Rock. His visit was historically symbolic and
emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop DAPL, indigenous people should renounce him. Politicians are helpful when they change policies and outcomes. We cannot and should not

If there is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition, the Left must support

settle for symbolic victories.¶

indigenous demands for land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty . At their core, these demands undermine the
imperial cut-and-paste model of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the present, which insists
that there is room for just one sovereign entity in the state apparatus . Thomas Piketty’s call for a
global wealth tax implies an international governance structure to levy such a tax . He pushes us to
think beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous demands for lands, jurisdiction, and sovereignty imply that we
must think beneath it.¶ As the Fourth World continues to push states to recognize our inherent,
constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot remain neutral. To remain
neutral is to perpetuate a long history of colonization . To remain neutral is to lose a valuable,
organized, and powerful ally.¶ Struggle Without End¶ On November 15, more than 1,500 protesters gathered in Foley
Square in Manhattan. With songs and chants of “Water is life,” we expressed our solidarity with
Standing Rock, and sent a strong message to Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers , whose offices lie just across the
street: rescind DAPL. We were just a fraction of the thousands who came together in cities across the country that day.¶ Marching into the street, a few dozen of us locked arms, sat down and
stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience. We refused to move. We became the bodies blocking the behemoth.¶ Police corralled us. An automated announcement warned us that we faced
imminent arrest if we refused to move. The machine blared louder and louder: “you are unlawfully in the roadway and blocking vehicular traffic . . .” We responded with even louder chants
and songs to drown out the machine. The officers tightened their ranks and arrested us one by one.¶ In jail, I was surprised to learn that I was just one of two indigenous arrestees. The radical

e can still stop the Dakota Access

potential of July’s canoe journey had spread farther and wider than anything we’d imagined just a few months earlier.¶ W

pipeline. The police may turn water cannons on us, assault and maim us, and lock us up, but we own the momentum. And even if we fail to defeat this
pipeline, we will have prevailed in many battles along the way , and we can still win the long war.¶ As we
seek a way forward amid an ascendant right, the Fourth World has opened up a new window of
political possibility. The Left must stand with them and start stitching their successful formula for
resistance and transformation together with movements for economic, racial, environmental, gender,
and sexual justice into a winning coalition.
 2nc
Fluidity and transgression
Grande 2k (Sandy, Associate Prof of Education & Chair of Education Department @ Connecticut U,
American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indígena and Mestizaje,
Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2000, 70.4, pg 467)//mm

