Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[18]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[18]

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1		-2016-10-09 16:45:09.754
	1	+2016-10-09 16:45:09.0

Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,46 @@
	1	+We agree that nuclear power should be prohibited, but are pic-ing out of the 1AC justifications.
	2	+
	3	+Subpoint A: We’ll isolate 2 reasons the AC is colonialism in disguise
	4	+
	5	+1- Epistemology
	6	+
	7	+The 1AC is based on an opposition between western and indigenous peoples and epistemologies that is rooted in essentialism. This form of criticism reinforces colonialism by reinforcing hierarchical difference
	8	+Andersen, PhD, 09
	9	+(Chris, Prof. Native Studies @ Alberta, “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 80-84)
	10	+In two recent articles,3 American Indian studies professor Duane Champagne challenges ‘Western’ academic disciplines’ epistemological ability to analyse contemporary Indigeneity.4 Specifically, their failure to consider Indigenous collectivities’ active role in colonial contexts in terms not readily discernable in Western forms of knowledge means these disciplines miss large elements of Indigeneity and, as such, fail to offer a plausible basis for its analysis. Champagne contends that despite its current failure to do so, American Indian studies—extrapolated here to include all Indigenous studies—should instead assume this mantle by presuming the distinctive agency of Indigenous peoples, including a focus on exploring our relations according to our distinctive epistemologies and according to the goals and mandates set by Indigenous communities. Not only will this distinguish Native studies from the rest of the academia, it will better position it to assist Indigenous peoples in righting their relationships with dominant, ‘whitestream’ society.5 I agree with Champagne’s assertion that Indigenous studies—whether within or outside specific departments and faculties—should exist in contemporary academia and that Indigenous communities ought to constitute a central focus to this endeavour. Despite his obvious love for the discipline (a fidelity I share), however, his peculiar positioning of Indigenous studies as different needlessly marginalises our density and, in doing so, unnecessarily gives ground to disciplinary turf long claimed by older disciplines. Thus, although he usefully positions Indigenous communities as producers of complex knowledge about indigeneity, his separation of Indigenous from white society unnecessarily marginalises two elements of our density critical to this relationship: 1) the extent of Indigenous communities’ knowledges about whiteness (a social fact which requires an expertise in ‘Western’ concepts); and 2) the extent to which the production of academic knowledge through Indigenous studies is shaped by the ‘whitestream’ academic relations of power, marking it in tension with other forms of knowledge (such as community knowledge). Both are unfortunate omissions. Regarding the first, the epistemological aprioris of whiteness are a dominant representational source through which Western societies produce and consume Indigeneity. As such, Champagne recklessly jettisons so-called Western disciplinary concepts and methodologies as immutable precisely where and when they are most necessary. Regarding the second, he dismisses the contextual importance of accounting for the academic institutional conditions under which native studies units (are allowed to) exist. My sympathetic critique of Champagne’s argument is divided into three major parts and a conclusion. Part one extrapolates his analysis of current native studies and his prescriptions for how to fix it. In this context I examine his charge that ‘Western’ disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and so on) are too epistemologically constricted to properly explain Indigenous agency or communities and I emphasise his failure to account for the conditions of possibility under which Native American studies entered into academic history (to borrow Foucauldian phraseology).6 This latter element challenges the relationships he posits between both Indigenous studies and other academic disciplines and Indigenous knowledge within and outside the academy. Part two unpacks his tropes to reveal an epistemological and ontological essentialism which positions Indigeneity as separate from (his notion of) colonialism, such that an endogamous focus on the former obviates the need for accounting for the influence of the latter (or at least, that native studies can analyse the former in a manner which separates it from the Western academic herd). I argue that Champagne reproduces a variant strain of ‘Aboriginalism’ 7 that oversimplifies contemporary Indigeneity and overstates the immutability of concepts emanating from existing ‘Western’ disciplines. In doing so, he unnecessarily limits the contributions Indigenous studies is ideally positioned to make in deconstructing Aboriginalist discourses and in doing so produces an oddly parochial formulation of the discipline. Finally, in part three I offer my own prescriptions for an Indigenous studies anchored in Indigenous density (rather than difference). The temporal and epistemological complexity of our relationships with whitestream society means that Indigenous studies must counter hegemonic representations of Indigeneity which marginalise or altogether ignore our density. Following in the footsteps of Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s path-breaking work, I argue that Indigenous studies’ study of both Indigeneity and whiteness must use all available epistemologies, not