1AC

The topic shifts its environmental management tactics away from extraction and
exploitation to conservation as a means of revitalizing settler biopolitics. Conservation
politics work by demarcating the environment as an ahistorical, depoliticized object in
order to naturalize settler sovereignty over it. Moves towards indigenous inclusion into
settler governance structures exacerbate this further by utilizing indigenous relations to the
environment as a means to consolidate a multicultural, liberal polity.
Isaki 13
[2013, Bianca Isaki, Ph.D., J.D., University of Hawai'i at Minoa. Bianca is researching Native Hawaiian claims to
public trust land revenues, lecturing in the Department of Women's Studies, and will be clerking at the Hawai'i State
Judiciary in the coming year. She also serves as a board member of KAHEA: The Hawaiian-Environmental
Alliance, Conservation Council for Hawai'i, and the Pacific Policy Research Center., STATE CONSERVATION
AS SETTLER COLONIAL GOVERNANCE AT KA'ENA POINT, HAWAI'I, ENVIRONMENTAL AND [Vol.
III EARTH LAWJOURNAL, Volume 3]

B. THE BIOPOLITICS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM This land belongs to Indonesia, not to you, said the logging bosses when local farmers in southeast Kalimantan complained that the
loggers were destroying their orchards. Go ask the President if you have complaints. - Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005).174 Tsings ethnography 175

how does land become nation-state space?176 While distant from Indonesia, this inquiry is relevant
poses a question that is fundamental to settler colonialism;

How do Ka`ena lands come to belon[g]178 to the State of Hawai`i?179 And, how does this
as applied to Hawai`i.177

incorporation of physical space also corral indigenous inhabitants into a political system (Go ask the President . . .)?
180 By foregrounding the states interest in a lands resources, Tsings quote underscores a crucial

modality of settler state authority that Foucault terms, biopower.181 Biopower is not amassed as the holdings of a
wealthy sovereign but from the intrinsic wealth of the states natural resources, commercial possibilities,
trade balances, and, most of all, the growth and productivity of its population.182 State power is thus power over life itself as
opposed to gathering power, as surplus labor, as the proceeds from existing lives. 183 States assume responsibility for life processes[;] 184 thereby

exercising biopower at a capillary level of controlling and modifying populations, reproduction, nutrition,
etc.185 HB645 (the now-defunct legislative proposal to allow permit holders to fish overnight) enunciates the states biopolitical interests in Ka`ena:186 Ka`ena point . . . has long been a place
where local residents can exercise and enjoy their cultural practice of fishing. However, tourists, who are unfamiliar with the area and not aware of the dangers of the illegal activity occurring at
Ka`ena point, have experienced being robbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, and pulled out of their vehicles at all hours of the day and night. Due to this unpermitted illegal activity at Ka`ena point,
the department of land and natural resources has prohibited overnight camping to protect the natural resources within the park and to promote safety for park users. This prohibition, however, has

the state stumbled in its rush to regulate unpermitted illegal

impeded upon the local cultural practice of fishing.187 As depicted in HB 645,

activity and protect the natural resources[,] thus inadvertently impeding a valued local cultural
practice of fishing.188 Settler state biopolitics transforms the lives of the public and non-
human species into rationales for state intervention.189 What is biopolitical about the states interventions at Ka`ena
concerns the kinds of lives targeted for governmental intervention urban lives, houseless lives, and the
lives of tourists whose safety and enjoyment are economic baselines for state parks.190 Environmental
conservation here supports state racism, a police-powered state warfare against particular
populations within a social body. 191 The states program of sanitizing, by externalizing, Ka`enas landscape of undesirable elements in the name of a
living social body is a racism that Foucault recognized as singular to the biopolitical.192 Crucially, state racism targets criminal and tent-cit[y] populations, not Hawaiians.193 In this framing,
the state evades addressing intersections between the populations, which would involve the criminalization of Hawaiians (evident in disproportionate rates of incarceration)194 and dispossession
of homelands, which has left a disproportionate number of Hawaiians literally houseless.195 This evasion is biopolitical; it produces a kind of Hawaiian life that can live under settler colonial

State intervention into lives associated with Ka`ena did not begin with HB645.
governance.196 C. GREENING BIOPOWER

The 1974 conceptualization of Ka`ena State Park to fulfill city dweller197 needs for aesthetic respite, for
example, marks state intervention on behalf of a kind of person who relates to wilderness as a place of

recreation, not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home[.]198 Historically, preserving the value of
virgin, uninhabited wilderness has meant the enforced exclusion of Indians as original inhabitants
from lands that thereby lost its savage image and became safe: a place more of reverie than of revulsion
or fear.199 The state legislatures guise of making Ka`ena safer, particularly for tourists and city-dwellers,
maintains this conception of wilderness-as-respite.200 This administration of life is not benign, 201 but suffuses conflicts between
disparate interes[t] groups at Ka`ena.202 DLNR sees itself as torn between its legal obligations to protect Hawaiian traditional practices,203 and the resources that are necessary for those

practices, the general publics interest in these resources, and the imperative to protect the resources themselves.204 This framing of the problemas one
remediable by better-balancing user conflicts against finite resourcesinoculates the
states interests in Ka`ena Point from scrutiny.205 Specifying the ways settler colonialism directs
state interests in Ka`ena allows us to better see these conflicts as enunciations of direct-action land
struggles for Hawaiian sovereignty.206 Political ecology207 and green governmentality208 theories
attend to [t]he ways in which the environment is constructed as in crisis, how knowledge about
it is formed, and who then is authorized to save it[.]209 These theories build on Foucaults insights into the nature of modern power to
critique a new regime of environmentality[.]210 The art of govern[ing] 211 populations by acting on a discursive object called
the environment is a state project in which scientists, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), and community organizations take part.212 That is, state and non-state actors interact
through a regularized way of talking, understanding, and producing knowledge about the
environment and its terms management.213 In their CCH petitions against BLNR approval of the predator-proof fence, 214 for instance,
petitioners invoked these terms to challenge KPERP assertions about best practices for protecting native
species and complying with historic preservation laws. 215 Theirs was a tactical engagement with green
governmentality to achieve legal intelligibility.216 Attending to these tactics exhorts us to ask: what non-
environmentalist propositions about relating to Ka`enas lands, species, and histories are
excluded by narrowing the field of debate over the fence to issues such as noncompliance
with a recommendation to complete an AIS?217 How, for instance, are knowledge of cultural reciprocity
with Ka`ena lands not addressed by environmental discourses?218 In this view, process is not only a
checklist of reviews and consultations, but of re-building relationships and especially with those
who carry memories of disenfranchisement on Ka`ena lands.219 Even state actions directed towards
accommodating Hawaiian understandings of Ka`ena220 are consistent with biopolitical
management of populations.221 DLNR, for instance, constructed a third gate that opens directly onto the
Leina a ka `uhane to address Hawaiian cultural practitioners concerns that the fence would prevent souls
from accessing the Leina.222 Some stakeholders felt the gate unnecessary because spirits can pass through physical structures, some approved the gate, and othersnot
mentioned in KPERPcountered that they had no way of knowing whether spirits could unlock gates. 223 We notice KPERPs narrow phrasing of the issue; 224 it notes the presence of multiple
interpretations of Hawaiian spiritualities, without addressing those that interpret the fence as incompatible with Ka`enas sacred landscape.225 The document does not identify the epistemic

conundrum that follows from attempting to assess spiritual knowledges for decision making purposes. 226 By so restricting the implications of
Hawaiians multiple interpretations of culture, practical resolutions such as the spirit gate
are made to seem227 appropriate redress.228 D. (SETTLER) COLONIAL BIOPOLITICS Other scholars have noted Foucaults relative silence
on the historical relationship between modern power and colonialism and sought to extend his analyses of biopower to settler colonial regimes.229 In The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism:
Morgensen demonstrates that sixteenth-century settler colonialism conditions the
Right Here, Right Now, Scott L.

eighteenth and nineteenth century-era situations that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical
state.230 Whereas scholarly attention to biopolitical racism emphasized colonial processes of sanitizing and excluding colonial others from the European social body, Morgensen notes
the biopolitics of settler colonialism demands techniques of occupying and incorporating
that

indigenous peoples within white settler nations.231 Settler colonial biopolitics not only eradicates
and excludes, but makes live indigenous subjects.232 On one level, settler states make indigenous lives through
official procedures for recognition, nationality, and even sovereignty.233 State administration of indigenous
lives also takes less blunt forms, such as prescriptions for recognizing traditional and
customary practices, 234 claiming an interest in the buried `iwi (bones) of indigenous
ancestors,235 and compiling rolls for a Native Hawaiian self-governing entity.236 Asserting
that the settler state makes indigenous lives further emphasizes settler societies inherent
interdependence with indigeneity.237 Approaching settler colonial power as an assemblage in
which the state relies 238 on the indigenous, as opposed to merely tolerating239 them,
renders state policies of accommodating Hawaiian culture unsurprising.240 Part III discusses the ways the settler
state is itself produced through [a]djudicating life for indigenous people.241 III. GOVERNANCE OF THE PRIOR: AN APPLIED ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK I believe that we will find
that the fence [at Ka`ena] has less to do with protecting birds than with establishing control over the land. Controlling who and what is provided right of way. - Paul Kealoha-Blake, Ka`ena
Cultural Practice Project.242 Governance of the prior holds that what matters politically is who arrived first.243 It is a political formation, based in fundamental tensions between settler states
and indigenous peoples claims to sovereignty.244 The problem with a discourse of priority is that it invidiously equates indigenous peoples prior occupancy with a rational self-interest in a
property-regime.245 Presuming an indigenous interest in their traditions and histories as property allows the settler state to inhabit a position of liberated rationality in contrast with indigenous
political perspectives that adhere to their partial, because propertied, vantage on society.246 Embedded in this formation of power, indigenous peoples and the settler state do not confront each
other, but rather share a vital set of organs.247 They are needed to signal the political priority of the creole settler state and to embody a kind of national difference that, because
genealogically-linked,248 contrasts with a universal liberal polity.249 Crucially, these shared ideological organs mean indigenous peoples are not only another sovereign in competition with
the settler state, but are also necessary to the production of the state itself.250 Competing claims of firstness without specific cultural groundings may merely repeat the logic of governance by
priorness. Historically, the governance of the prior proceeds from the emergence of a modern form of governance distinguished from kingly sovereign rule,251 British colonial and imperial
administration, and the U.S. colonies development of a distinctive creole nationalism252 in the course of claiming political independence from Britain. 253 The notion of the political priority
of the prior person in right as a rule of governance in British colonies.254 The U.S. retained the concept of prior-ness in formulating a creole nationalism against an imperial metropole (Britain)
and in so doing, projected indigenous peoples as the horizon of the U.S. settler states legitimacy.255 Although Hawaiians often define themselves as a genealogicallylinked political body, 256
the settler state achieves its own aims by defining itself in contrast to Hawaiians.257 Critical scholars contend that the consanguinal logic of indigenous identity has been instrumental towards

liberal, multicultural, and

amalgamat[ing] and eliminat[ing] Indigenous peoples . . . [to] thereby enable settler states to performatively universalise the West.258 A

universal U.S. sovereign can absorb indigenous subjects, 259 whereas indigenous political collectives are
presumed constrained by illiberal tradition and genealogy. 260 Put otherwise, settler colonialism lies with a liberal
multicultural political discourse that distributes the terms of belonging and obligation within narratives of
freedom (liberalism) and constraint (genealogy). 261 Povinelli proffers escaping the politics of the governance of the prior by making a new spacing in
which this crisis of obligation and belonging may be foregrounded. 262 This paper suggests lawai`a stewardship proposals create such a new space of governance.263 A. LEGAL MANEUVERS

We are tracking strategic manoeuvers 264 through which the liberal state
AND LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM

subordinates, by affirming, Hawaiian priority in Hawai`i.265 One move is to limit Hawaiian

claims to distinctiveness to liberal predicates of political legibility.266 Respectfully conducted, historically established,
Hawaiian traditional and customary practices are cabined within legal parameters that ensure
and not repugnant,267

that they will not unreasonably interfere with settler society.268 On the other side of this move, the settler state achieves
an identity with a truer, deeper multiculturalism through its formal legal recognition of
Hawaiian distinctive histories, laws, and traditional cultures.269 Povinellis research in Australia sheds light on certain
limitations of Hawai`is jurisprudence.270 Australian courts have recognized a kind of equivalence between the Australian and British worlds from which aboriginal Native title and Australian
common law proceed, respectively.271 This equivalence is not equal, however, because, as Australian Justice Kirby writes, self evidently . . . the High Court is not an institution of customary

law.272 These restricted overtures towards aboriginal peoples, according to Povinelli, merely impose a reassuring
form of liberal capitalist democracy that perpetuates the life of a supposedly more
multicultural settler nation.273 This multiculturalist paradigm is reassuring to a settler society that
seeks the survival of a subtending liberal formation (capitalist democracy) more so than to realize the actual
content of traditional law (or native title).274 This is the states cunning of recognition.275 The State of
Hawai`i also recognizes its continuities with Hawaiian Kingdom law in state statutes,276 the state constitution,277 and Hawai`is common law.278 As in Australia, the common law of England
and of Hawaiian Kingdom customary law are unequal and articulated.279 The rights and duties owed to Hawaiians, consequent to these legal authorities, have had material and beneficial impacts

on Hawai`is communities, ecologies, and political structure.280 This paper, however, views the states recognition of Hawaiian rights as a
strategy for holding together a U.S. politythe people of Hawai`iover foundational settler
colonial contradictions.281 Hawai`is Supreme Court and legislature have affirmed the interests of the people of Hawai`i in a horizon of lasting reconciliation with
Hawai`is
Hawaiians.282 This affirmation rightly registers an ongoing ethical or political bind inherent in [the people of Hawai`is] being and relation.283

multiculturalist faith in time is that a juridical framework in which Hawaiians hold a protected legal
status will eventually lead to reconciliation of ongoing colonial injustices.284 This interval between a colonized present and a
horizon of justice, Povinelli argues, provides a temporal tense of social belonging that emerges out of the specific historical formation of the governance of the prior.285 B. LIBERAL

