GDI 07-Give Back The Land

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007
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FIRST PRIORITY
1NC ...............................................................................................................................................................................2
Link: Assistance ............................................................................................................................................................6
Link: Foreign Aid ..........................................................................................................................................................7
Link: Disease Prevention...............................................................................................................................................8
Links: Intellectual Property Rights ................................................................................................................................9
Link: Biotechnology ....................................................................................................................................................10
Link: Human Rights ....................................................................................................................................................15
Link: Human Rights ....................................................................................................................................................16
Link: Law ....................................................................................................................................................................17
Link: International Law ...............................................................................................................................................18
Impact: Colonialism T/ the Case .................................................................................................................................20
Impact: Extinction .......................................................................................................................................................21
Impact: War .................................................................................................................................................................22
Impact: Environment ...................................................................................................................................................23
Impact: State Key to Capitalism ..................................................................................................................................25
A2: Perm......................................................................................................................................................................27
A2: Realism .................................................................................................................................................................28
A2: Nuclear War..........................................................................................................................................................29
A2: Extinction .............................................................................................................................................................30
A2: Cap Good..............................................................................................................................................................31
A2: Identity/Land K.....................................................................................................................................................32
A2: Churchill Indicts ...................................................................................................................................................35
AFF ANSWERS
AFF: Perm ...................................................................................................................................................................37
AFF: AltCapitalism .................................................................................................................................................38
AFF: Reverse Genocide...............................................................................................................................................39
AFF: Identity/Land K ..................................................................................................................................................40
AFF: A2 Colonialism=Root Cause..............................................................................................................................45
AFF: State Key to Solve Genocide..............................................................................................................................47
AFF: Churchill Indicts.................................................................................................................................................48
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The 1AC is a typical leftist response to international oppression that remains silent in the
face of the on-going colonization of native North America. The plan serves as a mask for
the state, making it appear benevolent, even as its existence is contingent upon a continuing
legacy of colonization that guarantees continued international exploitation, turning the
case.
Ward Churchill 1996 (Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, BA and MA in
Communications from Sangamon State, From A Native Son pgs 520 530)
Ill debunk some of this nonsense in a moment, but first I want to take up the posture of self-proclaimed leftist radicals in the
same connection. And Ill do so on the basis of principle, because justice is supposed to matter more to progressives than to
rightwing hacks. Let me say that the pervasive and near-total silence of the Left in this connection has been quite
illuminating. Non-Indian activists, with only a handful of exceptions, persistently plead that they cant really
take a coherent position on the matter of Indian land rights because unfortunately, theyre not really
conversant with the issues (as if these were tremendously complex). Meanwhile, they do virtually nothing,
generation after generation, to inform themselves on the topic of who actually owns the ground theyre
standing on. The record can be played only so many times before it wears out and becomes just another
variation of hear no evil, see no evil. At this point, it doesnt take Albert Einstein to figure out that the Left
doesnt know much about such things because its never wanted to know, or that this is so because its always
had its own plans for utilizing land it has no more right to than does the status quo it claims to oppose. The
usual technique for explaining this away has always been a sort of pro forma acknowledgement that Indian
land rights are of course really important stuff (yawn), but that one really doesnt have a lot of time to get
into it (Ill buy your book, though, and keep it on my shelf, even if I never read it). Reason? Well, one is just
overwhelmingly preoccupied with working on other important issues (meaning, what they consider to be
more important issues). Typically enumerated are sexism, racism, homophobia, class inequities, militarism, the
environment, or some combination of these. Its a pretty good evasion, all in all. Certainly, theres no denying
any of these issues their due; they are all important, obviously so. But more important than the question of
land rights? There are some serious problems of primacy and priority imbedded in the orthodox script. To
frame things clearly in this regard, lets hypothesize for a moment that all of the various non-Indian
movements concentrating on each of these issues were suddenly successful in accomplishing their objectives .
Lets imagine that the United States as a whole were somehow transformed into an entity defined by the parity of its race, class, and gender
relations, its embrace of unrestricted sexual preference, its rejection of militarism in all forms, and its abiding concern with environmental
protection (I know, I know, this is a sheer impossibility, but thats my point). When all is said and done, the society resulting
from this scenario is still, first and foremost, a colonialist society, an imperialist society in the most
fundamental sense possible with all that this implies. This is true because the scenario does nothing at all to
address the fact that whatever is happening happens on someone elses land, not only without their consent,
but through an adamant disregard for their rights to the land. Hence, all it means is that the immigrant or
invading population has rearranged its affairs in such a way as to make itself more comfortable at the
continuing expense of indigenous people. The colonial equation remains intact and may even be reinforced by
a greater degree of participation, and vested interest in maintenance of the colonial order among the settler
population at large. The dynamic here is not very different from that evident in the American Revolution of the late 18th century, is it? And
we all know very well where that led, dont we? Should we therefore begin to refer to socialist imperialism, feminist imperialism, gay and lesbian
imperialism, environmental imperialism, African American, and la Raza imperialism? I would hope not. I would hope this is all just a matter of
confusion, of muddled priorities among people who really do mean well and whod like to do better. If so, then all that is necessary to
correct the situation is a basic rethinking of what must be done., and in what order. Here, Id advance the
straightforward premise that the land rights of First Americans should serve as a first priority for
everyone seriously committed to accomplishing positive change in North America. But before I suggest everyone jump
off and adopt this priority, I suppose its only fair that I interrogate the converse of the proposition: if making things like class inequity and
sexism the preeminent focus of progressive action in North America inevitably perpetuates the internal colonial structure of the United States,
does the reverse hold true? Ill state unequivocally that it does not. There is no indication whatsoever that a restoration of indigenous sovereignty
in Indian Country would foster class stratification anywhere, least of all in Indian Country. In fact, all indications are that when left to their own
devices, indigenous peoples have consistently organized their societies in the most class-free manners. Look to the example of the
Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy). Look to the Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy. Look to the confederations of the Yaqui and
the Lakota, and those pursued and nearly perfected by Pontiac and Tecumseh. They represent the very essence of enlightened egalitarianism and
democracy. Every imagined example to the contrary brought forth by even the most arcane anthropologist can be readily offset by a couple of
dozen other illustrations along the lines of those I just mentioned.
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Would sexism be perpetuated? Ask one of the Haudenosaunee clan mothers, who continue to assert political
leadership in their societies through the present day. Ask Wilma Mankiller, current head of the Cherokee nation , a people
that traditionally led by what were called Beloved Women. Ask a Lakota womanor man, for that matterabout who it was
that owned all real property in traditional society, and what that meant in terms of parity in gender relations. Ask a traditional
Navajo grandmother about her social and political role among her people. Women in most traditional native societies not only
enjoyed political, social, and economic parity with men, they often held a preponderance of power in one or more of these
spheres. Homophobia? Homosexuals of both genders were (and in many settings still are) deeply revered as special or
extraordinary, and therefore spiritually significant, within most indigenous North American cultures. The extent to which these
realities do not now pertain in native societies is exactly the extent to which Indians have been subordinated to the mores of the
invading, dominating culture. Insofar as restoration of Indian land rights is tied directly to the reconstitution of traditional
indigenous social, political, and economic modes, you can see where this leads: the relations of sex and sexuality accord rather
well with the aspirations of feminist and gay rights activism. How about a restoration of native land rights precipitating some sort
of environmental holocaust? Lets get at least a little bit real here. If youre not addicted to the fabrications of Smithsonian
anthropologists about how Indians lived, or George Weurthners Eurosupremacist Earth First! Fantasies about how we beat all
the wooly mammoths and mastodons and saber-toothed cats to death with sticks, then this question isnt even on the board. I
know its become fashionable among Washington Post editorialists to make snide references to native people strewing refuse in
their wake as they wandered nomadically about the prehistoric North American landscape. What is that supposed to imply?
That we, who were mostly sedentary agriculturalists in any event. Were dropping plastic and aluminum cans as we went? Like
I said, lets get real. Read the accounts of early European arrival, despite the fact that it had been occupied by 15 or 20 million
people enjoying a remarkably high standard of living for nobody knows how long: 40,000 years? 50,000 years? Longer? Now
contrast that reality to whats been done to this continent over the past couple of hundred years by the culture Weurthner, the
Smithsonian, and the Post represent, and you tell me about environmental devastation. That leaves militarism and racism. Taking
the last first, there really is no indication of racism in traditional Indian societies. To the contrary, the record reveals that Indians
habitually intermarried between groups, and frequently adopted both children and adults from other groups. This occurred in precontact times between Indians, and the practice was broadened to include those of both African and European originand
ultimately Asian origin as wellonce contact occurred. Those who were naturalized by marriage or adoption were considered
members of the group, pure and simple. This was always the Indian view. The Europeans and subsequent Euroamerican settlers
viewed things rather differently, however, and foisted off the notion that Indian identity should be determined primarily by
blood quantum, an outright eugenics code similar to those developed in places like Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.
Now thats a racist construction if there ever was one. Unfortunately, a lot of Indians have been conned into buying into this antiIndian absurdity, and thats something to be overcome. But theres also solid indication that quite a number of native people
continue to strongly resist such things as the quantum system. As to militarism, no one will deny that Indians fought wars among
themselves both before and after the European invasion began. Probably half of all indigenous peoples in North America
maintained permanent warrior societies. This could perhaps be reasonably construed as militarism, but not, I think, with the
sense the term conveys within the European/Euro-American tradition. There were never, so far as anyone can demonstrate,, wars
of annihilation fought in this hemisphere prior to the Columbian arrival, none. In fact, it seems that it was a more or less firm
principle of indigenous warfare not to kill, the object being to demonstrate personal bravery, something that could be done only
against a live opponent. Theres no honor to be had in killing another person, because a dead person cant hurt you. Theres no
risk. This is not to say that nobody ever died or was seriously injured in the fighting. They were, just as they are in full contact
contemporary sports like football and boxing. Actually, these kinds of Euro-American games are what I would take to be the
closest modern parallels to traditional inter-Indian warfare. For Indians, it was a way of burning excess testosterone out of young
males, and not much more. So, militarism in the way the term is used today is as alien to native tradition as smallpox and atomic
bombs. Not only is it perfectly reasonable to assert that a restoration of Indian control over unceded lands
within the United States would do nothing to perpetuate such problems as sexism and classism, but the
reconstitution of indigenous societies this would entail stands to free the affected portions of North America
from such maladies altogether. Moreover, it can be said that the process should have a tangible impact in
terms of diminishing such oppressions elsewhere. The principles is this: sexism, racism, and all the rest arose
here as a concomitant to the emergence and consolidation of the Eurocentric nation-state form of
sociopolitical and economic organization. Everything the state does, everything it can do, is entirely
contingent on its maintaining its internal cohesion, a cohesion signified above all by its pretended territorial
integrity, its ongoing domination of Indian Country. Given this, it seems obvious that the literal
dismemberment of the nation-state inherent to Indian land recovery correspondingly reduces the ability of
the state to sustain the imposition of objectionable relations within itself. It follows that realization of
indigenous land rights serves to undermine or destroy the ability of the status quo to continue imposing a
racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, militaristic order on non-Indians.
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The Alternative is to reject the Affirmative and pursue indigenous land return as a first
priority. This act of impossible realism solves the caseColonization is the root cause of
oppression, exploitation and war. Only a return to an indigenous politics can remedy the
ills of colonialism.
Communications from Sangamon State, From A Native Son pgs 85-90)
The question which inevitably arises with regard to indigenous land claims, especially in the United States, is
whether they are realistic. The answer, of course is, No, they arent. Further, no form of decolonization
has ever been realistic when viewed within the construct of a colonialist paradigm. It wasnt realistic at the time to
expect George Washingtons rag-tag militia to defeat the British military during the American Revolution. Just ask the British. It
wasnt realistic, as the French could tell you, that the Vietnamese should be able to defeat U.S.-backed France in 1954, or that the
Algerians would shortly be able to follow in their footsteps. Surely, it wasnt reasonable to predict that Fidel Castros pitiful
handful of guerillas would overcome Batistas regime in Cuba, another U.S. client, after only a few years in the mountains. And
the Sandinistas, to be sure, had no prayer of attaining victory over Somoza 20 years later. Henry Kissinger, among others, knew
that for a fact. The point is that in each case, in order to begin their struggles at all, anti-colonial fighters around the
world have had to abandon orthodox realism in favor of what they knew to be right. To paraphrase Bendit,
they accepted as their agenda, a redefinition of reality in terms deemed quite impossible within the
conventional wisdom of their oppressors. And in each case, they succeeded in their immediate quest for
liberation. The fact that all but one (Cuba) of the examples used subsequently turned out to hold colonizing pretensions of its
own does not alter the truth of thisor alter the appropriateness of their efforts to decolonize themselvesin the least. It simply
means that decolonization has yet to run its course, that much remains to be done. The battles waged by native nations in North
America to free themselves, and the lands upon which they depend for ongoing existence as discernible peoples, from the grip of
U.S. (and Canadian) internal colonialism are plainly part of this process of liberation. Given that their very survival
depends upon their perseverance in the face of all apparent odds, American Indians have no real alternative
but to carry on. They must struggle, and where there is struggle here is always hope. Moreover, the
unrealistic or romantic dimensions of our aspiration to quite literally dismantle the territorial corpus of the
U.S. state begin to erode when one considers that federal domination of Native North America is utterly
contingent upon maintenance of a perceived confluence of interests between prevailing
governmental/corporate elites and common non-Indian citizens. Herein lies the prospect of long-term success. It is
entirely possibly that the consensus of opinion concerning non-Indian rights to exploit the land and resources of indigenous
nations can be eroded, and that large numbers of non-Indians will join in the struggle to decolonize Native North America. Few
non-Indians wish to identify with or defend the naziesque characteristics of US history. To the contrary most seek to deny it in
rather vociferous fashion. All things being equal, they are uncomfortable with many of the resulting attributes of federal postures
and actively oppose one or more of these, so long as such politics do not intrude into a certain range of closely guarded selfinterests. This is where the crunch comes in the realm of Indian rights issues. Most non-Indians (of all races and ethnicities, and
both genders) have been indoctrinated to believe the officially contrived notion that, in the event the Indians get their land
back, or even if the extent of present federal domination is relaxed, native people will do unto their occupiers exactly as has
been done to them; mass dispossession and eviction of non-Indians, especially Euro-Americans is expected to ensue.
Hence even progressives who are most eloquently inclined to condemn US imperialism abroad and/or the
functions of racism and sexism at home tend to deliver a blank stare or profess open disinterest when
indigenous land rights are mentioned. Instead of attempting to come to grips with this most fundamental of
all issues the more sophisticated among them seek to divert discussions into higher priority or more
important topics like issues of class and gender equality in which justice becomes synonymous with a
redistribution of power and loot deriving from the occupation of Native North America even while
occupation continues. Sometimes, Indians are even slated to receive their fair share in the division of spoils accruing from
expropriation of their resources. Always, such things are couched in terms of some greater good than decolonizing the .6
percent of the U.S. population which is indigenous. Some Marxist and environmentalist groups have taken the argument so far as
to deny that Indians possess any rights distinguishable from those of their conquerors. AIM leader Russell Means snapped the
picture into sharp focus when he observed n 1987 that: so-called progressives in the United States claiming that Indians are
obligated to give up their rights because a much larger group of non-Indians need their resources is exactly the same as Ronald
Reagan and Elliot Abrams asserting that the rights of 250 million North Americans outweigh the rights of a couple million
Nicaraguans (continues).
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Leaving aside the pronounced and pervasive hypocrisy permeating these positions, which add up to a phenomenon elsewhere described as settler
state colonialism, the fact is that the specter driving even most radical non-Indians into lockstep with the federal government on questions of
native land rights is largely illusory. The alternative reality posed by native liberation struggles is actually much different: While government
propagandists are wont to trumpetas they did during the Maine and Black Hills land disputes of the 1970sthat an Indian win would mean
individual non-Indian property owners losing everything, the native position has always been the exact opposite. Overwhelmingly, the lands
sought for actual recovery have been governmentally and corporately held. Eviction of small land owners has been pursued only in instances
where they have banded togetheras they have during certain of the Iroquois claims casesto prevent Indians from recovering any land at all,
and to otherwise deny native rights. Official sources contend this is inconsistent with the fact that all non-Indian title to any portion of North
America could be called into question. Once the dike is breached, they argue, its just a matter of time before everybody has to start swimming
back to Europe, or Africa or wherever. Although there is considerable technical accuracy to admissions that all non-Indian title to North
America is illegitimate, Indians have by and large indicated they would be content to honor the cession agreements entered into by their
ancestors, even though the United States has long since defaulted. This would leave somewhere close to two-thirds of the continental United
States in non-Indian hands, with the real rather than pretended consent of native people. The remaining one-third, the areas delineated in Map II
to which the United States never acquired title at all would be recovered by its rightful owners. The government holds that even at that there is no
longer sufficient land available for unceded lands, or their equivalent, to be returned. In fact, the government itself still directly controls more
than one-third of the total U.S. land area, about 770 million acres. Each of the states also owns large tracts, totaling about 78 million acres. It is
thus quite possibleand always has beenfor all native claims to be met in full without the loss to non-Indians of a single acre of privately held
land. When it is considered that 250 million-odd acres of the privately held total are now in the hands of major corporate entities, the real
dimension of the threat to small land holders (or more accurately, lack of it) stands revealed. Government spokespersons have pointed out that
the disposition of public lands does not always conform to treaty areas. While this is true, it in no way precludes some process of negotiated land
exchange wherein the boundaries of indigenous nations are redrawn by mutual consent to an exact, or at least a much closer conformity. All that
is needed is an honest, open, and binding forumsuch as a new bilateral treaty processwith which to proceed. In fact, numerous native peoples
have, for a long time, repeatedly and in a variety of ways, expressed a desire to participate in just such a process. Nonetheless, it is argued,
there will still be at least some non-Indians trapped within such restored areas. Actually, they would not be
trapped at all. The federally imposed genetic criteria of Indian ness discussed elsewhere in this book
notwithstanding, indigenous nations have the same rights as any other to define citizenry by allegiance
(naturalization) rather than by race. Non-Indians could apply for citizenship, or for some form of landed alien status
which would allow them to retain their property until they die. In the event they could not reconcile themselves to living under
any jurisdiction other than that of the United States, they would obviously have the right to leace, and they should have the right
to compensation from their own government (which got them into the mess in the first place). Finally, and one suspects this is the
real crux of things from the government/corporate perspective, any such restoration of land and attendant sovereign prerogatives
to native nations would result in a truly massive loss of domestic resources to the United States, thereby impairing the
countrys economic and military capacities (see Radioactive Colonialism essay for details). For everyone who queued up to
wave flags and tie on yellow ribbons during the United States recent imperial adventure in the Persian Gulf, this prospect may
induce a certain psychic trauma. But, for progressives at least, it should be precisely the point. When you think about these issues
in this way, the great mass of non-Indians in North America really have much to gain and almost nothing to
lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim the land which is rightfully ours. The tangible
diminishment of US material power which is integral to our victories in this sphere stands to pave the way for
realization of most other agendas from anti-imperialism to environmentalism, from African American
liberation to feminism, from gay rights to the ending of class privilege pursued by progressive on this
continent. Conversely, succeeding with any or even all of these other agendas would still represent an
inherently oppressive situation in their realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of Native North
America without the consent of Indian people. Any North American revolution which failed to free
indigenous territory from non-Indian domination would be simply a continuation of colonialism in another
form. Regardless of the angle from which you view the matter, the liberation of Native North America,
liberation of the land first and foremost, is the key to fundamental and positive social changes of many other
sorts. One thing they say, leads to another. The question has always been, of course, which thing is to the
first in the sequence. A preliminary formulation for those serious about achieving radical change in the
United States might be First Priority to First Americans Put another way this would mean, US out of
Indian Country. Inevitably, the logic leads to what weve all been so desperately seeking: The United States
at least what weve come to know it out of North America altogether. From there it can be permanently
banished from the planet. In its stead, surely we can join hands to create something new and infinitely better.
Thats our vision of impossible realism. Isnt it time we all worked on attaining it?
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Link: Assistance
Public health assistance only addresses a symptom of a larger overall problem caused by
colonialism. The Kritik solves the rot cause of the case harms
Thomas W. Pogge, Professor Moral & Political Philosophy, Columbia University, 2004
[The Ethics of Assistance: morality and the distant needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee, p. 262]
These passages suggest that poverty is due to domestic factors, not to foreign influences. This empirical view about
poverty leads rather directly to the important moral error to be exposed: to the false idea that the problem of world
poverty concerns us citizens of the rich countries mainly as potential helpers. I will therefore examine in detail the
empirical view of the domestic causation of severe poverty, showing why it is false and also why it is so widely held
in the developed world. It is well to recall that existing peoples have arrived at their present levels of social,
economic and cultural development through an historical process that was pervaded by enslavement,
colonialism, even genocide. Though these monumental crimes are now in the past, they have left a legacy of
great inequalities which would be unacceptable even if peoples were now masters of their own development.
Even if the peoples of Africa had had, in recent decades, a real opportunity to achieve similar rates of
economic growth as the developed countries, achieving such growth could not have helped them overcome
their initial 30:1 disadvantage in per capita income. Even if, starting in 1960, African annual growth in per capita
income had been a full percentage point above ours each and every year, the ratio would still be 20:1 today and
would not be fully erased until early in the twenty-fourth century. It is unclear then whether we may simply take for
granted the existing inequality as if it had come about through choices freely made within each people. By seeing
the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is
deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the
societies and cultures of four continents.
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Link: Foreign Aid