just those which apparently distance Western disciplines from Indigenous studies analysis.8 While Champagne’s formulation can possibly be stretched to examine whiteness, the epistemological strategies he proposes for analysing Indigeneity capture only specific, isolated elements of our complexity. The essay ends with a discussion of the implications of this argument. I Locating (Champagne in) the discipline of native studies Native studies ‘state of the discipline’ pieces often begin by differentiating our scholarship from that of longer-standing disciplines.9 Though these are as often prescriptive as reflective of actual practice, such immanent analysis signals a healthy and growing discipline. American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell suggests that, at least in native studies, these debates often play themselves out in a tension between two poles of analysis: essentialism/difference and adaptation/assimilation.10 She suggests that the essentialism cluster is rooted in an extreme form of post-colonialism which ‘implies that American Indian ways of thinking existed before colonialism and remain unknowable by anyone outside those cultures. Native American studies/American Indian studies can recover the long-suppressed values, epistemologies, and voices from colonial oppression’.11 Conversely, adaptation clusters typically emphasise the agency of Indigenous collectivities in the face of whitestream colonialism. Like the essentialism cluster, however, Kidwell argues that in its extreme variant: the idea of adaptation, or acculturation, or agency represents the ultimate disappearance of Indian identity into American society. If Indians dress like everyone else, speak like everyone else, attend public schools, are citizens of the state in which they live and citizens of the United States, how can they justify claims to a distinctive identity?12 Like others taking the essentialist position in the debate,13 Champagne contends that Indigeneity and Indigenous communities are fundamentally different in ways which elide the epistemological premises of Western disciplines (more on this in part two). These disciplines employ data collection concepts and practices saturated with a concern for ‘examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’.14 Indigenous issues are merely positioned as a specific instance of more general patterns of minority oppression.15 Such thinking has, he suggests, detracted intellectual energy from the more laudable Indigenous studies disciplinary goal of ‘conceptualising, researching, and explaining patterns of American Indian individual and collective community choices and strategies when confronted with relations with the American state and society’.16 Champagne suggests that most native studies departments are multidisciplinary in character with faculty scattered in numerous disciplines teaching theories and concepts from numerous academic fields, to students as often as not from non-Aboriginal backgrounds, with a vague mandate for increasing or generating broader awareness about Indigenous history and contemporary realities.17 He admits that this multidisciplinarity is often advantageous in that ‘programs could be constructed from long-standing disciplines, and often seasoned scholars could be called upon to provide guidance and support’.18 However, to the extent that concepts central to Western disciplines remain ‘oriented toward examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’,19 these approaches effectively stifle the ability of American Indian studies to produce disciplinarily endogamous theory and methodology. The existing Indigenous studies academic landscape is thus, Champagne explains, littered with disjointed and epistemologically scattered forays into (and about) Indigenous communities. The current inability to produce distinctive theory and method has exacerbated institutional marginality (his context is American but this is readily extrapolated more broadly): fiscal conservativism limits the likelihood that even well-meaning administrators will build-in the solid, permanent funding required for stable Native studies departments (since money made available for ‘Aboriginal issues’ is just as likely to go to more wellregarded disciplines such as anthropology, history or education); broader multicultural or diversity concerns overshadow the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences by linking them to broader forms of ‘minority’ oppression (thus the seemingly natural fit of native studies departments within ‘ethnic studies’ faculties); and mainstream theorising and methodological thinking has shown a reluctance to ‘think outside the box’ of Western modes of analysis.20 Champagne argues in a nutshell that: the university bureaucratic environment, weak resource support, the emphasis on race and ethnic paradigms over an indigenous paradigm, and the relegation of Indian Studies to serve general diversity interests for the university will continue to constrain, and often will prevent, full development of indigenous studies departments and programs at many universities.21 Champagne’s understanding of native studies’ relationship to the academy is reminiscent of the humanism Foucault critiques in his examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexuality regulation.22 Foucault takes such explanations to task for their tendency to position power repressively as an entity which prevents actions and curtails freedoms. Foucauldian notions of power instead stress its repressive and constitutive character. They emphasise how discursive power shapes the formation of subjectivities which, in turn, shape the conditions under which subjects ‘enter into history’. Wedded to a repressive understanding of power, Champagne makes a homologous correlation between the current academic institutional marginality of Native studies and the forms of marginality Indigenous communities experience outside the academy. Thus correlated, he argues that a robust and holistic Indigenous paradigm can assist in rectifying this repression. For Champagne, then, academic and nonacademic Indigenous knowledge are comrades-in-arms, with Indigenous studies—anchored in an Indigenous paradigm—providing the missing link. In this guise, his Indigenous paradigm places Indigenous communities and nations at its centre, instead of colonial critique. Native studies, Champagne explains, ‘cannot center on a critique of the colonial experience but rather must focus on the individual and community choices American Indians make to realize their culture, values, and political and economic interests within the constraints and opportunities presented by changing colonial contexts’.23 While colonial critique can be useful for examining external forces relating to political, legal and market conditions, it ‘excludes choice and social action on the part of Native historical and cultural experience, and in effect American Indians are not analyzed as players in their own historical contexts but rather viewed as billiard balls knocked around by powerful colonial powers and forces’.24 Champagne thus draws a clear distinction between, on the one hand, what he thinks Western disciplines, with their focus on colonialism, can explain about indigeneity and on the other, what makes Indigenous peoples truly Indigenous and, presumably, what these disciplines remain unable to explicate. Perhaps equally importantly, he assumes that such boundaries are discrete and readily discernable, such that he effectively erases the object–subject relationship within which all other academic disciplines produce knowledge.25 Champagne’s ostensible focus on Indigenous communities reflects a central disciplinary trope of native studies. For example, Cook-Lynn states bluntly that ‘Indian Studies as an academic discipline was meant to have as it constituencies the native tribal nations of America and its major purpose the defense of lands and resources and the sovereign right to nationtonation status’.26 This emphasis on tribally specific knowledge is also emphasised by Muskogee scholar Craig Womack, who argues the need for ‘more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns’ in a literary context,27 part of a larger ‘literary nationalism’ movement with broadly allied concerns.28 Holm et al. argue even more specifically that native studies should emphasise the exploration and support of and for what they term ‘peoplehood’, positioned to include language, sacred history, territory and ceremony,29 while Kidwell suggests that native studies should endeavour to emphasise Indigenous relationships with land, the inclusion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, our inherent sovereignty and the importance of our Indigenous languages.30 Thus, while Champagne’s focal concerns are not abnormal, his attempt to isolate Indigenous communities epistemologically from the broader social fabric of dominant, whitestream society effectively removes a large part of our arsenal for combatting the damaging representations of Indigeneity woven into larger society. Parts of his argument turn on the idea that colonialism exists external to Indigenous communities and nations, as something we are subject to. Thus, it isn’t that we don’t suffer (from) colonialism; rather, its power resides outside our communities. From this perspective, theories of colonialism are explanatory tools but are not enough in-and-of-themselves because their externality precludes their ability to fully comprehend and analyse our communities’ distinctiveness. In line with the repressive formulation of power which anchors his understanding of Indigenous studies, for Champagne colonialism = sameness/assimilation and indigeneity = difference/freedom. I will have more to say on this below, but suffice it to say for now that his prescriptions become particularly problematic when he attempts to circumscribe the theories and methods native studies should use in analysis of/with Indigenous communities. One can perhaps forgive Champagne’s diagnosis in this context, since it represents only part of his argument and, as I said, is a common trope of Indigenous studies. However, consider a fuller example of his positioning of colonialism: Colonial theories emphasize external forces such as political, legal, market, and cultural constraints and hegemonies to which American Indian communities are subject. Colonial arguments are powerful tools and explain much change in American Indian communities, but the kind of change that is explained is externally enforced and often coercive. Such change is often subtly resisted and not internalized. footnote omitted An old Spanish saying is ‘I bend my knee but not my heart’.31 While his statements might legitimately swell our hearts with pride at the ways our ancestors resisted colonialism/oppression while retaining their dignity, traditions and collective self consciousness, they nonetheless avoid questions about how the cultural power of nationstates do not merely oppress, but seduce as well.32 Champagne’s essentialism in effect marginalises the complex ways in which our Indigenous habitus (to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu) is inevitably and irrevocably constituted in and by the fields of struggle we occupy.33 His colonialism thus staggers between a vulgar Marxism which stresses an autonomous subject who can/must reject (or accept) colonialism and an equally vulgar structural-functionalism that measures Indigenous agency and collective choices against a Cartesian indigeneity which exists outside the life and reach of contemporary nation-states’ cultural power.
