Settler Colonial Studies

ISSN: 2201-473X (Print) 1838-0743 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rset20

Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the

taste of non-sovereignty

Billy-Ray Belcourt

To cite this article: Billy-Ray Belcourt (2018) Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste
of non-sovereignty, Settler Colonial Studies, 8:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2017.1279830

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1279830

Published online: 19 Jan 2017.

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SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 8, NO. 1, 1–15
https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1279830

Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste

of non-sovereignty
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Humanities Division, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The main argument of this paper is that the feeling of indigeneity Settler colonialism; health;
is the miserable feeling of not properly being of this world, and biosocial; biopolitics;
that a disease like diabetes mellitus is a key manifestation of diabetes; decolonization
this sort of exhausted existence. To do this, I pursue the
secondary claims that indigeneity is a zone of biological
struggle and that the reserve is something of a non-place
calibrated by affects I want to group under the sign of misery.
This is a story about the politics of interpretation, about how
we take stock of the horrors of Indigenous embodiment and
how we might do it differently.

Introduction: Misery’s geography/death’s grammar

On 18 July 2016, the Edmonton Journal published a story whose title evinces the fam-
iliar gloom with which indigeneity grabs public attention: ‘Alberta grapples with drop
in life expectancy for Indigenous people.’ In it, Keith Gerein and Ainslie Cruickshank
write: ‘After rising to 75.52 years in 2013, [I]ndigenous life expectancy has since
tumbled to 70.36 – meaning the typical First Nations resident born in the province
can expect to die about [a] dozen years earlier than other Albertans.’1 Expecting to
die is a quality of social death. For Lisa Guenther, social death is the arrangement
of modes of abandonment that empty some populations of moral purchase.2 Social
death is also descriptive of the ways minoritarian subjects become numb to the injus-
tice of being made into an always-already object of injury. Lopsided statistics like
these have a social history, but some are still left wondering: why are these people
always dying? In Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late
Liberalism, Elizabeth Povinelli notes that this kind of settler gossip obfuscates the ‘ulti-
mate’ cause, agent, and effect of Indigenous suffering.3 Case in point: Gerein and
Cruickshank have nothing to say about what M. Jacqui Alexander calls the ‘hydra-
headed quality of violence’,4 and how it shores up compromised life on the reserve
in the first place. What we do get is the catch-all ‘social determinants of health,’
which paints a simple picture about failed flourishing in the badlands of modernity.
There, health issues, like chronic post-traumatic stress disorder in Ann Cvetkovich’s
An Archive of Feeling, resist ‘the melodramatic structure of an easily identifiable
origin of trauma’.5 Colonial affects escape analytic capture. It is thus easy to think

CONTACT Billy-Ray Belcourt billyray@ualberta.ca

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B.-R. BELCOURT

that the reserve is bad for life because its members are bad at life. Misery loves
company.
The main argument of this paper is that the feeling of indigeneity is the miserable
feeling of not properly being of this world, and that a disease like diabetes mellitus is a
key manifestation of this sort of exhausted existence. To do this, I pursue the secondary
claims that indigeneity is a zone of biological struggle and that the reserve is something
of a non-place calibrated by affects I want to group under the sign of misery. Yes, misery is
a bad word. Harsh, even. But I think it is big enough to conceptualize the cramped con-
ditions under which life is haphazardly improvised on the reserve. Misery wears you
down, effecting both a corporeal fragility and an intellectual fatigue that double as soci-
ality’s background noise. I am recruiting misery here because it does not rest on the event-
ful. Instead, it blends into ordinary time. It is possible to make joy or to feel enlivened
within a miserable context. But, misery circumscribes the body’s potentialities. If misery
is a part of slow death’s arsenal, if it hangs ‘in the air like a rumor’,6 then there is no
easy way out. Existence is what taxes.7
If the reserve is a geography of misery, then it is where being in life feels like falling out
of it. There, negative affect bubbles just below a collective ‘threshold of awareness’,8 but
nonetheless fills out a confined area, mutating over time into the bodies that people it.
Misery flattens subjectivity and makes us submit to its tempos, operating here as both a
pesky obstacle to radical worldings and as an affective atmosphere that ‘hover[s]
around daily practices of survival’.9 Unlike the cruel optimist about which Lauren
Berlant writes,10 the band member is not oblivious to the cruelties of her object attach-
ments. She knows or is repeatedly told they are damaging, but cannot easily forge new
ones, if only because the reserve absents the possibility of making life unhinged by the
rote of premature death. She is stuck in a rut that was dug in the name of a colonial
ethos bent on disappearing Indians from the future, a rut whose chronic episodes of bio-
political tragedy are somehow still bearable by those who endure them. The goal is not to
be better at life, but simply to keep at it, even if ‘it’ taxes and eschews happiness without
becoming too conspicuous. The reserve is thus where we should go to think about what
happens when surplus populations get stowed away from the ‘what’ of what makes life
worth living, if we describe ‘life’ as a mix of reckless capitalist worldings and racist histories
of uneven precarity and safety.
Here, I want to ask the tricky question: might biosocial trauma partly make up indigene-
ity’s racial terrain? For me, the biosocial is where biology’s politics are thinkable, where
bodily production and statecraft meet, where sickness coheres as a racialized symptom
of a world that is not good for most of us. The biosocial is where disease’s raciality
takes shape. As I see them, indigeneity and sickness are co-constitutive categories in a
day and age where health is the biopolitical measure of a subject’s ability to adjust to
structural pressures endemic to the affective life of setter colonialism. This is thus also a
story about the politics of interpretation, about how we take stock of the horrors of Indi-
genous embodiment and how we might do it differently. If indigeneity is where the
fantasy of self-sovereignty is especially weak (none of us are self-sovereign), then colonial
publics hone in on and amplify this weakness to show that the world is not ours to freely
inhabit. Again, in what follows, I take diabetes mellitus as a case study in the quiet forms of
non-sovereignty that proliferate on the reserve, a place where living, dying, and failed
flourishing always hang in the balance.11
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 3

