Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Chapter 1 - Contact

We offer you, the judge, an almanac of the dead in the Americas. The story of the 1AC consists of three chapters. The first chapter is historical:

Who had spiritual possession of the Americas? Not the Christians…all over Europe, ordinary people had understood in their hearts the "Mother Church" was a cannibal monster…. Almost immediately, the wounded Europeans had begun to dress their wounds in the fat of slain Indians…. They all had come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They all had given the loss different names: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. They all feared illness and physical change; since life led to death, consciousness terrified them, and they had sought to control death by becoming killers themselves.

(Almanac 717-8, my italics and bold)

And the loss of a regenerative materiality justified and justifies colonial domination of native bodies who are historically produced as bare life or living dead.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

The trans-substantiation or cannibalism of Christ's body, the torture and killing by the "civilized" invaders and their Church, and the slippage to fetishism all mark the disruption of a generative and regenerative materiality that sustains and evolves in the cosmology of the Almanac. ...But for Silko, the destructive forces of Euro-American killers are subject to a dual prophesy, one of arrival and one of disappearance.

And the false logic which justified domination of not only the earth but also the societies of indigenous people is the idea that these areas were uninhabited and unused. This logic continues to this day in the technoscientific energy production cycle.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

23 The techno-nativisms of Mbembé, Sandoval and Silko forego narratives of unitary origins as well as efforts to "oppose" diametrically or to regulate U.S. and global "tech-neo-imperialism," both of which feed back into the vampiric tech-neo-imperial systems...And though ownership has been acquired by the tribal council subject to B.I.A. oversight, Jackpile-Paguate and approximately 2000 other open-pit uranium mines are still un-reclaimed, meaning they sit open and radioactive for the sake of future mining and national energy and security demands 20url:http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#20(%%).

The second chapter is contemporary:

However, neo-colonialism doesn’t end with the nuclear production system. It’s through the continued exploitation of the indigenous dead through forgetting that we use to legitimize status quo debates on energy policy.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

26 But tech-neo-imperialism does not begin and end with nuclear landscaping...Now it was up to the poorest tribal people and survivors of European genocide to show the remaining humans how all could share and live together on earth. (Almanac 749, my italics)

This technological colonialism works to place to rest the “dead” bodies in history (we act like the domination is over so we can get our energy in peace) – when in actuality the dead walk, physically and metaphorically, among us every day. This is the impact.

Tillett 2007 (Rebecca, “’The Indian Wars Have Never Ended in the Americas’ The Politics of Memory and History in Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’” in Feminist Review no. 85 accessed via JSTOR)

Clinton's comment  is a highly  appropriate   illustration  of the nature of the   living   dead: the elision of temporal boundaries  evident in the blending  of verb tenses;   the disordering  of perceptual boundaries  and certainties  marked by the confusion   of numbers  and persons. As a result... Ultimately, the resurfaced  bones indicate the   impossibility  of erasing   either the past or the dead, who continue to live in communal memory,  'Right   Now. Today.'            

The third chapter is the future genocide:

Our framework for this round is thus which team solves for the production of the dead in the status quo. To this end our starting point is the production of native bodies as bare life.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

7 If disciplinary bio-politics are constituted in the governmentality, management and instrumentality of human life, such as the doctrines of Human Rights, then the bio-politics of control and abandonment are constituted as "necropolitics," the profitable designation of bodies, races, gender, nations, and sub-populations selected for access, left to death, and/or made to die...the deadly and catastrophic stakes of bodies, complexity, control, bio-power, and bio-political technologies not simply designed to subdue the mass proletariat and exploit labor power, but to expropriate the value of living flesh itself.

Thus we advocate the world of the resolution through a techno-nativist futurism:

Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on and/or substantially increase financial incentives for energy production in the United States of one or more of the following: coal, crude oil, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, wind power.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

I want to talk a little about terrorism first. Poisoning our water with radioactive wastes, poisoning our air with military weapons' wastes -- those are acts of terrorism! Acts of terrorism committed by governments against their citizens all over the world. Capital punishment is terrorism practiced by the government against its citizens...You destroyers can't figure out why you haven't wiped us out in five hundred years of blasting, burning and slaughter. (Almanac 734)

We affirm techno-nativism to remove the living dead from the cycle of death production and instead the production of life. This means to recognize and resist the present and future genocidal history.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

Silko's techno-nativisms are futurist surveys of genocidal histories, tracing the circulation in economies of death, dying and morbidity...Techno-nativisms might produce an emergent and flexible topography for the production of survival, of political "love," and of habitable bioregions.

And our techno-nativist methodology uniquely avoids co-option, capture, and reproduction of native American cultures and social practices.   

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

In addition to the political techniques underwriting productive morbidity, concerns with post-social, post-identity and post-personal politics complicate techno-nativist fictions...In fact, the sovereign territory of the Navajo is also the location of "two-thirds of U.S. uranium deposits, most within the reservation boundaries" (20).

And our methodology is the best way to solve is the best way to make interventions in social reality and change ideological norms like the neo-colonialist mindset.

Sandoval and Davis 2000 (Chela and Angela, Methodology of the Oppressed p. 79)

Differential Coalitional Consciousness: The End of Domination

In 1991, East Indian feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminded feminists of color that it is not enough to be “a woman,” “poor,” “Black or Latino” to “assume a politicized oppositional identity.” What is required, as Fredric Jameson has insisted, is a specific methodology that can be used as a compass for self-consciously organizing resistance, identity, praxis, and coalition under contemporary U.S., late-capitalist cultural conditions.... As we shall see in the chapters to follow, this ethical principle guides the deployment of all technologies of power that are utilized by the differential practitioner of a theory and method of oppositional consciousness.

And this is uniquely key in a context of debate in which we are asked to engage in discussions of potentiality.

Bianco 2004 (Jamie Skye, “Zones of Morbidity” in Rhizomes vol. 8 spring 2004 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/bianco.htm#1)

The Almanac of the Dead is a book of futures and genealogies of death, the dead, and the dying...War machines and other weapons would appear spontaneously in the streets" (Almanac 686).