	11	+
	12	+
	13	+2nd- Paternalism
	14	+
	15	+The aff attempt to “save” indigenous people is a recasting of whiteman’s burden- it relies on the belief that indigenous groups are too primitive to make their own economic decisions
	16	+Gover and Walker 92
	17	+(Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
	18	+We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs. This means that even though tribes possess inherent authority to do so,10 tribal amendments will be necessary before tribes will be eligible under RCRA for any federal grant or contract assistance to deal with their waste problems. On Indian lands, it is estimated that there are over 650 sites where solid waste has been disposed of.11 This includes 108 tribally-owned landfills constructed years ago by the Indian Health Service (IHS).12 Although IHS originally built these landfills to meet the then existing federal standards, now, under the more stringent federal standards, only a handful of the 108 are reported to be in compliance with EPA requirements.13 One estimate by the Indian Health Service found that it would cost $160 million to construct on reservations solid waste facilities that would be in compliance with EPA standards,14 and to date, we do not know where this money will come from.15 The threat of tribal environmental liability comes at a time when Indian reservations are some of the most impoverished places in the country. Off the reservations, states, counties, and cities are scrambling to deal with their own problems of an ever increasing waste stream, rapidly dwindling capacity in existing landfills, and increasing public opposition to the siting of "locally unwanted land uses"-or"LULUs"-such as landfills. We refer to these public position groups as NIMBYs or "Not in My Backyard" groups. Another term used to describe them which seems particularly fitting where tribal waste projects are concerned is "CAVE" or "citizens against virtually everything." At any rate, the overall high poverty level for Indian communities and the NIMBY pressure on state and local governments to put landfills in someone else's backyard have contributed to the false belief that reservations alone have been targeted by the waste companies. The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environment compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development. (Continued) For tribes considering developing commercial waste projects on their reservations, the major issue they face will not be an environmental one, but instead one of power and racism. Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the Potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental interests. This is clearly a racist assumption; the same assumption that guided the federal policies that very nearly eradicated Indian people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.40 It is "environmentalist racism," and ultimately every bit as destructive as the open hostility to Indian people that we experience in many Parts Of this country.
	19	+
	20	+The affirmative has a one size fits all solution – allowing each group to decide is the best solution
	21	+Leonard, JD, 97
	22	+(Louis G., Executive Editor, 1996 ~-~- 1997, BOSTON COLLEGE THIRD WORLD LAW JOURNAL. SOVEREIGNTY, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN THE MESCALERO APACHE'S DECISION TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE 24 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 651 Spring)
	23	+If there are adequate improvements in the federal regulatory framework surrounding nuclear waste, and improvements in internal tribal decision-making, tribes should have the general authority to decide whether to allow a waste-site on their land. Increased technical assistance and greater involvement by tribes at the federal level will help to educate tribal members from the outset and thus allow for an informed decision and a real opportunity for tribes to better resolve these issues for themselves. n355 This type of empowerment through education and knowledge is the only way to begin to right the generations of marginalization and discrimination that have characterized mainstream society's relationships with tribes throughout history. n356 These are the recommendations of an environmental justice approach: tribal self-determination empowered by knowledge. n357
	24	+
	25	+Subpoint B: Our Critique turns and outweighs the case
	26	+1. Discourse matters- the resolution choses the policies we discuss but the affirmative picked their advantage framing for strategic purposes- they should have to bear the strategic costs for these choices- live by the sword die by the sword
	27	+2. Resolveability- our PIC solves any policy implications of their advocacy, in order to win the affirmative must win that their advantage framing is valuable. This is fair and predictable- since they get to pick what goes in the AC they should be prepared to defend it
	28	+3. The kritik turns the case- essentialist notions of indigenous identity are the root cause of imperialism
	29	+Chow, PhD, 98
	30	+*Rey, Prof. Modern Culture and Media @Brown, Ethics After Idealism, p. 8-9)
