SOVEREIGN HYDRO-LOGICS KRITIK

NOTES
This argument contends that the affirmative is committed to and/or perpetuates settler colonialism. The link arguments vary, but largely revolve
around the idea that western water management practices violate indigenous perspectives of water.

Affirmative responses are largely focused on perm/no link and an impact turn to the idea that there is an “indigenous perspective” of water that is
universal, environmentally benign and primitive.

For background reading, I found these two articles really useful, despite not really being great sources for evidence:
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-ecology
http://www.westcoastleaf.org/2019/07/17/decolonizing-our-understandings-of-the-law/

This is a relatively bare-bones file and there is a lot of room for improvement. If this research area becomes of interest to you/your lab in wave 2,
I recommend focusing on:

---a more nuanced description of which indigenous nations use which water practices. The affirmative evidence is example-heavy, the negative
evidence is more committed to generalizations
---naming conventions. This file uses contested terms pretty loosely. Indigenous, native, Indian, tribe, clan, nation, First World, aboriginal, etc. ---
work needs to be done defending/excluding these terms.
---framework articles grounded in indigenous pedagogy

Some cites that might be helpful for the next wave:

Harris, L. (2015) Hegemonic Water and Rethinking Natures Otherwise. In: W. Harcourt and I. L. Nelson (Eds) Practicing Feminist Political
Ecologies. Zed Books: London, pp. 157-181.

Sam, M.G.; Armstrong, J. Indigenous water governance and resistance: A Syilx perspective. In The Social Life of Water; Wagner, J.R., Ed.;
Berghahn Books: Oxford, UK, 2013; pp. 239–254.

Yates JS, Harris LM, Wilson NJ. Multiple ontologies of water: Politics, conflict and implications for governance. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space. 2017;35(5):797-815. doi:10.1177/0263775817700395
1NC
 #
Federal water management economizes water as resource. That facilitates indigenous
dispossession through physical, epistemic and ontological violence.
Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole, ““Seeing Water Like a State?”: Indigenous water governance
through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements,” Geoforum, 104)//BB

Engaging state-like forms of governance has several potential consequences for Indigenous water governance .
James C. Scott (1998) addressed the intersections of state power and expertise, territory, and control and management of “natures.” Among
other concerns, Scott stressed that states regularly pursue programs that advance the goal of ecological and cultural
simplification and legibility. This simplification is achieved through the creation of ‘management units’ that
considers “ resources ” outside of the broader ecological, socio-cultural and political realities they are a
part of (Stevenson, 2006). State programs extend state power over Indigenous peoples, a process that often
entails considerable physical, epistemic and ontological violence as they seek to dispossess
Indigenous peoples of their lands and waters, political structures, ontologies and epistemologies (Coulthard,
2014, Harris, 2004, Hunt, 2014, Sundberg, 2014, Todd, 2016, Watts, 2013, Wolfe, 2006). In the book What is water?: the history of a modern
abstraction, Jamie Linton (2010) describes the history of Modern Water – defined as understanding s of water as a
resource that can be known, owned and exploited (Groenfeldt, 2013, Linton, 2010, Strang, 2004) – as a history of abstraction,
meaning that water has become increasingly separated from its social and political contexts (see also Linton and Budds, 2014). The development
of the hydrologic sciences played an important role in the production of Modern Water. Overall, the conceptualization of water as a material
substance, H2O, which circulates through the physical processes of the hydrologic cycle (e.g., precipitation, evapotranspiration, etc.) ignores
socio-cultural and political relations to water and the ways that these are shaped through interactions among
water users, including relations infused with power differences and the cultural politics that follow (Boelens, 2013). The abstraction
of water is closely connected to state-formation as hydrologic science make water increasingly “legible” and amenable to control
by state agencies (Linton, 2010). In the United States, for example, Robert E. Horton’s (1931) visualization of the “hydrologic cycle” was
easily adapted to the needs of the state by rendering the nation’s water visible to central governing agencies and “by
institutionalizing the quantification of stocks and flows of water on a national scale, the state took a major step in making water available for, and
amenable to, management by state agencies” (Linton, 2010, p. 149). In the 20th century, in colonial states such as the United States, Canada and
Australia, the “legibility” of water and the hydraulic construction this enabled (e.g., the development of hydro-power) has been
closely related to the development of national identity and state expansion (Dunlap, 1999, Harris and Alatout,
2010, Swyngedouw, 2015, Worster, 1986). At the same time, these processes frequently contributed to the colonial
dispossession of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Feit, 1979, Lawson, 1994, Martin et al., 2008).

Settler violence threatens the entire planet with endless racist violence
Mishra 18, MA @ Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (Pankaj, “The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult,” New York
Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/race-politics-whiteness.html)//BB

settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States would jointly forge an identity geopolitics of the “higher races.” Today it
In the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its

has reached its final and most desperate phase , with existential fears about endangered white power
feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the greatest modern empire. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” President Trump said last
year in a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about “large-scale killing” of white farmers in
South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert Murdoch’s media, of white supremacists around the world. To understand the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism in English-speaking liberal democracies today, we must
examine the experience of unprecedented global migration and racial mixing in the Anglosphere in the late 19th century: countries such as the United States and Australia where, as Roosevelt wrote admiringly in 1897, “democracy,
with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien.” It is in the motherlands of democracy rather than in fascist Europe that racial hierarchies first defined the modern world. It is also where a
last-ditch and potentially calamitous battle to preserve them is being fought today. This “race selfishness” was sharpened in the late 19th century, as the elites of the “higher races” struggled to contain mass disaffection generated by
the traumatic change of globalization: loss of jobs and livelihoods amid rapid economic growth and intensified movements of capital, goods and labor. For fearful ruling classes, political order depended on their ability to forge an
alliance between, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “capital and mob,” between rich and powerful whites and those rendered superfluous by industrial capitalism. Exclusion or degradation of nonwhite peoples seemed one way of securing
dignity for those marginalized by economic and technological shifts. The political climate was prepared by intellectuals with clear-cut racial theories, such as Brooks Adams, a Boston Brahmin friend of Roosevelt, and Charles B.
Davenport, the leading American exponent of eugenics. In Australia, Pearson’s social Darwinism was amplified by media barons like Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert and a stalwart of the eugenics movement) and institutionalized in
a “White Australia” policy that restricted “colored” migration for most of the 20th century. Anti-minority passions in the United States peaked with the 1924 immigration law (much admired by Hitler and, more recently, by Jeff
Sessions), which impeded Jewish immigrants and barred Asians entirely. By the early 20th century, violence against indigenous peoples, immigrants and African-Americans reached a new ferocity, and nativist and racist demagogues
entrenched a politics of dispossession, segregation and disenfranchisement. Seeking to maintain white power globally, Roosevelt helped transform the United States into a major imperialist power. Woodrow Wilson, too, worked to
preserve, as he put it, “white civilization and its domination of the planet” even as he patented the emollient rhetoric of liberal internationalism that many in the American political and media establishment still parrot. At the post-
World War I Paris Peace Conference, which Wilson supervised, the leaders of Britain, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada not only humiliated the many Asians and Africans demanding self-
determination; they also jointly defeated an attempt by Japan, their wartime ally, to have a racial equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The exposure of Nazi crimes, followed by decolonization and civil
rights movements, generally discredited quasi-scientific racism and stigmatized overt expressions of white supremacism. In our own time, global capitalism has promised to build a colorblind world through economic integration. But
as revolts erupt against globalization in its latest, more disruptive phase, politicians and pundits in the Anglosphere are again scrambling to rebuild political communities around what W. E.B. Du Bois in 1910 identified as “the new
religion of whiteness.” The intellectual white web originally woven in late-19th-century Australia vibrates once more with what the historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds termed “racial knowledge and technologies that
animated white men’s countries and their strategies of exclusion, deportation and segregation.” Mr. Trump, for instance, has chosen Australia’s brutal but popular immigration policies as a model: “That is a good idea. We should do
that too,” he said in January 2017 to Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister at the time, as he explained his tactic of locking up refugees on remote islands. “You are worse than I am,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Turnbull. If right-
wing Australian politicians were among the first to mainstream a belligerent white nationalism, the periodicals and television channels of Rupert Murdoch have worked overtime to preserve the alliance between capital and mob in the
Anglosphere. Indulged by Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers, writers like Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Roberts repeatedly urged American neoconservatives after the Sept. 11 attacks to take up
the aging white man’s burden and quell mutinous natives. A broad range of figures in the Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which
Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition and

extermination of black and brown brutes. Not surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors
who build platforms where facts of injustice and inequality denied
political correctness, Islam and feminism are excoriated, the , chests thumped about a superior
but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active settler-colonialist project. Emotional incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of white power. For

the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today.
Whiteness denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth
find themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe
increasingly challenged. Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson
says that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that
his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him to vote for Mr. Trump. Other panicky white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to
propose norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted and

busy recyclers of Western supremacism , many of whom uphold a disgraced

promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a victim of politically correct criticism. Such

should not distract us from the lethal dangers

racial pseudoscience, remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce. The low comedy of charlatanry, however,

of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial knowledge, according to which the swarthy
enemy was subhuman, inviting extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The

Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across
the United States, Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair. A century ago, the
mere suspicion of being thrust aside by black and yellow peoples sparked apocalyptic visions of “race suicide.” Today, the “preponderance of China” that Pearson predicted is becoming a reality, and the religion of

whiteness increasingly resembles a suicide cult . Mr. Trump’s trade wars, sanctions, border walls, deportations, denaturalizations and other 11th-hour battles seem to push us all closer to
the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once outlined: that the rulers of the “higher races,” “struggling to hold on to what they have

stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the
world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end , will bring about a racial war such as the
world has never seen .”

The alternative is to decolonize water. That solves.

Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole Wilson, et al, “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance,”
Water, 11)//BB

The diverse understandings, constituencies and interests that surround water can be neglected, further erased, or oversimplified when water
governance actors assume what normative and shared understandings of water are [2]. Feminist scholarship, Indigenous theorists, and
political ecologists have contribute d valuable frameworks and analytics to extend analysis of politics and
governance. Applied to water, we can engage these approaches to understand water not as a hydrological or
biophysical system but as a “hydro-social” system, inseparable from politics, culture, and economy [9].
Offering another important example, Indigenous scholars and allies have foregrounded Indigenous water ontologies
and epistemologies, rooted in responsibilities to water as a living entity and suggesting that colonial
understandings of water, as a material resource , should be challenged and decolonized to address past
injustices and move towards more just and sustainable interactions with , and uses of, water (e.g., [11,13,16,17]).
Ethnographers, including feminist scholars, have re-scaled and re-contextualized water’s access, uses, and governance through a focus on
citizenship and racialization, the emotional and affective embodiments of water , and the politics, negotiations and relations
of “the everyday” (e.g., [18–23]). Examples of wider conversations open ed- up include how bodies are enrolled in uneven
geographies of water access, the multi-species and multi-actor entanglements that (re)constitute “hydro-
social” and infrastructural assemblages, and analytical re-orientations of governance to include intangible
meanings and values of water (e.g., [18–23]). From such scholarship, a broader understanding of what governance might entail
is brought into view, often contrasting with a narrow managerial perspective on how to “better” govern
water [1]. These provocative entry points invite attention not only to the uneven distribution and access to
water for humans and non-humans, but also highlight the wider governing ethics, arrangements,
histories, and political-economic systems that give rise to, sustain, and reinforce such patterns (e.g.,
[20,24–28]).
LINK
 L---Water As Resource
Federal water management is fundamentally at odds with indigenous epistemology.
Propagating it buttresses settler colonialism.
Wilson and Inkster 18, *PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell, **Professor @ U Alberta/Yukon College (Nicole and
Jody, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground,” Environment and Planning,
1.4)//BB

Yukon First Nations play a substantive role in water governance in Yukon as the result of modern land claims agreements. However, even
a
cursory analysis of water governance in Yukon Territory shows an approach to governance that reflects a
fundamentally different view of water than that carried through the Elders’ articulation of ‘‘respecting water.’’ Water is widely
referred to as a ‘‘resource’’ (e.g. Yukon Water Strategy and Action Plan (Environment Yukon, Water Resources Branch), 2014). Also, according
to the Yukon Waters Act (Yukon Legislative Counsel, 2003: 3) ‘‘Water belongs to Government.’’ While the idea that the Yukon
Government ‘‘owns’’ the water is problematic from the perspective of Indigenous rights and jurisdiction,
it also reveals the pervasiveness of settler colonialism and its buttressing ontologies – as ‘‘land [synonymous with
water] is remade into property and human relationships to [water],’’ restricting all views ‘‘to the relationship of the
owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are [thus] interred,
indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage’’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5). In the same vein, the ‘‘water rights
of Yukon First Nations,’’ referred to in the UFA frames the relationship to water in relation to property rights,
absenting all reference to water as an ethic of respect . It thus also undermines any charge to First Nations to recognize and
enact their ethic of responsibility, to take care of water – a living entity to which they have kinship ties (Anderson et al., 2013; McGregor, 2014).
Water is thus rendered a resource . Or, as Anishinaabe scholar Deborah McGregor states: Water, in the dominant Western Euro-
Canadian context, is conceptualized as a resource, a commodity to be bought and sold. Federal and provincial governments
therefore make decisions about water based on a worldview, philosophy and set of values which stands in
direct contrast to the views of First Nations people. (2014: 496) Although not necessarily intentional, following Kim
Tallbear (2011), engaging settler understandings of water in water governance ‘‘ engenders a lot of
violence’’ due to the constant impulse to separate humans from non-humans.

The colonial project hinges on turning water into resource

O’Shea 18, Professor of World Arts at UCLA (Janet, “Decolonizing the Curriculum? Unsettling possibilities for performance training,”
Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 8.4)//BB

Tuck and Yang attend to settler colonialism in particular, the breed of colonialism exercised in the Americas (as well as Australia and New
Zealand), pointing out that colonialism in this context involved the theft of land from its original denizens, the forced relocation of the original
inhabitants, and the ongoing impoverishment of their descendants. Settler colonialism resulted in the long-term loss of both land and sovereignty
whereas metropolitan colonialism resulted in long-term international imbalances of wealth but also saw rule and land at least partially returned to
the colonized. Metropolitan colonialism saw the extraction of wealth but land could more easily be claimed back in the wake of independence
when colonization occurred primarily on an absentee basis. Both settler and expansionist colonialism , however, as Tuck and Yang
point out (2012, p. 5), involved
the reconceptualization of people, land, water , animals, and minerals as “ resources ”’
that could be reframed as economic entities (objects, chattel, workers) in the first place . Tuck and Yang attend
exclusively to the United States context and their definition of decolonization refers particularly to the “unsettling” possibilities it poses,
specifically regarding land ownership. Their critique is an important one, given the tendency to overlook the American history of settler
colonialism in a rush to highlight the (formerly) colonized status of many immigrants to America, “equivocating” the vexed status of many
American immigrants as both formerly colonized subjects and as colonizers/settlers (Tuck; Yang, 2012, p. 17). The implications of Tuck and
Yang’s argument are that colonialism is not only material - relying upon extracting raw materials, processing
them, and selling them back at a profit - but also that its worldview turns an interconnected network of
beings into materials . I want to take seriously their arguments that colonization hinges on turning living beings
and the physical world into economic resources , a phenomenon seen clearly in Trump’s enabling of a corporate “land grab”2.
However, I also want to consider whether recognizing the epistemology that renders the living world economic things can undergird a critique of
the physical, material, and economic functions of colonialism, while not relegating those affected by settler colonialism to the “asterisk” category
that Tuck and Yang warn against (2012, p. 22-23). I want to consider whether treating the neoliberal system, in which profit is pursued at all cost,
as an extension of colonialism is helpful to resisting both ongoing colonialisms, neocolonialism, and neoliberal wealth inequality.
 L---Water Governance
Federal water management treats water as knowable and governable---that reifies settler
domination
Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole Wilson, et al, “Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance,”
Water, 11)//BB

Defined above, governance differs from government in that the latter is focused on formal government institutions, rules, regulations, and
managerial practices while the former involves wider considerations over how, and for whom, water is managed and made available [1]. This
broader governance framework includes focus on the interplay between actors, preferences, and political-economic imperatives [1], as well as
historical, socio-cultural, and legal considerations, and privileging of certain values, preferences, and worldviews. A focus on
government and management invites attention to politics as the formal regulation of water, inter-
jurisdictional negotiations, or outcomes of policies. Such an orientation also often implies that better
information and sharing of scientific data will help mitigate or solve problem x or y . Relatedly, such pursuits
might also assume that (a) water is knowable and can be managed, and (b) norms and desires are universal and
can be put into practice [7–9]. The reality is often remarkably different : Water access and rights are often
linked to contentious politics of struggle, water access and quality is deeply differentiated, water uses are
fundamentally contested, and what water “is” and how water is known, constructed, and lived is
variegated and difficult to conceptualize, let alone implement [8,10–14]. Allied with this, Perreault [15] suggests such
calls for “ good [water] governance ”, often ambiguous and vague, can: help conceal the political and economic
interests that lie behind the institutional arrangements, social relations, material practices and scalar
configurations involved in so-called ‘good governance’. If we are to employ this concept, then it is imperative we do so
critically, carefully elucidating the political nature inherent in the institutional arrangements and socio-environmental relationships to which it
refers. [15]
 L---MPAs
MPAs are intrinsically anti-indigenous---they maintain the drivers of both environmental
and indigenous destruction and violate treaty obligations with water-reliant tribes
Singleton 9, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Western Washington (Sara, “Native People and Planning for
Marine Protected Areas: How “Stakeholder” Processes Fail to Address Conflicts in Complex, Real-World Environments,” Coastal Management,
37.5)//BB

Why Tribes Oppose or are Skeptical of Large-Scale, Permanent MPAs. Tribes have not rejected the concept of marine
protected areas entirely, but they have raised
a variety of issues concerning what appears to them to be a simplistic,
and perhaps somewhat disingenuous policy initiative that shifts the burden of marine conservation away
from the larger society and onto a relatively small group of rights-holders (Williams & Rawson, 2006; Bowhay,
2006). Tribes are skeptical of MPAs on several grounds . One is what is perceived as a lack of specificity about the nature of the
problem(s) an MPA is intended to address, or how the MPA will be able to solve them. State and tribal managers are already using a variety of
tools such as conservation zones to protect vulnerable stocks during vulnerable periods, such as mouths of rivers when salmon are aggregating
prior to moving upstream to spawn. And tribes contend that some of the existing rules governing near-shore and marine protected areas are not
being enforced. The perception of many tribal managers is that MPAs are operating as a sort of “feel-good”
measure that was introduced—and embraced—before being properly considered (Bowhay, 2006). The most obvious place where institutional
differences between treaty and nontreaty fishing interests make a difference is that tribal fisheries are tied to specific areas—the tribe’s “usual and
accustomed places”—while nontreaty fishing is not. The implications of MPAs for allocation are obvious —place-based
no-take measures are likely to redistribute fishing opportunities from treaty to nontreaty fisheries , and, among
tribes with competing U. and A.s, from one tribe to another. This is an example of the problem referenced earlier—a lack of
attention to distributive inequalities. Claims that are often made—both in MPA planning processes and within the MPA academic
literature—about the direct or indirect economic benefits that may accrue to fishermen as the result of protected areas (such as spillover benefits),
yet in this instance, tribes
see MPAs as making further inroads into a right that is already severely
compromised . Distributive inequalities are subtext of a third set of objections, which illustrate the degree to which the interpretation of
terms or concepts is profoundly influenced by the specific history of a particular group of people in a particular location. Due to its place in the
often bitter conflicts over fishing rights during much of the 20th century, the discourse surrounding “conservation” is deeply
problematic for Washington tribes. In the decades leading up to the U.S. v. Washington case, tribal
fishermen were prosecuted, jailed, and had their equipment seized or destroyed —ostensibly on the
grounds of conservation. The reality was that by allowing the overwhelming proportion of harvestable
fish to be taken prior to reaching traditional tribal fishing grounds, the state was practicing allocation
between treaty and nontreaty fishermen, while labeling it “conservation.” 5 The legacy of that period lives on in the
minds of tribal managers and tribal fishermen. Many tribes believe that at least some MPA proposals may be analogous cases
of allocation masquerading as conservation—this time to recreational divers and the industries they
support, or to waterfront property owners seeking view protection (Williams & Rawson, 2006). Questions about
equitable allocation—of harvestable fish and of the costs of environmental remediation—also emerge from what might be considered the social
construction or broader narrative of marine conservation. Few would doubt that the history of mining, logging, and dam
construction in the region or the recent explosion of residential development, road-building, and
consequent stormwater runoff have had devastating impacts on marine resources and fish habitat .6
Historically, tribes have benefited little from most of these activities . Policy instruments such as MPA no-
take zones might be described as “lastditch” efforts to address environmental problems that have
developed over a long period of time from multiple causes . By applying the same sorts of restrictions to
all users or even to a particular class of users such as fishermen, they create the appearance of fairness, yet this
perception rests on an overly narrow, “snap-shot” view of the problem, without regard for its broader
causes or the asymmetry of their costs and benefits . In the words of one tribal policy analyst with respect to salmon fishing,
What you are seeing is the greater society, the non-treaty society, has made a decision about how they want to
allocate impact on a particular stock. [In effect, they are saying] “ We’d rather have our impact in terms of urban
growth and water removal for the greater society for watering lawns and power generation .” And
the tribes are saying, “Well, we want to maintain water in the rivers ... and we want to fish .” (Bowhay, 2006).
Incorporating indigenous perspectives into MPA design backfires---no indigenous buy-in
Ban 18, PhD, Professor @ U Victoria (Natalie and Alejandro Frid, “Indigenous peoples' rights and marine protected areas,” Marine Policy,
87)//BB

Incorporating Indigenous knowledge and data into environmental governance also raises broader
sensitivities about information-sharing [37]. For instance, our direct experience is that First Nations worry
that the public sharing of Indigenous spatial knowledge applicable to MPA network design could have
unintended consequences, such as increased fishing pressure in biologically-rich or culturally-
significant areas that they had intended to protect. This concern reflects a prior history of failed trust
between Indigenous people and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO: the federal agency that manages marine fisheries). Such history spans
conflicts over different species, but has been particularly strong in the case of fisheries for Pacific Herring in the Northern Shelf Bioregion [38].
 L---Infrastructure
Infrastructure building is antithetical to indigenous life. It’s physical trespassing and an
extension white modernity.
Spice 18, member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation. She has earned degrees in anthropology at the University of Lethbridge and Dalhousie
University. She is researching ways to build networks of solidarity between Indigenous movements against settler colonization and land
expropriation and is especially attentive to the spaces opened by and for queer, trans, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit people as a part of their work for
decolonization. She teaches and studies in Lenapehoking (so-called New York City) as a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the Graduate
Center, CUNY (Anne, “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 9)//BB

infrastructure refers to processes, systems, facilities, technologies, networks, assets and services
Critical

essential to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians and the eff ective functioning of government. . . . Disruptions of critical infrastructure could result
in catastrophic loss of life, adverse economic eff ects and signifi cant harm to public confi dence. (PSC 2018) In Unist’ot’en territory in northern British Columbia, Canada, clan members of the Wet’suwet’en people have built a
permanent encampment in the pathway of numerous potential and proposed pipelines. In response to the characterization of these pipeline projects as “critical infrastructure,” the camp’s spokesperson, Freda Huson, notes that the

pipelines were proposed to run through the clan’s best berry patches. By resisting pipeline construction, she explains, “what we’re doing here is protecting
our critical infrastructure.” Th e language game of the response inverts the promise and inevitability of settler infrastructures but
does not replace it with a network that works within the same epistemological and ontological relations to land and kin . When I asked
Freda to describe the diff erence between industry conceptions of critical infrastructure, and the infrastructures that sustain Indigenous life on Unist’ot’en yintah (territory), she told me this: So industry and government

always talk about critical infrastructure, and their critical infrastructure is making money, and using destructive projects to make that

money, and they go by any means necessary to make that hap pen. . . . So for us, our critical infrastructure is the clean drinking water, and the very water that
the salmon spawn in, and they go back downstream and four years, come back. Th at salmon is our food source; it’s our main staple food. Th at’s one of our critical infrastructures. And there’s berries that are our critical infrastructure,
because the berries not only feed us, they also feed the bears, and the salmon also don’t just feed us, they feed the bears. And each and every one of those are all connected, and without each other, we wouldn’t survive on this
planet. . . . For example, the bears will eat the berries and they’ll drop it, and the waste that comes out of the bear, it’s got seeds in it, so that germinates and we get more berries. We need the bears in order to keep producing our
berries, and same with the salmon. Th e bears eat the salmon as well, because once the salmon spawn, they end up dying anyways, and that becomes food for the bears, so it’s not being wasted. All of that is part of the system that our

government are pushing these

people depend on, and that whole cycle and system is our critical infrastructure, and that’s what we’re trying to protect, an infrastructure that we depend on. And industry and

projects that would destroy that critical infrastructure, most important to our people. (emphasis added) Here, Freda appropriates the term “critical
infrastructure” to index the interconnected networks of human and other-than-human beings that sustain Indigenous life in mutual relation. Th is network stands in
stark contrast to the critical infrastructures of government and industry— infrastructures that are meant to destroy
Indigenous life to make way for capitalist expansion. By contrasting these two meanings under one term, she brings attention to the underlying driving force of
industrial infrastructure, exposing the lie that these projects are creative/productive and instead insisting that they are regressive/destructive and embedded in a

capitalist system that is fundamentally at odds with the cycles and systems that make Indigenous survival possible. Infrastructure vis-à-vis Settler
Colonialism How, then, can an anthropology of infrastructure address the radical vision of Indigenous resistance to settler infrastructures? In a 2013 review article in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Brian Larkin defi nes

infrastructures as: built networks that facilitate the fl ow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its
movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown. Th ey comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the

undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life. (2013: 328) Larkin advocates for a systems analysis of infrastructures, and stresses that
infrastructures are networks that cannot always be reduced to the technologies or materials that make them up: “infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter . . . they are things and also the relation between
things” (329). As such, infrastructures “create the grounds” of operation for other objects. Looking at infrastructures as systems, Larkin argues, allows us to attend to how the defi nition of an assemblage as infrastructure works to
categorize the world. Th is act of defi nition “comprises a cultural analytic that highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural (and thus causal) and what one leaves out”
(230). As the Canadian government’s defi nition of “critical infrastructure” above makes clear, these political commitments may come into confl ict, as infrastructures are proposed across territories that Indigenous peoples have never
surrendered to the Canadian state. Th is article links literature in the anthropology of infrastructure, settler colonial studies, and critical Indigenous studies to understand the emergence of “critical infrastructure” as a settler colonial

An anthropology attentive to settler colonial power relations must

technology of governance and expropriation in lands now claimed by Canada.

consider not only “our” analytic categories (as anthropologists) but also the categories that wield and carry the authority (and violence) of the settler state. Th e government mobilizes the language
of “critical infrastructure” to transform oil and gas infrastructures from industry projects into crucial matters of
national interest. Th at authority is buoyed further by the genealogy of the concept of infrastructure itself, which Larkin shows is the genealogical descendant
of Enlightenment ideas about modernity and progress. While the categorization of oil and gas technologies as “critical infrastructure” is a relatively recent move, the
discursive positioning of infrastructure as a gateway to a modern future has been used in state-building
projects around the world for some time now. Th e confl ict over oil and gas infrastructures, however, is more than a disagreement about what “counts” as infrastructure and what does not. Embedded in
Larkin’s defi nition of infrastructure is a tacit assumption that infrastructures, as “things and also the relation between things,” are inanimate, are not alive. Freda Huson calls attention to the salmon, the berries, and the bears that form
“our critical infrastructure.” Th is living network is not an assemblage of “things and relation between things,” but rather a set of relations and things between relations. Th ese are relations that require caretaking, which Indigenous
peoples are accountable to. And they are relations that are built through the agency of not only humans but also other-than-human kin. Th e bears and salmon create and maintain the assemblage as much as (or more than) humans do.
Infrastructure, then, attempts but fails to capture the agentive and social network through which Indigenous life is produced.1 Th ese assemblages exist whether or not they are framed or captured by anthropological theory. Th e
comparison between oil and gas infrastructures and Indigenous assemblages, however, helps to illuminate how the binaries of civilized/savage and culture/nature continue to operate within anthropological theory to code the built
environment of “modern societies” as a mark of progress and a space of political reckoning while obscuring the Indigenous relations these infrastructures attempt to replace. If the infrastructural is what is seen as causal, and if the defi
nition of the infrastructural does not capture Indigenous assemblages that sustain life, then what do we make of the causal force of other-than-human relations (the water, the bears, the berries, the salmon)? Put another way, how do
Indigenous peoples mobilize relational systems—or how are Indigenous peoples mobilized by commitments to these systems—against oil and gas infrastructures when these are naturalized as the “ambient environment of everyday

critical infrastructures ” constitutes a form of

life?” To answer these questions, I make two central assertions. First, the characterization of oil and gas pipelines as “

settler colonial invasion , and second, Indigenous resistance to oil and gas infrastructures, through suspension, disruption, and
blockages, protect our relations against the violence of settler colonial invasion, and open alternatives for
living in good relation to our territories. I address each assertion by turning to a set of fi eld insights followed by an engagement with relevant literatures in settler colonial studies and the
anthropology of infrastructure. Field Insights: Critical Infrastructure I visited Unist’ot’en Camp for the fi rst time in the summer of 2015. I responded to the people’s call for support on the ground aft er increased industry pressure and
police presence threatened to breach the borders of their territory and begin construction of pipelines on their land. Th e atmosphere at the camp was tense, in part because the stakes of participation in Indigenous resistance to pipelines
were both raised and unclear. For the fi rst few days, I sat by the fi re alone, feeling the distrust and fear in the gaze of the Indigenous peoples gathered. In a matter of weeks, these people would grow to be my dearest friends, but in
those fi rst tense and heated days, they could not aff ord to trust a stranger. In May of that year, the Canadian legislature had passed Bill C-51 (House of Commons of Canada 2015), which redefi ned “activity that undermines the
security of Canada” as “any activity . . . if it undermines the sovereignty, security, or territorial integrity of Canada or the lives or the security of the people of Canada.”Activities explicitly listed include “interference with the capacity
of Th e Government of Canada in relation to intelligence, defense, border operations, public safety, the administration of justice, diplomatic or consular relations, or the economic or fi nancial stability of Canada,” “terrorism,” and
“interference with critical infrastructure.” An emergent category for the governance of crisis, critical infrastructure is defi ned by the Canadian government as the “processes, systems, facilities, technologies, networks, assets and
services essential to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians and the eff ective functioning of the government” (PSC 2009: 2). Th e United States operates under a similar defi nition of critical infrastructure as
“systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health
or safety, or any combination of those matters” (WHOPS 2013). Canada and the United States also coordinate to protect and maintain cross-border critical infrastructures, which facilitate the fl ow of goods, capital, and people
between the two countries. Because the discourse of critical infrastructure is tightly linked to one of “national security,” as well as “economic well-being,” there is discursive and legal space open for an understanding of oil and gas
pipelines as critical infrastructure because of the economic reliance of both the United States and Canada on revenue from fossil fuels. Th reats to pipeline projects, then, can be cast as threats to national (economic) security, and these
defi nitions of critical infrastructure make it possible to place resistance to fossil fuels in the same category as domestic terrorism. Even though the reoccupation of traditional territory at Unist’ot’en Camp has always been peaceful, in
2015 supporters worried that they could be cast as terrorists simply by helping the Unist’ot’en people to reestablish a home on the territory for which they have cared for thousands of years. Th is concern was amplifi ed by the
apparent coordination between oil and gas industry personnel and police. Supporters on their way to Unist’ot’en Camp were surveilled; police checkpoints stopped cars on the logging road and issued tickets for broken taillights and
cracked windshields. In between police visits meant to intimidate supporters, industry executives attempted to “negotiate” entry onto Unist’ot’en territory. Th ese tactics mirrored the industry-police collaboration that was made clear
in a leaked report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Assessment Team entitled Criminal Th reats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry. Th e report’s key fi ndings draw attention to “a
growing, highly organized and well-fi nanced, anti-Canadian petroleum movement, that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists, who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” and the capacity of “violent
anti-petroleum extremists” to “engage in criminal activity to promote their anti-petroleum ideology” (RCMP 2014:1). Th e report’s dismissal of environmental concerns with climate change and environmental destruction as “anti-
petroleum ideology” is matched with an uncritical ventriloquism of industry statements and concerns. Th e report is particularly concerned with “violent aboriginal [sic] extremists,” and their ability to garner wide national and

An unmarked binary operates throughout the report: privatized oil and gas technologies
international support for actions against oil and gas incursions into Indigenous territories.

and pipelines are “critical infrastructures ” in need of increased securitization and protection, while protection of

Indigenous lands and ecologies is extremist ideology. In the lands now occupied by Canada, the state’s approach to Indigenous protest has shift ed under Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau’s government, which has fully embraced the politics of recognition with its accompanying reconciliation pageantry. On National Aboriginal Day in 2016, the Trudeau administration released a statement on the
government’s approach to Indigenous peoples, saying: “No relationship is more important to our government and to Canada than the one with Indigenous peoples. Today, we reaffi rm our government’s commitment to a renewed
nation-to-nation relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples, one based on the recognition of rights, respect, trust, co-operation, and partnership” (PMO 2016). Despite these statements of “recognition,” Indigenous peoples
remain in a deeply subordinated relationship to Canada, and political claims to land and self-governance are repeatedly squashed in favor of cultural exchange (Coulthard 2014, A. Simpson 2014). Th e prime minister’s statement of
recognition itself embodies this by reciting the language of a nation-to-nation relationship as the route to reconciliation but ending with the facile suggestion that reconciliation can be practiced by Canadians reading more books by
Indigenous authors: “I invite you to join the #IndigenousReads campaign to help raise awareness and understanding through shared culture and stories and encourage steps toward reconciliation with Indigenous peoples” (PMO 2016).
While the government shift s the focus to “shared culture and stories” and away from Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty, oil and gas infrastructures have continued to operate as emblems of national progress and resource
wealth. Resource extraction is coded as “critical” to national well-being and is normalized as unavoidable common sense. While the veneer of cooperation and negotiation has thickened under Trudeau, the underlying approach to the
oil and gas industry has remained consistent with past governments. In the Speech from the Th rone presented by Stephen Harper’s government in 2013, the Government of Canada highlighted the role of resource extraction in
Canada’s future: “Canada’s energy reserves are vast—suffi cient to fuel our growing economy and supply international customers for generations to come. . . . A lack of key infrastructure threatens to strand these resources at a time
when global demand for Canadian energy is soaring. . . . Canada’s natural wealth is our national inheritance” (LOP 2013). In a continuation of this approach to oil and gas, Trudeau gave the keynote speech to a meeting of oil and gas
executives in Houston, Texas, noting, “No country would fi nd 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there” (Berke 2017). His speech was met with a standing ovation. Th e naturalization of oil and gas extraction

critical infrastructures ” serve to link industry profi ts to national security, criminalizing

and the securitization of pipelines as “

Indigenous dissent and recasting destructive infrastructure projects as natural outgrowths of the settler
state. Given the use of the term “critical infrastructure” to legitimize extractive projects that have not received the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous nations guaranteed under the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNGA 2008), the intersections between offi cial state defi nitions of “infrastructure” and the tactics and technologies of settler colonialism merit further explanation. Invasive Infrastructures Th is article

settler colonial “invasion is a structure not an event ” and turns to one of invasion’s contemporary material forms: oil and
takes up Patrick Wolfe’s (2006: 388) assertion that

infrastructure. In North America, the expansion of oil and gas networks is tightly linked to the continued displacement, pacifi cation,
gas

and expropriation of unceded and treaty-guaranteed lands historically inhabited and cared for by
Indigenous peoples. Pipelines, like other modern infrastructures, are not events, but they are eventful: rooted in a settler future, they enable
a material transit of empire (Byrd 2011), and this movement is hailed as an inevitable and necessary pathway to
progress. Pipelines become a key link between the expropriation of Indigenous homelands and industrial expansion, environmental crisis, and imperialist war. Oil and gas fl ow out of occupied Indigenous territories and fuel
the maintenance of environmentally and socially devastating ways of life. Despite this imperial “transit,” settler state discourse imagines “critical infrastructures” as assemblages that serve the Canadian public, need protection, and
reimagine the social good in terms of the aggregate economy (Mitchell 2011; Murphy 2017). Yet as Unist’ot’en spokesperson Freda Huson makes clear, Indigenous resistance to “critical infrastructures” contests the very category of

As the “undergirding of modern

infrastructure itself, asserting alternative ontological and epistemological modes of relating to assemblages that move matter and sustain life.

societies” (Larkin 2013), critical infrastructures are infrastructures of invasion . By facilitating capitalist exchange, reproducing and encouraging new forms of
white land ownership, and cementing settler ontologies that naturalize the existence and domination of the nation-state, colonial dispossession travels through

infrastructures, as they are used to extend settlements’ reach into Indigenous territories that remain unceded, unsurrendered to the
Canadian state, or protected under treaty agreements with Indigenous nations. The settler state is built through a network of infrastructures , which must

be normalized and maintained to assert settler jurisdiction toward nation-building projects (Pasternak 2014). Infrastructures
that transport people have been identifi ed as formations of settler colonization. Th e railroads that facilitated westward expansion onto Indigenous territories in Canada and the United States were deeply colonial projects that required
the labor of Chinese immigrants and the displacement of Indigenous peoples in order to build capital and deliver settlers to the West (Day 2016). Manu Vimalassery describes how the land grants underwriting the Central Pacifi c
Railroad link the assertion of settler sovereignty to underlying Indigenous claims to land; the practice of “counter-sovereignty” in this case uses railroad infrastructure to both build on and replace preexisting Indigenous sovereignties
to shape and expand colonial geographies (2014: 88). Other transportation infrastructures operate this way as well. As Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (2015) make clear in their book Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and
Expertise, roads and highways are fully entangled in politics at both the micro and macro levels. Madhuri Karak (2016) uses the case of Odisha, India, to trace how roads are used to aid counterinsurgency eff orts to remove guerrillas
and facilitate land grabbing. Th e association of roads with military presence led local people to take paths, avoiding the shiny asphalt highway even if this was an added inconvenience. And as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes, the
extensive roadways used by North American Native peoples as trade routes before colonization have been paved over, forming the major highways of the United States and obscuring the mobility and presence of Native peoples, both

modern infrastructure elides the supposedly “nonmodern”

historically and presently (2014: 28–30). Th us, in crucial ways, the concept of

assemblages of Indigenous peoples that were transformed into settler property and infrastructure. Settlers
acquired their “ modernity ” as infrastructures facilitated dispossession while disavowing their roots in
Indigenous organizations of space. If settler colonialism is a structure that “destroys to replace” (Wolfe 2006), then transportation infrastructures are themselves settler colonial technologies of
invasion. Th ese transportation infrastructures intersect with oil and gas projects, as both are increasingly grouped under the defi nition of critical infrastructures secured by the state in Canada and the United States. Furthermore, the
danger of transporting oil by rail is oft en used to argue for the construction of “safer” pipelines, ironically acknowledging the possibility of the railroads creating contamination, death, and disaster (as if they didn’t cause these things
from their inception), while pushing oil pipelines as further incursions onto Indigenous territories in the name of “public safety” (Wilt 2017). Since the very beginning of the settler colonial project in 46 Anne Spice North America,
infrastructures have been sites of contact, violence, tension, and competing jurisdiction. Deborah Cowen (2017) emphasizes not only the temporality of infrastructures that reach toward aspirations of their completion but also their
entanglement with the past: Infrastructures reach across time, building uneven relations of the past into the future, cementing their persistence. In colonial and settler colonial contexts, infrastructure is oft en the means of
dispossession, and the material force that implants colonial economies and socialities. Infrastructures thus highlight the issue of competing and overlapping jurisdiction—matters of both time and space. Th e infrastructures that support
oil and gas development form a network of completed and proposed projects that are embedded in the national imaginaries of settler colonies while also reaching beyond international borders. Th ey enable the material transit of
energy, as well as the ideological claims of settler sovereignty over Indigenous territory. 2 In the case of Unist’ot’en Camp, pipelines currently proposed through the unceded territories of the Wet’suwet’en nation in northern British
Columbia, Canada, rely on fracking fi elds to the northeast and on the construction of liquefi ed natural gas (LNG) export facilities on the coast. Th e controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline would transport oil from the
Athabasca tar sands across the US border to meet up with existing pipelines in Nebraska. Michael Watts (2015) has referred to this network as an “oil assemblage,” and anthropologists have attended to the material and political
consequences of oil as it travels through these networks (Rogers 2015). In the case of Indigenous resistance to oil and gas assemblages, these pipeline infrastructures also carry the work of jurisdiction and the assertion of political
claims to territory and resources. Proposed pipelines assume and assert settler jurisdiction over the unceded Wet’suwet’en territories in British Columbia in order to usher in prosperity for the Canadian public, and they do so in concert
with transportation infrastructures. When police approached the border of Unist’ot’en territory in 2015, they told us that our actions were not allowed because we were blocking a “public highway” (a logging road). Hence, the
language of infrastructure is used to delegitimize Indigenous claims to territory by replacing them with allusions to the legality of “public” access. Th e extraction of oil and gas is normalized, and the petro-economy invades Native
lands in the name of the settler public, extending the net of economic relations reliant on oil and gas and making it harder and harder to imagine and live into relations outside of capitalism. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) has
pointed out, settler nation-states are steeped in “possessive logics” that dispossess Indigenous nations both historically and presently through the enduring reproduction of white possession. Material infrastructures such as the
buildings, roads, pipes, wires, and cables that make up cities are built alongside and on top of Indigenous sovereignties. Th ese sovereignties, Moreton-Robinson insists, still exist but are “disavowed through the materiality of these
signifi cations, which are perceived as evidence of ownership by those who have taken possession” (2015: xiii). Indigenous peoples who are resisting the infrastructures of oil and gas recognize the power of a pipeline to reinscribe
white possession on their territories. Th ese are also infrastructures of white supremacy. For the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, resistance to the construction of pipelines in their territory is resistance to the invasion of
the Canadian state onto territories that they have never ceded or surrendered to the province or the crown. Unist’ot’en people regularly remind visitors to their land that it is not Canada, it is not British Columbia: it is unceded
Wet’suwet’en territory. Oil and gas companies, on the other hand, publicize their projects by hailing settler publics through possessive investment in Indigenous territories as a pathway to prosperous settler futures. Oil and gas
extraction and infrastructure reproduces the settler state, not only through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples but also through the generation, maintenance, reproduction, and naturalization of settler ontologies. In the case of
pipelines, the land through which pipelines are built is not owned by oil and gas companies but drawn into the oil and gas assemblage as a form of white dominion: Indigenous sovereignty stands in the way of oil and gas
infrastructures by asserting a prior jurisdiction over territory. While oil and gas companies strive to present their projects as just another national infrastructure—TransCanada’s (2017) Coastal Gaslink pipeline is even pitched as a
boon to other infrastructures: “Annual property tax revenues generated from the project can also help build important infrastructure that we rely on every day like roads, schools and hospitals”—white possession continues to
naturalize projects that cut through Indigenous territories in service of the national interest. As Indigenous feminist scholars continue to remind us, the work of white possession in settler states traffi c in patriarchal notions of

Reclaiming relations
ownership and property that have implications for ways of relating beyond heteropatriarchal settler normativity (Arvin et al. 2013; Barker 2017; Goeman 2013; Hall 2009).

beyond invasive infrastructures means acknowledging the violence done by prioritizing technical and
technological infrastructure as the work of national progress . The settler state shapes narratives around
infrastructure projects that make them out to be a part of the natural advancement of the nation-state
while masking the violence they cause to Indigenous land and bodies, especially the bodies of women
and girls (Dhillon 2015; Jensen 2017; A. Simpson 2016; L. Simpson 2017). Oil and gas extraction, in particular, creates spaces of unchecked white masculinity in which incidents of violent abduction, abuse, and rape of
Indigenous women and girls have skyrocketed (Gibson et al. 2017; Jensen 2017; WEA and NYSHN 2016). Attention to alternatives would recognize the work done by generations of women and
Two-Spirit people to protect and maintain the assemblages that sustain Indigenous life in the face of settler colonial invasion3 —work that the Dakota scholar Kim TallBear (2016) calls caretaking relations. In spaces of land defense

reinvigorate alternatives to infrastructures

and Indigenous resistance across Canada and the United States, women have led movements to protect the land and water and to

threatening destruction of land and Indigenous ways of life (Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014).

