The infrastructures of White settler perception: A political phenomenology of colonialism,genocide,ecocide,and emergency

Introduction

Nothing is quite like driving down I-5 through Oregon’s southern Willamette Valley on a sun-spotted day in spring. The grass is unbelievably green. The Douglas firs are blue-silver and look like fish swimming up the hillsides. Tune in to a local radio station and hear deep tracks from the Grateful Dead. It is easy to be lulled. Even the most cynical can forget that this landscape is in a state of emergency. Despite the roar of trucks and wailing of sirens, the interstate functions quietly in its occupation of Kalapuya land. Its hum inscribes a normalcy of perception in terms of access (or lack of), mobility, trade, proximity, temporality, and patterns of movement in the geographic production of western Oregon.

I-5 as a conduit of social conditions (or conditioning) and perception stands out as an emergency only from a certain vantage. This essay argues that Indigenous experiences of emergency that identify settler colonialism and capitalism as social structures of cyclical crisis are obfuscated by a range of strategic settler infrastructures that perpetuate the normativity of settler perception. For settlers, I-5 is an infrastructure that solidifies and stabilizes the sociality of colonialism. It makes a home for settlers and their interests (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5; Whyte, 2016: 161). For example, it transports much of the (almost) four billion board-feet (oregon.gov, n.d.) of timber harvested in the state per annum, enough to go to the moon and back with 2 × 4s just under two and a half times. I frequently pass by a mill near the Eugene Airport that is owned by the Seneca Sawmill Company. Although its namesake is most likely Seneca Smith, a Portland circuit judge, my mind cannot help but drift to the Roman imperialist philosopher. Indeed, the massive stacks of lumber and sprawling machinery bear witness to the magnitude and greatness of the enterprise. Out in front, they have a large billboard that rotates signage. In the fall of 2020, it read “Our Tree Farm Has 92% More Timber than 25 Years Ago: For every tree harvested we replant four more.” The catastrophic fires of that year in the northwest present an interesting context for the display of such a message. In a 2018 study, researchers in northern California and Oregon found that intensive plantation forestry management with homogenous tree size and spacing significantly enhances fire severity (Zald and Dunn, 2018). Yet even in a heightened crisis, timberland owners proudly declare that they are blanketing hillsides with monocrops of matchstick Douglas fir. What does this apparent contradiction say about how the perception of emergencies is framed by settler power?

One might think that the fires would put into crystalline perspective the unfathomably profound sabotage of ecosystem integrity produced by logging industries and other settler degradations of water and land. But governors have acted as though they could not possibly have seen the fires coming. Kate Brown called the fires a “once in a generation event” (KOIN Channel 6, 2020). Gavin Newsom was quick to point fingers at Washington, DC, saying “This is a damn climate emergency. This is real and it’s happening” (BBC, 2020). However, many Indigenous authors, activists, and community members have expressed that such radical environmental changes do not appear to them as one-time or novel events. As noted in the Native Peoples and Homelands chapter of the First National Climate Assessment, “Native peoples experienced continental scale changes in their surroundings that are not unlike the types of changes that all Americans, indeed all peoples may face in coming decades” (Houser et al., 2001: 355). ¹ From Indigenous perspectives, the fires may look like less of a break from normalcy and more like the continuation of settler colonial ecological violence that has been ongoing for hundreds of years (Bacon, 2019). Noticeable warming activity or “climate change” at regional levels is not a new crisis faced by Native nations. It is the fundamental bio-political strategy of settler accumulation, assimilation, and genocide characteristic of colonialism’s epoch of theft and displacement, or the “Kleptocene” (Keeler, 2020). If we take a broader look, the infrastructures that produce the conditions for catastrophic fire go back to the beginning of settler impact on the land through the elimination of Native relations and management and successive clearing, drying, draining, and warming for agriculture, mining, and intensive forestry (Norgaard, 2019). So, although emergencies such as oil leaks, fires, floods, and hurricanes highlight ecological crises and generate massive convergences of public attention, they do not necessarily put into relief how those emergencies are produced or what the root causes are. It is tempting to believe that ecological emergencies could someday trigger mass uprising against the forms of governance that produce them. But what if the opposite is true? What if emergencies are instead managed as a form of self-perpetuation, molding popular response in such a way to solidify the social cohesions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism?

Living through the fires of 2020 confirmed one thing: Emergencies bring people together. But to what end? The fires drew Oregonians together in the common goal of, on the one hand, helping those affected by the fire. On the other hand, however, people set about reestablishing the economic and cultural patterns of settler colonialism. Hence, from a certain perspective, a return to normalcy is also a doubling down on the social structures constitutive of that emergency. Governor Brown’s words of encouragement, “Oregon is strong, and we’ll stand together” (KOIN Channel 6, 2020), can be interpreted as a moment of forced assimilation into settler democracy, where Native people are asked to forget their national sovereign identities and become Oregonians. Emergencies, then, are key moments in how collective histories, futurities, and communities are experienced because they force the question of compliance with specific norms and power structures. Strict management of the framing and outcome of emergencies present crucial moments in the maintenance of settler colonial power because they offer a chance to mark and reestablish the boundaries of social formation and define the forces that pose threats to continued existence.