	31	+On the other hand, precisely because of the obstinacy of the methods of area studies, this is also a moment of danger because the turn toward "other" cultures that is espoused in the name of cultural studies could easily be used to refuse and replace rather than strengthen the theoretical modes of inquiry that remain a valuable part of comparative literature. For instance, it is disturbing to hear a kind of claim that is now often made about the study of nonWestern cultures in the age of multiculturalism: "Now we can go back to the study of indigenous cultures and forget all about `Western theory'!" Even though this is a caricatural paraphrase, I believe it accurately sums up the sentiments that are involved in the antitheoretical clamor for cultural studies. Let me be more specific about why such sentiments are problematic. In the age of the general criticism of Western imperialism, the study of nonWestern cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West. For the same reason, "theory," for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism, has easily but effectively been lumped together with everything "Western" and facilely rejected as a nonnecessity. This is evident in the manner in which the following type of question, for all its illogicality, continues to be in vogue among some practitioners of Asian studies: "Why should we use Western theory to study Asian cultures?" In the climate of multiculturalism, such practitioners find in cultural studies' obligatory turns toward pluralism a kind of rhetorical justification that works to their own advantage—for what better "reason" is there for the rejection of "Western theory" than the widely advocated study of "other" cultures? In the name of studying the West's ''others," then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and "culture" returns to a coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. 21 Pursued in a morally complacent, antitheoretical mode, "culture" now functions as a shield that hides the positivism, essentialism, and nativism—and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination, and marginalization—that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area studies; "cultural studies" now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness. One prominent instance of such legitimation is the argument for returning to "indigenous" origins. As Spivak points out, the notion of a return to pure "indigenous theory" is not a viable one because of the history of imperialism: I cannot understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality of nineteenthcentury history. As for syntheses: syntheses have more problems than answers to offer. To construct indigenous theories one must ignore the last few centuries of historical involvement. I would rather use what history has written for me.22 To add to Spivak's point, it should be emphasized that the advocacy for a return to indigenous theory and culture usually masks, with the violence of "the West," the violence of the cultural politics that is within an indigenous culture.
	32	+
	33	+4. The external impact outweighs the case- their AC framing promotes fascism that causes global imperialism
	34	+Chow, PhD, 98
	35	+*Rey, Prof. Modern Culture and Media @Brown, Ethics After Idealism, p. 26-7)
	36	+The Story of O, or, the New Fascism In the foregoing pages, I have tried to argue that fascism needs to be understood not only in its negative but more importantly in its positive aspects, and that fascism's production of idealism is a projectional production of luminosity as self evidence. In an essay entitled "The Evidence of Experience," which does not at first seem to have anything to do with the topic of fascism, Joan Scott has made comparable observations about the use of "experience" in the North American academy today. 39 In the general atmosphere of a felt need to deconstruct universalist claims about human history, Scott writes, scholars of various disciplines have increasingly turned to personal experience as a means of such deconstruction. However, she argues, by privileging experience as the critical weapon against universalisms, we are leaving open the question as to what authorizes experience itself. Scott charges that the appeal to experience "as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation" for historical difference has increasingly replaced the necessary task of exploring "how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world."40 For me, what is especially interesting is the manner in which Scott emphasizes the role of vision and visibility throughout her essay. Beginning her discussion with Samuel R. Delany's autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, Scott notes that "a metaphor of visibility as literal transparency is crucial to his project." She concludes that, for Delany, "knowledge is gained through vision; vision is a direct apprehension of a world of transparent objects."41 What Scott articulates here is the other side of Virilio's argument about the coterminous nature of visual perception and destruction—that is, the coterminous nature of visual perception and knowledge: "Seeing is the origin of knowing."42 While the technology of seeing, or seeing as technology, has become an inalienable part of the operation of militarism and fascist propaganda, Scott shows how it has also come to dominate our thinking about identity, so much so that visibility and luminosity are the conditions toward which accounts of difference and alternative histories derived from "personal experience" now aspire. This kind of aspiration, Scott implies, is an aspiration toward the selfevidence of the self's (personal) experience. The self as evidence: this means that the self, like the Stalin myth in Soviet cinema, is so transparent, so shone through with light, that it simply is, without need for further argument about its history or what Scott calls its "discursive character."
	37	+