Vote negative to reject settler infrastructures. That blockade is vital to disrupting settler
futurity.
Spice 18, member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation. She has earned degrees in anthropology at the University of Lethbridge and Dalhousie
University. She is researching ways to build networks of solidarity between Indigenous movements against settler colonization and land
expropriation and is especially attentive to the spaces opened by and for queer, trans, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit people as a part of their work for
decolonization. She teaches and studies in Lenapehoking (so-called New York City) as a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the Graduate
Center, CUNY (Anne, “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 9)//BB

Infrastructure is by defi nition future oriented; it is assembled in the service of worlds to come. Infrastructure demands a
focus on what underpins and enables formations of power and the material organization of everyday life in time and space. Cowen (2017) off ers
an expansive defi - nition of infrastructures as “the collectively constructed systems that also build and sustain human life,” and terms the
alternatives to state systems “fugitive infrastructures.” While fugitive infrastructure may not be an obvious place to start, anthropology must
break from the reifi cation of infrastructure’s stated purpose and imposed coherence. Fugitivity calls our attention to the ways in which time,
space, and the material world are organized by power yet constantly disrupted and remade. An analysis that dwells in “fugitivity” attends to that
which can be gleaned from spaces of power (Moten and Harney 2013). With Cowen’s frame of “fugitive infrastructures,” we can draw attention
to the material, social, and economic networks that fl ourish in the space opened by industry pressure and the threat of environmental devastation.
Th e concept of “fugitivity,” however, has temporal and theoretical limitations in relation to Indigenous movements. While Indigenous
movements may disrupt settler infrastructures and the capitalist relations they sustain, these movements are not transitory, fl eeting, or temporary
(Spice 2016). Furthermore, Indigenous peoples are not fugitives “on the run” from settler governance. Instead, resistance to invasive
infrastructures requires standing in place, in our territories, and insisting on our prior and continuing relationships to the lands, kin, and other-
than-human relations that those infrastructures threaten. Indigenous blockades, checkpoints, and encampments slow and disrupt fl ows of
extractive capital and the ideological project of settler sovereignty while also strengthening alternative relations that tend to the matter beyond
what is usually considered the “built environment.” As such, these are not simply spaces of negation (as the oft -repeated phrase “no pipelines”
might suggest), but also spaces of radical possibility under Indigenous leadership and jurisdiction—possibility that is deeply threatening to the
continued operation of the capitalist settler state. As Larkin (2013) notes, the Enlightenment underpinnings of “infrastructure”
root the term in the building of modern futures. Indigenous blockades of “critical infrastructures” disrupt
the reproduction of settler futures through assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction, placing the settler
future in suspension . Shiri Pasternak and Tia Dafnos describe how blockades trigger state securitization: “Simply put, Indigenous
peoples interrupt commodity flows by asserting jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands and
resources in places that form choke points to the circulation of capital . Th us, the securitization of ‘critical
infrastructure’—essentially supply chains of capital, such as private pipelines and public transport routes—has become a priority in
mitigating the potential threat of Indigenous jurisdiction” (2017: 3). Pasternak and Dafnos draw attention to the particular
circuitry of oil and gas infrastructures in the global system of capitalist “just in time” production. Th e attention to systems, here, considers the
materiality of oil and pipelines but insists that the pipeline infrastructure be understood within the particular networks of circulation it enables.
When the Canadian state steps in to protect “critical infrastructures” by securitizing risk, we might ask, “Critical to what and whom?” What
subjects and publics are hailed into infrastructure projects, and how are they reproduced? Managing “critical infrastructures,” then, is
primarily about colonial governance . Pasternak and Dafnos argue that this shift in governing strategies has positioned industry
and corporations as partners in national security, marking Indigenous jurisdiction as a “risk” to be mitigated. Th is shift in governance reinscribes
settler colonial dispossession through the legal and material network built to support pipeline infrastructure. Movements to block critical
infrastructures, such as those enacted across the country during the Idle No More movement (the “Native winter” of 2012–2013), highlight the
ability of dispersed Native nations to signifi cantly alter the circulation of capital by shutting down highways, bridges, and railroads. By
participating in the politics of blockades, Indigenous activists are correctly identifying the reliance of the petro-state on energy infrastructure and
forcing open the contradiction between proposed and presumed energy infrastructure on stolen land. Th e naturalization of resource extraction
projects alongside the suspension of Indigenous life through settler infrastructure projects combine to mask the ways in which the language of
infrastructure itself can work to legitimize “modern” assemblages like pipelines while rendering invisible the living assemblages that would
strengthen Indigenous sovereignty and lifeways. If, following Larkin, we turn to “what one sees as infrastructural (and thus causal) and what one
leaves out” as a window into state aspirations and intentions, the Canadian context of oil and gas extraction returns the following conclusion: in
the eyes of the Canadian state, oil and gas pipelines count as infrastructural, while the relations of rivers, glaciers, lakes, mountains, plants and
animals and Indigenous nations are the natural resources to be modernized as commodities or subjects. Here, Larkin’s note that
infrastructures “literally provid[e] the undergirding of modern societies ” (2013: 328) raises a crucial question.
If those modern societies have settled, colonized, and attempted to eliminate existing Indigenous nations and political orders, does the word
infrastructure itself denote an apparatus of domination ?4 Here, the very act of defi ning infrastructures as tools of the state
takes for granted the state’s ontological claims. “What one leaves out” of the defi nition of infrastructure is a world of relations, fl ows, and
circulations that the settler state has attempted to destroy and supplant.
 L---Asian Carp
Asian Carp eradication enables the Euro-American land ethic that drives settler
colonialism
Reo and Ogden 17, *citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He is Associate Professor of Native American and
Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College where he studies Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship on Indigenous lands. Dr. Reo
blends ecological, anthropological and Indigenous methodologies in his work, often via tribal community-university partnerships., **PhD,
Associate Professor of Anthropology @ Dartmouth (Nicholas and Laura, “Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of
invasive species,” Sustainability Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0571-4)//BB

Our research revealed three important findings, as we describe below, that provide alternative perspectives about invasive species. First,
Anishnaabe teachings begin by recognizing all plants and animals as persons who assemble in “nations” as compared to the Western scientific
notion of species. Instead of problematizing “invasive species ”, Anishnaabe teachings portray the arrival of
new plants or animals as natural processes resulting from migrations by other-thanhuman nations . Second,
according to Anishnaabe teachings, it is the responsibility of humans to determine the reason why new plants or animals have arrived in their
territories, and actively determine the nature of novel human–animal or human–plant relationships. Third, our Anishnaabe collaborators
reframed problems of environmental change as related to the introduction of a Euro-American land
ethic . Our interviews revealed specific linkages to European settlement, but not to simple timelines associated with post-contact biotic loss and
change. Instead, according to Anishnaabe teachings, culpability lies in “invasive” ideologies rather than the
fault of specific animals or plants. Migrating nations Within Anishnaabe teachings, plants and animals are more than species; they are
regarded as persons. As examples, trees are “the standing people” and one Anishnaabe word for maple trees is anenemik or “the man tree”
(Kimmerer 2013). Not only are plants and animals people, but they are kin, or part of Anishnaabe extended family
(see Kimmerer 2013; Johnston 1976). As an example, Migiizi (eagle) is Anishnaabe’s grandparent who is always keeping an eye on their human
relatives from the sky. We initiated our ethnographic project to understand how a group of people with such a “kincentric” worldview (Salmon
2000) make sense of introduced and “invasive” species. Though there are no beliefs held in common among all indigenous people, it is a
commonly held belief among many indigenous groups around the world that plants, animals and other
beings are members of the extended family. For example, Māori peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand, like the Anishnaabe,
recognize rivers as their living ancestors (Muru-Lanning 2016; Fox et al. 2017) and indigenous people of New South Wales hold kinship relations
with the more-than-human beings in their homelands (Rose et al. 2003). The tradition bearers we spoke with emphasized that their ethical
obligations to plants and animals begins with the first principle of asking permission from these relatives before harvesting them. Anishnaabe
teachings instruct people to speak to plants before harvesting them (see also Kimmerer 2013), which is a way of acknowledging relationships
with non-human kin. As we observed, Anishnaabe harvesters will introduce themselves, explain why they want to harvest the plant, how they
will show the plant respect, and express thanks and sorrow for potentially taking their lives. This Anishnaabe principle precedes and supersedes
the legal requirement of harvest licenses or landowner permissions. Kathy Leblanc, a cultural leader and elder from Bay Mills explained “…to
me it’s our land I do not care if the state, private, or federal, it’s Anishnaabe aki and I just need permission from the plants to pick; I do not need
permission from the government or the conservation committees”. According to Anishnaabe teachings, all plant and animal nations have their
own Creation stories, wisdom, and unique gifts given by Creator, but people are understandably ignorant about these details for newly introduced
species. Several community members we spoke with expressed interest in learning about newly introduced plants
and animals from the indigenous people who have the longstanding connections to those species as well
as from the new species themselves. Bud Biron, cultural educator from the Sault Ste Marie tribe , for example
asked, “ I wonder if anyone has bothered to ask the Asian carp [Hypophthalmichthys nobilis, H.
molitrix, Mylopharyngodon piceus, and Ctenopharyngodon idella] or the hybrid cattail [Typha x glauca] why they are here?
We should use our ceremonies to ask these new plants and animals why they are here ”. Basketmaker and cultural
educator Josh Hominga similarly recounted, “an elder spoke about using some of our traditions, you know, like has anyone ever gone and laid
their tobacco down and asked this bug [emerald ash borer-Agrilus planipennis] to leave?” Like human persons, plants and animals are enmeshed
in multiple social relations, including collectives that Anishnaabe call “nations”, and sub-groups within nations referred to as clans. As members
of nations, plants, like animals and people, migrate. When asked, several of our Anishnaabe collaborators provided this explanation for plant
population changes. While some traditional doctors and their helpers expressed concern with region-wide declines in specific plant populations,
for the most part, they approach these changes with a wait-and-see pragmatism. Kathy Leblanc suggested that invasive species may just
be enacting their own migration stories. For LeBlanc, it is unclear whether new plants are passing through or
here to stay, but she sees nothing “unnatural” about their presence . As an example, Keith Smith, an Anishnaabe
traditional doctor from Red Lake Minnesota, described how the community viewed introduced earthworms. Earthworms, such as the common
nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris), have become common in parts of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. This group of introduced
species are known for rapidly altering nutrient cycling processes and reducing the diversity and abundances of
understory plants within forests in the upper Great Lakes region. Herbaceous plants, such as wild ginger (Asarum canadensis), that the
Anishnaabe use for food and medicine appear to be significantly impacted by invasive nightcrawlers (Bohlen et al. 2004). Even so, Smith
contrasted non-Anishnaabe land managers’ anxieties about these earthworms with his mother’s welcoming attitude. As he described, his mother
said to the worms “Come and eat!” In contrast to the predominant perspectives in invasive species management and
research, being new to an area, human-introduced, or even leading to environmental change does not
make an animal or plant unwelcome or inherently bad . Plants and animals move and migrate, and
these migrations are not inherently good or bad. Our interviews revealed a repeated caution to not judge plants and animals for
attributes beyond their control. As Rita Bulley described, “I feel bad for those things that are getting introduced, because… they don’t
know they’re invasive. They’re just growing, doing the only thing they know how to do”. This hesitancy to judge
has management implications as well. Anishnaabe elders, as Smith explained, often feel strongly that nature finds its own

balance, and people should not

intervene using chemicals or other drastic
management techniques .
Countering “invasive species” is a settler trick to justify the invasiveness of colonial
expansion
Bousefield 19, PhD, Professor @ Ontario U (Dan, “Settler colonialism in vegetal worlds: exploring progress and resilience at the margins
of the Anthropocene,” Settler Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2019.1604297)//BB

This paper seeks to develop a

critical vision of the anthropocentric framings of the vegetal world through the concept of settler
colonialism. Thinking about settlement beyond the human is
to come to terms with the largely racist and chauvinist
sensibilities that underpin concepts such as ‘invasive species,’ ‘blight’ and ‘resilience’ as disciplined forms of
anthropocentric values mapped onto vegetal life. Settler colonialism is a framework to expose the tacit and
explicit role that supposed vegetal ways of being are framed in terms of the projects of colonial expansion
and the ongoing racist practices of territorial acquisition and dispossession . In this paper, the framing of the passivity
that underpins the idea of being settled (as a form of ‘coming to rest,’ ‘a seat,’ or ‘a cause to sit’) will be challenged by exploring the tacit notions
of ‘sovereign’ as a single form of being that manifests as law. ‘Law’ plays an important role in framing methodological
assumptions in science as it structures both the notion that ‘nature’ has singular rules, and the concept of
‘peace’ as a foundation of lawfulness.1 Settler colonial sensibilities frame the absence of explicit conflict as a form of
peace, and then use that peace to develop ideas that foreignness as invasive and foreignness as blight , necessitate political
action to eliminate these problems. This framing stems from a universal vision of settlement, as an
encounter that involves non-recognition, or the idea that colonial silence reduces the rest of the world to
absence and non-agency. Non-recognition is an inability to come to terms with the comingling of vegetal and nonvegetal life in ways
that shape human practice without being able to see this happening. Vegetal ontologies present a limit to the conception of humanity and the idea
that the logic of complex systems is often illegible in the anthropocentric framing of politics . Settlement is a
concept to
be rejected, as an impediment to thought and a failure of the anthropocentric description of the
lives which inhabit the world.

Indigenous perspectives towards “introduced species” are more effective than western-
science-based management practices
Reo and Ogden 17, *citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He is Associate Professor of Native American and
Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College where he studies Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship on Indigenous lands. Dr. Reo
blends ecological, anthropological and Indigenous methodologies in his work, often via tribal community-university partnerships., **PhD,
Associate Professor of Anthropology @ Dartmouth (Nicholas and Laura, “Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of
invasive species,” Sustainability Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0571-4)//BB

Addressing global environmental change requires comprehensive and proactive approaches to Earth stewardship that value and incorporate
diverse knowledge systems (Clark et al. 2016; Chapin et al. 2011). Incorporating indigenous cultural values and
perspectives in these efforts is valuable for multiple reasons, though we highlight two. First, indigenous peoples manage
a significant percentage of the Earth’s critically important habitats , though they make up only 5% of the world’s
population (Carino 2009, p 21). Based on the most conservative estimates, indigenous nations own or have customary rights
to at least 20% of the Earth’s territory (Stevens 2014; Collins 2009, p 84, see Fig. 3), a percentage that exceeds the
total of the world’s terrestrial protected areas (Juffe-Bignoli et al. 2014). In the United States, for example, American Indian
Tribes control three times more land in the 48 contiguous states than the National Wildlife Refuge System (Schmidt and Peterson 2009).
Throughout the world, indigenous lands offer high rates of biological diversity and ecologically intact
habitats, for complex reasons including the legacies of displacements to lands far removed from settler
interest and development (Toledo 2001; Sobrevila 2008). Recent scholarship suggests that biodiversity conservation efforts
depend upon indigenous lands to ensure representation of functionally and biologically distinct forest
classes (Asner et al. 2017) and protection of threatened species (Renwick et al. 2017). Second, there is an emerging consensus
that indigenous knowledge is fundamental to conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services . For
example, both the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ conceptual framework and Article 8 of the Convention
on Biological Diversity urges the preservation and sharing of diverse scientific disciplines, stakeholders, and
knowledge systems, including indigenous and local knowledge for the conservation and sustainable use
of biological diversity (Díaz et al. 2015; CBD 2017). These recommendations stem from research findings that
demonstrate a correlation between cultural and biological diversity (Pretty et al. 2009), as well as the
importance of indigenous knowledge and practices in maintaining biodiversity (Gorenflo et al. 2012; Walsh et al.
2013; Ens et al. 2015). Indigenous cultural values about introduced species do not always align with dominant
conservation paradigms , and these cultural values should be understood as an aspect of broader
knowledge systems and ethical commitments that have proven beneficial to conserving environments
and species. Johnson et al. (2016, p 3) make a compelling argument for reframing sustainability science to involve more thoroughly
“Indigenous science”, recognizing that this process requires us “to think in ways that take seriously and actually
respond to information, understanding and knowledges as if difference confronts us with the possibility of
thinking differently” . An important step in this direction could be to take seriously and respond to
indigenous knowledge and perspectives on introduced species .
 L---Water Efficiency
Water efficiency merely postpones the crisis posed by modern relationships to water. A
paradigm shift is needed.
Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. 210-211)//BB

The tenacity of modern water is such that, almost invariably, these changing hydrosocial relations are understood
as, and are reduced to, a matter of efficiency. Thus, for Gleick, the fault of hydrological forecasters of the twentieth century was
not their inability to see through modern water but their failure to factor in improvements in water-use efficiency in all sectors.78 Of course, there
is nothing wrong with water-use efficiency or with adopting measures to increase water-use efficiency; this is, after all, what "the
changing water paradigm" of the twenty-first century is all about. But in a sense, the new paradigm is not all that
new . Merely changing the ratios of people to water — or the rates at which people use water — leaves
the new paradigm constructed still of modern water . It could thus be argued that instead of addressing the
water crisis , the new paradigm of water efficiency only postpones it . The possibility of going beyond effi-
ciency to consider the more basic question of how people relate to water requires a different sort of paradigm
change , one based on an understand- ing that what we face is less a water crisis than the crisis of modern water. This kind of paradigm change
will be the subject of the concluding chap- ter. In the meantime, we will consider how the possibility of this change is somewhat hindered by the
dominant response to the water crisis.
 L---Western Water Science
Western water science marginalizes indigeneity through ontological exclusion
Hemming 17, Professor @ Flinders University, et al (Steve, “A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a
strategy for river health,” Ecology and Society, 22.2)//BB

Representatives of the MLDRIN, like many other Indigenous groups, feel that their participation
in water management is
piecemeal and tokenistic as stakeholders on government committees (Godden and Gunther 2009:251). Ayre and Mackenzie (2013)
demonstrate how water planning processes that seek to engage Indigenous people through performing cultural values
studies, providing information, or consultation did not increase Indigenous people’s participation, nor lead to the
effective inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in planning. Rather engagement served to separate
Indigenous so-called cultural insights and belief systems, leaving the scientific evidence to determine
flow regimes. Intangible Indigenous values, vital to Indigenous ontology and epistemology, often challenge
“the quantitative and competitive methods of resource allocation currently favoured by market-based reform programs”
(Jackson 2011:171). Mainstream environmental and water planners struggle to recognize knowledges outside
the “ dominant ontological framing of Western science” (Ayre and Mackenzie 2013:759) and thus tend to
dismiss Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as merely cultural, excluding them from their
management approaches (Jackson 2006, Hemming 2007, Hemming and Rigney 2008, Weir 2009, Jackson and Langton 2012, Muller
2012, 2014). Representing Indigenous views as cultural in water planning approaches does not guarantee equitable engagement (Hemming and
Rigney 2008). If water planning approaches are only framed within the terms of dominant society, they will continue to
perpetuate the marginalization of Indigenous nations .
 L---Watershed Governance
Watershed governance creates a politics of scale that reifies colonial distributions of
authority
Sanra-Wojcicki 19, PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, division of Society and
Environment, et al, (Daniel, “Decentring Watersheds and Decolonising Watershed Governance: Towards an Ecocultural Politics of Scale in the
Klamath Basin,” Water Alternatives, 12.1)//BB

Critiques of watershed-based governance published over the last decade have called attention to the 'cultural politics of scale', or the ways in
which cultural values influence the construction of scalar formations that determine whose knowledge is
considered valid or relevant in relation to particular decision-making or governance processes (Norman et al.,
2012; 2015). Scales provide templates for arranging and segmenting space and time in order to bring particular
relationships into focus (Sayre, 2005, 2009). Attention to the cultural politics of scale allows us to see how watershed scalar
frameworks shape understandings of the spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of water flows, as well as
the way in which they influence the distribution of power and assignment of authority in the governance
of hydrosocial relations (Budds and Hinojosa, 2012; Cohen and Davidson, 2011; Norman et al., 2015). Seeing the watershed as
a unit "mandated by nature" and devoid of any cultural or political influences, allows it to acquire an
" untouchable legitimacy " as the primary seat of environmental governance (Warner et al., 2008: 133). This
'naturalises' the watershed as the optimal scale of conflict resolution , water management, and environmental
governance, and accomplishes what Cohen and Bakker (2014) term an 'eco-scalar fix' . 6 This forecloses important
political choices and collective discussions about what scales and institutional arrangements are
appropriate for community and place, which social, economic, and ecological processes matter most, and
who has power to set priorities for ecosystem management and restoration (See also Warner et al., 2008: 134).
Watershed-centric governance can diminish the effectiveness of alternative channels of communication
and social organisation, and ignore difficult questions of inclusion, rights, and responsibilities implicated
in alternative scalar framings (Barham, 2001: 190).

Assuming the scale of “watershed” tramples indigenous ways of knowing and sovereignty
Sanra-Wojcicki 19, PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, division of Society and
Environment, et al, (Daniel, “Decentring Watersheds and Decolonising Watershed Governance: Towards an Ecocultural Politics of Scale in the
Klamath Basin,” Water Alternatives, 12.1)//BB

Watersheds were critiqued by Karuk representatives and tribal members for not registering the spatial and
temporal dynamics of fire, wildlife habitats, or soil-vegetation associations. From a sociocultural perspective,
watershed-based science and policy often excluded as irrelevant the spiritual and cultural dimensions of
Karuk worldviews. Collaborative watershed management forums were critiqued for discounting issues that the
Karuk community considered central to watershed restoration, such as youth empowerment, local jobs,
protection of sacred sites, and healing of intergenerational trauma . Watersheds, in effect, were seen as imposed
by outside experts , rather than composed by the local indigenous community. As cultural biologist Ron Reed
(2012) put it: You can’t just drop management zones down on us. It has to be about what’s important to us
in each place, based on ancestral management areas . You need to understand the landscape and the history that ties it into
where we’re at now. As the quote above demonstrates, uncritically applying watershed boundaries overlooks the cultural
context and historical connections between the Karuk community and place-based ceremonial sites and
ancestral cultural management areas connected to families across generations, as well as the cultural
practices of maintaining these places and the human and non-human relationships they support . Karuk Deputy
Director of Eco-Cultural Revitalization Bill Tripp sums the many reasons why watersheds do not provide an appropriate scale
for Karuk eco-cultural revitalization: Tribal issues are not well captured at the watershed scale. It misses
ecological and social dynamics that are important to us and it limits the management perspective . You have
to look both smaller, within watersheds, as well as at connectivity across the landscape. You have to look at the diversity
dynamics within a watershed and the key cultural values inside and across these drainages, at understory
dynamics, different elevation bands and variation within a band . Including other scales will allow you to look at multiple
cultural and ecological processes and better address all our needs related to fire, food security and local economic capacity – it’s all tied together
(Tripp, 2017). Furthermore, as Tripp has stated, this scalar formation has implications for tribal sovereignty and
selfdetermination: We need new scales of management that are symbiotic with the tribal perspective .
We need to make practices applicable across our whole territory, not just confined to particular
watersheds . The scale of management is also a political scale; it’s all about sovereignty (ibid).
 L---Indigenous Water Governance
The plan forces indigenous tribes into water protection schemes that expand colonial water
and undermine genuine sovereignty
Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole, ““Seeing Water Like a State?”: Indigenous water governance
through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements,” Geoforum, 104)//BB

SGYFNs have gained substantial authority through LCSGAs, as compared to their previous status as bands under the Indian Act (1985).6 Yet
there is no doubt that to benefit from the powers of LCSGAs, northern Indigenous peoples have had to radically alter
their way of life and engage forms of governance that bear little resemblance to traditional forms of
governance (Nadasdy, 2017, Nadasdy, 2003, Natcher and Davis, 2007). Such critiques remind us to heed the potential
consequences of engaging these forms of governance. In the context of water governance, they are useful
in prompting us to consider the ways ‘state-like’ forms of governance might , consciously or unconsciously, shape
how Indigenous peoples “see” water. It is widely noted that Modern Water has been hegemonic (e.g., Chiblow, 2019,
Wilson and Inkster, 2018, Yates et al., 2017). “Seeing” water in this way permeates all settler colonial water
legislation and has been essential to both state formation and the extension of state power through the
control of water. These critiques raise critical questions about how the development of Indigenous water legislation and
the specific types of technical and administrative expertise needed to accomplish this might contribute to
subtle changes in how First Nations “see” water . Indeed, legislation seeking to codify Indigenous legal
traditions would necessarily involve simplification of complex and dynamic traditions, practices, and
relationships to water. Boelens (2009) argues that the codification of customary or local water rights in Latin America
is used to facilitate state control and to further the neoliberal goal of incorporating local water users rights
and organizations into the market system. Indeed, Indigenous-State agreements are negotiated and
implemented within the broader context of neoliberalism (Li, 2007). In Yukon, it has been argued that the changes
brought about by Modern LCSGAs not only obscure and reinforce existing power relationships, but by tying First
Nations up in bureaucratic processes they can thwart meaningful change and extend the power of
settler states through naturalizing settler governance concepts and structures (Nadasdy, 2017). In this sense, settler
colonialism is a form of governmentality or a “relatively diffuse set of governing relations that operate through circumscribed modes of
recognition that structurally ensures continued access to Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources by producing neoliberal subjectivities that coopt
Indigenous peoples into becoming instruments of their own dispossession” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 156 cites Alfred (2009) and L. Simpson (2011)).
From this perspective, there is a potential for the water governmentalities produced through LCSGA agreements might
impinge on the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and create political arrangements that make these
spaces “ legible ” and therefore exploitable and controllable (Cf., Bebbington and Bury, 2013, de Francisco and Boelens,
2015).

Indigenous representation within colonial governance undermines genuine self-

determination
Neville and Couthard 19, *Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where she is cross-appointed to the Department of Political
Science and the School of the Environment, ** Canadian scholar of Indigenous studies who serves as an associate professor in the political
science department at the University of British Columbia (Kate and Glen, “Transformative Water Relations: Indigenous Interventions in Global
Political Economies,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

Alongside the invitation to GEP scholars to consider ontological and methodological challenges, the Special Issue articles present a series of
analyses that reveal how the lines between participation in and resistance to colonial systems can be blurred. Indigenous governments and
communities can strategically wield the tools of the state to acknowledge and defend their lands, practices, and values. The use of colonial
systems to defend Indigenous rights offers one path toward greater autonomy and can alter the practices of the state
itself, reshaping governance in multiple ways. Still , these processes have limits , and there are dangers to such
integration (Coulthard 2007, 2014).
Even as they assess the possibilities for altering state practices through engagement, our authors draw on the deep and expanding
literature on the politics of recognition, much of which cautions against Indigenous participation in
colonial state systems. Although participation can offer Indigenous peoples some additional power within
the state, it can undermine broader and longer-term transformation of governing relationships by
acknowledging the authority of the colonial state, thus limiting possibilities for reclaiming autonomy
and self-determination (Coulthard 2014; Daigle 2016). By engaging with specific cases—for example, water quality standards across
the United States, water rights and legal precedent in Arizona, water contamination from upstream agriculture in coastal Washington—the
authors of this Special Issue provide in-depth empirical evidence for the tensions they identify in these “ colonial
entanglements ,” a concept from Dennison (2012) used by both Curley and Diver et al. to examine the dynamics of
Indigenous peoples’ participation within the structures of settler states .
The interventions in this issue explore the possibilities for—but also limits of—the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, authority, and values
into settler state governance practices. Diver et al. examine the adoption of state-like powers by tribal governments in the
United States, where provisions under the Clean Water Act allow their “treatment as a state” in terms of conferring on them
the authority to set local water quality standards. Conducting an analysis across the tribes in the United States that have engaged with TAS
provisions, with a focus on environmental contaminants, they document the inclusion of cultural and ceremonial concerns in tribes’ water quality
standards. Still, these entanglements lead to a form of water management that , although it expands the limits otherwise
adheres to colonial perspectives on water resources , especially given structural
imposed by the state, still
constraints to tribal authority posed by US property rights regimes.

Attempts to provide indigenous control over water backfires

Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole, ““Seeing Water Like a State?”: Indigenous water governance
through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements,” Geoforum, 104)//BB

In relation to the Pueblo of Isleta WQS, Dussias (1998) emphasized the importance of the EPA’s approach to approval based on the tribe’s
Indigenous Knowledge and interests in developing the WQS represents a radical departure from previous federal efforts to eliminate or ignore
tribal relationships to the environment and spirituality. In contrast, Ranco (2009) argues that the case could also be understood as a failure of
tribal self-determination because of the extent of the EPAs authority over the process. For example, the Tribe obtained permission to adopt water
quality standards (WQS) under a US federal law and system that they did not devise and could not change, the Tribes’ WQS were subject to
review by the EPA – a U.S. agency and only the agency who reviewed them had the authority to enforce the WQS. In summary, “ to gain any
authority over its water quality standards, the tribe was required to go through a tedious procedure to gain the
approval and recognition of the federal government” (Ranco, 2009, p. 48). In other words, however much the EPA
has the power to support Tribal Sovereignty, the same powers can be used to the opposite effect . While
TAS had been said to show a strong commitment to tribal sovereignty, this praise has also been accompanied by critiques of both the decision
process and forms of governance Tribes must engage in to take advantage of TAS status (Saunders, 2009). To be treated like a state,
with the authority to set their own WQS, Tribes must meet an onerous set of requirements . For instance,
Tribes must prove that they have a functioning tribal government with the authority and capacity to
regulate. The U.S. EPA evaluates the Tribes readiness for TAS against a set of “requirements for Indian Tribes to Administer a Water Quality
Standard Program” (Section 40 Code of Federal Regulations 131.8), which stipulate that Tribes must be federally recognized and
exercise authority over a Federal Indian Reservation, have a “governing body carrying out substantial
governmental duties and powers,” and, among other requirements, be “reasonably” capable on the
“Administrator’s judgement, of carrying out the functions” (Section 40 Code of Federal Regulations 131.8). Among other
requirements, Tribes must also provide a map of the geographic area over which they assert authority and a
narrative statement describing their current approach to environmental governance including previous management
experience, existing tribal laws and policies, and a description of the technical ability of tribal staff. Only 54 of 562 federal recognized Tribes
have been approved for TAS to administer water quality standards; 44 of these have approved WQS (U.S. EPA, 2014). Many Tribes are
automatically excluded by the requirements associated with taking on TAS (e.g., the failure to
demonstrate adequate governance capacity). Two hundred and twenty-nine (229) Alaska Native Tribes – who do not
exercise authority over lands or the waters within them – a unique land ownership arrangements stemming from the Alaska
Native Land Claims Settlement Act (1971) – are also excluded from TAS for this reason. Tribes may be further deterred because they may
view TAS as having more risks than rewards for the assertion of tribal sovereignty. As noted by Saunders (2009, p. 452) “as often happens
when Tribes dare to regulate, disputes over jurisdiction with non-Indians, particularly with state
governments, inevitably occur.” According to Fort (1995), TAS provision increases the number of “states” up to ten-fold and
therefore dramatically expands the potential for jurisdictional conflict . Tribes may be deterred by this “risks outweigh
the benefits” view of TAS. For example, Tribes may be deterred by the potential for enacting their own WQS
because of the potential they might face expensive and time-consuming litigation (Porter, 2006, Saunders, 2009).
In addition to threats from litigation, Porter (2006) suggests that Tribes may be reluctant to participate in TAS due to the
perception that TAS threatens their sovereignty; lack of funding and infrastructure to develop and
implement water-quality programs; and differences in cultural concepts about water . It has also been shown that
the tribal WQ programs that most closely resemble state or federal programs are more likely to survive
litigation than tribal programs that reflect their cultural values, epistemologies, ontologies, and governance systems (Ranco, 2009, p. 46). This
is likely because water legislation resembling settler state water legislation is more likely to be
understood, considered transparent and defensible in a court of law .

The plan just morphs the type of constraints placed on indigenous governance. They will be
equally violent.
Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole, ““Seeing Water Like a State?”: Indigenous water
governance through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements,” Geoforum, 104)//BB

with other “state-like” political entities ( e.g.,

In other words, to function in a state-centric settler colonial political system, engaging
Canadian F ederal g overnment), First Nations have had to “assume the trappings of the state” (p. 7).2 In this view, the
First Nations governments that resulted from Modern land claim agreements are “state-like” in that they have citizens and
their governments exercise real, though limited, jurisdiction over distinct territories and peoples. From such a
perspective, engaging the powers of self-government might be seen as promoting new governance
arrangements that continue to constrain Indigenous forms of governance in indirect and less forceful, but equally
violent ways – as distinct from anything we might call decolonizing Indigenous-State relationships (Tuck and
Yang, 2012, Walia, 2013).

The plan will be challenged by non-federal stakeholders---the resulting legal disputes are
incommensurable with land tenure
Stevenson 18, PhD, Trent University, Ontario (Shaun, “Decolonizing Hydrosocial Relations: The River as a Site of Ethical Encounter in
Alan Michelson's TwoRow II,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 6.2)//BB

My interest in this approach to Indigenous rights stems from the presupposition that what are often referred to as land
claim processes
between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state—what are also commonly referred to as modern treaties1—are fixed
within abstracting conceptions of land use and ownership, private property regimes, and uneven power
dynamics, and are thus premised on unethical relationships within their current formulation . I mobilize ethics
here as means of highlighting the disjunct between Indigenous relations to their lands and waters and the universalizing logics of settler-Canadian
national politics. Where foregrounding ethics has potential to be attentive to the ongoing relationships that structure social relations to shared
waterways in particular, emphasizing the material, the specificity of place, and the power dynamics that shape interactions with shared
environments, the national politics that structure Indigenous rights in settler contexts are largely abstracted
from place, grounded in Western perspectives that refuse a politics of difference, and perpetuate the
maintenance of settler jurisdictional power . In many instances, such rights disputes, their corresponding
policies, and proceedings within the courtroom or at the negotiation tables, are incommensurable with
Indigenous conceptions of land tenure and self-determination (Coulthard, 2014; Dorries 2012; Kulchyski, 2013; Turner,
2006, 2013; Million, 2013).

Supposedly indigenous control replicates colonialism because Tribal Council’s are

colonially entrapped
Ellis and Perry 20, *educator, advocate, and researcher specializing in justice‐oriented watershed management and conservation in the
Southwest, **PhD, Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University (Rachelle and Denielle, “A
Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection,” Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 169.1)//BB

Beyond the court rulings, to some Hopi interviewees the continued illegitimacy of the Hopi Tribal Council is still of
concern. They described how the present‐day Council does not respect or include religious elders , does not represent
a majority of villages (only 5 of the 12), and is distorted in its decision‐making by a government budget generated from
mining royalties. In contemporary efforts to be ostensibly fair and equitable, the U.S. created a policy of government to
government relations with tribes which has had the effect of restructuring Indigenous societies into
miniature colonial governments. The imposition of colonial forms of government has replaced
traditional governance structures (e.g., Deloria 1969; Nadasdy 2003; Coulthard 2014), and in the case of the Hopi Tribal Council,
certain interviewees consider it a “ failed experiment .”

Piecemeal approaches without eliminating foundations of settler colonialism makes

indigenous liberation impossible
Norris 18, M.A. Candidate, University of British Columbia (Matthew, “How Bear Lost his Tail,”
https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0371608)//BB

Because of this, the deep societal, racial and economic divide continues to fester and grow . Such policies
have permitted non-Indigenous society to feel liberated, to release their guilt of the historical wrongs of
their ancestors, thus making the initial and continuing denial of the humanity of Indigenous peoples
invisible and uncontested . By not addressing these fundamental building blocks of settler
colonialism in Canada, efforts to “ level-the-playing-field ” across the political, economic and social spheres, have fail ed.
This divide becomes apparent when issues of ‘national’ interest become pitted against the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, most notably in relation
to extractive resource projects including the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline project (KM TMX) and the BC Hydro Site C
Dam project.
 L---Treatment As State WQS
TAS frameworks maintain colonial governance and are wildly insufficient for self-
determination
Diver 19, researcher at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science. She does community-engaged research on
Indigenous water governance, focusing on Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds. She received her PhD in environmental science from the
University of California, Berkeley. Sibyl began working on these issues as a Russian translator, facilitating international exchanges for
Indigenous community leaders on land rights and Indigenous resource management, et al (Sibyl, “Engaging Colonial Entanglements: “Treatment
as a State” Policy for Indigenous Water Co-Governance,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

In the US context, Indigenous water governance institutions are often based on dominant Western governance
frameworks and funded by federal grants, two conditions that often reinforce existing power
imbalances and the subordination of Indigenous knowledge traditions . Existing studies illustrate the tensions
around pursuing Indigenous self-determination through tribal environmental regulatory programs, such as TAS (Diver 2018). On the one hand,
Ranco and Suagee (2007, 702) describe tribal environmental programs as “laboratories for creativity,” which draw from multiple knowledge
systems leading to Indigenous innovations for water governance. For example, the Confederate Tribes of Umatilla preface their tribal water code
by acknowledging “Pł2005). On the other hand, Saunders (2010) depicts tribal environmental regulation as a highly constrained initiative and a
balancing act, which tribes may choose to undertake at the cost of inciting opposition from neighboring state governments. For instance, the
Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma’s efforts to establish WQSs in 2004 were met by lawsuits and legislation limiting tribal sovereignty (Chandler 1994;
Williams 1993). Indigenous scholars have also voiced strong critiques of federalist governance frameworks, where federal regulatory
responsibilities are delegated to states having no legally defined trust obligation toward tribes (Corntassel and Witmer 2008). With TAS, tribes
are leveraging the same legal and regulatory structures that were initially developed to support and coordinate state regulation. In doing so,
eligible tribes must depend on federal agencies to certify their capability to assume regulatory authority
over WQSs for tribal waters. Underfunded tribal governments must also contend with federal and state
government entities in a multilevel governance context , characterized by uneven power dynamics. Such
political realities call into question how much independence TAS tribes can maintain in developing
tribal WQSs and their ability to implement tribal regulations for water quality in practice .