TOLERANCE AND CAMPING PERMITS AT KA`ENA The people of Hawai`i is cohered as settler polity by assigning value
to indigenous difference within a liberal multiculturalism that neutralizes indigenous
priority as a political claim.286 Liberal settler multiculturalism, that is, offers itself as a solution to the
problem of how all can fit within a settler society while foreclosing interrogation of settler
colonial foundations. 287 Liberal theory thus serves as a mechanism through which modern liberal
settler states define themselves in and through their tolerance of indigenous peoples. 288
This performed-universality sustains liberal settler states capacity to incorporate and occupy difference,
including the ideally incorporated difference of native peoples.289 DLNRs approach to Ka`enas user conflicts
is a cluster of strategic manoeuvres290 through which the State of Hawai`i asserts itself as
a benign, even enlightened, authority over Hawai`is public trust resources.291 Public trust
rationales undergird DLNRs anxieties about homeless tent-cities, and are linked to biopolitical concerns for
public safety, maintaining natural resources for tourist-ready use, and endangered species
conservation.292 Against lawai`a who argued that the camping paraphernalia regulation293 should make allowances for overnight fishing at Ka`ena, former-DLNR chair
Thielen cited the states interests in liberal equality:294 The problem is the law does not allow the state to discriminate between different people. We cant allow tents only for fishers we have
to allow them for anyone. If we allow an unlimited number of tents, like weve seen elsewhere in Hawaii, parks quickly become tent cities that crowd out the general public, including fishers. In
order to manage parks so they remain safe and open to the public, we either have to prohibit tents overnight or only allow a specific number of tents at a given time without discriminating
between applicants.295

Settler environmental conservation is constellated not through legal machinations, but

primarily by particular affective formations surrounding the citizen. Attachments to the
land as a local site that must be protected formulates settler subjects as an embodiment
of sovereignty itself. Affect is essential.
Isaki 11
[2011, Bianca Isaki, HB 645, Settler Sexuality, and the Politics of Local Asian Domesticity in Hawaii, Settler
Colonial Studies, 1:2, 82-102]

Life in the colony is endlessly complex and sometimes surprisingly gentle. Literally, gentling
is a subtle coercion taming, making
docile, and domesticating. Not put together only by the violence of dispossession, settler colonial societies
incorporate these gentle technologies to assert a home on Native lands. Largely as a legacy of its
plantation history, Hawaii is home to many Asian settlers. This essay considers the colonial complicity of Asian settler homemaking in the
context of local fisher protests against Hawaii State prohibition of overnight fishing at Kaena Point, a wildlife sanctuary park on the northwest tip of Oahu, Hawaii.
For Asian settlers, home-making in Hawaii has been crosshatched with projects of US citizenly-
becoming, upward class mobility, struggles for, and attempts to articulate, cultural community
belonging. These histories situate Asian settlers on a tangent with white settler colonialism and Hawaiian
decolonisation struggles.1 This essay concerns one tangent, in which the State is anxious to protect endangered species
and tourists from invading tent-cities of houseless people that might attempt to pass as campers. Local fishers counter
that they have rights to exercise traditional, cultural practices (whether or not they, or their traditions, are
Hawaiian) and to pass them onto their families, that state administrators do not know the land they
purport to care for, and that fishers are easily distinguished from the homeless. I approach this impasse in three ways.
First, I question whether and how settler and Hawaiian relationships to land, specifically relations of ecological
stewardship and home-making, can align towards decolonisation. Second, and closely related to the first, is a concern
with local Asian settlers sentimental aggression, of a loving the land that can come to contest
indigenous claims to territory, cultural practice, and natural resource rights. Third, the essay circles
back to the complicity between modern sexualities and settler home-making by considering the gendered and sexualised terms of home, and whose homes are
recognised as such.2 Settler home-making constellates property regimes, investments in single family-homes, jus
sanguinis doctrines of citizenship that create family ties to the settler state, and personal
things, such as bodies, feelings, and family, that are supposed to mean the most to and
about us. These are the substrates of a settler colonial sexuality that instructs the reproduction of settler
colonial home-making in everyday life. Their constellation puts that which is supposedly most
within our reach, our desires, selves, and bodies, towards a means of asserting ourselves
within the settler nation. I seek to show that what may appear to be emblems of normative domesticity
(driver licenses, residences, and waged-employment), is also, and more actually, a
colonial administration of (settler) sexuality. Settler
sexuality parallels Lauren Berlant and Michael Warners index of national heteronormativity, a jumbled
hegemony that directs subjects from a normalising script that embeds sex into the
everyday.3 The citizens paradigmatic lifestyle is rife with signs of public sexual culture: paying taxes,
being disgusted, philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing for the future, teaching,
disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos, buying economy size, being nepotistic, running for
president, divorcing, or owning anything His or Hers.4 Pausing to name the normal ways that
communities participate in sexual cultures alerts us to the highly intimate forms through which settler
colonialism governs its citizens. Part of what makes public sexualitys imbrications with the colonial so elusive is that it takes up
concepts, categories, and activities that organise settler society those things that implicate sex practices
but do not turn us on.5 In what follows, I suggest the queerness of a tent city serves as a foil to settler sexualities oriented towards residence and
homemaking. Tent cities elicit anxieties in a state imagination of unruly subjects who fail to organise their lives as residents, taxpayers and within private spaces at
proper times. The houseless persons who live in tent cities are presumed to neither continue a culture, nor to contribute to political community. Neither presumption is
accurate, but they are taken to be true within a US settler colonial discourse that uses home as a unit of measurement for citizenly identity. While resonant with
gender and domesticity, settler sexuality is distinguished because it presses them into a particular political
configuration. The political here configures the proximity between the sentimental aggression of settlers that call Hawaii home and colonial power.
This sexuality is a Foucauldian technology of self it is a particular handle whereby we may
announce our fitness as a political settler subject that is keyed to our historical moment.6 As I
discuss, local fishers employ settler sexuality as heteronormative families, residents, citizens and carriers of cultural tradition to carve out spaces within the state.
We should attend to these spaces, and the ways they are claimed, because insofar as local fishers base their claims on fitness for modern sexual citizenship, they
naturalise settlement by keeping categories set out to monitor those who take part in the political. ASIAN SETTLERS IN HAWAII: A TWICE TOLD TALE OF
COLONIALISM7 Hawaii has been a US state since 1959 and a settler colony under military occupation since the US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in
1893. This ongoing history of colonial occupation situates Asian settlers, many of whom are descendents of economic migrants to Hawaiis plantations in the late
Asian settlers challenged white racism and planter
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As labourers and later, labour organisers,
control. Asian, particularly Japanese, settlers have not only been resistant subjects. They have also been patriotic model
minorities who enlisted in the US military during World War II and returned to take advantage of veteran
educational benefits and, consequently, expanded professional opportunities. By 1954, many Asian settlers held
elected office, civil service positions, and professional employment in legal, architectural, financial, and
real estate firms. As such, they were well positioned to profit from Hawaiis postwar economic boom, based in a burgeoning military defence industry, real
estate development, and tourism.8 In the 1970s and 1980s, many working class Asians and Hawaiians resisted this economic development. They organised

as locals, claiming a way of belonging to Hawaii tied to rural landscapes, subsistence and
agricultural traditions, and against state-backed resort and high-end residential
development projects meant to accommodate US mainland haoles (whites), Japanese investors,
tourists, and military personnel.9 A Native Hawaiian renaissance flourished within and against these local land development struggles.10 Calls
to defend a local way of life, while valorising Hawaiian culture, came up short in response to questions
about whether that way of life was based on indigenous selfdetermination or ethnic minority claims to
civil rights. Politically, the local tended to manage Native difference by holding out optimism for
US multiculturalism and thus problematically patched together an American community
fractured by settler colonialism. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement continues to challenge local Asians to see their status as settlers
within a Hawaiian nation as opposed to racial minorities in a US one. Hawaiians may share interests with locals, but non-native locals cannot claim
the status of indigenous peoples. Although many Hawaiians also identify as locals, the concept has been particularly important to Asian settler
efforts to articulate a distinctive experience of Hawaii.11 Many Asian settlers eschewed an Asian American identity in

favour of a local identity that reflected their histories in Hawaii.12 Yet, the very capacity of a local
identity to articulate non-indigenous belonging lends it towards render[ing] Hawaii an
emptied space open to settler claims of belonging.13 This neocolonial complicity complicates
efforts to create coalitions between Hawaiians and Asian settlers based on local identity.14 Nevertheless, I suggest
that local is also an ongoing project whose limits for Hawaiian sovereignty remain un-worked out for the
future. We should attend to the un-workedout-ness of projects that continue to compel allegiance, particularly when they make sense for people despite their
limits. As we see in Kaena, the local remains a widespread and usual way of cohering communities around a tacit
agreement about the kind of home that Hawaii should be. This essay considers the stakes of staying with this mode of coherence
N]ature has been the primary target through
in order to work out its beleaguered relation to decolonisation. KAENA POINT [

which bodies and populationsboth human and nonhuman have been governed, and it
has been the primary site through which institutions of governance have been formed and
operated. Jake Kosek, Understories (2006).15 When Hawaii was admitted into the US in 1959, the state became responsible for all
public lands, including those ceded to the US upon the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The State of
Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) was commissioned to manage these lands, which include the Kaena Point Natural Area Reserve.16
Kaena holds sacred dunes, ancient Hawaiian burials, and a wahi pana (sacred place): the Leina ka uhane, the place where souls leap toward the next world.17
Fishers, hunters, Hawaiians, and others have contested state regulation of Kaena Point since at least the
1980s, when the DLNRs Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DOFAW) erected a concrete barrier to prevent
illegal dumping and off-road vehicles from entering the park. Although the state had a good reason to stymie illegal dumping and
four-wheel drive enthusiasts, whose vehicles erode the lands into mud that suffocates tidepools and poisons the coasts, the barrier became a
touchstone for local hunters and fishers who protested another state land grab and elite territorial
control.18 In 2010, the DLNR again sought to limit activity at Kaena by promulgating regulations against camping paraphernalia such as backpacks, tents,
blankets, tarpaulins, in wildlife sanctuaries. Hawaii Administrative Rule 13-126 (2009) effectively prohibited overnight fishing at Kaena.19 Local fishers, many of
mixed Asian, Hawaiian, haole, and multiracial descent, raised four points in their opposition to the prohibition on camping paraphernalia: overnight fishing is a
traditional practice that is protected by the state constitution, they need camping paraphernalia to care for their children and wives, the DLNR is full of US
mainlanders who know nothing about fishing, and their officers act out of line.20 In response, the State argues that if they allow camping in state parks, tent-cities and
the dangerous people who live in them may spring up and threaten nesting native birds and tourists.21 Like the concrete barrier, the camping regulations express one
of the DLNRs basic assumptions. As Ollie Lunasco, a local fisherman, observes, I think they think, the less people there, the less they have to worry.22 In both
instances, the DLNRs approach posits fishers as nuisance populations instead of stewards. This approach is recalcitrant to critiques of fortress conservation
environmental management approaches that presume an opposition between nature and people. Indigenous groups have been particularly active in positing this
critique.23 Re-articulated in terms of indigenous conceptions of natural resource management and cultural practice, environmental protection means that those who
live closest to the land know best how to care for it and retain a right to land use. These shifting conceptions of indigenous environmental management have been
taken up in Hawaii as well. The Lawaia (Hawaiian Fisher) Community Stewardship Proposal advocates management of Kaena land that would reserve the area for
people who will care for it, including lawaia cultural practitioners qualified by their knowledge of, and respect for, Hawaiian traditions, values, ecologies, site
By focusing on land and how one acts towards it, the proposed stewardship
specific histories.

system also invites non-Hawaiians to take responsibility for Hawaiis lands. Enacting this
proposal would require new indices of evaluating claims to land. In this context, as I later
imply, sexuality is a relevant index to be considered. LOCAL FISHERS AT KAENA I like tourists. I really do. believe
me. I do. we are a tourist destination remember. be nice to the tourist. they make our economy go round and round and up and down. but what I do not like is when the
tourist come to Hawaii and forget to go home. make house and tell us locals how we supposed to live. Sandra Park, Ode to the DLNR (2010).24 Parks protest
against DLNR tourists cannily critiques the recognisably colonial situation in which outsiders rule and Hawaii problematically depends on the ecologically,
culturally and economically unsustainable tourism industry. Another fisher, Lawrence Yusumura said: You know, I question Laura Thielen [former-chairperson of the
DLNR] how many of your board members in your department are born and raised in Hawaii? How many of your board members are fisherman and hunters? You
know what she told me: none. They all come from the mainland. How you going [sic] to bring people from different areas of the U.S. to control Hawaii? How they
[sic] going to understand our culture? They dont understand the religion that we have? They dont understand nothing. And they enforcing their rules on us?25
Yusumura makes a good point about the irrationality of colonial racism, a point that sustains a local, if not
Hawaiian, project of self-determination. Yet, their criticism stops short of addressing the difference

between local and Hawaiian relationships to US colonialism. The problem is that local fisher
struggles stake out a political space within a liberal multicultural settler state as opposed to
focusing their protest against the very legitimacy of that state. Whether and how homegrown
board members would redress the colonial misappropriation of Hawaiis natural resources remains
unexplained in their critique. What is needed is to interrogate the de-colonial politics of a
scenario in which locals rule. In other words, how would local governance differ from a colonial administration? I argue that this
decolonising difference must consist in redressing the settler states sexualisation of citizenship. When local
fishers identify as Hawaiian, and even when they do not, they cite the Hawaii State Constitutions protections for rights, customarily and traditionally exercised for
subsistence, cultural and religious purposes and possessed by ahupua'a tenants who are descendants of native Hawaiians who inhabited the Hawaiian Islands prior to
1778 (Hawaii Const., Art. XII, 7), and the cultural, creative and traditional arts of the various ethnic groups [of Hawaii] (Hawaii Const., Art. IX, 9).26 Several
fishermen cited the constitution in their protests: One noted: Most of the [DLNR] officers shouldnt be officers because they do not follow the constitution. Thielen
has no clue what the constitution of Hawaii. I like see her resign and go back from where she came from the mainland.27 Keith Sienkiewicz also frames the
problem in constitutionally protected terms: we are no longer able to enjoy or practice our traditions, culture, fish at night or to pass this knowledge on to the next
generation [] of our unique island lifestyle.28