Dying and misery are affective bedfellows. ‘Dying’ is an adjective used to describe a
noun ‘on the point of death’. To be ‘on the point of death’ is to exhibit a mode of
being in the world that leaves loose ends untied. This is to say (1) that death’s origin
story amasses small and big culprits as time passes such that it becomes laborious to
track its long political history. Scapegoats like genes, for example, dilute the recent
past’s lethal ecologies. And (2) that there is an indeterminacy with which subjects and
objects die: slowly or quickly, suspiciously or predictably – or a cacophonous mix of all
of these. There is always something left to be said at the funeral. One of the conditions
of Indigenous life today is manslaughter hidden under the ruse of botched ways of popu-
lating the world.
‘Dying’ is a present participle too: it describes the affective energies of an inchoate hap-
pening, or time’s rupture between life as we knew it and death. It is a process of becoming-
liminal that is phenomenologically promiscuous. Its affects range from shock to agony to a
kind of cold sobriety. Death’s grammar is telling: to die is to have been dying, and ‘has
been’ takes a subject and the ‘of’ or the ‘from’ of ‘dying’ piece together a causal relation
that looks like a crime scene. Is dying worth zeroing in on if it could be said that we are
all dying, that to be human or to be in life is in fact to be dying? Of course, though,
death is not fairly apportioned when empire’s worlds are wrangled together by the unli-
vability of toxic pockets of minoritarian life. And, dying unevenly stands in for ordinary
life’s sociability in a big world whose public feelings circulate in the build up before and
in the aftermath of racial crisis. Perhaps dying is the racialized state of not properly
‘having’ or ‘being in’ a body.12 Perhaps it is where the advance of life eventually gets
quasi-melodramatic via a biopolitical drive to palliate racial surplus until an assailant
(the state) gets acquitted by time’s shoddy memory work and all you are left with is a
body beside itself.
The reserve, however, is a site of augured disappearance propped up in the wake of
insidiously lawful world-breaking events,13 ones whose delayed traumas fester beneath
the skin. For Donna Haraway, the Anthropocene – the current geological era in which
the social is animated by human-made ecological catastrophe and the anxieties produced
by it – pressures us to strategize about what she calls ‘the arts of living on a damaged
planet’.14 Indigenous worlds, however, have been sutured by this sort of apocalypticism
for quite some time now.15 The arts of living on a damaged reserve have little do with
building pleasurable collectivities, as Haraway sees it globally. Rather, we have to figure
out how to ward off an impoverished social life that our cells know is coming. What
does it mean to politically commit to a place that wears you down in order to maintain
an allegiance to indigeneity’s visible cultural forms? Is this all some of us have left?
Here is the historical aporia: in a twenty-first-century Canada manned by a liberal prime
minister dedicated to politically diluted forms of reconciliation, Indigenous peoples are
nonetheless still feeling the affective wrath of the long-twentieth century’s colonial state-
craft.16 Justin Trudeau’s is a national culture of sentiment that buries his and previous
Canadas’ complicities in decades-long biological warfare against Indigenous life. Speaking
to an audience of residential school survivors during the launch of the final report of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in December 2015, Trudeau said:
To the former Indian residential school students who came forward and shared your painful
stories, I say: thank you for your extraordinary bravery and for your willingness to help
4 B.-R. BELCOURT

Canadians understand what happened to you … The burden of this experience has been on
your shoulders for far too long. The burden is properly ours as a government, and as a country
… This is a time of real and positive change.17

Note how Trudeau’s authoritative speech acts fail also to be performative, if performative
speech aims to bring about that which it names.18 His tears are epistemological hallucino-
gens,19 luring us into an era of settler governance he vows is attuned to Indigenous grie-
vances, one that pledges to stop hurting us. That is, he lauded Indigenous elders for
opening themselves up to a nation-state that broke open their worlds, assuring them
that the past’s injustices would not live again in the present. Alas, bad feelings do not
go away because a head of state asks them to, especially if the conditions under which
they germinate are left intact. The affect of the now and the near future is sickness, and
this is a structural diagnosis.
The reserve, then, is where life is lived at the edge of the world, a bio-necropolitical
gulag of sorts where slow death stunts indigeneity’s future-bearing potentiality. Put differ-
ently, it is an incubator of deadened life, where the plasticity of the life-death binary is
worked up so as to harvest bodies that are stripped of vitality and sensation. For Jasbir
Puar, the ‘bio-necro collaboration’ is where the sovereign thirst for blood and the manage-
ment of biological life operate harmoniously – an addendum to Foucault’s biopower,
which Puar argues overlooks ‘biopower’s direct activity in death’ in a so-called age of
terror.20 As Scott Morgensen pointed out in 2012, settler colonialism too churns out its
own type of biopower, one that aggressively seeks to eliminate and then replace Indigen-
ous peoples, and coterminously to extend the ‘West’s’ juridical reach across the globe.
Indeed, to make everywhere its colony.21 My claim, then, is that the reserve worlds
death-worlds, to use Achille Mbembe’s term,22 whose poisonousnesses flatten into indi-
geneity’s hardened arenas of life. It is a coral whose biopower is characterized by the mis-
management of biological life, where disease control has been avoided as a method of
ethico-political abandonment. Sometimes negligence is the form that state power takes.
Which is to say that ongoingness on the reserve is an aspirational deadlock stymied by
negative affects like hunger, nausea, and dizziness. For Sara Ahmed, this style of getting by
produces a racial fatalism of sorts. She writes, ‘some are assumed to be inherently broken
as if their fate is to break’.23 If we die, things go on as if nothing happened. Indeed, some
die so that ‘the nothing’ can happen. Those that do not neatly or properly enflesh the
human as such occupy the social as if they were always-already missing something, as
if they were broken beyond repair. We might ask: what does it mean to be with feelings
of loss in a world in which losing things is a condition of political becoming, a world in
which maintaining one’s attachments to life routinely becomes too tiring to keep up
with? What does dying’s repetition do to the ordinary’s promise to keep us a part of some-
thing durable?
These questions point to the plight of those doomed to shoulder health’s discontents.
Put differently, disease cathects indigeneity within a present that is not only not enough,
but also deadly – a present which generates forms of non-sovereignty that are tasted.
According to Berlant and Lee Edelman, non-sovereignty is ‘the notion of a subject’s con-
stitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of our-
selves’.24 For Berlant, love launches something of a becoming-non-sovereign, as it compels
us to submit to its potentialities while rendering unpredictable the substance of the future.
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 5