TAS devastates indigenous life: Requires conformity to Western understandings of water,

only applies to federally recognized tribes, indigenous knowledge is subsumed by the
regulatory state, and resulting legal disputes strip self-determination
Diver 19, researcher at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science. She does community-engaged research on
Indigenous water governance, focusing on Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds. She received her PhD in environmental science from the
University of California, Berkeley. Sibyl began working on these issues as a Russian translator, facilitating international exchanges for
Indigenous community leaders on land rights and Indigenous resource management, et al (Sibyl, “Engaging Colonial Entanglements: “Treatment
as a State” Policy for Indigenous Water Co-Governance,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

Existing scholarship
on Indigenous self-determination offers some important critiques of TAS. The TAS
model is based on the premise of treating Native American tribes in a manner similar to states , for the purpose
of delegating federal regulatory authority over existing CWA programs. The explicit delegation of authority to tribes indicates that TAS extends
beyond a tribal consultation process. However, at this time, only forty-four tribes have adopted tribal WQSs under TAS .
This is out of 60 tribes that have applied to administer a TAS program for WQS and have been found eligible, and
approximately 330 tribes that may be eligible to apply for TAS under the CWA. The gap between tribal eligibility
and adoption of tribal WQSs suggests that the TAS program does not meet the governance needs or
agendas of all tribes (Diver 2018). Why would this be the case ? One key issue appears to be the fact that the TAS
framework is fully located within the existing US regulatory framework, yet tribal water relations
typically do not fit into the predefined, bureaucratic processes developed to support federal regulation .
While tribes and state agencies often share the basic goals of protecting human health and ecological functions (e.g., deLemos et al. 2009),
tribes have distinct values and needs around water protection . For many tribes, water quality protection is
embedded in Indigenous knowledge, emphasizing the mutual responsibilities and reciprocal relations
between Indigenous peoples and water (Arsenault et al. 2018; Lake et al. 2010; McGregor 2014). However, more holistic
values embedded within Indigenous knowledges are often subsumed by bureaucratic frameworks that
facilitate the “ standardization, sectorization, and instrumentality ” of knowledge systems (Martello 2001,
137). Dominant state agencies may also question the validity of Indigenous knowledge, as well as tribes’ inherent
authority to self-govern, thereby
undermining tribal environmental governance (Brody 1981; Nadasdy 2004). Tribes also face
challenges to their legal and political rights to water (Chief et al. 2016). For example, many
tribes lack jurisdictional authority
and the resources to implement environmental regulations (e.g., Doyle et al. 2018). This is, in part, due to the
colonial legacies of US allotment policies, which dispossessed many tribes of their homelands and turned
existing reservations into a patchwork of individually owned fee lands (Indian and non-Indian) that are
interspersed with tribal trust lands (Corntassel and Witmer 2008). In some cases, tribes may eschew TAS and instead adopt their own
non-TAS water quality standards and water codes, although tribally approved standards primarily apply to tribal members on tribal lands (Berry
2016; Vesely 2014). Adding to this critique, TAS eligibility and application requirements, as well as the politics
around TAS, prevent many tribes from accessing the program . Only federally recognized tribes with trust
lands (formal or informal reservations) can apply, which excludes all unrecognized tribes , some recognized tribes
with limited jurisdictional authority, and almost all Alaska Natives (Saunders 2010). Eligible tribes often lack
the resources to apply for or implement programs (Lefthand-Begay 2014). Eligible tribes may also forgo TAS
programs due to ongoing threats of lawsuits from states, individuals, or political groups that are hostile to
assertions of tribal sovereignty (Galloway 1995; Rey-Bear 1995). For example, in 2000, when the Penobscot and
Passamaquoddy tribes requested stricter state water quality standards for dioxin discharges by paper and pulp mills,
state opponents filed a lawsuit leveraging the Maine Freedom of Access Act to gain all materials on tribal authority (Rodgers 2004).
In 2004, after the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma gained EPA-approved WQSs, the state of Oklahoma filed
suit. Tribal opponents also inserted a legislative amendment in an unrelated bill that restricted tribal sovereignty for Oklahoma tribes seeking
TAS status (Grant 2007; Saunders 2010). These cases suggest a double bind for tribal environmental self-
determination: if a tribe regulates aggressively to protect community and ecosystem health, they may
provoke a costly legal battle , thereby draining tribal resources and threatening tribal self-
governance .
 L---Environmental Rights
Prioritizing environmental rights justifies is co-opted to marginalize indigenous water
rights
Hemming 17, Professor @ Flinders University (Steve, et al, “A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a
strategy for river health,” Ecology and Society, 22.2)//BB

There is an ongoing assumption that Indigenous interests are limited to cultural values or heritage management (Jackson 2006) and a misplaced
assumption that environmental water allocations will account for Indigenous values (Finn and Jackson 2011). Decisions about water are
often thus made on ecological values alone. Significantly, this creates the risk of the denial of Indigenous
agency and governance in managing water allocations with respect to Indigenous priorities (Weir et al.
2013:15). Weir and colleagues (2013:16) argue that “Indigenous people often identify Indigenous governance as a key
distinction between environmental and cultural water . With cultural flows, it is the Indigenous peoples
themselves who decide where and when water should be delivered, based on their priorities and goals. ”
Many Indigenous groups are keen to see water held by the CEWH used toward their own priorities, including roles for Indigenous governance,
but not as a replacement of their a priori rights to water allocations (Jackson 2011, North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management
Alliance (NAILSMA) 2012, Weir et al. 2013:27, Jackson et al. 2015). Jackson and Langton (2012) argue for a restorative justice initiative, in
which governments should purchase water rights for Indigenous groups, in the same manner that they do for environmental use, through the
CEWH. Indeed, thefact that “ the environment ” should be granted rights before Indigenous nations
illustrates the lack of priority given to Indigenous water rights in the first place. In the absence of Indigenous-
specific water allocations in South Australia, Indigenous groups assert their sovereign rights to speak as Country by seeking engagement in a
range of other water management processes.
 L---Indigenous Sovereignty
Assuming that sovereignty can be granted, instead of inherent, magnifies colonial violence
Byrd 20, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and associate professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Jodi, “Indigenous Futures beyond the Sovereignty Debate,” The Cambridge History of Native
American Literature, Kindle Edition)//BB

If there is one unifying principle that the field of Indigenous studies asserts as foundational, inviolable, and
central, it is the concept of sovereignty. It is also one of the most misunderstood and overburdened words
that scholars and activists circulate to assert Indigenous difference, persistence, and authority. Along with the connotatively similar –
but not quite the same – concepts of self-determination and autonomy, “sovereignty” purportedly signifies the baseline right and power
Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities have to govern themselves that distinguishes them from other minoritized populations and/or
individual citizens within and beyond the nation-states that represent the governments of the world. Sovereignty exists in the “s” on peoples and,
when paired with the word Indigenous, both disrupts and denaturalizes the dispossessive logics of racism, capitalism, colonialism, and
imperialism that have often commonsensically cast Indigenous peoples as racialized populations presumed to belong to and live within the
invading settler nation-states that formed themselves on top of and through the sublimation and appropriation of Indigenous lands, polities,
cultures, and identities. As Joanne Barker (2005, 17) observes about the United States’ relation to the Indigenous peoples it has colonized, “the
erasure of the sovereign is the racialization of the ‘Indian,’” a mode of an oppressive social force that “racialized (invented) an Indian identity that
can be used to usurp indigenous sovereignty.” Although it is often assumed to be something granted to a group of
people through the recognitive intervention of a more powerful sovereign country or government, sovereignty
is in fact inherent within each Indigenous community’s own existence and tied to that people’s connection
to ancestral lands and a millennia of enacted kinship formations that have sustained that relationship . It
cannot be conferred nor stripped through the fictive modalities of the recognitions or the denials of settler
nation-states . In other words, sovereignty is the concept that propels Indigenous peoples’ own understandings of the international and the
transnational, the political and the governmental, the bordered and the transgressed as well as the discursive force that distinguishes the citizen
from the descendant from the non-citizen at the level of community recognition and belonging.

Resistance to nation-state formations is central to indigenous resurgence

Byrd 20, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and associate professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Jodi, “Indigenous Futures beyond the Sovereignty Debate,” The Cambridge History of Native
American Literature, Kindle Edition)//BB

This last point is a critique that Glen Coulthard (2014, 3) poses to the settler state in his calls
to reject settler-state politics of
recognition, or the “now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous
assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity
claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state.” Arguing that “the politics of recognition in
its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist,
patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to
transcend,” Coulthard advocates for a theory and practice of Indigenous resurgence that engages five theses: direct action,
the dismantling of capitalism, confronting dispossession and the logics of urban spaces, linking gender justice to decolonization, and finally,
resisting nation-state formations to “practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non exploitative
alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of
Indigenous legal and political traditions” (165–79). In a recent piece that Coulthard coauthored with Leanne Simpson (2016), they
extend these theses to advocate for Indigenous futures through the relationality of Indigenous political orders that might be achieved through
decolonial resurgence and resistance committed to what they refer to as a “grounded normativity” that derives from
Indigenous place-based practices and knowledges . As Coulthard and Simpson explain, Grounded normativity houses and
reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded
normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating
nonexploitive manner. Grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-
Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. Our relationship to the land
itself generates the processes, practices and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. To willfully
abandon them would amount to a form of auto-genocide.
 L---Sacred Sites
Preservation of “Sacred Sites” paradoxically reinforces settler colonialism
Ellis and Perry 20, *educator, advocate, and researcher specializing in justice‐oriented watershed management and conservation in the
Southwest, **PhD, Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University (Rachelle and Denielle, “A
Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection,” Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 169.1)//BB

Further TCP analysis suggests this policy

designation better reflects IK perspectives but is no magic bullet for protecting
sacred places. TCP limitations partially derive from delineating protective boundaries. While tribes make the
documentation for site eligibility, the State Historic Preservation Officer and BOR must agree with their suggestions. Leigh
Kuwanwisiwma, who served as Director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office for 30 years explains, “With the many sites that we
have, it's hard for us to put boundaries around sacred sites ” (personal communication, December 2018). Similarly, Riggs
articulates: “You can't rate sacred on a scale from 1–10 in Diné perspective. The Confluence is not just one aspect of one place to
be saved or preserved or protected. There's more to it than just that one area. That's one, basically, one grain of sand. There's a whole list of things
that need to be protected, preserved, educated, all of that is Grand Canyon above and below” (Personal communication, March 2019). Though
tribes and agencies increasingly do agree on which sites should be protected, the final decision‐makers are
nonetheless colonial entities, demonstrating the dominance of colonial decision‐making powers. Thus,
compliance with NHPA via the HPP is one viable but incomplete policy option for protection of this region. At best this designation protects
sites from federal actions and can be used in the layering of other policies; at worst TCP is a kind of tokenism and detraction
from future protection efforts because a site is seemingly already protected . To engage this policy in anticolonial
ways, Indigenous water protectors can increasingly collaborate with federal agencies to pursue groundwater studies of the lower LCR and
Sipapuni while also reaffirming the importance of intangible values in site selection and protection.
 L---National Parks
National park protection legitimates stolen land
Murphy 20, analyst and staff at Eco Watch (Jazmin, “Decolonizing Environmentalism,” EcoWatch,
https://www.ecowatch.com/environmentalism-colonialism-racism-religion-2647696055.html)//BB

How Modern Conservation Upholds the Superiority of Humans

Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance. The
same Bible that was used to enforce
humans' domination over nature was also used to force Indigenous peoples to abandon their cultural truths
for those more palatable to Europeans. This laid the foundation that continues to separate human life from
nature to this day. As the Bible states in Genesis, "Let [Man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over
all the wild animals of the earth." We see echoes of this passage in the frameworks of many conservation objectives today, with concepts such as
"creating" sustainable forests, "managing" wildlife populations, and "preserving" wilderness as a realm separate from that of humans. This
reduces our perception of human connectivity to nonhuman life and to distance constituents from the objective recognition of Earth's intrinsic
value. Take one of the U.S.'s leading environmental organizations, for example. The National Park Service—a federal
organization with well-known racist origins—has a mission statement that almost exclusively highlights
the instrumental value of North America's natural lands : "The National Park Services preserves unimpaired the natural and
cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations … to extend
the benefits of natural and cultural resources conservation … throughout this country and the world." Their mission is painfully anthropocentric,
never mind that the
very lands it aims to extend were stolen from Indigenous tribes who are now denied
access. Missions such as these create a nigh impenetrable ideological barrier through which
environmentalists of non-Christian cultures cannot pass .
 L---IR
IR is a civilizing force. Indigenous dispossession is a necessary element.
King 17, Gchi'mnissing Anishinaabe writer and educator based in the Faculty of Arts @ Ryerson University in Toronto (Hayden, “The
Erasure of Indigenous Thought in Foreign Policy,” Open Canada, https://opencanada.org/erasure-indigenous-thought-foreign-policy/)//BB

Foreign policy, but in whose national interest?

For those studying and working in foreign policy, there are certainly debates over what constitutes the
definition of the field. In Canada, there are debates about what counts as foreign policy (defence, security, trade,
peacekeeping) and also how to approach those subjects (from liberal frameworks, realist, even some critical lenses). In his
textbook on foreign policy Kim Nossal notes that the field is inherently divisive, emerging from “the interplay of conflicting interests, divergent
Yet despite these divisive
objectives, contending perceptions, and different prescriptions about the most appropriate course of action.”
debates, there is near universal acceptance of two core assumptions: the legitimacy of the Canadian state itself as the
primary actor in foreign policy and the concept of the national interest, which the field of foreign policy
strives to serve. This is no surprise, really, considering these assumptions are underwritten and supported by every domestic institution —
from Canada’s constitutional sources, to the cultural organizations that currently promulgate the fantasy of Canada as 150 years of glowing
hearts, or decisions of the Supreme Court that reflect on the “assertion of Crown sovereignty” without ever explaining how that sovereignty was
obtained. But for critical Indigenous scholars, these assumptions are myths that form not a legitimate state in the
community of nations, but rather a violent settler colony. Between 1921 and 1923, after many years of resistance to the young countries,
Canada and the United States were steadily encroaching into Haudenosaunee territory and governance. Cayuga Chief Deskaheh, also known as
Levi General, travelled to London, England, to appeal to King George on the matter. (He wasn’t the first or last to appeal to a King or Queen;
Anishinaabe leader Shingwaukonse actively attempted to, post-War of 1812, and Chief Theresa Spence did so in 2013, among many others). But
when King George refused him, Deskaheh turned to the Geneva-based League of Nations, seeking a seat for the Haudenosaunee. With his efforts
undermined by English officials there too, he returned home but was stopped at the U.S.-Canada border and turned away by Canadian border
guards. He spent his final days in Rochester, New York. Before his death he made one last plea to ordinary Canadians and Americans for justice:
“Do you believe — really believe — that all peoples are entitled to equal protection of international law now that you are so strong? Do you
believe — really believe — that treaty pledges should be kept? Think these questions over and answer them to yourselves…We have little
territory left — just enough to live and die on [because] the governments of Washington and Ottawa have a silent partnership of policy. It is
aimed to break up every tribe of red men so as to dominate every acre of their territory.” (His plea is documented in Rick Monture’s We Share
Our Matters.) The last two sentences of this quote are an apt description of modern settler colonialism, nearly 100 years before scholars identified
the process. For anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, there is a distinction between colonialism, which eventually ends when the invaders leave, and
settler colonialism, where they don’t. While in the former formulation the Indigenous population is often transformed to labour for colonial
extraction, in the latter, the settler colony attempts to liquidate all remnants of the previous (Indigenous) societies to
legitimize its permanent presence. Deskaheh was speaking in the North American context, Wolfe in the Australian, but the
phenomenon can be seen elsewhere, from Aotearoa/New Zealand to Palestine/Israel. Common strategies in this liquidation are as follows:
physical extermination; oppressive Indian legislation designed to contain; the creation of
reserves/reservations/settlements, residential or boarding schools; discrimination aimed specifically at women; and
eventually legal absorption into state apparatuses and assimilation . While the genocidal nature of settler colonialism may
not appear as physical violence today (though we do still have plenty of that), the underlying motivation to expunge threats to
settler sovereignty endures. But where the specific harms of the field of foreign policy come into greater focus are
in crafting a common sense around what counts as a legitimate politics of the international . Consider the core concepts of
the field, or at least the discipline of IR that foregrounds foreign policy. I think it’s fair to say most traditional perspectives view the
international system as an anarchic environment where self-interested and (mostly) rational states
compete against each other for power. Or, in contrast, they may cooperate. For foundational IR scholar Hedley Bull, this
simple formulation is “the supreme normative principal of the political organization of mankind.” I don’t need to elaborate on these concepts for
this audience. But, what about political communities that do not resemble a state, that eschew coercive notions of exclusive sovereignty, that are
bound by obligations and responsibilities to the land and thus do not recognize an anarchic world, political communities that do not start and end
with men? The discipline of IR, as well as practice of foreign policy, effectively casts Indigenous peoples as
primitive (or at least inferior), sanctions the theft of their lands, and then forecloses the possibility of
resurgent political communities. At a fundamental level the perpetuation of this conceptual galaxy denies opportunities for
Indigenous expressions of liberation — whether the case is the Six Nations of the Grand River, whose demands for a seat at the League of
Nations in 1922 were rejected, or the current Canadian government demands that the articulation of international Indigenous rights not challenge
territorial integrity or state sovereignty (this is true generally but seen clearly with the United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples). Such a denial is also expressed in the unequivocal support of the state of Israel at the expense of Palestinian existence, or the
collaboration with a Honduran government that suppresses Indigenous communities and murders activists like Berta Cáceres. I am talking about
more than denying liberation. By continuing to enforce the view of humanity as a set of political states,
with Europe at the centre of the planet – as Chickasaw lawyer James Youngblood Henderson once pointed out in his
deconstruction of the familiar Mercator world map – foreign policy actively contributes to the erasure of Indigenous
political difference conceptually as well as Indigenous bodies physically . (Not to mention non-Indigenous but
racialized political communities and bodies, too.) Thus, Canadian foreign policy is a foreign policy that normalizes and affirms
settler colonialism. This is the primary national interest. And so, foreign policy is itself a manifestation
of settler colonialism .
 L---Nuc War
Representations of nuclear war as catastrophic event authorizes limitless violence and
genocide against indigenous people
Kato 93, Professor in Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, Honolulu (Masahide, “Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets,
Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,” Alternatives, 18.3)

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and became
deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be
historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the First World
community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is
nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance,
relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the
apocalyptic imagery . And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this
earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924
nuclear explosions have occurred on earth." The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the
former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times)." The primary targets of
warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous
Peoples . Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times),
Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama
Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times)."
Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we
are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare
to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and
disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and
other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and
Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in
the Third World produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus,
from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear catastrophe has
never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing
nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to
the imaginary grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the
history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World
community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be
observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions
in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on
which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against
nature itself. Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkablde study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic
The imagery of final nuclear war narrated
division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact.
with the problematic use of the subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of
discursive value. This ideological division /hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the
ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated
and hence legitimatized . The discursive containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished,
ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has
established the
unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the
Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
IMPACT
 !---Framing/Prioritization
Prefer the critique’s impact. There’s a cognitive bias to downplay settler violence.
King 20, PhD, professor in the Liberal Studies department at Grand Valley State University (Sarah, “What We’re Talking about When We’re
Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint, Michigan,” in The Wonder of Water, UMich Libraries)//BB

For many North Americans, reflecting on and analysing their role as settlers in colonial nations2 – and about their
relationship to place in this context – is a fundamental challenge. The liberal discourse of equality often denies that racism
is a systemic or everyday problem, promoting instead a “‘national story’ of benevolence and generosity” (Srivastava 2005, 35).
Srivastava suggests that Canadians operate within “contemporary national discourses of tolerance, multiculturalism and nonracism” that
mask ongoing racialized conflicts (35). Addressing the racialized structure of society is profoundly challenging because Canadian
and American moral identity is so tied up in a vision of equality, a vision that, like all national visions, “requires not
only sameness and communion but also forgetting difference and oppression” (Benedict Anderson, in Srivastava 2005, 39). This
vision of sameness and nonracism is fundamental to the vision that the Canadian government sought to uphold in Esgenoôpetitj, and that the
Michigan government used to frame its emergency manager laws. Confronting the racism inherent in North American relationships with
Indigenous peoples requires confronting fundamental questions about the history and legitimacy of the colonial states of Canada and the US.
Taiaiake Alfred, an Indigenist academic, argues that most Settlers are in denial . They know that the foundations of
their countries are corrupt, and they know that their countries are “colonial” in historical terms, but they
still refuse to see and accept the fact that there can be no rhetorical transcendence and retelling of the past
to make it right without making fundamental changes to their government, society, and the way they
live ... To deny the truth is an essential cultural and psychological process in Settler
society . (2005, 107) Many settlers know Canada/the US as their only home, and wonder, as some of the people I interviewed in Burnt Church
did, why they must pay for the sins of their forefathers. But the problems inherent in settler relationships with Indigenous
peoples are not only historical; they exist in individual, social, and political lives in the present . The
fundamental discomfort of reflection on race and racism makes it difficult for many to reflect upon their
shared position in the colonial present.
 !---Root Cause---Water
Treating water as resource is the root cause of all global water crises. Indigenous
perspectives avoid this.
Wilson and Inkster 18, *PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell, **Professor @ U Alberta/Yukon College (Nicole and
Jody, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground,” Environment and Planning,
1.4)//BB

‘‘Respecting water’’ raises important ontological challenges. To engage with this, we take as our point of departure the broader
question – what is water? – a question that has been raised by scholars in a variety of fields (e.g. Boelens, 2014; Chen et al., 2013; Linton,
2010; Strang, 2004; Wagner, 2013). As Linton (2010) notes, the answer to this seemingly simple question is
taken for granted , due to
the pervasiveness of the concept of Modern Water or settler-colonial understandings of water as a material
resource . Water or H2O in this modern interpretation is abstracted from social context or ‘‘rendered technical’’
(Li, 2007), making it possible to understand water as a resource available for human consumption and use
that can be known and managed or manipulated by humans (Groenfeldt, 2013; Linton, 2010; Strang, 2004). Modern Water,
it is argued, dominates current approaches to water governance, whereas the separation of water from its social context is thus
considered at the root of contemporary water crises (Schmidt and Shrubsole, 2013). Therefore, critics argue that challenging
this requires ‘‘attention to water’s social context and dynamics , and to reposition water as inherently political’’ (Linton
and Budds, 2014: 175). Yet, to date, few academics have explicitly addressed the ontological politics of water (cf. Boelens, 2014; Linton, 2010;
Norman, 2012; Wilson, 2014; Yates et al., 2017). This paper thus examines water as a ‘‘more-than-human’’ entity through the lens of post-
humanism and critical Indigenous studies. It explores conflicts in water governance and how dominant ontologies of water, based on
the idea of Modern Water, inform present approaches to water
governance, and how instead a project of decolonizing
might unsettle conventional water governance. Working towards meaningful water governance
alternatives will necessarily involve prioritizing Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and forms of
governance.
 !---Root Cause---Biodiversity
Biodiversity protection terminally fails without protection of indigenous life
Swiderska 20, principal researcher in IIED's Natural Resources research group (Krystyna, “Protecting indigenous cultures is crucial for
saving the world’s biodiversity,” IIED, https://www.iied.org/protecting-indigenous-cultures-crucial-for-saving-worlds-biodiversity)//BB

2020 is being hailed as a ‘super year’ for nature, with a series of major international events looking at how we can stop the decline of wildlife and
natural ecosystems. IIED’s Krystyna Swiderska argues that saving biodiversity can’t succeed without working to save
indigenous cultures. Species are being lost at about a thousand times the natural rate of extinction. This is faster than at any other period in
human history. Ecosystems – the vital systems on which all life depends – are being degraded across the globe . This
crisis of biodiversity loss is finally getting some attention. But its connection to another loss – that of
indigenous cultures – is rarely mentioned. From animals to insects and plants, biodiversity loss cannot be
effectively addressed without tackling the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures . The two are
inextricably linked . Indigenous peoples have conserved biodiversity for millennia . They have created
much of the world’s agricultural biodiversity, including thousands of crop varieties, livestock breeds and unique landscapes. These
practices continue today in many of their territories, creating new varieties of crops and livestock that are often more resilient than modern
equivalents. So it is unsurprising that the rich diversity of nature is declining less rapidly on indigenous
peoples’ lands than in other areas. This clearly shows that the world’s 370 million to 500 million indigenous
people play a critical role in conserving biodiversity. This is backed up by extensive research. According
to several studies (PDF), traditional ecological knowledge is effective in conserving biodiversity and
regulating sustainable resource use, including hunting, wild harvesting, fishing, farming and pastoralism , a
form of animal husbandry. Living in harmony with nature is a fundamental part of indigenous peoples’ core
values and beliefs. Similar ecological values and worldviews can be seen across indigenous cultures, from southern China to the Americas.
Among Andean peoples, for example, the world is divided into three parts: the human and domesticated; the wild (species, ecosystems, water);
and the sacred and ancestral. Rather than focusing on economic development, their goal is holistic wellbeing, which is achieved through balance
between these three worlds. A stronger voice Yet across the world, indigenous cultures and practices are being eroded by modernisation,
commercial development pressures, lack of secure rights to land and resources, migration and lack of cultural education. As a result, many are
struggling to save their unique cultures, knowledge systems and identities from extinction. This is despite growing recognition that they hold the
key to solving many of today’s environmental problems. Up to 80% of biodiversity is located on indigenous peoples’
lands (PDF), while at least a quarter of all land is traditionally owned or managed by indigenous peoples (PDF). Evidently, these
cultures need to be protected . This should be part and parcel of broader tactics to conserve
biodiversity. New biodiversity targets, for example, must protect indigenous cultures.
 !---Root Cause---Drinking Water
Settler domination is the root cause of unsafe drinking water
King 20, PhD, professor in the Liberal Studies department at Grand Valley State University (Sarah, “What We’re Talking about When We’re
Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint, Michigan,” in The Wonder of Water, UMich Libraries)//BB

It’s tempting to characterize the ruination of the drinking water system in Flint as a case of “accidental
pollution” by people who “made mistakes.” After many months of activism on the part of local residents, the first official acknowledgements of problems in the water system framed them in these terms. As the crisis wore
on, it began to be seen as a failure of legislation and oversight, and was positioned as such by politicians and bureaucrats. The question became where to hang that failure – on the governor? The state water protection bureaucrats? The
EPA? Eventually, the state attorney general also laid criminal charges against former municipal, state, and EPA employees who neglected their responsibilities, falsified reports, and covered up the toxicity of the water, increasing the
harm to residents. Victoria Morckel, a geographer at University of Michigan–Flint, portrays the situation as an urban planning failure (2017). Butler, Scammell, and Benson (2016) suggest that we understand it as an example of

Explanations such as these continue to see the situation in Flint as a failure of law , to some degree – as a
regulatory failure and environmental injustice.

Placing the racialized ruination of

situation in which the law did not do what it was intended to do, and in which people charged with upholding the law did not carry out their responsibilities.

the Flint drinking water system in the context of the city’s own history, and of North American
imperialism, demonstrates how the pollution of the drinking water system occurred within the context of
a larger system of imperial control designed to maintain the ruination of an already marginal racialized
city to protect the well-being of privileged others elsewhere . It is tempting to talk about events such as those in Flint as though they are disconnected from other
environmental crises in North America. But failing to see patterns, treating each of these crises as unique failures, continues to place all of the responsibility for these situations on local players, and allows the larger structures of
power that rely on and perpetuate the persistent recurrence of such situations to remain invisible. To illuminate some of the hidden social and political patterns at play, the Flint case is explored in the context of another seemingly
dissimilar water conflict that I have discussed extensively in its own terms elsewhere: the fishing dispute at Esgenoôpetitj/Burnt Church, New Brunswick. In 1999, a prolonged and violent fishing dispute erupted at Esgenoôpetitj/
Burnt Church among an Indigenous community, the Mi’kmaq, their settler neighbours, and the Canadian government after the Supreme Court of Canada’s Marshall decision upheld the treaty right of the Mi’kmaq to fish and earn a
moderate living from their catch (King 2014). This dispute got plenty of media attention over many years, and the government and many commentators continued to insist that the dispute was about fish. For local residents, both
Indigenous and settler, the conflict was actually grounded in place, and in their contested (post)colonial relationships to their own lands and waters. Place is a way of understanding the web of interrelationships between humans and
the other-than-human world that shapes both humans and the other-than-human through time. Humans are affected by the plants, animals, rocks, mountains, lakes, rivers, or seas where they live, and the presence of humans affects the
plants, animals, rocks, mountains, lakes, rivers, and seas. Consider, for example, that human bodies are made mostly of water. We drink and excrete water, eat creatures from water, and use water in all manner of ways in our daily
lives. How we go about doing that has a huge effect not only on us, but on water, too – on individual bodies of water, on watersheds, and on the entire water cycle. The value of taking a holistic, place-based approach is to see the ways
in which water is connected not only to other elements of the ecosystem, but also to other elements of the social and political systems of humans. This chapter is an attempt to sketch out some of those connections and to raise some of
the complex political and justice-oriented questions that arise once we take the dialogic challenge of place seriously. My book Fishing in Contested Waters: Place and Community in the Dispute at Burnt Church/Esgenoôpetitj explores
the depth and complexity of the local Indigenous and settler experiences of place and the dispute; I am drawing on that work here to show how race, ruination, and imperial politics are important at Esgenoôpetitj/Burnt Church and in
the larger (post)colonial North American context, such as in the ruination of the drinking water system in Flint. I draw this comparison not because the communities of Esgenoôpetitj and Flint are necessarily alike – while the remote
Mi’kmaw community and the post-industrial city are both highly impoverished, unemployed, racialized, and segregated, little in the public framing of the crises in these two places is similar. Esgenoôpetitj had a “fishing dispute,” a
conflict over local employment, Indigenous rights, and sovereignty, and a prolonged period of direct conflict between Indigenous activists and the Canadian government. Flint had a “public health crisis,” a loss of safe drinking water,
and a public failure of law and regulation. Drawing connections between the two allows us to consider the similarities in their experiences of racialization, in their experiences within structures of imperial power, and as racialized sites

of ecological ruination for those powers. As Tuck and Yang (2012) remind us, “ settler colonialism is built on an entangled triad structure of settler-
native-slave” (1); within their commitment to decolonization, Tuck and Yang emphasize the importance of the uncommonality of Indigenous experience. This chapter is not an attempt to recreate commonality between
specific community experiences, for example by suggesting that life in Flint and Esgenoôpetitj is somehow the same (it is not), but rather to illuminate the often hidden values and structures of

(post)colonial North American politics and the ways in which politics forged in the crucible of the settler-native-slave
triad foment and create ruination in racialized communities for the economic benefit of so-called others.
Pollution of racialized and Indigenous places in the present is not simply accidental or
happenstance , but the clear result of social and political processes designed to create differential
harm to such places.
ALTERNATIVE/FRAMEWORK
 FW---Top-Shelf
Prioritize unsettling academia in debates about water
Hendershot and Mutimer 18, *Office of the Dean @ York U,**Professor and Chair of Department Political Science @ York U
(Chris and David, Critical Security Studies, in The Oxford Handbook of International Security, Kindle Edition)//BB

Despite avowed commitments to critique concepts and practices that sustain militarized, carbon dependent, or zero-sum security relations, critical security scholars
must also imagine the possibility that criticality can still affect domination and exploitation. That is to say, CSS needs to more thoughtfully consider its ongoing
complicity with the settler-colonial and imperial ordering of global relations. As two scholars who live and work on the traditional territory of the
Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and most recently, the territory of the Mississauga of the Credit River (CAUT 2016) and are thus sustained
through the
occupation of this territory, we must immediately confront our complicity in settler-colonialism . Or to
paraphrase Sundberg (2014: 35), as citizens of a settler-colonial state, we “have a profound obligation and
responsibility to confront the widespread implications of colonialism in [our] scholarship and to ask what [security]
thought has to become to face the political, philosophical, and ethical challenges of decolonizing.” Without a vigorous un-settling, CSS will be incapable of working
for and with “Indigenous sovereignty in its material, psychological, epistemological, and spiritual forms” (Sium et al. 2012: v). What must be more readily confronted
is that criticality does not obviate complicity with colonialism, imperialism, and racialized domination .
Expansive referents, nonpositivistic metatheories, and openness to difference can certainly create the intellectual space to read and cite the work of Patrick Wolfe
(2006) or Glen Coulthard (2014) or Sarah Hunt (2014). Or to consider how the Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and/or Native
Hawaiians are affected by and affect security politics. Critical scholars who focus on the security politics of the Arctic are already including Indigenous concerns and
knowledge in their analysis. Using securitization theory, Greaves (2016) engages with Inuit and Sámi discourses “in order to explain variation in different
understandings of (in)security” among Indigenous Peoples as well as recognizing how colonial agendas constrain the capacities of Indigenous Peoples “to advance a
conception of (in)security that is distinct from those of settler governments” (2016: 462-3). Harrington and Lecavalier (2014) work through an emancipatory approach
in order to understand how Inuit discourse, particularly that which is articulated by and through the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and traditional knowledge “offers an
important emancipatory alternative to traditional practices of environmental security” (2014: 114). Yet, inclusion and recognition of Indigenous Peoples and
knowledge does not necessarily un-settle the academy (Ahenakew 2016). Greater inclusion need not contest the fact that the academic
study of security,
whether it be traditional or critical, is not possible without (settler) colonialism /imperialism. Ontologically , the
world of nation states, citizens, consumers, the environment, water , and food cannot exist as referents of security because they
do not exist as such without colonial rearrangements of economics, geographies, and politics (see Byrd
2011; Samson and Gigoux 2017). Epistemologically, notions of threat and danger are entwined with colonial determinations of the civilized, productive, and/or human
(see Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013). Methodologically, the Anglo-European “modernization” of academic knowledge production does not occur without the
discovery, classification, and collection of “native” people, flora, and fauna (Tuhiwai Smith 2012). Politically, the
educational authority of Anglo-
European universities rests, in many instances literally, on the coercive disposition of land, suppression of language,
and spiritual and creative practice, as well as the ignorance of traditional knowledge (see Todd 2016). Only
through honestly confronting this (ongoing) complicity with colonialism can critical security scholarship sincerely
consider, support, and enact decolonial possibilities.
 FW---Critique Key
Critique is a pre-requisite to policy-making. It opens new pathways that drastically alter
our relationships to water.
Ellis and Perry 20, *educator, advocate, and researcher specializing in justice‐oriented watershed management and conservation in the
Southwest, **PhD, Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University (Rachelle and Denielle, “A
Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection,” Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 169.1)//BB

Anticolonial analyses are relevant in the examination of federal policy, water governance, and Indigenous
community organizing. Any attempt s to protect Sipapuni, the Confluence, and the LCR must examine if and
how such efforts either continue or challenge the colonial legacy of severing Indigenous people from their
homelands and culture in the name of conservation or compliance. While it is perhaps incongruous to assess anticolonial
critique is still needed as a component of systemic anticolonial
dimensions of federal policy tools, the
strategies . A comprehensive anticolonial protection pathway arguably starts with deconstructing “colonial
mentalities.” This can be done by incorporating IK as knowledge‐action‐value‐spiritual constructs equal to Western science and then
building genuine, collaborative, and inclusive decision‐making processes that prioritize Indigenous sovereignty and
self‐determination. The next step requires recognizing that Indigenous rights to land and water are inherent ,
while understanding advocacy strategies must simultaneously adapt colonial policies to achieve anticolonial ends. The final step entails
progressing toward repatriation of Indigenous lands ( i.e., physical decolonization ). Anticolonial pathways further
support re‐Indigenizing water management through a heavy emphasis on the role that relationships, responsibility, respect, reciprocity, and
accountability play in interactions with the human, physical, and spiritual world.
 FW---AT Fairness
Reject appeals to fairness in the context of indigenous violence
Singleton 9, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Western Washington (Sara, “Native People and Planning for
Marine Protected Areas: How “Stakeholder” Processes Fail to Address Conflicts in Complex, Real-World Environments,” Coastal Management,
37.5)//BB

How do we explain this? Among a host of factors including bureaucratic turf battles, resistance to change, uncertainty regarding
leadership, and capacity issues among aboriginal governments, I will focus on one that is seldom acknowledged or discussed. The particular
status of native people—societies within larger societies—presents significant challenges for models of political
processes that equate equality with treating everyone the same . Among many academics and policymakers
there is a pervasive , and almost unthinking , sense that an appropriate process is one in which all
“stakeholders” enter on a more-or-less equal footing . Consequently, policy practitioners maintain, as best they
can, a process that weighs the concerns of different groups equally and without prejudice. Collaborative
processes are seen as a way of broadening and deepening democratic practice, which, in practice, is
invariably framed along the lines of a “one-person, one-vote” form of political equality (Fung & Wright, 2001).
Phrases such as a “ level playing field ” embody that aspiration. Yet the question of what it means to treat people
equal ly is deeply contested , as ongoing conflicts over affirmative action and reparative justice will attest to. At
the very least, the myth of the “level playing field” requires a considerable degree of naivete´ concerning the
effects of the past on the present. Nonetheless, it is a powerful image, and one for which the particular
status of tribes and First Nations presents an inconvenient exception. It is this, I would argue, that partially accounts for the fact
that they are often overlooked , despite the fact that their special status has been recognized by the courts in
both countries and carries real force on the ground.
 Alt Solvency / Brink
The alternative solves. Colonialism is at a breaking point and alternative epistemologies
can shatter it.
O’Shea 18, Professor of World Arts at UCLA (Janet, “Decolonizing the Curriculum? Unsettling possibilities for performance training,”
Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 8.4)//BB

As Trump’s executive order with which I opened this discussion suggests, we are witnessing a reckless extension of corporate
largesse and of extractionist and expansionist industries at the very moment our planet and people can
least afford it (Klein, 2014). More resources, proportionally, lie in hands of the very few than in any time since the Gilded Age of the early
twentieth century (Neate, 2017). And, yet , the instability we now confront also signals that this time is one of crisis
for neocolonialism and neoliberalism. The benevolent mask of colonialism , with its fraudulent promises of equality,
has been torn away to reveal the exploitative agenda that runs it.
This moment of instability, this time of political and economic crisis, offers an opportunity for re-envisioning ways
of being, working, and connecting. A decolonizing approach might seize upon this instability to further
unsettle it and seriously consider alternatives. Jane Desmond (2016) argues that scholarship in the humanities allows us
to question whether how we live now is how we want to live. Desmond suggests, accordingly, that arts and humanities
scholarship allows us to envision other worlds and other ways of being. As with our theorization, so, too, can our teaching enable
us to envision other ways of existing and interacting. In rethinking our curricula, we can rethink, and
recraft, our labor so as to supplant colonial models of exploitation and ownership . Decolonizing
moves in dance and performance studies can seize on instability, not only seriously considering alternatives but
also bringing them into being .
 Alt Solvency---MPAs
The critique is pre-requisite to successful marine protection
Singleton 9, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Western Washington (Sara, “Native People and Planning for
Marine Protected Areas: How “Stakeholder” Processes Fail to Address Conflicts in Complex, Real-World Environments,” Coastal Management,
37.5)//BB

Managers who are designing and maintaining MPAs must be fully cognizant of the differences that exist between
native groups and other interested parties or stakeholders . A working knowledge of formal and informal institutions
such as legal entitlements, preexisting practices, and formal and informal norms of, for example, decision-

making and the exercise of authority in the particular native community are prerequisites for

building productive relationships. Because these institutions vary from place to place and country to country, training needs to be
place-specific . In many instances, brief orientations in native political culture and institutions are already a
part of training, but they are often superficial and rarely taken as seriously as other aspects of MPA
planning and practice. Yet the history of marine conservation initiatives is replete with examples of how a
failure to fully comprehend the social and economic issues surrounding native/state relations prior to
entering into negotiations has been a primary cause of their derailment . In most cases, negotiations with
tribes or other native political entities needs to take place prior to , and as an independent piece of, the “stakeholder” process that
generally accompanies the implementation of marine conservation measures . Involving native people in the
initial stages—or better yet, as part of an ongoing consultation process—conveys a sense of respect, as well as alerting
state mangers to potential problems. In addition, it helps to address what one group of resource management consultants
refer to as the “missing piece” of aboriginal/state collaborative processes—”the part where the parties mutually explore and learn about the
options and their consequences, deal with the uncertainty and complexity inherent in resource management, and
systematically and constructive address difficult tradeoffs ...” (Gregory et al., 2008, 37). The Washington State
tribes have created an excellent set of guidelines (see earlier) that could serve as the starting point for MPA
planning. Setting up a process that runs along a different “track” to the stakeholder process may also help preclude or at least defuse
conflicts surrounding the contested place occupied by native people with larger societies. While there is certainly
the possibility that having a separate process may elicit resentment for other local residents or user-groups, it will nonetheless probably be
preferable to the alternative—a public process in which native groups are accorded different standing, with all the opportunities for
conflict that that may elicit.
 Specific Alternative---Decolonize Water
Only decolonization first can promote water legislation that avoids colonial trappings
Wilson 19, PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell (Nicole, ““Seeing Water Like a State?”: Indigenous water governance
through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements,” Geoforum, 104)//BB

Finally, Yukon First Nations are exploring how to strategically engage legislative options for the purpose of protecting their relationships to
water. Critiques of these forms of governance can assist with the development of SGYFN water legislation by
highlighting how to avoid reproducing the same problems found in settler colonial legislation . While there are
clear benefits to developing this legislation, some Yukon First Nations will likely determine that the risks are not worth the rewards. The
experiences of Tribes with TAS, explored in this paper, are instructive in terms of some of the challenges SGYFNs might face in developing and
enforcing their legislation. As the TAS example suggests, Tribes who develop legislation are very likely to face litigation
by proponents and/or settler governments. The extent to which their legislation stands-up in court will,
therefore, in part depend on the legislation’s resemblance to settler legislation, regulations or policy . In this
sense, as Inupiat/Inuvialuit legal scholar Gordon Christie (2007) notes, Indigenous peoples should be wary of the limitations
imposed on the reinvigoration of Indigenous legal traditions through framings structured by the dominant
legal system and its ontological underpinnings. Indeed, for such a shift to be meaningful , a transformation or
decolonization of the broader legal and governance system is needed . For instance, such a system must take a
legally pluralistic approach that respects Indigenous peoples “free, prior, and informed consent” (Askew et al., 2017, Curran, 2019). At the same
time, Indigenous legal scholars have begun to develop approaches that could guide the development of such legislation. In two recent reports
analyzing the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2008), Indigenous legal scholars including
Craft, Christie, Borrows and others propose that Indigenous legal orders can be engaged in the development of Indigenous or co-developed
legislation and policy by “braiding of Indigenous, constitutional, and international law” (Craft et al., 2018, Fitzgerald et al., 2017). While such an
approach requires much caution, the metaphor is useful in thinking through how settler states might begin to work jointly with Indigenous
governments to develop legislation, and/or respect the legislation developed by SGYFNs.