Foreign aid mostly benefits the donor countries. Foreign aid attempts to bring civilization
to other nations and ends up acting as a form of colonization
CASA, May 2007 (Collectives of Support, Solidarity, and Action, Development Pushers: Foreign Aid and
Microcredit as Modernization, Not Poverty Reduction, http://www.chiapaspeacehouse.org/en/node/471)
In historical origin, foreign aid is colonial. The practice of granting Foreign aid began long before the 20th
Century with empires investing in their colonial outposts so as to develop, among other social elements,
transportation and local economy. The type of investment changed with the particular interests of the empire
but all were designed to bring civilization to the primitive colonies (Ortiz). These sentiments and
practices have lived on in modernization ideology and contemporary Foreign aid. Although empires and
colonies are no longer recognized as such, the practice of rich countries investing in poor, need-stricken
countries reiterates the colonial power dynamic. The discourse of Foreign aids benevolence has also changed
little: now disguised as bringing modernization to traditional societies, the same idea of civilizing the
primitive societies, for their own good, lives on.
Neocolonialism takes shape as the developed nations are using their aid to manipulate the
growth of others. This results in the fulfillment of a political agenda as opposed to purely
aiding people.
CASA, May 2007 (Collectives of Support, Solidarity, and Action, Development Pushers: Foreign Aid and
Microcredit as Modernization, Not Poverty Reduction, http://www.chiapaspeacehouse.org/en/node/471
Foreign aid is rarely given freely. In its conception Foreign aid is inherently directive. It is loaded down with
an ideology that dictates a Western approach to poverty eradication and understands development as a linear
trajectory, with inferior and superior models of society at its extremes. Given the diversity and plurality of the
worlds many societies, it is at best narrow to allow for only a two set expression of society; at worst it is deeply
neocolonial and exploitive to grant aid money in a directive way that mandates a certain type of social change
be achieved. The situation is particularly perverse when actual local needs are considered. Take for the
example the indigenous villages of Chiapas, Mexico. In these villages running water is a rarity, education beyond
the primary years virtually unheard of and hunger a staple of life. To offer money to those who live the harsh
reality of poverty, and then to bind it to a predetermined development scheme, is to manipulate the choices of
the worlds most disadvantaged in order to fulfill a personal political agenda; not to offer aid. Granting aid in
order to serve the political and economic interests of the donor country is economically and morally
problematic. In a colonial fashion, it allows the donour country to mold the recipient country so as to serve its
own interests. As in the case of eastern Europe and the Marshall plan or Iraq in the wake of the Iraq War, this may
mean directing aid money so as to stomp out particular political movements (communism) or to institute other
political models (federalist democracy.) This is a violation of the national right to political liberty and
autodetermination. Furthermore, the type of political limits that are placed on countries, not to mention the
economic ones, can have very real impacts on the effectiveness of aid money. The tying of aid money in Africa
has reduced the value of the funding by 25-40% because it has obligated the nations to buy products at
inflated prices from the donour nations (Deen). This means that a large chunk of the aid money is directly
returned to the countries that originally donated it and that fewer people in the recipient countries benefit. As
is concisely expressed in the article Puppets on Purse Strings, as long as aid is tied rich countries like the
U.S. continue to have a financial lever to dictate what good governance means and to pry open markets of
developing countries for multinational corporations.
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Link: Disease Prevention

Disease prevention has become thoroughly geopoliticizedhealth standards used to
solidify national boundaries
Alison Bashford, Medical History Professor University of Sydney, 2006
[Medicine at the Border: disease, globalization, and security, 1850 to the present, ed. Alison Bashford, p. 6-7]
The geopolitics of disease prevention has often operated through, and linked, nationalism and the policing of
sovereign territory. From the early nineteenth century both maritime and land borders became closely regulated
places for the inspection of the goods of commercial exchange, as well as vessels and animals. This is why, in many
modernizing bureaucracies, quarantine officials were typically located within the broader government office and
power of customs. But nineteenth-century quarantine law typically governed the movement and traffic of goods,
animals and humans. With the emergence of European nation-states and their colonial extensions over the
nineteenth century, and with increasingly bureaucratized administrative government, disease was checked by
border inspections of people their bodies, their identity and their documents. The documents of health, of
being disease-free (or more likely coming from a disease-free town or region) existed as a system prior to the
widespread use of identity documents (the passport or the visa, for example). Thus one of the factors which
made jurisdictional (increasingly meaning national) borders meaningful was the checking of health
documentation and of peoples bodies for signs of infectious disease, and indeed, for signs of disease prophylaxis
vaccination. These procedures made borders more than abstract lines on maps, but as a set of practices on
the ground.
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Links: Intellectual Property Rights