It is one of the few times we admit we need to change.25 But, in my assessment, this kind
of control loss is not cut and dry: perhaps non-sovereignty schematizes the condition of
possibility for settler colonialism’s race-making practices, ones that produce bad types
of not knowing that fray Indigenous worlds and bodies and produce seemingly normal
forms of precarity. For Anna Tsing, precarity is not the exception to democracy’s march
of progress. It is the ‘condition of our time’.26 But, unlike her, I am not solely drawn to pre-
carity’s unlikely life-building energies, but rather to its re-workings of science’s epistem-
ology such that bad political life becomes genetically predictable. Non-sovereignty can
be a bad affect when scenes of living through that are tethered to settler colonialism’s
re-worldings speed up the material and symbolic decaying of indigeneity. What does it
mean that our cells can anticipate our collective undoing?
Perhaps the reserve is bound by an affective atmosphere within which toxic sensations
and viruses proliferate, ones that alter the biochemistries of the bodies therein, consigning
them to a kind of cellular frailty. As I see it, the food that does and does not make its way
into this geography of slowed immiseration renders calculable the biosocial toll of colonial
world-building. What follows is thus a phenomenological account of one of the ways Indi-
genous bodies are biopolitically generated to slowly destroy themselves from the inside.27

‘You get munchies’: a phenomenology of decaying worlds

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing asks, rhetorically: ‘What do you do when
your world starts to fall apart?’28 Sometimes worlds only know how to decay and fall
apart. Perhaps we need a phenomenology of decaying worlds. Phenomenology is
suited for the study of reserve life, as it, according to Ahmed, ‘allows us to theorize how
a reality is given by becoming background, as that which is taken for granted’.29 Following
Bourdieu and Butler, phenomenology is the study of entanglements, taking the body as a
‘form of engagement with the world’, where ‘the body’ is an analytic tease both sculpted
by social discourse and an accumulation of shattering encounters with others.30 Phenom-
enology might provide a thicker account of what it is to be in a body that does not feel like
it belongs to you, a feeling that I would wager is also the feeling of indigeneity. Following
Butler,31 I think the body is a blind spot for natives, for we cannot guarantee that we will
know what it is like to be in a body without it feeling suspect. Phenomenology gets at how
bodies come to feel suspect.
Now, a short story about a crumbling public. The Driftpile Convenience Store is nested at
the side of highway two, which runs through the Driftpile Cree Nation and deeper into the
ancestral lands of the Plains Cree (Figure 1). The store is independently owned and operated,
and its light-green exterior is paired with the word ‘FIREWORKS’ in upper-case, pale-red print.
Thinkable first via its bare-bones aesthetic, the store was built by laborers from the reserve
and is one of two atrophied food publics therein, both of which vend an excess of so-called
‘junk foods’. There, a cooler is stocked with microwavable submarines and burgers, and a
shabby table displays a disparate set of processed pastries and candy. In the corner sits
three dried-up oranges and two bruised apples. Groceries like bread, cereal, and bananas
are irregularly imported from neighboring towns, the closest of which is 25 kilometers
east. Without transportation or exposable income, organic foods are worlds away.
This scene is nothing if not ordinary: the lull of reserve life invests junk foods with
fetishistic power, distributing value into goods that accumulatively if not heartbreakingly
6 B.-R. BELCOURT

Figure 1. Driftpile Cree Nation – University of Alberta.

damage you. In a study of the Alexander First Nation northeast of Edmonton, one youth
spoke of the way junk food invades your diet and of how the convenience store stymies
personal agency, explaining; ‘You know what you’re going to get before you go, you know
what’s there, little selection.’ And, another youth, simply: ‘you get munchies’.32 ‘Munchies’
here do not offer up their own ‘structure of apprehension’,33 availing themselves of a sup-
posedly contextless and cramped place where consumer habits are of a piece with hard-
fought efforts to do things under constraints not entirely of your own making. For Jill
Stauffer, autonomy is something of an anthropological given for erroneously thinking pol-
itical life: ‘it’s in the air and the water, you might say, to think that an uncomplicated auton-
omy is a natural and therefore nonnegotiable trait of human beings’.34 But, if ‘you get
munchies’ because there is ‘little selection’ and ‘little selection’ chips away at your sense
of autonomy over time, then this might not be the case on the reserve. Munchies do
away with the fantasy of an always-already autonomy. If, according to Kathleen Stewart,
little worlds proliferate around a host of ‘conditions, practices, manias, pacings, scenes
of absorption, styles of living, forms of attachment’,35 what can be said of the bleak
little worlds that ‘munchies’ manufacture on the reserve? Problems surface here when
the protracted craving to eat junk food is stalled by the petty knowledge that those
kinds of products are bad for you and that there is little you can do about it. To
suggest that the convenience store predicts your consumer habits is to bring into focus
a form of capitalism outdoing itself: before you go there, it is as if you have already
started eating munchies. Perhaps your mouth starts to salivate. Habits world.
Here is the statistical nightmare. According to D. DyckFehderau et al., ‘It is estimated
that First Nations children living on reserves are 4.5 times more likely to be obese than
Canadian children in general.’36 And, Health Canada admits that ‘First Nations on
reserve have a rate of diabetes three to five times higher than that of other Canadians.’37
Diabetes mellitus or type 2 diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease characterized by high
blood glucose (or hyperglycemia) and insulin resistance (or an inability to produce and/or
to use insulin to keep up the body’s energetics). Symptoms included increased thirst,
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 7