These fantasies of belonging represent the crucial mechanism that enables settler colonial
violence. Settler colonialism operates primarily through every day, quotidian structures of
feeling. Asian American fantasies of belonging represent the affective instantiation of
settlement and work to normalize colonial relations. Liberal ideals of inclusion, recognition,
and redemption work to orchestrate and produce settler subjects.
Isaki 13
[2/27/13, Bianca Kai Isaki, Ph.D., Esq. currently works as a judicial clerk in the state appellate courts and an
instructor at the University of Hawaii Women's Studies Department; serves on other nonprofit boards; and
maintains a habit of academic research and publication. As an academic, she teaches and writes at intersections
between environmental conservation and settler colonialism in Hawaii, This trouble is a woman who talks too
much sometimes: Gender and Asian Settler Structures of Feeling in Hawaiis Plantation Pasts, downloaded via
Academia.edu]

Archives are frustratingly full of dead ends and the Luzons record is no exception. I cannot report whether Anatolio found another job or repatriated to the
I situate the Luzons in a longer history of Asian
Philippines, nor whether his wife left quietly with him. Instead of those endpoints,
settler colonialism an other history in which Asian immigrants were involved in the creation of a colonial
paradise at the expense of indigenous peoples (Kosasa and Tomita 2000: viii). Asian settler histories that describe
progressive accounts of racial equality and immigrant incorporation into an American Hawaii
abet settler colonialisms techniques of occupying and incorporating indigenous peoples
within white settler nations (Morgensen 2011: 60). We must interrogate the liberal politics of racial
equality that undergird Asian settler histories of citizenly-becoming for the ways it occupies
and incorporates Hawaiians as non-conflicted components of Hawaiis settler polity. Approaching settler
colonial power as an assemblage in which the state relies on indigeneity, as opposed to merely
it, renders state policies of accommodating Hawaiian culture unsurprising. Some have argued for refocusing on Hawaiian
rights to land and self-governance to combat appropriative ideologies that threaten to corral Hawaiian sovereignty within an account of U.S. multicultural democracy-
making in Hawaii (Trask, Franklin et al. 2004). Doubtless, decolonisation
is impossible without securing Hawaiian lands and
rights. And yet. Settler colonialism manifests not only as bodies that squat on native space these
bodies are familial, public, intimate, official, political, racially-marked, hopeful, and sexual. What we risk
underemphasising is variety of forms that are bound up with a settler colonial apparatus
that recruits legacies of resistance, familial histories, community, and hopes for upward
mobility within a partnership between neoliberal capital, colonial power, and their overlapping
patriarchies. Attention to multiple facets of colonialism forwards an indigenous politics of decolonising
settler forms of nation, citizenship, and jurisdiction (Goeman 2012). An other history must account not only
for the dialectical relationship between Asian settler Americanization and Native Hawaiian dispossession, but
a fuller story about how Hawaiis plantation pasts produce structures of feeling (Williams 1977). This paper
examines the affective existence of Asian settler colonialism in settler states of feeling. . .
[p]rocesses and institutionalized frameworks of settlement . . . [that] give rise to certain
modes of feeling, and, reciprocally, particular affective formations among non-Natives [that]
normalize settler presence, privilege, and power (Rifkin 2011: 342). Hawaiis historically-specific Asian settler
states of feeling normalize a liberal multicultural present as the achievement of Asian labor
migrants historical resistance to white-racism. Approaching plantation pasts as affective formations
hones a method of challenging the settler nation-state as the paradigmatic frame for the
production of forms of affective interiority normalizing certain modes of selfhood and
experiences of space that reiterate the obviousness of settler jurisdiction (Rifkin 2011: 345-346). This
paper posits a relay between the Luzons 1939 eviction, the sense made of it in a 1969 gubernatorial speech, and the ways we must render these histories for a
decolonizing present. Approached this way, these events demonstrate what is malleable in structures that produce Asian settlers as affective subjects of colonialism.
1969 Feeling Inferior In 1969, former-Hawaii governor John A. Burns put together a future for rejecting Anatolios method for surviving plantation inequality in
1946. Anatolios moment becomes the historical referent for the inferiority of the spirit engendered by the hurtful racism of plantation hierarchies. No longer
inferior to a white planter oligarchy, Burns multiracial people of Hawaii celebrate a story of historical
resistance and overcoming that binds Hawaiis settler collective. To be perfectly candid, I sense among certain
elements of our community particularly those who are descended from our immigrant plantation workers a subtle inferiority of the spirit, which is totally
unwarranted and which becomes for them a social and psychological handicap in life. You who have grown up with me here in these Islands and who remember the
pre-World War II climate know full well what I mean. You know, too, that there should be no basis for this feeling. On the contrary, our people are equal to [or] in my
judgment, superior to their counterparts anywhere. They should be proud, and we should be proud, of their ethnic roots, of the riches and treasures of their Pacific and
Asian cultures. . . . I submit further that they should be given every opportunity even in our public school system to learn more about their own rich past
Hawaiis history, in its every facet, should be a matter of general knowledge to all our people The contributions to our society of the Chings and Lums, the
Caravalhos and the Henriques, the Kahanamokus and the Kealohas, the Samsons and the Menors, the Kims and the Ahns, the Cooks and the Judds their stories
and thousands of other stories like them are an integral part of Hawaiis real history (Boylan & Holmes 2000: 245-6 (quoting Burns, John A. Haw. House J., Reg.
Sess. 1969, 20 Feb.: 18-20). Montana-born Burns was hugely popular with Hawaiis electorate, serving three terms from 1962 to 1974. No longer subject to planter
authority and governed by a less-white political landscape, Burns audience readily adopted his message of equal citizenship. Burns rendering of raced-injury as an
inferiority of the spirit was part of a national conversation as well, resonating with Chief Justice Earl Warrens comment in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
State-mandated racial segregation in schools harmed black children by imparting to them a "feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community" (1954: 494).
Burns earned his informal moniker, Great White Father, by fathering Hawaiis modern Democratic Party as a coalition of new, especially Japanese, American
citizens and organized labor (Coffman 2003). The coming to power of this Democratic coalition contextualizes Burns claim that Hawaiis real history sounded the
end of a white Republican-dominated plantation-era. The popularity of Burns 1969 speech owed in part to the post-plantation societys need for narrative. Burns
1969 claim to a New Hawaii as the resolution of oppressive pasts buttresses a neocolonial portrait of the
multiethnic postwar settler state as the just desserts of racial progress (Fujikane & Okamura 2008). First, how this happens
concerns, paraphrasing Rifkin, Burns normalizing of affective personhood as an interiority within settler jurisdiction. His inferiority of spirit speech achieved wide
currency as way of understanding how a New Hawaii heal[ed] the hurts of the past (Coffman 2003: 282). Burns
urges settler-citizens to
harken unto a feeling of connection rooted in their personal histories and thus to inhabit their collectivity
as Rifkins settler states of feeling. Second, Burns invocation of equality-under-American rule makes
multiethnicity function as an alibi for not-addressing Hawaiian dispossession. Further, he enacts a Hawaiian-American ethnicity
by resetting the historical referent of the people of Hawaii to the pre World War II climate. Crucially, this origin story excises the 1893 U.S.-backed overthrow of
the last sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Silva 2004). Instead of a foundational fracture in Hawaiis polity, the 1893 Overthrow becomes the Kahanamokus and
the Kealohas contribution to his portrait of Hawaiis American multiethnic history. The functions history serves in Burns speech as alibi and identity are
repeated today. Recently, queer and indigenous Hawaiian theorists identified the conservative adoption of
historically liberal equality as, alternately, a shift in the spatial predicates of U.S. political imaginations
(Patton 1992; Goldberg-Hiller 2002) and as a limit of U.S. civil rights discourse vis--vis
indigenous politics (Goldberg-Hiller 2002; Kauanui 2008). Newly conservative uses of liberal imaginations of
political space help to explain the dis-utility of equal rights discourse for Native Hawaiian
decolonization. Beginning with Rice v. Cayetano (2000), colorblind conservatives have challenged Hawaiian trusts and
entitlements (which derive from Hawaiian Kingdom institutions and laws) with the insistence that Hawaiian special privileges
deprive us of a Hawaii that can belong equally to everyone. They advocate for a Hawaii that is most itself when it goes
ungoverned by a history mired in race-based classifications (Kauanui 2008). Burns portrait similarly sets its stakes in a liberal U.S.
citizenship with a disarticulated relationship to Hawaiian histories. Rendering Hawaiian into an American ethnicity enabled Burns,
amongst others, to make ahistorical assertions of identity. His biographers write; [i]ndeed, Jack Burns thought of himself as being Hawaiian; and to him, being
Hawaiian was not a matter of blood, but a state of mind and heart (Boylan and Holmes 2000: 291). Notably, this disrepaired concept of identity, as a matter of who
one feels oneself to be, is the basis for the Hawaiian at Heart, a crucial figure in anti-Hawaiian conservative rhetoric that simultaneously celebrates and eviscerates
liberal politics locates the pressure of flawed social systems in
Hawaiian identity (Hall 2005: 404). American

the sufferings of subjugated subjects. It configures a political script that rehearses national
redemption of suffering subjects of social injustice and makes those identities into ligaments
to a common polity. Burns configuration of history and healed-hurts likewise traverses this discourse
of the subject of true feeling (Berlant 2000a: 42). This subject encounters collectivity through an affective
structure that consists partly in interpretive apparatuses through which Burns enjoins his audience to
understand their historical presence in a New Hawaii -- to know full well what I mean. Ways of knowing an inferiority
of the spirit are affective practices that aid his audience in working their experiences into a
story about belonging to Hawaii. This story itself cues a strongly liberal discourse that equates emotional
appropriateness with proximity to social justice (Berlant 2002: 163). This false equation encourages citizens
to understand feelings as testaments to their personal and moral complexity and invites a model of
agency that circuits back to settler national belonging (Berlant 2000b: 14). While the equation of agency
and feeling is false, affective sensation can make subjectivities happen in the gaps between
tactile and ideological dimensions of existence. The sensational immediacy of experience, feeling
and remembering, on the one end, and the institutional and ideological assemblage that a subject attaches
to, on the other, is a structure of responsivity quite a different thing than emotion, with
all its conventionality and its authenticating centrality to self-understanding in modern
Western cultures (Berlant 2009: 262) (emphasis in original). This is what is disrepaired about Burns liberal politics.
Feeling right about who they have been in history, normalizes a version of resistance and
community that is defective for a decolonizing present. The timeliness of his organization of affect marks Burns settler
structure of feeling when and for whom, are structural injustices felt? His
speech operates a liberal political calculus that
articulates felt sensations with past experiences of suffering heritages, and the people who can have them.
Crucially, Anatolios speech shows that plantation inequalities were not only experienced in the terms that Burns later uses to describe them. Put simply, plantation
 The point is not that records of the Luzons lives are truer than Burns real
experiences had lives before Burns gave them his history.