Enforcing IPRs is a modern-day manifestation of colonialism ensuring that
discrimination, exploitation and destruction of culture will all befall Indigenous Peoples
who are forced into compliance.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Executive Director, Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for
Policy Research and Education) 99
[TRIPS and its Potential Impacts on Indigenous Peoples, http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/jpc/trips2.html]
The imposition of western legal regimes on indigenous peoples is one of the root causes of the many problems
they are faced with in the past up to the present. These legal regimes either totally negate customary laws or
accommodate only those aspects which reinforce them. The intellectual property rights (IPRs) regime,
particularly the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) Agreements, is the latest example of this kind of imposition.
The struggle to bring in IPRs into the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is a
classic case of transnational corporations cooperating closely with the worlds most powerful
nation-states to ensure that their interests will be legally protected in international and national law. In the past, the
colonial governments crafted national laws which facilitated their access and control over the
natural resources of their colonies. They also forged unequal bilateral treaties with their colonies or ex-colonies
which allowed for free trade or which gave them parity rights to exploit natural resources or set up businesses.
At present, aside from bilateral treaties there are already multilateral agreements like the GATT (now known as
WTO Agreements) whose role is to ensure that national laws will be changed to conform to the
international legal regimes.
The harmonization of intellectual property rights laws to ensure that these are consistent with TRIPs could
be disastrous for indigenous peoples. It is similar to how national laws and policies on land, forests,
governance, etc. were imposed on indigenous peoples without any consideration
whatsoever on customary laws on these same areas. In this case, however, it is an international body, the WTO,
which is acting like national governments. In this case diverse laws and policies regarding
IPR protection have to be recast in the mold of TRIPS.
The form which the national legislation on intellectual property rights protection should have is one bone of
contention between the developed countries, developing countries, transnational corporations, and
local communities. For indigenous peoples, however, the problem lies not just in the form of the law but the
essence of the law itself. The TRIPS Agreement is an embodiment of western legal philosophy, norms, values,
and mindset which are contrary to many indigenous peoples cosmologies and values.
The key impact that TRIPS has on indigenous peoples is that it denigrates, undermines, and discriminates
against indigenous ways of thinking and behaving. Intellectual property rights are monopoly rights given
to individuals or legal persons (such as transnational corporations) who can prove that the inventions or
innovations they made are novel, involved an innovative step and are capable of industrial application.
Indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage are usually collectively evolved and owned. If indigenous peoples
have to use western IPRs to protect their own knowledge and innovations, they will have to identify
individual inventors. This will push scrupulous indigenous individuals to claim ownership over potentially
profitable indigenous knowledge which will cause the further disintegration of communal values and
practices. It can also cause infighting between indigenous communities over who has ownership over a particular
knowledge or innovation.
10
First Priority
Link: Biotechnology
Indigenous peoples view biotechnology and genetic engineering as harmful to their land,
environment, and ways of life.
Kanahe, 05 (Lea, Attorney-at-law for Indigenous and human rights, and environmental law, legal analyst for the
Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism; Press release, January 24)
With 1418 field releases and 4566 field test sites, Hawaiì has had more plantings of experimental biotech
crops than anywhere in the U.S. or the world. Furthermore, Hawaiì is second only to Nebraska with the
most field trials of biopharmaceuticals - crops that produce dangerous drugs like vaccines, hormones,
contraceptives, and other biologically active compounds.
Regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the biotech industry is severely under-regulated and
allowed to operate in a shroud of secrecy, while in the case of bioprospecting, the industry is not regulated at
all. Rather than passing laws to protect the publics safety and Native Hawaiian rights, the legislature
passes laws to protect the biotech industry, such as one in 2001 that makes anyone found destroying GE
crops liable for damage. Furthermore, the State facilitates GMO production through Agribusiness
Corporation leases of State lands in Kekaha to GMO giants like Syngenta and Pioneer Hi-Bred International.
In addition to the environmental and human health risks and economic concerns raised by many antiG.E. activists, genetic-based research and development in Hawaiì has significant negative cultural,
political, and legal impacts for Native Hawaiians, the Indigenous peoples of Hawaiì.
Native Hawaiians need to be very careful about our communities responses to the new genetic technologies and the
place, if any, that those technologies will be given in our islands. We need to have an understanding of how
genetic engineering works, and what kind of changes it will create between ourselves and our environments.
We need to think about how adopting genetically engineered farming will affect the survival of our
traditional knowledge systems and the plant and animal life at their base. We need to be evaluating genetic
technologies based on our own cultural beliefs and standards. These are the issues that this Indigenous speaking
tour will raise.
Indigenous peoples right to their heritage is violated by the development of biotechnology.

New scientific advances in this field attempt to colonize indigenous peoples territories once
again.
Tauli-Corpuz 06 (UNPFII Chair, presented at the Executive Board Meeting of the International Fund for
Agricultural Development , TWN, Third World Network, Biotechnology and Indigenous Peoples, 6/1/06,
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tokar.htm)
The position of indigenous peoples vis a vis biotechnology is still evolving. The common thread in the various positions is the view that life-forms should not be patented. If the
ownership of patents on life-forms is the main incentive for scientists and corporations to invest in biotechnology, it might be a good idea not to allow this. The benevolent motives avowed by
scientists who want to contribute to sustainable development should not be tainted by the commercialization or commodification of life.
It is also generally agreed that the harmonization
of intellectual property rights regimes to fit the mold of western IPRs particularly TRIPS is morally and legally indefensible. This is being done to further legitimize the desire of industrialized
countries and their transnational corporations to have monopoly control over biotechnology and information technologies. Those who have contributed their centuries-old knowledge to develop
and protect the rich biodiversity in their communities will now be accused of biopiracy because the right to this knowledge is going into the hands of the corporations through IPRs.
It should be recognized that indigenous peoples have a right to their intellectual and cultural heritage; this is
clearly articulated in the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other UN standards. This
right is being blatantly violated by developments in biotechnology. Even the collection of genetic materials from indigenous peoples bodies
Indigenous peoples also agree that the
through the HGDP and other similar projects is a violation of the rights and integrity of indigenous peoples.
protection of biodiversity and cultural diversity cannot be effectively guaranteed if their rights to their
ancestral territories are not recognized and respected. Therefore, protests against biotechnology cannot be
separated from the call for the recognition and respect of the rights of indigenous peoples to their territories
and resources and their right to their intellectual and cultural heritage.
The UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples is the emerging standard which should guide states, corporations, and society in general on how to deal with indigenous peoples. It was the result of over a decade of intensive dialogues
between indigenous peoples, outside experts and government delegations. It is the articulation of the collective values and aspirations of indigenous peoples from the different parts of the world.
The march of science and technology will
likely proceed in spite of protests from indigenous peoples and NGOs. In the face of the aggressive
recolonization of indigenous peoples territories, bodies and minds which is facilitated by the new science and
technologies it is imperative to support the struggles of indigenous peoples. Whatever gains indigenous
peoples will make will also be gains for the whole of humanity and nature.
Indigenous peoples are pushing for the immediate adoption of this before the Decade of Indigenous Peoples ends in 2003.
11
First Priority
Link: Biotechnology
Biotechnology promotes colonization of the environment and the elimination of indigenous
knowledge.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UNPFII Chair, 2006
(presented at the Executive Board Meeting of the International Fund for Agricultural Development , TWN, Third
World Network, Biotechnology and Indigenous Peoples, 6/1/06, http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tokar.htm)
Biotechnology carries with it a worldview or philosophy which is reductionist and determinist. A living organism is
This worldview also regards nature as
something which should be controlled, dominated, and engineered or re-engineered.
This runs counter to
indigenous beliefs, knowledge, and practice. The cosmological vision of most indigenous peoples regards
nature as divine and a coherent whole, and human beings as a part of nature. Thus, it is imperative that humans should
create meaningful solidarity with nature. This is the web of life concept or what is now referred to as the ecosystem approach which
appreciates the relationship and bonds of all of creation with each other. Human beings have to work and live
with nature and not seek to control and dominate it. Whether we recognize it or not, we humans are totally dependent on
water, air, soil, and all life forms and the destruction or pollution of these will also mean our destruction. The integrity or
intrinsic worth of a human being, plant, or animal is measured in relation to how it affects and relates with the others.
For indigenous peoples, biodiversity
and indigenous knowledge or indigenous science cannot be separated from culture and territoriality. Thus, the
reduced into its smallest component, the gene. The explanation of the way the organism behaves is sought in the genes.
genetic determinism of biotechnology conflicts with the holistic worldview of indigenous peoples.
With the invention of technologies which control and re-engineer nature,

human beings have succeeded in setting themselves apart from nature. This is what happened after the industrial revolution and now with the biotechnology and
information revolution. Plants, animals, and humans, are reduced into their genetic components and their integral wholeness is not important anymore. These separate
components can be manipulated and engineered at will and for commercial purposes.
The engineering mindset is becoming the norm. Efficiency, not only of
Because profits and

economic growth are the most important parameters used to measure development and progress, the adverse
environmental, economic, cultural and social impacts of biotechnology are viewed as insignificant .
The way biotechnology further promotes and reinforces the mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist and
dualist worldview is a major concern for indigenous peoples. There is an observable, growing intolerance toward other cultures and
machines and human beings but of all living things is the goal. Since it is life which is being engineered scientists can act as God.
worldviews. Eugenics is promoted with the universalization of the western standards of beauty and efficiency. Being beautiful means being tall, white, blonde, blueeyed, and slim.
For indigenous peoples to accept the genetic determinist view, they have to radically alter their world views, their ways of knowing and
thinking, and their ways of relating with nature and with each other. Maybe social and natural scientists will say that this is inevitable, because we have to move on
with the progress achieved in science and technology. However, with the prevailing environmental, social, economic, and cultural crisis, the dominant worldview has
lost the moral high ground.
Indigenous peoples who have not totally surrendered the cosmological vision inherited from their ancestors, and have indeed
developed it further, are in a better moral and ethical position. If indigenous peoples keep asserting their own philosophy and their right to believe and practice it, we
might someday evolve a different philosophy or perspective which provides a balance between the two extremes.
12
First Priority
Link:Biotechnology
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UNPFII Chair, 2006
(presented at the Executive Board Meeting of the International Fund for Agricultural Development , TWN, Third
World Network, Biotechnology and Indigenous Peoples, 6/1/06, http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tokar.htm)
The ecological risks of biotechnology have been amply elaborated by NGOs and scientists.
Genetically engineered organisms are