**clarity edits |||

The forces of identity appropriation, cultural encroachment, and corporate commodification pressure
American Indian communities to employ essentialist tactics and construct relatively fixed notions of identity, and
to render the concepts of fluidity and transgression highly problematic . It is evident from the examples above that
the notion of fluid boundaries has never worked to the advantage of indigenous peoples: federal
agencies have invoked the language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for dismantling the
structures of tribal life and creating greater dependency on the U.S. government; Whitestream America has
seized its message to declare open season on Indians , thereby appropriating Native lands, culture, spiritual
practices, history, and literature; and Whilestream academics have now employed the language of
postmodern fluidity to unwittingly transmute centuries of war between Indigenous peoples and their
respective nation-slates into a genetic and cultural dialogue (Valle & Torres, 1995, p. 141). Thus, in spite of its aspirations to social
justice, the notion of a new cultural democracy based on the ideal of mestizaje represents a rather ominous
threat to American Indian communities. In addition, the undercurrent of fluidity and sense of displacedness
that permeates, if not defines, mestizaje runs contrary to American Indian sensibilities of connection to place,
|||and||| land, and the Earth itself. Consider, for example, the following statement on the nature of critical
subjectivity by Peter McLaren: The struggle for critical subjectivity is the struggle to occupy a space of hope — a
liminal space, an intimation of the anti—structure, of what lives in the in-between tone of undecidedability — in which one can work
toward a praxis of redemption. . . . A sense of atopy has always been with me, a resplendent placelessness, a feeling of living in
germinal formlessness I cannot find words to express what this border identity means to mc. All I have are what Georgres Bastille (1988) calls
mots glissants (slippery words). (1997, PP 1—4) MeLaren speaks passionately and directly about the crisis of modern society and the need for a
“praxis of redemption.” As he |||some||| perceives it, the very possibility of redemption is situated in our
willingness not only to accept but to flourish in the “liminal spaces, border identities, and postcolonial
hybridities that are inherent in postmodern life and subjectivity. In fact, MeLaren perceives the fostering of
a resplendent placelessness” itself as the gateway to a more just , democratic society. While American Indian
intellectuals also seek to embrace the notion of transcendent subjectivities, they seek a notion of transcendence that
remains rooted in historical place and the sacred connection to land. Consider, for example, the following commentary by
Deloria (1992) on the centrality of place and land in the construction of American Indian subjectivity: Recognizing the sacredness of
lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiment . Instead of denying this
dimension of our emotional lives, we should be setting aside additional places that have transcendent meaning. Sacred sites that
higher spiritual powers have chosen for manifestation enable us to focus our concerns on the specific form of
our lives. . . . Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence
of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to
the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each
generation. (pp. 278. 281) Gross misunderstanding of this connection between American Indian subjectivity
and land, and, more importantly, between sovereignty and land has been the source of numerous injustices in
Indian country. For instance, I believe there was little understanding on the part of government officials that passage of the Indian
Religious Freedom Act (1978) would open a Pandora’s Box of discord over land, setting up an intractable conflict between property rights and
religious freedom. American Indians, on the other hand, viewed the act as a invitation to return to their sacred sites, several of which were on
government lands and were being damaged by commercial use. As a result, a flurry of lawsuits alleging mismanagement and destruction of
sacred sites was filed by numerous tribes. Similarly, corporations, tourists, and even rock climbers filed suits accusing land managers of
unlawfully restricting access to public places by implementing policies that violate the constitutional separation between church and state’. All
of this is to point out that the critical project of mestizaje continues to operate on the same assumption made
by the U.S. government in this instance, that in a democratic society, human subjectivity — and liberation for
that matter — is conceived of as inherently rights- based as opposed to land-based. To be fair, I believe that
both American Indian intellectuals and critical theorists share a similar vision — a time, place, and space free of the
compulsions of Whitestream, global capitalism and the racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia it engenders. But where critical
scholars ground their vision in Western conceptions of democracy and justice that presume a “liberated
self”, American Indian intellectuals ground their vision in conceptions of sovereignty that presume a
sacred connection to place and land. Thus, to a large degree, the seemingly liberatory constructs of fluidity,
mobility, and transgression are perceived not only as the language of’ critical subjectivity, but also as part of the
fundamental lexicon of Western imperialism. Deloria (1999) writes: Although the loss of land must be seen as a political and
economic disaster of the first magnitude, the real exile of the tribes occurred with the destruction of ceremonial life
(associated with 11w loss of land) and the failure or inability of white Society to offer a sensible and cohesive alternative to the
traditions which Indians remembered. People became disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived .
They could not practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to learn were|||be||| in a
constant state of change because they were not a cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments
which whites were making to the technology they had invented . (p. 247). In summary, insofar as American Indian
identities continue to he defined and shaped in interdependence with place. Thus transgressive mestizaje functions as a
potentially homogenizing force that presumes the continued exile of tribal peoples and their enduring
absorption into the American “democratic” Whitestream. The notion of mestizaje as absorption is
particularly problematic for the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America, where the myth of the mestizaje
(belief that the continent’s original cultures and inhabitants no longer exist) has been used for Centuries to force the
integration of Indigenous communities into the national mestízo model (Van Cott, 1994). According to Rodolfo
Savenhagen (1992), the myth of mestizaje has provided the ideological pretext for numerous South American
governmental laws and policies expressly designed to strengthen the nation state through incorporation of all “non-
national” (read indigenous”) elements into the mainstream . Thus, what Valle and Torres (1995) previously describe as the
continent’s unfinished business of cultural hybridization (p. 141), Indigenous peoples view as the Continents’ long
and bloody battle to absorb their existence into the master narrative of the mestizo . While critical
scholars do construct a very different kind of democratic solidarity that disrupts the sociopolitical and economic
hegemony of the dominant culture around a transformed notion of mestizaje (one committed to the destabilization of the isolationist
narratives of nationalism and cultural chauvinism), I argue that anyliberatory project that does not begin with a clear
understanding of the difference of American Indianness will, in the end, work to undermine tribal life.
Moreover, there is a potential danger that the ostensibly knew cultural democracy based upon the radical mestizaje
will continue to mute tribal differences and erase distinctive Indian identities . Therefore, as the physical and
metaphysical borders of the post modern world become increasingly fluid, the desire of American Indian
communities to protect geographic borders and employ essentialist tactics also increases. Though such tactics
can be viewed by critical scholars as highly problematic, they are viewed by American Indian intellectuals as a last line of defense
against the steady erosion of tribal culture, political sovereignty, Native resources, and Native lands . The
tensions described above indicate the (lire nee(l foi- an Indigenous. revolutionary theory that maintains the distinctiveness of American Indians
as tribal peoples of sovereign nations (border patrolling) and also encourages the building of coalitions and political solidarity (border crossing).
In contrast to critical scholars McLaren and Kris Gutierrez (1997), who admonish educators to develop a concept of unity and difference as
political mobilization rather than cultural authenticity, I urge American Indian intellectuals to develop a language that operates at the
crossroads of unity and difference and defines this space in terms of political mobilization and cultural authenticity, thus expressing both the
interdependence and distinctiveness of tribal peoples.