history of Hawaii[,] but that their existence as other than Burns historical referents shows how pasts
are integrated as affective structures. The Luzons misfit with Burns story underscores
orchestrations of affect the ways that history can be made to feel true.
Settler subjectivity must be refused. Genocidal settlement is not a one-off event, but a structuring
ontological logic of elimination constantly manifested in the everyday reiteration of subjective
modes of being that define settler identity.
Rifkin 14 Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
Renaissance, pp. 7-10)
If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and
associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its
effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of
inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as
a system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, Settler colonies were (are) premised on the
elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stayinvasion
is a structure not an event (2).6 He suggests that a logic of elimination drives settler governance and
sociality, describing the settler-colonial will as a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to
expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism (167), and in Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, he observes that
elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and
superceded) occurrence (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since
the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure
settler- colonial society (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinsons work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the
domination and displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty, she argues, As a regime of
power, patriarchal white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation
as a white possession (88), and in Writ- ing Off Treaties, she suggests, At an ontological level the structure of
subjective possession occurs through the imposition of ones will-to-be on the thing which is perceived
to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed, such that possession . . . forms part of the ontological
structure of white subjectivity (8384). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal
mode of U.S. settler colonialism. She observes that colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated, in
ways that tend to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion and that misdirect and cloud attention from the
underlying structures of settler colonialism (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the
translation of indigeneity as Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S.
jurisdiction and manage- ment: the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises
through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself ; ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as
the ontological ground through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself (xix).
The 1AC serves as an affective rupture, a strategy of disorienting the dominant narratives
that help formulate Asian American subjectivity. This strategy of resistance makes
nationality visible as a contingent formation of history. Thats critical to the emergence of
new decolonizing strategies.
Isaki 08
[3/20/08, Bianca Isaki, "Decolonizing history as an aesthetic political enactment: Asian settler colonialism in
Hawai''i" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association,
http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p238290_index.html]
Akira Iriyes The internationalization of history accounts for the resilience of the nation by considering the role of culture in political identities
. Inverting a structure that presumes nations are only vehicles for grouped economic interests, he builds on Max Webers argument that the
economic community is only another form of the conflict of nations with each other (Weber qtd. in ). The superstructural
individual attitudes and orientations that constitute a culture are also foundational to the relationships that
hold together a national community. At these micropolitical levels, the coherence of nations and their
histories begin to fray into modalities that call for interdisciplinary dialogue; [i]international historians in particular may have much to
learn from art historians who, after all, have explored the transfer of artistic styles and tastes from one part of the world to another [and that]
emphasized the need to go beyond national frameworks and to look for transnational artistic themes...Perhaps we could borrow from such a
vocabulary . While executed within infrastructures oriented by and towards nation-states, the transnational transfer of ideas,
styles, tastes, trades and people place material challenges to the limits of an only-national order of things.
That is, we must still talk about the nation, but its myriad modalities of influence call for new analytics of
things not corralled within hermetic nation-forms. Aesthetic Politics, Transnational Analytics: Iriyes account of the
nations less-continent dimensions suggests a need for an expanded literacy in variable modalities of
inter-national traffic. A language of culture and aesthetics offers a powerful means to variously theorize
nationalized interfaces between Asian settlers, Hawaiian and U.S. hegemony. Yet, aesthetics and culture
cannot mark national boundaries between settlers and Hawaiians in any simple way. These interfaces are cross- hatched with political
communities that are already immanent to the nations boundaries. Against the U.S.s attempt to cohere a political
decolonial strategy is to re-constitute a
community over and against a history of violated Hawaiian nationhood, the
critique of U.S.-Hawaiian relationships as a critique of U.S. foreign policy . This discursive
gesture radically reorients the spatial predicates of the issue, Michael J. Shapiro observes; [n]ative claims are
profoundly political, not just because they address a polity, but because they force a moment in which a part that has had no part asserts itself .
Crucially, political agency takes the form of forcing attention towards the heretofore non-political. Jacques Rancires definition of the political is
quoted in Shapiros passage. Elsewhere Rancire elaborates; politics
is an aesthetic affair because politics is not the
exercise of power or the struggle for power. It is the configuration of a specific world, a specific form of
experience in which some things appear to be political objects, some questions political issues or
argumentations, and some agents political subjects . The syntax of an aesthetic politics calls us to see how the
configuration of a world, events, an experience, or an affect as political, or not, is a political enactment .
Seen as a project of re-arranging things, decolonization acts on the political, aesthetically. Conceptualizing political
identity as an aesthetic synthesis offers an analytical structure to the otherwise vague
metaphorical operation of detaching Asian settlers from American identities. National identity
normally cuts citizens out from other identity-markers: territorial birth, reproductive kinship, spoken oaths, and other cultural practices. Seen in
these other networks, past events, memories, discourses and the very notion of nationality appear as things that can be recovered from their
is an interpretive apparatus that determines
heretofore-American moorings. Highlighting its role as an optic, nation-ness
the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience, by translating myriad dimensions of a
lifeworld into citizenly meaning . The Asian Americans historical yes can be conceptualized as a valence put on a jumble of not-
inevitably- national forms on which America stakes its claims. This jumble can be diffracted into components of something other than only a
colonizing investment in an American-Hawaii. I next attend to the cultural apparatuses through which the putatively personal and natural
dimensions of historical identity slip into public attachments to an American constellation of meaning. In his Imagined Communities (1991),
Benedict Anderson posits nations as cultural artefacts of a particular kind . To
conceive of nations foremost as cultural
entities is particularly appropriate to the U.S., where its constitutive mode of recruiting the emotive into
national culture has a singularly American history. The emotive clustering of goodness around an
American community gave rise to a liberal rhetoric of promise historically entitled in the
United States, which avows that a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through
channels of affective identification and empathy . Built from patterns initiated in the 1830s, Lauren Berlant identifies this U.S.
emotive-apparatus as national sentimentality . This national mode of communion recurs as a modal shift from
the rational to the emotional in U.S. political rhetoric, through which the object of national justice
becomes the remediation of social injuries. 21 Alongside the post-fordist dismantling of social welfare, notably under the Clinton
administration, the role of feelings as national attachments have been compounded. 22 In the era of neoliberal capitals
shrinking public, the national polity is increasingly contoured by a common orientation of feelings. Clintons therapeutic idiom is native to this
new political terrain. Feelings get magnified into visceral attachments to an American political community, which
is increasingly imagined as a flattened televisual media-sphere. Citizens thus interface with their representative institutions and other citizens in a
constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds This newly neoliberal U.S. hegemony has changed the
spatiotemporal coordinates of the No-no boys model of resistance. The point is not that opposing
America is futile, but that outdated forms of opposition may be newly configured by a post-Fordist, neoliberal
America that assimilates prescriptions for un-citizenly comportment. Sorting out the temporal bounded-ness of political
enactments pushes towards a robust reading of Asian settler political emotions. Uncommitted to the nations sparse categories
of yes and no citizenship, transnational analytics focus on making nationality visible as
contingent formations of history, politics and culture. These analytics lets us see how Asian
settlers departure from Americas usual pattern of national identifications mark the necessity of
learning new vocabularies for political action. Historical inquiry into America as an apparatus of
political feelings tracks how they [nations] have come into historical being, in what ways
their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound
emotional legitimacy . My project is not to recount this genealogy, but I traverse its concept of national legitimacy as an exercise of
aesthetic political power. Emotional legitimacy sites the nations command over the emotive corrals the
interpretation of felt-sensations emotions into evidence of political attachments to the nations
community. In these forms, the nation does not have to be a political or economic institution as much as an
optic through which people can place their political attachments. Asian American anxieties
over indigenous political claims thus indicate a conflicted vision of that American object of attachment .
Using a politicized concept of aesthetics, Im locating the colonial power with the ways that an American
political culture recruits and exploits the nations authority to name an emotion. This
operation is aesthetic because it organizes the spatio-temporal schema through which sensation is
registered, interpreted, and authorized. Among other things, the American political sphere has long been a
space for cultivating emotions to which we aspire . The fair-minded settler interested in social
justice who repudiates America in support of Hawaiian decolonization draws on this space for
cultivating political personhood . While Asian settler resistance is conversant with this feeling-ed mode of political speech, Ive been
arguing that expressions of political emotion have a shelf-life. Decreasingly, political acts of side-taking happen in scenes
of speaking truth to power. 23 The drama of the scene falls flat perhaps because its radical gestalt lacks
an ethical theater in which repudiations of American hegemony could feel like theyve displaced power .
The historical heterogeneity of forms that constitute this scene may regain that gestalt if
resituated within the changed coordinates of political speech. Brought to the problem of Hawaiis contested
nationality, transnational analytics show that national side-taking enacts an aesthetic disruption
of a political configuration. Hawaiian national sovereignty not only asserts the established rights of those who are already seen as
political subjects, but newly partitions a U.S. political field. Likewise, Asian settler repudiations of America that abet this
new partition do more than add to the body-count of its national-supporters. By identifying as settlers,
rather than Americans, their decolonial support implicitly agitates for a new mode of political part-taking. Yet,
these enactments of support take part in this political contest over Hawaiis nationality insofar as they find critically timely forms. That search
might set to work from the limits of reconciling the nations injustices as healed injuries. On the other side of that limit, the No-no boy perhaps
too readily accepts the nation as the axis for political activity. Clintons Apologys incapacity to heal Hawaiians political claims illuminates the
colonizing capaciousness of a discourse that telescopes feelings into politics. Both instances stage the nation as a constellating object for
promises, aspirations and injuries. Justice premised on Americas promise to have progressed from its history of injustice serves to reconcile
injured-others to that promise again. calculating justice from feelings As Anderson and Berlant have discussed, such capillary forms are
malleably-national attachments, which condense out of complex cultural and historical cross-hatchings. Mining
moments in which
Asian settlers asserted political personhood shows material forms of national identifications
that might be reorganized as support for Hawaiian decolonization. Seen over the space of a background
image transnational history, otherwise
opaque categories of sensation and emotion retain political consistencies at
this intersection between Hawaiian decolonization and Americas post-Fordist neoliberal regimes. Asian
settler emotions may be potent texts for specifying what acts reconfigure the political, and
when. Ive argued that an
aesthetic political analytic may offer a primer for reading these texts within neoliberal
hegemonys confused amalgam of culture, feelings and national citizenship. Perhaps this new politics can
guide the recollection of these forms into a political present alive to the sense of
emancipation that invests decolonization with audacious promise.
Debate is first and foremost a site of subject formation. In light of this, we must center the
centuries long genocidal structure that forms how we think and exist. The affirmatives affective
intervention is essential to destabilize the stability of a settler psyche that otherwise coheres itself
by pushing this violence out of the picture. Anything else is to sustain the ongoing violence of
dispossession.
Henderson 15 prof of political science @ University of Victoria
(Phil, Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism, Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue
on Globalizing Unsettlement)

settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces,
daily life in all its banality is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The
jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these
charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto
operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation
of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see
their beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As
Brown writes, in the loss of horizons, order, and identity the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66
Threatened with this loss of containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the settler
colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of
a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic this rabid and insatiable anger is always already at the core
of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression even after
indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the
maintenance of settler colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as
such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject further development and entrenchment of the settler
colonial imago is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves
the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers
are also always already in
a psychically defensive position that is, the settler's offensive position on occupied land is sustained
through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the
attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires,
if the subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers
reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these
requires averting
defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this
attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create
a city on the hill.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to
periodic hysterical outbursts'. Such is the case when settlers utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they
imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into an
obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of
community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby
naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are
intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the
threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always
remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler
is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous
peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution,
should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-
must include an analysis of the dominant self-disciplining
allies as well, that decolonization
colonial subject.73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or
phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must
also examine and cultivate the ways in
which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the
subject's arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all
subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my
account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological
accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical
perspective, the unconscious constantly reveals the failure of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects
this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status.
Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus,the process of subject
formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the
settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of
settler colonialism can be subverted creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened
wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a restorying of settler colonial history
and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous
peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to
panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only
in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and
disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the repetitive practices of everyday
life are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler
imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate
radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy
(re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the micro-politics of
resistance', which historically took the form of moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey
parties amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters
with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that
founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler
colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing
presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.
 2AC Case
The impact is the worst form of settler colonial violence like boarding schools and forced
relocation. Settler colonialism is not oppositional, its assimilationist.
Cameron 12
[2012, Emilie S. Cameron, "Securing Indigenous politics: A critique of the vulnerability and adaptation approach to
the human dimensions of climate change in the Canadian Arctic." Global Environmental Change 22.1 (2012): 103-
114.]