As historically defining experiences, emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call a process of “inculcation” (2002: 1). Settler perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by economic and normative conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal strategies of dominant society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates collective experience of emergencies always to the advantage of the settler state. The inevitable emergencies of capitalism and settler colonialism, whether intentionally produced or not, are an engine of this social inculcation.

However, the manufactured experiences of emergency cannot reduce them to any one meaning. Many groups are refusing narratives that obfuscate their experiences of local and planetary crises as continuing cycles of colonialist and capitalist destruction. The disruptive or destructive element of emergencies, and hence, what is actually at stake, is always framed by historical consciousnesses that cannot be extrapolated from the material position of social groups. Therefore, it is important to attend to the ways in which emergencies reveal the relationships between us and how these indicate differential and interconnected political and moral responsibilities. Maurice Merleau-Ponty asks the question, “how does one delimit an emergency?” (1969: 82). Non-reductive consideration of emergency that peels back the layers of perceptual distortion is critical at a time when a host of wicked problems are being reproduced by overlapping systems of genocide, exploitation, and displacement.

The infrastructures of settler perception tend to deflect away from fundamental causes and consequences of emergencies. What is perhaps most notable is the refusal to come to terms with emergencies insofar as they are characterized by social formations rather than isolated events. The invisibility of deeper social emergencies is coupled with the exploitation of disasters to further settler colonial capitalist accumulation. In an op-ed for Teen Vogue, Jenn M. Jackson writes “Rather than seeing this pattern [of displacement, houselessness, and criminalization] as an emergency, Whiteness treats ongoing disasters afflicting these communities as economic opportunities” (2020). This tactic of White supremacy is afforded in part by a linear/progressivist perception of time that can only conceive of emergencies as caused by historical events or trends rather than embedded in social structures characterized by cyclical patterns that defy linear causalities. For example, the “climate crisis” is said to be “human caused.” We can point to various historical events that lead us here to the “Anthropocene.” But if there is a switch to thinking of emergencies as social structures, then, for example, we can consider White supremacy an emergency. It is a self-perpetuating social emergency that is both cause and effect of the disasters it produces. For the United States and other settler nations, there is no “environmental crisis” that is not both a cause and effect of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is the environmental crisis. There is no “climate crisis” that is not caused by capitalism. Capitalism is the “climate crisis.” There is no “humanitarian crisis” that is not caused by xenophobic heteropatriarchy. Xenophobic heteropatriarchy is the humanitarian crisis. Hence, emergencies in this structural sense serve precisely to subordinate and control whatever groups stand in the way of White settler colonial capitalist domination. Emergencies are not just events. They are also self-perpetuating material-perceptual infrastructures that create ongoing conditions of death, disease, vulnerability, and servitude. These emergencies are by definition hidden in plain view, but not without resistance.

Settler obfuscations of indigenous experiences

In Red Alert! Daniel Wildcat argues that from Indigenous worldviews the “climate crisis” or “global burning,” as he calls it, is clearly linked to settler colonialism. He writes that global burning is “yet another removal scenario for indigenous peoples” (2009: 8). Consequently, the “climate crisis” is visible to Native peoples in a way that it has not been to White settlers. In the context of removals from homelands, abductions from reservations (to boarding schools), and killing of culture in assimilationist cultural genocide, the fourth removal of climate change is marked by an unmistakable continuity (2–4) that can only be understood, as Sandy Grande emphasizes, “in contingency with the past” (2015: 32). Therefore, it is not merely a crisis of the climate and but also a crisis of settler colonialism.

To those who experience what Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, and Lemyra M DeBruyn call the “historical unresolved grief” of settler colonialism, global burning is manifestly part of a continuous cycle of events related to the same root crisis (1998: 57). Historical unresolved grief is not historical in the sense that it relates only to the past; it also pervades the present and is projected into the future in a manner that forms a circle (72). The “fourth removal” of the climate crisis functions as a cyclical reappearance of cultural and physical genocide as Native nations and communities are torn from the possibility of continuing their relationships with the plants, animals, and places that form ceremonial and traditional life (Norgaard et al., 2018).

