Tournament: Rochester | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

In this room there are four debaters that come from colleges with the resources to field debate teams. My partner and I believe that we should set aside that privilege in order to confront the historical and ongoing dynamics of oppression that affect Native Americans. As queer subjects, we don’t conform to stable concepts of gender and identity. From this position, we can challenge the normative categories that dominate Native peoples and destabilize their value. We are called to respond to a resolution that uses the term “the United States” not once, but twice, referencing both a governmental and spatial entity. We believe that to talk about energy production “in the United States,” it is imperative for us to first discuss how this idea of energy has played out in and against Native American communities since Contact, 500 years ago.

Native peoples are increasingly resisting neoliberal developmental paradigms, which have dominated indigenous cultural and economic life since first contact with European settlers. Native Americans are demanding independent control over energy projects to combat this history of colonial control and to free themselves from the discursive thrall of colonial development.

Powell, Dana, ‘06, “Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement, Development (2006) 49, 125–132. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100287

In her work with the indigenous movement in Ecuador, Catherine Walsh speaks of the movement’s building of local alternatives as ‘the resignifying in meaning and practice of development’ (Walsh, 2002: 7). Development, with its long history of top-down, state-driven, regulatory, and often export- and expert-oriented goals, is being increasingly challenged by indigenous social movements in the Americas seeking to decentralize and gain local control over various aspects of governance, economic growth, cultural projects, and natural resources. Not completely unlike the Ecuadorian Pachakutik movement Walsh describes, the movement for ‘environmental justice’ in indigenous communities in the US is experimenting with alternative strategies to restructure the production of power to advance democracy and sovereignty for indigenous communities. This essay addresses the possible resignification of development being produced by the practices and discourses of a particular indigenous movement in the US, which addresses controversies over natural resource management on reservation lands. In particular, I consider the emergence of renewable energy projects within the movement as new modes of economic, ecological, and cultural development, countering the history of biopolitical regimes of natural resource extraction, which have marked indigenous experience in North America since Contact. I argue that these emerging technologies not only resist but also propose alternatives to the dominant models of energy production in the US. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975 enabled American Indian tribes for the first time to self-determine their own resource policies and regulatory agencies, overseeing tribal programs, services, and development projects. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act opened the way for the development of casinos on reservations as a new mode of tribal economic development, and today 34% of all federally recognized tribes run full-scale (class III) casino gambling, although only a minute fraction of these represents the soaring economic success of places like Foxwoods Casino and Resort on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation. These and other approaches to economic development – especially natural resource extraction and casino gaming – have become issues of intense debate among scholars and activists (LaDuke, 1999; Gedicks, 2001; Blaser et al., 2004; Cattelino, 2004; Hosmer and O’Neill, 2004), as well as among tribal governments, federal agencies, and within the general population.  In the cacophony of competing moral claims and recommended approaches elicited by these various controversies, the voices with alternative proposals are sometimes lost. Against these two dominant approaches, there is another trend in tribal economic development beginning to emerge, connected to the indigenous environmental justice movement (IEJM) in North America and critical of neo-liberal development models. Drawing upon an historical conflict over resource extraction on reservation lands (see Figure 1), this movement is turning towards what David Korten has called an ‘emergent alternative wisdom’ of development practice (Korten, 2005). This trend, embedded in a broader network of environmental justice projects in Native America, is a move towards renewable energy technologies on reservations: wind power and solar power in particular. While these projects engage wider energy markets, global discourses on climate change and the ‘end of oil,’ and funds from federal agencies, they also embody an alternative knowledge grounded in an historical, indigenous social movement in which economic justice for indigenous peoples is intimately intermeshed with questions of ecological wellness and cultural preservation. As such, wind and solar technologies are being presented and implemented as alternative approaches to dominant practices of economic development and carry with them a history of centuries of struggle, as well as the hope for a better future.

These emerging practices of a social movement-driven development agenda draw our attention to the cultural politics, meanings, histories, and conceptual contributions posited by unconventional development projects. As part of an emerging movement in support of localized wind and solar energy production on tribal lands, these projects are responses to the biopolitical operations of 20^th century development projects. They respond to a long history of removal, regulation, knowledge production, and life-propagating techniques administered on reservation-based peoples. The movement itself addresses controversies in a way that interweaves the economic, the ecological, the cultural, and the embodied aspects of being and being well in the world; as a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) said to me:

The movement is really about health and people dying…people can’t have an enjoyable life anymore. The work of the movement is never about the power plant itself, but about how all the EJ (environmental justice) issues come together and link up to affect people’s lives…it’s about having a good life (B Shimek, 2004, personal communication).

Such an analysis resonates with Arturo Escobar’s emphasis on a framework of a ‘political ecology of difference’ and the need to consider ‘cultural distribution’ conflicts in studies or other engagements with natural resource issues (Escobar (2006) Introduction). Concerns of ‘cultural distribution’ have become crucial work for the IEJM as it seeks to resignify development as ‘environmental justice’ in the context of a particular history of illness and disease, environmental contamination, poverty, and place-based worldviews. I argue that the way in which the IEJM has coalesced around these alternative development projects suggests that these projects are ‘technologies of resistance’ (Hess, 1995) to dominant forms of economic development, but also – and perhaps more significantly – imaginative technologies of existence, mediating a particular discourse of natural resource controversies, including values of a ‘good life’. As such, renewable energy technologies are resignifying the politics of ‘sustainability’ through the movement’s concept of ‘environmental justice’, which cuts across reductive interpretations of economy, ecology, and culture.