Indigenous control of water is key to water sustainability

Hemming 17, Professor @ Flinders University (Steve, et al, “A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a
strategy for river health,” Ecology and Society, 22.2)//BB

A nation-building approach in which Indigenous nations are recognized as sovereign partners in water
management and planning can serve to address many of the issues highlighted above (Hemming et al. 2011, Dolan et al. 2015). Indigenous
Nations, adequately resourced, are able to build their own capacity to engage in the complexities of the rapidly evolving water
management realm. Indigenous nations want to see an engagement across epistemologies and ontologies ,
the sharing of whole world views and institutional insights, rather than a one-way removal of Indigenous knowledge from its
context and insertion of it into a mainstream framework (see Muller 2012, 2014). Engaging with Indigenous
epistemologies and ontologies as the cultural anchors of Indigenous political authority can inherently
change the overarching framework for natural resource management and provide new insight into
sustainability (Berkes 1999, Armitage et al. 2010, Dolan et al. 2015, Rigney et al. 2015). The true opportunities and benefits of
Indigenous participation in comanagement of lands and waters can only be realized if Indigenous nations are adequately
resourced to be in the driving seat of incorporating their own knowledges in planning and management
frameworks. Ngarrindjeri Nation engagement in water planning in South Australia provides a useful insight into the benefits of a nation-
building approach for addressing the challenges of incorporating Indigenous values and interests into wetland management and environmental
water allocation.
 Specific Alternative---Radical Relationality
The alternative is radical relationality with water. That builds successful counterhegemonic
movements.
Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy 18, *Professor of Native American Studies, bilagaana born for Ma’iideeshgiizhinii (Coyote
Pass Clan). She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism and decolonization; biopolitics; water;
Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies;
Marxist theories of history, knowledge, and power; and theories of policing and the state., **Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of
the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit organization that supports
the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture., PhD and Assistant Professor @ Humboldt (“Introduction: Indigenous peoples
and the politics of water,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7.1)

The reclaiming of our accountability to water view has been the hallmark of struggles for decolonization
(including research and direct action) in recent years . Our resurgent commitment to water view has
reinvigorated our human liveliness and our decolonial conviction . This accountability to water view envisions
and enacts an ethos of “living well,” which Harsha Walia (2013) points out defies “the capitalist and colonial system’s logic of
competition, commodification, and domination” (p. 255). Living well requires “interdependency and respect among all living
things” (Ibid). We call this ethos of living well radical relationality , which is radical in the sense of roots or
origins, as in a relationality from which all life and history derives meaning and shape (like water view), and
also in the sense of a dramatic and revolutionary change from our current epoch of power, as in a radical
shift towards decolonization (Yazzie, 2017). We conceive of radical relationality as a term that brings together the
multiple strands of materiality, kinship, corporeality, affect, land/body connection, and multidimensional
connectivity coming primarily from Indigenous feminists (Danforth, 2015; Dhillon, 2016; Goeman, 2016; TallBear, 2017).
It provides a vision of relationality and collective political organization that is deeply intersectional and
premised on values of interdependency, reciprocity, equality, and responsibility . In ‘Talkin’ Up To The White
Woman, Aileen Morton-Robinson (2001) states that “In Indigenous cultural domains relationality means that one experiences the
self as part of others and that others are part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation,
shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and social memory ” (p. 16). Within this framework of
relationality, water is not seen as a resource to be weaponized for the interests of capital by corporations that harness, obstruct,
pollute, and discipline water through infrastructure projects like dams and pipelines to boost the capitalist economies of settler nation-states. No,
within an Indigenous feminist framework, water is a relative with whom we engage in social (and
political) relations premised on interdependency and respect . Kim TallBear (2017) offers a similar framework she calls
“caretaking.” Drawing from Kate Shanley, who is also an Indigenous feminist, TallBear argues that caretaking is an expression of “obligations of
human kin with our other kin.” She goes on to argue that scholarly theories of relationality are simply inadequate for capturing the “vibrancy” and
“spirit” of “Indigenous relationships with our non-human relations in these lands,” largely because they sever materiality from spirit (Ibid).
TallBear’s critique of academic work on relationality suggests the importance of looking to other spaces of
knowledge production like political movements (and relationalities like water view) to understand the stunning
vibrancy and spirit of relational worlds. Indeed, this rich and diverse work by Indigenous feminists in the
academy dovetails with equally impactful discourses that have emerged from Indigenous-led
decolonization struggles occurring outside of the academy. Both fields of production point us to a
framework of radical relationality that helps to theorize what might be called ontologies of
decolonization, which are defined by the condition of being-in-relation-to that water view instills in us . In
other words, decolonization’s diverse political, ontological, and epistemological manifestations all center on and reproduce the interdependency,
interconnection, and respect between all beings with spirit. The future is uncertain. Whether or not we come together on a
larger scale and in a spirit of radical relationality to forge an effective counterhegemonic force is
entirely up to us , human beings. This issue is titled “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water.” When we talk of
Indigenous peoples and the politics of water, we are talking about reorienting our politics and our
collective practice of decolonization toward the framework of radical relationality, toward an
accountability to water view. This radical relationality of water, however, is not invoked within the terrain of struggle simply as an act
of cultural reclamation, Indigenous knowledge-making, or individual healing. Although these scales of decolonial investment are important
aspects of struggle that scholars and activists certainly espouse as part of our practice of protecting our water relatives, we argue that radical
relationality requires interconnecting these variously scaled decolonial practices to build the kind of mass
movements that are necessary for staging a serious counterhegemonic challenge to the status quo of
death that currently structures our existence . This requires commitment and trust in the work we have already done. The
paradigm has already been created; we just need to enforce it .

A vast and interconnected challenge to settler colonialism is burgeoning. It relies on radical

relationality to water to succeed.
Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy 18, *Professor of Native American Studies, bilagaana born for Ma’iideeshgiizhinii (Coyote
Pass Clan). She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism and decolonization; biopolitics; water;
Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies;
Marxist theories of history, knowledge, and power; and theories of policing and the state., **Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of
the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit organization that supports
the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture., PhD and Assistant Professor @ Humboldt (“Introduction: Indigenous peoples
and the politics of water,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7.1)

It is in our interdependencies and reciprocities that we derive our greatest power and secure a future for
all. Although Indigenous peoples in North America do not have a monopoly on relationality (indeed, by definition, relationality is not a possessive ontology), it cannot be denied that the widespread
renewal of our bonds with these lands and waters is necessary for the larger struggle for decolonization.
This renewal of relationality has stunningly energized what we believe is a potential paradigm shift . The multi-spatial and multi-

scalar constellation of struggles that is forming now could potentially cohere into a broader epistemic shift

where the deadly hegemony of capitalist-colonial relationality is met with a fully formed
counterhegemony based on a politics and ontology of relational life (Yazzie, 2016). This has been an ongoing struggle and we acknowledge how
resistance and movements can be seen from the very first moments of settler invasion. Resistance can also be seen in the ongoing practices of Indigenous

peoples in their communities, their refusal to bow to state or imperial regulations on their ceremonial, cultural and
environmental practices with or without media or popular interest or support for their actions (Risling Baldy, 2013). In this contemporary moment, the convergence of movements like MMIW with land-
based struggles against resource extraction (which coalesced into Idle No More in 2012- 2013) has been quickly followed by new uprisings like NoDAPL (2016) to protect water and new movements like The Red Nation (2014) to
abolish carcerality in urban and bordertown locations (Dhillon, 2017; The Red Nation, 2014). The 2015 struggle to prevent copper mining in customary Apache territory in Oak Flats and the uprising that same year by Kanaka Maoli
relatives to prevent construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai’i are also a part of this growing movement. Each of these struggles has received massive international support and significant
mainstream media attention. As we note above, a simple review of the discourses coming out of these struggles demonstrates a conscious actualization of radical relationality. For example, The Red Nation (TRN), which is an
Indigenous-led liberation organization that Melanie co-founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2014, espouses an Indigenous feminist framework based on the elaborate and expansive systems of kinship that Indigenous peoples
continue to practice. Like TallBear, who highlights the relations of caretaking that are at the heart of Indigenous kinship practices, The Red Nation operates according to an ethics of caretaking, and believes that revolutionary struggle
requires the caretaking of human, land, water, and ancestor kin wherever and whenever they need protection.5 All of the organization’s campaigns, which range from establishing Indigenous Peoples Day in Albuquerque, to resisting
hydraulic fracking in Chaco Canyon, to protesting police violence against human relatives in reservation border towns, extend from this philosophy and practice (TRN, 2014). Melanie notes that TRN does not see itself as unique or
novel. To the contrary, those who organize with TRN represent the current generation of kin who are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a future for our world, just as our ancestors of the before and the already forthcoming
have and will always do (Estes, 2017). For TRN, this intergenerational relationality is the basis of decolonization and the horizon of a collective revolutionary struggle to free all living beings from the violence of colonialism and
capitalism. It is a far-reaching and unremitting labor of love; a quest to galvanize a federation of life that can overthrow the empire of death that structures our current reality. We do not wish to gloss over the fact that several of these
struggles were forced to an early conclusion by unrelenting state repression. Nor do we want to downplay the actual complexity and conflict that has characterized these struggles. Indeed, there were several important battles regarding
the culmination, reinvigoration, and conclusion of past paradigms of struggle that played out in this cluster of uprisings between 2012 and 2017. The multiple trajectories both within and in the aftermath of Idle No More,
#SaveOakFlat, #NoDAPL, Nihigaal Bee Iiná, and others, point to this. Whereas some came out of these struggles settled on healing and cultural resurgence as the path forward, others rejected these terms and instead shifted their
efforts towards confrontations with state violence. Some have become more interested in collaborating with other Leftist, radical, and progressive traditions, while others have chosen to see Indigenous resistance as a singular struggle

these struggles opened space for

with unique challenges. And whereas some have embraced non-violent direct action as the tactic of choice, others have chosen militancy. Whatever the trajectories, the complexity of

long brewing tensions and contradictions to be worked out. But they alsoforged possibilities for equally dynamic struggles to form in the future.
It is out of this complexity and vibrancy that radical relationality has emerged as a common feature of
these struggles. Amidst this complex history unfolding, we see a critical process emerging, one where we
are learning how to work together as good relatives even whilst carrying all the contradictions and injuries that colonialism has imposed upon us into these relationships.
And most of us are doing this on a scale and magnitude (and with unprecedented support) that we never imagined possible . But we

want to emphasize that what is politically and analytically significant here is the saliency of our collective

commitment to radical relationality . Indeed, this cluster of struggles was not entirely localized to the geopolitical context from which each emerged; they were, as Goeman might say,
part of a larger phenomenon of radical relationality that collapses the perceived distance between scales of space

that colonial knowledges fabricates. In its place, these struggles have cultivated the seeds for a vast interconnected
movement that operates at multiple scales of spatial justice, including the individual, social, political,
community, and transnational (2016, p. 101). Regardless of our different approaches to decolonization or resistance, we thus ask our relatives who are reading this to recognize that the expansive
interconnectedness forged through these struggles remains very much intact. Our mountain, human, animal, and water relatives with whom we have

reignited a promise of mutual care and protection await our next move . We are not starting from scratch; the seeds have already been planted,
the cracks in empire already made . The tide of history is with us . So long as we remain committed to
building a successful liberation movement and embracing a far-reaching relational politics of life, the
web of radical relationality will only grow until it blankets the world in stunning beauty and restores
the balance that our stories and prophecies have always foretold . While the new relatives and cacophonies of struggle we have made in the past six years
certainly move us toward a more fully formed practice of radical relationality, we still have work to do— together—to build the interconnectedness that is needed to build a successful liberation movement premised on values of
cooperation, respect, interdependency, and care. This can and will only be strengthened by making new relatives and practicing traditions of belonging and incorporation that are not based on capitalist and colonial notions of

difference, exclusion, scarcity, and competition. Radical relationality is, after all, simply the ontology of being-in-relation-to that
describes all life and futurity; keeping ourselves open to the possibility of making new relatives is one of
the essential functions of life and, indeed, decolonization . It is thus important not to treat Turtle Island as exceptional or somehow isolated within the broader
constellation of actually-existing (and already won) struggles for decolonization in other parts of the world. How can we conceive of, and build, connections between the ontology of decolonization (i.e. radical relationality) that

the reach
emerges from this specific place, and ontologies of decolonization elsewhere? How can we look to radical relationality and water view as a guide for our relationship-making with other nations? We believe

and impact of radical relationality extends beyond the web of relations that comprise life in our specific
nations. We can see this with our waters, which run and interconnect across nations, across continents,
across any arbitrarily drawn border. We learn from water that these interconnections are complex and
dynamic and that they weave together in a web that sustains and builds the infrastructure for life as we
know it. Like our waters, we are meant to work, sustain, and support each other .

Radical relationality to water builds decolonizing movements globally

Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy 18, *Professor of Native American Studies, bilagaana born for Ma’iideeshgiizhinii (Coyote
Pass Clan). She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism and decolonization; biopolitics; water;
Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies;
Marxist theories of history, knowledge, and power; and theories of policing and the state., **Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of
the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit organization that supports
the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture., PhD and Assistant Professor @ Humboldt (“Introduction: Indigenous peoples
and the politics of water,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7.1)

Decolonization is an aspiration and a militant struggle that has been and will continue to be waged in all places that have been ravaged by empire.
If radical relationality is about living well, and if living well depends on acting in a manner of
interdependency and respect among all things with spirit , then it makes sense to extend this logic to the realm of solidarity
where working and collaborating across difference is a key part of what it means to organize under the banner of liberation and decolonization
globally. In this sense, radical relationality encourages a view of decolonization consistent with the intersectionality that Angela Davis (2015)
points out has been so central to the relations of solidarity that have defined the growing interdependencies between the Palestinian liberation
struggle and the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Davis also implies that these interdependencies are a prerequisite for actual,
mature movements to grow out of uprisings like Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL, or the Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions struggle that has captivated US-based Palestine solidarity work over the last handful
of years (Ibid). In addition to the interconnections that have been transpiring and growing in the organizing world, there have been promising
parallel developments in Native American and Indigenous studies. Renewed interest in solidarity between the Palestinian liberation struggle and
North American (and Pacific) Indigenous struggles has taken form over the past several years under the aegis of critiquing settler colonialism in
Israel and the United States (Kauanui, 2012; Warrior 1989; Waziyatawin, 2012; Yazzie, 2015). In Inter/nationalism: Decolonizing Native
America and Palestine, Steven Salaita (2016) highlights how at the center of this growing PalestinianIndigenous solidarity has been the
articulation of a shared struggle for decolonization and national liberation, both of which are organized under the larger structure and imaginary
of Indigenous nationalism. However, this nationalism, like decolonization, is not an “isolated organism. It is a radical entity that survives in
relation to the destinies of other nations” (p. xvii). While US settler colonialism is certainly sited in specific territorial configurations, Salaita
points out that “American 12 Introduction colonization is an international phenomenon” (p. 61). A prime example of this phenomenon is
contemporary Israeli nationalism, which he argues is a “modern incarnation and proud conserver of American manifest destiny” (p. 15-6). This is
why he concludes that decolonization and national liberation are necessarily cooperative—indeed, inter/national—processes (Yazzie,
forthcoming).6 The inter/national interconnectedness that has been growing between Black, Palestinian, and Native liberation efforts gives an
additional dimension and scale to the relationality between humans, land, and water that has been growing here on this continent over the past
five years. There are multiple other connections and axes of cooperation materializing, as well. We are in a historical moment in
which political struggle is manifesting anew as large-scale, collective mobilization for liberation on
numerous fronts. Indigenous peoples of this continent are part of a worldwide uprising of the
dispossessed who are confronting a growing conflagration at the nexus of climate change, resource
extraction, militant resistance, forced human migration, feminist mobilizations to end sexual violence,
imperial wars and militarization, and wide-scale demands to end carcerality (Dhillon, 2017). Although many see
these struggles as isolated or issue-driven campaigns, we encourage our relatives reading this to see the radical relationality in and across these
struggles. More importantly, we implore our relatives to build and foster this radical relationality. In Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of
Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2011) asks something similar from us: While
theoretically, we have debated whether Audre Lourde’s ‘the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house,’ I am interested in a different
question.I am not so concerned with how we can dismantle the master’s house , that is, which sets of
theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house . I
have spent enough time taking down the master’s house, and now I want most of my energy to go into visioning and building
our new house” (p. 32). Like Salaita and Smith, Simpson is invested in building struggles for decolonization that abound with the kind of
noisy optimism and relationality—a praxis centered on building vibrant alternative futures rather than just challenging colonial violence—that
drives our commitment to decolonizing knowledge, building successful decolonization movements and, ultimately, decolonized futures. The
phrase “ontologies of decolonization” certainly points to this dual character of struggles for decolonization: dismantling the master’s house and
building our own. However, we hope to have demonstrated a third dimension of struggles for decolonization. This dimension, simply put,
is struggle; the dynamic, materiality of decolonization that is forged in the terrain of the here-andnow of
collective and cooperative struggle. How we struggle is how we remember, how we live, how we dream.
It is how we relate. This is what water teaches us .
 Specific Alternative---Local Control
Genuine local control of solves and is mutually exclusive with state-centered regulation of
water
Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. 238)//BB

The principle that water is the product of peoples' involvement in the water process finds expression in new forms of water governance. For
example, a new constellation of public participation, water infrastructure and regulatory apparatus seems to
be forming in the wake of the experi- ment with urban water privatization in the 1990s. The shift toward pri-
vatizing water-service infrastructure may have had the salutary effect of breaking up some of the least
responsive statist water regimes; however, after a decade or more of initial exuberance, it has became
obvious, as discussed in Chapter 3, that privatization was no simple panacea: its wide- spread failure to provide
adequate water services to the poor, to invest in new infrastructure and maintain existing infrastructure, to
promote con- servation, and even to make a profit has given rise to a rethinking of the simple dichotomy
between statist and market water systems. In some jurisdictions, as Karen Bakker has shown, water services have been re-
structured and re-regulated so as to correct some of the more abject lapses of out-and-out privatization.31 The combined shortcomings
of both state and market-driven water systems have shown that the problem is neither quite the state
nor quite the market but "a lack of democratic process in the public sector . "32 Thus, the " reclamation
of public water manifests as a process in which organizational structures respond to changing social and
hydrological circumstances. Balanyå and her colleagues have assembled a compendium of case stud- ies where the citizens of
urban regions in the global north and south are engaging with water in a way that patently bucks the
modern trend of statist, technocratic water management .33 The basic principle of these people-oriented
"water solutions" is that local citizens are involved in all matters pertaining to water management.34
While it may be too simplistic to characterize these solutions as a matter of substituting "community control" for privatization," it is patent that
when they are so involved, people identify water and assert its social nature in ways that differ mark-
edly from modern water . The compendium shows how significant improvements in access to clean
water and sanitation have been achieved by diverse forms of public water management . These people-
centred public water solutions have occurred under a variety of socio- economic, cultural and political
circumstances ... In [most of these cases], citizen and user participation in various forms is an essential factor
behind the improvements in effectiveness, responsiveness and social achievements of the water utility ...
While it should not be considered a panacea to be implemented in every situation, and in some circumstances may not be feasible,
participation and democratization in its multiple forms can be a powerful tool for positive change in most
circumstances.} 6 In order to gain access to and control of water on their own terms, the players involved
in these people-oriented water solutions have insisted on identifying water in their own terms, that is, as a
public good , but one to which the state has no prior claim . What seems to be emerging at the progressive
edge of urban water governance combines the rejection of state structures and rigid techniques with a renewed
emphasis on democratic participation in decision making to produce a plethora of what might be called
postmodern public waters . The principle of local involvement in water governance is also an important lesson learned by
international development agencies involved in water projects. "Local water management,' writes resource economist David Brooks,
"permits a democratizing decentralization of decision making and accountability. Well done, it empowers people (particularly the
poor and otherwise disadvantaged) to take part in the decisions that define their own futures . And it
encourages the integration of tradition- al knowledge with innovative science to promote fair and efficient supply management.
The overriding principle of "local water management" as described by Brooks is that people "need to be engaged in the decisions
affecting their lives. "38 Although this may seem an obvious prerequisite for success, it nevertheless poses
a serious challenge to modern water and to the expert discourses by which modern water is sustained .
Adhering to such a prin- ciple means paying attention to the particular hydrosocial relations and the
different waters that inhere in specific social contexts . Further, it often means recognizing the legitimacy of,
and adapting relatively simple tech- niques that embody, traditional or local knowledges of water . In many cases, these
knowledges and techniques have been shown to be more suc- cessful and sustainable than complex,
exogenous technologies, no matter how brilliant the latter may appear to their progenitors.39
 Specific Alternative---Hydroelectics
The alternative is hydroelectics. That breaks modern conceptions of water and facilitates
water self-determination for indigenous peoples.
Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. 224-226)//BB

This chapter brings together several strands of the discussion above to outline a practice of social hydrology that I call " hydrolectics." Con-
sistent with a relational-dialectical outlook, hydrolectics conceives of a water process out of which particular instances of
water get fixed, or instantiated, in social relations . Hydrolectics thus complicates the science of abstract
water with the idea that we cannot have knowledge of water except in relation to our own circumstances
and modes of knowing. In every case, it is the relation that defines the essence of what water is . This
primacy of relation is obvious in the literal and material sense in which every cell of our body contains
water and functions by virtue of water. The very process that we call "life" is so conditioned by water that it be- comes impossible
to separate these two processes except by fixing them in abstractions such as "people" and "HIC)." Thus, knowing and identifying
water is necessarily a product of engagement, with engagement itself being the real — that is, relational
— substance of both the knower and the known. That we live and think by virtue of engagement with and participation in the
water process means that we cannot identify water as something apart from ourselves except through the violence of abstraction. With respect to
water and ourselves, there is no inside and no outside ; water is always in our life process and so long as we
live, we are always part of the water process . This statement may be taken as the hydrological
imperative of a general ontology of process. As A.N. Whitehead puts it, "We are in the world and the world is in us. "i An
ontology of process might seem a rather impractical stance on which to build any sort of practice. But it
simply means that for all practical purposes, every instance of water is secondary to the process of
engagement that makes it part of our world. From the drilling of a well to the discov- ery of H20 on Mars by researchers at
NASA, water is a collaboration between ourselves and the environment rather than a self-identical thing in
itself. And to the extent that we make practical use of water — by pump- ing water from a well or perchance by living on Mars — the water
process occurs through us. Water problems, therefore, are never just water problems; to imagine them in such a
way is to deprive ourselves of the potential that exists in the water process . Every relevant instance of water is
realized by someone, whether a state planner, a well driller, a consumer, a researcher at NASA, or a child play- ing in the rain. Water is therefore
conceived not as a self-identical object but as a process whose identity is formed in social relations. The possibil- ities for water are
thus open to social change. In this sense, hydrolectics draws attention to the politics of waters instead of
waterpolitics . The politics of waters begins with the assertion that water is never simply "neutral
stuff"; it is never merely given .2 The fact that water always becomes what it is in accordance with a particular kind of engagement
Wherever water is declared a resource , the
means that it always becomes for someone or something.
nature of its resourcefulness is defined by the particular uses for, and interests in, water held by those
who declare it thus . Much of this study has examined how, throughout the era of modern water, a particu- lar idea of the
resourcefulness of water has been naturalized by government agencies, private corporations, and water
managers and experts who have held the authority to generalize particular kinds of hydrosocial
engagement — and particular waters. In this concluding chapter, I want to suggest a practice founded on the idea that water itself is
political— that what is always at play is not just the question of who gets it, but the question of what water is. Several years ago, as an earlier
draft of this book was being prepared, Canadians were learning (or being reminded) of the appalling water con- ditions that pertain in many of the
country's remote Native communities. In late October 2005, it came to light that the water treatment and distribution
system of the Kashechewan reserve on the shore of James Bay was contaminated with potentially deadly
E scherichia coli bacteria. Most of the community's 1,200 residents were evacuated to cities in central and southern Ontario pending a
solution to the problem. In the ensuing media coverage of the event, it was reported that for more than two years before this outbreak, federal
government officials had been advising people in Kashechewan to boil their tap water before using it. Now, in the wake of an infamous E. coli
outbreak that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ontario in 1999, the discovery of E. coli in Kashechewan was rightly deemed a national disgrace.
The plight of the residents of Kashechewan makes an argument for water's social nature and for an
approach to water problems that recognizes social conditions as the key ingredient . Although most acute, the
problem faced by these people was hardly unique. At the time the incident was reported, thirty-eight other Native communities in Ontario were
under official "boiling water advisories," and for First Nations commun- ities in Canada as a whole, the number was more than one hundred.3
The residents of Native communities all across the country were thus compelled to use bottled water or water imported by other means (e.g., by
tanker truck) from hundreds if not thousands of kilometres away for their basic needs. Nor was this situation only a recent occurrence: In 1988,
the Science Council of Canada had reported that fully one-halfofall on-reserve homes in Canada had no piped water. And in 1994, an outbreak of
water-borne hepatitis B. in the community of Pukatawagan in northern Manitoba reached the attention of the public when a group of its residents
began to walk three hundred kilometres south to the provincial capital to protest the deplorable water conditions in their community.4 As with the
revela- tion of E coli in Kashechewan, the Pukatawagan story drew national attention to the water crisis facing Canada's First Nations
communities. Then, as now, Canadians expressed their shock and disgust, and politicians promised to fix the problem. The irony of the water
crisis in Canada's northern Native communities is striking. Although a couple of the reserves identified as having inadequate drinking water were
located in the southern, more densely populated part of the country, almost all were in more remote northern regions. There is perhaps no place
on earth where "natural" water resources are, in propor- tion to the population, more plentiful and of better quality than in north- ern Canada.
Even when including the more heavily populated parts of the country, Canada boasts a per capita supply of river runoff greater than almost every
other country, and our share of the world's lake water is second to none: With its vast hydrological resources and relatively min- iscule human
population, there could hardly be a less likely place for severe water problems than northern Canada. And yet, for the people involved, these
problems are of a magnitude similar or equal to those facing com- munities in parts of the world that have been designated as "highly water 6
stressed" when measured in terms of water resources per capita. The stories of Kashechewan and Pukatawagan illustrate how the water
crisis has less to do with water than modern water leads us to believe. As the Indian socio-environmental activist
Sunita Narain has declared, " Water is not about water ." This assertion strikes us as paradoxical — like a water crisis in northern
Canada — because we regard "water" in the first instance as something that we act upon. In the way of thinking conditioned by modern water,
water can always only be "about water." That water is, or may be, about something entirely different from that to which we have become
accustomed is suggested in the second part of Narain's statement: "Water is about building people's institutions and power
to take control over decisions." Taking "control over decisions" is relevant to the water crisis in Canada's north. Of all Canadian
communities, the residents of northern reserves have been among the least likely to have a say in the water systems on which their collective and
individual health depends. Although First Na- tions band councils have primary responsibility for the construction, operation, and maintenance of
these water systems, they are designed, built, and operated in accordance with federal (or in some cases provincial) government standards.
Furthermore, they consist of technologies that have been developed in industrialized, urban environments. The choice of technologies, as well as
the construction, operation, and maintenance of these systems, is largely a matter of remote control from Ottawa, governed by what can only be
described as foreign knowledge and expertise.7 The result is a water so alien to people in these communities that many of the residents do not
trust it for drinking, or even for bathing. Instead, many use expensive bottled water or take their water directly from lakes and 8 rivers. The
irony that people living in northern Canada feel they must use bottled water for their daily needs suggests a
fundamental, and tragic, disconnect in hydrosocial relations. It suggests a mode of engagement with water
that is hardly on the terms of the people who actually live in these places . The water ofsuch places is not merely
given — rather, it has become in accordance with programs, plans, and technologies that emanate from
another place and another, entirely different, set of hydrosocial relations . Although the government
agencies involved are undoubtedly sincere in their efforts to furnish water for the First Nations peoples of
these com- munities, no expenditure of goodwill — or money alone — can substitute for allowing the
people the capacity to engage, and produce, water for themselves . Until they gain a greater measure of
power and control over the means by which water comes into their lives, such people are ever susceptible to
water crises .9

Hydro-social understandings of water form basis for ethical water-politics

Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. Kindle Edition)//BB

The hydrosocial cycle makes it unreasonable (and irrelevant) to isolate flows of water from social processes
and vice versa. Whereas the hydrologic cycle "proceeds endlessly in the presence or absence of human activity," 24 the hydrosocial cycle
frames a science whose field is defined by relations between the hydrological and the social. The hydrosocial cycle can be
considered a way of conceptualizing, envisioning, and accounting for the necessary correspondences
between hydrological and social processes. To elaborate on the comment made by Swyngedouw and cited above, analyz- ing
physical flows of water in particular places "narrates stories" about social structure and cultural norms . 25
Therefore, in contrast with "the global water system " depicted above, the hydrosocial cycle can hardly exist as
an abstract concept — it doesn't exist apart from the process of tracing and narrating specific flows. In this
way, drawing the hydrosocial cycle might be considered a performance that yields practical
knowledge of the social- historical nature of water . Drawing the hydrosocial cycle can thus be
regarded as a means of pro- ducing critical knowledge of the social nature of waters. The examples and images
presented here are drawn to reflect my position on water politics in Canada. Readers are invited to consider similar examples drawn from their
own places, experiences, and positions. Figures 12.2 and 12.4 illustrate two different kinds of water, as defined by the social structures and
physical infrastructures by which they are made available to people. Figure 12.2 shows how the use of a public drinking fountain sustains water
as a public good, while simultaneously producing a kind of public/citizenship — or "body public" — in which all members of society have equal
access to water services. The fountain, the provision of high-quality water, and the public itself are sustained by the vested interests of fountain-
users in maintaining these services. The interruption of this cycle by the strategic placement of a commercial bottled-water vending machine
(Figure 12.3) is illustrated in Figure 12.4 to show how the diversion of water through private channels has the effect of producing a different kind
of access, with the corollary of producing individual consumers rather than a body pub- lic. One socio-political effect of sustaining the flow of
water through commercial vending machines (and similar means of securing private supplies of water) is suggested by considering how people
who procure such private supplies might be less willing to fund public water infrastruc- ture and facilities through their taxes. The general trend
of the dereliction of public drinking fountains in many parts of North America might thus be analyzed as a function of this widespread change in
the hydrosocial 26 As argued in Chapter 6, the hydrologic cycle has long provided a means of defining the field of scientific work known as
hydrology. The suggestion here is that the concept of the hydrosocial cycle might provide a common basis for work in
the political ecology of water. To this end, researchers have already begun to explore ways of formalizing a connection between this
concept and critical investigations of water. A series of special sessions were organized at the annual meetings of the American Association of
Geographers around the themes of "Water, science, humans: Adventures of the hydrosocial cycle" and "Water, science, humans: Advancing the
hydrosocial cycle" in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The call for papers for the 2009 conference sets out the basic framework: Considering
water as a socio-physical process makes it impossible to abstract water from the social circumstances that
give it meaning and from the social and ecological relations that get consolidated in material flows of
water. At the same time, attending to the social dimensions of these flows provides a means of analysing
water's political nature so as to promote/facilitate change in what is often taken to be a fixed set of
circumstances . The hydrosocial cycle thus offers a framework around which researchers interested in
the social and political nature of water might rally as well as an approach to investigating the social
production of hydrological knowledge. 27

The alternative confronts the social factors driving water harms. That’s a distinct
approach that solves the root cause.
Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. 234)//BB

Practical hydrolectics
reorients our response to water problems so that instead of striving to master a
presumed water nature , we strive to change water's social nature . Something of this reorientation is suggested in the
concept of integrated water resources management. Recall the second and third principles adopted at the 1992 International Conference on Water
and the Environment (the Dublin Conference): "Water develop- ment and management should be based on a
participatory approach, involving users, planners, and policy makers at all levels ," and "Women play a central part
in the provision, management, and safeguarding of water." However, that there may be fundamental differences between the waters of users,
planners, and policy makers (including women in each of these roles) needs to be recognized. The modern-water bias of IWRM makes it difficult
to put these excellent principles into practice. As Ken Conca has pointed out, "Not surprisingly an approach grounded in expert
knowledge, scientific rationality, and increasingly bureaucratic organiza- tion has often reinforced a
limited, hub-and-spoke notion of participation . Helpful information about uses, preferences, behavior, and effects flow in
from society to expert centers; scientific truths as guides to social action flow out."28 Practising hydrolectics might be considered
a means of allowing IWRM to live up to its participatory potential . However, it stresses different modes of
participation. By its constitutional separation from people, modern water limits participation to the act
of making decisions about water; thus, the participatory ideal becomes one of allowing everyone to have a
hand in making these decisions. One might consider a different sort of partici- pation, one that is
forbidden by modern water's constitutional separation of water from people . Our bodily engagements with water —
from diving to drinking to draining — constitute a kind of participation by which we make different waters rather than making decisions about
water. The no- tion of getting into water can be taken literally as well as figuratively, in the sense of
getting involved in the decision-making process . This more direct sense of participation, moreover, is a
process in which we are constantly engaged . Practical hydrolectics is the business of recognizing and
appreciating the different waters that get produced in these engagements . Once again, the examples given below are
drawn from my own rather privileged experience and engagements with water in a wealthy, northern- temperate country. As examples, they are
intended to be suggestive for readers in different places and circumstances.
ANSWERS TO
 AT PDB---Resource Link
Each rhetorical utterance of water as “resource” prevents the emergence of alternative
hydrosocial realities
Linton 10, MA, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies @ Carleton (Jamie, “What Is Water?: The History of a Modern
Abstraction,” p. 13)//BB

We can see how particular kinds of water can be held fast in recursive webs of social and natural processes . Because
such fixations — like the identity of water as a resource for producing hydroelectricity — are the product of mixing water
with social processes, they perform a kind of political work in the sense that they strengthen some social relations
while making it difficult for others to establish or sustain themselves. To treat water as an economic
resource allows some people to use it as a means to whatever ends they may have the economic and
technological capacity to effect. Thus, alternative , potential meanings and relations with water may be
ignored or shunted aside, along with the people for whom such mean- ings and relations are constitutive
of life and livelihood. The business of fixing water , in other words, is hardly just an intellectual performance; in
each instance , it allows for certain hydrosocial realities while making it difficult or impossible for
others to spring to life. The meanings of water that get fixed in any particular time and place can therefore
be seen as a function of the relative power of different social actors .

Naming water as a resource is incompatible with indigenous understandings of water

Stevenson 18, PhD, Trent University, Ontario (Shaun, “Decolonizing Hydrosocial Relations: The River as a Site of Ethical Encounter in
Alan Michelson's TwoRow II,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 6.2)//BB

The second related dominant discourse that works to contain water within limiting social relations of production and the confines of Western
property regimes is that of commodification. Water, not unlike land, is often treated as a resource commodity under state
interpretations of Indigenous rights. Water’s value is made legible most predominately through monetary terms
as set by the market. Under these terms, social relations to water are largely understood in relation to its
potential short-term capital gains, often as a capital generating utility, with little attention given to either
its place-specific value, or its sustainability as one of the most fundamental resources necessary for the
maintenance of life.7 Bruce Braun (2015) has highlighted this discursive process as “the refiguring of nature in terms of
“services” and “natural capital” (2). Further, this refiguring of nature within the discursive constraints of commodity presupposes that
humans, as the owners of the commodity, are capable of controlling that which has been deemed their
property (Burdon et al., 2015). Water is treated as if it were as constant and stable as the market permits, with
humans understood as the sole actors within relationships that seem only to concern transactions between
people and the market. The limits of these discourses emphasize the necessity to focus on the hydrosocial
relations of disparate communities as a means of understanding how communities are differently
positioned in history and the law, in our relations to the state, property, capitalism, and the lands and
waters we inhabit. Official land claims policy highlights a stringent attempt to delineate hydrosocial relations.
Such policies centre almost exclusively on economic flows with “the movement of money and resources …
generally separated from ideas about social or ecological flows ” (Strang, 2013, p. 193). In the confines of Western
property regimes, culture is bifurcated from nature, with culture defined in terms of human ability to direct and
control natural processes on a scale that is exceptionally large and abstract . When social relations are
grounded exclusively in the relations of production, nature is displaced and water is abstracted from its source
and specificity of environs, with policies mobilizing instead the abstract language of economics, which
attempts to make itself coextensive with ecology through reference to, for example, the large scale flows
and fluidity of capital, the liquidity of one’s assets, floods or overflow of particular populations, and market saturation. These are
vastly different and abstract relations to the hydrosocial than those articulated by Indigenous
thinkers and grassroots movements, which engage the hydrosocial outside of the traditions of liberal
political economy, and which seek to ground relationships to water within the specificity of the
hydrosocial environment.8

Decolonizing water requires an abandonment of frameworks of possession

Craft 18, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Common law, University of Ottawa and an Adjunct Professor in Law at the University of
Manitoba, Indigenous Lawyer (Aimee, “Decolonizing Water: A Conversation with Aimée Craft,” CIGI Online,
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/decolonizing-water-conversation-aimee-craft)//BB

CG: My next question is around the Decolonizing Water Project, how would you propose that we live collectively
and live a good life in relation to water? AC: The first and easiest answer to that is that we have to
understand that we are in relationship with water, that water has a spirit and that it has life. It is life-giving. But it also
has its own life-giving and spirit. It has its own agency and therefore we need to recognize that in taking up this
responsibility, it’s not one of control or ownership , or jurisdiction over water, but rather a relationship to and
with water. That is a truly decolonizing understanding of the relationship that we have with water; that it
has its own agency and decision making. A prime example of that is in thinking about the duality of water; it is a source of life but
also able to take life. In thinking of decolonizing water, we have had such a perverted relationship with water in modern
times, we’re looking at water as something we can control, own and consume — that is what we need to
set aside if we are truly going to have decolonizing relationships relating to water. One other piece is
abandoning the ideas and frameworks around possession — we must rethink how we make our decisions as humans that
effect water. Jurisdictions that we create as humans are also not responsive to the jurisdictions that water has
created itself. For example, in a watershed, the water has told us indirectly in how it wants to be in relationship with us.
 AT PDB---Governance Link
The permutation uses governance to mediate relationships to water. That’s fundamentally
incompatible with indigenous respect for water.
Wilson and Inkster 18, *PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell, **Professor @ U Alberta/Yukon College (Nicole and
Jody, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground,” Environment and Planning,
1.4)//BB

Several Elders from Yukon First Nations with land claims also expressed concerns that their relationships to water
were not represented or protected through the governance approaches taken on their ‘‘behalf’’ (including by their own First
Nation government). They disagreed with the style of governance developed through land claims and with some of the
decisions regarding resource development made by their governments (Elders 7, 4, 5, 8). One Elder stated that ‘‘respect for

water’’ cannot be achieved through government because they consider the institutions
and processes of government to be inappropriate means for acknowledging and protecting relationships
to water. According to this perspective, ‘‘respecting water’’ is better achieved through ceremony and other
land/water-based practices that remind people of their responsibilities to water through direct
engagements that are not mediated by external institutions (Elder 4). At the same time, many people from signatory
First Nation governments (11 Yukon First Nations including CTFN, KFN, and THFN) see substantial power in the rights and authorities
acknowledged in their agreements and express hope in the potential for implementing these agreements to protect water in a manner consistent
with their relationships and the imperative to respect water. Our intention is not to disparage the hard work that was put into land claim
negotiations and the ongoing implementation of these agreements nor to understate the dramatic and in many cases, beneficial changes that land
critiques because they reflect debates occurring among and between Yukon
claims and selfgovernment brought about. Instead, we raise these
First Nations and to highlight the importance of debates about the appropriateness of governance institutions
and processes for improving water governance in Yukon.
 AT Ecological Indian Counter-K
Their counter-critique is based on colonial definitions of environmentalism/conservation---
question THAT, not the authenticity of indigenous knowledge!
Nadasdy 5, associate professor of anthropology and American Indian, PhD, Now @ Cornell (Paul, “Transcending the Debate over the
Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory, 52.2)//BB

There are two main problems with this standard refutation of indigenous ecological nobility. First , it is
framed negatively; it focuses on what indigenous people do not do (that is, they fail to live up to an
impossible ecological ideal), rather than on what they do. While this may help us understand why Euro-
American environmentalists react the way they do when indigenous people do not act as expected , it tells
us nothing about the latter’s motives. Second , those critics of ecological nobility who make this type of argument
retain an imperialist perspective insofar as they continue to evaluate indigenous people’s actions
according to a Euro-American ideal (they merely allow for indigenous people not to live up to it). Part of the reason the
debate over ecological nobility has been unable to transcend its imperialist roots , I suggest, is that scholars
have focused on only half of the problem. While they have painstakingly examined the cultural assumptions underlying Euro-
American notions of ‘‘indigenousness,’’ they have paid relatively scant attention to the equally problematic assumptions
about ‘‘ environmentalism’’ that underlie the image of ecological nobility. Yet terms like environmentalism and
conservation are notoriously ill defined. Some scholars embroiled in the debate over ecological nobility (see, e.g., Alvard1994; Brightman1987;
Hames1987,1991) have responded to this conceptual fuzziness by coming up with more rigorous definitions. Their approach has been adopted by
researchers interested in developing techniques for scientifically managing land and wildlife that will be compatible with local indigenous
peoples’ beliefs and practices (e.g., Zavaleta 1999). Such an approach, however, does little to advance our understanding of the relationship
between indigenous people and environmentalists, because it ignores the fact that the concepts of conservation and
environmentalism are of Euro-American origin to begin with, thus rendering any attempt to use these
concepts to classify indigenous ideas and practices —regardless of how subtly or precisely they have been defined—
extremely problematic. While many scholars (e.g., Berkes 1987, 1999: 151– 53; Harries-Jones1993: 49; Krech1999: 212–13;
White1985) have acknowledged the culturally contingent nature of concepts like conservation, most
nevertheless continue to use them as yardsticks against which to judge indigenous peoples’ beliefs and
practices in the ongoing debate over ecological nobility (i.e., either Indian people are acting as conservationists or they are not).
One notable exception is Steve Langdon (2002), who argues that the standard model of wildlife conservation is based on outmoded assumptions
about ecological equilibrium that fly in the face of current scientific understandings of chaos and complexity—even among ecologists.
Nevertheless, this standard ‘‘puritanical’’ model of conservation retains its power at least in part because its
roots lie in Judeo-Christian—particularly Protestant—assumptions that link ‘‘the good’’ with sacrifice and
selfdenial, while evil is seen as the product of excess and self-indulgence . Thus, Langdon argues, contemporary
wildlife conservation is a constellation of beliefs and practices rooted in a particular set of cultural values rather than in some ‘‘objective’’
understanding of animal population dynamics. As a result, any attempt to use ‘‘conservation’’ as an objective measure
of behavior necessarily privileges one particular set of cultural values while simultaneously obscuring the
power relations that make that very privileging possible. Significantly, he then goes on to demonstrate in detail how this
dynamic plays out in the case of waterfowl management in western Alaska, where the discourse and practice of conservation have undermined
Yup’ik goose hunters’ claims to decision-making power over local goose hunting. Langdon’s analysis challenges the usefulness—indeed, the
very meaning—of one of the fundamental questions underlying the debate over ecological nobility: ‘‘Are
indigenous people conservationists?’’ What is more, it indicates that simply by posing the question (i.e., attempting
to evaluate indigenous people—as well as their beliefs and/or practices—by the yardstick of
‘‘conservation’’), scholars necessarily commit themselves to judging indigenous peoples’ actions in
accordance with Euro-American cultural assumptions —not only about indigenous people, but also about conser-vation
itself. And, as Langdon has demonstrated, this can have very real adverse consequences for indigenous people .