In Whitestream imagination, the climate crisis is not caused by settler colonialism. Rather, it is “man-made.” Created in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the “Doomsday Clock” was originally intended to signal the probability of impending nuclear catastrophe. In 2007, global warming was added as a consideration in calibrating the clock. The managers write, “Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change… We gather the most informed and influential voices tracking man-made threats and bring their innovative thinking to a global audience” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d.). The clock was set to 100 seconds to midnight on 23 January 2020, in response to the demise of nuclear treaties and the worsening of climate change. I do not want to disagree that both these factors pose a threat to human existence. However, with this universalizing language, the Bulletin plays at being neutral while invoking a horizon of experiences unique to White settler society.

The settler strategy of universalization is a form of perceptual distraction or obfuscation. Expanding on the work of Maori scholar Graham Hingangaroa Smith (2000), Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee) argues that a “politics of distraction” functions as one of “the tools of shape-shifting colonial entities to separate us from our homelands, cultures, and communities” (2012: 91). The politics of distractions works by ceaselessly co-opting the experiences of Indigenous communities and repackaging them in “state-centric” terms (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005: 600). By framing the nuclear and climate crises as the result of “technology that humans create,” the Bulletin imposes the constructions of the settler state on the lives of Indigenous people as if they too are somehow directly responsible. ² However, to return to Wildcat, these are “catastrophic and deadly situations in which, strictly speaking… indigenous cultures had no part” (2009: 8). Settler frames of reference obfuscate these aspects of environmental and political crises to deflect responsibility and move to innocence (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with planetary ecological collapse. Furthermore, many of these same people have actively resisted or stood in the way of White settler colonial capitalist expansion and in so doing, their own lives have been devastated in the march to “human” world domination.

This same universal framing is used when emergencies are spoken of in terms of causes and effects. It is said that we have a “climate crisis” and a “humanitarian crisis” although the climate and the humans affected are not themselves responsible. These crises can be thought of as “effects.” It is often said that there is a “population crisis,” an “energy crisis,” a “crisis of overconsumption,” or a “crisis of governance.” These crises can be thought of as causes. However, sophisticated causal models should develop complex associations in ways that link dynamic variables in nonlinear systems (van Nes et al., 2015). Given the complexity of emergencies, relationships between causal forces can easily be manipulated, skewed, or obfuscated. Furthermore, it is possible to obfuscate the fact of an emergency entirely if certain factors are overblown or designated as sole causes. Hence, infrastructures of perception effectuate inculcations at all these sites of experience: the connections between cause and effect, the relations between emergencies, and the things that appear as emergencies whatsoever.

The “state-centric” framework shifts focus from the experiences of Native people, casting settler experience of crisis as the “given” experience of “all humans.” Colonial science often plays a role here by publicly interpreting data only insofar as it applies to all humanity. The idea that scientific observations are raw, “data” are traceable to early modern British empiricists such as John Locke who, as is well known, was also a zealous colonialist. In his Principles of Psychology, Euro-American philosopher William James berates such theories for failing to notice that perception does not work as the intake of pure sensorial information. Rather, perception works as a sort of “selective attention” that fixes upon certain elements of the world while other elements move to the fringe or margin of experience (1950: 402). Some factors of experience can become so dominant, so imposing, that we reach a state of total “absorption” in which we “banish ordinary sensations” that would otherwise be apparent (419). This selective attention is not random, but is, as Manulani Aluli Meyer (Kanaka Maoli) argues, related to “the fact and logic of our bodies” that arises from the culturally sedimented tendencies of our senses to interpret the world in various ways (2001: 130). The settler colonial infrastructures of perception work to absorb and inculcate perception into attentive modes and sensible habits in which the settler state is always at the center of experience, reality, designation, interpretation, and orientation. Such are the selective attentions of White supremacy. As the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz writes, the “scheme of interpretation” and “scheme of orientation” for members of an in-group determine systems of experiential relevance (1970: 120–121). Experiences are named and understood in terms of pre-experienced horizons of feeling and meaning that occur at the commonsense level (117–120). It is at this “communal” everyday understanding of events that the “politics of distraction” attempts to dominate the perception of emergencies.