To contextualize this discourse about development, let us also look at the history of USFG interaction with Native American populations:

EXAMPLES

All of this information from the website of The Library of Congress at: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/alt/native_american.html

1492-Columbus seizes control of America for the Spanish Crown. At this time, population estimates for Native Americans hover around 18 million people

1763-Proclamation of 1763 put into place by the British Crown, limiting colonization to areas east of the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists object to this limitation, and want to expand the colonies to gain access to the land and resources further west. This becomes one of the prime causes of the American Revolution. Essentially, part of the original impetus for the founding of the US was the desire to appropriate Native American territory for European use.

1786-first Indian reservation established

1830-Indian Removal Act

1832-Supreme Court upholds Cherokee side

1838-Thousands of federal soldiers and Georgian volunteers hunt, imprison, rape, and murder Native Americans. Over the course of the 1000-mile “Trail of Tears,” 4000 Cherokee die

1852-Report: The Indians of Southern California in 1852 states that “The opinion then current among Californians, most of whom were not in contact with the southern California Indians of the following report, was that destiny had awarded California to the Americans to develop, that the aborigines were no asset to the state, and that wherever they interfered with progress they should be pushed aside. The state proceeded to implement this opinion by authorizing military campaigns against Indians alleged to have committed depredations and by accepting the bills for such work as a charge against the state treasury.”

1864-Union Army engages in a campaign to relocate Navajos to reservation by destroying everything they owned. The thousands who surrendered were forced to walk 300 miles to Fort Sumner, NM, where they were kept in a tiny disease-ridden camp as prisoners for four years.

1868-Native Americans excluded from constitutional amendments granting the right to vote

1875-USFG opens Black Hills to gold mining,

1876-Little Big Horn, following which the USFG forced the Sioux and Cheyenne onto reservations

1860s-1880s-buffalo hunted into virtual extinction

An account cited by the L of C, written by Noah Armstrong: “We came upon a smouldering sic campfire and the remains of a buffalo . . . . and a row of Indians going down the path single file. We opened fire as we were accustomed to doing and killed two of the Indians . . . . and chased them right on into a white camp and found to our dismay that we had been chasing Government Indians . . . sent out with United State Officers . . . to show them how to hunt buffalo. We . . . had to go into court over killing the Indians, but it was settled in our favor.”

1887-Dawes Act dissolves communal ownership, forcing Native Americans to own land as individuals while reducing the total land under Native control and handing the rest over to settlers. Its intention was to Euro-Americanize Native people and assimilate them

1890-Wounded Knee, 300 Lakota killed in attempt to suppress Native religious practices

by 1900-Population down to 250,000

between 1952 and 1956-USFG sells 1.6 million acres of Native American land to developers

It is evident from this history that the results of settlement have been disastrous for Native Americans, and have far reaching effects that continue to obscure the history of oppression and the subjugation of Native identities.

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

I am compelled by Puar's analysis, which I extend at the intersections of queer studies and Native studies. Puar presents the term homonationalism to explain how racialized sexuality and national terror interact today. I interpret homonationalism as an effect of U.S. queer modernities forming amid the conquest of Native peoples and the settling of Native land. The terrorizing sexual colonization End Page 105 of Native peoples was a historical root of the biopolitics of modern sexuality in the United States. Colonists interpreted diverse practices of gender and sexuality as signs of a general primitivity among Native peoples. Over time, they produced a colonial necropolitics that framed Native peoples as queer populations marked for death. Colonization produced the biopolitics of modern sexuality that I call "settler sexuality": a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects. Despite having formed in the United States to serve Anglo-American landowning classes and the Euro-ethnics they absorbed, settler definitions of modern sexuality became hegemonic for all non-Natives, as well as for Native people who sought ties to sexual modernity. Settler colonialism thus conditioned the formation of modern sexuality in the United States, including  By the mid-twentieth century U.S. sexual minority movements had formed on normatively white and national terms, which could include reversing the discourses marking them as primitive and embracing a primitive or specifically Native sexual nature. Non-Native queers of color long remained marginal to such projects or critiqued them, as their participants or as the organizers of queer of color coalitions. But over time non-Natives were able to form shared identities and movements to claim modern sexual citizenship in the settler state. Under such conditions, queer movements can naturalize settlement and assume a homonormative and national form that may be read specifically as settler homonationalism. My reading of settler homonationalism extends a larger project in which I am centering settler colonialism as a condition of the formation of modern queer subjects, cultures, and politics in the United States.⁵http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f5(%%) Narrating Native histories of sexuality and gender while absenting Native people from sexual modernity produces U.S. queer projects as settler formations. Such projects remain distant from Native queer activisms that challenge the colonial formation of modern sexuality, by denaturalizing settlement, reimagining subjugated Native knowledges, and fostering Native survivance within broader work for decolonization. Inspired by Native queer activisms and Indigenous feminist and queer critiques, my historical and ethnographic work traces the processes that made settler definitions of sexual modernity normative in U.S. queer projects. I conduct this work as a non-Native and white participant in the multiracial U.S. queer cultures and politics I critically engage, and from within allied and dialogic relationships with Native queer activisms and Indigenous queer and feminist work in Native studies. My work invites new conversation among queer of color, queer diasporic, and Indigenous queer critiques and all critical queer projects in the United States that End Page 106 would disrupt homonationalism, by calling all to mark and challenge its settler formation.