living beings. and if these are released they can mutate, multiply, and migrate. Should they have adverse
environmental impacts there is no way to recall them or contain them. Since indigenous peoples territories
are the last remaining biodiversity-rich centres, the erosion of this biodiversity could be facilitated by the
invasion of more evolutionary advantaged transgenic plants.
Biotechnology claims that it will be able to clean up the
environmental pollution brought about by industrial activities such as mining, oil exploration, etc. This falls into a typically end-of-the-pipeline kind of pollution
management, and we have yet to see this working on a large-scale. From the experiences of indigenous peoples, mining and oil drilling operations are still the worst
polluters and the most destructive to the land. The track records of mining and oil companies in rehabilitating what they have destroyed in indigenous peoples
territories is very poor, to say the least.
In fact, from what we can gather, the efforts of biotechnologists are more often directed towards developing
transgenic micro-organisms which can eat into the mineral ores and isolate precious minerals such as gold. Then there will be a lesser need for workers and machines
which process the ores. The ecological implications of releasing such engineered microbes into the environment, however, is not seriously considered or addressed.
Studies on the environmental impacts of the release of transgenic organisms, whether to clean up oil pollution or to ameliorate the pollution of rivers and soils by toxic
chemicals used by the mines, are not adequate. The consequences are not publicly known, especially by those who are directly
affected.
The appropriation of indigenous knowledge on plants and plant uses, along with the
destruction of indigenous sustainable resource management and agro-forestry practices is also facilitated by
biotechnology. Patent applications by scientists, corporations, and even governments for medicinal plants
used by indigenous peoples since time immemorial are increasing each day. The neem plant and turmeric in India are very
much used by the tribals. Ayahuasca and quinoa in Latin America, kava in the Pacific, the bitter gourd in the Philippines and Thailand are all widely used by
indigenous peoples.
Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), for instance, is a high protein cereal which has been a staple in the diet of millions of indigenous peoples
in the Andean countries of Latin America. It has been cultivated and developed since pre-Incan times. Two researchers from the University of Colorado received US
patent number 5,304,718 in l994 which gives them exclusive monopoly control over the male sterile plants of the traditional Bolivian Apelawa quinoa variety. This
crop is exported to the US and European market and the value of Bolivias export market on this is US$1 million per year. The most logical development is that the
patent will be taken over by corporations. The hybrid varieties will be used for wide-scale commercial production in the US or Europe, and the Bolivian exports will
be prevented from entering the US and European markets. The patent owners will assert their intellectual property rights.
This will lead to the displacement of thousands of small farmers, most of which are indigenous. The other
possibility is that lands will fall into the monopoly control of corporations who own the patents or their
subsidiaries in Bolivia who will produce quinoa using the hybrid commercial varieties. The genetic erosion of the diverse quinoa varieties developed by indigenous farmers over
centuries will take place.[5]
This process is the most probable course of events for many indigenous peoples in
different parts of the world. This is made possible because of developments in biotechnology and the legal
systems that grant intellectual property rights to those who are able to innovate in high technology
laboratories. The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of the World Trade Organization has become the standard through which IPR laws are being
harmonized the world over. The contributions of indigenous peoples in preserving, sustaining, and developing biodiversity, and resource management systems are not recognized and valued by
this prevailing system.
13
First Priority
Link: Biotechnology
Biotechnology is colonization in disguisethis biocolonialism legitimates the theft and
control of indigenous knowledge and decreases biodiversity
Debra Harry, Executive Director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, 2001
(Biopiracy and Globalization: Indigenous Peoples Face a New Wave of Colonialism, April 2001 Volume 7 Issues 2
& 3, http://www.ipcb.org/publications/other_art/globalization.html)
Historically there has been prolific scientific interest in the lifestyles, knowledge, cultures, histories, and worldviews of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples are probably the most studied
people in the world. Today, the genomics revolution is fueling a new wave of scientific research in the form of bioprospecting, and it is impacting the lives of indigenous peoples around the
world. Like all other unwanted advances of colonization, the biotech industry has come knocking at our door.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are now at the forefront of a new wave of scientific investigation: the quest for
monopoly control of genetic resources that will be useful in new pharmaceuticals, nutriceuticals, and other bio-engineered products. The genetic diversity that exists
within the veins and territories of indigenous peoples is threatened by expropriation. These unique genetic resources, which have nurtured the lives of
indigenous peoples for centuries, are sought by the biotechnology industry (both public and private). The industry seeks
to identify genes associated with diseases, and for the creation of new bio-engineered plants and animals,
pharmaceutical products, nutriceutical products, and other processes and products useful in genetic research. In the area of human
genetic research, genetic diversity research seems to be a high priority of many research agendas. Indigenous peoples currently are
the subjects of evolutionary genetic research, pharmaco-genetic research, and the search for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or disease genes, to name
a few. This work has seen extensive violations of human rights by researchers who fail to get fully informed consent from their research subjects,
and who allow widespread secondary use, and/or commercialization, of human genetic samples without the consent of the donor. And the, through
the application of intellectual property rights law, namely patents, corporations can claim ownership over
genes, products, and data derived from genetic resources, thereby enclosing genetic resources which were
developed by nature or are the result of centuries of cultivation by indigenous farmers. The current
framework allows corporations to assert monopoly claims over life-forms they had no hand in inventing".
This results in benefits to their shareholders at the expense of the society, and the peoples, from whom the resources were stolen. Colonization is an age old process of
theft and control facilitated by doctrines of conquest such as the Manifest Destiny and Terra Nullius, that claim the land as empty (except for the millions
of aboriginals living there), and non-productive (in its natural state). And as the self-proclaimed "discoverers" of crops, medicinal plants, genetic resources, and traditional knowledge, these
Intellectual property rights are being used to turn nature and life processes into
private property. As private property, it is alienable; that is, it can be owned, bought and sold as a
commodity. The result is a legitimized process for thievery, which we call "biocolonialism". The quest for this "genetic
bioprospectors become the new "owners".
gold" seems to be a significant motivation of many research projects. Indigenous communities are disadvantaged in this paradigm by being dependent solely on the researcher for information
The
profit motive in genetic research makes indigenous peoples highly vulnerable to exploitation. Racism and
human rights violations, attitudes of racism, dehumanization, and oppression result in a research paradigm
that objectifies the subjects, and negates their full humanness. Indigenous people are not seen to be fully
equal participants and partners in research. These attitudes justify actions that contravene standard ethical
practices. Indigenous peoples are finding themselves treated as objects of scientific curiosity, with very little
regard for their needs, or concern about how the research may negatively impact them. With their eye on the prize, which is to
explaining the benefits and risks of the research. Often they are not informed that their DNA can be commercialized through patents and used in the development of new products.
collect blood samples, researchers often fail to get true informed consent, claiming the subjects cannot understand genetics, or the researchers collect biological
samples under false circumstances. In some instances, coercion may be the best means for finding cooperative research subjects by offering
medical attention, cash, or other token benefits. While the specific research purpose itself may seem benign, population-based genetic research invariably will be applied to the
whole group. And, once biological samples have been secured, there is often widespread interest in those samples by other researchers. Scientists often share their collections with their
colleagues, as a matter of course, or for a price. There are virtually no legal protections to invoke when ethical violations occur. The Failure of ELSI to Reach
Impacted Groups The US earmarked 5% of its annual Human Genome Project (HGP) funds to address associated ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the work. ELSI programs have
failed miserably to help indigenous peoples prepare to address the issues raised by genomic research. Indigenous peoples are largely unaware of the scale and potential impacts of genetic research
to their communities. Despite a decade of ESLI funding, the burden has fallen upon the tribes themselves to get a basic genetics education, and understand its potential impacts on their lives. In
the meantime, the government has busily funded projects studying indigenous groups, without any meaningful consultation with the group. Current bioethical protocols fail to address the unique
conditions raised by population-based research, in particular with respect to unique processes for group decision-making and cultural worldviews. Genetic variation research is group research,
but most ethical guidelines are not equipped to address group rights. In this context, one of the challenges of ethical research is to include respect for collective review and decision making, while
also upholding the traditional model of individual rights. Genetic Research and Tribal Protection Strategies It has become evident that this new era of science and technology poses new
Western intellectual property rights bear little

resemblance to indigenous systems that usually focus on the protection and management of resources for the
benefit of the collective group. One author describes the conflict succinctly: "In particular, there is a very serious question whether the category property, or the
challenges to the collective protection and management of genetic resources of indigenous peoples.
historically contingent and individualistic notion of property that has arisen in the West, is even appropriate when discussing things like agricultural practices, cell lines, seed plasm, and oral
narratives that belong to communities rather than individuals. If we are not capable of acknowledging the existence of different lifeworlds and ways of envisioning human beings; relationship to the natural world in our intellectual property
laws, then unfortunately, it may be late in the day for biodiversity and hopes for a genuinely multicultural
world." Indigenous groups are asserting their own rights to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their territories by controlling
research. The "Indigenous Research Protection Act" (IRPA), recently developed by the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (IPCB),
helps tribal governments protect their people against unwanted research and when they believe the research may be beneficial the IRPA provides
a framework to control the research agenda. This changes the paradigm from being treated as research subjects to being active partners with the
power to make informed decisions and choices. It is believed that more tribal control of research is likely to result in more beneficial outcomes,
and of the research actually meeting the needs of the people.
14
First Priority
Link: Biotechnology
Biotechnology colonizes indigenous knowledge, turning it into a resource for Western use
Shah 02 (Judicial Board Member Associate SG Webmaster for the Judicial Branch, Geneticlly Engineered Food,
Food Patents Stealing Indigenous Knowledge?, September 26th 2002,
http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/GEFood/FoodPatents.asp)
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help protect investments into research and development and stimulate innovation by providing incentives to invent, progress, develop etc. The promise
of just reward for one's efforts are important. Yet, there are criticisms that the way intellectual property rights related texts have developed, they put more emphasis on protecting ones creations
and stifling other's ability to compete. In the area of biotechnology there are further debates and issues on the right to patent living organisms, especially resources and seeds that have been
Capitalizing on public knowledge often comes into conflict with

indigenous knowledge and the rights of indigenous people, sustainability of local ecosystems, and even the
ability of nations to provide food security and protection of the global environment. As a result, this has also
raised many philosophical questions. Large transnational corporations like Monsanto, DuPont and others have been investing into
biotechnology in such a way that patents have been taken out on indigenous plants which have been used for
generations by the local people, without their knowledge or consent. The people then find that the only way to
use their age-old knowledge is be to buy them back from the big corporations. In Brazil, which has some of
the richest biodiversity in the world, large multinational corporations have already patented more than half
the known plant species. (Brazil is estimated to have around 55,000 species of flora, amounting to some 22% of the world's total. India, for example, has about 46,000.) A
developed or passed on as traditional and public knowledge. This
patent gives a monopoly right to exploit an invention for 17-20 years. To be patentable an invention must be novel, inventive and have a commercial use. Controversially though, the US and
European patent offices now grants patents on plant varieties, GM crops, genes and gene sequences from plants and crops. The current WTO patent agreement, TRIPs - Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights - has been very controversial in this respect for many developing countries who want to have it reviewed, but are being somewhat blocked by the wealthier nations
"Knowledge is proprietary. It belongs to corporations and is not accessible

to farmers," [Dr. Altieri] said. Altieri feels that biotechnology has emerged through the quest for profit, not to solve the
problems of small farmers. "Scientists are defending biotechnology ... but at the same time there's a lot of money from corporations going into universities, influencing the
from doing so. As reported by Environment News Service,
researchers in those universities in the wrong direction," Altieri said. The cost to developing countries in "pirating" their knowledge has been considerable: "Vandana Shiva believes that the West
has a clever structure in place. Using convenient patent laws as a system, the Trade Related Intellectual Property [TRIP] instrument as a stick and the World Trade Organisation [WTO] as the
enforcing authority, the First World is seeking to 'rob' the Thirld World. She says in a rigorous article: "When the US introduced IPRs in the Uruguay Round as a new issue, it accused the Third
World of 'piracy'. The estimates provided for royalties lost in agricultural chemicals are US$202 million and US$2,545 million for pharmaceuticals. However, as the Rural Advancement
Foundation International (RAFI), in Canada has shown, if the contribution of Third World peasants and tribals is taken into account, the roles are dramatically reversed: the US owes US$302
million in royalties for agriculture and $5,097 million for pharmaceuticals to Third World countries."" -- Abduction of Turmeric provokes India's wrath, Good News India, January 2002 Some
examples In Texas, a company called RiceTec took out the patents on Basmati rice (which grows in the Indian and Pakistan regions) and have created a genetically modified Basmati rice, while
selling it as normal Basmati -- and it was not against the law, either. In fact, four of the patents were withdrawn in June 2000, when the Indian government formally challenged the patent.
However, it, and other incidents continue to raise controversy on patenting indigenous plants. Eventually though, 15 of the 20 patents were also thrown out by the US Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO) due to lack of uniqueness and novelty. However, towards the middle of August 2001, three patents were awarded to RiceTec -- to variants called Texmati, Jasmati and Kasmati,
all cross breeds of Basmati and American long grain rice, while RiceTec was also given permission to claim that its brands are "superior to basmati" as reported bythe Guardian, who also point
out the uproar that has caused in Indian political circles. The article also points out how RiceTec CEO doesn't understand why there is such a fuss over this, yet he perhaps doesn't see ActionAid's
point (also mentioned in the news article) that "[t]here is growing concern that corporations are taking advantage of traditional Indian crops developed over thousands of years by farmers, without
any recompense for the poor people who do all the work." (It is a further irony that the CEO is Indian in ancestry, himself.) There has also been an unsuccessful attempt by RiceTec with
Thailand's Jasmine Rice as well in 1998. "London's Observer reported that there were more than 100 Indian plants awaiting grant at the US patent office. And patents have already have been
granted to uses of Amla, Jar Amla, Anar, Salai, Dudhi, Gulmendhi, Bagbherenda, Karela, Rangoon-ki-bel, Erand, Vilayetishisham, Chamkura etc, all household Indian names. These need to be
vacated. Bio-piracy doesn't affect just India. Much of Africa and Latin America are prowling grounds for First World's knowledge pirates." -- Abduction of Turmeric provokes India's wrath,
Good News India, January 2002 A US Patent Authority ruling did manage to prevent another company from using turmeric to create bi-products because there intentions were not novel and
"Patents and
intellectual property rights are supposed to prevent piracy. Instead they are becoming the instruments of
pirating the common traditional knowledge from the poor of the Third World and making it the exclusive
"property" of western scientists and corporations."-- Vandana Shiva, Poverty and Globalization, Reith 2000 Lectures, BBC. In India, these and other
turmeric had been around for a long time. They also canceled a patent on the Ayahuasca plant, a sacred plant for many indigenous people in Latin America.
events have led to much criticism on the ability to patent many indigenous plants so easily by big corporations. Another patent causing outrage has been a remedy for diabetes involving eggplant,
bitter gourd and jamun, the fruit of the rose apple tree extract. It has been common knowledge in India for centuries, yet again there is an attempt to patent it. There were also fears in India that
Europe would follow USA and Japan's examples of bio-piracy, by allowing patents of indigenous plants and life-forms, which have already led to genetically modified versions of these without
A number of food ingredients and

plants have been, or have seen attempts to be, patented by various biotech firms. As this article suggests, US
patent laws may be part of the problem. As Inter Press Servicereports, "Over the last 10 years, for examle, [sic] the US-based chemical giant DuPont has filed
approximately 150 applications for patents on genetic resources with the European Patent Office." While many biotech companies claim that genetically
engineered foods will help alleviate hunger and increase food security, their acts of patenting the knowledge
and food that has been developed over centuries itself may be a threat to food security, due to more
concentrated ownership and the political advantages that goes with that. The large biotech firms are mainly
from western nations, especially America. (Such control over basic resources can and has been used as a foreign policy leverage tool, as seen in the food dumping
sufficient proof that they are safe to consume. Well, they do not need to worry any longer, because it has actually happened.
section on this web site.) An International Undertaking to tackle the issue? "Patent proponents keep banging on about the importance of IPR for access and innovation. But this is a smokescreen.
If access was the issue, then the evidence stands against IPR: it restricts the flow of germplasm, reduces sharing between breeders, erodes genetic diversity, and, all in all, stifles research. What is
actually at issue is the question of whose interests agriculture R&D should serve. IPRs are suited to the profit strategies of the global seed conglomerates that want to dominate agricultural
production worldwide. The transnational seed companies are building vast industrial breeding networks in all major crops and, with their economies of scale and ownership over technology
through IPR, they will shut local private and public breeders out of the commercial market. For them, IPR is simply a means for controlling the market and extracting more profit from it." -Intellectual Property Rights: Ultimate control of agricultural R&D in Asia, by Devlin Kuyek, March 2001, GRAIN (Genetic Resource Action International).
15
First Priority
Link: Human Rights