Failure to uphold indigenous static identity causes backlash and violence – the ballot
should side against such exclusion
Grande 4 (Sandy, assoc prof @ UConn, “Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought”
pp. 91-123)//hm
the inherent contradictions of
The above indicators position American Indians in a wholly unique and paradoxical relationship to the United States. They also illuminate

modern American Indian existence: the paradox of having to prove “authenticity” to gain legitimacy as a
“recognized” tribe, while simultaneously having to negotiate a postmodern world in which all claims to
authenticity are dismissed as essentialist (if not racist). This reality not only conscripts American Indians to a gravely dangerous and precarious space but also
points to the gross insufficiency of models that treat American Indians as simply another ethnic minority group .
Specifically, the identity paradox of American Indians deeply problematized the postmodern insistence
that we move beyond the concretized categories and disrupt the “myth” of prima facie indicators of
identity. For American Indians, such notions only reflect whitestream reality. For instance, it currently
remains a fundamental truth of Indian reality – no matter how you define it - that the title to Indian land
remain in the hands of the U.S. government. Moreover, the U.S. government – not tribes – retains the right
to confer “federal recognition” and therefore the power to enable self-determination. Indeed, the criteria required
for the federal recognition are constructed to protect the rights and interests of the government and not those of
Indian tribes. According to the Indian Definition Study (1980), the inner contradictions of the current criteria create
the following impossible paradox for tribes: 1. An American Indian is a member of any federally
recognized tribe. To be federally recognized, an Indian tribe must be comprised of American Indians. 2. To
gain federal recognition, an Indian tribe must have a land base. To secure a land base, an Indian
tribe must be federally recognized. So, five hundred years after the European invasion, “recognized” and
“unrecognized” American Indian communities repeatedly find themselves engaged in absurd efforts to prove (in
whitestream courts) their existence over time as stable and distinct groups of people. Thus, contrary to
postmodern rhetoric, there are in fact, stable markers and prima facie indicators of what it means to be
Indian in American society. Within this context, indigenous scholars cannot afford to perceive essentialism
as a mere theoretical construct and may, in fact, be justified in their understanding of it as the last line of
defense against capitalistic encroachment and last available means for retaining cultural integrity and
tribal sovereignty. The question therefore remains whether contemporary theories of identity are able to
provide any valuable insights into the paradox of American Indian identity formation.

Their arguments about the radical alterity of indigeneity is itself an attempt to ascribe
intentionality onto indigenous bodies – their theory merely converts the indigenous
body into the very circumscribed commodity they claim to criticize
Li 2 – Professor of English at Dalhousie (Victor, “The Premodern Condition: Neo-Primitivism in
Baudrillard and Lyotard” in After Poststructuralism: writing the intellectual history of theory p. 93-
95)//jml