Interrogating the normativity of settlement is a prerequisite to addressing all other issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Our solidarity with Native American causes is rooted in a problematization of the legitimacy of the state and the society that condition our identities.

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

What would it mean for U.S. queers to confront their settler formation? What would resistance to settler homonationalism look like? While I cannot foresee an end to these questions, I begin with the deceptively simple argument that queers must denaturalize settler colonialism in all its forms. Queers naturalize settler colonialism whenever conquest and the displacement of Native peoples are ignored or appear inevitable. They also do so whenever they produce sexuality and gender from the desires of settler subjects for a home on Native land and relationship to Native histories and culture. Settler colonialism thus must be challenged not only in social and political spaces but also in the definition or experience of subjectivity. For instance, non-Natives may think that as queer subjects, they inherit ties to Native histories of gender or sexual diversity that grant them a kind of kinship with Native peoples. Identifying this way, non-Native queers may think that the terrors of sexual colonization visited on Native peoples were caused by persons unrelated to them or that those same violences were visited on themselves, either of which may obscure their specific non-Native relation to Native peoples and settler colonialism. At its extreme, non-Native queer longing for Native histories of sexuality or gender can seem to invite alliance when it performs a racial or national "passing" End Page 121 that appropriates Native culture in order to indigenize non-Native queers. Native queer and Two-Spirit activists critique such practices, including offers of alliance that try to absorb them or Native histories into non-Native politics. While Two-Spirit activists have sought recognition in U.S. queer spaces, they have done so less to join them than to hold them responsible to the distinctions of Native histories, which remind non-Natives that colonization continues to shape contemporary life.

Non-Native queers can learn from Native activists how to focus their identities and politics on challenging settler colonialism. What does it mean for non-Natives, located differently as they are by race and nationality, to study their formation in a settler society: knowing one's home is not one's own; knowing one feels at home only to the degree that others remain dispossessed; being accountable to histories of Native displacement by questioning one's sense of place? One site where these questions have been asked has been in queer of color coalitions that form intimately with Native queer activism. Such projects have noted that non-Native queers of color can inherit the power of settlers despite their anti-racism or anticolonialism, and they have theorized the varied colonial histories that shape non-Native queers of color and Native queers from within new and decolonial queer theories and activisms.⁵⁵http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f55(%%) How can non-Native queers of color in the United States continue to theorize histories of forced migration, slavery, occupation, and globalized labor as effects of white supremacist colonization, and the ancestral histories notably linking Chicana/o, Latina/o, and African American communities to Native Americans, while still vigilantly challenging wherever they may sustain or benefit from settler colonialism? Such critical reckonings with settler colonialism rarely have arisen in normatively white U.S. queer spaces, where the need for them is dire. White queers still must recognize race and nation as intrinsic to their formation by sexuality and gender. How then can they mark settler colonialism as a primary context of their racial and national formation? How can they then trace the histories that sought to merge Anglo colonists, Euro-ethnic immigrants, and hosts of persons marked by whiteness into the normative status of settler subjects —a persistent status, like whiteness, that cannot be dismissed but must be perpetually interrogated?

THUS OUR ADVOCACY:

JJ and I affirm the place of the resolution in the history of energy production in the United States.

Because of this recontextualization, it is crucial for non-native queers to step away from the privileges afforded by settlement, and to challenge colonial settlement.

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

Denaturalizing settler colonialism will mark it as not a fait accompli but a process open to change. While settlement suggests the appropriation of land, that history was never fixed: even the violence of allotment failed to erase collective Native land claims, just as land expropriation is being countered by tribal governments reacquiring sovereign land. In turn, as Thomas King and Paul Carter suggest, settlement narrates the land, and, as storytelling, it remains open to debate, End Page 122 such as in Native activisms that sustain Indigenous narratives of land or tell new stories to denaturalize settler landscapes.⁵⁶http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f56(%%) The processes of settler colonialism produce contradictions, as settlers try to contain or erase Native difference in order that they may inhabit Native land as if it were their own. Doing so produces the contortions described by Deloria, as settler subjects argue that Native people or their land claims never existed, no longer exist, or if they do are trumped by the priority of settler claims. Yet at the same time settler subjects study Native history so that they may absorb it as their own and legitimate their place on stolen land.⁵⁷http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f57(%%) These contradictions are informed by the knowledge, constantly displaced, of the genocidal histories of occupation. Working to stabilize settler subjectivity produces the bizarre result of people admitting to histories of terrorizing violence while basing their moral systems on continuing to benefit from them. The difference between conservative and liberal positions on settlement often breaks between whether non-Natives feel morally justified or conscionably implicated in a society based on violence. But while the first position embraces the status quo, the second does nothing necessarily to change it. As Smith pointedly argues, "It is a consistent practice among progressives to bemoan the genocide of Native peoples, but in the interest of political expediency, implicitly sanction it by refusing to question the illegitimacy of the settler nation responsible for this genocide."⁵⁸http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f58(%%) In writing with Kehaulani Kauanui, Smith argues that this complicity continues, as progressives have critiqued the seeming erosion of civil liberties and democracy under the Bush regime. How is this critique affected if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as predicated on the genocide of indigenous people? . . . Even scholars critical of the nation-state often tend to presume that the United States will always exist, and thus they overlook indigenous feminist articulations of alternative forms of governance beyond the United States in particular and the nation-state in general.⁵⁹http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f59(%%) Smith and Kauanui remind us here that Indigenous feminists crucially theorize life beyond settler colonialism, including by fostering terms for national community that exceed the heteropatriarchal nation-state form.⁶⁰http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f60(%%) Non-Natives who seek accountable alliance with Native people may align themselves with these stakes if they wish to commit to denaturalizing settler colonialism. But as noted, their more frequent effort to stabilize their identities follows less from a belief that settlement is natural than from a compulsion to foreclose the Pandora's box of contradictions End Page 123 they know will open by calling it into question. In U.S. queer politics, this includes the implications of my essay: queers will invoke and repeat the terrorizing histories of settler colonialism if these remain obscured behind normatively white and national desires for Native roots and settler citizenship. A first step for non-Native queers thus can be to examine critically and challenge how settler colonialism conditions their lives, as a step toward imagining new and decolonial sexual subjectivities, cultures, and politics. This work can be inspired by historical coalition politics formed by queers of color in accountable relationship to Native queer activists. Yet this work invites even more forms, particularly when Native queers choose to organize apart. White queers challenging racism and colonialism can join queers of color to create new queer politics marked explicitly as non-Native, in that they will form by answering Native queer critiques. As part of that work, non-Native queers can study the colonial histories they differently yet mutually inherit, and can trouble the colonial institutions in which they have sought their freedom, as steps toward shifting non-Native queer politics in decolonizing directions. 