The concept of human rights excludes indigenous perspectives by universalizing
Eurocentric norms. The native is considered savage and in need of western saviors.
Makau Mutua, Professor of Law and Director, Human Rights Center, SUNY-Buffalo School of Law, 2002
[Terrorism and Human Rights: Power, Culture, and Subordination, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, p. lexis]
The international law of human rights, arguably the most benign of all the areas of international law, seeks the
universalization of European cultural, philosophical, and political norms and social structures. It is largely a
culturally specific doctrine which is expressed in the idiom of the [*5] same culture. The human rights corpus is
driven -- normatively and descriptively -- by what I have called the savage-victim-savior metaphor, in which
human rights is a grand narrative of an epochal contest that pits savages against victims and saviors. 5 In this
script of human rights, democracy and western liberalism are internationalized to redeem savage nonWestern cultures from themselves, and to alleviate the suffering of victims, who are generally non-western and
non-European. The images of the savage Taliban, the Afghan victims mired in pre-modernity, and the American
saviors put the metaphor in sharp relief.
In the human rights idiom, North America and the European West -- acting generally under the guise of the
United Nations and other multilateral agencies -- are the saviors of hapless victims whose salvation lies only in
the transformation of their savage cultures through the imposition of human rights. The human rights corpus
is presented as a settled normative edifice, as a glimpse of an eternal, inflexible truth. As a result, attempts to
question or reformulate a truly universal regime of rights, one that reflects the complexity and the diversity
of all cultures, have generally been viewed with indifference or hostility by the official guardians of human
rights.
This refusal to create a culturally complex and diverse human rights corpus is all the more perplexing because the
view that the human rights doctrine is an ideology with deep roots in liberalism and democratic forms of
government is beyond question. In fact, an increasing number of scholars now realize that the cultural biases of the
human rights corpus can only be properly situated within liberal theory and philosophy. Understood from this
position, human rights are an ideology with a specific cultural and ethnographic fingerprint. The human rights
corpus expresses a cultural bias, and its chastening of a state is therefore a cultural project. If culture is not
defined as some discrete, exotic, and peculiar practice which is frozen in time but rather as the dynamic totality of
ideas, forms, practices, and structures of any given society, then human rights is an expression of a particular
European-American culture. The advocacy of human rights across cultural borders is then an attempt to
displace the local non-Western culture with the "universal" culture of human rights. Human rights therefore
become the universal culture. It is in this sense that the "other" culture, that which is non-European, is the
savage in the human rights corpus and its discourse.
16
First Priority
Link: Human Rights

Human rights and international law are both otherizing discourses that construct the
native as primitive and backward. These labels easily shift to discourses of terrorism that
justify violence.
It bears saying that the history of international law -- including its post-1945 expression through the United Nations
-- is largely about ordering the lives of non-European native peoples. The purpose of such ordering is to
create a world in which American and European interests are not threatened or injured by political and
cultural paradigms that may be inconsistent with those interests. That is why the "othering" process is
absolutely essential if Western hegemony is to be maintained. Although that process is arduous and usually only
produces an elite that has no depth in its own society, the West regards that as the first and necessary step towards
the recovery or reclamation of primitive, backward, and pre-modern societies. As American officials have put it, the
"Afghan swamp must first be drained." The West has no illusion that Afghani society will turn into a modern,
Western political democracy overnight. But at the very least it can under the tutelage of the United Nations and
other multi-lateral agencies and donors be defanged of virulent anti-Westernism, and placed on a recovery track -- a
linear ladder-like progression towards modernity.
It is important to note that the native savage has always been racialized in human rights discourse and
international law. He has been defined as dumb, meek, lazy, backward, primitive, and incompetent. This is
the classic European view of the native. But in Western discourse, the native has also been depicted as
dangerous, particularly when he has challenged European authority in the anti-colonial movement. The Mau
Mau of Kenya, for example, who took up arms against British colonialists were regarded as particularly dangerous.
This is where the native savage morphs into a terrorist, primarily because he pursues his political objectives
by deploying armed force as an instrument of the struggle. Both the Mau Mau and the Algerian FLN were
regarded as terrorists, as was Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. The post-September 11 crisis returns
the world to the image of the native savage as a terrorist. In terms of norm-creation in human rights, this
image makes it less likely that advocates of cultural pluralism will get a fair hearing. It creates an
environment that is intolerant of debate, particularly if the thrust of the dissent is to question the sanctity of
liberal values, which the terrorists are now accused of attacking.
17
First Priority
Link: Law
The law is inherently Eurocentric and the appearance of legality is used to disguise the
colonialist intentions of the plan.
Kenneth B. Nunn, prof. of law, University of Florida School of Law, in 1997
[Law as a Eurocentric Enterprise, Law and Inequality, Spring, p. lexis]
Although the European was liberal with his law, he was parsimonious with his rights, and this is especially
true in regard to the right of self-determination. 227 This potent combination is a constant feature of European
contact with other cultures and thus merits further attention.
European colonizers dominated the majority peoples of the world, took their land, and destroyed or
corrupted their cultures. 228 Yet these colonizers always proceeded "legally" through treaties or the dictates
of international law. 229 Ani argues convincingly that the European preoccupation with "legalizing" their
conquests served the double purpose of disarming their victims and bolstering the European self-image. 230 A
key part of the European belief system is faith in the linear notion of "progress," 231 the belief that later historical
developments are superior to preceding ones and that the course of human history flows from worse to better. This,
in combination with the European conviction that white culture was superior to the world's other cultures made
European conquest a matter of pride and self-esteem. 232 Their conquests needed to be "legal" in order to provide
the full psychological benefits.
In addition, the export of European law was deemed as synonymous with the export of European
"civilization" and thus synonymous with progress:
The concept of "codified law" is a definite ingredient of that of civilization; for with civilization, according to
European ideology, comes order and legality assures "lasting order" - not moral conduct but consistent and
predictable conduct. So that the "civilized" way - the European way - is to bring laws, however forcibly, and the
structures of European culture ("civilization") to those whom one treats immorally and for whom one has no
respect. 233
From a pragmatic perspective, then, the law cannot be viewed as a positive force for change. The law must be
viewed for what it is, a necessary component for the extension of white power around the globe. Although the
introduction of law into indigenous societies brought order, it did not - it could not - bring peace. Instead "law was
in the vanguard of what its own proponents saw as a "belligerent civilization,' bringing "grim presents' with its penal
regulation and, in the process, inflicting an immense violence." 234
Consequently, the best choice for people of color who choose to resist white dominance is to reject the law, to
become "out/laws," since "by refusing to relate to Western order, these individuals [*363] ... succeed in
robbing [Europeans] of a potent tool for psychological and ideological enslavement." 235
18
First Priority
Link: International Law

By definition, international law is a universalizing discourse that assimilates and eliminates
native worldviews. This approach guarantees U.S. domination of the globe.
The effects of the September 11 attacks on the United States on human rights and the international legal regimes are
best understood as a historical continuum. The unilateral actions taken by the United States under the veil of an
allied coalition expose international law as a system of "insider" groups and dominant global interests. The
invocation of self-defense as a justification for U.S. military actions in Afghanistan -- and the inability of any state
or international institution to question or challenge them -- underscore the biases of international law. Those biases,
on which international law is founded, treat the universe as a theater for European and North American
military, political, economic, and cultural interests. 2 This global white European supremacy over nonEuropean peoples is premised on the notion of Europe as the center of the universe, Christianity as the
fountain of civilization, the innateness of capitalist economics, and political imperialism as a necessity. 3
In this scheme of international law, the West is the point of reference for the world, and every other country or
region is incidental to the [*4] European West. In the current global terror-driven crisis, public discourse implies
that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the moral and naturalist foundation of civilization and reason, without which full
humanity is unattainable. In historical terms, Christianity was coupled with the colonial project, fusing the church,
state, and empire. Capitalism was constructed as innate in humans, and therefore the basis for the regimes of the
ownership, protection, and distribution of global resources. Political imperialism -- defined today as global
American leadership -- is an indispensable paradigm in the ordering of the relationship between Europeans
and non-European peoples, with the manifest duty of European peoples to convey the gifts of civilization to
backward and uncivilized races.
Thus international law orders the world into the European and the non-European, and gives primacy to the
former. This is done by creating the notion of the hierarchy of cultures and peoples. The fundamental
principles of international law evidence this inflexible view of the discipline. Sovereignty and statehood are
defined in such a way as to exclude or subordinate non-European societies. 4 Membership in international
society is a prerogative of American and European powers, which alone decide who -- and on what terms -belongs to this international society and can benefit from the privileges of international law. Nowhere has this
been more evident than in Afghanistan where the United States has arrogated to itself the right to dismantle the state,
and to recreate it. The current crisis leaves no doubt about the identity of the masters of the universe. The
international legal order erects, preserves, and advances the European and American domination of the
globe.
19
First Priority
Link: International Law

International Law naturalizes the collective identity of the state, legitimizing complete
control of the nation by the state apparatus. The plan is not a radical gesture toward the
Other, but a way that the state maintains internal domination through the perpetuation of
the overall international system.
Trimble, Prof. of Law University of California, in 1990
[Philip, International Law, World Order, and Critical Legal Studies, Stanford Law Review, Feb., p. lexis]
A quick look at the "rules" of international law shows why governments love international law. Contrary to the
realist/idealist view of law as a restraint on unruly governments, international law confirms much more authority and
power than it denies. For example, the basic rule of international law is that a state generally has the exclusive
authority to regulate conduct within its territory. International law thus confers authority to control entry and exit, to
establish police control, to determine economic structure, to tax, to regulate, and to reinforce in many other ways the
power and legitimacy of government. Public international law also grants governments sovereignty over air space
and control over the continental shelf and economic resources 200 miles into the sea.
Of course, each rule conferring authority on a government denies it to all others. The United States government may
be restrained in attempts to enforce its law in Canada, and Japanese fisherman may be barred from fishing near
California's coast. Nevertheless, governments have little interest in extending their authority to that extent, at least
when compared with their interest in controlling matters at home. For the most part, governments do not want to
invade other countries or apply their law or send their fishermen to other territories. To be sure, there are exceptions,
and these exceptions can be of vital importance to the actors involved. In the aggregate, however, they are less
important than the effect of the general rules.
Even the rules of public international law that expressly restrain government authority may at the same time give a
government an excuse to impose its authority throughout its own society so that it can effectively discharge its
obligations under international law. International human rights law, for example, promotes national judicial review,
general criminal law procedures, and a host of objectives that can best be met by assertions of national government
power, especially against village or other traditional structures. For example, a government's international
responsibility for injuries to aliens gives that government a mandate to control local officials and practices.
Even when the rules do prevent a government from doing something that it otherwise wants to do, such as denying
overflight rights to a hostile state's aircraft (contrary to the Chicago Convention), it may decide to forgo the shortterm advantages derived from violating those rules because it has an overriding interest in maintaining the overall
system. The rules comprising the system as a whole enable each government to achieve welfare goals for important
parts of its population, and hence solidify its standing and legitimacy. Thus, the United States government may
decide not to block transit of Cuban aircraft over United States territory because it derives support from the airline
industry [*834] and the traveling public, both of which in turn benefit from transit over Cuba or from the system of
which such transit rights are an integral part. The rules of international law accordingly are very congenial to
governments. They mostly justify or legitimate the practical exercise of state power. n94
20
First Priority
Impact: Colonialism T/ the Case