	38	+5. No aff offense- racism and romanticism are two sides of the same coin- their turns don’t grapple with the critical distinction between essentialized and nuanced conceptions of native identity
	39	+Gagne, PhD, 3
	40	+(Karen, Prof. Sociology @Wisconsin Platteville, “Falling in Love With Indians: The Metaphysics of Becoming America.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3 p. 206-207)
	41	+Rroberto fernández retamar argues in caliban and other essays (1989) that the image of the Carib/cannibal, a “bestial man situated on the margins of civilization,” is contrasted with that of the Arawak/Taino, the peaceful, meek, and even timorously cowardly native. This Taino, he writes, would be transformed into the paradisiacal inhabitant of a utopian world—as in the world of Thomas More in 1516. Further, this notion of an Edenic creature would serve as a “working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that feudal world against which the bourgeoisie is in fact struggling.” The vision of the cannibal, then, corresponds to the right wing of that same bourgeoisie. Retamar writes, “It belongs to the ideological arsenal of politicians of action, those who perform the dirty work in whose fruits the charming dreamers of utopias will equally share” (7; my emphasis). Both of these visions, as Shakespeare was to address in The Tempest, were perfectly reconcilable. The first epigraph I include above came from a book I found recently at a feminist bookshop. While I had hoped to find some literature to support my topic, I hadn’t expected to find one quite so precisely related to my premise concerning both “falling in love” and “becoming American.” But there it was, right on display near the register. Upon reading it, I considered it a different angle on the subject of representing Native Americans than that provided by Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000), and realized that both works provided contemporary examples of becoming American by falling in love with “natives.” Its author is an “acclaimed environmental activist and essay writer,” and the book is titled in very simple letters, Red. The subtitle, in much smaller letters, is Passion and Patience in the Desert (Williams 2001). The title of my paper is a twist on Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1997). I argue that both Indian loving and Indian hating constitute two sides of the same racialization of the indigenous populations of the Americas, as well as two sides in the racialization of the colonizers. This duality has been significant to the process of the Self-development of the colonizer. Far from being a process of psychological development of the individual European, however, this process is the “collective attitude” that is the history of the Americas, to use a phrase by E. Franklin Frazier, cited by Greg Thomas (1999); it is “part of American psychology and the mentality of America,” to quote Robert F. Williams, cited again by Greg Thomas (2002). Further, these two ideas—which tend to coincide with the left and right visions of the bourgeoisie—are complementary rather than contradictory, as suggested by Retamar (7). They are complimentary visions in the “arsenal of the bourgeois,” and must be attacked accordingly.
	42	+
	43	+Our alternative embraces epistemological pluralism- it recognizes the diversity and density of native communities instead of homogenizing them as a collective group of noble savages bamboozled by the nuclear industry. Emphasizing density instead of absolute difference avoids throwing out the baby with the bathwater
	44	+Andersen, PhD, 09
	45	+(Chris, Prof. Native Studies @ Alberta, “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 95-6)
	46	+By way of conclusion, let me offer some thoughts on where my removal of difference—a central pillar of Champagne’s Native studies—leaves us with respect to fashioning a discipline which can honour our past complexity while accounting for its contemporary and future manifestations.68 Champagne spends much of his analytical time arguing that Western concepts and disciplines are of only limited use to Indigenous studies because they fail to account for the distinctive needs, aspirations and epistemologies of Indigenous communities. A proper Indigenous studies discipline must thus produce: points of view and conceptualizations drawing on the everyday strategies and conceptions of American Indian communities that require mainstream academics and policy makers to rethink and extend the views of indigenous groups, as a means to include their views and socio-cultural actions outside the use of class, ethnicity, race, and even nationality. Native American Studies, and more generally indigenous studies, calls for conceptualizations and strategies that encompass issues, rights, and strategies of political, cultural, and territorial survival.69 He thus positions Native studies (a position familiar to Native studies practitioners) as a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations. Such a position offers little in the way of analysis about the complexity of academic/community relations but it certainly feels good to say. He doesn’t appear to realise the extent to which analysing such a relationship necessarily requires sliding into disciplinary territory long claimed by other disciplines. If his point is that as Indigenous studies practitioners we need to claim this territory as our own, I am in full agreement. My point is merely that staking such a claim requires none of the epistemological baggage he wants to pack for the journey, and indeed raises troubling issues that require us to carefully unpack what he proposes to bring. Two of these are worth unpacking here. First, the community/academic relationship