Native communities have found that legal and legislative reforms for their communities are merely hollow victories. In the fight for independence, these reforms are coopted to resemble and worsen the capitalist and colonial logics that dominate indigenous peoples in the first place.

Gorelick, Melisa, 2005, Indian Country Today Newspaper, http://www.powwows.com/gathering/archive/index.php?t-30329.html 

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Problems in the Native community require uniquely Native solutions, said cutting-edge American Indian scholar Taiaiake Alfred at a recent Syracuse University lecture. Alfred, a Mohawk who teaches in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, discussed the contents of his new book, ''Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom'' - namely, ways in which Natives can learn to live and think as Onkwehonkwe, original people. The book, he said, is based on the experiences of Natives who have accomplished this goal. ''It is time for our people to live again,'' the book begins. It goes on to detail a journey away from the effects of the white invasion of the Americas, which Alfred sees as the source of most major problems in Indian communities today. ''The journey is a living commitment to meaningful change in our lives by ... regenerating our cultures, and struggling against the forces that keep us bound to our colonial past,'' Alfred wrote. Colonial values have become ingrained in the Indian community, he said, addressing a packed room at the Syracuse University College of Law. These values, which run contrary to traditional Native beliefs, have caused long-standing problems of the community, the body and the spirit. ''The most damaging aspect of colonization was the way it was premised on a relationship of white domination and Indian subordination,'' said Scott Lyons, a Native scholar and creative writing professor at Syracuse University who attended Alfred's lecture. This colonial notion of Indian inferiority was drilled into Native communities throughout history, Lyons added. The policy of allotment, for example - privatizing and parceling out tribal land to individuals - was designed to create capitalistic values in the Indian community. Capitalism, and the dependency on the non-Native world that necessarily accompanies it, still dominates Indian life today. For this reason, Alfred said, Natives have discovered that the legal and legislative battles won by their communities over the last few decades are what he called ''hollow victories.'' Tribal courts and indigenous governments, for instance, have arisen, and many Natives communities have won independence from the United States or Canada. Too often, however, these institutions resemble those of the colonizers. No real change can come from the halls, desks and courts of such institutions. ''When it comes down to surviving or not surviving, none of these laws are going to matter,'' said Regina Jones, an Oneida and the program coordinator for Syracuse's Office of Multicultural Affairs, who also attended the lecture. ''What we really need is a society that doesn't depend on department stores.'' Recalling his first two books, Alfred traced the evolution of Indian resistance to colonial problems over the last few decades. Native scholars and activists soon realized that legal victories were ''very dangerous,'' leading to more dependency on white ways of thinking.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Observation 1: Here and now

In this room there are four debaters that share the privilege of being at a debate tournament today. My partner and I believe that we should examine our privilege and our social location to confront both the historical and the ongoing dynamics of oppression that affect indigenous communities. As queer subjects, we don’t conform to stable concepts of gender and identity. From this position, we challenge the normative categories that dominate and devalue indigenous peoples. Today, we are called to respond to a resolution that uses the term “the United States” not once, but twice, in reference to both a spatial and governmental entity. We believe that to talk about energy production “in the United States,” it is imperative for us to first discuss how the idea of energy has played out in and against Native American communities since Contact, 500 years ago. 

Native peoples are increasingly resisting neoliberal developmental paradigms, which have dominated indigenous cultural and economic life since Contact. Native Americans are demanding independent control over energy projects to combat the history of colonialism and to free themselves from the discursive thrall of colonial development.

Powell, Dana, ‘06, “Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement, Development (2006) 49, 125–132. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100287

In her work with the indigenous movement in Ecuador, Catherine Walsh speaks of the movement’s building of local alternatives as ‘the resignifying in meaning and practice of development’ (Walsh, 2002: 7). Development, with its long history of top-down, state-driven, regulatory, and often export- and expert-oriented goals, is being increasingly challenged by indigenous social movements in the Americas seeking to decentralize and gain local control over various aspects of governance, economic growth, cultural projects, and natural resources. Not completely unlike the Ecuadorian Pachakutik movement Walsh describes, the movement for ‘environmental justice’ in indigenous communities in the US is experimenting with alternative strategies to restructure the production of power to advance democracy and sovereignty for indigenous communities. This essay addresses the possible resignification of development being produced by the practices and discourses of a particular indigenous movement in the US, which addresses controversies over natural resource management on reservation lands. In particular, I consider the emergence of renewable energy projects within the movement as new modes of economic, ecological, and cultural development, countering the history of biopolitical regimes of natural resource extraction, which have marked indigenous experience in North America since Contact.