For example, in response to the threat of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en land protectors set up Unist’ot’en Camp to obstruct the path of the proposed project in 2010. Between 2018 and 2020, the conflict escalated, and courts issued injunctions against the land protectors, empowering the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to make arrests. In acts of solidarity, allies of the Wet’suwet’en including the Mohawk and other groups blocked rail lines and ports across the country. Covering these events, Canada’s Global News announced that the disagreement was “again disrupting trade and travel in this country” (Global News, 2020). This manner of speaking names or typifies the situation with a structure of intention built around a horizon of relevance that refers back to the settler state. It is not the homelands of the Wet’suwet’en that are being disrupted by the pipeline. Rather it is the trade and travel of Canada that are being disrupted. Furthermore, Global News emphasized supposedly internal disagreements between certain Hereditary Chiefs and the Band Councils, stating, “Who speaks for the Wet’suwet’en people and who has authority over the 22,000 square kilometers of land in northern B.C. is not straightforward. There is confusion and misunderstanding” (Global News, 2020). But the Band Councils themselves were created under the Indian Act and structured specifically by the Canadian government to deal with negotiations for natural resources. So, the conflict was produced by Canadian interventions in traditional governance structures that were seen as unconducive to resource extraction. The Hereditary Chiefs who, as the anchor puts it, “believe they have authority over the territory,” never ceded that authority. Furthermore, the land upon which the original camp was made does not belong to the Wet’suwet’en as a whole or any of the neighboring Band Councils or tribal nations. It is on Unist’ot’en Clan territory that has never been ceded. As their website states, “The Unist’ot’en homestead is not a protest or demonstration. Our clan is occupying and using our traditional territory as it has for centuries” (Unist’ot’en, n.d.). Settler media distorts this view, arguing that it is not Canada but rather the Wet’suwet’en who are confused and divided.

In response to being blocked from her office, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, “It is very important for all people of Canada including government officials to be able to go about their rightful and legitimate business even as other Canadians are expressing their right to peaceful protest” (Global News, 2020). In this moment, Freeland co-opts the experience of the Wet’suwet’en into Whitestream perceptual infrastructures by disregarding the fact that they are not simply “Canadians.” Corntassel wrote of the UN position on Indigenous relations, “an Indigenous political agenda is shifted and altered to fit the dominant norms of existing institutional structures” (2007: 140). Political marginalization, therefore, will not be solved by “inclusion” that does not somehow fundamentally allow the “included” to set their own terms on the manner of that inclusion and allow for decolonized forms of governance to take first precedence over laws, land, and life. The Wet’suwet’en are a sovereign nation. Freeland’s language subsumes Native political action into a nationalistic multicultural framework of forced democratic inclusion (Grande, 2015: 33).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said of the land protectors, “We recognize the important democratic right … of peaceful protest. This is an important part of our democracy in Canada. But we are also a country of the rule of law and we need to make sure those laws are respected” (Global News, 2020). But this statement is not actually intended to emphasize a politically neutral “rule of law.” It is meant to assert the rule of Canada’s laws and dominion over the unceded Wet’suwet’en land so that it can be used for the transport of natural gas. Molly Wickham, Chief and Matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan, said “It’s also a bigger issue around Indigenous right and title and the sovereignty of our nation … Our traditional governance system is in place and this is a conflict between that governance system and colonization and the imposition of Indian Act band systems” (Democracy Now!, 2020). The colonialist desires undermining these sovereign governance systems are embodied by Trudeau’s comments, posing assimilationist projects of democratization and cultural genocide as a politics of inclusion in Canadian citizenship and manufacturing an emergency in state-centric terms.

The resistance of the land protectors led by Wet’suwet’en matriarchs challenges Canadian control over the land and does so in a way that asserts Indigenous frames of reference and experience that make the connection between settler colonial power and the climate crisis. The response of the settler state is primarily one of obfuscation, befuddlement, co-option, and outright attack on Native sovereignty. Indeed, as Grande writes, “One of the primary effects of the contemporary environmental debate is that is obfuscates the real environmental struggles of Indigenous peoples (access to and control over tribal lands and resources) and the real source of environmental destruction (colonization and the ill-effects of consuming habits)” (2015: 95). Colonial ecocide goes hand in hand with genocide as a form of erasure. It not only destroys the ecological relationships that form Indigenous life but also the very possibility of these relationships. In so doing, it must always push the limits of experience in its own favor. Grinde and Johansen argue that to see the true extent of the environmental crisis, “it is necessary to understand the earth from a Native American perspective – as a sacred space, as provider for the living, and as shrine for the dead” (1995: 3). Hence, these experiences must be continually recast to obfuscate settler colonialism, capitalism, and slavery as the real environmental and social crises. Whyte argues that settler colonialism is a “structure of oppression that specifically targets indigenous people’s ability to experience the world as imbued with responsibilities” (2016: 170). Hence, settler infrastructures of perception do not merely enforce social exclusion or inclusion, but the social erasure thereby of Native peoples through the destruction of eco-social kinship relations characterized by reciprocal responsibility.

Settlers accomplish this goal by targeting the bodily and spiritual sovereignty of Native people as it is expressed in their relationships with their homelands. Settler co-opting of experience entails capturing and possessing land in ways that make it antagonistic to Native life. As Corntassel notes, “When market transactions replace kinship relationships, Indigenous homelands and waterways become very vulnerable to exploitation” (2012: 95). One strategy is to turn the bodies of Native people into “obstructions” that stand in the way of social or economic “progress.” When Native land and water protectors are arrested, harassed, and attacked, it objectifies their bodies and the meanings they share with the land. Ahmed writes that in contrast with White, entitled bodies that are secured in their place by a milieu of White supremacy, the body of non-Whites “becomes an object alongside other objects. The experience is one of nausea and the crisis of losing one’s place in the world … pressure upon your bodily surface” (2007: 160–161). Arrests of Wet’suwet’en matriarchs by the RCMP objectifies their bodies in a way that mirrors how the pipeline objectifies the land. It attempts to sever the sacred bonds and meanings that make up life in that place. It attempts to erase and destroy reciprocal responsibilities and to inscribe the land with meanings that make the world conducive to the fulfillment of settler desires and experiences (Whyte, 2016: 172).