The problem with Baudrillard's valorization of radical alterity is that its incomprehensibility and
incommensurability open up an absolute cognitive relativism that would not permit him to know or say
anything about the Other, about whom he has in fact quite a lot to say. The Other may resist
ethnographic understanding but Baudrillard not only knows about its resistance, he also confidently
describes its feelings towards us. Thus about other non-Western cultures he has this to say: Outward conversion to Western ways
invariably conceals inward scoffing at Western hegemony. One is put in mind of those Dogons who made up dreams to humour their
psychoanalysts and then offered these dreams to their analysts as gifts. Once we despised other cultures; now we respect them. They do not
respect our culture, however; they feel nothing but an immense condescension for it. We may have won the right by conquest to exploit and
subjugate these cultures, but they have offered themselves the luxury of mystifying us. (Transparency, 136) But
if the Other is
unintelligible and inscrutable, as Baudrillard constantly reminds us, then how does he know that it scoffs at us, that it
shows an 'immense condescension' towards us, that it is deliberately engaged in 'mystifying' us? Baudrillard tells us
that the otherness of primitive cultures is not recuperable and that they 'live on the basis of their own
singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility oftheir own rites and values' (Transparency 132).
But if these primitive cultures are absolutely singular , exceptional, and irreducible, then what Baudrillard
says about them cannot be true, since to be comprehended and described as such would be to have
their singularity generalized, their exceptionality made into an example and their irreducibility reduced
to so many adjectives. Baudrillard's paradoxical knowledge of the radical incomprehensibility of the
primitive Other reaches a dangerous point when he argues that South American Indians chose to die
rather than surrender the secret of their otherness to the Spanish conquistadores : When they [the Indians]
found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they
preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniard's
mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.
(Transparency 133) Apart from the moral and factual dubiousness of Baudrillard's argument (it would be interesting
to see what contemporary South American Indians make of Baudrillard's description of their ancestors' 'mass self-immolation'), there
is the
epistemological question of how Baudrillard can know the intention behind the Indians' actions when
these actions were precisely designed to preserve the secret of their otherness. If the South American Indians were that
radically Other, then how can Baudrillard so confidently know what they were up to? The answer to this
paradox lies in the realization that despite Baudrillard's critique of Western epistemology, he is not
really concerned with epistemology at all. Though he may use historical and ethnographic accounts to illustrate his theory of
radical otherness, his theory does not require the actual, living presence of the primitive Other since the
Other is needed only as a discursive element of rupture, a structural antithesis to Western thought . This is
why Baudrillard is not bothered by criticism, such as Hefner's, that his generalizations lack ethnographic evidence, or
troubled by the aporia of describing an Other he is not supposed to know. The primitive Other functions
primarily as a discursive proxy or theoretical place-holder and the secondary question of its phenomenological or
material actuality may in fact interfere with or muddy its primary function. The real live 'primitive' can complicate matters
with his behaviour, whereas the discursive proxy can't. We can now see why to Baudrillard the extinction or
imminent disappearance of the primitive Other can be turned into a theoretical advantage. The dead
or disappearing Indian becomes a pure and perfect example of the Other; through his physical death, the
Indian gains theoretical immortality. We have here an instance of a 'pataphysical' logic that Baudrillard elsewhere illustrates
through the example of AlfredJarry's dead cyclist who carries on cycling: 'Rigor mortis is replaced by mobilitas mortis, and the dead rider pedals
on indefinitely, even accelerating, as a function of inertia. The energy released is boosted by the inertia of the dead' (Transparency 102; also see
America 115). Similarly, the primitive Other's death confers on it a greater power to 'destabilize Western rule.' The dead primitive returns
powerfully as a 'phantom presence,' its 'viral, spectral presence ... [infecting] the synapses of our [Western] brains' (Transparency 137).
Baudrillard's neo-primitivism thus exemplifies a bizarre logic in which the primitive dies as a presence
to serve as an irreducible, internalized idea.
Their politics reify a model of western subjectivity that valorizes the object of
indigeneity only to further study it
Li 2 – Professor of English at Dalhousie (Victor, “The Premodern Condition: Neo-Primitivism in
Baudrillard and Lyotard” in After Poststructuralism: writing the intellectual history of theory p. 98-
99)//jml

In Baudrillard's thought, then, the primitive as simulation is deconstructed only to be replaced by the
primitive as pure or authentic object. The primitive is a pure object, however, only if it is unknowable .
As Baudrillard describes it, 'the Object is an insoluble enigma, because it is not itself and does not know itself. It resembles ... [a] savage, whom
one could not understand for the same reason that he could not understand himself (Transparency 172). It is precisely because the
object is unknowable that it is able to master the knowing subject . There are a couple of problems,
however, with Baudrillard's account of the triumph of the uncognizable object . First, the object's (or
primitive's) victory is surely pyrrhic; because it cannot know itself, it cannot know about its overcoming
of the subject. The primitive as pure object may defeat ethnology's attempts to understand and
manipulate it, but it has neither conscious agency nor comprehension of either its plight or its
triumph. Second, the pure primitive or object, described as being unlike the subject in that it is unknowing
and unknowable, seems nonetheless to exhibit subject-like intentions, motives, and emotions such as
vengeance, cunning, sly servility, and 'the passion of indifference' (Ecstasy 93; emphasis mine). Supposed to be
unknowable, the object appears amenable to all kinds of descriptions and imputations. Perhaps the
object is not as purely objective as Baudrillard thinks it to be , and we may thus entertain the suspicion that the object
may well be the most subtle theoretical trick yet employed by the subject, the most realistic simulation
currently available and one that would offer an avant-garde edge to a theorist in the highly competitive
Parisian academic scene. Douglas Kellner, for example, has described Baudrillard in such terms, calling him a double agent who, while
championing the object, is really in fact speaking for the subject: [A] lthough Baudrillard wants to present himself as the voice and
advocate of the object, he is really a double agent, secretly representing the subject as he anthropomorphizes
the object world in an amazing creative display that out-Disneys Disney . For it is clear that, ultimately, he is
projecting the categories of subjectivity, as well as his own subjective imagination, into the domain of objects
(ascribing to them as objective features his subjective projections such as revenge, indifference and so on), thus secretly continuing
in a different form the very philosophy of subjectivity that he pretends to combat . (180-1) In the end, then,
despite Baudrillard's valorization of the object, it is the subject that continues to run the theoretical
show. Baudrillard's theory of the fatal object turns out to be a covert theory of the subject's fetishistic
approach to the object in the same way that his critique of ethnology's simulation of the primitive
merely reintroduces the primitive as a pure object simulated by the theorist's own subjective
imagination.

Link turn – making the subaltern visible prevents a total lack of power
Britton, 99 – Carnegie Professor of French at Aberdeen University in Scotland (Celia M. “Edouard
Glissant and Postcolonial Theory Strategies of Language and Resistance,” University of Virginia Press,
May 29, 1999, Google Books)

Spivak's term for this is "epistemic violence." She

argues that it not only characterizes the imperialist project but also
continues to operate in postcolonial societies to exclude and silence subaltern groups, that is, those
outside the new bourgeois nationalist ruling class. Her question "on the other side of the international
division of labour from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuits of the epistemic violence of
imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?" receives a
largely negative answer: the subaltern cannot "speak'' in the sense of directly and unproblematically making his
or her voice heard within the dominant social discourse .22 Thus, for Spivak as for Glissant, subaltern consciousness is
opaque in that it cannot be "read" by the ruling groups. But whereas Glissant interprets this as a form of resistance, for Spivak it is merely a
form of disempowerment. However, this contrast is in turn complicated by Glissant's equally strong sense of the difficult relationship the
subaltern has with language per se the ''lack" of language considered in my next chapter which can be seen as another formulation of the
subaltern's inability to speak and one that is closer, although not identical, to Spivak's. But he also posits a dynamic relationship between the
lack of language, as a passively determined condition, and opacity as an active strategy of resistance, a strategy that assumes lack and
transforms it into a positive force (in ways that are discussed in chapter 2). This can be translated into Spivak's terms as follows: the
subaltern's exclusion does not cause any problems for the dominant discourse as long as it remains
invisible to that discourse, but if it can be made visible as exclusion, it will constitute a locus of resistance
to the discourse's appropriation of it; it will become opaque, in Glissant's sense. Indeed, some of
Spivak's own analyses of particular cases show this process in operation and thus counteract the
impression of total powerlessness that her general formulations sometimes give.23 Even so, Glissant's opacity is still a far more
active, positive form of resistance than Spivak's theorization allows for. To sum up the difference simply, Spivak focuses more on the subaltern's
inability to "speak" the dominant discourse whereas Glissant focuses more on the dominant discourse's inability to "understand" the subaltern

rejecting representations of suffering leaves marginalized communities out to dry

Weheliye 14 (Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern
University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the
Human,” pp 14-5) gz

Consequently, rather than assuming that suffering must always follow the path of wounded attachments in
search of recognition from the liberal state, and therefore dismissing any form of politics that might
arise from the undergoing of political violence as inherently essentialist, my thinking is more in line with
a materialist reconceptualization of suffering. 29 Asma Abbas does not conscript minoritarian suffering
to the realm of individual ressentiment used in the service of gaining liberal personhood but, instead,
argues for an “understanding of suffering that allows us to honour the suffering and hope of others not
because we are humbled by their impenetrability and unknowability, but because of how we see our
sufferings and our labours as co-constitutive of the world we inhabit, however homelessly.”30 Once
suffering that results from political violence severs its ties with liberal individualism, which would
position this anguish in the realm of a dehumanizing exception, we can commence to think of suffering
and enfleshment as integral to humanity. I emphasize the family ties between political violence and
suffering not because they are nobler or more worthy than other forms of suffering, but because they usher us away from the
liberal notion of wounding that is at the core of modern western politics and culture. Given the
prominence of political violence within the histories of colonialism, indigenous genocide, racial slavery,
internment, de jure segregation, and so on, black studies and other incarnations of racialized minority
discourse offer pathways to distinctive understandings of suffering that serve as the speculative
blueprint for new forms of humanity, which are defined above all by overdetermined conjurings of
freedom. Overall, I am asking whether there exists freedom (not necessarily as a commonsensically positive category, but as
a way to think what it makes possible) in this pain that most definitely cannot be reduced to mere recognition
based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal state, and if said freedom might
lead to other forms of emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described.