I argue that these emerging technologies not only resist but also propose alternatives to the dominant models of energy production in the US. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975 enabled American Indian tribes for the first time to self-determine their own resource policies and regulatory agencies, overseeing tribal programs, services, and development projects. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act opened the way for the development of casinos on reservations as a new mode of tribal economic development, and today 34% of all federally recognized tribes run full-scale (class III) casino gambling, although only a minute fraction of these represents the soaring economic success of places like Foxwoods Casino and Resort on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation. These and other approaches to economic development – especially natural resource extraction and casino gaming – have become issues of intense debate among scholars and activists (LaDuke, 1999; Gedicks, 2001; Blaser et al., 2004; Cattelino, 2004; Hosmer and O’Neill, 2004), as well as among tribal governments, federal agencies, and within the general population.  In the cacophony of competing moral claims and recommended approaches elicited by these various controversies, the voices with alternative proposals are sometimes lost. Against these two dominant approaches, there is another trend in tribal economic development beginning to emerge, connected to the indigenous environmental justice movement (IEJM) in North America and critical of neo-liberal development models. Drawing upon an historical conflict over resource extraction on reservation lands (see Figure 1), this movement is turning towards what David Korten has called an ‘emergent alternative wisdom’ of development practice (Korten, 2005). This trend, embedded in a broader network of environmental justice projects in Native America, is a move towards renewable energy technologies on reservations: wind power and solar power in particular. While these projects engage wider energy markets, global discourses on climate change and the ‘end of oil,’ and funds from federal agencies, they also embody an alternative knowledge grounded in an historical, indigenous social movement in which economic justice for indigenous peoples is intimately intermeshed with questions of ecological wellness and cultural preservation. As such, wind and solar technologies are being presented and implemented as alternative approaches to dominant practices of economic development and carry with them a history of centuries of struggle, as well as the hope for a better future. 

These emerging practices of a social movement-driven development agenda draw our attention to the cultural politics, meanings, histories, and conceptual contributions posited by unconventional development projects. As part of an emerging movement in support of localized wind and solar energy production on tribal lands, these projects are responses to the biopolitical operations of 20^th century development projects. They respond to a long history of removal, regulation, knowledge production, and life-propagating techniques administered on reservation-based peoples. The movement itself addresses controversies in a way that interweaves the economic, the ecological, the cultural, and the embodied aspects of being and being well in the world; as a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) said to me:

The movement is really about health and people dying…people can’t have an enjoyable life anymore. The work of the movement is never about the power plant itself, but about how all the EJ (environmental justice) issues come together and link up to affect people’s lives…it’s about having a good life (B Shimek, 2004, personal communication).
 

Observation 2: How we got here

We advocate methodology rooted in historical and material analysis to focus on the ways that West Point and the colonization of land along the Hudson River has committed violence against local indigenous groups and silenced their voices. Engaging with the debate space, the military-industrial complex, and the history of the land surrounding us allows us to support indigenous peoples and change material conditions most effectively.

So let’s provide some context.

Before the arrival of the colonists, indigenous nations along the Hudson River such as the Mahicans, the Delawares, and the Iroquois were ruled by a matrilineal system of governance. Chiefs were selected from the lineage of the wife. (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17823/17823-h/17823-h.htm)

But life on the Hudson quickly changed when indigenous peoples encountered European settlers. On Henry Hudson’s first voyage along the Hudson, Henry and his crew violently removed an indigenous community from their homes and raided them for all their valuables. The colonists acted without provocation. Chillingly, an account from one of the colonists about the plunder reads: “We manned our boat and scute with twelve men and muskets, and two stone pieces, or murderers, and drave the savages from their houses, and took the spoil of them, as they would have done us.” (The Hudson, Wallace Bruce, 2006) (http://history-world.org/henry_hudson.htm) 

This was only the beginning of a legacy of brutal colonial violence and exclusion of indigenous groups along the Hudson River, a legacy that West Point is founded upon. On cold winter night in 1643, William Kieft, Director-General of New Amsterdam, sent 80 soldiers to massacre the Native Americans who lived on the Pavonia settlement near the Hudson River, land recently purchased by a Dutch developer. The soldiers brutally slaughtered 80 indigenous men, women and children in their sleep. (http://www.visithudson.org/html/about.html) 

During 17 and 1800s, colonists systemically exterminated the Mahican people of the Hudson River – stealing their land, devastating their culture, and killing every last one of the Mahicans. One indigenous descendent reflects on the genocide of the Mahicans: "They disappeared in the night." "The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again. My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unami happy and strong; and yet before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the race of the Mahicans." (The Hudson, Wallace Bruce, 2006) (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17823/17823-h/17823-h.htm)

West Point represents the training of an American military which carries out this violence against indigenous peoples. Not only the forced migrations and the mass murders, but also in West Point’s complicity in the logics that enframe indigenous people as an other, as inferior. For example, Major Dave Palmer, a former professor of military history at West Point, acknowledges indigenous resistance to colonialism, but then advocates for the regulation -- the TAMING -- of quote on quote “red" bodies, calling for the same biopolitical control that leads to exclusion and genocidal violence. In an Article entitled, “Ice and Indians, Pirates and Patriots, Major Palmer states that “the red men could have been tolerated, perhaps even tamed, if the white men could have kept the peace among themselves. They could not.”

