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.

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.

THUS OUR ALTERNATIVE:

Max 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||style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "

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.

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, 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.