Strategic essentialism is power. It tricks settlers into genuine land tenure.

Nadasdy 5, associate professor of anthropology and American Indian, PhD, Now @ Cornell (Paul, “Transcending the Debate over the
Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory, 52.2)//BB
As I indicated above, many
scholars have criticized the image of ecological nobility. In so doing, they have
highlighted many of the political consequences that arise from judging indigenous peoples according to
the standards of Euro-American ‘‘environmentalism .’’ As I also indicated, however, these same scholars have tended to
overlook the fact that the terms of the debate over ecological nobility themselves serve to reinforce a number of unexamined and unwarranted
assumptions about First Nation people and their relationships to the environment. Because of this, the standard critique of ecological nobility
requires some modification if we are to take into account the culturally constructed nature of environmentalism itself (e.g., the spectrum of
environmentalism). One of the most glaring weaknesses of the standard critique of ecological nobility is
exposed by the following question: Why do indigenous people themselves make such extensive use of
the ecologically noble savage stereotype if it is simply a European construction that serves Euro-
American ends? Most critics of ecological nobility are fully aware that indigenous people themselves make frequent
use of the image. Generally, these critics have explained this in two ways: as a result of false consciousness or as an opportunistic political
strategy. In an example of the first approach, Krech (1999: 27) argues that the image of the ecological Indian, like earlier incarnations of the
noble savage, has become hegemonic: ‘‘At first a projection of Europeans and European-Americans, it eventually became a self-image. American
Indians have taken on the Noble Indian/Ecological Indian stereotype, embedding it in their self-fashioning.’’ In this view, Indian people, by
subscribing to and using the image of ecological nobility, participate in their own exploitation and ‘‘dehumanization’’ (Krech 1999: 26; see also
White and Cronon 1986: 20). To view the ecologically noble Indian stereotype as an unmitigated evil for Indian
people, however, is to ignore the very real clout that its use gives them in certain political contexts. The
image of the ecologically noble Indian is an extremely compelling one , appealing to sympathetic
audiences around the world. By invoking the image, environmentalists and indigenous people alike tap
into the image’s rhetorical power, enabling them in some instances to galvanize broad—even worldwide—
support for particular local struggles (see, e.g., Brosius 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995; Ramos 1998). As a result, some
critics of ecological nobility have argued that Indian people invoke the stereotype not out of false consciousness but as an opportunistic political
strategy. Beth Conklin and Laura Graham (1995), for example, argue that Amazonian Indian people are more concerned with
issues of land rights and self-government than with the environment per se, but some have adopted the
stereotype of ecological nobility for political reasons (see also Ramos 1998). By representing themselves as
ecologically noble, the Kayapo Indians of Brazil, for instance, suddenly gained access to a vast amount of
symbolic capital. They were then able to use this symbolic capital to reach an international audience and
forge an alliance with numerous international environmental organizations. The pressure brought to bear
on the Brazilian government by this international environmentalist-indigenous alliance led to
unprecedented gains—not only environmentally, but in terms of political power at home . The Kayapo were able
to parlay their new political capital—gained in the environmental arena—to advance their own political goals. Along similar lines, some have
argued that when indigenous people use the image of ecological nobility, they are often not really making claims about
themselves all. Rather, in time-honored fashion, they
are using it as a foil for criticizing Euro–North American
society (e.g., Beuge 1996: 77; Krech 1999: 214). Conklin and Graham (1995), along with many other critics of ecological nobility
(e.g., Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism 313 Beuge 1996: 86–87; Cruikshank 1998; Krech 1999: 26, 214–16), however, ultimately
conclude that while the image of ecological nobility may be useful to Indian people in the short term, in
the long run any use of the stereotype—even by Indians themselves—does them more harm than good . At
first glance, this view is compelling. According to its proponents, temporary alliances between environmentalists and indigenous people may
sometimes develop, but these are necessarily based on a combination of colonialist stereotyping and false-consciousness that are ultimately
detrimental to indigenous people. And, worse yet, if Indian people are not in fact ‘‘ecologically noble,’’ as so many scholars have pointed out,
there will inevitably be those who argue that indigenous people who use the image of ecological nobility (an image they know to be false) are
guilty of cynical and opportunistic misrepresentation. As it turns out, this is precisely the argument used by opponents of the Makah whale hunt,
and one hears it espoused by environmentalists everywhere who find themselves opposed by indigenous peoples. Thus, environmentalist-
indigenous alliances are doomed, for as soon as the ‘‘true’’ nature of indigenous people’s relationship to the environment comes to light, relations
between the parties will dissolve—often in bitterness and amid charges of betrayal and denunciations of inauthenticity. My own
experience in the southern Yukon, however, suggests that this picture —though not exactly wrong— is somewhat
oversimplified . Relations between environmentalists and Indian people in the Yukon—as elsewhere—are indeed often based on
stereotypes, misunderstanding, and political maneuvering. But this is not the whole story. To get a handle on the complexities of these relations
we must examine why and how indigenous people themselves make use of the image of ecological nobility. First
Nation people in the Yukon, like Indian people in Amazonia and elsewhere, make regular and strategic
use of the image of ecological nobility. By identifying themselves with the image of the ecologically
noble Indian, Yukon First Nation people do indeed gain a certain amount of legitimacy in the eyes of
many Euro-Canadians, a legitimacy that, when wielded effectively, translates into very real power in
certain political arenas, including those of wildlife management and environmental politics , as well as
land claim and self-government negotiations . And Yukon First Nation people do sometimes use the
image of ecological nobility as a foil, more to criticize Euro-Canadian society than to make specific
claims about themselves. But does this mean that their use of the stereotype should be dismissed as (merely) political opportunism? On
the contrary, most Yukon First Nation people with whom I have spoken invoke the image of ecological
nobility at least in part because they really do feel that some 314 Paul Nadasdy of their beliefs and practices are
more appropriate and environmentally benign than those of Euro–North Americans . In such cases, it would
be inaccurate to claim that they are either acting opportunistically or being duped by a false
consciousness . In my experience, it makes little sense to divorce First Nation people’s political goals from concerns about the environment
per se, as Conklin and Graham suggest. Like the Indians of the Amazon with whom Conklin and Graham worked, Yukon First Nation people are
extremely concerned with issues of land and sovereignty. Their claims to land and self-government, however, are—and
have always been—deeply entwined with broader concerns about what constitutes ‘‘proper’’ and
‘‘improper’’ use of the land (Yukon Native Brotherhood 1973). First Nation land claims and selfgovernment in the Yukon simply
cannot be understood except in relation to First Nation peoples’ understandings of and concerns about the environment.
 AT Indigenous People Want Aff
The assumption that indigenous people “want” to treat water as a resource is a result of
violent suppression of native identity
Wilson and Inkster 18, *PhD in Resource Management @ U BC, MS @ Cornell, **Professor @ U Alberta/Yukon College (Nicole and
Jody, “Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground,” Environment and Planning,
1.4)//BB

stressors
Indigenous peoples are increasingly at the forefront of water conflicts as the waters within their territories are under pressure from
including the intensification of resource extraction and the effects of global environmental change (Babidge,
2016; Boelens, 2015; Harris et al., 2017; Perreault, 2013; Wilson et al., 2015). While these stressors have undeniable biophysical effects (Bates et
al., 2008; Salvarredy-Aranguren et al., 2008), we suggest here that water conflicts are
rooted in ontological differences . While
Indigenous nations in the area see water as a living being, ideas about water as a ‘‘resource’’ that can be
owned and exploited prevail in all meanings with which they must contend . This is because Indigenous
ontologies and epistemologies2 were violently suppressed and marginalized through settler colonialism
(Wolfe, 2006),3 and within contemporary practices of water governance (Anderson et al., 2013; McGregor 2014; Sam and
Armstrong 2013).4 Acknowledging this pattern and the challenges it raises, Yates et al. (2017: 2) ask what it would mean to ‘‘take seriously the
possibility and politics of a multiplicity of water-related worlds, highlighting multiple water realities and ways of being-with-water, not just
different perceptions of our knowledge systems tied to water’s (singular) material existence.’’ We articulate this possibility here as
a need to study the ‘‘political ontology’’ of water governance and ‘‘the conflicts that ensue as different
worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as they interact and mingle with each other’’
(Blaser, 2009a: 877).

Attempts to appease indigenous people without challenging the fundamental status of

colonialism fails
Norris 18, M.A. Candidate, University of British Columbia (Matthew, “How Bear Lost his Tail,”
https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0371608)//BB

Herein, we can find Fanon’s argument at play once again. To

quell the uprising and revolt of Indigenous groups who
challenge the foundations of Canadian society and the existence of these projects, the Canadian government
introduces appeasement policies which act as a façade to address the concerns of Indigenous opposition
without fully addressing the fundamental concerns raised by Indigenous groups which
fundamentally challenge the status quo of colonialism in Canada. It is not to say that these initiatives are
without merit or without the support of Indigenous Peoples, but rather that these initiatives, by not addressing the
foundations of colonialism , have not only failed to address and rectify the social and economic divide in Canada, but assuage
settler guilt and further remove Canadian society from the need to address the foundations of
colonialism, and thus risk losing the legitimacy required to stymy social unrest and outrage. This effectively
makes these foundations invisible, bolstering settler arguments that “First Nations… have milked this issue to their decided advantage.”135
Examples of such initiatives are not limited to but include: the enfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples in 1960, the funding of Indigenous
Representative Organizations in 1964, 136 the development and implementation of Indigenous-focused federal departments in 1966, the
enshrinement and protection of the Indigenous peoples rights in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, an acknowledgment and
commitment from Canada to renew its relationship with Indigenous peoples in 2015, and the on-going legislative review of Laws, Legislation and
Policy pertaining to Indigenous peoples, by the Attorney General of Canada and Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould from 2017 onward.
Herein I suggest that these
appeasement policies, as implemented from the top-down , and by not addressing
the foundations of colonialism in Canada, cannot heal the societal divide which currently exists in this
country, and further, has the potential to reinforce it .
 AT Pessimism Bad
Our critique is not pessimism. New water futures are based in optimism for indigenous
people.
Byrd 20, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and associate professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Jodi, “Indigenous Futures beyond the Sovereignty Debate,” The Cambridge History of Native
American Literature, Kindle Edition)//BB

In her essay on Indigenous futurisms, Danika Medak-Saltzman suggests that such futurist work derived from and inspired by
Indigenous experiences and epistemologies allows for ways to theorize beyond settler conscriptions and
fantasies of native elimination and toward decolonization . It is a process of imagining otherwise, of
thinking beyond the accepted norms of how things are presumed to be, to allow rivers , for instance and as
Leanne Simpson envisions, to heal from the dams capitalism and colonialism have built and in the process
speak new words of relationship and welcome to the salmon who should have been there all along. “By
creating blueprints of the possible and providing a place where we can explore the potential pitfalls of certain paths, Indigenous futurist
imaginings make it possible to transcend the confines of time and accepted ‘truths’ – so often
hegemonically configured and reinforced – that effectively limit what we can see and experience as
possible in the present, let alone imagine into the future ” (Medak-Saltzman 2017, 143–44). Sovereignty has been
one way that Indigenous communities have tried to imagine Indigenous survival otherwise and against the
ongoing colonial and imperial regimes built on top of Indigenous land; how we imagine futures beyond
the inherent debates about Indigenous sovereignty’s role in the logics of dispossession, antiblackness, capitalism, and
gendered violence will play a role in determining the outcomes of our resurgence against the structures
that continually attempt to coerce us back into the systems of our continued subjection .
AFFIRMATIVE
 Counter-K---Ecological Indian
Romanticizing Natives as ecologically pure is a settler trick used to extend MAGA
settlerism and denigrate indigenous peoples
Gilio-Whitaker 17, Policy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies, and is an award-
winning journalist at Indian Country Media Network. With a bachelor’s in Native American Studies and a master’s in American Studies, Dina’s
research interests focuses on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. For the past several years has been
involved with Indigenous peoples’ participation in the United Nations arena. (Dina, “The Problem With The Ecological Indian Stereotype,”
KCET, https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/the-problem-with-the-ecological-indian-stereotype)//BB

We’ve all heard it a million times: Native Americans are the original environmentalists . Not that it’s not
flattering. In a country whose history is built and maintained on the erasure of the “inferior” indigenous population, as a Native person I can say
it’s nice to get credit for something once in awhile. Nor is it entirely a falsehood. It’s true that indigenous peoples in the U.S.
(and around the world) tend to have relationships with the land and the environment that are qualitatively different than
populations built on imperialism and heavy industrialization. But to apply to them the blanket statement that they are “original
environmentalists” is to overlook the meaning of the concept of environmentalism on the one hand, and on the
other to mischaracterize Native peoples’ actual relationship to land . It creates an impossibly high
standard to live up to, exposing Native peoples to dangerous policy objectives when they fail to meet
those standards. Euphemistically called the “ecological Indian” stereotype ,[1] it has its roots in the earliest
portrayals of Indians by European settlers. Back then, though, they were not the celebratory representations they are today. They
hark back to a time when Native peoples were generally understood as so inferior that they were not even
fully human. Consider the words of George Washington: “Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” To
Washington, Indians were clearly no different than animals, indistinguishable from any other form of wildlife. They lurked about in the wilds of
the “untamed” landscape, attacking without cause. Naturally, this informed Washington’s policies toward them (which were largely war and
displacement), earning him the Iroquois moniker “Town Destroyer.” In the settler imagination Native people had to be
constructed as less than human in order to justify settlers’ relentless and often illegal incursions into
Indian lands. By the nineteenth century, with the rise of anthropology, emergent theories classified humans by different races in what we
know today as scientific racism. The theories that constituted scientific racism contributed to the narrative of the “vanishing Indian” who was
doomed to perish by virtue of his inherent inferiority, and these narratives were plainly visible in popular cultural representations. Indians were
common subjects of the earliest Hollywood films, which invariably lamented the tragedy of their vanishing at a time when they were
outnumbered and militarily defeated. These cinematic representations capitalized on what by then were firmly established tropes of the noble
savage in American literature. The noble savage was a recuperated version of the ignoble savage, the wild beasts of the forest who needed to be
safely disappearing , the noble savage could be
excised from the environment because they were obstacles to “progress.” Now
enshrined into America’s romanticized narratives in which settlers as the rightful inheritors of the land
were destined to replace the primitive indigenes. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, Indians reliably
appeared in cinema and other popular culture texts as the ignoble savage. What would those old spaghetti westerns and Louis L’Amour novels be,
after all, without bloodthirsty, marauding Indians? The civil rights movements of the 1960s ushered in a new era of Indian cultural
representations. Native peoples were rising up, fighting for the protection of their treaty rights in places like the Pacific Northwest and Alcatraz
Island. This is when Indians became cool, even if they were portrayed predominantly by non-Natives. Think Tom Laughlin in Billy Jack; Richard
Harris in A Man Called Horse; Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man. 1971 saw the official birth of the environmental Indian stereotype with the
launch of an anti-littering campaign that featured the famous “crying Indian.” Dressed in full buckskin regalia and feather headdress — an
invocation of the disappeared noble savage — the “Indian” is shown among intermingled images of pristine nature and man-made pollution.
Never mind that the Indian is no Indian at all, but the long-ago-outed 100 percent Sicilian fraud Espero Oscar de Corti. Chief Seattle's fake
speech excerpt A popular excerpt from a speech attributed to the Suwamish Chief Sealth, but actually written by a Texas screenwriter in 1971.
The ecological Indian is thus a mixed bag of beguiling messages. He is part of a larger phenomenon in the American
cultural landscape, one that is a reflection of the country’s ambivalent relationship with indigenous peoples. As the noted Native scholar
Philip Deloria argued in his now-classic book Playing Indian, this ambivalence spans centuries, embodied in federal policies that vacillated
between extermination on the one hand, and assimilation on the other. It explains American’s bizarre obsession with appropriating all things
Indian, from the theatrical Indian impersonations of the Boston Tea Party to the Indian hobbyist organizations like the Boy Scouts of America,
and even the pervasive use of non-Native actors to play Native roles. Native American appropriation is enmeshed with — really, a product of —
the American imperative to claim ownership of that which is not one’s own, beginning with land, and inevitably identity. By the 1960s, when
disaffected American youth began waking up to their spiritually and morally bankrupt society, they
looked to indigenous peoples for answers. The counterculture movement was born, and back to the land the hippies went,
bedecked in beads, feathers, and buckskins. There they lived in pseudo tribal communities (which invariably involved tipis), and flocked to
Indian reservations to learn Native wisdom. They learned that Indians had a different, more harmonious relationship
to the land. The intensely romanticized savage Indian was redeemed. But he became the symbol of
renewed hope for America , the possibility to return to a simpler and more honorable past . At its core,
however, the trope of the ecological Indian symbolizes an idealized — and largely fictitious — appeal to a
perceived lost purity, and in the words of Noel Sturgeon, is “the founding moment of conservationist or preservationist
environmentalism.”[2] Preservation and conservation was the language of the earliest environmentalists, beginning in the early twentieth century
with the creation of the National Parks Service. Both imagined a “pure” environment, either free of human interference, or in need of a highly
regulated human presence. Either way, the environment was seen for its utilitarian value relative to humans. In other words, humans were viewed
as as separate from, and even a threat to, a pristine natural environment. Yet indigenous peoples hadn’t just lived sustainably in virtually all of the
landscapes on the continent for thousands of years; many Native
nations are also known to have had complex land
management practices . That these facts were and are systematically ignored was part of larger patterns
of erasure, genocide, and dispossession.

Native ecology is epiphenomenal, not intentional. Statements to the contrary rely on violent
essentialism that violate indigenous humanity.
Rodrigue-Allouche 15, MA Uppsala, Dept of Archaeology and Ancient History, (Sarah, “Conservation and Indigenous Peoples The
adoption of the ecological noble savage discourse and its political consequences, Proquest Theses)//BB

As shown above through colonisation, indigenous peoples have been conceived as biologically inferior to White
people, in an ethnical hierarchy and justified by so-called science. In
the late 20th century, as scientific racism was discredited,
another cultural stereotype started to emerge; the idea that culturally, Indigenous peoples are closer to
Nature. But this idea might only be another display of essentialism .
1. Indigenous peoples and their environment: intentional or epiphenomenal conservation?
The idea that indigenous peoples respect their environment probably stem from the fact that most
environmental degradation was caused by state societies whereas hunter-gatherer tribes certainly had less impact (see Borgerhoff
Mulder and Coppolillo 2005). Besides, comparative studies have shown a correlation between the presence of indigenous peoples and high
biodiversity whereas the presence of non-indigenous is correlated to low biodiversity (Redford and Robinson 1987). However, it is
unavoidable to ask whether this is intentional or simply a consequence of a certain lifestyle correlated to a
low population density and a low access to technology. Indeed, anthropologist Eugene S. Hunn was the first scholar to
emphasise the intentionality factor in conservation; in a 1982 article he distinguished epiphenomenal (or side-effect) conservation from
intentional conservation. In 2000, anthropologist Eric Alden Smith and forester Mark Wishnie followed Hunn’s lead and defined the term
‘conservation’ as actions preventing or mitigating biodiversity loss and designed to do so. Smith and Wishnie (2000: 493) in a review of existing
research concluded that intentional conservation amongst indigenous peoples or what they called ‘voluntary conservation’ is
rare . Below, I will review the debate around epiphenomenal conservation according to Hunn’s definition. In 1987, Redford and Robinson,
compared hunting yields of sixteen native groups in the Amazon to six Peruvian and Brazilian backwoodsmen. Their study demonstrated that
colonists had hunted a more limited number of species and had a more negative impact on the game populations because of factors such as a
greater population density, catering to extra local demand, and a more efficient technology. On the other hand, because Native Amazonians took
a wider variety of game, they had a less significant impact on game populations than colonists. It is very hard to assess whether this case is one of
intentional or epiphenomenal conservation. In effect, it is ethically problematic to decide for other peoples if their
practices constitute conscious choices or are simply necessary . I wish to advocate to keep in mind when reading such data
that Indigenous communities are constituted of many individuals who each have different preferences and understandings of the world; and not to
deny individuality to those who belong to Indigenous tribes. The debate on epiphenomenal vs intentional conservation intensified among the
scholarly community when American anthropologist Shepard Krech III published a book aiming at debunking the idea of ecological-friendliness
among Indigenous peoples. He postulated that Native Americans did not follow conservation practices before contact with Whites and overused
resources during the contact period. Krech concluded that although Native Americans understood complex environmental interactions, they made
no systematic efforts to conserve game species. Researchers in anthropology, biology and archaeology have since been debating about indigenous
peoples and conservationist practices. In 1994, Allyn MacLean Stearman declared that the idea of ecological nobility was due to a few
ethnographic cases that had been indiscriminately generalized to all indigenous peoples (Stearman 1994: 2). I agree with Stearman that
generalisations do not form the basis of sound conclusions. Indeed, anthropologist Michael S. Alvard researching the evolution of human
behaviour demonstrated that conservation most likely occurs under restricted circumstances. Using foraging theory in order to determine the
hunting preferences of the Piro hunters in the Amazonian Peru, Alvard stated that Piro hunters make decisions consistent with foraging theory
predictions 25 and do not hesitate to kill game identified as vulnerable to over-hunting (1993). Alvard (idem.) stresses that although
indigenous peoples have an intimate knowledge of their environment, there is not enough empirical
evidence to state that they use this knowledge in order to maintain equilibrium within the ecosystems
surrounding them or to sustain their resources. In 2002, the University of Wyoming hosted a conference entitled Re-figuring the ecological Indian
which led to the publication of a volume edited by Harkin and Lewis (2007). Many supported Krech’s claim that Native American
practices were not aimed at conservation of resources. American social anthropologist Ernest S. Burch who had been doing
research on the historic social organization of the Eskimo peoples in the Artic, notably demonstrated that Native
Alaskan hunters
drove a number of species to local extinction (Burch 2007). Burch concluded that nearly all groups harvested sustainably until
the arrival of Europeans, but sustainability was un-intended. The introduction of breech loading rifles and the high trade value placed on local
hides and furs led to cases of over-harvesting. Hence, Burch (idem.) supports the hypothesis of epiphenomenal conservation. But is indigenous
technological efficiency really limited? If epiphenomenal conservation is a consequence of limited technology, it is essential to assess the
efficiency of indigenous weapons. In 1978, anthropological Eric Ross fostered a controversy when he advanced that traditional indigenous
hunting technology can be more efficient than modern western technology and that shotguns have reduced the efficiency with which certain
important animals can be killed (quoted in Yost and Kelley 1983). If Ross’s statement is correct it supports the view that Indigenous peoples are
intentional conservationists because they do possess the technology to overkill. Many anthropologists have since published data to counteract
Ross and assert that indigenous technology is less efficient and does not allow hunters to kill the same species of animals that a shotgun
would11 . For instance, Hames responded with extensive data indicating again that the shotgun is a far more efficient weapon than the bow
(quoted in Yost and Kelley 1983). However, despite the controversy it can be established that the efficiency of indigenous weapons’ efficiency is
undoubtable. In 1979, Chagnon and Hames demonstrated that the bow and arrow are quite adequate to provide population with sufficient levels
of protein (idem.). In the same vein, Yost and Kelley (1983) were the first anthropologists to advance data supporting the efficiency of the
blowgun and spear as I will develop in the next part. The fact that many indigenous societies rely on common-property
regimes could also strengthen the hypothesis of epiphenomenal conservation is also strengthened . Indeed,
common-property regimes might encourage a wise utilisation of resources. For instance, anthropologist Flora Lu conducted fieldwork among the
Huaorani of Ecuador who function on a common property regime in which people are free to choose any available location to clear a plot of land
for a garden (Lu 2001: 433), and concluded that when people live in small sub-populations of closely related kin, they are much more
accountable to each other (Lu Holt 2001: 439) – a situation which probably encourages the preservation of resources and thus indirectly fosters
conservationist practices. Common-property regimes could thus result in epiphenomenal conservation; although in 1968,
American economist Garrett Hardin asserted that in a situation of open-access resources, depletion would soon occur (Olstrom 1990, 2005;
Berkes et al. 2000; Berkes 2004; Olsson et al 2004; Barthell et al 2013b; Ruiz-Mallén and Corbera 2013). Although indigenous conservationist
practices may seem to be cases of epiphenomenal conservation, a few famous case-studies of indigenous resource management attest that
indigenous communities can be deliberate conservationists. One of them was published by American anthropologist and ethnobiologist Eugene
Hunn and colleagues (Hunn et al. 2007) and relates the traditional gull-eggs harvests in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska,
indicating that the 11 Beckermann, Good, Nietschmann and Vickers all reacted promptly in Current Anthropology (Volume 19, 1978) to
contradict his contention that traditional technology was more effective than the shotgun 26 Huna Tlingit peoples possess an extensive knowledge
and understanding of the glaucous-winged gull nesting biology and behaviour. Traditional gull-eggs harvests seem to represent a case of
intentional conservation. Another case-study of intentional conservation is Harvey A. Feit’s presentation of conservationist hunting practices of
the Waswanipi Cree peoples. An essential component of Waswanipi’s cosmology is the north wind spirit, the chuetenshu, who provides men with
enough to eat as long as they respect other species. Here, the link between Waswanipi’s cosmology and the sustainable use of resources is
obvious, as Feit emphasises that the hunter must act responsibly towards the game and the north wind spirit (Feit 1973: 76). Waswanipi hunting
seems well to be a case of deliberate conservation because hunters possess the skill and technology to kill many animals but it is part of their
responsibilities to abstain from killing more than necessary, and not to kill for enjoyment or prestige (idem.). Overall it is important to bear in
mind that conservation can only occur when people are aware of resource scarcity, which is far from being
the rule. Indeed, anthropologist Natalie Smith conducted interviews among the Machiguenga people in the
Peruvian Amazon to understand their management patterns. When asked why the amount of game had decreased
around the village, Machiguenga men interviewed replied that animals had been scared or that they were
hiding. Many people declared that the amount of animals had remained the same or increased, simply
they were further away from the village (Smith 2001: 435). Moreover, although the fallow time had significantly decreased these
past decades, when asked about the decreasing yields, informants asserted that poor seeds or spiritual contamination
were responsible for poor yields and not soil problems. Smith also interviewed the men hunters to find out if they avoided
killing pregnant and younger animals, but the informants replied they could not make any distinction (idem., p. 446). Smith makes it clear that
the Machiguenga are not conservationists ; it is no criticism but simply a fact that the Machiguenga lack the social
structure and information necessary that would enable them to carry out informed conservation . This is
common to many indigenous societies which lack awareness of resource scarcity and thus where
conservation cannot exist . Indeed, Lu Holt (2001: 432), in connection to her fieldwork with the Huaorani of Ecuador, wrote that she
was repeatedly told by the community that no resources were rare or scarce. On the basis of the review I gave above, I contend that it is
impossible to generalise over the question of intentional or epiphenomenal conservation. It seems that each indigenous society constitutes a
unique case. Though indigenous communities have institutions in place to manage resources sustainably, it is unclear to what degree this can be
called intentional conservation or not; these practices also rely on very distinctive cosmologies and social negotiations. Thus, conservation does
bring a foreign concept in indigenous cosmologies, as I will develop further later. But before going into this I want to stress that indigenous
peoples are not conservationists but merely humans .
2. Indigenous peoples, merely humans
A broad scholarship has demonstrated cases of environmental destruction among indigenous peoples. In 1985, American anthropologist A. Terry
Rambo claimed that the Semang, a nonindustrial small-scale society of Peninsular Malaysia, affected their environment in some ways as much as
or even more than industrial societies. Other scholars have raised case-studies to demonstrate that environmental destruction is a common feature
among human societies, whether indigenous or not., world-famous American cultural geographer Jared Diamond presented well-documented
examples of environmental indifference or destruction by tribal peoples in his book Collapse (2005). In the contemporary controversy around
indigenous peoples and ecological nobility, two sides emerged: some people use data demonstrating that indigenous peoples have wreaked havoc
on their environments in order to dispossess them of their rights, whom Diamond qualifies of ‘rac- 27 ists’, while others reject such scholarship
because it threatens Indigenous peoples’ status of ecological angels (Diamond 2005: 8-9). Diamond acknowledges that indigenous peoples do not
like to be told that their ancestors caused damage to the ecosystems because it seems that this assertion prejudices their rights to land ownership
(idem.). However, although it has become politically incorrect to assert that indigenous populations wrecked
damage on their environment, this fact simply points out our common humanity . The interest of Diamond’s
work lies in its clear emphasis that all human societies share the same human traits, that very different societies located in different times and
spaces have had negative impacts on their environments, and oftentimes were powerless over their own impacts. Indigenous
peoples do
not fundamentally differ from modern First World peoples; indeed, managing environmental resources has always been
a challenge since mankind developed inventiveness and hunting skills around 50 000 years ago and wherever humans settled, large animals
which had evolved without fear of the human species underwent destruction (Diamond 2005: 9). It is paramount to understand what being human
entails, no matter where one originates from. By emphasising our common humanity, researchers’ work can help
tearing apart essentialism .

Ecologically noble savage myth undermines self-determination

Rodrigue-Allouche 15, MA Uppsala, Dept of Archaeology and Ancient History, (Sarah, “Conservation and Indigenous Peoples The
adoption of the ecological noble savage discourse and its political consequences, Proquest Theses)//BB

In this thesis, I have argued that the

claim of indigenous ecological nobility fosters an unethical kind of
environmentalism relying on power dynamics between white environmentalists and complex,
heterogeneous and changing indigenous peoples. The ecological noble savage idea is based on
epistemological racism which has been subtle within environmental movements’ discourse since the 19th century. Dichotomies between
nature and men led to essentialism regarding Indigenous societies. If the most archaic form of essentialism, which described Indigenous peoples
as barbaric and inferior, gradually disappeared after the Second World War, the most positive form of essentialism ascribing them the role of
ecological noble savages has resisted up to today. Indeed, it is much harder to dismantle positive stereotypes than negative ones. Attachment
to place and traditional ecological knowledge of a certain region are undeniable but, as I have argued here, the
belief that indigenous peoples are intrinsically conservation stewards is a myth, in which we should not
buy if we want to adopt an ethical approach to protecting our world free from power dynamics. If we
do not want to fall into the trap of racism, hegemony, neo-colonialism and domination , it is essential to
rethink environmentalist attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples . The ecological crisis we currently face calls for a common
response and a common concern. It is every nation’s responsibility, as well as every individual’s duty to protect our threatened Earth. I suggest
that it is time to reconsider a more inclusive way to conceive environmentalism, not based on differences
but based on our common destiny as humans. Indeed, in this thesis I have tried demonstrating that stereotypes - even
positive - towards Indigenous peoples have been a source of misunderstandings and confusion within the
conservation movement. It seems that the main task lies in finding the right balance between human species and non-human species. The
quest for ecological protection might be the quest for the balance between species. Alliances between environmentalists and indigenous peoples
should be questioned because of their history of ambivalence and failures and contentious confrontations. As I have tried to highlight, land rights
relying on conservation aptitudes are doomed to failure and those two concepts should not be mixed and misused. Comparing land rights
struggles for indigenous peoples in Amazonia and Australia triggers a reflection about ethical land rights policy in the 21st century. Land
stewardship has been used as a political tool, appealing to various stakeholders, to policymakers in global environmental governance, to scientists
working for conservation programmes as well as to Indigenous peoples themselves. However, ecological nobility has presented
many dangers and shortcomings when used as a political tool . Traditional ecological knowledge and community-based
conservation have sometimes been disregarded or abused by policy-makers. Locked in a role of ecological noble savages ,
indigenous peoples have not benefited from selfdetermination as much as they could have expected given the United
Nations declarations

The K relies on racist essentialism that feeds neo-colonial power structures

Rodrigue-Allouche 15, MA Uppsala, Dept of Archaeology and Ancient History, (Sarah, “Conservation and Indigenous Peoples The
adoption of the ecological noble savage discourse and its political consequences, Proquest Theses)//BB

But if biological racism has weakened, cultural racism that stems from ethnocentrism (see LéviStrauss 1952) is still very
strong. In the case of racism towards indigenous peoples, the cultural stereotype that indigenous peoples are closer to Nature has not faded as I
am arguing here. As has been argued here the ecological noble savage myth conceals a form of essentialism . Hence, the
myth of ecological nobility carries two ethical and academic issues: first creating and oversimplifying an
ʻotherʼ as a subject and defining her/him within a static essence and judging another culture according to
one’s values. First of all, to define indigenous peoples as noble savages is undoubtedly essentialist. Essentialism
can be defined as “the practice of regarding something (as a presumed human trait) as having innate existence or universal validity rather than as
being a social, ideological, or intellectual construct”13. Essentialism is thus correlated to racism , whether it is negative or positive. In
his book The Nature of Prejudice, the American psychologist Gordon Willard Allport defined racism as an antipathy based upon generalisation
that can be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual member of that group (Allport 1954: 4). But racism, is not restricted to
negative generalisations. It is also expressed in any kind of generalisation towards other ethnic groups. Thus negative racism and positive racism
have more in common than could be assumed. Indeed, Broome classifies the noble savage myth as a variant within the narrative of savagery. As
previously developed, I patently agree with Broome that noble savagery is solely a variant from the savagery myth. The
romantic idea of the noble savage quenched the need of exoticism among intellectual Europeans and also
influenced Pacific explorers in search of exoticism (Broome 2010: 19), in sum these explorations were part and
parcel of the need to identify oneself in opposition to an ‘other’. In the case of the Australian colonisation, the view of
ecological noble savagery coexisted with that of ignobility and wildness. Among the social elite, namely the British admiral and first governor of
New South Wales Arthur Phillip and his officers, the idea of noble savagery predominated; but to the vast majority of the settlers, the convicts,
Aboriginal people were plain savages. As Broome argues both views were social constructions: The idea of savagery predominated because it
suited the context of land-conflict and the idea of nobility soon faded with the reality of contact (Broome 2010: 19). Both views were
undoubtedly two sides of the same coin. As Bal (1996: 4-5) emphasises, whether it is a positive or negative form of essentialism, the narratives of
the discourse are closely related; both forms of essentialism rely on the same dichotomies, simplifications and
categorisations. Neither idea was a sound basis for practical relations with the Eora for, as Broome says, the Eora were neither noble nor
savage, but rather human and different (Broome 2010: 19). On this point, I strongly agree with Broome; for the Eora, just like any other
Indigenous people, held a unique worldview and it is merely simplistic and ethnocentric to classify them under a savagery label. The Eora were
civilised in their own way, as Broome advances, they were guided by their own moral code and their own law. Conversely, the newcomers on the
Australian continent among whom many were convicts, could have appeared as savages. The problem is that the myth of the
noble savage informs other myths of primitivism . The combination of opposites, the binary thinking between
barbarism and civilisation position such myths to be taken as granted as apparent truths (Bal 1996: 4-5).
Although essentialism is harmful, stereotypes are very hard to uproot, because they help us making sense of the world. In his book Public
Opinion (1922), American journalist Walter Lippmann defined stereotype as a simplification guiding our perception of others and our integration
of information (Poata-Smith 2015). Perhaps it is impossible to be free of stereotypes; as Allport (1954) contended. Language itself can never be
fully neutral: Stereotypes are embedded in our thinking, they foster subtle racism in our thinking because they bolster differences between groups
and assume homogeneity in other groups. One major issue is that stereotypes actually tend to mainly be directed to and disadvantage minorities
(Devine and Elliot 1995). Simplifications provide general expectations about social groups and simplify the demand of perceiving and evaluating
group members as individual (idem.). Following Allport’s lead, Devine and Elliot underline that simplifying groups identities often makes it
easier for outsiders to perceive these entities, the same way as it was easier for colonisers to homogenise indigenous or aboriginal groups (Mc
Gloin 2015). However, these simplifications do not respect the differences and particular identities of indigenous peoples. To the question “what
is Indigeneity today?”, the noble savage stereotype responds by a static immobile definition that denies Indigenous peoples the right to self-
determination and the fundamental human right of acknowledging their culture as dynamic and changing. For all those reasons, the concept of
ecological nobility when applied to Indigenous peoples is an example of essentialism. As previously stated in the introduction, Australian
Indigenous scholar Michael Dodson emphasised the importance of self-definition for Indigenous people worldwide and stated that indigenous
peoples should be free to evolve according to each generations’ aspirations and to live outside the cage built by other people’s images and
projections (Dodson 1993, 2003: 31). The perception of Indigenous peoples as ecological angels has been
denounced as racist in the non-European world as well. From October 14th to 19th 2013, Uppsala University hosted a
symposium “Re-Claimings - Empowerings - Inspirings”, to encourage research for and with indigenous peoples, minorities and local
communities. Kaori Arai, a PhD student at Rikkyo University in Japan, related the controversy that occurred between researchers and the Ainu
people in the post-war context. The Ainu peoples were the indigenous peoples of Hokkaido, slowly subjugated by the Waijin who thought it their
duty to civilise them. Robertson (2009) recounts that the scientific study of Ainu people constituted a fierce tragedy for their skulls, as remains
were examined by the Waijins in the 1980s without any approval from the families. First seen as barbaric, ugly and inferior, they were then
turned into the complete opposite. Philosopher Umehara Takeshi embraced a narrative of harmony with nature when he published with the
controverted anthropologist Hanihara Kazuro in 1982 the dubious Are the Ainu the original Japanese?. In 1985, Fujimura Hisakazu praised Ainu
oral traditions and their harmony with nature in the book Ainu, the people who live with the Gods. No longer were they seen as ethnically inferior
but simply perceived as closer to nature. According to Kaori Arai though, quoting the Japanese historian Takeshi Higashimura, the narrative of
harmony with nature may simply be a reappearance of race theory under an ecological disguise. Indeed, essentialism and prejudices do not stop at
the door of the academic world. Oversimplifications that cultural stereotypes embody have been and continue to be part of the academic world.
James R. Martin from the University of Sydney, discusses how racism infiltrates scholarly discourse analyses and states
that racialised relationships between the researcher and the researched should be thoroughly examined
(quoted in Poata-Smith 2015). Similarly, Scheurich and Young (1997) stated that epistemological racism occurs when the research
epistemologies arise out of the dominant culture and history while excluding other cultures’ epistemologies. Because the ecological
noble Indian myth arose out of European social history and culture while excluding Indigenous cultures, it
is reasonable to advance that the myth reveals epistemological racism , as has been discussed above several times. Although
positive in appearance, the noble savage myth reflects the worst racism, the invisible one, the one we participate
in without consciously knowing or intending it (see discussion in Scheurich and Young 1997: 12). The epistemological racism
expressed towards indigenous peoples through the stereotypes of the Noble Savage during the colonial era is related to the stereotype of the
ecologically Noble Savage expressed by environmentalists. Indeed, just as Enlightenment philosophers projected their 31 values on colonised
peoples, environmentalists projected their worldviews on the populations they encountered. American anthropologist Paul Nadasdy (2005: 298)
argues that the ecological noble savage myth began with the late 19th century conservationists George Bird Grinnell and Gifford Pinchot who
were interested in Native American tribes and claimed that Native Americans were original conservationists. The approval of indigenous peoples,
were granted on the condition that they embrace certain lifestyles and practices appealing to white environmentalists. This as Nadasdy (idem.)
points out, poses a real threat to human rights recognition and implicitly means that indigenous peoples have value solely if they do certain things
and believe in certain concepts. Interpreting another people’s worldview through the lens of one’s own paradigm,
as well as praising certain beliefs because they fit within the white man’s belief system seem to be a
manifestation of power dynamics at play. This stereotype reflects one way western pracitioners and researchers have been making
sense of distant cultures they could relate to only from the outside. Ellingson (2001) argues that Western value system still
pervades every assumption we make about distant romanticised characters . Used by environmental NGOs to
praise Indigenous supposedly ecological societies, the myth serves as a tool to accuse Western modes of
production; capitalism and individualism.