Observation 3: Why this matters

A. The question of energy production and indigenous sovereignty are inextricably linked. Today, Native reservations, targeted for natural resources, endure the most environmental destruction in the country. 

Andy Smith, 1997, a Cherokee woman and a co-founder of Women of All Red Nations, “Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework”, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature

One reason why this is necessary is because Native lands are the site of the most environmental destruction that takes place in this country. About 60 percent of the energy resources (i.e., coal, oil, uranium) in this country are on Indian land. In addition, 100 percent of uranium production takes place on or near Indian land. In the areas where there is uranium mining, such as Four Corners and the Black Hills, Indian people face skyrocketing incidents of radiation poisoning and birth defects. Many Navajo traditionalists are speculating that the “mystery virus” that is afflicting people in Arizona may be related to the uranium tailings left by mining companies. They think that the uranium has poisoned rats in the area. Children growing up in the area are developing ovarian and testicular cancers at fifteen times the national average. Indian women on Pine Ridge experience a miscarriage rate six times higher than the national average. Native reservations are often targeted for toxic waste dumps, since companies do not have to meet the same EPA standards that they do on other lands. Over fifty reservations have been targeted for waste dumps. In addition, military and nuclear testing takes place on Native lands. For instance, there have been at least 650 nuclear explosions on Shoshone land at the Nevada test site. Fifty percent of the underground tests have leaked radiation into the atmosphere. At the historic People of Color Environmental Summit held in October 1991 in Washington D.C., Native people from across the country reported the environmental destruction taking place on Indian lands through resource development. The Yakima people in Washington State stated that nuclear wastes coming from the Hanford nuclear reactor had been placed in such unstable containers that they were now leaking, and they believed that their underground water was contaminated. They said it would cost $150 billion to clean up these wastes, and plans were being made to relocate the wastes to a repository on Yucca Mountain, where the Shoshone live, at a cost of $3.25 billion. Yucca Mountain is on an active volcanic zone. Kiloton bombs are also exploded nearby, thus increasing the risks of radioactive leakage.

B. It is evident from this history that colonial energy development has been disastrous for Native Americans, and has far reaching effects that continue to obscure the history of oppression and the subjugation of Native identities

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

I am compelled by Puar's analysis, which I extend at the intersections of queer studies and Native studies. Puar presents the term homonationalism to explain how racialized sexuality and national terror interact today. I interpret homonationalism as an effect of U.S. queer modernities forming amid the conquest of Native peoples and the settling of Native land. The terrorizing sexual colonization End Page 105 of Native peoples was a historical root of the biopolitics of modern sexuality in the United States. Colonists interpreted diverse practices of gender and sexuality as signs of a general primitivity among Native peoples. Over time, they produced a colonial necropolitics that framed Native peoples as queer populations marked for death. Colonization produced the biopolitics of modern sexuality that I call "settler sexuality": a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects. Despite having formed in the United States to serve Anglo-American landowning classes and the Euro-ethnics they absorbed, settler definitions of modern sexuality became hegemonic for all non-Natives, as well as for Native people who sought ties to sexual modernity. Settler colonialism thus conditioned the formation of modern sexuality in the United States, including  By the mid-twentieth century U.S. sexual minority movements had formed on normatively white and national terms, which could include reversing the discourses marking them as primitive and embracing a primitive or specifically Native sexual nature. Non-Native queers of color long remained marginal to such projects or critiqued them, as their participants or as the organizers of queer of color coalitions. But over time non-Natives were able to form shared identities and movements to claim modern sexual citizenship in the settler state. Under such conditions, queer movements can naturalize settlement and assume a homonormative and national form that may be read specifically as settler homonationalism. My reading of settler homonationalism extends a larger project in which I am centering settler colonialism as a condition of the formation of modern queer subjects, cultures, and politics in the United States.⁵http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f5 Narrating Native histories of sexuality and gender while absenting Native people from sexual modernity produces U.S. queer projects as settler formations. Such projects remain distant from Native queer activisms that challenge the colonial formation of modern sexuality, by denaturalizing settlement, reimagining subjugated Native knowledges, and fostering Native survivance within broader work for decolonization. Inspired by Native queer activisms and Indigenous feminist and queer critiques, my historical and ethnographic work traces the processes that made settler definitions of sexual modernity normative in U.S. queer projects. I conduct this work as a non-Native and white participant in the multiracial U.S. queer cultures and politics I critically engage, and from within allied and dialogic relationships with Native queer activisms and Indigenous queer and feminist work in Native studies. My work invites new conversation among queer of color, queer diasporic, and Indigenous queer critiques and all critical queer projects in the United States that End Page 106 would disrupt homonationalism, by calling all to mark and challenge its settler formation.

THUS OUR ADVOCACY: JJ and I affirm the place of the resolution in the history of energy production in the United States.

Observation 4: Seeing here and now differently

A. Interrogating the normativity of settlement is a prerequisite to addressing all other issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Our solidarity with Native American causes is rooted in a problematization of the legitimacy of the state and the society that conditions our identities.