Scapegoating, distracting, and other means of social and perceptual distortion dominate a politics of obfuscation in contexts of emergency and crisis. Where the experience of Indigenous people invokes contrasting frames of reference and becomes attentive to settler colonialism as the basis of social and environmental emergencies, it becomes a direct challenge to state control and dominion as well as capitalist enterprise that cannot abide its presence. Hence, refusals to have experience reframed and co-opted are crucial to resistance efforts. Grande writes that “understood as a radical assertion of sovereignty, the act of ‘refusal’ is threatening to the settler state” (2015: 7). This is an important point for White environmentalists to understand as well, because it urges a deeper understanding of how state and White-centered terms of experience will never be sufficient for grasping the nature, cause, or consequence of “environmental” emergencies.

Surveilling and valuing life, death, and vulnerability in the Settler state

The normative effect of the settler infrastructures of emergency befalling the range of subalterneity—individuals, groups, and sovereign nations—is the devaluing of land and life, such that certain emergencies are elided and erased in settler perception. This slippage generates the paradox noted by Donald Grinde (Yamasee) and Bruce Johansen who note “how preoccupied the ‘majority society’ has become with its own environmental crisis and how cheaply it still regards Native American life” (1995: 3). When “emergencies” are constructed through the lens of White supremacy, many emergencies are never seen at all. So powerful are the infrastructures of perception that even an “apocalypse for Africans and the indigenous” disappears into abstraction for the Whitestream (Horne, 2018: 17). As Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues, the irony of White obsessions with dystopic futures imbued with environmental chaos is that the past and present dystopic realities of Native people go unnoticed. In “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now” he writes “we consider the future from what we believe is already a dystopia” (2017: 207). If colonial infrastructures of perception produce the erasure of such dystopic realities, to what extent can Whitestream understanding of emergency be trusted, accurate, or even said to approach the reality of death, loss, and disaster in a minimal sense? One place to begin looking for evidence of this paradoxical displacement of emergency is the empirical structures operationalized by settler states to formulate vulnerability in disaster response plans and to calculate and communicate the scope and nature of disasters as they happen.

Preliminary evidence of these empirical structures can be found in the disaster plans formulated by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and other governmental agencies. Disaster plans are created from the perspective of the White, able-bodied, propertied male. Regarding New Orleans and its suburbs after Hurricane Katrina, Robert Bullard writes, “Emergency plans were particularly insufficient with regard to evacuation for the car-less and ‘special needs’ populations – individuals who cannot simply jump into their cars and drive away” (2008: 756). Statistically, the groups without access to cars were/are overwhelmingly African American, Chicanx, and Indigenous people as well as people with disabilities, unhoused people, sick people, elderly people, and children (754). These populations rely more heavily on public transportation and tend to live in areas with insufficient flood protection infrastructure. The occurrence of “unnatural disasters” highlights crises of infrastructural inequality, many elements of which have existed for hundreds of years and directly follow the geographical segregations of slavery. Hence, this initial view of vulnerability belies its regulation as a strategy of social inculcation into settler/slaver epistemologies of emergency.

The forward-looking frame of disaster plans is complimented by the backward-looking frame of death counts. Though conceivably simple at a surface level, counting deaths in emergency situations is far from an objective or straightforward mathematical process. B. E. Aguirre and E. L. Quarantelli write, “Counting is a social process made plausible by often-unexamined general notions of authority” (2008: 34). Perhaps unsurprisingly, an elite social status is strongly correlated with the probability of being counted as a death; on the other hand, the likelihood of becoming one of “The Invisible Dead” is linked to “social exclusion” (21). Although data clearly marks out this correlation, the notion of “social exclusion” as discussed above may not be sufficient for understanding what is at stake in such counting “errors.” The lives of Indigenous, Black, and people of color, immigrants, refugees, and women (especially Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, #MMIW) are not merely subject to various forms of “social exclusion.” If we interrogate the inverse idea, a “politics of inclusion,” it is apparent that it has been, as Grande writes, “an accomplice to the broader project of assimilation,” forcing Native nations into “multicultural nationalism” defined by racial rather than national divisions (2015: 51–52). From Native perspectives where democratic inclusion is compulsory and the values of individualism, private property, and progress are instilled in the manner of cultural genocide, “inclusion” is anathema to sovereignty and self-determination. Hence, “social exclusion” can be read as a complementary rather than an opposing strategy to democratic inclusion, both of which are opportunistically deployed to attack Native sovereignty. Hence, the core issue in death counts is not marginalization from a preexisting political power structure that is somehow neutral with regard to its racial, national, and gendered composition. Rather, the discounting of life is an active component of perception that is already saturated with White supremacist, colonialist, and neo-liberal desire, relative to which the denial or bestowal of representation and inclusion are strategic and symptomatic.