frequent urination, increased hunger, fatigue, and sores that refuse to heal. Long-term
complications include heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, and poor blood flow. According
to the World Health Organization, type 2 diabetes makes up 90% of diabetes diagnoses,38
most of which are triggered by obesity, lack of exercise, and a so-called genetic predispo-
sition that is fastened to the anatomies of Indigenous peoples and other racialized popu-
lations who are disproportionately made live in dodgy social worlds.
There is a sociological story to be told about the genetic imagination, as the semantic
pulse of ‘predisposition’ throws the raciality of illness into the tempo of normal life and
away from the political. To be predisposed to something is to be stalked by the something,
which waits for the right mix of conditions to rear its head. Health, then, is not merely a
biological state, but also a subject’s capacity to adapt to and survive structural pressures
that are felt biologically and psychologically. Perhaps predispositions are slow death’s
attendant transmutations: the exacting and meticulous way non-sovereignty is made. In
‘Framework for Aboriginal-guided decolonizing research involving Métis and First
Nations persons with diabetes’, Bartlett et al. make the risky claim that their interviewees
do not experience diabetes ‘as a central issue or life difficulty’.39 This claims rests on the
observation that the interviewees did not consistently discuss diabetes when probed
about what made being in life hard. If diabetes is a manifestation of non-sovereignty,
which is a state of precarious embodiment that gets worse as time passes, then it
would not collect the same kind of worry as unpaid bills or police brutality, for example.
Type 2 diabetes is phenomenological evidence of a body corrupted to the point of phys-
iological short-circuiting. But, in Indigenous publics, it loses some of its shock value.
I know: it is difficult to talk about obesity, as food is where we take a stab at trying to
cope with late capitalism’s anxiety publics, bad economics, and shoddy health cultures. It is
where the body’s failure to adapt quickly in times of extended crisis runs up against a pol-
itical history of disgust and shame. Of course these are not the only ways to experience
fatness and these tensions, as Berlant sees them, are intensified by the stresses of the
fantasy of the good life, the global trade in sugar, the increasing availability of fast food,
the flare-up of food deserts in ghettoized neighborhoods and remote communities like
reserves, the slow violence of workplace tempos, inter alia.40 Things keep piggy-backing
off of other things. Causality slips past us, but suffering still infiltrates the ordinary. The
impulse is to shelve obesity’s raciality in the name of an identity politics that offers up a
new type of embodied revolt (i.e. to be fat in a normatively thin world is to be a body
in protest). If, according to Berlant, the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ is also ‘a way of
talking about the destruction of life, bodies, imaginaries, and environments by and
under contemporary regimes of capital’,41 what can be said of the forms of political
becoming that obesity and diabetes amplify on the reserve if they are bound for
worldly rupture and death? Margery Fee insists that those populations singled out as
fat are rendered ‘willfully deviant’, as if they were deserving of ‘whatever misfortune
befalls them’.42 The ‘obesity epidemic’ is thus also a way of talking about how popular
science empowers public thought that dedramatizes Indigenous suffering.
According to Health Canada, diabetes germinates on reserves at a volume quantifiable
as an epidemic.43 It is thus easy to chalk this up as a biological tragedy waiting to happen-
ing, explained away by the so-called ‘thrifty-genotype hypothesis’. Which is to say the
hypothesis that ‘the high prevalence of type 2 diabetes and obesity is a consequence of
genetic variants that have undergone positive selection during historical periods of
8 B.-R. BELCOURT

erratic food supply’.44 The story goes: Indigenous bodies are genetically trained to store
energy, an anatomical fate that runs wild in the absence of migratory periods. In short:
we were meant to be hunter-gatherers, so a sedentary lifestyle becomes its own kind of
death sentence. Not only did this hypothesis emerge out of a period of ‘gene hunting’
among Indigenous communities that rendered the bodies therein as objects of medical
inquiry,45 it also enlarged a small opening in the socio-medical consciousness to reroute
political blame for premature death and cheapened quality of life to the people and com-
munities who are somehow both doing it to themselves and defenseless against their
bodies’ stubborn genetic makeup. For the medical researchers of that fad, Indigenous
peoples were at the mercy of genes mismatched for life in contemporary times. In this
scenario, indigeneity is nothing if not self-destructive. Fee put it like this:
The stories emerging around the ‘thrifty gene’ can be seen as … situating the source of the
problem in Aboriginal peoples, rather than in ‘civilization’ or ‘progress’. Indeed, diabetes
has been figured as the price Aboriginal people have paid for civilization, rather than the
penalty exacted by colonization.46