Prior to the settlement of comprehensive land claims in northern Canada (see Hicks and White, 2000 for an overview), the
concept of colonialism circulated widely in both academic and political spheres, and provided analytical
traction for understanding the conditions under which Indigenous peoples struggled to sustain their lives
(e.g., Brody, 1973, Dene Nation, 1977, Indian-Eskimo Association, 1970, Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, 1977 and Scott, 2007). Today, although
references are occasionally made to a colonial past, to speak of colonial relations as persistently present
in the North is to be accused, in some circles, of analytical, political, and ontological misrecognition:
colonialism was; it is no longer. And yet processes and practices that were understood, prior to the
settlement of land claims, in relation to colonization, remain persistently present in the region: poverty,
loss of traditional culture, loss of language, lack of control over resource development, suicide,
addictions, and physical and mental health disparities ( Cameron, 2010, Hicks, 2007, Kral and Idlout, 2009 and Tester and
McNicoll, 2004). Their persistence, moreover, in a place and for a people that is now supposed to be after or
beyond colonization, still justifies a range of interventions; it still demands solutions.
Northern Indigenous peoples are still understood to have problems (indeed, as Smith (1999, p. 92)
makes so clear, the equation of Indigeneity with problems is so deeply rooted in Western knowledge
systems that its persistence in a supposedly post colonial context should not surprise us). And thus
academic, governmental, and non-governmental institutions continue to intervene in the
region in an effort to improve the lives of Indigenous northerners. It is precisely the framing of
intervention into the lives of Indigenous peoples as well-meaning, benevolent, pragmatic, and
necessary that has been problematized by scholars in recent years. As Tester and Kulchyski (1994, p. 4)
observe, efforts to improve and help northern Indigenous peoples have been central to colonial
formations in the region. As a population targeted most extensively after World War II, the central historical dynamic
that came to link Inuit to non-Inuit society politically was put in place during the period of high
modernism. Unlike Indian affairs, where a pre-welfare state employed largely coercive measures, in Inuit
affairs it was a liberal form of welfare state, which gave the appearance of having a more benign
face and which employed a greater reliance on ideology, that became the means for
attempting assimilation. Processes and practices that are understood, today, as central to colonization
in the North (including forced relocation into settlements, the shooting of sled dogs, mass
evacuation to southern sanatoria for tuberculosis treatment, residential schooling, and the
imposition of southern models of health and education; see Kulchyski and Tester, 2007, Stevenson, 2009,
Stevenson, 2011 and Tester and Kulchyski, 1994) were carried out under the auspices of a well-meaning
liberal welfare state, a state concerned with helping Inuit adapt to the modern world,
saving Inuit bodies from disease, and teaching Inuit how to effectively operate in Western
economic and political spheres. The history of intensive colonial intervention into Inuit lives
interweaves, then, with governmental benevolence, improvement, and expertise, and as such recent
work on the colonial will to improve (Li, 2007) and writings on colonial governmentality
more generally (e.g., Mitchell, 2006 and Scott, 2005) are particularly helpful for understanding colonial and
neocolonial processes in the North. The will to improve, Li argues, is a hallmark of colonial relations; it is
a form of trusteeship in which the objective is not so much to dominate others but to enhance a
target population's capacity for action, and to direct it (2007, p. 5). Drawing on Foucault's understandings of
government as a field of power but also on Gramsci, Li
is interested in the will to shape the conduct of conduct, to
educate desires, and to configure peoples relations not only with each other, but with land, wealth,
resources, means of subsistence, and so on. Governmental power, she notes, targets the well-being of
populations at large rather than individuals, whether understood as the whole population or specific
subgroups defined by gender, race, location, or other features, each with characteristic deficiencies that
serve as points of entry for corrective interventions (6). Li notes that the will to improve is marked by
intentions that are benevolent, even utopian. Its practitioners desire to make the world better and
they do so not through violence or force, but through schemes that are made to seem like the
natural expression of the everyday interactions of individuals and groups (5). Governing
Indigenous peoples in this mode, she argues, is no less significant than more coercive, assimilative,
or disciplinary modes of domination. It is an extension and modification, not a departure
from, colonial forms of power. Of particular relevance to this paper is Li's attention to the rationalities
underpinning governmental intervention (including the ways of thinking, the calculations, and the
techniques that characterize governmental power), as well as the ways in which these rationalities
intersect with colonial imperatives to maintain the difference and distinctiveness of colonizer and
colonized. There are two practices and three tactics Li identifies in this regard that warrant discussion here. First , Li identifies two
practices by which trustees translate the will to improve into explicit programs (7). The first,
problematization, is a process of identifying deficiencies that need to be rectified. The practice of
identifying and naming deficiencies or weaknesses in a target population, and their corresponding need to
be improved, fixed, or otherwise rectified, is, Li argues, a hallmark of governmental power. The second,
corresponding practice Li identifies is a process of rendering technical, a process she describes,
following Nikolas Rose, as a whole set of practices concerned with representing the domain to be
governed as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics.
defining boundaries, rendering that within them visible, assembling information about that
which is included and devising techniques to mobilize the forces and entities thus revealed
(7). Populations targeted through governmental improvement schemes, in other words, must first be
problematized as facing particular challenges or suffering from particular deficiencies. Next, the quality
and shape of those problems and deficiencies must be rendered technical, their boundaries
and content must be specified and rendered visible, and techniques developed to target
them. Crucially, Li observes, questions that are rendered technical are simultaneously rendered nonpolitical
they focus more on the capacities of the poor than on the practices through which one social group
impoverishes another (7). Experts operating within this framework constantly repose what James
Ferguson calls political questions of land, resources, jobs, or wages as technical
problems responsive to the technical development intervention (Ferguson, 1994, p. 270). Expert
discourses, Li further argues, are devoid of reference to questions they cannot address, or that might
cast doubt on the completeness of their diagnoses or the feasibility of their solutions. (2007, p.
11) In particular, they exclude politicaleconomic questions. In other words, processes of
problematization, representation, specification, and technical intervention necessitate the
exclusion of all that cannot be addressed in technocratic terms. They require the reframing of
complex, inherently political formations in terms that can be governed through targeted, technical
intervention. Improvement has been central to colonial projects for decades and even
centuries, Li argues, and efforts to improve target populations in colonial and neocolonial contexts
invariably confront a tension between a desire to improve a colonized group and a belief in the
fundamental difference and distinctiveness of the colonizing group. There is a basic contradiction, Li observes, between
believing that the colonized are utterly different than their colonial masters, a distinction that itself justifies colonial rule, and the desire to
improve the colonized in the image of the colonizer. This
tension between difference and improvement, Li argues, has been
addressed by colonial regimes through at least three tactics, including: (a) the permanent deferral of the
possibility of improvement on the part of colonized subjects; (b) the hierarchical division of colonized
subjects into more and less improvable categories; and (c) the promotion of an understanding of
improvement in which improvement for natives did not mean becoming like their colonial masters, it
meant being true to their own indigenous traditions. It was the task of trustees to improve native life ways
by restoring them to their authentic state (15). This third tactic, I will argue, is particularly
operative in the human dimensions of climate change literature, where techniques and
policies aimed at mitigating Inuit vulnerability and improving Inuit adaptive capacities in
the face of climatic change emphasize the preservation and restoration of Inuit traditional
knowledges, practices, and skills. They aim, in Li's terms, to restore Inuit to a more traditional
state, as a way of enhancing their adaptation to a rapidly changing world. If we bring
together this attention to a governmental will to improve a politicization of the
processes by which deficiencies and problems are first identified, and then targeted for
improvement in technocratic terms with critiques of the spatiality of Indigeneity and the
delimitation of Indigenous peoples to the local and traditional, a critique of recent work
assessing community vulnerability and adaptation to climate change emerges. In the following
section I bring these two critical perspectives to bear on the human dimensions of climate change literature.
 2AC CP
1. Framework comes prior
2. Markets presume existence
Apocalyptic framing of environmental crisis invisibilizes ongoing extinctions and presumes
universal subject of politics which obscures unique settler responsibility
Ahuja 15 [Neel, associate professor of postcolonial studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
Volume 21, Numbers 2-3, June 2015]

To Kill Softly Media representations of climate change struggle to grasp the enormity of killing. The planetary
scale of carbon
amplification, its association with expanding bodies and displaced destruction, coincides with a
spectacular trauma of extinction: ecologically violent uses of land, chemicals, and carbon are
accelerating the sixth major extinction event in earths history. This event (if we can stomach the cool
rendering of mass death as a singularity) will commit 1835 percent of extant animal and plant species to extinction by 2050.19 Perhaps one
million species will disappear, and countless billions of living bodies will be denied the conditions of life or prematurely killed. Climate-
related disasters are accelerating threats to already precarious lifeways: Inuit nations face melting Arctic ice;
Maldivians and other islanders lose ground to rising seas; vulnerabilities to infectious disease grow with shrinking water supplies; the worlds
agrarian poor face crop diseases, drought, desertification, and food price instability; and all countries face increased weather disasters. The large
number of people who depend on subsistence agriculture are already living outside the ecological boundary parameters that enabled the rise of
modern human societies.20 In this sense, we
are already living the future of extinction. The planetary
presentnot some speculative futureexhibits a staggering scale of reproductive failure, human and
nonhuman. Yet small bodies and intimate environments often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its
seventeenth-century origins in English, the term atmosphere has signaled the fluid medium of above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration
as a space of geology and life, and a background that forges exchange between social and physical processes. Atmospheres can surround big and
small bodies, and can shift as bodies entangle and disentangle spatially. With industrial pollution, lower atmospheric space abounds with plumes
of toxic gases (methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous oxide and ozone) that
unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as we encounter a busy street, a power plant, or a factory farm. In addition to
rising to heights where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil and water, returning unpredictable flows of
toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These toxicitiesoften concentrated in poor and minority communities
contribute to childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers. In an account of living with toxic
sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel Chen describes navigating and transforming unpredictable
atmospheres and their conjoined affective and spatial entanglements. The improvisational strategies for
prophylaxissuch as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle [End Page 370] emissions on a busy streetinevitably
conjure public surveillance. Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask, writes Chen, I am perceived as a walking symbol of
contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of repulsion.21 Chens account points to how the materiality of everyday air
pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to Renisa Mawani, might itself be understood as an atmospherics rather
than a social construction. Drawing on Fanons accounts of race and atmosphere, Mawani explores race as an affective movement, a force
rather than a thing, a current that reconstitutes and reassembles itself in response to its own internal rhythms and to changing social and political
conditions.22 If race is not simply a phenotypic characteristic but an ecology of affective movement and exchange, the effects of carbon
pollutiondisability, disease, forced migration, and sometimes deathcan catalyze the emergence of xenophobic fears about economic and
ecological interconnection. Racialized climate reporting draws affective power from senses of pervasive and
inescapable environmental pollution. Michael Ziser and Julie Sze detail the persistent geopolitical and racial fears driving US
responses to climate change. Contrasting the sentimental domestication of the (white) polar bear in US media
with persistent fears of the cross-Pacific migration of Chinese air pollution, Ziser and Sze argue that climate
discourses conjure earlier racial panics about yellow peril and obscure primary US
responsibility for contemporary and historical emissions.23 While such reporting contributes to
an atmosphere of fear and crisis, the everyday physicality of climate processes inscribes fear at the site
of the skin. Atmosphere names a space of unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle violencesa
space at once geophysical and affective, informed by yet exploding representation, a space where the
violences of late-carbon liberalism subtly reform racialized sensoria through shifting scales of
interface. To explore this further I suggest that we think with mosquitoes, mosquitoes both figural and real, mosquitoes that bite, migrate,
and feed on various bodies. These are parasites like those in Narayans vision of gay plague; they are also strange kin in a warming atmosphere.
Mosquitoes excite colonial tropes in environmental discoursefrom anthropophagic consumption (feeding on humans) to visions of tropical
contagion.24 In the vampiric image of female mosquitoes blood feastsrequired for their sexual reproductionthere is a counterpoint to the
carnivorous virility that Carla Freccero attributes to liberal humanist visions of the subject. A small body becomes a predator of the human,
forcing strange ecologies of attraction and feeling even as it poses risks of debility and death.25 But the parasite turns out to be feeding on a
parasite. Alongside the mosquito,
a universalized, waste-expelling human settler appears as the
ultimate atmospheric parasite in neoliberal climate discourse. Michel Serres puts the point about scale this
way: The human parasite is of another order relative to that of the animal parasite: the latter is one, the former a set;
the latter is time, the former, history; the latter is a garden, the former, a province; to destroy a garden or a world.26 An organic imperialist, the
human colonizes ecologies, time, and thought itselfan entire lifeworld. In the hands of late-
carbon liberalisms human settler, killing takes a form both massive and casual. This figuration is
based on some daunting facts of extinction. The everyday activities of carbon-dependent industrial
living connect ones bodily consumption and waste to the stranger intimacies of a shared
atmosphere, slowly threatening other far-flung bodies, human and nonhuman.27 The effects of waste
may kill softly, enmeshed in the deep time and circuitous space of slow violence, a largely
unintentional ecocide.28 From this vantage, beyond its invocation of xenophobic rhetorics of shape-shifting,
virality, and contagion, the parasite suggests a problem of knowledge about agency and causality. For
this is a human defined by waste rather than by romantic marks of sentience, feeling, or
intentionality.