An example of how death counts are manipulated to conform to Whitestream narratives can be found in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Initially, official reports fixed on the number 64 (Kishore et al., 2018). In response, a group of independent researchers conducted community-based surveys in Puerto Rico to determine more accurate levels of mortality. These researchers explain that the official number of 64 was generated by a range of institutions and policies including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Puerto Rico’s Institute of Forensic Sciences, and hospitals, whose interaction tended to minimize the disaster. Bodies of the dead had to be brought to local municipalities to be verified as disaster-related deaths and “indirect” deaths were not always designated as disaster-related on death certificates (163). This method of counting indicates a fixation on rigid ideas of “cause and effect” rather than an understanding of the social structures at play in emergencies. In contrast, through the collective knowledge of Puerto Ricans affected by Maria, researchers found the following: “Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria. Our estimate of 4645 excess deaths from September 20 through December 31, 2017, is likely to be conservative since subsequent adjustments for survivor bias and household-size distributions increase this estimate to more than 5000” (167).

In such instances, public health surveillance as an infrastructure of perception tends to minimize the human costs of social inequality and colonialism. Indeed, it is an empirical framing that can only count the deaths of events, not social structures. This obfuscates the fact that in Puerto Rico, for example, the health, energy, and transportation infrastructures were already in a state of emergency. Carmen Zorilla, a Puerto Rican Medical Doctor, writes, “ … our infrastructure, including the health care infrastructure, was already in crisis” (2017: 1801). In addition, long-term policies of energy colonialism created centralized energy systems and weakened community abilities to provide care for the sick and vulnerable in the ongoing hurricane fallout (de Onis, 2018). The interlocking grid of political, racial, and economic forces contributing to the outcome of the hurricane are hidden from view by colonial systems of health surveillance and emergency response. In this context, the term “disaster mitigation” takes on new meaning where the harm of the disaster is not the main target of mitigation, but rather the potential blowback for the settler state. Mitigating disasters in this sense requires erasures of death and vulnerability on mass scales that play directly into the primary imperatives of settler colonialism.

Settler colonial logics, among them the “logic of erasure” (Wolfe, 2006), target Native and in many cases Black and other people of color for death or removal to make more space for Whites. This diasporic and genocidal urge of White supremacy, which includes lynching and other forms of murder, is described as a logic of death by Tiffany Lethabo King, who writes, “To become or ascend to Whiteness is to enact a self – or self-actualize – in a way that requires the death of others” (2019: xii). The deaths of non-White bodies make the world, as Sarah Ahmed writes, “‘ready’ for certain kinds of [White] bodies” (2007: 153–154). Accordingly, White supremacy views mass deaths of non-White people as only minimally constitutive of death, much less anything approaching an emergency. In a White logic of death, or a “necropolitics” (Mbembe, 2019), the structures of colonialism, genocide, war, and slavery represent not the beginning but rather the end of violence and disorder. As then Senator Joe Biden said before congress prior to the invasion of Iraq, “I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security” (Weisbrot, 2020). The fulfillment of White supremacy is perceived to be the opposite of an emergency; it is the return of calm, tranquility, civilization, and good fortune. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “The material and moral culture of England presupposes the exploitation of the colonies. The purity of principles not only tolerates but even requires violence” (1969: xiii). In keeping with this purity principles, Justice John Marshall wrote “ … the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness … ” (1823: 590). The elimination of the Native is the solution to the crisis of war, not the crisis itself. Slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration bring peace, stability, and prosperity, not disaster. Eve Tuck (Aleut) and C. Ree write, “Colonization is  … the management of those who have been made killable, once and future ghosts” (2013: 642). White supremacy contains an inversion of emergencies that not only makes certain populations killable but in fact mandates murder as a perceived crises. Indeed, as Nick Estes has written, “Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide” (2019: 1).

In today’s world, there are ample opportunities to see how emergencies are managed to obscure not only the extent and consequences of disaster but also the true emergencies themselves. The structures that regulate the White settler relation to emergency in terms of inculcation, designation, and understanding are revealed in how the disasters and deaths of displacement, houselessness, mass incarceration, police brutality, and ecological collapse are counted and valued. After Hurricane Katrina, the political economy of “bloated bodies” quite literally washed up for all to see (Sovacool et al., 2018). But seeing dead bodies is not yet seeing the crises of racial capitalism and slavery. Quite the opposite, it may simply confirm what is already “known” within a White supremacist frame. Effort must be made, then, to combat White supremacist inculcation by nurturing experiences of emergency that refuse participation in the infrastructures of White settler perception.