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

What would it mean for U.S. queers to confront their settler formation? What would resistance to settler homonationalism look like? While I cannot foresee an end to these questions, I begin with the deceptively simple argument that queers must denaturalize settler colonialism in all its forms. Queers naturalize settler colonialism whenever conquest and the displacement of Native peoples are ignored or appear inevitable. They also do so whenever they produce sexuality and gender from the desires of settler subjects for a home on Native land and relationship to Native histories and culture. Settler colonialism thus must be challenged not only in social and political spaces but also in the definition or experience of subjectivity. For instance, non-Natives may think that as queer subjects, they inherit ties to Native histories of gender or sexual diversity that grant them a kind of kinship with Native peoples. Identifying this way, non-Native queers may think that the terrors of sexual colonization visited on Native peoples were caused by persons unrelated to them or that those same violences were visited on themselves, either of which may obscure their specific non-Native relation to Native peoples and settler colonialism. At its extreme, non-Native queer longing for Native histories of sexuality or gender can seem to invite alliance when it performs a racial or national "passing" End Page 121 that appropriates Native culture in order to indigenize non-Native queers. Native queer and Two-Spirit activists critique such practices, including offers of alliance that try to absorb them or Native histories into non-Native politics. While Two-Spirit activists have sought recognition in U.S. queer spaces, they have done so less to join them than to hold them responsible to the distinctions of Native histories, which remind non-Natives that colonization continues to shape contemporary life. Non-Native queers can learn from Native activists how to focus their identities and politics on challenging settler colonialism. What does it mean for non-Natives, located differently as they are by race and nationality, to study their formation in a settler society: knowing one's home is not one's own; knowing one feels at home only to the degree that others remain dispossessed; being accountable to histories of Native displacement by questioning one's sense of place? One site where these questions have been asked has been in queer of color coalitions that form intimately with Native queer activism. Such projects have noted that non-Native queers of color can inherit the power of settlers despite their anti-racism or anticolonialism, and they have theorized the varied colonial histories that shape non-Native queers of color and Native queers from within new and decolonial queer theories and activisms.⁵⁵http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f55 How can non-Native queers of color in the United States continue to theorize histories of forced migration, slavery, occupation, and globalized labor as effects of white supremacist colonization, and the ancestral histories notably linking Chicana/o, Latina/o, and African American communities to Native Americans, while still vigilantly challenging wherever they may sustain or benefit from settler colonialism? Such critical reckonings with settler colonialism rarely have arisen in normatively white U.S. queer spaces, where the need for them is dire. White queers still must recognize race and nation as intrinsic to their formation by sexuality and gender. How then can they mark settler colonialism as a primary context of their racial and national formation? How can they then trace the histories that sought to merge Anglo colonists, Euro-ethnic immigrants, and hosts of persons marked by whiteness into the normative status of settler subjects —a persistent status, like whiteness, that cannot be dismissed but must be perpetually interrogated?

B. Because of this recontextualization, it is crucial for non-native queers to recognize the privileges afforded by the history of settlement, and to challenge the existence and mentalities produced by the settler state. 

Morgensen, Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.

Denaturalizing settler colonialism will mark it as not a fait accompli but a process open to change. While settlement suggests the appropriation of land, that history was never fixed: even the violence of allotment failed to erase collective Native land claims, just as land expropriation is being countered by tribal governments reacquiring sovereign land. In turn, as Thomas King and Paul Carter suggest, settlement narrates the land, and, as storytelling, it remains open to debate, End Page 122 such as in Native activisms that sustain Indigenous narratives of land or tell new stories to denaturalize settler landscapes.⁵⁶http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f56**__ The processes of settler colonialism produce contradictions, as settlers try to contain or erase Native difference in order that they may inhabit Native land as if it were their own. Doing so produces the contortions described by Deloria, as settler subjects argue that Native people or their land claims never existed, no longer exist, or if they do are trumped by the priority of settler claims. Yet at the same time settler subjects study Native history so that they may absorb it as their own and legitimate their place on stolen land.⁵⁷http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f57 These contradictions are informed by the knowledge, constantly displaced, of the genocidal histories of occupation. Working to stabilize settler subjectivity produces the bizarre result of people admitting to histories of terrorizing violence while basing their moral systems on continuing to benefit from them. The difference between conservative and liberal positions on settlement often breaks between whether non-Natives feel morally justified or conscionably implicated in a society based on violence. But while the first position embraces the status quo, the second does nothing necessarily to change it. As Smith pointedly argues, "It is a consistent practice among progressives to bemoan the genocide of Native peoples, but in the interest of political expediency, implicitly sanction it by refusing to question the illegitimacy of the settler nation responsible for this genocide."⁵⁸http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f58 In writing with Kehaulani Kauanui, Smith argues that this complicity continues, as progressives have critiqued the seeming erosion of civil liberties and democracy under the Bush regime. How is this critique affected if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as predicated on the genocide of indigenous people? . . . Even scholars critical of the nation-state often tend to presume that the United States will always exist, and thus they overlook indigenous feminist articulations of alternative forms of governance beyond the United States in particular and the nation-state in general.^{59url:http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f59} Smith and Kauanui remind us here that Indigenous feminists crucially theorize life beyond settler colonialism, including by fostering terms for national community that exceed the heteropatriarchal nation-state form.⁶⁰http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html#f60 Non-Natives who seek accountable alliance with Native people may align themselves with these stakes if they wish to commit to denaturalizing settler colonialism. But as noted, their more frequent effort to stabilize their identities follows less from a belief that settlement is natural than from a compulsion to foreclose the Pandora's box of contradictions End Page 123 they know will open by calling it into question. In U.S. queer politics, this includes the implications of my essay: queers will invoke and repeat the terrorizing histories of settler colonialism if these remain obscured behind normatively white and national desires for Native roots and settler citizenship. A first step for non-Native queers thus can be to examine critically and challenge how settler colonialism conditions their lives, as a step toward imagining new and decolonial sexual subjectivities, cultures, and politics. This work can be inspired by historical coalition politics formed by queers of color in accountable relationship to Native queer activists. Yet this work invites even more forms, particularly when Native queers choose to organize apart. White queers challenging racism and colonialism can join queers of color to create new queer politics marked explicitly as non-Native, in that they will form by answering Native queer critiques. As part of that work, non-Native queers can study the colonial histories they differently yet mutually inherit, and can trouble the colonial institutions in which they have sought their freedom, as steps toward shifting non-Native queer politics in decolonizing directions.