To gloss Berlant, inhabiting late-carbon liberalism produces myths, icons, and feelings that may be
profoundly confirming despite binding a person or world to situations of profound threat.29 Rather
than settle comfortably into the assumption of species-derived powerof the destructive and universal human
geological agency of the Anthropocenewe might say that to recognize that life is ambiently queer is to
divest from spectacular temporalities of crisis and transcendence that infuse queer theory and
environmentalism alike. Queering in this sense emerges by tracing an affective materiality that interrupts
anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign stance of negation in
relation to Law, including the law of compulsory reproduction. Thus I interpret queer inhumanism as an account of
interspecies entanglement and reproductive displacement, an inquiry into the unrealized
lifeworlds that form the background of the everyday. This requires thinking askance the human and
thinking death, animality, and vulnerability in an age of many extinctionsextinctions of taxonomized
species, to be sure, but also more subtle orchestrations of racial precarity and quiet obliterations of
histories that could have been. In a time of extinctions, lateral reproduction suggests not some
transcendent space of queer negationor worse, an acceptance of Narayans logic of plaguebut a problem of
rethinking our casual reproduction of forms of ecological violence that kill quietly, outside the
spectacular time of crisis. colonial order live on.
Carbon trading is means of depoliticizing elite strategies
Bond 15. Patrick, University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance (Johannesburg) and University of
KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (Durban). Can Climate Activists Movement Below Transcend
Negotiators Paralysis Above? JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH. ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. # 21
No. 2
Trading Carbon Instead of Paying the Climate Debt One of the central tenets of climate justice, especially since
the term was used by the Durban Group for Climate Justice in 2004, has been opposition to the UNFCCCs Kyoto
Protocol strategy of carbon trading. Kyto undergirds the process of emissions cut-backs with
various kinds of carbon markets, reflecting the aim of maximising efficiency. The market-
related ordering of the emissions-cutting process will be amplified at the Paris UNFCCC
summit in December 2015, as a result of revived emissions markets in several countries. President Barack
Obama re-introduced the cap and trade strategy as part of national climate policy in the United States in
August 2015, for example, in spite of its failure to date not only in the Chicago Climate Exchange which
was forced to close in 2010, but in the main test site, the European Union (EU). In the wake of the 90 percent
crash in EU carbon market prices between the 2008 peak (29) and the 2013 trough (down to 2.81/ton), and similar
crashes in the UNs own Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) carbon market, a comeback will be difficult.
European and United Nations turnover had plummeted from a peak of $140 billion in 2008 to $130 billion in 2011,
$84 billion in 2012, and $53 billion in 2013, even as new carbon markets began popping up (Reuters 2014). But
after dipping to below $50 billion in 2014, volume on the global market is predicted by industry experts to recover
in 2015 to $77 billion (worth 8 Gigatons of CO2 equivalents) thanks to higher European prices and increased U.S.
coverage of emissions, extending to transport fuels and natural gas (Nichols 2015). However, geographically
extreme uneven development characterizes the markets in part because of the different regulatory regimes. Since
2013 there have been new markets introduced in California, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Quebec, Korea and China, while
Australias 2012 scheme was discontinued in 2014 due to the conservative governments opposition. The price per
ton of carbon also differs markedly, with early 2015 rates still at best only a third of the 2006 European Union peak:
California around $12, Korea around $9, Europe around $7.3, China at $3-7 in different cities, the U.S. northeast
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives voluntary scheme at $5, New Zealand at $4 and Kazakhstan at $2. The market
for CDMs collapsed nearly entirely to U.S.$0.20/ton. These low prices indicate several problems. First, extremely
large system gluts continue: two billion tons in the EU, for example, in spite of a new Market Stability
Reserve backstopping plan that aimed to draw out 800 million tons (Van Renssen 2015). Second, the new
markets suffer from unfamiliarity with such an ethereal product, emissions. So trading volume has slowed
to a tiny fraction of what had been anticipated (especially as in China and Korea). Third, fraud continues
to be identified in various carbon markets (as can be witnessed at the http://map.carbonmarketwatch.org/
website). This is a debilitating problem especially in the timber and forest-related schemes that were meant
to sequester large volumes of carbon. Fourth, resistance continues to rise against carbon trading
and offsets in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where anti-REDD movements are linking up
(as the http://redd-monitor.org website documents, and, more generally as one of the main websites of climate
justice analysis http://www.iicat.org/ also reveals). As a result, the introduction of market incentives
to make marginal changes to emissions is simply not working: the cost of switching from coal to
renewable energy remains in the range of $50/ton, in contrast to the prevailing price of carbon at best a fifth as high
in California. Carbon trading remains the elites default option for climate management in
spite of the fact that the sites in which carbon trading is today strongest or advancing
fastest the EU, California and China are also those in which extreme market failure in
financial markets (and related real estate) repeatedly threatened these countries national
economies over the past fifteen years, starting with the 2000 dot.com crisis and 2007 sub-prime mortgage
failure in California, enveloping the EU since Iceland crashed in 2007, and coming to China in mid-2015 when more
than $3 trillion in paper wealth evaporated in a massive 3-week long stock market crash. Not only China, but at least
two others in the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc Brazil and South Africa appear ready to
gamble on these markets. Revealing the geographical diffusion of financialized nature, those BRICS countries
whose elites might have done more to leapfrog carbon-intensive accumulation strategies (or at least not
repeat the most ecologically disastrous strategies of western industrialization) witnessed backsliding.
Along with Japan, Australia and Canada, in 2012 Russia also dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol and, along with
South Africa remained in the top-ten per capita GHG emitters. South Africa celebrated its hosting of the Durban
UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2011 by committing to build three new coal-fired power plants,
including one Medupi that received the World Banks largest-ever project loan in 2010 ($3.75 billion).
Meanwhile, China became the worlds leading GHG emitter in absolute terms. To address the prolific emissions,
three BRICS then established or announced future promotion of carbon markets and offsets as strategies to deal with
their prolific emissions: Chinas seven urban carbon markets, as South Africa and Brazil committed to doing so. In
the same current can be found Chile, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and Eastern Europe. China, India, Brazil and South
Africa had already enjoyed disproportionate access to the CDM until the rules changed in 2012 (CDM Pipeline
2013). By then the price of CDM credits had sunk so low there was little point in any case and nearly three quarters
of subsequent CDMs may not represent real emissions reductions, according to Carbon Market Watch (2013: 1),
while The environmental integrity of the other Kyoto offsetting mechanism Joint Implementation is even more
questionable with over 90 percent of offsets issued by Russia and Ukraine with very limited transparency and no
international oversight. In the meantime, as Naomi Klein (2014: 189) pointed out, two BRICS had become
notorious for gaming the CDM: The most embarrassing controversy for defenders of this model involves coolant
factories in India and China that emit the highly potent greenhouse gas HFC-23 as a by-product. By installing
relatively inexpensive equipment to destroy the gas (with a plasma torch, for example) rather than venting it into the
air, these factories most of which produce gases Journal of World-System Research | Vol. #21 No. 2 | Bond
jwsr.org | http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2015.577 257 used for air-conditioning and refrigeration have generated
tens of millions of dollars in emission credits every year. The scheme is so lucrative, in fact, that it has
triggered a series of perverse incentives: in some cases, companies can earn twice as much by destroying
an unintentional by-product as they can from making their primary product, which is itself emissions
intensive. This is not surprising, according to Bryant, Dabhi and Bhm (2015: 36), given that the CDM
discourse isused to legitimize the inclusion of developing countries in the international
climate regime; an essential component of a spatial fix which seeks to accommodate the
demands of Northern capital for flexibility and promote new business opportunities for
project developers and carbon traders. Similar problems of system integrity plague the seven Chinese
carbon markets, according to the Carbon Tax Center (2015): authorities face high hurdles in program design,
information provision and political acceptability if the eventual national program is to put an effective price on
carbon and actually constrain and reduce emissions. Within China, there is growing unease with carbon markets.
At the Chinese Academy of Marxism, for example, Yu Bin (2014) argues that along with Intellectual Property,
emissions commodification is vital to understanding the way capital has emerged under conditions of global crisis.
From Global Crises to Global Movements The attraction of carbon trading in the new markets, no matter its failure
in the old, is logical when seen within a triple context: a longer-term capitalist crisis which has raised financial
sector power within an ever-more frenetic and geographically ambitious system; the financial markets
sophistication in establishing new routes for capital across space, through time, and into nonmarket
spheres; and the mainstream ideological orientation to solving every market-related problem with a
market solution, which even advocates of a Post-Washington Consensus and Keynesian economic
policies share (Krugman 2009). Interestingly, even Paul Krugman (2013) had second thoughts, for after reading
formerly pro-trading environmental economist William Nordhaus (2013) Climate Casino, he remarked, the
message I took from this book was that direct action to regulate emissions from electricity generation would be a
surprisingly good substitute for carbon pricing. But rationality and even efficiency do not appear to
be the decisive forces in multilateral climate policy. Instead we are better locating the
carbon markets and other emissions trading and offset strategies as vehicles for displacing
over-accumulated capital, during a period of extended crisis. Still, even if the new markets get
off the ground, the contradictions become extreme: frequent estimates of a $3 trillion carbon market by
2020and even one (from the lead Merrill Lynch trader) of $30 trillion (Kanter 2007) were overblown, as the
peak year so far was 2008 at $140 billion. With Chinas seven pilot projects launched in 2014 ostensibly covering
700 million tons of CO2 emissions (and $135 million in 2014 deals), renewed estimates are being made of a $3.5
trillion market there by 2020 (Responding to Climate Change 2013). But in China like everywhere else,
financial markets over-extended themselves geographically as investment portfolios diversified into
distant, risky areas and sectors. Global and national financial governance proved inadequate, leading to
bloated and then busted asset values ranging from subprime housing mortgages to illegitimate emissions
credits. And another round lies ahead. What the period after 2008 showed, once again, is that geopolitical
tensions emerge over which sites would be most vulnerable to suffer devalorization of over-accumulated
capital, i.e., which regions or countries would bear the brunt of the deep financial sector and real
economic downturns. The geopolitical context during the 2000s featured a sole military superpower, one oriented
to neoconservative imperialism (especially in relation to U.S. energy needs and hence in-built climate-change
denialism) but mitigated somewhat by a global class politics of neoliberalism. This arrangement evolved since 2010,
what with BRICS becoming the most coherent emerging-market network. But as Lula da Silva, Jacob Zuma,
Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao showed in 2009, they were perfectly willing to agree to a Copenhagen Accord
that served Northernand elite Southerninterests: GHG emissions without constraint. That deals Journal of
World-System Research | Vol. #21 No. 2 | Climate Activists Movement Below jwsr.org |
http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2015.577 260 non-binding, voluntary approach would raise world temperatures by 4
degrees C by 2100, even conservative scientists conceded (Bond 2012), and the U.S.-China deal in October
2014 continued the fiction that both countries could ratchet down emissions in time to avoid runaway
climate change. Competition in emissions laxity is the only way to describe the COPs under
present circumstances, in which delegates arrive at summits in carbon-intensive
countries Mexico in 2010, South Africa in 2011, Qatar in 2012, Poland in 2013 and Peru in 2014and where
the UNFCCC secretariat is led by a carbon trader (Christiana Figueres).

The aff feeds into a narrative of redeemed corporations that obscures the markets
responsibility for eco-crisis and limits the horizon of alternatives
Grear 14, (Dahrendorf Visiting Fellow @ Grantham Research Institute, Towards climate justice? A critical
reflectionon legal subjectivity and climate injustice: warning signals, patterned hierarchies, directions for future law
and policy, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 5, Special Edition)
2.1.2 Laws structural complicity?
In his 2013 review of environmental law and governance, Turner argues that the very design of the law itself
is fundamentally predisposed to environmental degradation and forms part of a dysfunctional
global legal architecture which cannot achieve environmental sustainability.10 Turner is unequivocal
concerning the fact that the existing foundational commitments of law make it exceedingly difficult to hold
to account some of the most egregious offenders against environmental standards. In making his argument,
Turner identifies a key feature of the global legal architecture: the centrality of the corporate form and its interests:
He explicitly points to the legal structure and historical evolution of business enterprises arguing that, even
during [their] formative years, certain features were being built into their design that would eventually have
huge impacts on the environment in the modern era.11 Turner concludes that separate legal personality,
limited liability, the separation between ownership and control of corporations, and the legal duty placed
upon company directors to pursue the companys best interests as a profit-making entity are key
structural juridical reasons why environmental legal responses fail with respect to meeting
important accountability targets for modes of environmental degradation.12 Moreover, the structural
components of the corporate form are nowadays globalized, making critique of their form globally salient: Turners
critique of the modern corporate entity are as relevant for China and Japan as they are for France and Germany and
for the AngloAmerican corporate form now so dominant in the international order.13 Anticipating the response that
there are new forms of environmentally-facing corporations, Turner counters that even in a corporation that has
certain environmental standards, there is still a bottom line as it is a business venture that is designed for
the creation of profit and therefore such standards can only go so far.14 Sinden puts the point in a more
critical context: In the face of all of this corporate greening, its easy to lose sight of the vast power
imbalance that still forms the backdrop for the political debate on climate change. Increasingly, these
stories of corporations going green are being spun into a larger cultural narrative of the
corporation as redeemed sinner. Like the Grinch stopping at the top of the mountain to hear the
joyful voices of the carolers below, the new green corporation has heard the environmental gospel and its
heart has grown five sizes. But it would be a mistake to think that the recent concessions of many in the fossil
fuel industry with respect to global warming mean that corporations have suddenly come around to represent
the best interests of the general public. Corporations are still structured by law to put the short-term profits of
shareholders first. Even as they abandon their oppositionist stance and come to the table acknowledging the
existence of climate change and the need for regulation to curb it, they will come to the bargaining table
with the primary purpose and duty of protecting short-term share price.15 Sindens point about the backdrop
of power imbalance is fundamental. It is clear that corporations have exerted and continue to exert
considerable influence with the complex complicity of neoliberal states both upon states themselves
and upon the specialist legal architecture (including key international institutions) set up by states to
respond to centrally important law and governance challenges, including climate change.16 It is not going
too far, indeed, to claim that corporations dominate the entire global order: this fact being widely
accepted by theorists of globalization as the defining phenomenon of the global age.17 Transnational corporations
(TNCs)18 exert almost unimaginable power, supported in their dominance by powerful economic institutions
(themselves both a symptom of and a stimulus for globalization)19 such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The guardians of the
neoliberal global order which many (especially in the light of the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath) see as
being the guardians of a global economic elite are committed, it seems, to an ideology with demonstrably
destructive social and environmental impacts, and a profoundly intensifying effect on the
unevenness of the legal order. Gill has argued, for example, that the worldwide amendment of old
constitutions and the formation of new ones under the influence of the IMF, the World Bank and other
institutional agencies of neoliberalism, amounts to the construction of a de facto constitution for global
capital, operative in a range of contexts: international, regional and national.20 Beck asserts that the power of
global business is engaged in a meta-struggle with nation states a reality in the light of which
globalization needs to be decoded as a creeping, post-revolutionary, epochal transformation of the
national and international state-dominated system governing the balance of power and the rules of
power.21 And while analysing this struggle is rendered vastly more complex by forms of political complicity,22
by the indispensability of state power to the conditions of accumulation for capital and by the fact that it is the state
itself which has provided the conditions enabling global capital to survive and navigate the world ,23 it
remains relatively clear that contemporary globalization is, in Becks words, one of the most important changes
there has been in the history of power.24 The analytical intricacy of this shift presents a Gordian knot of complex
sets of shifts and struggles in which TNCs have emerged to function as private sector quasi-states.25 This power is
exercised in (and facilitated by) wider structural conditions in which, as Woods has argued, economic power has
become detached from direct coercion meaning that the economic hegemony of capital can extend far beyond the
limits of direct political domination.26 Infact, Woods argues, capitalism is distinctive among all social forms
precisely in its capacity to assert its domination by purely economic meansand that capitals drive for relentless
self-expansion depends on this unique capacity, which applies not only to class relations between capital and labour
but also to relations between imperial and subordinate states.27 In the contemporary globalized order such realities
create, to say the least, a very complex relation between state and economic power.28 2.1.3 Implications for
climate law initiatives Myriad such analyses, unsurprisingly, imply a deepening of neoliberal capitalist
ideologys grip on mainstream international legal strategies for addressing the climate crisis. Turners
disturbing thesis is amply supported by such critiques of the transmutation of politics and law in
favour of global corporate power and may also be borne out by the contemporary emphasis placed
upon greening market growth as a strategy for reducing climate emissions. Such strategies, while
important, carry the risk, however, that in bringing the value of ecosystem services and natural capital
into economic and legal calculations, the market is simply confirmed as the meta-structure
dominating all other structures, while neoliberalism simply redeploys itself in modes of
environmental reductionism.29 While appropriate forms of market accountability (as UNEP signals in its
2011 report) are of pivotal importance,30 it is essential to keep in mind that market-based solutions place
intrinsic ideological limits on the horizons of possibility. They tend to avoid confronting a
fundamentally unsustainable capitalist commitment to unlimited growth;31 they occlude important
social dimensions of economic activity including socio-economic human rights;32 and they ignore
to a significant extent both the biomaterial substrate of capitalism and ecological limits, unless and until
these make themselves felt as economic limits that is, as a cost burden within the economic system.33 Market-
based approaches also evade deeper questions concerning market dominance itself. They also tend to
be corporation-dominated and overly corporation friendly. This is true even of avowedly green market
approaches. Indeed, that is a charge levelled by Adelman at the outcome of Rio+20, which, he argues, failed to
deliver anything beyond a greened market mono-culturalism.34 However, it seems deeply
counterintuitive not to question the wisdom of placing faith in markets alone to transform the eco-
destructive excesses that market capitalism itself has generated.35 The deep links between capitalism and
environmental destruction are now well established,36 as is the link between capitalism and climate
change.37 Greened market approaches may simply mean that nature becomes even more deeply
commodified just another interchangeable global commodity-element to be traded and exploited. None
of this holds out great hope for environmental accountability or for climate justice. Not only is there a
fundamental misalignment between the complexity of climate crisis and the laws reductive tendencies,
but laws ideological structure (its deep intimacy with capitalism and its commitment to the centrality of
the corporate form) renders law a paradoxical tool at best. The complexity of the states relationship with
capitalist expansionism and the states role in designing a legal order in which corporate capital power
now predominates, means that we cannot afford to be nave about the promise of a strong rule
of law approach.38
 2AC F/W
Counter-interpretation the affirmative should relate to the resolution affectively, not
instrumentally.
This solves the majority of their fairness and limits arguments. Affirmatives cant emerge
from nowhere but must discuss tie their affective interventions to emotional communities
formed by climate policymaking. Reducing the debate to the costs and benefits of climate
policy decenters those questions.
Ground and limits are not intrinsic goods. If being predictable requires us to adopt
certain violent practices, then that does impact turn their offense as well.
The case is a DA to their framework based on their attempt to direct the vision of debate
outside its walls. The settler psyche stabilizes itself by having the settler identity disappear
altogether, by looking way from our own settler subjectivities.
Henderson 15 prof of political science @ University of Victoria
(Phil, Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism, Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue
on Globalizing Unsettlement)

settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces,
daily life in all its banality is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The
jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these
charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto
operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation
of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see
their beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As
Brown writes, in the loss of horizons, order, and identity the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66
Threatened with this loss of containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the settler
colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of
a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic this rabid and insatiable anger is always already at the core
of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression even after
indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the
maintenance of settler colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as
such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject further development and entrenchment of the settler
colonial imago is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves
the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers
are also always already in
a psychically defensive position that is, the settler's offensive position on occupied land is sustained
through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the
attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires,
if the subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers
reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these
requires averting
defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this
attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create
a city on the hill.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to
periodic hysterical outbursts'. Such is the case when settlers utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they
imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into an
obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of
community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby
naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are
intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the
threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always
remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler
is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous
peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution,
should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-
allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant self-disciplining
colonial subject.73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or
phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must
also examine and cultivate the ways in
which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the
subject's arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all
subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my
account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological
accounts of the subject: that of
assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical
perspective, the unconscious constantly reveals the failure of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects
this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status.
Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus,the process of subject
formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the
settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of
settler colonialism can be subverted creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened
wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a restorying of settler colonial history
and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous
peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to
panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only
in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and
disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the repetitive practices of everyday
life are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler
imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate
radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy
(re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the micro-politics of
resistance', which historically took the form of moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey
parties amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters
with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that
founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler
colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing
presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.
Theres no topical version of the aff. The resolution requires federal management of the
environment through a positive climate policy and regulating pollution. In order to make
the idea of the environment itself legible to legal ideals, the environment must be treated as
a depoliticized object to be plugged into bureaucratic calculations and decisions. This
naturalizes a settlerist relationship to the environment. Thats Isaki
Multiple DAs
1. Cunning of Recognition DA. Their interpretation forces debaters to speak in the
language of policy to be predictable. Speaking on the terms of the state incorporates
indigenous environmental demands. Legal legibility becomes a tool for perfecting
multiculturalism, unifying a postracial liberal polity and neutralizing indigenous political
claims as something prior to various policy machinations of the settler state itself. Thats
Isaki.
Their interpretation motors settlerism. as a means of becoming socially coherent citizens.
Isaki
11

[2011, Bianca Isaki, HB 645, Settler Sexuality, and the Politics of Local Asian Domesticity in Hawaii, Settler
Colonial Studies, 1:2, 82-102]

This distinction between what hetero-reproduction pushes into the future allows me to analyse Asian
settler attachments to the settler state. Asian settler sexuality is specifically not sexy. It is fit for public display
and thereby feels to be a way of being an appropriate citizen. Affective registers can trade on the appeal
of institutional recognition, which, amongst other things, relieves marginalised groups from the
experience of being a social contradiction. Judith Butler schematises this dynamic: the appeal to
the state is at once an appeal to a fantasy already institutionalised by the state, and a leave-
taking from existing social complexity in the hope of becoming socially coherent at
last.63 This desire for relief is read retroactively (for example, after citizenly recognition is achieved), as an occasion
to reinvest in optimism for the US Through this affective relay, stories of Asian settlers ongoing and
historical civil rights struggles are enlisted into the work of maintaining Hawaii as a US settler colony. At
Kaena, local fishers enact citizenship by articulating their private interest in fishing as a matter of public concern. They claim standing as people
who embody the cultures that define us. CONCLUSION Local fishers articulate a relationship with Hawaiian land that
amount to the awkward claims of settlers to living the cultural practices that the state professes to protect.
These claims are not inauthentic, opportunistic or merely tactical. They are strategic mobilisations, and the languages
with which communities speak to the state are tailored to the categories that the state sets
out to recognise. Yet, it is the very process through which the settler state shapes its subjects
that needs to be interrogated. To approach the ways in which the settler state controls land use and
creates the conditions of possibility for non-Hawaiian cultural practice and stewardship, we must also
attend to the ways in which sexuality is used to manage those conditions. What is unresolved is the relationship
between non-Hawaiian claims to Hawaii and the settler colonial states disavowal of Hawaiian sovereignty. This calls us to consider
Asian settler homemaking as also a mode of space-making for a politics that has not worked out its
relationship to decolonisation. Dismissing the indirect contributions of home-making to colonial power as
opaque to analysis, politically inexpedient, or simply irrelevant may make us miss the ordinary and
definitive forms through which the settler colony exists. Instead, I look to rectitude as convention, and conventionality as the
regulation of a colonial order. Conventional forms, such as residency, houses, and permits are the micrological
textures of a settler sexuality that stitches Asian settlers into a USoccupied Hawaii. I work from this oblique
angle on colonial power to shake our certainty about the forms that colonialism takes, like family fishing trips. This
means undoing
the settler colonial labour of making selves intelligible as market segments,
emotionallyappropriate citizens, and, in my examples, living receptacles of local traditions
that absorb colonial contradictions in order to let a colonial order live on.
2. Settler Innocence DA. Their model of debate views argumentation as a neutral form with
no prior ontological commitments. However, settler colonial assemblages define and bound
what is legitimately subject for contestation by giving primacy to the settler state as a
naturalized institution. This reaffirms settler violence.
Bruyneel 15 professor of history @ Babson College
(Kevin, Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism, Settler Colonial Studies,
Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)
I agree with their assessments, but would also add that what we see here, as we can with the many other examples of these forms of identity appropriation, is that the
work of settler memory is fundamental to the reproduction and legitimation of settler colonial assemblage
through a relationship to the past that is not about forgetting. It is a powerful form of national remembering. In the contemporary era, I would
include politics itself as among the facets of existence that settler colonialism colonizes. That is, settler
colonial assemblage defines and seeks to bound that which is legitimately subject for debate and
contestation as it concerns the distribution and role of power, identity, interest and institutions. Before
one can even ask the question of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation, the
question may be rendered moot, outside the bounds of legitimate, or realistic, politics. In this light,
my suggestion here is that the response to such appropriations as that of Geronimo's name should not be to ask the White House for an apology, and

thus concede the status of this statist institution. Instead, the association should be embraced, in one key respect. To embrace
the association is not to stand in alliance with Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all or the US military, but rather to re-assert the fact that
Geronimo was, indeed, an enemy of American statism and settler colonialism. It is to maintain the
political posture of friend versus enemy, and to render as important and necessary the status and actions of what political theorist Joel
Olson called the zealot or fanatic as an important political category that holds out the possibility for more radical

transformation of the political order.27 It is to say that the use of Geronimo's name is not simply the sign of an
absence of respect or sensitivity for Indigenous people, but is more evidence of the active presence of
settler colonial assemblage in the specific form of US liberal colonialism. In sum, in critiquing the problem with the
Codename Geronimo case, we should seek to avoid either reproducing a politics of recognition and multicultural discourse or diagnosing it as a sign of collective
LaDuke and Harjo get it right I believe
amnesia, as if only people knew all the facts of history things would be fine, or better. Rather, in this regard,

in emphasizing the persistent posture of American warfare against Indigenous people. While
this is a difficult framework to ponder, it is the appropriate one for a decolonizing, unsettling
politics which insists on drawing clear lines for and against settler colonialism. In this sense, the unsettling
response here is to put settler memory front and center as an active contemporary practice, in
which Geronimo's name is utilized by the US military because the invocation of his legend habitually calls forth possibly unlike any single
the appropriative violence of settler colonial conquest that
figure in US-Indigenous history

fundamentally shapes, as an active verb in the twenty-first century, the political

development and status of American liberal colonialism.
3. Normalization DA Framework is spun as a sign of normality for the rising fascism of
the Trump regime through falsely re-assuring words that the world has not ended
institutional engagement WILL NOT save us, merely greasing the wheels for a rapid
autocratic takeover of the United States.
Gessen 11/10. Masha Gessen, world-famous Russian and American journalist, author, and activist noted for her
opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Autocracy: Rules for Survival, The New York Review of Books,
November 10, 2016, http://www2.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html,
accessed November 13, 2016

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week,
which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches . Confronted
with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority
figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the
world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history.
Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included
periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of
relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that
the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that,
Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets againbut by that time Dubnow
had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in
historyits just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the
Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed
unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man
once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone
half of a quarter centurys accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy. Of course, the United
States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and
Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The
problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather
than in law, and all of themincluding the ones enshrined in lawdepend on the good
faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution. The national press is likely to be
among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There
is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold
daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long
familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer),
for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information. The
power of the investigative presswhose
adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning
Trump campaignwill grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some
mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government,
or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues.
Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign
when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective
responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the eyes and ears of
law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make
good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States . Rule #4:
Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But
in the
face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain
ones capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical,
and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare
yourself. Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American
leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on
the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This
means not only that Trump
will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an
unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase ithis ideal is the
totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putinand the way to achieve that is through
There will be more wars, abroad and at home. Rule #5:
mobilization.

Dont make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump
utterly amoral and a pathological liar to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an
amazing victory for the American worker, Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative
pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats
in Congress will begin to make the
case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything doneor at least, they will say,
minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a
transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the
new administration. This will be fruitlessdamage cannot be minimized, much less reversed,
when mobilization is the goalbut worse, it will be soul-destroying. In
an autocracy,
politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those
who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that
cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of
autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
4. Sovereign Inhabitance DA. Their focus on the state and governmental action as the
primary political actor mystifies the function of settler colonialism. Settler sovereignty
exists as an embodied practice by which the settler body itself carries with it its own
implicit claim to sovereignty. This occludes the quotidian, affective ways by which subjects
settle land and establish a settler biopolitics. Our very presence in this debate is an
embodiment of sovereignty and the state, which means their look to political instantiation
prevents challenging everyday practices. Thats Rifkin and Isaki.
5. Deliberation DA. Their model of debate presumes that rationalist communication can
provide us with proximate truths. This ignores that how we come to think and act is
formed primarily by affective associations that are instantiated through discursive
repetitions. Its not through logical reason that settlers attach themselves to emotional
communities associated with belonging, nor is it through rational dialogue that the settler
state recruits and incorporates new subjects. Only a focus on disrupting the affective
formations that constellate how we think and act can solve. Neuroscience proves.
Livingston 12 prof of govt @ Cornell
(Alex, Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public Sphere, Philosophy &
Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2012), pp. 269-294, Project MUSE)