Public health problems and underdevelopment are both products of colonialism. We must
address the underlying causes of our contemporary situation.
Charles Mangongera, research fellow with the Mass Public Opinion Institute, September 19, 2002
[Should We Continue to Blame Colonialism? Financial Gazette (Harare),
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2002/0919blame.htm]
These are some of the innumerable problems that Africa faces today and the question that should be asked is
whether they are the legacy of colonialism and the perpetual neo-colonial exploitation of Africa's resources.
Western imperialism should have its fair share of blame for these problems. It is undeniable that the
continent has never recovered from the looting and plunder that it was subjected to during the colonial era. It
is undeniable that the Western world continues to make conscious and deliberate efforts to exacerbate
Africa's isolation in the global economy. It is true that instead of helping Africa recover from the adverse
impact of their colonial domination, the Western powers have sought ways to alienate Africa in terms of
development by prescribing flawed experimental economic policies that have been made a precondition for
aid.
The Bretonwoods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, have formulated these policies and they have
failed to steer Africa to development. African leaders have been forced to adopt these policies in return for
aid with very little understanding of what the policies entail. They have assumed that they could apply the
science of muddling through in implementing these policies but it has turned out that the policies are condemning
the generality of African people to chronic poverty.
The point is that the Western powers are not seriously committed to helping Africa recover from the abject
poverty that it is enmeshed in following the decades of imperial domination and unprecedented asset
stripping that it was subjected to. This explains why today they are not willing to write off Africa's debt or to pay
reparations for slavery.
21
First Priority
Impact: Extinction
The alternative sparks global decolonization movements that are critical to averting
environmental collapse and extinction.
George E. Tinker, Iliff School of Technology, 1996
[Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice, ed. Jace Weaver, p. 171-72]
My suggestion that we take the recognition of indigenous sovereignty as a priority is an overreaching one that
involves more than simply justice for indigenous communities around the world. Indeed, such a political
move will necessitatea rethinking of consumption patterns in the North, and a shift in the economics of the
North will cause a concomitant shift also in the Two-thirds World of the South. The relatively simple act of
recognizing the sovereignty of the Sioux Nation and returning to it all state-held lands in the Black Hills (for
example, National Forest and National Park lands) would generate immediate international interest in the rights
of the indigenous, tribal peoples in all state territories. In the United States alone it is estimated that Indian nations still have
legitimate (moral and legal) claim to some two-thirds of the U.S. land mass. Ultimately, such an act as return of Native lands to
Native control would have a significant ripple effect on other states around the world where indigenous
peoples still have aboriginal land claims and suffer the ongoing results of conquest and displacement in their own
territories.
American Indian cultures and values have much to contribute in the comprehensive reimagining of the
Western value system that has resulted in our contemporary ecojustice crisis. The main point that must be made is that
there were and are cultures that take their natural environment seriously and attempt to live in balance with the created whole around them in
ways that help them not overstep environmental limits. Unlike the Wests consistent experience of alienation from the natural world, these
cultures of indigenous peoples consistently experienced themselves as part of the that created whole, in relationship with everything else in the
world. They saw and continue to see themselves as having responsibilities, just as every other creature has a particular role to play in
maintaining the balance of creation as an ongoing process. This is ultimately the spiritual rationale for annual ceremonies like the Sun Dance or
Green Corn Dance. As another example, Lakota peoples planted cottonwoods and willows at their campsites as they broke camp to move on,
thus beginning the process of reclaiming the land humans had necessarily trampled through habitation and encampment.
We now know that indigenous rainforest peoples in what is today called the state of Brazil had a unique relationship to the forest in which they
lived, moving away from a cleared area after farming it to a point of reduced return and allowing the clearing to be reclaimed as jungle. The
group would then clear a new area and begin a new cycle of production. The whole process was relatively sophisticated and functioned in
harmony with the jungle itself. So extensive was their movement that some scholars are now suggesting that there is actually very little of what
might rightly be called virgin forest in what had been considered the untamed wilds of the rainforest.
What I have described here is more than just a coincidence or, worse, some romanticized falsification of Native memory. Rather, I am insisting
that there are peoples in the world who live with an acute and cultivated sense of their intimate participation in the natural world as part of an
intricate whole. For indigenous peoples, this means that when they are presented with the concept of development, it is sense-less. Most
significantly, one must realize that this awareness is the result of self-conscious effort on the part of the traditional American Indian national
communities and is rooted in the first instance in the mythology and theology of the people. At its simplest, the worldview of American Indians
can be expressed as Ward Churchill describes it:
Human beings are free (indeed, encouraged) to develop their innate capabilities, but only in ways that do not infringe upon other
elements called relations, in the fullest dialectical sense of the word of nature. Any activity going beyond this is considered as
imbalanced, a transgression, and is strictly prohibited. For example, engineering was and is permissible, but only insofar as it does
not permanently alter the earth itself. Similarly, agriculture was widespread, but only within norms that did not supplant natural
vegetation.
Like the varieties of species in the world, each culture has contributed to make for the sustainability of the whole.
Given the reality of eco-devastation threatening all of life today, the survival of American Indian cultures and
cultural values may make the difference for the survival and sustainability for all the earth as we know it.
What I have suggested implicitly is that the American Indian peoples may have something of values something
corrective to Western values and the modern world system to offer to the world. The loss of these gifts, the
loss of the particularity of these peoples, today threatens the survivability of us all. What I am most
passionately arguing is that we must commit to the struggle for the just and moral survival of Indian peoples as
peoples of the earth, and that this struggle is for the sake of the earth and for the sustaining of all life. It is
now imperative that we change the modern value of acquisitiveness and the political systems and economics
that consumption has generated. The key to making this massive value shift in the world system may lie in
the international recognition of indigenous political sovereignty and self-determination. Returning Native
lands to the sovereign control of Native peoples around the world, beginning in the United States, is not
simply just; the survival of all may depend on it.
22
First Priority
Impact: War
The colonialism of early America is the root cause of wars todaythey are extensions of
genocidal carnage against native people
Paul Street, author, March 11, 2004.
[Those Who Deny the Crimes of the Past Reflections on American Racist Atrocity Denial, 1776-2004,
http://thereitis.org/displayarticle242.html]
It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the vicious, often explicitly genocidal "homeland"
assaults on native-Americans, which set foundational racist and national-narcissist patterns for subsequent
U.S. global butchery, disproportionately directed at non-European people of color. The deletion of the real story of
the so-called "battle of Washita" from the official Seventh Cavalry history given to the perpetrators of the No Gun
Ri massacre is revealing. Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US savagery at
Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the Philippines, the denial of which
encouraged US savagery in Korea, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of
which (and all before) has recently encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a vicious circle of
recurrent violence, well known to mental health practitioners who deal with countless victims of domestic violence
living in the dark shadows of the imperial homeland's crippling, stunted, and indeed itself occupied social and
political order.
Power-mad US forces deploying the latest genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that
white North American "pioneers" tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, "Apache," "Blackhawk," and
"Comanche" helicopters) are walking in bloody footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and
plains to the leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt acknowledged as
America's "original inhabitants." Racist imperial carnage and its denial, like charity, begin at home. Those who
deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their offenses in the future as long as they retain the means
and motive to do so.
23
First Priority
Impact: Environment
Indigenous knowledge is key to achieving an understanding of how to properly manage the
environment
B. Rajasekaran, Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture and Rural Development, Iowa State, 1993
(A framework for incorporating indigenous knowledge systems into agricultural research, extension, and NGOs for
sustainable agricultural development. Studies in Technology and Social Change No. 21. Technology and Social
Change Program, Iowa State University, 1993, http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/docs/004-201/004-201.html)
Indigenous knowledge is local knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society (Warren, 1987).
Indigenous knowledge is the systematic body of knowledge acquired by local people through the accumulation of
experiences, informal experiments, and intimate understanding of the environment in a given culture (Rajasekaran,
1993). According to Haverkort (1991), indigenous knowledge is the actual knowledge of a given population that
reflects the experiences based on traditions and includes more recent experiences with modern technologies. Local
people, including farmers, landless laborers, women, rural artisans, and cattle rearers, are the custodians of
indigenous knowledge systems. Moreover, these people are well informed about their own situations, their
resources, what works and doesn't work, and how one change impacts other parts of their system (Butler and
Waud, 1990).
1.2 Value of indigenous knowledge
Indigenous knowledge is dynamic, changing through indigenous mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness as
well as through contact with other local and international knowledge systems (Warren, 1991). These knowledge
systems may appear simple to outsiders but they represent mechanisms to ensure minimal livelihoods for local
people. Indigenous knowledge systems often are elaborate, and they are adapted to local cultural and
environmental conditions (Warren, 1987). Indigenous knowledge systems are tuned to the needs of local
people and the quality and quantity of available resources (Pretty and Sandbrook, 1991). They pertain to various
cultural norms, social roles, or physical conditions. Their efficiency lies in the capacity to adapt to changing
circumstances. According to Norgaard (1984, p. 7): Traditional knowledge has been viewed as part of a romantic
past, as the major obstacle to development, as a necessary starting point, and as a critical component of a cultural
alternative to modernization. Only very rarely, however, is traditional knowledge treated as knowledge per se in
the mainstream of the agricultural and development and environmental management literature, as knowledge that
contributes to our understanding of agricultural production and the maintenance and use of environmental
systems.
1.3 Diversity of indigenous knowledge
Indigenous knowledge systems are: adaptive skills of local people usually derived from many years of experience,
that have often been communicated through "oral traditions" and learned through family members over generations
(Thrupp, 1989), time-tested agricultural and natural resource management practices, which pave the way for
sustainable agriculture (Venkatratnam, 1990), strategies and techniques developed by local people to cope with
the changes in the socio-cultural and environmental conditions, practices that are accumulated by farmers due to
constant experimentation and innovation, trial-and-error problem-solving approaches by groups of people with an
objective to meet the challenges they face in their local environments (Roling and Engel, 1988), decision-making
skills of local people that draw upon the resources they have at hand.
24
First Priority
Impact: Environment
Continued lack of understanding of indigenous people and their practices leads to further
decimation of the environment
B. Rajasekaran, Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture and Rural Development, Iowa State, 1993
(A framework for incorporating indigenous knowledge systems into agricultural research, extension, and NGOs for
sustainable agricultural development. Studies in Technology and Social Change No. 21. Technology and Social
Change Program, Iowa State University, 1993, http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/docs/004-201/004-201.html)
Undermining farmers' confidence in their traditional knowledge can
lead them to become increasingly dependent on outside expertise (Richards, 1985; Warren, 1990). Small-scale farmers are often portrayed as
2.7 Consequences of disregarding indigenous knowledge systems
backward, obstinately conservative, resistant to change, lacking innovative ability, and even lazy (IFAP, 1990, p. 24). The International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) enumerated
certain reasons for such a perception: Lack of understanding of traditional agriculture which further leads to a
communication gap between promoters and practitioners giving rise to myths; The accomplishments of
farmers often are not recognized, because they are not recorded in writing or made known; and Poor
involvement of farmers and their organizations in integrating, consolidating, and disseminating what is
already known. One of the greatest consequences of the under-utilization of indigenous knowledge systems,
according to Atteh (1992, p. 20), is the: Loss and non-utilization of indigenous knowledge [which] results in the
inefficient allocation of resources and manpower to inappropriate planning strategies which have done little
to alleviate rural poverty. With little contact with rural people, planning experts and state functionaries have
attempted to implement programs which do not meet the goals of rural people, or affect the structures and
processes that perpetuate rural poverty. Human and natural resources in rural areas have remained
inefficiently used or not used at all. There is little congruence between planning objectives and realities facing the rural people. Planners think they
know what is good for these `poor', `backward', ìgnorant', and `primitive' people. 2.8 Need for a conceptual
framework Despite continuous importance given to linkages between research-extension-farmer while developing, disseminating, and utilizing
sustainable agricultural technologies, several socio-political and institutional factors act as constraints for such an effective linkage (Oritz et al.,
1991). After a decade of rhetoric about feedback of farmers' problems to extension workers and scientists, a large gap remains between the ideal
and reality (Haugerud and Collinson, 1991). Kaimowitz (1992: 105) provided illustrations to support the above statement: Researchers
perceived extension agents and institutions to be ineffective and unclear about their mandate, making
researchers reluctant to work with extension. When researchers did work with extension agents, they tended
to look down on them and view them as little more than available menial labor, an attitude strongly resented
by the extension workers. Keeping these potential constraints in conventional transfer of technology, a
framework for incorporating indigenous knowledge systems into agricultural research and extension has
been developed with the following salient features: strengthening the capacities of regional research and
extension organizations; building upon local people's knowledge that are acquired through various processes such as farmer-to-farmer
communication, and farmer experimentation; identifying the need for extension scientist/ social scientist in an interdisciplinary regional research team; formation of a sustainable technology
development consortium to bring farmers, researchers, NGOs, and extension workers together well ahead of the process of technology development; generating technological options rather than
fixed technical packages (Chambers et al., 1989);
working with the existing organization and management of research and public
sector extension;
bringing research-extension-farmer together at all stages is practically difficult considering the existing bureaucracies and spatial as well as academic distances
among the personnel belonging to these organizations. Hence, utilizing the academic knowledge gained by some extension personnel (subject matter specialists) during the process of validating
understanding that it is
impractical to depend entirely on research stations for innovations considering the inadequate human
resource capacity of the regional research system. Chambers and Jiggins (1987, p.5) supported the need for such a framework:
farmer experiments; outlining areas that research and extension organizations need to concentrate on during the process of working with farmers.
The transfer of technology (TOT) model fits badly with the needs and priorities of resource-poor farmers. Agricultural extension programs are
still biased towards techniques and strategies which are capital-intensive. Resource-poor farmers (RPF) are scattered and are not able to make
their needs and priorities readily known and felt. The TOT model cannot easily handle the complex interactions of RPF farming; links between
crops, especially with intercropping and multiple tiers; agro-forestry and livestock-crop-tree complementaries; and the progressive adjustments
required in the field in the face of seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations
25
First Priority
Impact: State Key to Capitalism

Without the state to prop it up, the entire capitalist system would fall apart, from the top
down.
Preston 2003. (Keith, Essayist at American Revolutionary Vangaurd, "Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of
Empire" www.attackthesystem.comlphilo.html)
Conventional theories of political economy typically portray "Big Business" and "Big Government" as
natural antagonists of one another. The "left" champions the state as the protector of the little guy from the
predatory corporation while the "right" champions the corporation as the hapless victim of predatory
government bureaucrats.(41) However, the present corporate system could not exist without the favors
granted to corporations by the state in the form of subsidies, infrastructure, central banking, the state
monopoly over the production of currency, tariffs, monopoly privilege, contracts, bailouts, guarantees,
military intervention, patents, the suppression of labor, regulatory favors, protectionist trade
legistlation, limited liability and corporate personhood laws and much else. Similarly, the state's
legistlative process and executive hierarchy is beholden to the corporate interests who fund the electoral
system and provide the bureaucratic elite among the military, foreign policy and "international trade"
establishments. Condoleeza Rice's migration from Chevron to the National Security Council is no mere
coincidence. The amalgam of Big Business and Big Government, consolidated on an international scale,
represents a centralization of wealth and power of so great a degree as to jeopardize the future of
humanity.
What sort of economic order would accompany the political victory of anarchism? Economic
decentralization would naturally follow political decentralization. As the massive, bureaucratic nationstates currently being incorporated into the New World Order collapsed and disappeared, the corporate
entities propped up and protected by these states would also vanish. Just as the dissolution of centralized
political power would result in the sovereignty and self-determination of communities and associations, so
would these entities be able to develop their own unique economic identities. Economic resources of all
types, from land to industrial facilities to infrastructure to high technology, would fall into the hands of
particular communities and popular organizations. Such entities would likely organize themselves into a
myriad of economic institutions. It can be expected that workers would play a much greater leadership role in
the formation of future economies as workers access to resources and bargaining power, both individually
and collectively, would likely be greatly enhanced. The result would likely be an economic order where
the worker-oriented enterprise replaces the capitalist corporation as the dominant mode of economic
organization.
26
First Priority
Impact: State Key to Capitalism