which appears to anchor Champagne’s formulation is problematic in that it ignores the ways that whiteness in the academy shapes the boundaries of its knowledge production in ways which do not necessarily subscribe to the regimes under which community knowledges are produced: Moreton-Robinson contends quite rightly that such representations ‘may not reflect the same knowledges about authenticity that are created and deployed within and by Indigenous communities and as such they may not be acceptable’.70 In ignoring this complexity, how on earth is Champagne to deal with the conflicts that inevitably arise? It does little good to acquiesce to one discourse or the other (though more often than not academic representations are given the nod), nor can we pretend that such differences are always reconcilable. These conflicts arise in situations pertaining to fundamentally irreconcilable positions on precisely the relationships between humans and nature (as Champagne points to) but they can also arise in more mundane situations, such as how to provide honorariums for elders involved in research projects in ways which don’t claw back from their monthly social assistance cheques. Second, even (or especially) if Indigenous studies is a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations, why does this necessarily require an entirely new set of theoretical or methodological precepts that differ from those of mainstream disciplines? I agree with the broad strokes of Champagne’s argument about constructing a specific niche for ourselves in the academic, as do many other Native studies practitioners. But many of us have been involved in situations in which an Indigenous community has approached our department to ask for research assistance for mundane issues about collecting data on telephone or internet use in their community; proper application of census documents to produce the robust statistical profiles through which they interface with government funders; water purity samples to make determinations of water safety; or even archival documents to assist them in legal battles over hunting, fishing and other resource extraction questions. Although the disciplines of sociology, biological sciences, history or anthropology could and have undertaken this assistance, so can many existing Indigenous studies departments. It seems inherently strange to call for a theoretical and methodological orientation—and thus, according to Champagne, a discipline—which possessed none of this capability. His model presupposes the difference of Indigenous communities and in doing so slams the shutters closed on forms of expertise which might nonetheless prove of central concern to the communities. Champagne contends that ‘the issues confronting indigenous peoples are not reducible to race, class, ethnicity or other common analytical dimensions in use within mainstream disciplines’.71 The problem, from an epistemological standpoint, is that no issues of any peoples can be reduced to these factors. Concepts—all concepts—are by definition schematic and as such are laughably simplistic in the face of the enormous complexity of human life. This complexity requires us to acknowledge that Indigenous communities are—and have been for centuries—more than the ‘holistic, institutionally nondifferentiated’ entities in which ‘knowledge is inherently integrated with community, culture, and political and economic relations’72 painted by Champagne. Thus, although not fully captured by terms like race, ethnicity or class, such terms nonetheless assist greatly in reflecting upon the relationships between our communities and the various nation-states, and not only because they possess symbolic power in dominant society. The real irony of Champagne’s model of Indigenous studies is that his choices of analytical focus require none of the theoretical or methodological prescriptions he begs of them. For example, his most prominent critique of Indigenous studies—that a ‘cacophony’ of theoretical and methodological tools will ‘doom’ it to institutional marginality73—is usually emphasised as a disciplinary strength. Thus, Indigenous studies scholar Jace Weaver writes that: in dealing with the totalizing systems that we know as Native cultures, each view from traditional disciplines is limited and partial, NAS must draw together the various disciplines and their methods in order to achieve something approaching a complete picture of Natives, their cultures and experiences.74 This isn’t an issue for Champagne, apparently, since his positioning of Indigenous communities strips them of any of the epistemological complexity that would require us to intrude on others’ disciplinary turf. He sees this as his model’s strength but in fact it becomes its Achilles heel. By beginning with the assumption that Indigenous communities are epistemologically dense (rather than just different), however, Weaver’s appeal for interdisciplinarity becomes vital. Indeed, failure to account, interdisciplinarily, for this density elevates the danger of producing a naive, substantialist and ultimately parochial Indigenous studies.

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2016-10-09 16:45:17.366

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Sean Fee

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+University JC

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+18

Round

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+3

Team

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Harvard Westlake Chaudhary Neg

Title

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+SEPT-OCT Natives Epistemology K

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Voices