C. Natives have found that legal and legislative reforms for their communities are merely hollow victories. In the fight for independence, these reforms are coopted to resemble and worsen the capitalist and colonial logics that dominate Natives in the first place.

Gorelick __2005 (Melissa, “Writer Taiaiake Alfred Urges Freedom From
Colonial Thinking” Indian Country Today,
http://www.powwows.com/gathering/archive/index.php?t-30329.html) 

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Problems in the Native community require uniquely Native
solutions, said cutting-edge American Indian scholar Taiaiake Alfred at a
recent Syracuse University lecture. Alfred, a Mohawk who teaches in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, discussed the contents of his new book, ''Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom'' - namely, ways in which Natives can learn to live and think as Onkwehonkwe, original people. The book, he said, is based on the experiences of Natives who have accomplished this goal. ''It is time for our people to live again,'' the book begins. It goes on to detail a journey away from the effects of the white invasion of the Americas, which Alfred sees as the source of most major problems in Indian communities today. ''The journey is a living commitment to meaningful change in our lives by ... regenerating our cultures, and struggling against the forces that keep us bound to our colonial past,'' Alfred wrote. Colonial values have become ingrained in the Indian community, he said, addressing a packed room at the Syracuse University College of Law. These values, which run contrary to traditional Native beliefs, have caused long-standing problems of the community, the body and the spirit. ''The most damaging aspect of colonization was the way it was premised on a relationship of white domination and Indian subordination,'' said Scott Lyons, a Native scholar and creative writing professor at Syracuse University who attended Alfred's lecture. This colonial notion of Indian inferiority was drilled into Native communities throughout history, Lyons added. The policy of allotment, for example - privatizing and parceling out tribal land to individuals - was designed to create capitalistic values in the Indian community. Capitalism, and the dependency on the non-Native world that necessarily accompanies it, still dominates Indian life today. For this reason, Alfred said, Natives have discovered that the legal and legislative battles won by their communities over the last few decades are what he called ''hollow victories.'' Tribal courts and indigenous governments, for instance, have arisen, and many Natives communities have won independence from the United States or Canada. Too often, however, these institutions resemble those of the colonizers. No real change can come from the halls, desks and courts of such institutions. ''When it comes down to surviving or not surviving, none of these laws are going to matter,'' said Regina Jones, an Oneida and the program coordinator for Syracuse's Office of Multicultural Affairs, who also attended the lecture. ''What we really need is a society that doesn't depend on department stores.'' Recalling his first two books, Alfred traced the evolution of Indian resistance to colonial problems over the last few decades. Native scholars and activists soon have realized that legal victories were ''very dangerous,'' leading to more dependency on white ways of thinking.

D. Asserting our queerness politicizes our discourse and allows us to reorient gender and sexual norms. This politicization is crucial for projects that aim to reverse the exclusion and biopolitical control of queer subjects.

Butler, Judith, 1993, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of Call Berkeley, Bodies that Matter, pp. 21-22.

‘Queerness’ might be understood not only as an example of citational politics, but as a specific reworking of abjection into political agency that might explain why “citationality” has contemporary political promise. The public assertion of ‘queerness’ enacts performativity as citationality for the purposes of resignifying the abjection of homosexuality into defiance and legitimacy. I argue that this does not have to be a “reverse-discourse” in which the defiant affirmation of queer dialectically reinstalls the version it seeks to overcome. Rather, this is the politicization of abjection in the effort to rewrite the history of the term, and to force it into a demanding resignification. Such a strategy, I suggest, is crucial to creating the kind of community in which surviving with AIDS becomes more possible, in which queer lives become legible, valuable, worthy of support, in which passion, injury, grief, aspiration become recognized without fixing the terms of that recognition in yet another conceptual order of lifelessness and rigid exclusion. If there is a “normative” dimension to this work, it consists precisely in assisting a radical resignification of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain toward a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world. To recast the symbolic as capable of this kind of resignification, it will be necessary to think of the symbolic as the temporalized regulation of signification, and not as a quasi-permanent structure. This rethinking of the symbolic in terms of the temporal dynamics of regulatory discourse will take seriously the Lacanian challenge to Anglo-American accounts of gender to consider the status of “sex” as a linguistic norm, but will recast that normativity in Foucaultian terms as a “regulatory ideal.” Drawing from the Anglo-American accounts of gender as well, this project seeks to challenge the structural stasis of the heterosexualizing norm within the psychoanalytic account without dispensing with what is clearly valuable in psychoanalytic perspectives. Indeed, “sex” is a regulatory ideal, a forcible and differential materialization of bodies, that will produce its remainder, its outside, what one might call its “unconscious.” This insistence that every formative movement requires and institutes its exclusions takes seriously the psychoanalytic vocabulary of both repression and foreclosure.