State sovereignty is a fundamental pillar of the capitalist economy
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar in Sociology at Yale, 1997
[States? Sovereignty? The Dilemmas of Capitalists in an Age of Transition, http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwsovty.htm]
The sovereignty of the states - their inward and outward sovereignty within the framework of an interstate system is a fundamental pillar of the capitalist world-economy. If it falls, or seriously declines, capitalism is
untenable as a system. I agree that it is in decline today, for the first time in the history of the modern worldsystem. This is the primary sign of the acute crisis of capitalism as an historical system. The essential dilemma of
capitalists, singly and as a class, is whether to take full short-run advantage of the weakening of the states, or to try
short-run repair to restore the legitimacy of the state structures, or to spend their energy trying to construct an
alternative system. Behind the rhetoric, intelligent defenders of the status quo are aware of this critical situation.
While they are trying to get the rest of us to talk about the pseudo-issues of globalization, some of them at least are
trying to figure out what a replacement system could be like, and how to move things in that direction. If we don't
want to live in the future with the inegalitarian solution that they will promote, we should be asking the same
question.
Neo-liberalism dependent upon the state for implementation of its policy goals
Chris Harman, Marxist, 2001
(ANTI-CAPITALISM: THEORY AND PRACTICE, http://www.marxists.de/anticap/theprax/part2.htm)
Although neo-liberalism as an ideology opposes state intervention, the practical implementation of these
policies always depended on the state - or at least bargaining between the world's most powerful states. This is
why its implementation through international trade and business meetings has been far from smooth. The
Financial Times can still worry that something as apparently trivial as the row between Europe and the US over
banana imports "could be escalating transatlantic retaliation that would bring the already enfeebled WTO to its
knees". There are similarly intractable disputes over what preparations the IMF should make for intervention in any
further international financial crisis like that which hit Asia in 1997. The "theorists" of neo-liberalism do not
themselves have any easy answers to these conflicts. For although their creed preaches non-intervention by
the state, it has been an ideology reflecting the needs of the state-industrial complexes of the US, the
European powers and Japan in their collisions with each other and the world's smaller states.
27
First Priority
A2: Perm
Must insist on hierarchiesThe Alternative must be a priority or it risks being neutralized
as just any other political issue
Communications from Sangamon State, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, Page 8)
Turning to Americas vaunted opposition, we find record of not a single significant demonstration protesting the
wholesale destruction of Iraqi children. On balance, U.S., progressives have devoted far more time and
energy over the past decade to combating the imaginary health effects of environmental tobacco smoke and
demanding installation of speed bumps in suburban neighborhoodsthat is, to increasing their own comfort
levelthan to anything akin to a coherent response to the U.S. genocide in Iraq. The underlying mentality is
symbolized quite well in the fact that, since they were released in the mid-1990s, Jean Baudrillards allegedly
radical screed. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, has outsold Ramsey Clarks The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq,
prominently subtitled The Children are Dying, by a margin of almost three to one. The theoretical trajectory
entered into by much of the American left over the past quarter-century exhibits a marked tendency to try
and justify such evasion and squalid self-indulgence through the expedient of rejecting hierarchy, in all its
forms. Since hierarchy may be taken to include anything resembling an order of priorities, we are faced
thereby with the absurd contention that all issues are of equal importance (as in the mindless slogan, There is
no hierarchy to oppression). From there, it becomes axiomatic that the privileging of any issue over
another-genocide, say, over fanny-pinching in the workplacebecomes not only evidence of elitism, but of
sexism, and often homophobia to boot (as in the popular formulation holding that Third World antiimperialism is inherently nationalistic, and nationalism is inherently damaging to the rights of women and gays).
Having thus foreclosed upon all options for concrete engagement as mere reproductions of the relations of
oppression, the left has largely neutralized itself, a matter reflected most conspicuously in the applause it
bestowed upon Homi K. Bhabhas preposterous 1994 contention that writing,which he likens to warfare, should
be considered the only valid revolutionary act. One might easily conclude that had the opposition not conjured up
such postmodernist discourse on its own initiative, it would have been necessary for the status quo to have
invented it. As it is, postmodernist theorists and their post-colonialist counterparts are finding berths at elite
universities at a truly astounding rate. To be fair, it must be admitted that there remain appreciable segments of the
left which do not subscribe to the sophistries imbedded in postmodernisms failure of nerve. Those who continue
to assert the value of direct action, however, have for the most part so thoroughly constrained themselves to the
realm of symbolic/ritual protest as to render themselves self-nullifying. One is again hard-pressed to decipher
whether this has been by default or design. While such comportment is all but invariably couched in the loftyor
sanctiomoniousterms of principled pacifism, the practice of proponents often suggests something far less noble.
28
First Priority
A2: Realism
Realism is informed by colonialist views of human nature that depict the savage native as
proof of the need for the state. This serves to absolve the state of its role in genocide
Anthony J. Hall, Department of Native American Studies University of Lethbridge, April 15, 1999
[Ethnic Cleansing of Native North American People,
http://www.akha.org/content/international/ethniccleansingofnorthamericanindigenouspeople.html]
To now read all these years later Mr. McKays dismissive comments about
Bruce Clark as the infamous loser in Temagami and countless and other
cases, raises the question of strange argumentative concoctions youd
need to win before a judge with the deep prejudices and sparce
historical knowledge of a Mr. Justice Steele. While I thought he was
the last word in judicial ethnocentrism, Mr. Justice Allan McEachern
managed to outdo his Ontario counterpart in the ruling of the lower
court on the Delgamuukw case. Mr. McEachern, who doubles as chair of
the judges own self regulating body, pronounced that Indians have
almost nothing of worth to retain for either themselves or the world
from their own Indigenous cultures. To make this point, the BC jurist
actually quoted Thomas Hobbes, who used imaginary North American Indians
in 1651, to argue that life without a dictatorial ruler is nasty,
brutish and short.
Accordingly, to properly understand the genesis of Dr. Clarks legal
interpretation, you need to know someting of the nature of his formative
experiences with judges that, in my view, were unusually extreme in
their ethnocentric hostility to Indian peoples and Indian cultures. What
emerged for him from this experience, was a dawning recognition that the
stakes of the contentions over Aboriginal and treaty rights are so big,
and the legacy of legal impropriety so old and so well protected by
layer upon layer of dubious and overtly racist legal precedent, that it
is almost unimaginable that any judge would take the responsibility of
overturning this status quo-- of overturning this institutionalized
complicity in genocide that is so deeply ingrained in the framework of
North American experience that it is made to seem normal and natural and
simply a fact of life.
29
First Priority
A2: Nuclear War

Representations of nuclear war as a distinct, future event mask the reality of ongoing
violence toward the periphery, reconstructing political space as homogenous.
Masahide Kato, Professor of Political Science, University of Hawaii, 1993
[Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze, Alternatives]
30
First Priority
A2: Extinction
By presenting nuclear extinction as the single most important impact, the AFF naturalizes
and legitimizes the on-going colonization of the indigenous periphery.
[Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze, Alternatives, p.351]
By representing the possible extinction as the single most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe
(posing it as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear
violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive process. The "real" of nuclear war is
designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal" (Derrik De Kerkbove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what they reserve as
the authentic catastrophe. The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of
"extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by stating that nuclear
catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the
local effects." Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process
of discursive "delocalization" of nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but
delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe.
The elevation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear criticism through which extinction is
conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze: nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear
catastrophe to the "absolute" point from which the fiction of "extinction" is configured. Herein, the
configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of "extinction" reveal their interconnection via the
"absolutization" of the strategic gaze. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of the earth is constructed,
the fiction of extinction is derived from the figure perceived through the strategic gaze. In other words, the
image of the globe, in the final instance, is nothing more than a figure on which the notion of extinction is
being constructed. Schell, for instance, repeatedly encountered difficulty in locating the subject involved in the
conceptualization of extinction, which in turn testifies to its figural origin: "who will suffer this loss, which we
somehow regard as supreme? We, the living, will not suffer it; we will be dead. Nor will the unborn shed any tears
over their lost chance to exist; to do so they would have to exist already."
31
First Priority
A2: Cap Good

Capitalism guarantees the extermination of the indigenous periphery. It is part of the logic
of colonization
[Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze, Alternatives, p.347]
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of relatively autonomous
space in the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric
of the society into the division of labor but also by the desire for "pure" destruction /extermination of the
periphery. The penetration of capital into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social
organizations by capital are not separable. However, what we have witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a
rapid intensification of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer
interested in incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of
such "pure" destruction /extermination of the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another
problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction.
Particularly, the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier phases in its production of the
"ultimate" means of destruction /extermination, ie., nuclear weapons.
32
First Priority
A2: Identity/Land K
Land Key to Culture
Land is the cornerstone for Indigenous culture: governance, ancestry and religion, society,
all depend on it.
Babcock, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, 2005 (Hope M.; A Civic-Republican Vision of
"Domestic Dependent Nations" in the Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-envisioned, Reinvigorated, and
Reempowered; 2005 Utah L. Rev. 443; Lexis; JLS)
But it is said, that they are averse to society and a social life. Can anything be more inapplicable
than this to a people who always live in towns or clans? Or can they be said to have no
"republique," who conduct all their affairs in national councils, who pride themselves in their
national character, who consider an insult or injury done to an individual by a stranger as done to
the whole, and who resent it accordingly. In short, this picture is not applicable to any nation of
Indians I have ever known or heard of in North America. n418
[*537] The republican principle of having a place within which to practice the art of being a good
citizen is (and always has been) central to tribal society. Indian tribes have always had a concept
of territory and boundaries. Most tribes assigned hunting territories to villages or lineages, which
other tribes and tribal members knew of and respected. n419 Tribes also recognized (and still
recognize) territory through mythical or sacred claims, and the burial sites of lineages and clans
marked territory for most, if not all tribes. n420
Today, a tribe's traditional homeland is the "centerpiece of contemporary Indian life." n421 Tribal
lands and their resources are not only sustaining for the tribe, but are the tribe's cultural and
spiritual base - where ancestors are buried, and spirits live - and the very topography can provide
cleansing and rebirth. n422
You cannot understand how the Indian thinks of himself in relation to the world around him unless
you understand his conception of what is appropriate; particularly what is morally appropriate
within the context of that relationship. The native American ethic with respect to the physical
world is a matter of reciprocal appropriation: appropriations in which man invests himself in the
landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental
experience. n423
33
First Priority
A2: Identity/Land K
Land Key to Culture
Land is an integral part of Indigenous culture; it shapes who they are and allows them to
retain aspects of their ways of life that would otherwise be lost.
Babcock, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, 2005 (Hope M.; A Civic-Republican Vision of
"Domestic Dependent Nations" in the Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-envisioned, Reinvigorated, and
Reempowered; 2005 Utah L. Rev. 443; Lexis; JLS)
To lose the hunting ground was to a Cherokee like losing the Latin mass to a conservative
Roman Catholic. A sacred, ancient, and apparently timeless tradition - something that God or the
Great Spirit had written into the fundamental structure of things - was gone forever. n188
Land is the sine qua non of tribal sovereignty. Maintaining a separate land base is critical for
tribes not only because of land's physical attributes and the legal consequences that flow from
having a tribal homeland, but because it allows Indians to "remain[] indelibly Indian, proudly
defining themselves as a people apart and resisting full incorporation into the dominant society
around them"; n189 - a concept Wilkinson calls measured separatism. n190
Historically, and still today, tribal members rely on the wildlife and plants found on or near their
reservations for subsistence, medicine, and traditional ceremonies. Tribes also lease their lands
to energy companies for development of subsurface resources n191 and disposal of waste
material, n192 and operate a variety of commercial enterprises like hotels, ski resorts, and
gambling casinos. n193 They depend upon the productivity of these lands to support multigenerational
habitation as an important, enduring, and unique feature of Indian culture. n194
Reservations also give tribes a separate, physical place that they can [*487] close to nonIndians - enabling them to remain free from the influence of white society and to retain the unique
aspects of their cultures. n195
Tribes without land find it more difficult to gain federal recognition and government-to-government
status with the federal government. n196 Nonrecognition means that tribes cannot assume
primary regulatory authority under federal pollution control laws for activities that take place on
their reservations. n197 Nonrecognized tribes cannot develop casinos as a source of tribal
income n198 and are ineligible for much-needed financial and technical assistance under a host
of federal programs. n199
The reservation also performs an important legal function for tribes, as the Court considers the
presence of tribal land to be a precondition for the exercise of tribal sovereignty. n200 For
example, on its reservation, with the exception of [*488] certain crimes, n201 a tribe exercises
full jurisdiction over the activities of its members. n202 But, the sovereign authority of a tribe over
its members lessens as the member moves away from the reservation boundaries, and, on the
reservation, the sovereign immunity disappears entirely over non-Indians on non-Indian
inholdings. The loss of authority is discussed in greater detail in the next section of this Article.
n203
[*489] What is harder for non-Indians to understand, and less obvious to us given our more
mobile, rootless way of life, is that tribes have a multi-generational, cultural bond to their land that
makes that land unique and nonfungible. n204 To a tribe, its reservation is its "cultural
centerpiece
34
First Priority
A2: Identity/Land K
Land Key to Culture
Theres no chance of offense here, land provides the internal link to all facets of Indigenous
culture and ways of life.
Bradford, Chiricahua Apache. LL.M., 2001, Harvard Law School; Ph.D., 1995, Northwestern University; J.D., 2000,
University of Miami. Assistant Professor of Law, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2003 (William; "With a
Very Great Blame on Our Hearts": n1 Reparations, Reconciliation, and an American Indian Plea for Peace with Justice;
27 Am. Indian L. Rev. 1; Lexis; JLS)
The relationship between the land and Indian people is fundamental to their physical and cultural
survival as distinct, autonomous groups. Indian land is constitutive of the Indian cultural identity
n111 and designative of the boundaries of the Indian cultural universe. n112 Indian land transmits
knowledge about history, links people to their ancestors, and provides a code of appropriate
moral behavior. From the moment of first contact with European "discoverers," [*26] Indians
proclaimed a sacred responsibility to preserve and transmit Indian land, and with it, identity,
religion, and culture, to successive generations. n113 The discharge of that responsibility was
compromised by federal policies of land acquisition ranging from fraud and deceit to expropriation
and outright theft.
Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, prudence directed Euro-Americans
to formally recognize militarily potent Indian tribes as independent societies and accord them
diplomatic recognition as sovereigns. n114 Even subsequent to the defeats of France in the
Seven Years' War in 1763 and Britain in the War of Independence in 1781, the Euro-American
foothold in North America remained tenuous, and ongoing military insecurity stymied territorial
ambitions while stifling any notions of conquest. Moreover, the United States' land hunger was
largely slaked by available space within the original thirteen colonies, and land acquisitions from
Indian tribes were of necessity accomplished by treaties of cession n115 after peaceful
negotiations. n116 [*27] Still, if during its first several decades of existence the fledgling
government was obliged to recognize the sovereignty of Indian nations and to respect Indian land
titles as a matter of international and domestic law, n117 from the moment of its creation the
United States was crafting legal solutions to the "problems caused by the . . . fact that the Indians
were here when the white man arrived[.]"
Land is the center of Indigenous culture