Ecological stereotypes cause political disenfranchisement in every non-environmental

matter
Mahoney 13, Professor, About Kathleen Mahoney F.R.S.C., LL.B. (University of British Columbia), LL.M. (University of Cambridge),
Diploma, International Institute, Comparative Human Rights Law, (Strasbourg) (Kathleen, “The Role of the “Noble Savage” in Environmental
Social Activism,” Calgary Faculty of Law, https://ablawg.ca/2013/05/13/the-role-of-the-nobel-savage-in-environmental-social-activism/)//BB

The ‘Noble Savage’ stereotype of the North American indigenous is a different type of creature than, say, stereotypical portrayals of Arabs or
Africans, who are supposedly savage savages. The ‘Noble Savage’ in North America has a profound connection to
nature. His primeval relationship with the land, water, and wildlife illustrates his innocence and reveals an
authenticity of sorts. His desire for a clean environment is pure. His existence is not infiltrated by commerce, industry, learning, or any
other complex machination of modern life. When he speaks of the environment, or, rather, when he sheds a tear for the environment, we should
listen intently. In the Canadian context, these stereotypes are being used advantageously by some First Nation activists against both the Gateway
Pipeline and the Alberta oil sands, even though they have a much broader agenda. Their strategy is to seek the support of other nations to exert
pressure on Canada so that their otherwise ignored concerns, are heard. By exploiting the ‘Ecological Indian’ or ‘Noble Savage’ stereotype, they
tap into the special fascination many European and other countries have for North American indigenous populations, seeing them as objects of
reverence and fascination. In pursuit of this objective is the tireless Dene Elder Francois Paulette, whose battles with Ottawa a generation ago,
launched the era of modern land claims. Paulette, who easily fits Twain’s physical description of the “noble red man,” has travelled around the
world taking full advantage of orientalist attitudes in gaining access to leaders who, to put it colloquially, are far above his pay grade. This photo
of Elder Paulette paddling British Royalty in his canoe on Blatchford Lake in the N.W.T. speaks eloquently to the stereotype. When the G20 was
held in Toronto for example, Paulette showed up to make his case for the cancer affected aboriginal residents downstream from various oil sands
projects. Resplendent in braids, beads and a fringed buckskin vest, he was followed by television cameras wherever he went. Before the end of
the proceedings, he miraculously gained access to several European heads of state when he was invited to dine with them. This was especially
interesting, as our own Prime Minister did not have the time of day for Mr. Paulette and no other NGO or scientists received such attention. The
meeting may have been shrugged off by the Canadian politicians as a publicity stunt, but, a year later, as the European Union contemplated
introducing trade restrictions on the import of Canadian Oil Sands oil, suddenly Prime Minister Harper was on full alert, attempting to counter the
claims made by Paulette and his aboriginal and non-aboriginal supporters. Paulette’s speech to the UN climate change conference in Durban is
another example, where he evoked the stereotypical images of the ‘Ecological Indian’ very effectively (see YouTube video clip from 5:29 to
9:07). Although these interventions
gain exposure to the environmental issues , they are also potentially
problematic . If aboriginal peoples are reduced to caricatures , two kinds of effects are generated. On one hand,
when First Nations groups protest on environmental issues their concerns are taken seriously, as Mr. Paulette’s reception internationally attests.
After all, being at one with nature is the most important aspect of a native person’s existence, is it not? The stereotype gives positive credibility to
the speaker, but while his words get the attention the issue requires, the one dimensional characterisation can carry a
potentially large price tag . If Aboriginal advocacy on the environment gets attention only because of the
racist view that indigenous people are inherently limited this narrow area of expertise , then virtually any
other issue is relegated to secondary status, for example, their advocacy for other critical issues such as
improved health care , resource revenue sharing , economic development , education or self
government . Even within the environmental sphere, an infantilized conception of environmental protection can be
generated by the ‘Noble Savage’ or ‘Ecological Indian’ stereotype, one that denies that indigenous people are
sufficiently able to contemplate the social, political, and economic complexities that engage any real discussion of
environment. After all, the implication is, what do these naturalists know about industry? The pipeline will
generate hundreds of millions of dollars and creates thousands of jobs. Their protest is ignorant of such weighty concerns, or so it is
said. Surely, no rational person could value a few caribou, swamps and trees over the massive economic wealth these projects would create for
our country. It is these childlike simplifications promoted by the media and the oil companies that make serious advocacy
difficult for indigenous groups in Canada. Their demands are taken seriously in one specific sphere, but are
rendered insignificant in others that are vitally connected to it.
Claims of ecological friendly indigenous peoples are inaccurate and victimizing – turns
their impact
Krech 99 - Professor: Anthropology and Environmental Studies
(The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, conducts research on the intersections of humans and the natural world; anthropology and history, and material culture and the development of museums. Current projects are on time in indigenous cultures, bird-human interactions, and
environmental knowledge. All research and writing is informed by ethnography in and a general geographical focus on native North America. Interests Born in New York City, educated at Yale (B.A.), Oxford (B.Litt.) and Harvard (Ph.D.), Shepard Krech III is professor of anthropology and
environmental studies, and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, at Brown University. He has received major fellowships and grants from the National Humanities Center (twice), Woodrow Wilson International Center, NEH, Canadian Embassy, and Wenner-Gren
Foundation. He has written over 150 essays and reviews, lectured widely, and is the author or editor of 11 books and monographs, including Praise the Bridge That Carries You Over; Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade; A Victorian Earl in the Arctic; The Subarctic Fur Trade; Collecting
Native America, 1870-1960; The Ecological Indian (1999); Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (ed. with J. R. McNeill and C. Merchant, 2004), Spirits of the Air (2009); and Indigenous Environments (MS ed. with David Gordon). The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W. W.
Norton, 1999) was discussed on radio coast-to-coast and reviewed or featured in over 100 publications in more than one dozen languages, including The New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Times Literary
Supplement [TLS], Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education Supplement, Der Spiegel, NRC Handelsblad, and others. Reviewers remark that the book "teaches us everything we have wanted to know about American Indians and the environment" (New York Times), is
"ground-breaking and myth-busting" (Wisconsin Public Radio), and "is what good science should be" (Detroit News). The book was the subject of a session at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, a conference in Laramie, Wyoming, and the edited collection, Native
Americans and the Environment (eds. M. Harkin and D. R. Lewis [U. Nebraska Press]). Critics refer to the three-volume Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (Routledge, 2004) as edited with "great insight and skill" (James G. Speth) and "the most ambitious effort yet to offer a
comprehensive overview of the long-term history of human interactions with the natural world on a truly planetary scale" (William Cronon). Early comments from anthropology and environmental history on Spirits of the Air (University of Georgia Press, 2009) include "superbly researched
and splendidly illustrated" (Raymond Fogelson), "insightful" (Carolyn Merchant), and "exhaustive" (Charles Hudson); and from ornithology and the professional birding world a "landmark work" (Kenn Kaufman) and "thought-provoking." (Donald and Lillian Stokes). Shepard Krech III is
past-president (2004-05) of the American Society for Ethnohistory and a trustee of the National Humanities Center. A lifelong birder and environmentalist, he lives in Washington, D.C. and Sedgwick, Maine)

Uranium mining simultaneously affected the Navajo with active tailings, one large spill, ground and animal contamination, and irradiated workers. For years these huge projects have roiled
Navajo and Hopi politics, exacerbating splits between antidevelopment traditionalists (to whom environmentalist outsiders have been drawn) and prodevelopment progressives; they also led to
demands for indigenous control over—if not a halt to—the extraction of resources.10 But what should be made of the differences of opinion among the Navajo? Of Hopi Indians who favor strip-
mining, arguing that the most important part of their guiding philosophy and prophecy is to know "how to use the gifts of Mother Earth"? Of Miccosukee Indians, who proposed building sixty-
five houses in Everglades National Park against the objections of the Park Service and environmentalists whispering that they are poor stewards of the land and therefore undeserving of special
rights as Indians? Of the Alaskan Inupiat, who killed hundreds of caribou in the 1970s, used only part of the kill, left bloated carcasses behind, and were accused by white hunters (who had acted
in virtually identical fashion themselves) of placing the herds in jeopardy? Of the Wisconsin Chippewa, who reportedly let thousands of fish spoil in warm weather? Of Rosebud Sioux activists,
who wanted to stop use of the reservation for off-reservation trash out of concern—as the tribal chairman remarked facetiously—for Mother Earth, yet had never protested Rosebud's existing
open dumps? Of Crow Indians and Indians from Wind River, the joint ShoshoneArapahoe reservation in Wyoming, who, in separate incidents, killed many elk and, to the horror of big-game
hunters and biologists, reputedly took only choice cuts for themselves, or only meat or antlers for sale, leaving many animals to rot? Or of the Ute who want a dam and reservoir—over strong
For the sake of a
objections from the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund—probably to transport low-sulfur coal through a coal slurry pipeline to power plants at some future time?11

simple narrative, critics who excoriate the larger society as they absolve Indians of all blame sacrifice
evidence that in recent years, Indian people have had a mixed relationship to the environment. They victimize
Indians when they strip them of all agency in their lives except when their actions fit the image of the
Ecological Indian. Frozen in this image, native people should take only what they need and use all that they take, and if they must participate in larger markets, far better it be to
profit from hydroponic vegetables, fish, or other "traditional" products than from oil, coal, trash, and like commodities. As one journalist remarked, "native people are supposed to be keepers of
The connections between Indians and nature have been so tightly drawn over five hundred
the earth, not protectors of its poisons."12

many non-Indians expect indigenous people to walk softly in their

years, and especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century, that

moccasins as conservationists and even (in Muir's sense) preservationists. When they have not, they have at times eagerly been
condemned, accused of not acting as Indians should, and held to standards that they and their accusers
have seldom met.
 Perm / No Link
Colonial water infrastructures can be repurposed for decolonial pathways. Complete
escape is impossible because coloniality is pervasively entangled with indigenous life.
Curley 19, PhD, Professor of Geography @ U Arizona (Andrew, ““Our Winters’ Rights”: Challenging Colonial Water Laws,” Global
Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

Much of the scholarship on Indigenous water rights in the United States focuses on legal and political rights awarded or denied in water
settlements. This article highlights the voice of settlement opponents within Diné communities over the
proposed Little Colorado River Settlement in 2012 between the Navajo Nation and Arizona. Using interviews
with key actors, observations of water hearings, and a mini focus group with settlement opponents, my
research finds that the proposed water settlement produced contradictory logics, practices, and
frameworks that combined two “traditions of Indigenous resistance,” one rooted in the language of self-
determination and sovereignty and the other in emerging notions of decolonization . This hybridity of
seeking increased water recognition within colonial law, while advocating for decolonial waterscapes,
speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscapes of Indigenous peoples.
Ultimately, in opposing the water settlement, Diné opponents and community members demonstrate that they seek to rectify
the injustice of ongoing settler colonialism and realize their collective capabilities as nations, not “Indians,” “tribes,” or
“minorities” within and against the authorities of the colonial state. On April 5, 2012, US senators Jon Kyl and
John McCain from Arizona met with Navajo Nation Council delegates in the western Diné community of Tuba City. Their intent was to persuade
lawmakers to settle Navajo claims to the Little Colorado River, a dry and shallow waterway that originates high in the mountains of central
Arizona and concludes at the confluence of the main Colorado River, just north of the Grand Canyon. The settlement established the terms by
which the Navajo Nation would forever “resolve” its collective claims to the river in exchange for small water infrastructure and remaining
waters after upstream diversions are taken into account. Although the tribal government was initially in favor of the agreement, much of the Diné
community rejected it and mobilized outside of the meeting to express their collective frustration and discontent.1 They criticized governing
officials and reminded them that “water is life.” Much of the narrative of water rights and Indian water settlements in the United States focuses on
the legal-political “rights” to water that tribes maintain within western water laws (Burton 1991; Colby et al. 2005; Curley 2019b; McCool 2006;
Perramond 2018; Thorson et al. 2006). These are important studies because they document the structuring of water use in practice. But the
emergent perspectives of water and law among community actors is sometimes missing from these narratives, that is, the grounded
understandings and decolonial strategies that both use and negate colonial laws. Recently, Yazzie and Baldy (2018) emphasized the
“decolonization” of waterscapes as a pathway to radical Indigenous knowledge and practices around water. For Yazzie and Baldy,
decolonization is not simply a metaphor, as Tuck and Yang (2012) put it, or a practice of “awareness raising” (Smith 2013); it is material
struggle. My research finds that this struggle produces
contradictory logics, practices, and frameworks that combine
traditions of Indigenous resistance with a dominating discourse of rights to water . In highlighting the dialog,
debate, and discourse over the future of the Little Colorado River, this article seeks to document ongoing, expanding, and changing notions of
water governance for Indigenous peoples today, notions that speak to both rights and decolonization. The central point is that Diné water
governance transcends the colonial limitations of western water law through use of both pragmatic and
decolonial practices. Diné advocates work to maximize water quantification while supporting the idea of traditional water uses for
sustainable lifeways. This hybridity of seeking increased water recognition within colonial law , while advocating
for decolonial waterscapes, speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscape of
Indigenous communities that our critical politics sometimes ignores, misses, or downplays. This article highlights the voices of the Diné
people who resisted what appeared to be the inevitability and finality of a water settlement. Their critiques provide an important understanding
for how we might interpret water settlements and decolonization between Indigenous peoples and colonizing states. Schlosberg and Carruthers
(2010), for example, find that questions of justice for Indigenous peoples are not concerned simply with distribution of resources but also with the
“capability” of the resources to fulfill the well-being of a people at the level of the collective. They emphasize that justice for Indigenous peoples
is community based and capabilities centered. Like Ciplet et al. (2013), they build on Sen’s (2009) notion of justice related to achieving the
fulfillment of people’s capabilities. However, this approach misses the historic critique of unrectified settler colonial theft that is repeated in
Indian water settlements. Indian water rights were designed to fulfill the colonial purpose of reservations. They were not meant to resolve senses
of injustice or wrongful dispossession inherent within the structure of U.S. colonial governance. Although Diné critics speak in the
language of law and legalism when they exclaim “our winters’ rights,” referencing an important Supreme Court decision that
I will discuss later, they are also speaking beyond the law and to these broader notions of justice that cannot be
resolved in a water settlement. It is not the particulars of the settlement that mobilize Diné resistance but the inherent sense of injustice that water
settlements reproduce. In the presentation of this argument, I follow Diné thinking and planning philosophies.2 Diné opposition to the Little
Colorado River Settlement was not simply a shared understanding among actors; it was an intellectual process. First, there was thinking and
planning—highlighted in the section titled nitsáhákees dóó nahat’á. In this section, I show how opposition to the water settlement was built on
two ideological trends and frameworks in Indigenous activism, nation building, and decolonization. These trends framed the argument against the
proposed water settlement and addressed the larger notion of injustice in the colonization of Indigenous water sources. Afterward, I highlight how
Diné people acted and lived out this thinking and planning in action—collective opposition to the settlement. Action was called iina, which also
refers to “life,” toh éí ííńá or “water is life.” Finally, siihasin calls on us to reflect on what was learned and derive some preliminary conclusions. I
conclude that the struggle was an effort to reclaim and revitalize Diné lifeways. My research suggests that Indigenous opponents to water
settlements built their frameworks on a sense of rights and recognition that is rooted in ideas of traditional knowledge and historic practices on
the land. Proponents understood these practices as better suited for sustainable living than existing quantification schemes provide. Their
frameworks blended statist and aboriginal conceptualizations of water into a bundle of complicated and contradictory
ideas of inherent Indigenous water rights. Both nation building and decolonial notions of Indigenous water
governance undermined the legitimacy of colonial water laws while positing a sense of inherent rights to the water in
the interest of increasing the amount of water the Navajo Nation was owed. The de- in decolonial did not completely negate
colonial institutions as a site of struggle and advocacy. Rather , opponents reworked and repurposed colonial
infrastructures toward Indigenous lifeways and decolonial nation building.

Tribes can leverage colonial frameworks for material gain without sacrificing self-
determination
Diver 19, researcher at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science. She does community-engaged research on
Indigenous water governance, focusing on Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds. She received her PhD in environmental science from the
University of California, Berkeley. Sibyl began working on these issues as a Russian translator, facilitating international exchanges for
Indigenous community leaders on land rights and Indigenous resource management, et al (Sibyl, “Engaging Colonial Entanglements: “Treatment
as a State” Policy for Indigenous Water Co-Governance,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

Still, given the hostile political environments many tribes are operating within, tribes are gaining some
advantages from leveraging pre-existing colonial governance frameworks , particularly around
regulatory capacity and conflict resolution among sovereigns . Instead of creating an entirely new set of
legal orders, TAS tribes work within dominant regulatory systems that are both federally recognized and
federally funded. Because tribal water quality standards are based on the EPA’s highly developed procedural regulations, TAS tribes
benefit from existing EPA enforcement and conflict resolution mechanisms . Due to the judicial deference afforded to
federal agencies in US courts, asserting tribal WQSs within EPA structures can convey some legal protections for tribes. For
example, litigation to date on TAS has targeted EPA policy implementation, as opposed to challenging tribes directly. Finally, the EPA has
developed an extensive regulatory and policy framework supporting TAS, which explicitly maintains federal
trust responsibility, precludes state authority over tribal waters, and embraces tribal self-determination as
a central goal.

Working within systems of power is key to integrating indigenous water perspectives into
meaningful change
Nursey-Bray 9, PhD, Professor @ U Adelaide (Melissa and Phillip Rist, “Co-management and protected area management: Achieving
effective management of a contested site, lessons from the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA),” Marine Policy, 33.1)//BB

Another key lesson for co-management is the utility for indigenous peoples of building networks within formal
policy domains . Through proactively seeking partnership and collaboration, Girringun became part of the
network of policy communities in the region and built important bridges between indigenous peoples and
management agencies in ways that facilitated trust [52] and collaboration. A policy community has been defined as ‘a
diverse network of public and private organizations generally associated with the formation and implementations of policy in a given resource
area …. Policy communities are interactive networks of alliances around common interests’ [53]. These policy communities not only occur at
multiple levels, i.e., federal, state, local, but across the community within a number of sectors. Thus, the work Girringun did to
progress its aspirations has necessitated working within hierarchical structures of power , and across
networks of influence , thus by default encouraging a polycentric approach to management in this region [23]. Social learning was
encouraged and adaptive capacity built into the management realm [50]. What remains is for this process to continue and be consciously adopted
by both parties in order to achieve a cross-cultural management relationship yielding dividends for both conservation management interests and
indigenous peoples. Finally, a fundamental aspect of genuine power sharing is the sharing of resources and building capacity. This process may
necessitate developing cross-culturally appropriate ways of building capacity and adopting culturally different modes of decision-making. Within
the co-management processes described here, power sharing might have meant one party lending the weight of its resources to the other, e.g.,
management agencies providing resources for enforcement. Importantly, this process, as all of the processes suggested here need to be two-way,
in that they necessitate both indigenous people and management agencies to appropriately recognise differences and their collaborative strengths
between them. Finally, the Girringun experience highlights the importance of understanding all forms of co-management as a continuous process.
Many experiments in developing and implementing co-management within MPAs falter when they encounter the ‘red lights’ endemic in any
political landscape, including public opinion, lack of funding, and the inability to share power and decision-making forums. Management
domains then become contested sites, with competing values and expectations causing conflict and at times permanent breakdown in
communications and future activities [54]. Many participants to these processes feel that hopes are dashed because their expectations have not
been met; largely because the gains achieved are often disproportionately overshadowed by the fact many objectives remain unfulfilled. For
example, in this case study, funding might be granted for one ranger part—time rather than full time, when community aspirations are for two full
time rangers. Members of a group such as Girringun also often find themselves in an inherently unequal position in relation to agencies such as
GBRMPA. For management agencies, constructing a co-management initiative within a protected area as a continuous process has been equally
important. Studies on co-management highlight its usefulness as enabling a ‘continuous problem solving process’ [17], [21]. In this sense, power
sharing can be conceived as the result, not the starting point of the co-management process, and co-management as a means of governance. 5.
Summary In this case study, a defining characteristic of Girringun's approach has been a persistent positiveness and a commitment to work within
an understanding of co-management as a continuous process , rather than a program punctuated by a series of products or
outcomes. This has enabled members of Girringun to continue to advance their aspirations at the highest
level , while accepting and achieving the smaller gains along the way. Strong relationships have been built, discrete funding opportunities have
been taken advantage of, and small but important steps taken towards achieving parity and real recognition within decision-making processes for
that area. However, at the point of implementation, neither Girringun nor the management agencies have completely met their management goals.
The clash between cultures and between the paradigms of co-management versus protected area management means that management remains a
contested area. Traditional owners will still prioritise their right to participate in and benefit economically from involvement in management,
while maintaining ongoing access to and traditional use of the area. Management agencies will always prioritise conservation, the rights of the
third party and maintenance of the world heritage status of the GBRWHA through biodiversity protection. Nonetheless, the flexibility and
reflection embedded within the processes established to date have made it possible for both Girringun and
Management agencies to ‘see’ each other ; and reveal the commonalities between their management aspirations despite the fact
they operate from within different cultural and management paradigms. Although there is still a long way to go for both parties, in the context of
the contesting value systems they each represent, the future implementation of co-management deliberations within the GBRWHA may enable
the parties to further shift their positions leading to an ongoing, working and mutually agreed to co-management process. As Jones and Burgess
[21] note, it is rare to have the opportunity to systematically study the early stages in design and implementation of new governance arrangements
for the achievement of conservation objectives. The opportunity provided here makes it easy to be critically reflective but also learn from
mistakes and progress forward. This paper demonstrates the development of partnership capacity, and highlights that a diversity of arrangements
for sharing power can be trialled and achieved. Initiatives such as those embarked upon by Girringun can begin to
provide the template for how environmental managers and communities worldwide, whether indigenous
or not, can work together to develop management processes that are not only environmentally sustainable but
economically viable. In ensuring these conditions, environmental management will also be politically feasible , resulting
in socially just conservation outcomes for all .

Strategic use of policy is necessary to achieve adoption of indigenous water alternatives

Neville and Couthard 19, *Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where she is cross-appointed to the Department of Political
Science and the School of the Environment, ** Canadian scholar of Indigenous studies who serves as an associate professor in the political
science department at the University of British Columbia (Kate and Glen, “Transformative Water Relations: Indigenous Interventions in Global
Political Economies,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

Indigenous nations are reshaping land and resource politics across the Global South and North, with significant
implications for global political economies. By influencing energy and resource extraction, fisheries and food
production, and water governance and access, Indigenous approaches to reclaiming sovereignty from
settler states are challenging the economic foundations of nation-states and their domestic and
international exchange relationships. Within the settler states of the Global North—where reparations and restitution for
Indigenous nations remain nominal— these changes are being forced through strategic legal
channels , creative negotiation tactics, powerful resistance efforts, and layered local and transnational campaigns. Through
modern treaty relations , Indigenous nations are revising authority over lands and waters, embedding
self-governance, co-governance, and other models of layered decision-making into state practice . Some of
these shifts echo the rewriting of property relations in postcolonial countries of the Global South, including complex
arrangements of customary and statutory land rights in many African countries (Lund and Boone 2013), while
others reflect the specific constitutional arrangements of settler states and the contemporary contexts of
urban populations, land development, international and trade relations, and other state-specific dynamics.
 Consequentialism
The goal of policy-making should be to maximize benefit and minimize costs---that
requires analysis of consequences, not adherence to moral aboslutes
Fettweis 13, Professor of IR @ Tulane (Chris, “The Pathologies of Power,” p. 242-243)//BB
Classical realists have long considered prudence, in Hans Morgenthau's words, " the supreme virtue in politics."47 Their conception
of the term, and how it has traditionally been used in U.S. foreign policy, is similar to the dictionary definition: wisdom, caution, circumspection,
and "provident care in the management of resources."48 Simply put, a prudent foreign policy would aim above all to minimize cost
and maximize benefits .49 It would strive to be rational, careful, and restrained , and it would not waste national
resources pursuing low-priority goals or addressing minor threats. Prudence is essentially the ability to weigh potential
consequences of alternative political actions. It demands that the main criteria for any decision be a cost-
benefit analysis, or an honest attempt to assess the implications for the national interest. Although such calculations are by necessity
uncertain in a world where rationality is bounded and values unquantifiable, if policy makers were to value prudence above all other virtues they
would by force of habit explain and justify their decisions using a rational framework, with reference to reason and evidence rather than emotion.
Were prudence the defining virtue in policy debates, the ideal for which policy makers strive, it would quickly silence the voices of fear, honor,
glory, and hubris. The process of evaluation can never be foolproof, but by insisting that it be at the center of decision making at the very least
prudence can make assumptions clear and offer a basis for evaluation absent in those decisions driven by pathology. The evaluation of
policy cannot be done without recognition of cost. Simply achieving a goal - or winning - does not justify
action. To be considered rational, the other side of the ledger must be considered as well . This may sound
obvious, but a surprising number of scholars and analysts judge foreign policies based solely on whether or
not objectives are fulfilled.50 Neoconservatives in particular tend to ignore costs, assuming that the United States is
capable of paying virtually any price in the fight against evil. The war in Iraq, that exemplar of imprudence, was not
preceded by extensive projections of the likely price tag. When pressed, Bush administration officials repeatedly deferred
such discussions by denying such estimates were possible.5' At best, they were of secondary relevance. In the war's aftermath, the same
officials stress how much better the world is without Saddam rather than how much worse it is without those who gave their lives in removing
him.∂ Like realism itself, prudence
is hardly amoral. It merely demands a focus on the morality of outcomes ,
not intentions . Actions that produce bad results are imprudent, no matter how good the intent . On this, Morgenthau quotes

Lincoln:∂ I do the very best I know, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.2∂ Although the central criteria for prudent cost-benefit analyses must be the national interest, no abnegation of
national ideals or international responsibility need follow. Foreign humanitarian assistance is cheap, relatively speaking, and often carries benefits for donor and recipient alike. The entire operation in Somalia, during which as many as a quarter million lives were saved, cost U.S. taxpayers less than two billion dollars.53 More was spent every week at the height of the Iraq war. Qaddafi
was removed for half that. A focus on the outcome makes it clear that the Iraq war was a blunder of the first order. Even if the intentions of the Bush administration were indeed good, it is hard to see how the outcome can be said to be worth the cost. Thomas Ricks quotes a senior intelligence official in Iraq as saying that the long-term American goal after the surge is "a stable Iraq that is
unified, at peace with its neighbors, and is able to police its inter-nal affairs, so it isn't a sanctuary for Al Qaeda. Preferably a friend to us, but it doesn't have to be."54 Presumably one could add the absence of weapons of mass destruction to this rather scaled-back list of goals, and perhaps the continuation of the uninterrupted flow of oil from the Gulf. In other words, if all goes well over
the course of the next few years -and there is obviously no guarantee it will - Iraq might look quite a bit like it did in 2003, only with a marginally more friendly dictator in charge. The cost of this restoration of the virtual status quo ante will be at least forty-five hundred American dead and some thirty thousand wounded, at least a hundred thousand Iraqis killed and millions more
displaced, and up to as many as three trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars spent.55 The war inspired many young Arabs, such as Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, to join the∂ ranks ofjihadi terrorists, swelling the ranks of America's true enemies. Al-Asiri is currently the main bomb maker for "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," the group that operates out of Yemen and continues to try to take down
Western airliners, and he is considered the "most dangerous man in the world" according to many people who maintain such rankings.56 The decision to invade Iraq may well turn out to be the most imprudent action this country has ever taken.∂ Another operation from the same year might serve as a counterexample to Iraq, a prudent foreign policy adventure where the benefits
outweighed the costs. The July 2003 intervention in Liberia may be little remembered, but that is partially because it was such a success. The United States deployed around two thousand Marines to Monrovia and ended a siege during a particularly brutal civil war. Security returned to the capital and an unknowable number of lives were saved. Unlike in Somalia, die mission did not creep
into nation building, proving that intervention need not be tainted by hubris. By October the civil war had effectively ended and the Marines withdrew, having suffered no casualties and incurring little cost to the U.S. taxpayer. In the years since, Charles Taylor, the paragon of the West African kleptocradc despot, was put on trial at The Hague and the security situation in Liberia has

systematic evaluation of alternatives, expectations can be

improved markedly. The Marines have not returned.∂ No assessment of costs and benefits can guarantee good decisions, of course. But by making assumptions clear, by inculcating and rewarding a

assessed more rationally and decisions rescued from emotion. If leaders work actively to minimize pathologies and replace them with rational,
fact-based beliefs, the odds of arriving at rational conclusions rise. If prudence is the goal, therefore, the following should
form the core
of the foreign policy conventional wisdom:∂ • The world is more peaceful than ever before.∂ • While no country is ever completely safe, the
United States has few - if any - serious security threats.

Frameworks that only rely on the neg pointing out imperfections are intellectually useless
Sikkink 8, Professor of political science at the University of Minnesota (Kathryn, “The Role of Consequences, Comparison, and
Counterfactuals in Constructivist Ethical Thought,” http://www.polisci.umn.edu/centers/theory/pdf/sikkink.pdf)---ability edited //BB

Ethical arguments of these different types are ubiquitous and necessary. But because they are also slippery and open to manipulation and misuse,
we also need to be very careful and precise about how we go about using them. I would recommend that first we distinguish very carefully
between the comparison to ideals and historical empirical comparison. I believe that many critical constructivist accounts rely on the
comparison to the ideal or to the conditions of possibility counterfactual argument. In almost every critical constructivist work
there is an implicit ideal ethical argument. This argument is implicit because it is rarely clearly stated, but it is found in the nature
of the 36 critique. So, for example, in her discussion of U.S. human rights policy, Roxanne Doty critiques a human rights policy carried out by
actors who sometimes use it for their own self aggrandizement and to denigrate others. 42 The implicit ideal this presents is a human rights policy
that is not used for denigration or surveillance or othering those it criticizes or conversely, of elevating those who advocate it. What would be
examples of such a policy? The book does not provide examples. We do not know if examples exist in the world. So the implicit comparison is a
comparison to an ideal – a never fully stated ideal, but one present in the critique of what is wrong with the policies discussed. Nicolas Guilhot
makes a similar argument in his recent book. The promotion of democracy and human rights, he argues, are increasingly used in order to extend
the power they were meant to limit. “The promotion of democracy and human rights defines new forms of administration on a global scale and
generates a new political science.” He historically examines how progressive movements for democracy and human rights have become
hegemonic because they “systematically managed to integrate emancipatory and progressive forces in the construction of imperial policies.” But
once again, the book offers no alternative political scenario. In the final sentence of the book, the author clarifies that “this book has no other
ambition than to contribute to the democratic critique of democracy.” 43 In the introduction, he clarifies, “This book does not provide
answers to these dilemmas. At most, its only ambition is to highlight them, in the hope that a proper
understanding constitutes a first step toward the invention of new courses of action.”44 Ethically , I believe this is a
cop-out . Politically and intellectually, I find it too comfortable and too easy. This critique has a crucial role to play in
pointing to hypocrisy (as Price highlights in the introduction). It could also serve as a catalyst for policy change in the direction of policy that
would include less surveillance or less cooptation of human rights discourse. But it is unlikely to serve as a catalyst for new
action or policy change unless it ventures something more than pure critique, unless it risks a political or
ethical proposal. Without that, it has the impact of delegitimizing any human rights policy without suggesting
any alternative. Any policy to promote human rights of democracy policy is shown to be deeply flawed or even
pernicious. It is portrayed as part of the problem, certainly not as offering any kind of solution. Human rights policy appears to make the
situation worse, not better. The critique has the effect of telling us clearly what we do not want, what we can not
support—human rights policies by imperfect and hypocritical actors like the U.S. In its historical comparisons, it also lumps
human rights policy together with colonialism and does not provide any elements to distinguish between
one policy of surveillance and other. All are equally flawed. The ethical effect is to remove normative
support from existing policies without producing any alternatives. This is similar to what Price means when he says that
“critical accounts which do not in fact offer constructive normative theorizing to follow critique ironically lend
themselves to being complicit with the conservative agenda opposing erstwhile progressive change in world
politics.” Neither Doty nor Guilhot, for example, contrast two human rights policies to give examples of policies that are more of less
hypocritical or where there has been more or 44 Guilhot, p. 14. 38 less surveillance. They don’t contrast human rights policies or democracy
promotion policies to previous policies that were also hypocritical and self aggrandizing, but more pernicious – e.g. national security ideology
and support for authoritarian regimes in the third world. By presenting no contrasts, the critique would appear to say that there is
no ethical or political difference between a policy that supports coups and funds repressive military
regimes and a policy that critiques coups and cuts military aid to repressive regimes. These policies would
appear to be ethically indistinguishable. Indeed, by these standards, a realist policy (a la Kissinger) might be
preferable. Kissinger didn’t denigrate his authoritarianism allies. He took regimes as they were. He treated
them as valuable allies. He didn’t lecture them on how they should change. He also, in doing so, encouraged,
in some cases, coups and mass murder. But at least he didn’t “Other ”. Doty and Guilhot give me no ethical criteria
to distinguish between the policies of the Kissinger administration, the Carter administration, and current Bush administration policy. Because the
comparison is an implicit ideal, never an empirical real world example, the critique is very telling and can delegitimize the critiqued
policy. But nothing is put in its place . So, it demobilizes any support we might have for any human rights
policy. It puts the analyst in an ethically comfortable position , but by not proposing any explicit
comparison, it [mollifies] demobilizes the reader. We learn what to oppose, to critique, but we don’t learn
explicitly what to support in its stead . The result can be political [inaction]. One finds it difficult to act.
 LT---Generic
Indigenous movements support water protection
Neville and Couthard 19, *Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where she is cross-appointed to the Department of Political
Science and the School of the Environment, ** Canadian scholar of Indigenous studies who serves as an associate professor in the political
science department at the University of British Columbia (Kate and Glen, “Transformative Water Relations: Indigenous Interventions in Global
Political Economies,” Global Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

“Water is life.” This slogan is heard at protests and gatherings around the world , in art and in song, to resist the
disruption of water resources, whether through their contamination, their consumption or rerouting for energy
infrastructure, or their removal from common access through privatization . The phrase is central to
movements that oppose industrial development projects and exclusionary enclosures . It also requires listeners to
think through water as more than a commodity in a capitalist system. While water is implicated within extraction and production processes across
sectors, from energy to agriculture and beyond, it is as—if not more—deeply embedded in social practices and spiritual traditions across cultures
and regions. In North America, “Water is life”— or “Mni wiconi” in the Lakota language—became a rallying cry during
the highly publicized resistance at Standing Rock, North Dakota, mounted by the Oceti Sakowin (and
their allies) against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline over a ten-month period in 2016 . The
phrase marks the deep ontological roots of Indigenous peoples’ critiques of environmental injustices relating to land and water. “For the Oceti
Sakowin,” writes Lakota historian Nick Estes (2019, 21), “Mni Wiconi, or ‘water is life,’ relates to Wotakuye, or ‘being a good relative.’”
 LT---Dam-Specific
Rejection of dams is consistent with decolonial approaches to water
Curley 19, PhD, Professor of Geography @ U Arizona (Andrew, ““Our Winters’ Rights”: Challenging Colonial Water Laws,” Global
Environmental Politics, 19.3)//BB

On the other hand, there

was a strong thread of activism based in an ideology of decolonization.
Decolonization challenged many premises of “western water law,” including the notion that people deserved rights to
the water if they colonized water sources and used it “productively,” which usually meant unsustainably. Settlement opponents looked to
Indigenous philosophies of water that were pre-existent and fundamentally discordant to quantification schemes and notions of water rights. This
speaks to what Coulthard and Simpson (2016) refer to as “grounded normativity” or notions of Diné resource governance that
are rootedin ethics of care and responsibility for all peoples and nonhuman peoples who use the water .
Dams , diversions, large farms, and even some forms of ranching would violate these alternative principles of resource
governance . Yazzie and Baldy (2018) argue that these politics of decolonization are defined by political struggle and radical relationality
with nonhuman actors like water (see also Todd 2018).
 LT---MPA-Specific
MPAs invigorate indigenous life
Ban 18, PhD, Professor @ U Victoria (Natalie and Alejandro Frid, “Indigenous peoples' rights and marine protected areas,” Marine Policy,
87)//BB

Yet some Indigenous peoples see spatial management, such as MPAs and spatial fishery closures, as a way to
recognize, honour, and (re-) invigorate Indigenous rights [7], [8]. Declining marine resources are of
particular concern to Indigenous peoples because depressed stocks limit their ability to fish for traditional
resources [9], [10], an essential activity for continuing cultural practices and transferring traditional
knowledge across generations. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [10] affirms the inherent rights of Indigenous
peoples, differentiating them from stakeholders [11], and marine spatial planning needs to account for these rights. Establishing MPAs to
support and reinvigorate Indigenous rights, therefore, is a promising path forward towards addressing
social injustices and simultaneously enhancing biodiversity conservation . There is a strong cultural basis
for combining Indigenous rights and biodiversity conservation. Traditional forms of marine spatial
management, though varied in implementation and application to match local ecosystems and customs, are ubiquitous in
Indigenous cultures that rely on marine resources [5]. For example, marine customary tenures delimit areas
of the ocean where rights of access and extraction are limited; ‘periodically harvested closures’, common
in Melanesia and Polynesia, are off-limits to extractive activities except when opened for fishing for
special occasions (e.g., village feasts, funerals, meeting cash needs) [12]; and Indigenous enhancement strategies (e.g.,
transplanting of eggs and improvement of spawning grounds) support biodiversity [13]. Such practices are underpinned by
worldviews that embed respect for other living beings into customs that guide conservation practices (e.g.,
take only what you need) [13], [14], and are maintained through stories, Indigenous laws and traditions [5].
Indigenous marine management practices and marine conservation are thus generally well aligned . However,
while Indigenous management of oceans was prevalent, such management has declined in many places because of the effects of colonization and
marginalization of Indigenous peoples [15], [16].
 AT “Discourse” Links
Changing water discourse is insufficient. Path dependence pre-empts rhetorical shifts
Williams 20, PhD, PostDoc research fellow @ Hong Kong (Jessica, “Discourse inertia and the governance of transboundary rivers in
Asia,” Earth System Governance, 3)//BB

Institutionalisation and the creation of path dependencies reinforce discourse inertia . Large scale infrastructure,
such as hydropower constructions, often have long life spans and once water is apportioned, it is politically difficult to redistribute. Decisions
concerning institutions, policy, planning and resources allocation are made on the basis of these projects, which simply reinforces the approach.
However, variations and unpredictability in water supplies can undermine and impair institutional and physical structures, which challenge the
hydraulic mission. Further, in the case of the Mekong the shift in discourse from the MC to the MRC demonstrates that the institutionalisation of
a discourse is not necessarily accompanied by a change in the overall sanctioned discourse. Instead, institutions in South and Southeast Asia
appear to be largely state instruments. Therefore, they are mediums for supporting state discourses and objectives. As well as the MRC, this
appears to be demonstrated in situations such as the Indus and the LMC. This implies that challenges to the sanctioned discourse need to occur on
more than just the institutional level to disrupt discourse inertia. The conceptualisation of layers of narratives and how they operate supports this
finding. It suggests that privileged narratives and the actors that support them need to be targeted when looking to effect genuine discourse
change. When a sanctioned discourse is institutionalised, it is likely to be successful and perpetuated. The
introduction of new institutions upholding an alternative discourse while the old one is still active may not bring reform.
This implies that the international communities’ tactic of promoting environmental and climate change approaches via institutions they have
created is unlikely to affect the intended policy results. Analysis of the three river basins suggests areas where discourse inertia is being
challenged, particularly with regard to environmental and climate change discourses. However, these narratives are susceptible to co-option and
only appear to be genuinely considered when they represent a visible threat. This implies that discourse change and state actions have so far been
reactive rather than proactive. Discourse inertia may aid further understanding of conflict/cooperation dynamics in
international relations. This supports recent work in this area (For example: Mirumachi, 2015; Zeitoun and Mirumachi, 2008) as it demonstrates
that even when a situation appears open and dynamic, it may actually be restricted and dominated by an
elite group. Sensitivity to the role of ideational and discursive power is, therefore, vital when considering cooperative endeavours. If the
sanctioned management approach is maintained, tensions could increase and overall stability decrease in the region. Discourse inertia within
these river basins needs to be disrupted to open up the discursive-institutional spiral, and thus the political agenda. This will allow alternative
approaches to the hydraulic mission to be genuinely considered. There is the potential that increasing natural disasters could open-up a window of
opportunity for policy change. Actors outside the hydrocracy have made some headway in challenging the sanctioned discourse. This is as
environmental and climate change concerns have become legitimate topics of political discussion. As a note, discourse inertia as a concept is
subject to the same potential limitations as discourse theory and discursive institutional theory. This includes issues of privileging agency over
institutions, which underplays the constraining and enabling effect that institutions can exert over actors (Bell, 2011). Further, as with discursive
institutionalism, discourse inertia's explanatory utility is limited as events outside people's control can occur and that agents' actions can have
unforeseen and unintended consequences (Schmidt, 2010). However, discourse inertia does allow for the analytical duality of institutions and
discourse as well as the interactive role between the two. Similarly, it allows for the nuanced understanding of co-existing cooperation and
conflict. Discourse inertia builds on neo-institutionalism in providing an alternative to traditionally orthodoxies of
institutionalism. Therefore, it goes beyond the almost free floating ideas, concepts and communication of discourse theory through re-
focusing on their materialisation and effect. It introduces new dynamics and discursive understanding in institutional theory (Arts and Buizer,
2009). Discourse inertia allows for the role of power to be considered within interactions between agents and institutions as well as between
groups of agents. As a result, the dynamics behind seemingly static or path dependent situations can be captured. The concept of discourse
inertia needs to be examined in greater depth as, while it is demonstrated here in terms of transboundary water , it may also be present
across public policy. While it is likely that reallocating power away from certain groups can cause a change in discourse, the
transboundary water cases demonstrate the difficulties with shifting power , particularly when the group has
the backing of the state. Therefore, further work in how to end situations of discourse inertia would be beneficial to prevent the
perpetration of unsustainable or ineffective situations.