Refusing settler inculcation and fostering incommensurable collective experiences of emergencies

The general strategies of inculcation used by settlers to shift perceptions of emergency in their favor are mirrored in the history of Indian education where material and spiritual principles were formed to achieve the genocidal assimilation of Native children. Here, emergency is operationalized by placing blame on Native people for their own genocide, posing the White settler state as an end to war, death, disease, and cultural malaise, transmuting the crisis of settler colonialism into the supposed crisis of being Indigenous (the “Indian problem”). Three core markers of “civilization,” appear again and again in the historical documents: individualism, private property (capitalist logics), and White supremacy. As Grande notes, these are not always explicit but are enforced by habituation “to specific forms of social organization and behavioral patterns” that embody “the deep structures of colonialist consciousness” (2015: 100). These principles appear as various forms of psychological and physical coercion and manifest as emotional and bodily abuse. They attack the ability of Native children to experience themselves and the world as meaningful within a web of responsibilities and relationships. A weekly newsletter printed by unpaid Native children at Carlisle Indian Industrial School called The Indian Helper functioned primarily as a way for the school to broadcast its “success stories” in killing the Indian and saving the man. It was intended for distribution to boys and girls. One issue bragged that “Carlisle boys are very active in their efforts to persuade the other Indians to take their lands in severalty and become individuals” (The Indian Helper, August 1890). Just days after the passage of the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) in 1887, the newsletter pronounced, “We wish Senator Dawes could have heard the hearty applause of our whole school when the announcement was made the other evening that the Lands in Severalty Bill had become a law” (The Indian Helper, February 1887). A few months later, they published a poem written by Elise Fuller, an Omaha girl (The Indian Helper, May 1887):

Now I am a citizen!

They’ve given us new laws,

Just as were made

By Senator Dawes

We need not live on rations,

Why? There is no cause,

For “Indians are citizens,”

Said Senator Dawes.

However, as Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen note, “infrastructure is not inherently colonial – it is also essential for transformation” (2020: 245). Infrastructures of resistance that push back against genocide and dispossession include refusals of spiritual and perceptual domination, Black Elk, who is from the same nation as Oscar Warden (Oglala Sioux), tells a very different story about the center of the universe. In Black Elk Speaks, he describes a vision in which he is taken to the Black Hills, “to the center of the world” (Neihardt, 2014: 121). He “saw that the sacred hoop of … [his] people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father” (52). Black Elk’s vision re-centers perception within in “zones of relevance” that are Indigenous and tied to homeland, people, and place in relationships of reciprocal care and responsibility (Schutz, 1970: 111). Boarding schools sought to eliminate Native languages, ceremonies, and ties to community and land. In this way, the collective experiences of Native nations came under attack by infrastructures of lived experience that framed life in terms of individualism, property, and White supremacy. In so doing, the emergency of genocidal settler colonialism was transmuted into the false idea of Native cultural failings. By obfuscating the nature of the emergency, perspective was manipulated to engender reliance and dependency on the settler state for salvation and ultimately to justify settler takeover of Native lands.

The question, then, becomes how these central elements of colonialist consciousness work to transmute and co-opt experiences of emergencies. They operate by defining in advance the terms of experiential relevance, or attention. When working smoothly, these zones of experiential relevance are taken for granted in experience. As Schutz writes, “The zone of things taken for granted may be defined as that sector of the world which, in connection with the theoretical or the practical problem we are concerned with at a given time, does not seem to need further inquiry, although we do not have clear and distinct insight into, and understanding of, its structure” (111). Zones of relevance are politically, geographically, and socially defined. Individualism works in a way that breaks down the ability of people to experience the world collectively, and, by extension, systematically in terms of social relations. The we-relationship that defines a community of experience is only possible when “another person … [is] within reach of my direct experience when [they] share with me a community of space and a community of time” (184).

Communities of space and time characterized by collective undergoing are shattered by an epistemic individualism that conveys emergencies in terms of “death counts” and “property damage” that favor a wealthy, White perspective. The media and state apparatuses position us as objective observers vis-à-vis an aggregate of affected individuals. This breaks down the ability of what Schutz calls “reciprocal witnessing” in which communal interpretations of a situation are shared between two or more people (193). Individualism frames emergencies as a one-sided or mono-perspectival situation; even if we “feel for” or “sympathize with” the “victims” we do not see ourselves implicated in a direct way because the frames of reference are held at a distance. Hence, community response breaks down because there is no sense that, for example, the northwest fires are happening to “us” – rather they are happening to “them.” Individualism is not just an ideology or belief but rather an active element in the perception of events, a lived experience materialized in economic systems of exploitation and possessive logics of property ownership.

What is needed is a politics of refusal regarding the core perceptual elements of settler consciousness and a resurgence of the ability for collective experience that simultaneously holds space for an “ethic of incommensurability” (Grande, 2015; Simpson, 2007; Tuck and Yang, 2012). This ethic of incommensurability fosters “moves that unsettle innocence” (35). In other words, it emphasizes an awareness of how one’s own existence (especially for White settlers) is tied up with harm inflicted on others in the emergencies of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and White supremacy. Transforming perception is not only a matter of attuning individual senses but is also a public and communal process of addressing the material, spiritual, and mindful infrastructures that secure settler ways of seeing. Such collective efforts in refusal must avoid employing a nationalistic “we” which is only a “we” in the sense that it is composed of a group sharing the same isolated point of view that is actively antagonistic to understanding anything outside that pregiven community. An incommensurable collectivity is much more than simply “open minded” to other points of view. It is open to the world within a frame of moral relationality such that there is no emergency that happens to “those poor people,” Emergencies are part of a shared world; when seen as social structures, emergencies are happening to all of us. This perspective gathers together communities in time and space—past, present, and future, place, land, and people—in ways that reveal how emergencies are cyclical manifestations of “shape-shifting” yet persistent social powers that implicate some of us more than others and call incommensurable communities forth to action each in their own way.

Conclusion: Reformulating past, present, and future emergencies

Seeing emergencies as emergent cycles of social structures demands that past, present, and future crises be rethought by those who have failed to see them. For example, if we think back on what has been called “Canada’s most tragic disaster”—the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbor—certain factors appear as significant that are not generally considered from a Whitestream lens. As the “official” narrative goes, after a series of communication errors, a French transport bound for Europe filled with explosives collided with another ship, producing the largest “man-made” explosion at that time, obliterating a half-mile radius of the port township and killing thousands of people. If we expand the analysis to look at the structural conditions that brought a ship full of explosives to the harbor, a story emerges that goes well beyond human error and miscalculation. As one historian describes, the city of Halifax had recently undergone massive changes to invite more traffic to the economically depressed port area. A new city government began planning to bring “the Nova Scotian capital into the mainstream of North American development … Talk and action converged in 1912 when Canada’s new Conservative government committed itself to a $35-million-dollar megaproject designed to rebuild Halifax’s harbor facilities. The old South End would be invaded to create a massive dock and warehouse complex, with infrastructure ranging from grain elevators to high-rise hotel and convention facility” (Sutherland, 1994: 5–6).

This push for modernization and economic development coincided with a shifting real-estate market that put pressure on the local Mi’kmaq community at Turtle Grove to move from the little remaining land they had left as part of “Slum clearance, public housing, [and] comprehensive urban planning … ” (6) that employed “constant threats of expulsion and relocation” (Burke, 1994: 46). After the explosion, the already embattled Mi’kmaq community at Turtle Grove was never re-established. While Halifax was rebuilt and remade, Mi’kmaq life was scattered and disbanded. The broader contexts of colonial domination and capitalist progress beg the question here: Is this disaster about a failed mission to transport explosives from New York to France or did it begin with French colonization in the early 1600s when land was stolen, and the Mi’kmaq were forced into war and violence? Was the disaster due to its most proximate causes or is it best understood as another cycle of colonial violence? When viewed as the latter, the 2020 attacks on Mi’kmaq lobster fishers can be seen as just the latest in the incessant settler-produced crises for Mi’kmaq life. As one journalist called it, this “conflict brewing since the 1700s” (Slaughter, 2020) is clearly an extension of policy and activity that aims to weaken, undermine, and eventually remove any trace of Mi’kmaq life from Nova Scotia. From this perspective, settler colonialism is a social structure of emergency.

If we transport back on the Willamette Valley and surrounding lands with anticolonial sensibilities, not as Oregon, but as the land of the Kalapuya, Siuslaw, Alsea, and Siletz, we see that the expansive fields of fescue and monocrops of Douglas Firs are a landscape in crisis. They represent environmental disaster and ecocide that are part-and-parcel of what J.M. Bacon has called settler colonial ecological violence (2019). This is the case, I would propose, even without catastrophic wildfires. To dwell again on the words of Grinde and Johansen, these landscapes express anything but an understanding of the earth “as a sacred space, as provider for the living, and as shrine for the dead” (1995: 3). This is the truth from which the infrastructures of White settler perception would keep us.

Highlights

Settler perceptions of emergency are framed by interlocking material-political infrastructures that inculcate social understanding to the advantage of the settler state.