The thrifty-gene hypothesis, then, is how scientists give name to the imperative that Indi-
genous peoples fall out of the world.
For Haraway, biomedical language does disastrous things, as it shapes ‘the unequal
experience of sickness and death for millions’.47 How we talk about disease and race is
a life-or-death matter. Berlant contends that ‘the epidemic concept … [is] inevitably part
of an argument about classification, causality, responsibility, degeneracy, and the imagin-
able and pragmatic logics of cure’.48 Sickness has a discursive grip on some bodies more
than others. The reserve’s ‘diabetes epidemic’ is one that is not up for interpretation, as
social theory is dodged in favor of biomedical readings that fix diabetes to indigeneity
in the public health imaginary. It is as if the reserve were an incubator of epidemics, a
place where disease always-already teeters on the verge of unmanageability. If so, life is
never sure-fire, as an outbreak points to the possibility of mass death. Importantly, the ‘epi-
demic concept’ also carries with it a temporal form. It containerizes the disease within a
shortened time frame, missing the historicity and social fields that characterize structural
violence in settler states. Before we know it, it is as if things have already fallen out of our
control.
To say that Indigenous peoples are genetically hardwired to make worlds that are fated
to proliferate diabetes is to write our obituaries before we are born. Biomedical language is
representational, working up a semiotics of indigeneity that writes us off as undeserving of
the good life. Indeed, indigeneity’s racial matter – articulated at the level of genetics, the
endocrine system, and health – is made inseparable from the bad life. The body might be
plotting to hurt itself, but this is a matter of colonial science, of cheapened ethical and
economic investment, and of statecraft that messies the body’s ability to adjust to even
the smallest headwinds. What kinds of epistemologies and political action might we
rouse if we understand the reserve’s sick socialities as emanating from the carceral
tempos of legislation like the Indian Act? Which is to say that when a population is cor-
ralled in land-bases not entirely their own and legally forced to make do with very little
therein, bodies will revolt and sometimes shut down.
The epidemic is a social concept where some forms of life are readied for premature
death. Put differently, biology is where Indigenous suffering is tethered to the future.
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 9

Neuropathy, non-feeling, and other keywords

What would it mean to make away with microbiology and pathology as decolonial
methods? To put them to use as makeshift reading practices to dissect the messy
crowds of colonialism’s microscopic worlds? This is cheap and dirty of course, but micro-
biology is the study of organisms, most of which cannot be caught via human sight,
including bacteria, fungi, and acellular agents like viruses.49 And, pathology is the study
of diseases – their histories, incidence, distribution, and control (or lack thereof). These
are disciplines that can tell us things about the social life of genetics, worldly assemblages,
the politics of health care, and the ways that bodies cannot end at the skin.50 Indeed, they
show us how the body is mythical, ‘material-semiotic generative nodes’ whose ‘boundaries
materialize in social interaction’.51 They are inestimably constituted via leakages and
exchanges that seep outside themselves, for better or for worse. A small leakage can
silently ignite worlds. It can also make them corrosive. Maybe microbiology and pathology
can be interpretive modes that allow us to understand how the cell and the nervous
system, for example, are where colonial power gets marshalled. Following Haraway, we
might ask: what is indigeneity’s ‘social text of sickness?’52 Put differently, what sort of
meanings and affects accrue around indigeneity in a settler state where sickness is how
reserve life enters the ordinary’s ebbs and flows? In Bioinsecurities: Disease Intervention,
Empire, and the Government of Species, Neel Ahuja sets out to demonstrate how US
empire operates ‘as a project in the government of species’, arguing that it works up
the idea of the vulnerable body to mold political life in the image of empire.53 The
reserve, then, is where settler states like Canada dump biological risk, polishing the struc-
turally produced vulnerability of Indigenous bodies, compressing them into containers for
sickness. On the reserve, doing nothing in the face of biosocial violence is often how
empire besieges Indigenous worlds.
According to the Canadian Diabetes Association, Indigenous peoples with diabetes
are more likely to experience complications than other diabetics in Canada. One of
these is neuropathy: exposure ‘to high blood glucose levels over an extended period
of time causes damage to the peripheral nerves – the nerves that go to the arms,
hands, legs, and feet’.54 Recall that type 2 diabetes gestates sores on the skin that
contest recovery. There is an anatomical cost to this kind of enervation: if left untreated,
sores can turn into ulcers that take victim body parts. Neuropathy causes weakness and
numbness, allowing sores like these to go unnoticed. This kind of non-feeling shores up
forms of embodiment that are patchy, such that being in a body estranges one from the
world. To be Indigenous in settler states is to be prone to this type of affective mess: the
loss of portions of your body and stripping that loss of any kind of spectacularity. An
epidemic is a biosocial event through which dispossession occurs. A becoming-
dispossessed.
According to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, dispossession in the sense of ‘being
made’ or ‘becoming’ is how some bodies stop mattering, left exposed to bodily pressures
ratcheted up via ‘critical displacement[s]’ that leave us tragically ‘receptive to others’.55
This manufactured form of susceptibility to harm incites a normativity whereby it is as if
our bodies could only deteriorate. Here, the body is enlisted to clandestinely short-
circuit Indigenous life. Everywhere in the West the ‘body is conceived as a strategic
system’,56 except when Indigenous bodies are put under the microscope.
10 B.-R. BELCOURT

