Tournament: NSD Camp Tournament | Round: 2 | Opponent: Vratin Mankidy | Judge: Lauren Gilbert
The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance-- Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands.
Carlson 16 (Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213) recut SJ DL
Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broade_r view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic.
Settler colonialism is not a one-off occurrence – it requires the combination of external and internal colonialism fused with the identity-making of the settler through the erasure of indigenous populations that rewrites ontological identity and relationships.
Tuck and Yang 12 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 2012, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society
Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of colonialism2 . External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought ‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset of activities properly called military colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as ‘natural resources’ - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel. The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white3 elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery. Strategies of internal colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization, are both structural and interpersonal. Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts - though they can overlap4 - and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US military still nicknames all enemy territory “Indian Country”). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments. Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage. In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree, forthcoming). At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5 , whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror. 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 be in the form of property (land). The settler's wealth is land, or a fungible version of it, and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The settler positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural.
Settler workers are still settlers – the 1ac grounds their politics in a defense of indigenous dispossession and necessitates settler expansion.
Englert 20 Sai Englert (lecturer @ Universiteit Leiden), 2020, “Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession,” Antipode, Vol. 0, No. 0, doi:10.1111/anti.12659
The history of settler colonialism underscores the conspicuous absence of involvement by settler working classes (as opposed to individuals or limited networks) in mass, sustained challenges against the process of settlement and indigenous dispossession.3 In fact, more often than not, settler labour movements fought for the intensification of settler expansion and racial segregation (see “An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native” above), through colour bars, boycott campaigns and demands for expulsion. In the process, bitter confrontations emerged between settler labour and capital, when the latter attempted to increase its profit margins through the exploitation of indigenous labour—for example in the context of the white labour movements in Australia and South Africa.4 Yet these conflicts can be resolved, especially while the settler colony continues to expand, by intensifying the dispossession of indigenous populations in order to improve the material conditions of settler workers (see “Case Studies” below). Here, the question of accumulation by dispossession returns to the fore. If settler workers are exploited as workers within the settler colony, they remain settlers. As such they participate in the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the occupation of lands, the elimination or exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the extraction of expropriated resources. For example, at a very basic level, their houses, workplaces, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railways, etc., are all premised on the capture and control of indigenous land. Settler workers are both exploited by settler bosses and their co-conspirators in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As such, class struggle within a settler society has a dual character: it is waged over the distribution of wealth extracted from their labour as well as over the colonial booty. In the case of Zionism in Palestine, the current associated with the publication Matzpen (“Compass”) developed a class analysis of Israeli society. They came to the conclusion that because the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised from the outside (first primarily by Britain, then by the US) and that this subsidy was not simply going into private hands but was used by the Labour Zionist bureaucracy to organise the development of the Israeli economy and infrastructure, class antagonisms were diverted within its society. Hangebi et al. (2012:83) wrote: The Jewish worker in Israel does not receive his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment, which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living, which does not correspond to the output of that society ... In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies. If this analysis was essentially correct, it underplayed, however, the consequences of an important aspect of Israeli wealth creation (which Matzpen otherwise recognised): the Israeli state, its infrastructure, and its economy were made possible by colonial expansion, land confiscation, the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their wealth and property. Affordable housing, for example, an issue discussed further below, was not only possible because of the subsidies the Israeli state received from abroad. It was possible because the land on which new houses were built, as well as existing Palestinian houses, had been confiscated by the Israeli army, Palestinians had been expelled in their hundreds of thousands, and the spoils were re-distributed amongst settlers. It was—and remains—the collective dispossession of the indigenous population by the Israeli population as a whole, which ties the settler community together, despite internal class, ethnic, and political divisions. The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession. This dual class and colonial relationship helps explain the relative absence of settler workers’ resistance against settler colonial expansion or alliances with Indigenous peoples.5 This tendency can be understood as “settler quietism”: even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequally, in the distribution of the colonial loot. Participating in the process of dispossession and fighting for a greater share of the pie leads to more important and immediate material gains. It also follows, as many anti-colonial thinkers and activists, not least among them Fanon (2001) in the Wretched of the Earth, have argued that indigenous people face the settler population as a whole in their struggle for de-colonisation. This is not to say that individual settlers or specific settler organisations cannot or have not supported struggles for decolonisation. It is however to point out that this is not the case for the majority of the settler working class, while it continues to depend on the continued dispossession of the natives for the quality of its living standards. Whether the settler colony is organised on the basis of an eliminatory or an exploitative model, what remains constant is that the entirety of the settler polity will participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that the different settler classes will struggle both against the natives to impose and maintain this dispossession, as well as amongst themselves in order to determine the nature of its internal distribution. More than that, the specific structural forms of settler rule over the indigenous population is best understood as the outcome of struggle, both between settler classes and between settlers and indigenous populations. This paper now turns to two brief case studies demonstrating this process in the context of Zionism in Palestine.
The alternative is one of decolonization – settlers need to enact an ethic of incommensurability to relinquish settler futurity.
Tuck and Yang 12 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 2012, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, SJ DL
An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability.