A Summary Of Indigeneity

It has become increasingly unpopular within the academy to think of things through a poststructuralist, multicultural frame in which the myriad of overlapping identities situate a given Being within a particular time and space. Yet, such a structural attempt to think through the problem of Indigeneity and the West might enhance the explanatory power of postcolonial and settler colonial studies of the problem at hand. In light of this, I attempt to explain the way that the Settler and their colony (Lacan, Marx, Popper) works as an antagonistic and genocidal position in relation to Indigeneity (Tuck, Byrd, Deloria, Kay-Trask). Given the myriad of Indigenous and Western identities, readers accustomed to the normative cultural diversity and historical …show more content…
Prominent meta-commentators on “Savage” ontology (Haunani Kay-Trask, Jodi Byrd, Vine Deloria Jr., etc) attribute the cosmological destruction that is presently occurring to the arrival/creation of the Settler. This occurs primarily due to a ontological and cosmological pathology inherent within the Settler. Whereas existence in the Indigenous worldview correlates to a sense of power that is pervades the universe and thus requires balance between oneself and all one’s relations, the Settler conceives of the universe as either a completely secular world that humanity must master and control (the atomizing and objectivist thought of Western science) or as having complete spiritual dominance over the world (Christianity and Western monotheism writ large), often the two simultaneously. The notion of coercive power of the Human over everything else is thus at the heart of the Settler’s world conception. When faced with the spiritual, ecocentric ontology of the “Savage,” the Settler’s world is thrown into disorder as the colony and its occupants become unethical not only contingently, but structurally – which is to say outside of liberalism’s ethics of choice and therefore unethical at the level of ontology. Thus, to enter the world of “Savage,” of those “merciless Indian savages” which inhabit the …show more content…
The fact that the literal, corporal flesh of the Indigenous has been used to formulate and make possible the body of then Settler implies that an ethical repossession of that flesh can only occur through the destruction of Settler bodies. Postcolonialism and Indigenism’s decolonial project of land, language, or cultural restoration flinches in the face of the radical ethicality of the genocided object because the “Savage” not only falls outside the Marxian rubric of gains and losses which lays the foundational theoretical understanding for such fields’ restorative project, but also because genocide obliterates the space-time coordinates necessary to make such demands coherent. When the Indian is the land, how can land be returned without a restoration of flesh? Can land, languages, cultures be given back to groups who no longer exist? How does the decolonial project attempt to end the violence perpetuated against Indians that has no rational basis in ideological conflict or land seizures? Locked forever into the past, the Indian sits at the edges of time itself, the a priori non-Human from which civilization is built against. The fact that the debate amongst prominent theorists about what constitutes decolonization itself