There is a cautionary folktale of sorts on the Driftpile Cree Nation that sores will pepper
your legs if you scratch mosquito bites too much, and that the next time you visit your
doctor things will turn for the worse. To be made dispossessed, Athanasiou notes, is
also to be subjected to acknowledgment’s wrath.57 And, as Haraway sees it, ‘biology is
about recognition and misrecognition’.58 Which is all to say that when a people are
hailed as sick over and over again, the hospital becomes a place where indigeneity mate-
rializes as pathogenic vis-à-vis histories of colonialism that are bound up in our narrow ali-
mentary cultures.
The reserve’s ‘diabetes epidemic’, then, is where affectivity is so rewired that to be in a
body is to risk losing your bearings in the world. The terms by which the federal govern-
ment articulates reserve governance – that the reserve is land set out for the ‘use and
benefit’ of Indian bands – holds out misplaced hope that things will turn out the way
we want them to. If only we ate better or exercised more. But, when the cell or the
nervous system runs amok in response to histories of colonial trauma, there is little you
can do to stop it. And, soon a new kind of pessimism invades normal life and submitting
to the specter of illness feels like going about your day unobstructed. Margaret Robinson
made the point that for Indigenous peoples it seems as if the scenario is not if you will get
diabetes, but when.59 We might ask, then: why is it so easy to submit to this kind of bio-
social fate?
In their breath-taking article-cum-manifesto ‘Before Dispossession, or Surviving It’,
Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective write of ‘cartographies
of dispossession’, where ‘scratch marks on the door’ stand in as unlikely evidence of a
world-shattering war being waged against abjected life. They write:
This is a hard place, a place where my swollen body is hammocked above Lost and below
Oriented. Something’s there in the stall before Momentum. Even before the scratch marks
appear on the door. Long before wormholes pinhole the sky. Something’s there, somewhere
between I don’t want, I can’t see, I am dead, and I can’t turn away. I smell a black hole deform-
ing everything in its path.60

Let us hone in on the semantic promiscuity of this ‘something’ and ‘somewhere’, as they
might be the hermeneutic openings to a mode of political thought that thinks precarity
and other cognate genres of living like diabetes that are both emergent and timeworn,
attending to the host of corporeal forms that hard places like the reserve incubate.
Sometimes we have to squint to see death-worlds.61 Sometimes they are burrowing
in the split-second time frame between chewing and swallowing. Something does
not taste right.

Conclusion: after abandonment

As Shiri Pasternak pointedly argues via Foucault, Indian Country is where many are let die
to ‘dispose of strong Indigenous nations as surplus to the state’. It is where life cannot be
lived without ‘suffering massive deprivation’.62 As noted earlier, Indigenous peoples in
Alberta are projected to die a dozen years before other residents of the province, and
this is a sad story whose ending is prefigured by a series of bouts with sickness and
other forms of bodily collapse that saturate one’s sense of identity. Ours is an elongated
state of near-deathness that rarely collects the public outrage constitutive of the out-of-
the-ordinary. In Economies of Abandonment, Povinelli writes:
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 11

Indigenous communities are often cruddy, corrosive, and uneventful. An agentless slow death
characterizes their mode of lethality. Quiet deaths. Slow deaths. Rotting worlds. The everyday
drifts toward death: one more drink, one more sore; a bad cold, bad food; a small pain in the
chest.63

A small pain in the chest can be bigger than the historical present’s affective tonalities.
Rotting worlds are set in motion before we can study them, such that it feels as if you
have no option but to ‘get munchies’. As if there were nothing you could do about the
sores on your legs or your high blood glucose levels.
The past–present–future of settler colonialism is ridden with scenes and technologies of
abandonment. In Geraldine Pratt’s reading of Agamben, abandonment is an ‘active, rela-
tional process’ that is topographical, producing minority populations as ‘neither inside nor
outside the juridical order’, but instead enmeshed inside geographies that make them into
bare life.64 In Agamben’s words, bare life is life stripped of meaning, that which is exposed
to death ‘in the sovereign ban’. It is political life’s discontents, produced when law and life
slip-slide into each other such that the rule of law’s absences instantiate the law itself.65
The abandoned live in a zone of exception whose horrors perversely hold up the world
of sovereign citizens. Might the reserve be an outpost of empire whose biological risks
smooth out the racial contours of the human? Perhaps the affective state of improperly
being in the world is the feeling of bare life. Diabetes is how this feeling manifests on
the reserve. To be abandoned on the outskirts of the world pushes you to come to
terms with your shoddy embodiment. There, life is a schematization of bad affects that
make diabetes seem of a piece with the everyday. Discourse of course is partly how this
kind of painful existence sticks to indigeneity.
As we know, reserves in Canada were dreamt up with the deliberate goal of shunning
Indigenous life from the national body, locking it in the past by way of geographic iso-
lation. Indigenous peoples have nonetheless warded off and survived abandonment’s
goal of no future, building makeshift worlds that could maintain life if only until the
next week or the next paycheque. Social abandonment works by obscuring its origin
story, turning something like diabetes into the end-point of lives lived badly. In this
version of colonialism’s story, the cell is a culprit that gets let loose, acquitted. Abandon-
ment therefore allows the reserve to forgo the possibility of alimentary decision-making,
turning the convenience store into a public that hurries along the body’s breakdown. The
future becomes something of a catch-22: longevity does not have an embargo on nega-
tive affect.
There is a health center on the Driftpile Cree Nation, and there diabetes diagnoses are
handed down to patients who saw them coming. My grandmother was diagnosed with
type 2 diabetes in her early fifties: a quasi-event foreshadowed by the earlier diagnoses
given to her mother and to several of her siblings. Over and over again, the political begin-
nings of biosocial scenes like these burrow under the sign of heredity.
This is all to say that we need worlds that are not holed up in the reserve’s tragedies, but
rather: ones that allow for forms of collective Indigenous life that are not stunted by the
menace of structurally orchestrated injury and loss. For Haraway, we must ‘stay with the
trouble’ in a world where trouble is the ordinary’s condition of possibility. As she sees it,
negativities link capacities, pointing to social webs that nourish modes of being with
that just might world better worlds in the near future.66 To be abandoned is not yet to
be dispossessed of the ground beneath your feet where you were left.
12 B.-R. BELCOURT