Discursive analysis doesn’t come first --- their method overstates the importance of rhetoric
and forfeits changing institutional structures
Jerdén 14, research associate @ Utrikespolitiska institutet (Björn Jerdén, 2014, “The Assertive China Narrative: Why It Is Wrong and How
So Many Still Bought into It,” Chinese Journal of International Politics, 7.1, doi: 10.1093/cjip/pot019,
http://cjip.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/1/47.full)

The ‘practice turn’ in International Relations theory, among other things, urges discourse analysts to be wary of neglecting how discourses affect
social action.171 In other words, we should pay attention to not only what people say, but also to what they do .
Similarly, a
change in how people talk and write should not invariably and straightforwardly be expected to
lead to a change in how they act. A number of accounts of China’s new assertiveness arguably commit this ‘discursive fallacy’ and
mistake changes in Chinese non-official discourses for a change in foreign policy.172 Attention to the (re)formation of China’s national identity
is of course indispensable to our understanding of its foreign policy, not least when it comes to predicting its likely future development.
Nevertheless, the
level of influence of public discourse and identity construction on official policy is an
empirical question and should not be treated as a fact prior to analysis . Needless to say, discursive changes
in the broader society need to be mediated by changes in political priorities and the institutional set-up
in order to have any long-lasting impact on policy.173 Moreover, the study of China’s foreign policy might have been
especially receptive to discursive determinism, particularly in recent years. First, due to the non-transparent nature of China’s policymaking
processes, ‘Pekingological’ analyses of subtle nuances in news media outputs have long been indispensable to the study of its foreign policy.
Discourse-centred approaches have a long and impressive pedigree in the field. The downside of this is that analysis sometimes tilts
too heavily towards discourse and away from policy. Second, China’s current debate over foreign policy includes more voices
and viewpoints than it used to.174 Not surprisingly, many have expected this noteworthy discursive change to bring with it a corresponding
policy change. The assertiveness narrative thus confirmed a development that many had expected.
 AT “Resource” Link
Economizing water and tech advances are both key to sustainability
Matheson 16, CEO, Oasys Water (Jim, “Should We Put a Price on Water?,” Yale Insights, https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/should-
we-put-price-on-water)//BB

Water is critical to sustaining life, but markets aren’t pricing it accordingly . “Water is a priceless asset in the
sense that it is invaluable—you can’t live without it,” said Jim Matheson, president & CEO of Oasys Water, Inc. “But it is also without
price in that we haven’t figured out how to price water relative to the value of the water.” That may, necessarily, change as
the limits of global freshwater sources become increasingly clear. A NASA study of new satellite imagery shows 21 of the 37 largest aquifers on
the planet are being depleted at unsustainable rates, according to the Washington Post. “ The situation is quite critical,” said Jay
Famiglietti, NASA’s principal investigator on the project. “There’s not an infinite supply of water.” Freshwater
scarcity is only
expected to get worse as climate change, energy, food, and water interact in complex and potentially destabilizing ways. The World
Economic Forum has assembled a scary list of water worries. Roughly 2.7 billion people—36% of the world’s population—currently face water
shortages of at least a month every year. By 2050 some 4 billion people may be living in water scarce areas. At the
same time, growing population and rising demand for meat are only expected to increase the water needs
of agricultural production. The current trajectory has water demand exceeding sustainable supply by 40%
in 2030. The World Economic Forum’s annual risk report for 2016 highlights the interconnection of possible impacts including large-scale
involuntary migration driven by climate change and water scarcity. Today, less than 1% of the world’s water is fresh and accessible, so new
technologies that expand usable freshwater sources could be transformative . In a Q & A with the trade magazine
Water Technology, Snehal Desai, global business director for Dow Water & Process Solutions, pointed to efficiency, recycling, reuse, and
desalination as important currently existing options. “Since we don’t have a replacement for water, we have to focus
on
the scarcity side of the picture,” he said. The long-term solution is to build a “circular” water economy, in
which water, a non-renewable resource, returns to the system to be used again and again . Yale Insights talked
with Jim Matheson, whose company creates desalination technology for industrial use, about the challenges of changing how societies handle
their water. One barrier to new technologies, he noted, is a tangle of regulation. “The water sector, generally, is a regulatory-driven sector,”
Matheson said. In the U.S., he pointed out, there are 45,000 regulatory bodies, including federal, state, county, and municipal authorities. Because
of those “kinetics,” Matheson explained, “it is an area where innovation, new ideas are slow to bloom.” But imminent scarcity is starting to
prompt a sense of urgency. “The water industry and the water question is in transition. Folks are thinking deeply about water and its relationship
not only to the resource scarcity or abundance but also water’s relationship to societal stability,” Matheson said. “This connection is being
focused on appropriately and significantly.” Putting the cost of water at levels that consider long-term stability can
have a real impact, he said. “If you start to create a little bit more of a strong drive on the demand side
through price, you start to create a slightly less tortured path from innovation out into the marketplace .”
 AT “IR” Link
The assumption of Eurocentric IR as fundamentally incompatible with the alternative
paradoxically re-asserts its power --- the perm is preferable because it denies an ontological
division between the ‘West’ and ‘The Rest’
Sabaratnam 13 – Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. She has previously taught at the University
of Cambridge and at the LSE, from which she received her PhD and MSc degrees in IR (Meera, “Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the
liberal peace,” Security Dialogue, 44.3)

Ontologies of Otherness: Liberal–local relations, ‘hybridity’, ‘resistance’ and the ‘everyday’

Sensitive to the problem of such occlusion, a major strand of recent literature has emphasized the need to rethink the
relations between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’ in intervention settings (Mac Ginty, 2011; Richmond, 2009, 2010, 2011), in what has been
labelled a ‘fourth generation’ approach (Richmond, 2011). This writing has taken a much more proactive approach to research with and about the
peoples targeted by intervention, aiming to correct the impression of smooth liberal transformation and the ‘romanticization’ of the local (Mac
Ginty, 2011: 2–4). Yet, the paths it has taken have, quite unwillingly, reinforced a Eurocentric understanding
of intervention, through the use of an ontology of ‘Otherness’ to frame the issues . Prominent among these accounts
is Richmond’s (2009, 2010, 2011) recent work on ‘post-liberal peace’, which frames the key problems of intervention through an ontological
distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’. In earlier writing, the liberal peace is elaborated as genealogically
endogenous to Western traditions of thought, reflecting Enlightenment , modern and post-Christian values
(Richmond, 2005). In post-conflict settings, however, it is critiqued for exercising forms of hegemony that suppress
pluralism, depoliticize peace, undermine the liberal social contract and exercise a colonial gaze in its treatment of local
‘recipients’ of the liberal peace. In view of these various aspects of failure, the liberal peace is characterized as ‘ethically bankrupt’
(Richmond, 2009: 558) and requiring re-evaluation. The ‘local’, on the other hand, is a space characterized by ‘context,
custom, tradition and difference in its everyday setting’ (Richmond, 2010: 669), which is suppressed by liberal peace interventions.
The very conception of the ‘post-liberal peace’ is thus about the ways in which two ontologically distinct elements – the
‘liberal’ and the ‘local’ – are ‘rescued and reunited’ via forms of hybridity and empathy, in which ‘everyday local agencies, rights, needs, custom
and kinship are recognized as discursive “webs of meaning”’ (Richmond, 2010: 668). Mitchell (2011: 1628) has recently argued that Richmond’s
conception of the ‘local’ is not ‘a reference to parochial, spatially, culturally or politically bounded places’ but ‘the potentialities of local agents to
contest, reshape or resist within a local “space”’. Richmond (2011: 13–14) himself has also been concerned not to be understood as
‘essentializing’ the ‘local’, emphasizing that it contains a diversity of forms of political society. Indeed, in this more recent work, a more complex
conception of the ‘everyday’ as a space of action, thought and potential resistance is elaborated. Despite these qualifications, however, there is
much conflation, interchangeability and slippage between these conceptions of the ‘local’. Accordingly, the ontology of Otherness, understood as
cultural distinctiveness and alterity, continuously surfaces throughout the narratives of liberal and post-liberal peace. Not only is the
liberal peace closely linked to the intellectual trajectory of the ‘West’, but a conception of the ‘local’ as
non-modern and non-Western often re-appears: This requires that local academies and policymakers beyond the already liberal
international community are enabled to develop theoretical approaches to understanding their own predicaments and situations, without these
being tainted by Western, liberal, and developed world orthodoxies and interests. In other words, to gain an understanding of the ‘indigenous’ and
everyday factors for the overall project of building peace, liberal or otherwise, a via media needs to be developed between emergent local
knowledge and the orthodoxy of international prescriptions and assumptions about peace. (Richmond, 2009: 571, emphasis added) There is a
clear emphasis here on the need to engage with the ‘indigenous’ or ‘authentic’ traditions of non-Western
life, which seems to reflect an underlying assumption of cultural difference as the primary division
between these two parties. This reproduces the division between the liberal, rational, modern West and a
culturally distinct space of the ‘local’. Indeed, the call for a post-liberal peace is often a call for peacebuilding to reflect a more
‘culturally appropriate form of politics’ (Richmond, 2011: 102) that is more empathetic and emancipatory. This emphasis on tradition and
cultural norms as constitutive of the ‘local’ is carried through in recent research on interventions in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands. These
focus largely on the reinvigoration of ‘customary’ houses and institutions as a form of ‘critical agency’ in distinction to liberal institutions and the
state (Richmond, 2011: 159–182). The point here is not simply that there is an account of alterity or cultural difference within the politics of
intervention, but that the liberal/local distinction appears to be the central ontological fulcrum upon which the
rest of the political and ethical problems sit (see also Chandler, 2010b: 153). Therefore, ‘local’ or ‘everyday’ ‘agency’ is seen to
be best expressed to the extent that it reclaims ‘the customary’ and is not ‘co-opted’ by the internationals. It is understood as enhanced where
codes of ‘customary law’ become part of the new constitutional settlement. A similar division can be seen in Mac Ginty’s (2011) framework,
which sees the hybridities in peacebuilding as emerging at the intersection of the ‘international’ and ‘local’ agents and institutions. Again, this
framework is built on an ontological distinction between the two that repeatedly splits the ‘Western’/‘international’ from the ‘non-
Western’/‘local’. Even though this is well qualified, overall Mac Ginty (2011: 94) defends this distinction, arguing that if one were to abandon
such potentially problematic labels then this would lead to an abandonment of research altogether. This can quite straightforwardly be read as a
defence of the basic ontology of the project, which is an ontology of the distinction between the West and its Others, which meet through various
forms of hybridization. While Mac Ginty does not pursue the ethics of the post-liberal peace in the same way as Richmond, the underlying
intellectual framework also uses this distinction as the analytic pivot of the research . We earlier defined
Eurocentrism as the belief in Western distinctiveness , and I have argued that this is philosophically
fundamental to this strand of the critical literature that grapples with the relationship between the
‘liberal’ and the ‘local’. This strand has put substantial analytic weight on fundamental cultural differences
between these two entities, even while disavowing any essentialism and making some substantive conceptual efforts to move away
from this. Such difficulties are indicative of the deep hold that this particular avatar of Eurocentrism
has on the critical imaginary . By contrast, the point made by a wide variety of other ‘postcolonial’ writers has
precisely been against such an ontology of the international, pointing instead to the historically blurred,
intertwined and mutually constituted character of global historical space and ‘culture’ (Bhabha, 2004;
Bhambra, 2010).

Non-western IR essentializes cultural tropes of non-US peoples---turns the K, reifies

imperialism and undermines any intellectual gains in their framework
Mena 20, PhD Student at the department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is working on the intersection between
the production of Chinese International thought, China´s political economy and the expansion of global capitalism (Ferran Perez, “The Trap of
Diversity: What Constitutes ‘Non-Western IR Theory’?,” E-IR, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/05/08/the-trap-of-diversity-what-constitutes-non-
western-ir-theory/)

During the last decade, the field of International Relations (IR) has witnessed the emergence of ‘non-Western IR
theory’. Acharya and Buzan’s seminal work titled Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and Beyond Asia (2009)
marked a watershed for the discipline. Acharya and Buzan’s book contributed to a disciplinary self-reflection, which resulted in a wide range of
academic publications aimed at turning the field of IR into a more pluralistic discipline that respects the subaltern voices that have been silenced
by the imperial origins of IR. For this reason, the celebration of ‘cultural diversity’ as an ontological source has become the central focus of new
theoretical endeavours. Both the projects of ‘Global IR’ (Acharya, 2016; Yong-Soo, 2019) led by the prestigious scholar Amitav Acharya and the
various ‘national schools of International Relations’ (Cho, 2013; Qin, 2018; Shahi, 2019; Shih et al., 2019; Yan, 2019; Zhao, 2019) are prime
examples of this new phenomena. Despite the welcoming efforts of promoting ‘cultural diversity’ (Acharya, 2016; Reus-
Smit, 2018; Tickner and Blaney, 2012) to produce theoretical projects that seek to transcend both the ‘Western’ and ‘imperial’ origins of the
discipline, the field of IR has fallen into a dangerous dynamic that stems from the very imperial origins of
discipline: the reification of culture as an essentialist construction . In this sense, essentialism is ‘the view
that cultures have fundamental or “essential” properties, among them their values and beliefs’ (Goodhart 2003,
p.940). In the late 19th century, Western imperialism had to imagine essentialist cultural forms beyond the
domains of the ‘West’ to rationalise its ‘civilising mission’ (Said, 2014). In a historical and disciplinary twist , both
the celebration of ‘cultural diversity’ and the promotion of pluralism have allowed and legitimised the arrival of
‘essentialist’ theoretical projects by a disciplinary ‘back door’ . Put it differently, in an act of disciplinary
redemption, the field of IR has accepted forms of theorising that would have been disqualified some years
ago due to their essentialist tendency. For instance, the celebrated ‘Chinese school of IR’ solely
reactivates Confucianism as an ontological source, dismissing thus other political traditions that exist or
have existed in China such as 1930’s revolutionary Chinese thought, Mao Zedong’s thought, Buddhism or even a ‘sinicised’ Islam.
In this way, only Confucianism is equated with Chineseness. Regarding the project of ‘Global IR’, Hurrel (2016, p.150), wisely warned us about
the dangers of Global
IR as it ‘can also lead to a cultural and regional inwardness that may work to reproduce
the very ethnocentricities that are being challenged’ . This is perhaps one of the main paradoxes that exist
in IR given the massive and recent disciplinary efforts to evade such ‘essentialist’ constructions . This is what
I call the ‘trap of diversity’ in IR. It is worth mentioning that the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’ has manifested several degrees of
‘essentialism’. Although, there are some great contributions (Hurrel, 2016) that seek to transcend these dynamics. Nonetheless, I contend that
such essentialism that informs the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’ is a result of the impact of the ‘dual legacy’ (Chibber, 2018) of Edward
Said’s Orientalism in the discipline of IR. As Chibber (2018, p.37) argues ‘[Said’s] legacy is therefore a dual one – propelling the critique of
imperialism into the very heart of the mainstream on the one hand, but also giving strength to intellectual fashions that have undermined the
possibility of that very critique’. Specifically, in the field of ‘non-Western IR theory’, these academic trends have been
crystallised in (neo)-Weberian and postmodern approaches and a problematic scholarly tendency to understand the
production of international theory as an independent intellectual process that is completely disjointed
from a specific form of political economy or material reality . In this light, the main challenge that the IR discipline has to
address is the legacy of ‘Western cultural imperialism’, in an idealist fashion, rather than the specific social and geo-economic structure that both
enabled and shaped the form in which ‘Western IR’ has been materialised since 1919. As a result of this idealist critique, it is widely recognised
that ‘cultural representation’ (Acharya, 2014) is indeed the deep structural problem of the IR discipline rather than the material historical pillars
and infrastructure that enabled its emergence. The logical consequence of this has been the mainstream approach that understands ‘non-Western
IR thought’ as the theory produced in non-western societies, which are in opposition to the conventional geography of an eternal ‘West’. Hence
the apparent importance of Confucianism, Hinduism or political Islam as ‘non-Western’ ontological sources in the new theoretical formulations.
The activation of such cultural imaginaries as ontological foundations from ‘non-Western’ societies in the
context of the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’ is conceived as the logical step towards a more pluralistic and
‘cultural’ egalitarian discipline. It is worth clarifying that I am not arguing against cultural diversity.
Cultural diversity is the very foundation of humanity. On the contrary , I argue that it is important to critically
engage with the very enterprise of ‘non-Western IR theory’ in its current disciplinary form . Despite the
respectable efforts to turn the IR discipline into a more pluralistic field, critical scholars have taken for granted the
essentialist notion of ‘non-Western IR theory’, uncritically assuming that such theory is only produced in
non-Western societies in a binary contrast to that of conventional IR . This not only reifies ‘the West’ as an
eternal and fixed entity but also orientalises the ‘non-West’ . For this reason, this article seeks to answer the following
question: what constitutes ‘non-Western IR theory’.
To properly analyse the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’, we first need to sketch out what we mean by ‘the West’ and its relationship with the emergence of the IR discipline. In the next section, following the work of Kees van der Pijl, I will define the ‘West’ as what he describes as the ‘Lockean Heartland’. The ‘Lockean heartland’ and the origins of the IR discipline In his work titled The Discipline of Western Supremacy. Modes of Foreign Relations and political economy, volume III, the critical scholar Kees van der Pijl (2014) attributed the origins of the IR discipline
to the imperial pulses of what he describes as the ‘Lockean heartland’ (1998, 2006, 2007, 2014). According to Van der Pijl (2006, p.13), ‘the heartland is therefore best understood not as some massive central island but as a networked social and geo-economic structure comprising a number of (originally English speaking) states and a regulatory infrastructure. Expansion occurs on two dimensions: one of capital, to global proportions; and the other of the West, which by definition has a more limited reach. In their combined advance across the globe, the two progress in tandem
was a way of live, a culture, and a politics, with their means of coercion complementing discipline’. Its Lockean nature stemmed from the specific legal culture which was epitomised by Locke’s Two Treatises of Government that took a transnational form after the immigration from the British Isles to North America and the settle colonialism that followed thereafter. Such state/complex was sealed in the British Isles after the Glorious Revolution in 1688. According to Van der Pijl (2006, p.8), ‘the Lockean state, governed by a constitutional monarch controlled by a parliament, is
the true bourgeois political formation; a state that ‘serves’ a largely self-regulating, ‘civil’ society by protecting private property at home and abroad’. This last point is crucial because it was the main ontological source of the idealist IR theory produced in the ‘Lockean heartland’ at the beginning of the 20th century. In parallel, during the 17th century, the expansion of the heartland and the Protestant Reformation mounted geopolitical pressures on other contender states such as catholic France. To not be dispossessed and ‘resist peripheralization by the Lockean heartland’ (Van
der Pijl 1998, p.78) and catch-up with it, France was forced to develop a strong state. The specific form of the new French state was described by Van der Pijl (1998, p.79) as the ‘prototype of the Hobbesian contender state’. Such Hobbesian state/complex was characterised by ‘the paramountcy of the state as the institution driving forward the social formation and pre-emptively shaping, by action, sometimes revolution from above, the social institutions which have evolved ‘organically, if not necessarily autonomously, in the heartland’ (Van der Pijl 1998, p.80). In such
state/complex, society is completely confiscated in favour of the social and economic development of the state. As I will demonstrate later on, this point is crucial to understand the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’. As Van der Pijl (1998, p.83; 2006, p.1) argues, the structure of the ‘Lockean heartland’ vis-a-vis contender states has been the main structural divide of world politics since the European Enlightenment until the present. The evolution of international affairs has been characterised by the expansion of the ‘Lockean heartland’ and the (semi or full) integration of
several contender states such as France, Prussia, Japan, the Soviet Union, China to its expansionist network. Against this backdrop, the origins of the IR discipline in 1919 was marked by the willingness of the Anglo-American ruling elites of the heartland via education institutions to produce academic knowledge to legitimise and guide their imperial expansion. For this reason, as Schmidt argues in (Van der Pijl 2014, p. viii) ‘the academic discipline is marked by British, and especially, American parochialism’. As we have seen since its origins, the evolution of IR has gone hand
in hand with the imperial project of the Liberal West after the First World War. Due to the historical evolution of the ‘Lockean heartland’ and its dialectical relation with other contender states, the production of international thought in its core was crystallised in an idealist form. As Walker (1993, p.42) points out, ‘if it is necessary to identify a tradition of international relations theory, then the most appropriate candidate is not ‘realism’ but ‘idealism’. As Van der Pijl argues (2014, p.ix), ‘English-speaking social thought, which today dominates academic life the world over,
remains locked into the antinomy between (materialist) empiricism and (religious-idealist) moral judgement. Contender states and ‘non-Western IR theory’ With this in mind, I argue that, paradoxically, the current production of mainstream ‘non-Western IR theory’ (Cho, 2013; Qin, 2018; Shahi, 2019; Shih et al., 2019; Yan, 2019; Zhao, 2019) has been informed by the antinomy between (materialist) empiricism and (religious-idealist) moral judgement, which is the main characteristic of the ‘English-speaking social thought’ and not that of other external societies to the Lockean
heartland. In this vein, despite the influences of Daoism and Confucianism in their theoretical propositions, both Qin’s constructivist relational theory (2018) and Yan’s moral realism (2019) are a case in point. The existence of such persistent antinomy explains why the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’ has been materialised in its current form and its unable to transcend the logics imbued by the imperial origins of the discipline. On the contrary, to overcome the ‘trap of diversity’ in the field of IR, I propose an alternative path to conceive the development of ‘non-Western
IR theory’. Against culturalist approaches, I argue that ‘non-Western IR thought’ should be better understood as the knowledge informed by the legacy of the structural experience of several historical contender states since the 18th century. Put it differently, the production of ‘non-Western IR thought’, rather than being a product of a reified and sealed cultural background, is the logical consequence of the knowledge that emerges from a specific structural position of a given society within the wider historical structure of the ‘Lockean heartland’ vis-a-vis contender states. In this
vein, the distinctiveness of the production of international knowledge in the ‘non-West’ is not solely manifested by a cultural divergence but a structural one. In this light, the primacy of the state over society, which is one of the main characteristics of the contender states experience, is perhaps one of the fundamental ontological foundations that has shaped the production of ‘non-Western IR Theory’ since the 18th century. For this reason, in addition to the ‘Global IR’ and the ‘national schools of IR’, the international thought produced in contender states such as 18th century
France, Prussia, imperial Japan or the Soviet Union could also be described as being produced in a non-Western setting. For instance, following my argument, ontologically speaking, Prussian political realism which is always regarded as the quintessential IR theory of the ‘universal’ West, has more in common with the Qin’s Confucian relational IR project (Qin, 2018) than with Anglo-Saxon liberalism. Both theoretical projects are shaped by the same ontological premise of the primacy of the state over society. For this reason, in the context of the production of IR theory in
China, the reactivation of Confucianism as an ontological source to build the ‘Chinese school of IR’ is not a solely consequence of its eternal existence within the Chinese civilization but also due its political meaning within the wider structural position of China. Put it differently, Confucianism is indeed a political tradition that gives primacy of the state over society and can rationalize best the structural contender posture of contemporary China. This crucial structural ontological foundation that shapes the production of ‘non-Western IR theory’ is one of the elements that has
been obscured by the dominant essentialist approaches that exist within the discipline of IR. During the past decade, the field has tended to emphasise the ontological value of ‘cultural otherness’ rather than the existence of universal structural elements that are reproduced in different cultural settings due to the geopolitical pressures of the ‘Lockean heartland’. The obscuration of this crucial point not only has to do with the internal evolution of the IR discipline in the Anglo-American academia and its postmodern drift, but also with the neoliberal forces that has shaped the
discipline since the 1980s. Davenport (2019, p.535) argues that these ‘debates [the Third Debate] should be understood, in both its timing and its substance, as a phenomenon of neoliberal globalization: it was the reflection into disciplinary IR of the enormous transformations through with so many of the structures and hierarchies that had characterized the modern age were disintegrated’. It is worth mentioning that I am not dismissing the importance of culture in the process of production of IR theory. Cultural multiplicity plays a fundamental role in shaping theoretical
knowledge and the diverse cosmovisions that enable communities to make sense of the world. Nonetheless, with the alternative path that I have outlined above, I attempt to denaturalise the deep-seated interpretation of the problematic dichotomy between ‘Western IR theory’ vs ‘non-Western IR theory’ which is reproduced in most of the mainstream literature on ‘non-Western IR theory’.

Conclusion
This article has argued that the uncritical engagement with ‘cultural diversity’ in the discipline of IR, which has been epitomised by the
development of ‘non-Western IR theory’, has not succeeded in transcending the ‘imperial’ or ‘Western’ origins of the discipline. On the contrary,
the interpretation of the production of non-Western International thought as the knowledge produced by
societies beyond the territories of the West has reinforced new forms of essentialism . This is what I have
described as ‘the trap of diversity’ in IR. For this reason, the form in which ‘non-Western IR theory’ has materialised
should be understood as a form of disciplinary ‘identity politics’, a struggle for the representation of abstract
and reified cultural entities, rather than as a real theoretical challenge to question its imperial foundations
and the material infrastructure that enabled that specific production of knowledge . In other words, I maintain that
these approaches are a disciplinary ‘dead-end’ .
 AT “Nuc War” Link
Discussion of war does not displace focus on structural violence—it allows an injection of
complexity that is not hierarchical
Barkawi 12—Professor Politics at the New School for Social Research (Tarak, “Of Camps and Critiques: A Reply to ‘Security, War,
Violence’” Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol 41 No 1, p 124-130, SagePub)

A final totalising move in ‘Security, War, Violence’ is the idea that the study of war should be subsumed under the category of ‘violence’. The reasons offered for this
are: violence does not entail a hierarchy in which war is privileged; a focus on violence encourages us to see war in relational terms and makes visible other

kinds of violence besides that of war; and that the analysis of violence somehow enables the disentangling of politics from war and a proper critique of liberal
violence.22 I have no particular objection to the study of violence, and I certainly think there should be more of it in the social sciences. However, why and how this

obviates or subsumes the study of war is obscure to me. Is war not historically significant enough to
justify inquiry into it? War is a more specific category relative to violence in general, referring to reciprocal organised
violence between political entities. I make no claims that the study of war should be privileged over that of other forms of violence. Both the violence of war, and that

of, say, patriarchy, demand scholarly attention, but they are also distinct if related topics requiring different forms of theorisation and
inquiry. As for relationality, the category of war is already inherently relational; one does not need the concept of violence in general to see this. What precisely distinguishes

war from many other kinds of violence, such as genocide or massacre, is that war is a relational form of violence in which
the other side shoots back. This is ultimately the source of war’s generative social powers , for it is amidst the clash of
arms that the truths which define social and political orders are brought into question. A broader focus on violence in general risks losing this

central, distinctive character of the violence of war . Is it really more theoretically or politically adequate to start referring to the Second World War as
an instance of ‘violence’? Equally, while I am all for the analysis of liberal violence, another broad category which would include issues of ‘structural violence’, I also think we have far

from exhausted the subject of liberalism and war, an important area of inquiry now dominated by the mostly self-serving
nostrums of the liberal peace debates. What perhaps is most interesting about Aradau’s remarks on violence is that she assumes we know what war is. So, for example, she suggests that we attend
to a continuum of violence in which war is considered alongside ‘insurrections, revolts, revolutions, insurgencies, rebellions, seditions, disobediences, riots and uprisings’.23 Apparently, on her
understanding, these other things are not war, even though most of them typically involve reciprocal, organised violence. This is precisely to take as given the IR disciplinary view of ‘real
interstate war’ that underlies Correlates of War and other mainstream work. This is the definition of war that I sought to critique in ‘From War to Security’, a critique Aradau has overlooked. I
was posing new questions and possibilities for the study of war, not proffering definitive answers about what war is and what it is not, or about where and when it starts and ends. It is, I would
suggest, Aradau who is most concerned about hierarchy and privilege, particularly in respect of perceived slights to Critical Security Studies and her demand that any study of war be in dialogue
with Critical Security Studies. In this, she overlooks the fact that, conceived another way, with a more holistic vision of the community of relevant scholars, my article was already an engagement
with critical inquiry into security relations. Perhaps it was the opening rhetoric of my article that inspired Aradau’s ire, my reference to partygoers from Copenhagen and Aberystwyth dancing on
graves, or my suggestion that contemporary ‘wider agenda’ security scholars know rather less about the composition of carrier battle groups than did their traditional predecessors.24 But does
anyone seriously doubt that ‘wider agenda’ scholars are less familiar with histories and sociologies of wars and militaries than were the traditional predecessors, who even so still managed to
overlook their significance? These passages were meant to serve a very specific purpose, to denaturalise our images of the new and old security studies, and to open up the reader to the
Neither traditional nor
possibility that, with respect to the study of war, these fields of study share more in common than is conceivable within the current terms of debate.

‘wider agenda’ security studies are centrally interested in war. Given the significance of war in the human
past and present, and the dire state of the study of war in the Anglo-American academy, this seems to me
a serious problem for critical thought .

Kato is about nuclear testing

Kato, their author, 93, (Masahide Kato, 1993, “Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic
Gaze," Alternatives 18.3 (1993), pages 339-360)
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjecture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the
interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due
recognition by the First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjecture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose meaning is relevant only to
the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking
place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on Earth. The major perpetrators
of nuclear warfare are the United States (936) times, the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). The primary targets of
warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars
against the Marshall Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Austrailian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24
times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xianjian Provine, China) (36 tims). Moreover, although I
focus primarily on " nuclear tests " in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of
violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan and the
European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation,"
"low intensity intervention," or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have take a form of nuclear
extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
But that’s ended — it proves that there is a distinction between nuclear annihilation absent
the plan and the status quo; Public pressure, international negotiations, and Congressional
cooperation ended nuclear testing — the alt’s withdrawal from institutions fails
von Hippel 19, Professor and Co-Director of Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University and Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs, American physicist (Frank N. von Hippel, December 2019, "The Decision to End U.S. Nuclear
Testing," No Publication, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-12/features/decision-end-us-nuclear-testing)
Today, for the first time since the beginning of the nuclear age, none of the world’s nuclear-armed
states is conducting nuclear test explosions . After more than 2,000 detonations, the world’s nuclear test sites are
dormant . The journey that brought us to this point has been long, and there have been some key turning
points and some particularly important decision-makers who have steered us away from nuclear
testing and the arms racing and environmental contamination it produces . When U.S. President Bill
Clinton took office in January 1993, one of the first issue s he confronted was the future of U.S. nuclear
testing. At the time, Congress was firmly in Democratic control, and the Democrats had been pressing
the resistant Reagan and Bush admin istrations to agree to end U.S. nuclear testing if other
countries , especially Russia, did as well. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had declared a nuclear test
moratorium starting on August 6, 1985.1 Despite a lack of reciprocation from the Reagan administration, the
Soviet moratorium had a substantial impact on Western public opinion , and Gorbachev extended it
through 1986 before pressure from the Soviet military forced him to allow resumed testing. Public pressure against nuclear testing
in Kazakhtan, however, where the Soviets conducted the majority of their nuclear tests, was growing . After a n underground
test vented at the Semipalitinsk test site in Kazakhstan in February 1989, public outrage grew further, forcing the
shutdown of the site .2 Soviet nuclear testing shifted to the Arctic site on the island of Novaya Zemlya,
but in the face of international protests , only one more test, on October 24, 1990, was conducted there. A year
later, in October 1991, just before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev announced another year-
long testing moratorium.3 His successor, President Boris Yeltsin, confirmed the extension of the moratorium and
called again for the U nited S tates to reciprocate.4 In response , Democratic and Republican members of
Congress introduced legislation to halt U.S. nuclear testing for one year, which gained momentum and, with
some modifications, was approved in October 1992 and very reluctantly signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
The Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell Amendment
The test moratorium law resulted from the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment to the fiscal year 1993 energy
appropriations bill. The amendment was sponsored by Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.), a liberal who had, as a Navy
lieutenant, visited Hiroshima a month after the nuclear bombing on August 6, 1945; Senator James Exon (D-Neb.), a
moderate serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell
(D-Maine). The law suspended U.S. nuclear testing for nine months and required a complete halt of U.S.
nuclear testing by September 30, 19 96 , if other countries had stopped testing by then. Clinton adopted that as a goal, and
after more than two years of intensive multilateral negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament
(CD) in Geneva, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ( CTBT ) was opened for signature on September 24, 1996,
with Clinton and 65 other national leaders signing on the first day.5 Since that time, only three nations have tested: India and Pakistan in May 1998 and North Korea (six
tests between 2006 and 2017). The road to the signing ceremony was a bumpy one. One of the most important issues in the U.S. internal policymaking process was how the safety and reliability
of U.S. nuclear warheads would be maintained in the absence of testing. The Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment recognized that problem and allowed up to 15 tests before September 30, 1996,
for fixes of specific safety and reliability problems. It also allowed up to three of these tests to be conducted with the United Kingdom, which had no test site of its own, if the UK had a problem
with an existing warhead type that needed fixing.6 The “physics packages” of all U.S. nuclear warheads have been designed by two Department of Energy laboratories, the Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, located in New Mexico and California, respectively. The associated electronic controls for the warheads are designed and procured by the Sandia
National Laboratories, which has sites near both of the weapons physics labs. These three weapons laboratories therefore had to recommend whether any tests were required before the United
States ended testing and, if so, bring them for approval to the secretary of energy.
 AT FW vs Settlers
Tying decolonization to a settler W is a double-turn
Bazinet 16, MA in Globalization and Internationa Development @ U of Ottawa (Trycia, “White, Settler-Colonialism, International
Development Education, and the Question of Futurity: A Content Analysis of the University of Ottawa Master’s Program Mandatory Syllabi in
Globalization and International Development,” Proquest Theses)//BB

The comfort of settlers just cannot be an additional burden that Indigenous peoples have to carry (Yerxa, as cited in Battell Lowman & Barker, 2015, p. 22).
Decolonization is not about the future of settlers, and to imagine decolonization as addressing settlers’
anxieties means that it has already failed, including in education and curricula (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013, p. 85-86).
Settlers must be willing to be refused and direct their work to imagine relational ways of being that are not dependent on dispossession (Flowers, 2015, p. 34).
Even when settlers do engage in unsettling settler-colonialism, it cannot be for their own
instrumental ends (De Leeuw, 2013, p. 391). Settlers’ engagement with the process of creating spaces for
decolonization cannot happen if it has a pre-determined goal to attain or an assumed reconciliation to be reached in the end.
Under rematriation, not only are white settlers not at the center of decolonization, but they are also refused what they always felt entitled to, or from accessing
knowledges they do not deserve (Tuck & Yang, 2014, as cited in Zahara, 2016). There
is no praise to be received from taking so-
called decolonizing initiatives, as they are already about 500 years late . Their good intentions are simply
not enough, expected to be harmful, and therefore will not be engaged with .
 AT Alternative---Environment DA
The alternative destroys the environment
Redford 91, PhD @ Harvard, principal at Archipelago Consulting, established in 2011 and based in Portland, Maine. He was most recently
Director of the WCS Institute and Vice President, Conservation Strategies at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. (Kent,
“Romanticizing the Stone Age,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-
quarterly/ecologically-noble-savage)//BB

It is the latter idea, that Indians lived in conformity with nature, that inspired this century's reincarnation of the noble
savage. Writings of several scientists and indigenous rights advocates echo the early chroniclers' assumption that indigenous people lived in "balance" with their environment. Prominent
conservationists have stated that in the past, indigenous people "lived in close harmony with their local
environment." The rhetoric of Indian spokespersons is even stronger: "In the world of today there are two systems, two different irreconcilable `ways of life.' The Indian world -
collective, communal, human respectful of nature, and wise - and the western world - greedy, destructive, individualist, and enemy of nature" (from a report to the International NGO Conference
The idealized figure of centuries past had been reborn, as the ecologically noble
on Indigenous Peoples and the Land, 1981).

savage. The recently accumulated evidence, however, refutes this concept of ecological nobility. Precontact Indians were not
"ecosystem men"; they were not just another species of animal, largely incapable of altering the environment, who therefore lived within the "ecological limitations of their home area."
Paleobiologists, archaeologists, and botanists are coming to believe that most tropical forests have been
severely altered by human activities before European contact . Evidence of vast fires in the northern
Amazonian forests and of the apparently anthropogenic origins of large areas of forest in eastern
Amazonial suggests that before 1500, humans had tremendously affected the virgin forest, with ensuing
impacts on plant and animal species. These people behaved as humans do now : they did whatever they had to to feed
themselves and their families. "Whatever they had to" is the key phrase in understanding the problem of the noble savage myth in its contemporary version. Countless examples make it clear that
indigenous people can be either forced, seduced, or tempted into accepting new methods, new crops, and new technologies. No better example exists than the near-universal adoption of firearms
for hunting by Indians in the Neotropics. Shotguns or rifles, often combined with the use of flashlights and outboard motors, change completely the interaction between human hunters and their
prey. There is no cultural barrier to the Indians' adoption of means to "improve" their lives (i.e., make them more like Western lives), even if the long-term sustainability of the resource base is
threatened. These means can include the sale of timber and mining rights to indigenous lands, commercial exploitation of flora and fauna, and invitations to tourists to observe "traditional
lifestyles." Indians should not be blamed for engaging in these activities. They can hardly be faulted for failing to live up to Western expectations of the noble savage. They have the same
capacities, desires, and, perhaps, needs to overexploit their environment as did out European ancestors. Why shouldn't Indians have the same right to dispose of the timber on their land as the
international timber companies have to sell theirs? An indigenous group responded to the siren call of the market economy in just this spirit in Brazil in 1989, when Guajajara Indians took
Such observed behavior
prisoners in order to force the government Indian agency, FUNAI, to grant them permission to sell lumber from their lands. "Inherent Superiority"?

contrasts sharply with the claims made about Indian use of natural resources in the modern world. Despite
evidence to the contrary, indigenous people continue to be credited with natural respect for ecology and a
commitment to sustainable methods of resource sue under all circumstances. Some Indian groups, reading of the qualities
attributed to them by Europeans , have begun to give themselves the same credit . In some cases, Indian spokespersons
promise that adoption of "Indian ways" will solve many of the problems created by the ignorant ways of the non-Indians. In the highly publicized Chimane Forest Reserve in Amazonian Bolivia,
for example, where indigenous people are protesting lumbering activities by commercial firms, a spokesperson for the Moxo Indians lays claim to some of the land stating: "We have learned to
The assertion that as Indians these people will be
take care and maintain the ecology because we know that it guarantees our existence."

ecologically noble stewards, though unproven , is a trump card in the current world of conservation
sensitivities. The currency of the myth of ecological nobility was demonstrated again in Colombia, when the Colombian government granted Indians rights to more than half of national
rain forest territory, arguing that the Indians are the people most likely to protect the biological diversity of the tropical forest. The Indians will administer the territory because, supposedly, as
Indians, they will sustainably use and therefore preserve the plant and animal diversity. (Any "serious" exploitation will presumably be turned over to non-Indians, more experienced in
The belief in the inherent
nonsustainable resource use. The government has kept the rights to minerals and to commercial extraction of natural resources.)

superiority of indigenous resource use systems has reached its twentieth-century apogee in the argument that such
systems are ideal models for development. Books, conferences, and learned editorials push the relevance of indigenous

knowledge to contmporary development in the tropics. A recent World Wildlife Fund study on indigenous methods of resource use was titled "The Once and Future Resource
Managers."