The first step in exploring the potential of William Connolly's reluctant theory of deliberative democracy is to come to terms with the reasons
why he thinks extant accounts of communicative politics are insufficient. Intellectualism, Connolly argues, is the
grand failing of deliberative democracy. In accusing deliberative democracy of intellectualism, he is not issuing a by-now familiar
criticism of deliberative rationalism. To say that deliberative democracy is guilty of intellectualism is not to say that
it is blind to questions of power, or identity, or differenceor at least it's not only to say thisbut rather that
deliberative models of democracy are working with a faulty conception of thinking. They have
been captured by what Gilles Deleuze calls the image of thoughtthe idea that thinking is an autonomous,
linguistically mediated process of mind that is oriented toward coherence and truth (1994, 129
67). Deliberative thinking takes place at one relatively transparent register where our reasons for action
can be compared, reasoned about, and revised through the force of the better argument.
This image of thought is intellectualist because it fails to see how thought is a layered process of neural,
perceptual, and embodied activity not reducible to conceptual ratiocination alone. Attempts
to give priority to the highest and conceptually most sophisticated brain nodules in thinking and
judgment, Connolly argues, may encourage those invested in these theories to underestimate the importance
of body image, unconscious motor memory, and thought-imbued affect (2002, 10). Against the intellectualist image
of thought, Connolly argues that thinking is distributed across multiple registers that make possible visceral
modes of appraisal (1999, 27). It is these deep, intensive, and reactive visceral modes of thinking
and judgment that the deliberative image of thinking overlooks. Disgust, for example, is a visceral
response that makes your stomach turn. It seems to well up inside you without your willing it. The
values and beliefs of others can sometimes stimulate this kind of feeling, say, if they present you with a
defense of cloning, or euthanasia, or gay marriage, as the case may be. You can't always put your finger on what it is that strikes you as so
disgusting and morally contaminating about such proposals, but sometimes you just feel that they are plain wrong. We're unable to
provide defensible reasons for our responses. Sometimes things just rub us the wrong way. Connolly's point is that visceral
and embodied responses like disgust, shame, and hatred come to play a role in political
decision makingas they evidently do in political deliberations about matters such as cloning, euthanasia, and gay marriageand
that a deliberative approach is poorly equipped to deal with them. Deliberative democrats
either require that these sorts of affective feelings are purged from the public sphere as
unfortunate distortions of real communication, or they suggest that they can be subject to
deliberation and argument just as any other sort of belief, interest, or prejudice can be.
Connolly thinks that both of these approaches are bound to fail. Visceral reactions are not conceptually
sophisticated thoughts and as such are not amenable to deliberation, argumentation, or verbal persuasion.
The exchange of validity claims alone is not enough to stop your stomach from churning when you think about the right to die. Deliberative
democrats need to learn how much more there is to thinking than argument and to begin
experimenting with alternative forms of political engagement (1999, 149). Because political
judgment is so often carried out at the level of this visceral or virtual register, deliberation cannot provide
a privileged or efficacious form of participation, justification, or transformation. To corroborate these claims about
the multiple registers of thinking, Connolly turns to recent findings in neuroscience that suggest a more intimate
relationship between reason, the emotions, and the body than the intellectualist account assumes. Like some
other political theorists, Connolly hopes that a closer engagement with neurology and cognitive science will provide
grounds for a more adequate account of subjectivity, reason, and ethics.3 The kind of thinking that
intellectualists privilegesophisticated, conceptual, reflective, deliberative, and linguistically mediated
thoughtpertains to the activity of the largest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. It is through the rich
and complex layers of neural activity in the cortex that we can perform intricate activities like planning,
speaking, reasoning, and arguing. What recent findings in neuroscience suggest, however, is that cortical activity is not
autonomous and is in fact in some ways subservient to the parts of the brain that control
emotions, memory, and affect.4 In particular, the cortex responds to information from the limbic system,
the small curved part of the brain below the cortex that controls emotion and fine motor movement. Made up of the basal ganglia, the
hippocampus, and the amygdala, the limbic system enables the fast, intensive, and reactive action of affects. The jolt
of fear that makes one's hair stand on end or the disgust that we feel in the pit of our stomachs is the work of the part of the limbic system called
the amygdala. The sort of reactions governed by this system are an evolutionary necessity for a species that needs to appraise and respond to
dangerous situations quickly and effectively without much cognitive expenditure. The decision to jump out of the way of a speeding car needs to
happen in a split second. It is not the sort of situation that allows you to deliberate about the relative merits of your different options before acting.
But thisis not to say that the limbic system is entirely thoughtless. It is not concerned with sophisticated,
conceptual, and deliberative thinking, but its actions certainly are symbolically mediated or
thought imbued in some sense (the expression is Connolly's). These intense affective responses are not
entirely biologically determined but instead take a fair deal of cultural learning. The limbic system
in a sense learns or records cultural standards of what is dangerous and what is disgusting and then
habituates them as automated response.5 Between the cortex and limbic system there is a feedback loop of mutual influence
through which these fast, affective, proto-thoughts of the limbic system shape the slow, reflective thinking of the cortex (2002). The existence
of these intensive, instinctive elements moving below the register of reflective judgment means that human reason is not pure and
autonomous but rather is shaped in a complex way at the neural level by the influence of the emotions and
affects.6 David Hume, it would seem, was right to say that reason is in fact the slave of the passions. And what this means for
politics is that the emotions and affects that shape and guide thinking are themselves
deeply influenced by values and opinions that we may or may not actually want to endorse.
Racist, sexist, homophobic, and other ideological sentiments may lodge themselves deeply into this body-brain-culture network (2002). Where
and sound argumentation is at a loss to dislodge them and the force of the better
this is the case, valid
argument may be powerless to persuade us to respect, tolerate, or trust each other in the
ways that democratic cooperation require. Connolly explains: Culturally preorganized charges shape
perception and judgment in ways that exceed the picture of the world supported by the models of
calculative reason, intersubjective culture, and deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain
regions respond not only to events in the world but also, proprioceptively, to cultural habits, skills, memory traces, and affects mixed into our
muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions. (2002, 36) This all culminates in a critique of deliberative models of democracy: the
inability of
practical reason to influence these potentially dangerous or hateful culturally preorganized charges
points to its undoing. VISCERAL POLITICS Before analyzing the merits of Connolly's critique of deliberative democracy I want to first
situate his charge of intellectualism within its political context. At its heart, Connolly's objection to the deliberative turn in
democratic theory boil down to his belief that too much focus on the terms of justification and
legitimation ignores the everyday sensibilities expressed and reproduced in the actions of
citizens. These sensibilities are not identical to doctrinal beliefs or articulate reasons; or, as he prefers to put it in his most recent book,
spirituality is not identical with doctrinal creed (2008). Rather, the
sensibility that determines how it is that we hold our
beliefs or creed is unreflectively informs this visceral register of judgment and thinking. Where these
sensibilities have been cultivated to promote respect, responsiveness, and generosity a pluralistic liberalism can thrive. The political problem,
however, is that in contemporary America this noble ethos is largely absent. Instead Connolly argues that this visceral register has become a
vehicle for a stingy sensibility animated by resentment, fear, and a desire for revenge (1999, 7). The deep roots of existential resentment in an
increasingly disempowered American working class today provide the spiritual common ground for the an emerging coalition of competing
neoconservative and neoliberal elites who share a punitive and vengeful ethic while disagreeing on matters of doctrine. The resulting theological-
corporate-media apparatus Connolly calls the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine wreaks havoc on American democracy today as it
proceeds to undermine the terms of liberal pluralism and roll back the hard-won achievements of the liberal democratic struggles of the last
hundred years (2008, 3968). Democratic theory's idea of deliberation seems poorly equipped to confront this threat. Connolly's contention is that
the failing of the left in America today is due in no small part to its resistance to accepting
the role of the visceral register in politics. Instead, it is still caught up in a potentially antiquated search
for some better argument that would bring reason and truth together to serve the ends of justice . The
American right, however, has been a much better student of the visceral elements of thinking and has crafted an array of strategies that seek to
manipulate it to punitive ends. Among working-class Americans who have suffered unemployment with the collapse of the industrial economy,
cultural alienation from a powerfully secular and liberal cultural elite, and social fragmentation from the increasing speed, ethnic pluralism, and
diversity of a globalizing world, there exists a reserve of resentment to be tapped. Neoliberals
and neoconservatives on the
American right have overcome their traditional antagonism to draw on this resentment and
channel it into a shared spirituality of revenge that vilifies foreigners, immigrants, nonwhites, women,
queers, liberals, and secularists.7 Crucial to the success of this resonance machine has been its most powerful echo chamber: the
media. Savvy exploitation of new media technologies enable conditions of mass persuasion through which the sentiments of resentment are
validated, entering the thought-imbued feelings of viewers before being subjected to critical scrutiny (2008, 55), and channeled to political
ends. Twenty-four-hour news shows, aggressive and partisan pundits, and the constant fluctuation of terror
alerts all combine to excite, code, and steer visceral fear and anxiety. The result is the proliferation of ugly
dispositions that the powerful media machinery of the right can foment and amplify, installing them in habitual patterns of perception, identity,
interest, and judgments of entitlement (2008, 53). Micropolitics as the manipulation of embodied, intensive affects along the visceral register of
thinking is a familiar tactic in the repertoire of commercial capitalism and the state. Marketers and advertisers have long drawn
on findings in psychology, neurobiology, and related fields to manufacture the desires their commodities
satisfy. Branding is only the most recent affective technique of assuring consumer loyalty in a long history of unconscious and unwilled
consumption. Marketers now talk about low-involvement advertising that bypasses the higher-level cognitive functions of viewers to appeal to
nonconscious mental processing. Similarly, the
manipulation of intensive reactions and affect has been
crucial in sus-taining consent for America's open-ended war on terror. The color-coded terror alert
system in place to warn Americans of the likelihood of terrorist attacks functions as a perceptual marker by which public fear and anxiety are
calibrated. The aggressive rhetorical tactics, facial gestures, and vocal timbre of conservative media pundits like Bill O'Reilly and Rush
Limbaugh as well as the explosive graphics, and fast cutting techniques of twenty-four-hour news channels all have the effect of expressing the
spinelessness of the liberals they browbeat.8 And the list goes on. Techniques
of affective persuasion that function
through sub-discursive modes of communication are ubiquitous and powerful in the
modern world (2008, 66). The challenge of confronting them today, Connolly wagers, means learning to play their game. The left
is done arguing. It's time to learn how fight fire with fire (2006, 74).

6. Colonial Education DA Their framework focuses debate on particular discriminatory

acts, which produces a limited understanding of how larger sets of relationships produce
environmental violence in the first place. This means their model of education produces
colonial subjects.
McLean 2013. Sheelah, Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan The
Canadian Geographer. The whiteness of green: Racialization and environmental education.

Kahn (2008) and Gonzalez-Guadiano (2005) argue that, across North America, environmental
education programs are primarily
experiential and lack
a connection to social and political issues. Critical scholars also acknowledge that
environmental education lacks a critical race analysis and generally does not include a history of
colonial violence or a political analysis of the destruction of the environment. The theories,
policies, and discursive themes in environmental education are drawn from a western
framework and often disregard Indigenous issues globally (GonzalezGuadiano 2005). Many critical scholars
contend that these
western theories essentialize nature and create binary views of nature and wilderness
(Baldwin 2009a, 2009b; Erickson 2010). According to Kahn (2008), this
can be traced to the history of environmental
education and the foundational role that forest conservation played in its inception. The first two waves of
environmental education were led by middle-class white male scholars, and have proved harmful in
promoting strategies that could work across historically produced differences such as gender, race, class, and sexuality (Kahn 2008). Numerous
environmental education programs position their curriculum within a post-racial context,
where sustainability is proposed as a panacea for industrialism, while silencing industrys
relationship to colonization. This problematic positioning was commonly identified by many outdoor education student-
participants: Even in [outdoor education] that was more environmentally focused and the environmental movement, as critical as it is about a lot
of things it isnt critical about race or privilege or any of those types of issues (Xochitl). As Churchill (2003) contends, the
destructive
elements of contemporary globalization insatiable greed for resources, genocidal
disregard for life, militarism, and racismall trace their lineage in North America back to
the invasion by Europeans in the 16th century. The colonial relationship between white-settler
society and Indigenous Peoples is foundational to land-based struggles. The construction of whiteness as a
form of individual accumulation relies on the consumption of land and resources. Canadian whiteness was
not simply imported from Europe but forged through the colonial encounter (Milligan and McCreary 2011).
Many environmental education programs problematically centre ecology in a frame that
focuses on the effects of environmental destruction, which depoliticizes and silences
primary causes such as colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. As a result, the socially
acceptable solutions students are invited to engage in are often individualistic, and celebrate white
middleclass subjectivities through activities such as recycling, biking, or buying from organic Farmers Marketssuch solutions
do not challenge racialized systems of inequality. Sarah: I felt like [outdoor education] actually was more like environmentally
based and I feel like I had a really good handle on that but then I wanted more of the human rights side of things like colonization, things going
on with the government, and all that kind of stuff. Sheelah: What did the [outdoor education] program focus on when you were there? Sarah: It
was totally environmentally based, conservation based but it wasnt really the systems that make the environmental situations the way they are.
Its more focusing on your personal ways to change things, like riding your bike everywhere, recycling, all that kind of stuff. Sheelah: Like our
own footprint...? Sarah: Exactly. Instead of looking at the government that passes legislature [sic] that allows big companies to do whatever to the
environment. Student-participants indicated that their environmental education curricula did not allow for the type of power analysis that might
evoke crucial questions such as who benefits from environmental destruction? This absence of a race analysis encourages a failure to
acknowledge The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe canadien 2013, 57(3): 354362 358 Sheelah McLean white supremacy as a
system of ongoing colonial privilege and consumption. Where there may be discussion of
environmental racism in environmental education, this type of analysis focuses on the effects of
particular discriminatory acts on communities of color (Pulido 2000). Pulido (2000) argues that this frame
conveys a limited understanding of racialization, failing to analyze how environmental
injustice has been coconstructed through a set of relationships between spaces that have
been racialized. Without an analysis of the unequal consequences of environmental destruction on all
racialized communities, environmental education can become a place where good white people
can maintain superiority by saving both the environment and people of color, which includes
Indigenous communities devastated by environmental destruction.