It breaks my heart to write about my reserve like this, to zero in on the kinds of bodies
that populate it as an effect of habits that reek of the afterlife of abandonment. Ours,
however, is not a terminal prognosis: though temporally fugitive, the cellular labor of
settler colonialism is reparable, if we pursue a radical remaking of the public health cul-
tures that shape living and dying on the reserve.67 My grandmother and her brothers
and sisters have lived, loved, and fought for survival in the face of diabetes’ world-breaking
potentialities for quite some time now, an endurant Indigenous presence that contests the
reserve’s sociogenesis as a geography of quiet biological ruination. But, the contradiction
that I have fleshed out here is one where resistance writ large – the desire to keep going
despite it all, to make do the best you can, to refuse to die – occupies the same psychic and
temporal space as the decision to eat junk food to keep up with life.
The land of the body is sometimes a wasteland in compromised times like ours. To
world as a last-ditch attempt to make do with what you have is not really to world at
all. What does it mean for indigeneity to be future-bearing,68 if staying alive means
staying attached to pain and the hospital atrophies your sense of autonomy day in and
day out? For decolonial theory to enable otherwise life, it needs to be dedramatized
and aligned with the blustery pathways of the peripheral nerves. We need a phenomen-
ology of the peripheral nerves.69

Notes
1. Keith Gerein and Ainslie Cruickshank, ‘Alberta Grapples with Drop in Life Expectancy for Indi-
genous Peoples’, edmontonjournal.com, last modified July 18, 2016, http://edmontonjournal.
com/news/local-news/alberta-grapples-with-drop-in-life-expectancy-for-indigenous-people.
2. Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), xx.
3. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late
Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 145.
4. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory,
and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3.
5. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 33.
6. José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), 65.
7. For Lauren Berlant, slow death refers to ‘the physical wearing out of a population in a way that
points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.’ As
an effect of capitalist histories of violence and alienation, effects that are felt ‘at an extreme
and in a zone of ordinariness,’ slow death renders life-building and ‘the attrition of human
life’ indistinguishable such that persistence looks a lot like dying. Writing against a genealogy
of political theorists who elevate sovereignty to the domain of the eventful and the juridical,
Berlant points to scenes of living through in which mere existence is itself tiring, the product of
forms of sovereignty that work on the body of a people day in and day out. See Lauren Berlant,
Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 95–6.
8. Elizabeth Povinelli cited in Tyler Morgenstern, ‘“Little Things Pile Up”: Ordinary Lessons’, DE/
CALAGE: politics + ethics + art + technology (blog), May 18, 2014, https://tdmorgenstern.
wordpress.com/2014/05/18/little-things-pile-up-ordinary-lessons/.
9. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012),
206.
10. For Berlant, ‘cruel optimism’ exists ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your
flourishing.’ As she sees it, this kind of relation is not inherently cruel: it becomes cruel when
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 13

‘the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it
initially.’ See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.
11. For a similar discussion about thinking with scenes where living and dying are at stake, see
‘Donna Haraway, Eduardo Kohn, and Colin Dayan: Keynote Conversation’, YouTube video,
1:10:08, posted by CSTMS Berkeley, May 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
-6Txr39E9n0.
12. This thought stems from Catherine Kellogg’s, ‘“You be My Body for Me”: Dispossession in Two
Valences’, Philosophy and Social Criticism (2016): 1–13, doi:10.1177/0191453716651667. There,
Kellogg tends to Butler’s provocation that the master-slave dialectic churns out a kind of
impossible injunction that the slave be the master’s body without confessing to that sort of
embodiment. My claim is that the state of ‘having’ or ‘being in’ a body is radically cramped
under conditions of contemporary colonialism.
13. According to the then Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada,
reserves are tracts of land, ‘the legal title to which [are] held by the Crown, set apart for the use
and benefit of an Indian band.’ See http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100014642/
1100100014643.
14. Donna Haraway, ‘SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble’, YouTube
video, 1:48:45, posted by KIASualberta, June 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Z1uTVnhIHS8.
15. See Joshua LaBare and Kim TallBear, ‘Matters of Life and Death’, YouTube video, posted by
Anthropocene, Ecology, Pedagogy: The Future in Questions, December 15, 2015, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=tjiVcwpBhSc.
16. In Bioinsecurities, Neel Ahuja identifies the long-twentieth century as 1870 – present. See Bioin-
securities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 4. Also, the ‘statecraft’ to which I refer here includes the Indian Act, the
pass system, residential school policy, inter alia.
17. Susana Mas, ‘Truth and Reconciliation Chair Says Final Report Marks Start of “New Era”’, cbc.ca,
last modified December 15, 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/truth-and-reconciliation-
final-report-ottawa-event-1.3365921.
18. See Judith Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1993): 17.
19. During the public launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report,
the CBC reported that Trudeau was seen ‘wiping away his tears.’ See Susana Mass, ‘Truth and
Reconciliation Chair Says Final Report Marks Start of “New Era”’, cbc.ca, last modified Decem-
ber 15, 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/truth-and-reconciliation-final-report-ottawa-
event-1.3365921.
20. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 35.
21. See Scott Morgensen, ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler
Colonial Studies (2011): 52–76, doi:10.1080/2201473x.2011.10648801.
22. See Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture (2003): 39.
23. Sara Ahmed, ‘Fragility’, feministkilljoys (blog), June 14, 2014, https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/
06/14/fragility/.
24. Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
25. See ‘No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt –
Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin’, NOMOREPOTLUCKS, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/no-one-is-
sovereign-in-love-a-conversation-between-lauren-berlant-and-michael-hardt/ (accessed July
18, 2016).
26. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 20.
27. This article does not address the literature on Indigenous food sovereignty. Food sovereignty
falls outside the reach of my essay, which is concerned with a phenomenology of non-
sovereignty.
28. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 20.
14 B.-R. BELCOURT

29. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012), 21.
30. Judith Butler, ‘Performativity’s Social Magic’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Schuster-
man (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 115.
31. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
32. D. DyckFehderau et al., ‘Feasibility Study of Asset Mapping with Children: Identifying How the
Community Environment Shapes Activity and Food Choices in Alexander First Nation’, Rural
and Remote Health (2013): 2289.
33. Audra Simpson, ‘Consent’s Revenge’, Cultural Anthropology (2016): 329, doi:10.14506/ca31.3.
02.
34. Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2016), 4.
35. Kathleen Stewart, ‘Atmospheric Attunements’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
(2011): 446, doi:10.1068/d9109.
36. Dyckfehderau et al., ‘Feasibility Study of Asset’, 2289.
37. ‘First Nations & Inuit Health’, hc-sc.gc.ca, last modified September 30, 2013, http://www.hc-sc.
gc.ca/fniah-spnia/diseases-maladies/diabete/index-eng.php.
38. See Adrienne Santos-Longhurst, ‘Type 2 Diabetes Statistics and Facts’, healthline.com, last
modified September 8, 2014, http://www.healthline.com/health/type-2-diabetes/statistics.
39. Judith G. Bartlett et al., ‘Framework for Aboriginal-guided Decolonizing Research Involving
Métis and First Nations Persons with Diabetes’, Social Science & Medicine (2007): 2380.
40. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 106–13.
41. Ibid., 104.
42. Margery Fee, ‘Racializing Narratives: Obesity, Diabetes, and the “Aboriginal” Thrifty Genotype’,
Social Science & Medicine (2006): 2994
43. ‘First Nations & Inuit Health’, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/diseases-maladies/diabete/
index-eng.php.
44. L. Southam et al., ‘Is the Thrifty Genotype Hypothesis Supported by Evidence Based on Con-
firmed Type 2 Diabetes- and Obesity-susceptibility Variants’, Diabetologia (2009): 1846, doi:10.
1007/s00125-009-1419-3.
45. See Carolyn Abraham, ‘How the Diabetes-linked “Thrifty Gene” Triumphed with Prejudice Over
Proof’, theglobeandmail.com, last modified August 23, 2012, http://www.theglobeandmail.
com/news/national/how-the-diabetes-linked-thrifty-gene-triumphed-with-prejudice-over-proof/
article569423/?page=all.
46. Fee, ‘Racializing Narratives: Obesity, Diabetes, and the “Aboriginal” Thrifty Genotype’, 2994.
47. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Associ-
ation Books, 1991), 203.
48. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 103.
49. See, for example, ‘What Is Microbiology?’, Colorado State University, http://csu-cvmbs.colostate.
edu/academics/mip/undergraduate/Pages/Microbiology.aspx (accessed June 28, 2016).
50. This is of course a reference to Donna Haraway’s seminal provocation: ‘Why should our bodies
end at the skin?’ See Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 176.
51. Ibid., 208.
52. Ibid., 203.
53. Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, x–xi.
54. See http://www.diabetes.ca/publications-newsletters/advocacy-reports/2015-report-on-diabe
tes-driving-change and http://www.diabetes.ca/diabetes-and-you/complications/nerve-damage-
diabetic-peripheral-neuropathy.
55. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 14.
56. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 211.
57. Athanasiou, Dispossession, 13–14.
58. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 211.
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 15

59. Robinson made this comment during our ‘Indigenous Food Cultures’ panel at a conference
called Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies at the University
of Alberta on June 23, 2016.
60. Eve Tuck, Angie Morill, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before Dispossession, or
Surviving It,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (2016): 12.
61. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
62. Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Fiscal Body of Sovereignty: To “Make Live” in Indian Country’, Settler Colo-
nial Studies (2015): 16, doi:10.1080/2201473X.2015.1090525.
63. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 145.
64. Geraldine Pratt, ‘Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception’, Antipode (2005): 1055–6.
65. Ibid.
66. Haraway, ‘SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.’
67. Put differently, decolonial imaginings of Indigenous life in the aftermath of colonial traumas
need to take health and its biopolitical discontents into full account in order to instantiate
embodiment otherwise.
68. For a quick glimpse of the beautiful work operating under the sign of Indigenous futurisms or
Indigenous futurity, see Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, ‘We Live in the Future. Come Join Us’, Ke
Kaupu Hehiale (blog), April 3, 2015, https://hehiale.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/we-live-in-
the-future-come-join-us/; and/or Karyn Recollet, ‘Gesturing Indigenous Futurities through
the Remix’, Congress on Research in Dance (2016), doi:10.1017/50149767715000492.
69. By this I mean that Indigenous studies needs to think in the small worlds of the ordinary and
the biological, not only in the big worlds of the court or the House of Commons, for example.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank (1) Emily Riddle for pointing me in the direction of literature on the Alexander
First Nation’s food cultures and (2) Dr Chloë Taylor and Kelly Struthers-Montford for commissioning
an earlier version of this paper for a conference called Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping
Critical Animal Studies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an
M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He holds a BA (Hons.) in Comparative Literature
from the University of Alberta. He was named by CBC Books (à la Tracey Lindberg) as one of six Indi-
genous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red
Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, and mâmawi-âcimowak.