Indigenous methods can’t sustain the current population

Redford 91, PhD @ Harvard, principal at Archipelago Consulting, established in 2011 and based in Portland, Maine. He was most recently
Director of the WCS Institute and Vice President, Conservation Strategies at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York (Kent,
“Romanticizing the Stone Age,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-
quarterly/ecologically-noble-savage)//BB

To be sure, several scientists have demonstrated that there are methods used by indigenous peoples that are
definitely superior to those used by non-indigenous peoples living in the same habitat. These methods include polycropping, techniques to enhance soil fertility,
and sustainable harvesting of forest plants. Other scientists have shown that indigenous groups possess culturally encoded mores that result in preservation of the
resource base. But
these documented patterns are sustainable only under conditions of low population density,
abundant land, and limited involvement with a market economy. How relevant are such methods and
customs to situations where these three conditions no longer exist , as in most place in the Neotropics today? Techniques
developed to satisfy subsistence needs are unlikely to work when surpluses are needed for cash. As an example,
the Irapa-Yukpa Indians of western Venezuela, who traditionally moved over an extensive area in search of game and plant food, are now
stationary. They raise coffee and work as seasonal laborers. The Indian hunters, who for the most part -use shotguns, have eliminated most large
animals from near their villages and use much of the cash earned growing coffee or working for wages to purchase canned meat or fresh fish. As
the anthropologists studying this group note, "Traditional ideology, language, and economic pursuits are rapidly being replaced by the customs and behavioral
characteristics of the imposing Venezuelan rural culture." These researchers go on to suggest that what is happening to the Yukpa will soon happed to most other
relatively unacculturated tribes. To
believe that when confronted with market pressures, higher population densities,
and increased sedentism most indigenous peoples will maintain the integrity of their traditional methods
is not only to argue against the available evidence , but worse, to fall into the ideological trap that
produced the ecologically noble savage.
 AT Alternative---Reductionism DA
The alt is reductive, shuts down solutions, and reifies authoritative gatekeeping
Nakata et al. 12, Director of Nura Gili at the University of New South Wales; first Torres Strair Islander to receive a PhD in Australia,
their mother is an Indigenous person from the Torres Strait Islands (Martin Nakata, Victoria Nakata, Sarah Keech, Rueben Bolt, 2012,
“Decolonial goals and pedagogies for Indigenous studies,” Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 120-140)
Decoloniality, critical theory and the cultural interface
Decolonial theorists from Latin America now inform an international field of ‘decolonising thought’ and share “a view of coloniality as a fundamental problem” (Maldonado-Torres, 2011, p. 2).
Across the globe Indigenous peoples, in common with other colonised populations, also assert a “definitive rejection of ‘being told’...what we are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of
humanitas and what we have to do to be recognised as such” (Mignolo, 2009, p. 161). Imbo (1998), for instance, as a critic of such understandings and responses as practised in parts of Africa,
suggests this is at risk of being no more than a “rush toward that inviting community called ‘humanity’ [which] turns out to be no less than a succumbing to a world defined by Europe” (p. 131).
Thus, while the decolonial turn holds emancipatory and identity goals central to its project, decolonial inquiry engages the question of knowledge and epistemology critical to understanding the
presence of others’ worldviews and the limits these impose on Western philosophy (Maldonado-Torres, 2011). Mignolo (2009), for example, makes the argument for ‘epistemic disobedience’ as
a way to ‘delink’ from the Western epistemological assumption that there is a “detached and neutral point of observation” (p. 160) through which to interpret and know the world. For Mignolo, it
is both the geo- and bio-politics of knowledge that necessitates disobedience. By these he means the universalising of European thought and reason as the ideal and global human system of
thought and the contemporary positioning of colonised peoples who now act “knowing [they] have been described as less than human” (2009, p. 174). Mignolo’s call for epistemic disobedience
is evident in the work of Australian Indigenous scholars whose critical analysis is constructed in strident opposition to positivist traditions embedded in colonialisms. This is despite the
in this oppositional
recruitment of embedded positivist traditions in many Indigenous theoretical propositions for going forward (e.g., Rigney, 1999; 2001). However, this aside,

analysis, the role of the disciplines in constructing a corpus ‘about’ the Indigenous, which continues to
shape and re-shape understandings and knowledge production ‘about’ and ‘by’ the Indigenous in the
present, is revealed for critique. Indigenous critique of the universalising Western standpoint announces
that there are other epistemologies and other standpoints from which Indigenous people come to know the
world and from which we understand and analyse our more recent encirclement by Western knowledge
over the last few centuries and its legacies. In Australia, this critique underpins Indigenous political resistance and principles of self-
critique of
determination within the nation-state, as well as relations of solidarity with other Indigenous peoples internationally. However,
the Western is not sufficient for the defence of Indigenous systems of thought or the re-building of
Indigenous lives and communities . And so an imperative of decoloniality and a central task of Indigenous people, including
scholars in this field, is ‘decolonial knowledge-making’ that reasserts and draws in concepts and meanings from Indigenous knowledge and
systems of thought and experience of the colonial. This makes for a complex knowledge interface in Indigenous knowledge production, and here
the challenge for Indigenous Studies in the Academy becomes a little clearer. In the Academy, Indigenous Studies is ‘discipline-like’ in the way it
contests and seeks to transform ‘Indigenous’ relations to ‘the Western’ academy. There is, in much Indigenous inquiry, an embracing of
Critical Theory with its emphasis on emancipation or liberation, and on its arguments for participatory
knowledge-making and actions that empower and transform Indigenous individuals and collectives (e.g.,
Freire, 1972; Horkheimer, 1993). Critical Theory’s great attraction lies in its promise of overcoming ‘dominant’ power relations and delivering
‘empowerment’ to Indigenous people on the ground in the form of practical action in Indigenous interests. An assumption is that this knowledge
production is transparent and Indigenous participants are self-knowing, apolitical agents of knowledge when producing knowledge in their own
contexts and on Indigenous terms. The ‘knowledge in action’ approach (following Habermas, 1984-1987) also marries [pairs]
well with Indigenous approaches to re-utilise the coloniallyusurped traditional knowledge of Indigenous
collectives. Critical theory, particularly as it came to apply in teaching and learning areas (e.g., Murphy &
Fleming, 2009), is also drawn into the production of ideological and oppositional analysis via ‘grassroots’
knowledge production in Indigenous communities in a way that animates political resistance to
dominating Western theory and intellectualism. However, various interpretations of Critical Theory’s conception of power and
loyalty to early beginnings in Structuralism and Western philosophy appear not to pose concerns for Indigenous theorists. On the surface at least,
Indigenous decolonising knowledge production appears to be controlled by Indigenous knowers ‘on the
ground’ supported by Indigenous scholars from within the Academy who understand and have subjected
to critical analysis the practices of Western knowledge production and practice (Rigney, 1999, 2001; Bishop, 2003;
Martin, 2008). Here Indigenous knowledge traditions are made available for re-working on the contemporary
ground to give shape to new knowledge production for Indigenous social practices , such as health ,
education , and governance , that are continuous with older or coloniallydisplaced Indigenous social meanings. And here a sense of
practical knowledge production for Indigenous life-worlds is prioritised ahead of disciplinary or academic concerns for theory and method. By
contrast, other Indigenous scholars, along with other critical pedagogues (e.g., Hountondji, 1983; Deloria & Wildcat,
2001; Smith, 2011), do more than simply contest a destructive and imposed Western framework. These scholars
acknowledge that Indigenous people have more complicated, embodied histories of observing colonial
impacts, ignoring or refusing colonial demands, conforming to colonial demands (albeit ambivalently or
contradictorily), and appropriating Western understanding for Indigenous purposes and interests (Nakata,
1993). This view of more engaged histories evidences Indigenous agency and both continuity and
discontinuity with Indigenous social meanings , as well as the assimilation of ‘new’ meanings and,
much more unevenly across different local contexts , some internalisation of colonial meanings .
Nakata (2007b), for instance, emphasises the role of Indigenous agency in everyday standpoints and argues that
Indigenous agency is premised on forms of analysis that are historically-layered , responsive to
changing social conditions , often traditionally-grounded , and often forward-looking . These reflect a
practice of intelligent, self-interested, and pragmatic sense-making based on a distanced observation of
the external colonial order being imposed, via the logic and reasoning of traditional modes of analysis,
and against the oppressive and often seemingly absurd logic of colonial reasoning applied in local and
everyday contexts. In this form of practised analysis are myriad refusals, non-engagements, and ambivalent or conditional deferrals of and to colonial meaning. As well,
historically, in places, Indigenous forms of analysis enabled domestication of Western meanings and practices into traditional meaning systems in ways that served some practical, self-interested
purpose. Domestication practices worked to uphold continuity of social practices but often misunderstood the logic and reasoning of the Western order in which meaning was embedded. Such
practices could both subvert and uphold the colonial order. As an example, for Nakata (2007b), who writes in relation to the experience of Torres Strait Islanders, the minority within Australia’s
Indigenous minority, Islander analysis of the Islander position vis-a-vis the imposed colonial order was always limited by the inaccessibility of the underlying organisation of imposed ‘outside’
knowledge, its logic and practices. Islander analysis derived from being centred in the continuing but changing Islander world, and this enabled ‘a view’ that allowed a gauged domestication and
appropriation of outside ideas, rather than ‘mimicry’ and collapse of a sense of ‘being’ in the Islander realm. It could not, however, provide Islanders with a full, self-knowing account of
themselves in their changing world as they confronted external impositions from outside their own spheres of knowledge and experience. This historical process of domesticating outside
meanings, which depended to some extent on geographical isolation, is now more fragile and exposed due to fast changing technologies of communication. More than ever, understanding the
terms and conditions of the Western order of things, or ‘outside meanings’, is critical to the production of Islander political, economic, and social analyses that now need to be more than
immediately pragmatic or politically reactionary. Nevertheless, a persistent Islander standpoint, continuous with the older traditional forms of social organisation and knowledge practice can be
discerned in the way Islanders continue to look out at the world and interpret what that world might mean for continuing Islander worlds of meaning. That is, Islanders have been and are always
first disposed to ‘outside meanings and influences’ as in need of domesticating on Islander terms – never disposed to outright rejection of their propositions but always inquisitive about how their
various elements can assist Islander futures. Nakata (1993; 2007a) has long argued, in contrast to the many Australian Indigenous education theorists who emphasise cultural agendas in
Indigenous education, that full access to ‘knowledge about knowledge’ is a critical pre-condition of Islanders’ understanding of themselves ‘in the world’, as they are positioned at the point of
convergence between competing systems of thought. For him, ‘the Western’ is able to be ‘made sense of’ and is best worked on when its history and its workings are understood. This enables a
fuller appreciation of its complex interface with ongoing Indigenous systems of thought and ongoing analysis of colonial experience and the ever-changing face of the ongoing ‘Western’
knowledge presence. This conceptualisation of the Indigenous contemporary space allows analytical attention to be drawn to the presence of both systems of thought and their history of
entanglement and (con)fused practice, all of which conditions the way that contemporary Indigenous lifeworlds can now be understood and brought forward for analysis and innovative
engagement and production. Our concern in this sense, in the teaching of Australian Indigenous Studies, is with how Indigenous peoples can defend their interests and construct their arguments
in spaces where a wide and complex world of converging knowledge and practice shapes the way lives can be enacted. Our concern for non-Indigenous students is with how they might come to
understand the depth and complexity of the challenges Indigenous people confront in trying to pursue their goals and how students might think about the effects of their own practices, as they
a clearer understanding of the politics of knowledge production and the effects of
move into professions. For this,

knowledge positioning is required all round. The politics of Indigenous Studies in the academy In Indigenous Studies,
simplistic critique of the Western has had a tendency toward reductive ideological critique in the
effort to demonstrate political resistance as the path to Indigenous ‘liberation’ and re-affirmation
of traditional identities 2 . By simplistic critique, we mean that which represents the Western in
singular terms and antithetical to the Indigenous . This reflects, in part, the activism of the struggle for
freedom, recognition, and self-determination. When coupled with the determination to affirm dynamically adapting cultural
practices or to re-instate conceptual thought from Indigenous knowledge systems or ‘traditions’, Smith’s (1999) decolonising priority to re-claim,
re-name, re-write and re-right is upheld. This approach is ideologically powerful in terms of the Indigenous sense of
autonomy and distinctiveness. However, it runs the danger of reifying the colonial binaries , even
though ‘deconstruction’ of them re-turns the negative binary into a positive force mobilised by re-
generated Indigenous meanings . More importantly, political resistance that demands the routine dismissal
of the Western , as colonial and as the singular originary source of Indigenous struggles , when
coupled with the quick re-claiming and re-naming of the Indigenous, inhibits fuller, more measured
examination of the complex layers of meaning that now circumscribe what it means to be Indigenous and
how Indigenous contemporary social conditions and concerns can be understood (see, for example, Sutton, 2009).
Further to this, in the decolonising effort, attention to ‘epistemic concerns’ likewise engage in simplistic
oppositional analysis between Indigenous and Western knowledge epistemologies as the antithesis
of each other , when the epistemological conditions of each demand much more measured and
complex analysis (see, for example, Edwards & Hewitson, 2008 in contrast to Agrawal, 1995; Christie, 2006; Verran, 2005). As well,
Indigenous knowledge, meanings, and practices are often re-constructed and applied without sufficient mechanisms for critical examination of
them. The invocation of the ‘traditional’ or ‘community’ realm brings a regime of knowledge
authorisation tied to the assertion of ancestral, spiritual, authentic, and distinct Indigenous identities
grounded in claims to time-tested, collectively agreed-upon forms of truth-making. These are assumed as
evidence of emancipation from Western inscriptions and practices but do not provide methods for
critical examination of such assumptions or their limits in the contemporary space , which remains
circumscribed by ongoing intrusions of Western meaning and logic (e.g., Wilson, 2008). In the teaching and
learning literature, for example, are descriptions of some attempts to instate Indigenous knowledge practices
in Indigenous Studies in the Academy that trivialise , distort , misunderstand , misuse and romanticise
Indigenous knowledge and systems of thought . In these instances, academics both claim and, at the same
time forgo , the specificities of the lived contexts of these forms of knowledge through which
Indigenous people continuously interpreted and managed in the world and from which particular
forms of social organisation were operationalised (see, for example, Sheehan, 2003). As well, in the context of the
international field of Indigenous Studies scholarship, the borrowing of concepts and meanings across groups (for example, sharing and talking
circles from North America to Australia) also generalises from the specific inter-relations between traditional knowledge practice, colonial
experience, and contemporary concerns and goals that exist in local spaces. This need not be a problem if brought to awareness in analytical
accounts; knowledge re-working routinely involves utilising other ideas. It is a problem if this knowledge production is not transparent and
mystifies its sources by a practice of homogenising or universalising the Indigenous. A familiar risk re-presents: that of misrepresentation of
Indigenous people via generalisation, misunderstanding, or distortion of knowledge, social meanings and the social functions of knowledge
organisation. All these practices evidence a ‘determined’ but arguably too hurried movement from colonial
critique to the instatement of alternative Indigenous knowledge positions . Decolonial theorist, Maldonado-Torres,
speaks of the problems of pre-occupation with claims for emancipation and identity above epistemic concerns: The problem emerges when
liberation is translated as a claim for immediate political action, a kind of political immediatism that becomes antipathetic to theoretical
reflection...When the two combine, that is, the worst aspects of the claim for identity and those of the search
for liberation, then we have a form of what Lewis Gordon calls epistemological closure . (2011, p. 4)
Epistemic concerns, however, are arguably heightened rather than overcome when Indigenous
epistemologies are re-presented as the antithesis of Western epistemology and argued as the basis
to serve Indigenous contemporary needs , interests and practices . The major weakness of opposing
positivism as the singular Western epistemology, while recruiting other ‘Western’ epistemologies
emanating from critiques of positivism and in wide use for social and human inquiry, means that
epistemic distinctions become much harder to sustain but are nevertheless often assumed and
asserted . These assumptions sometimes support false propositions , a primary one being the split
between theoretical (Western and colonial) and practical (Indigenous and emancipatory) forms of
knowledge-making. The privileging of action as Indigenous practice, at the expense of theoretical inquiry,
implies, to use Mignolo’s words, Indigenous people cannot “function as...theoretically-minded [people]”
(2012, p. 160), or that to do so would be to devalue Indigenous ways of knowing or even to cease being
Indigenous (Deloria, 2004). Indeed, in Indigenous Studies sometimes discussions about theoretical questions are excluded by arguments that
position intellectualism as the tool of ‘cognitive imperialism’ or as the antithesis of Indigenous knowledge as lived action or received wisdom
(e.g., Rigney, 2001; Martin, 2003). The cause for concern here is neither the methodologies utilised nor the questioning of the place of theoretical
inquiry. Rather, the concern is how the claims to truth that attach to accounts generated from ‘the ground’, or
from within Indigenous knowledge traditions, establish themselves as unquestionably ‘authentic’
forms of decolonial knowledge production , when it is not at all clear that they are. Under these
conditions and in the absence of critical examination of contemporary innovations of Indigenous
knowledge practice within Indigenous academia, the risks entailed in moving from ‘epistemic
disobedience’ of the Western to ‘epistemic obedience’ of the regenerated Indigenous are less examined . In
these practices, Indigenous academia exemplifies a determination by some to eclipse the influence of the
Western by moving too quickly to instate modes of knowledge authority that valorise markers of
authenticity based in tradition (see, for example, Anderson and Hokowhitu, 2009). As these authors have argued, in the
challenging decolonial spaces where the presence of both Western and Indigenous knowledge traditions
produce fields of difficult comprehensibility or total incomprehensibility, it is the ‘easily translatable’ that
becomes ‘knowable’ to the Academy, including the Indigenous Academy (2007, p. 45). It is also the ‘easily
translatable’ from academic theory that becomes ‘knowable’ to Indigenous communities. In all of this
movement, what is accorded the most legitimacy from recognised Indigenous community authorities is
arguably ‘recognised’ more broadly by higher education institutions and the Academy, albeit often in the
form of inclusive patronisation or tolerance. The growing frustration with the difficulty of questioning
traditional/cultural/community forms and sources of Indigenous authority pivots around the Indigenous
political and scholarly allegiance to conceptualisations of Indigenous worldview as a counter-
narrative to the Western . This is concerning because the production of counter-narratives is the
work of decoloniality . However, if Indigenous cosmology and epistemologies are positioned as the
unquestionable basis of renewed Indigenous resistance , knowledge and authority , then what is not
brought into question in this decolonial analysis in the Indigenous academy are notions of Indigenous
authority . Here Indigenous Studies, even when under the control of Indigenous scholars, operates in a
‘discipline-like’ way . Indigenous people, including Indigenous academia, construct and defend
Indigenous grounds for good reason and justifiably in the Indigenous epistemic sense . But for many,
these Indigenous conditions of knowledge-making are no more transparent than , and just as
mystifying as , Western disciplines , in terms of how they disguise the politics of their production in
contemporary collective spaces . For instance, emancipatory agendas propositioned on the basis of some
cultural beginning along the road between primitiveness and modernity, can lead to the de-identification
of Indigenous people (e.g., Driskill, Finley, Gilley & Morgensen, 2011). Here, decolonial theory provides some critical
questions to turn back onto the assumptions of decolonial knowledge-making practices . Should Indigenous
academia and the Indigenous ‘grassroots’ community be more concerned about the positioning effected through all conceptual frames when, as
Vallega (n.d.) reminds us, “conceptual knowledge in its articulations of senses of beings is always a source of power, and the configuration of
practices and institutions that will sustain specific ideas are clearly instruments of power” (p. 6)? Might Indigenous Studies scholars also heed
Mignolo’s discussion of the function of knowledgemaking for social organisation and his argument that “institutions are created that
accomplish two functions: training of new (epistemic obedient) members and control of who enters and what
knowledge-making is allowed, disavowed, devalued or celebrated” (2009, p. 176)? Should we be more open
to the question of what Indigenous oppressions are unable to be interrogated when Indigenous ‘decolonial
knowledge-making’ assumes an epistemic [ unawareness ] blind-eye to its own practices ? These questions
are not to make an argument for constant deferral of Indigenous meaning or authority but for more open
inquiry in the difficult and intricate tasks that go toward the decolonial project as envisioned by its
theorists . As Deloria suggests in relation to the North American context, “Indians must examine some of the same
phenomena as Western thinkers and must demonstrate that their perspectives and conclusions make
sense” (p. 6). Here also, the Caribbean scholar, Lewis Gordon, in his discussion of ‘disciplinary decadence’
offers cautionary food for thought for the ‘discipline-like’ field of Indigenous Studies: Instead of being
open-ended pursuits of knowledge, many disciplines have become self-circumscribed in their aims and
methods in ways that appear ontological. By this I mean that many disciplines lose sight of themselves as efforts
to understand the world and have collapsed into the hubris of asserting themselves as the world .
(2006, p. 8) While Gordon might have the disciplines in his sight and be contributing to decolonial discourse, he constructs an
arg ument that should apply to all quests to know and understand the world, including the contemporary
Indigenous world . It may seem unfair to apply this to a field of inquiry emerging from within a
contested philosophical, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological intersection where scholars are
currently preoccupied with attempts to render visible all that has been submerged, excluded or
overwritten. However, where claims to know are authorised via asserting Indigenous epistemologies and
‘traditions’, to oppose and invalidate colonial/Western constructions, the less examined entanglements -
where the Western and Indigenous converge and constitute each
other - deserve more thought and more analysis , especially in terms of how
we understand the everyday of contemporary Indigenous life . Problematic Indigenous efforts to
decolonise knowledge and methodologies while carving out ownership of the field of Indigenous Studies
within higher education institutions can be understood as early incursions into a challenging and contested
knowledge space . Nakata’s conceptualisation of the Cultural Interface is useful here to militate against
hurried ‘claims to know’ the Indigenous on Indigenous terms at this very complex knowledge interface.
Nakata’s conceptualisation (2006) supports the idea of Indigenous scholarship as a space for developing
dispositions for not yet contemplated ways of thinking by bringing more attention to the conditions of
knowledge, both ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’. This implies the need for engagement with the world of
Western theory as well as Indigenous analysis forged from lived experience of everyday historical and
contemporary spaces. Defence of the Indigenous does not necessarily depend on authenticating or
separating the Indigenous (e.g., Grande, 2011) by appeals to notions of ‘intellectual sovereignty’ and
resistance of the Western (e.g., Rigney, 2001), for example, but rests on understanding the positioning effect of
knowledge or claims to know, as well as the practices that order, privilege, and operationalise some
claims to know by excluding or silencing others. The will may be to overcome the Western but to pretend
its presence disappears when the Indigenous re-asserts its epistemic conditions is a dangerous
delusion . At the complex Indigenous-Western knowledge interface, “forms of scepticisms and epistemic
attitudes” (Maldonado-Torres, 2011, p. 1) are necessary to consider the delimitations and dispositions of both
Western and Indigenous theorising for understanding Indigenous contemporary social realities in
this space and possibilities for the future . As Maldonado-Torres contends, for “a consistent decolonization of
human reality.... [o]ne must build new concepts and be willing to revise critically all received theories
and ideas ” (2011, p.4). In this space, Wiredu’s (1995) appeal to ‘epistemic awakening’ and “not a return to
anything” (see Mignolo, 2012, p. 169) offers more than the call to ‘epistemic disobedience’ as a means to counter
the demand for ‘epistemic obedience’ of the disciplines . However, those Indigenous scholars in higher education
areas who construct and/or teach Indigenous Studies programs and who are interested in these complex
knowledge entanglements are often caught in battle with both ongoing coloniality (from the institution and the
Academy ) and simplistic Indigenous analysis that positions them as traitors or wayward spirits (from
the Indigenous commonsense) merely because they dissent from or question popular and comforting
Indigenous positions (see, for example, Anderson and Hokowhitu, 2007).
 AT Alternative---State Key
Challenging environmental injustice through state engagement is key
NoiseCat 16, enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia where he was nominated to run for Chief in 2014
AND a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Oxford (Julian Brave, “The Indigenous Revolution,” Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-obama/)//BB

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 must hold them to it. Longstanding

alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to our success. In 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 settle for symbolic victories. If there is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition, the Left must support
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 .
 AT Alternative---Decol-Speciific
Academic calls for decolonization are a settler move to innocence
Tuck 12, PhD Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at the State University of New York at New Paltz (Eve, Decolonization is not
a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1)

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder
whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical
consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the
more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid
people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of
ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness
building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of
settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is
relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we
respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest
(your ass) will follow.” Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian, wrote his celebrated book,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the
practices of educators committed to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences between
Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization. Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract
category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which
always positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of Native and
settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout
that an innocent third category of enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire, 2000, p. 42).
These words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy
and suffering. Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the
violence of the colonizer and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor
and oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water),
and indeed read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and
indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either
that it is an unimportant analytic or that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of liberation
resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically
emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical consciousness. By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the
darkness of the cave, in that well of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated. These places of possibility within ourselves are
dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds
an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us
is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp contrast to
Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet -
whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a name to
the nameless, “first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom is a possibility
that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt. Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to use “colonization” as a
metaphor for oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”, logically leading to the solution of
decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions: The essential thing is
to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?
(Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be considered globally and
historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is
colonization?” must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between
particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’. Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings,
settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be
thought through in these particularities. To agree on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a
desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to
assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of
‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad
umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of
Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice. We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and
lives to teaching themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism.
We are asking them/you to consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a
critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve
the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or
privilege. Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white harm reduction models. Harm reduction
models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of
most other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the harm that white supremacy has had on
white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white people over generations. Learning from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricular
pedagogical project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of
settler ontologies. (Settler) harm reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates and peoples around the globe are
exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm reduction is acute, profoundly so. At the same time we
remember that, by definition, settler harm reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not inherently offer any
pathways that lead to decolonization.

Decolonization is too vague; their “structural claims” make it impossible

Bashir & Busbridge 19, *Sociology at Open University **Research Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University (Bashir
Bashir; Rachel Busbridge, 2019, “The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” 67.2)

it is important to emphasise that the meanings of decolonisation as both a concept and

For all its attached redemptive prospects and radical possibilities,

political project are not just broad , but also multifaceted and highly contested . What it means to ‘undo’

colonialism is deeply contextual (Jansen and Osterhammel, 2017). While colonialism can be defined broadly as a relationship of domination in
which a people or territory is politically and economically subjugated to a foreign power, actual colonial situations vary quite widely from each other, depending on, among
others, the particular political systems instituted to maintain control, types of exploitation and expropriation (resources, labour, plantations), relationship between the metropole and colony and patterns of migration they compel
(slavery, settlement). Projects of decolonisation accordingly take different forms even if they are united by the common concern of ending or overturning structures of domination instituted by colonialism, which has historically taken
place mostly through the withdrawal of colonial powers and achievement of independence for the colonised (Buchanan, 2010). Decolonisation speaks to the aspiration of self-rule and its concomitant critique of colonialism as the

As Todd
‘systematic denial of freedom’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 6) and is therefore entangled with a variety of concerns, namely, self-determination, justice, equality, freedom and solidarity against colonialism and imperialism.

Shepherd (2006: 3–4) writes, decolonisation is ‘a much wider concept than the mere “winning of Independence” or “transfer of power”… It
entails the exploration of dreams, the analysis of struggles, compromises, pledges and achievements, and
the rethinking of fundamentals’. Traditional literature on decolonisation approached it in terms of the historical process that began in the immediate aftermath of World War Two in which
countries previously under (typically European) foreign rule transitioned to constitutional independence (Buchanan, 2010). Decolonisation was one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century, radically changing the
face of the globe from one in which a small number of empires had dominion over some 80% of the earth’s surface to an international order based on the principle of self-determination and made up of ostensibly independent states
(Hopkins, 2008). Scholars in this tradition have done much to illuminate the widereaching structural transformations that accompanied decolonisation, including the emergence of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles at the
turn of the century, shifts in world economy that made the maintenance of traditional forms of Empire increasingly difficult, the development of a ‘Third World’ political project and the institutionalisation of human and civic rights
principles that rendered systems based on ideas of racial and ethnic superiority less viable (Hopkins, 2008: 216). Yet, the focus on transition has been critiqued for its narrowness insofar as it seems to take for granted the meanings of
selfdetermination and temporally restricts decolonisation to the moment of national liberation. Postcolonial scholars, among others, have been at the forefront of this charge, arguing that decolonisation did not produce a postcolonial
world per se, but rather one that continues to be shaped in significant ways by the legacies of European colonialism (e.g. Spivak, 1999). As Ella Shohat (1992) has argued, there is no way of turning back from the world colonialism set
in play nor did colonial modes of domination end with the formal period of decolonisation. From this broadened perspective, decolonisation is the difficult task of tracing the economic, political, social, cultural, relational and
linguistic consequences of colonialism and is therefore also an ongoing imaginative project seeking ‘a new form of consciousness and way of life’ (Pieterse and Parekh, 1995: 3) beyond the coloniality of modern modes of culture,
identity and knowledge more generally. While the transitional focus of conventional scholarship is quite illuminating in the contexts of Africa and Asia, for example, it furthermore excludes a great many decolonisation efforts that
have taken place and continue to take place in other regions. This includes countries that remained dependent or only achieved semi-independence as dominions, decolonising projects carried out in territories never formally under
colonial rule (the Iranian Revolution, for instance) and – as is particularly important to our discussion here – settler colonies that only partially decolonised, whether by way of loosening ties with the Motherland or achieving

There is a significant lacuna in the decolonisation literature

independence, but which continue to dominate substantial indigenous populations (Hopkins, 2008).

when it comes to set tler col onialism, which has increasingly been recognised as a distinct form of colonial practice – and one that is particularly
resistant to decolonisation (Veracini, 2007). As the transfer of an exogenous population to a territory they intend to claim as their permanent home, settler colonialism establishes quite a different
structural relationship to ‘traditional’ forms of colonialism, especially when settler colonial projects succeed in creating a state (Bateman and Pilkington, 2011). Rather than governing native peoples in order to extract resources for
economic gain, settler colonisers instead aim to ‘seize their land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement’ (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 2). For Patrick Wolfe (2006), what distinguishes settler colonialism is thus

The primacy of national

that it is guided by a logic of elimination as opposed to a logic of exploitation, wherein the eradication of indigenous presence is essential to the success of settler colonial projects.

liberation in the literature makes it especially difficult to imagine, let alone theorise , decolonisation in many settler colonial
contexts. Whereas some settler colonial projects like Algeria and Kenya saw decolonisation by way of a mass settler exodus , paving the way for
the establishment of independent states, the more successful ones established permanent settler communities (e.g. Northern Ireland) or their

own states (e.g. Australia, Canada, the United States) which preclude a simple transition from foreign rule to sovereign status (Veracini, 2007). This is of course not to say that self-determination of the type aspired to by
anti-colonial national movements was an easy or even necessarily achievable task. As Kohn and McBride (2011) suggest, in pursuing the dream of self-rule, anti-colonial thinkers had to

reckon with the difficulties of articulating alternative political foundations that would make for a
genuinely self-determining polity, an enormous task which demands decolonising of minds as much
institutions and territory (see Fanon, 2001[1963]). Decolonisation must pursue a convincing ‘break’ between a colonial past and a postcolonial future ‘through decisive action in the present’; it must also
‘seek to reinterpret the past in such a way that it may help in the present and future struggle for self-rule’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 19). While these pursuits are invariably contingent, partial and commonly symbolic, national

Settler colonial contexts, especially

liberation struggles very often provide the fodder for a reinterpreted past that is robustly positive and the establishment of an independent state serves as that aspired for ‘break’.

those where indigenous peoples live as minorities in settler states, make these types of symbolic transitions challenging , as they do the

imagining of postcolonial alternatives . If the narrative structure of colonialism is circular (leave, stay, return),
making that symbolic break possible, settler colonial narratives are linear insofar as the settler comes to
stay and the line continues on unbroken (Veracini, 2007). As Ann Curthoys (1999: 288) writes, settler colonial spaces are
simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonising and decolonising, which makes decolonisation
temporally ambivalent at best . Lorenzo Veracini (2007) suggests that there are only two alternatives to settler
evacuation for decolonising settler colonial forms and it is dubious whether one of these counts as decolonisation at all : the
decolonisation of relationships through ‘the promotion of various processes of Indigenous reconciliation’ or the maintenance of the
status quo ‘with the explicit rejection of the possibility of reforming the settler body politic’. Again, what the former
might mean[s] is often vague , and historically it is the decolonisation of relationships that is hardest to
come by considering the psychological consequences of colonialism for coloniser and colonised alike
(Memmi, 1965). Like traditional forms of colonialism, settler colonialism was legitimated by a belief in the colonised’s racial and cultural inferiority. However, the specific settler colonial pursuit of land seizure compels additional
stereotypes of native peoples or unique applications of existing colonial ones, wherein their supposed inferiority makes them ill-equipped to develop that land (premodern, nomadic, barbaric) or, alternatively, voids any claims to
ownership (terra nullius). In other words, settler colonialism is as much premised on the denial of indigenous peoples as a political constituency with rights to land as it is their purported inferiority, which is typically enshrined in their

Given that settler societies are marked by

status as second-class citizens with all the economic, cultural and social disadvantage this entails (Bateman and Pilkington, 2011: 3).

‘pervasive inequalities, usually codified in law , between native and settler populations’ which preserve political and economic
privileges for the latter (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 4), decolonising relationships demands structural changes that often
encounter significant resistance from settler constituencies. Likewise, it requires a reckoning with historical injustice – specifically violence and conflict at
the colonial frontier – that is challenging for settler states and populations because it opens questions of settler identity, privileges, legitimacy and reparations and expressly seeks to scrutinise disavowed and long suppressed histories.

Settler colonial decolonisation is thus complicated by a multitude of hurdles , which bring the postcolonial
caution of the impossibility of a ‘break’ into stark relief. Kohn and McBride (2011) suggest that decisive action in the present is
essential to decolonisation, but in settler colonial contexts this is hindered by power discrepancies between settler and
native constituencies, a general lack of settler political will to enter into difficult processes of historical introspection as well as the constraining of Indigenous claims within the settler state. Indeed, even a commitment to a
postcolonial polity as expressed through processes of historical reconciliation often encounters strong resistance when it comes to judicial, constitutional or legislative change genuinely decolonised relationships would demand.

the central question must be

Nevertheless, even if it remains difficult to comprehensively imagine the decolonisation of ‘settler societies vis-à-vis Indigenous constituencies’ (Veracini, 2007),

how to construct political foundations which simultaneously acknowledge ‘the practices of racism,
violence and subordination’ (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 18) that preceded them while also paving the way for a
postcolonial future in which natives and settlers are equal parties and share the right to narrate the polity.
Equality, freedom and justice may come from legally enshrining Indigenous rights to self-determination
or, alternatively, doing away with the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘native’ altogether (Mamdani, 2001). What shape such efforts are
likely to take depends, among others, on the ‘size and tenacity’ of Indigenous populations as well as the power of the settler constituency (Elkin and Pedersen, 2005: 3, 6). But we would suggest that the measure to which they may be
thought of as decolonising rests on the robustness of the relationship they envision and the space they carve for equal membership in and to a postcolonial polity.
 AT Alternative---Movements
Extra-legal activism fails
Lobel 7, Professor of Law @ UCSD (Orly, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics”,
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf)

Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to
broaden our inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics — that is, attempts to produce meaningful changes
in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a shared theory of social reform, rejects formal

programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices . Thus, it is described in such terms as a plan of no plan,211 “a
project of projects,”212 “anti-theory theory,”213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 “practice over theory,”216 and chaos and openness over order and formality. As a result, the contemporary message rarely
includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights
movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that this move away from grand narratives is self-

“[T]he opposition is not playing that game . . . . [E]veryone

defeating precisely because only certain parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance:

else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .”218 Intertwined with the resignation from law and policy, the
new bromide of “neither left nor right” has become axiomatic only for some .219 The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the
scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are interested, for example, in a more competitive securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of

conservative advocacy groups

“conservative public interest lawyer[ing].”220 Although “public interest law” was originally associated exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three decades

have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional legal strategies to promote their causes .221
This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional

progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested that there may be “something inherent in the left’s conception of social change —
focused as it is on participation and empowerment — that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.”222 Once again, this
conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt
alternatives to legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in existing social

arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal

scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then
to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete transformation. This
celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate approach — an idea that the multiplication of
practices will evolve into something substantial . In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack
of change being produced, while the broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform
produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars
write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere
reframing. At the same time, the elephant in the room — the rising level of economic inequality — is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical
theorists decry as losers’ self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their

willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the
prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental

sphere of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized

transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is
national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter
including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary
legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations
have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and

the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in
sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that
this failure is due in part to the ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in
current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate? It is important for next-generation
progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness , to recognize that not all
extralegal associational life is transformative . We must differentiate, for example, between inward-looking groups,
which tend to be self-regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in political
activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities .231 We must differentiate between
professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on

a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas . Consequently,
within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action . We should question the
narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that

groups are situated in opposition to any form of

are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when

institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against and merely
producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the narrow space that is left in a
rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted, and contemporary
discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification .
 AT Alternative---Local Control
Socially situated knowledge is not unquestionably valid
Ferguson 15, Professor of Liberal Studies, Ph.D. University of Kansas Social and Political Philosophy, Africana Philosophy, Critical Race
Theory, and Philosophy of Sport (Stephen, “Nothing Left of Blackness,” p. 184-186)//BB

The conflation of epistemology with the sociology of knowledge often leads to a reduction ad absurdum,
namely, the validity and veracity of a given idea, or body of thought turns entirely on the social origins or
sources of knowledge. This reduction is no more than the expression of a genetic fallacy. This fallacy is
pervasive among those, in AAAS, who desire to affirm that which is African/Black and negate that which is
European/white on the basis of their respective points of social origin or "social situatedness ." In fact, being a
member of a "subjugated group" does not mean that you will interpret reality differently from that of the
hegemonic dominant ruling class. The so-called Reagan Democrats refers to traditionally Democratic voters, particularly white working-class Northerners, who
defected from the Democratic Party and, in turn, supported Republican presidential can- didates in 1980, 1984, and 1988 elections in the United States. The turn to the right by "Reagan
Democrats" was greatly influenced by bourgeois ide010U in the form of Nixon's concept of the "Silent Majority," television shows such as All in the Family and the overall structural crisis Of
capitalism in the late 1970s. '01 It is important to highlight that, in any class-divided society, the ruling ideology is the ideology of the
ruling class. Proletarian consent to the rul- ing ideas is in substance the subordination of objective proletarian inter- ests to bourgeois ideology This contradiction in objective conditions
as reflected in subjective consciousness is directly manifested as proletarian false consciousness. 102 So, given the influence of white supremacist ideol-

ogy, all white workers are not inherently racist in the sense of being active and organized proponents of
racist ideology. Despite this fact, I would be remiss if I overlooked the fact that racist ideology has a definite influence on the social psychology of white workers, leading to certain
beliefs, customs, and traditions as well as to spontaneous actions that are obstacles to class solidarity and the development Of class consciousness and, yet, shared by the ruling class. A clear
example of this is the tragic Vincent Chin incident. On June 19, 1982, in Detroit, Michigan, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American drafts- man, was killed by two unemployed Euro-American
autoworkers—Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. Before bludgeoning him to death with a base- ball bat, they reportedly screamed racial obscenities and believing him to be Japanese blamed him
for layoffs in the automobile industry. 103 Rather than see increasing unemployment as a structural contradiction of monop- oly capitalism, resulting primarily from the trade and investment
rivalry between United States and Japanese firms, auto workers such as Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz place the blame on some "Yellow Menace" tak- ing jobs from American workers. Their
immediate social experiences of the world obscured their perception of the objective world. The origins of standpoint epistemology can be found in the empiricist errors of György Lukåcs's work
History and Class Consciousness, particularly in his discussion of class-consciousness and the "standpoint of the prole- tariat." For Lukåcs, the shared collective consciousness of the proletariat
becomes the basis for their designation as the gravediggers of capitalism by Marx. Lukåcs observes: "Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of the impasse
of capitalism "104 In a parallel move, standpoint epistemology gives "epistemological priority" to the "phenom- enological experience of a specific collectivity." IOS As such, epistemology
passes over into the sociology of knowledge. However, as Terry Eagleton astutely notes: For it is not in the first place the consciousness of the working-class, actual or potential, which leads
Marxism to select it as the prime agency of revolution- ary change. If the working-class figures as such an agent, it is for structural, material reasons—the fact that it is the only body so located
within the pro- ductive process of capitalism, so trained and organized by that process and utterly indispensable to it, as to be capable of taking it over. In this sense it is capitalism, not Marxism,
which "selects" the instruments of revolutionary overthrow, patiently nurturing its own potential gravedigger. 106 There are "structural, material reasons" for Marx and Engels designating the
working-class as the "prime agency of revolutionary change." In con- trast, feminist and critical race theorists have found in Lukåcs's framework a critical standpoint from which to articulate
forms of oppositional political subjectivity that no longer privilege the proletariat as "the identical subject- object of history." Consequently, we are left with communities that speak a different
If all knowledge claims are partisan and
language and, ultimately, "incommensurable communities across which rational discourse is impossible "107

partial, then it logically follows that all knowledge claims are equally valid. The obvious problem for Collins's
relativism is the following: if all viewpoints or "situated knowledges" are equally valid, then there seems to be no

reason why hegemonic perspectives (by white racist and sexist males) should be thrown out of the
intellectual marketplace. Collins provides us with the view that reality is always subject to different descriptions or
interpretations. There are as many valid "true" descriptions of the world as there are "language-games," "forms of life," or "cultural communities"
in existence. Ultimately, our standpoint or "social situatedness" becomes the final arbitrator in all conflicts or

disagreements, whether epistemological, political, social, economic, or aesthetic. We should take note of the following commentary by Andrew Sayer: To note that a
particular kind of knowledge comes from a particular culture or is associated with a particular subject position, does not entail
that it is valid for or applies only to those who belong to the same originating social group. Acupuncture
is Chinese in origin but it can also work on non-Chinese people, just as Western medicine can work on
non-Western people. Similarly, French social theory cannot be discounted as only applicable within France! To be sure, there is no view from nowhere
—all knowledge is social, situated, and contextual. But it does not follow from this that truth claims can

only be applicable to the particular group who propose them . 108 From the standpoint of Collins's Afrocentric feminist
epistemology, both race and gender take on the power of epistemology and, consequently, make the rules
for valid arguments. The problem with "malestream" social science is not merely that it is a masculine or Eurocentric view. Rather, the heart of the problem is that it does not
offer a true, approximate reflection of the way the world is.