Pommersheim, Professor of Law at South Dakota University, 1993 (Frank; Making All the Difference: The Native
American Testimony and the Black Hills; 69 N. Dak. L. Rev. 337; Lexis; JLS)
Such a wide-ranging legal and historical controversy as the Black Hills issue inevitably requires
that analytic attention be paid to context and situatedness. For the Sioux Nation, land restoration
is a cornerstone cultural commitment. Economic considerations are important, but not as central.
The Black Hills land is of primary importance because of its sacredness, its nexus to the cultural
well being of Lakota people, and its role as a mediator in their relationship with all other living
things. As noted by Gerald Clifford, Chairman of the Black Hills Steering Committee, "until we get
back on track in our relationship to the earth, we cannot straighten out any of our relationships to
ourselves, to other people." n68
Land is inherent to Lakota people. It is their cultural centerpiece - the fulcrum of material and
spiritual well being. Without it, there is neither balance nor center. The Black Hills are a central
part of this "sacred text" and constitute its prophetic core:
As part of the "sacred text," the land - like sacred texts in other traditions - is not primarily a book
of answers, "but rather a principal symbol of, perhaps the principal symbol of, and thus a central
occasion of recalling and heeding, the fundamental aspirations of the tradition." It summons the
heart and the spirit to difficult labor. In this sense, the "sacred text" constantly disturbs - it serves
a prophetic function in the life of the community. The land, therefore, constantly evokes
the
fundamental Lakota aspirations to live in harmony with Mother Earth and to embody the
traditional virtues of wisdom, courage, generosity, and fortitude. The "sacred text" itself
guarantees nothing, but it does hold the necessary potential to successfully mediate the past of
the tradition with its present predicament.
35
First Priority
A2: Churchill Indicts

Dont believe any of this nonsense. All the evidence proves that the charges are simply
politically motivated and are just empty assertions.
MAYER 2006 (Tom, Professor of Sociology at Colorado University, "The Report on Ward
Churchill," June 1 9, http://www.swans.com/library/art 1 2/zig094.html)
By addressing only a tiny fragment of his writings, the report implies that Ward tries to overawe and
hoodwink his readers with spurious documentation. Anyone who reads an essay like "Nits Make Lice:
The Extermination of North American Indians 1607- 1996" with its 612 footnotes will get a very
different impression. Churchill, they will see, goes far beyond most writers of broad historical overviews in
trying to support his claims. He often cites several references in the same footnote. Ward is deeply
engaged with the materials he references and frequently comments extensively upon them. He typically
mounts a running critique of authors like James Axtell, Steven Katz, and Deborah Lipstadt. Readers will
see that Churchill is familiar with a formidable variety of materials and can engage in a broad range of
intellectual discourses.
Like most scholars, Churchill practices an implicitly Bayesian (a statistical term) form of analysis. That is,
he evaluates the plausibility of assertions and the credibility of evidence partly on the basis of his prior
beliefs. That government officials connived in generating the 1837-40 smallpox epidemic seems far more
plausible to Ward than to the investigating committee precisely because he thinks this is what American
governments are inclined to do. He discounts many of the so-called primary sources cited in the report
because their authors despise Indians or wish to conceal their own culpability in spreading the epidemic.
And contrary to what the report says, many first rate scholars focus on proving their own hypotheses
rather than considering all available evidence even-handedly. Einstein, for example, spent the last
three decades of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics while largely disregarding evidence in
its favor. This is not research misconduct. The operational definition of academic misconduct used by
the investigating committee is so broad that virtually anyone who writes anything might be found guilty.
Not footnoting an empirical claim is misconduct. Citing a book without giving a page number is misconduct.
Referencing a source that only partially supports an assertion is misconduct. Referencing contradictory
sources without detailing their contradictions is misconduct. Citing a work considered by some to be
unserious or inadequate is misconduct. Footnoting an erroneous claim without acknowledging the error is
misconduct. Interpreting a text differently than does its author is misconduct. Ghost writing an article is
misconduct. Referencing a paper one has ghost written without acknowledging authorship is misconduct. No
doubt this list of transgressions could be greatly expanded. I strongly suspect that many people who
vociferously support the report have read neither it nor any book or essay Ward Churchill has ever
written. Perhaps this should be deemed a form of academic misconduct.
36
First Priority
A2: Churchill Indicts

The plagiarism claims against Churchill are not only false, but grossly unfair compared to
other authors who did the exact same thing!
MAYER 2006 (Tom, Professor of Sociology at Colorado University, "The Report on Ward Churchill," June 19,
http://www.swans.com/library/art l2/zig094 .html)
I have finally finished a careful reading of the 124 page report about the alleged academic
misconduct of Ward Churchill. Often, but not always, I have been able to compare the
statements in the report with the relevant writings of Professor Churchill. Although the report by the
committee on research misconduct clearly entailed prodigious labor, it is a flawed document requiring
careful analysis. The central flaw in the report is grotesque exaggeration about the magnitude and
gravity of the improprieties committed by Ward Churchill. The sanctions recommended by the
investigating committee are entirely out of whack with those imposed upon such luminaries as Stephen
Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Lawrence Tribe, all of whom committed plagiarisms far more
egregious than anything attributed to Professor Churchill.
The text of the report suggests that the committee's judgments about the seriousness of
Churchill's misconduct were contaminated by political considerations. This becomes evident on page 97
...
where the committee acknowledges that "damage done to the reputation of

the University of Colorado as
an academic institution is a consideration in our assessment of the seriousness of Professor Churchill's
conduct." Whatever damage the University may have sustained by employing Ward Churchill derives from
his controversial political statements and certainly not from the obscure footnoting practices nor disputed
authorship issues investigated by the committee. Indeed, the two plagiarism charges refer to publications
that are now fourteen years old. Although these charges had been made years earlier, they were not
considered worthy of investigation until Ward Churchill became a political cause celebre. Using
institutional reputation to measure misconduct severity amounts to importing politics through the back door.
The report claims that Professor Churchill engaged in fabrication and falsification. To make these
claims it stretches the meaning of these words almost beyond recognition. Fabrication implies an intent to
deceive. There is not a shred of evidence that the writings of Ward Churchill contain any assertion that
he himself did not believe. The language used in the report repeatedly drifts in an inflammatory direction:
disagreement becomes misinterpretation, misinterpretation becomes misrepresentation, misinterpretation
becomes falsification. Ward may be wrong about who was considered an Indian under the General
Allotment Act of 1887 or about the origins of the 1837-1840 smallpox epidemic among the Indians of the
northern plains, but the report does not establish that only a lunatic or a liar could reach his conclusions on
the basis of available evidence.
37
First Priority
AFF: Perm
Insisting that the government comply with the law is an effective way to recognize our
complicity in the maintenance of a colonial order.
Natsu Saito, professor of law at Georgia State University, December 2004
[Like a Disembodied Shade: Colonization and Internment as the American Way of Life, Bad Subjects 71,
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2004/71/saito.html]
The other option left us is to follow the advice of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson who, in his capacity as
the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945), stated, "We are able to do away with domestic
tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we
make all men answerable to the law." In this spirit we can insist that the government which purports to
represent us comply with the rule of law as articulated in both the U.S. Constitution and in international
law in all of its actions and with respect to all territories and peoples over whom it exercises jurisdiction. To
the extent we fail to do so we are complicit in, and therefore responsible for, the maintenance of a colonial
order in which law serves only to protect and privilege the colonizers.
Even if we disagree on the roots of violence, we can still combine both struggles to spur
activism against oppression
Judith Butler, UC Berkeley, in 2004
(Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence, page 48)
We could have several engaged intellectual debates
going on at the same time and find ourselves joined in
the fight against violence, without having to agree on
many epistemological issues. We could disagree on
status and character of modernity and yet find
ourselves joined in asserting and defended the rights
of indigenous women to health care, reproductive
technology, decent wages, physical protection,
cultural rights, freedom of assembly. If you saw me on
such a protest line, would you wonder how a
postmodernist was able to muster the necessary
agency to get there today? I doubt it. You would
assume that I had walked or taken the subway! But the
same token, various routes lead us to politics,
various stories bring us onto the street, various
kinds of reasoning and belief. We do not need to
ground ourselves in a single model of communication,
a single model of reason, a single notion of the subject
before we are able to act. Indeed, an international
coalition of feminist activists and thinkers a
coalition that affirms the thinking of activists and
the activism of thinkers and refuses to put them into
distinctive categories that deny the actual complexity
of the lives in question will have to accept the
array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological
and political beliefs and modes and means of agency
that bring us into activism.
38
First Priority
AFF: AltCapitalism
Turn/ A world absent a strong central nation-state allows corporations to pillage the world
without any restrictions, increasing colonization.
Richard Moore, Political Scientist, 1996
[THE FATEFUL DANCE OF CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY, p.
http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberjournal/frm00089.html].
Maastricht, Scottish independence, ethnic or regional autonomy, stronger international "peace" arrangements -these are all developments which might have much to be said for them taken in isolation, or if implemented within a
democratic framework. But within the context of the corporate elite storming the Bastille of democracy, it is
necessary to re-examine all changes and "reforms" from the perspective of whether they strengthen or
weaken our fundamental democratic institutions. If we don't look at the big picture, then we'll be like the frog
who submits to being cooked -- the victim of a sneaky slow-boiling policy. The fact is that the modern nation
state is the most effective democratic institution mankind has been able to come up with since outgrowing the
small-scale city-state. With all its defects and corruptions, this gift from the Enlightenment -- the national
republic -- is the only effective channel the people have to power- sharing with the elites. If the strong nationstate withers away, we will not -- be assured -- enter an era of freedom and prosperity, with the "shackles of
wasteful governments off our backs". No indeed. If you want to see the future -- in which weak nations must
deal as-best-they-can with mega-corporations -- then look at the Third World.
Even a weakened state would allow the unrestrained rise of capitalism.

Stephen Hasler, economist, THE SUPER-RICH, 2000, p. 142.
Global capitalism is a godsend to such anti-statists. By disposing of the "interfering' and 'expropriating'
nation-states the only realistic mechanism for state power is marginalized. This in turn allows the
libertarian attack on the state -- or the public sector -- fuller rein than ever before in human history. In an
unusual alliance with libertarians, big corporate capital sees all the advantages of a weakened state -- the
un-hindered mobilization of capital (so those who invest can punish those states and societies that do not
encourage sufficient returns), low or zero inflation (in order to ensure low interest rates and thus boost the
prices of shares and bonds), low taxation (so that the returns from capital remain high), bonds (so that the
returns from capital remain high), and "flexible labor markets" (in order to keep costs, particularly social
costs, low and therefore raise profits and return on shares).
Its empirically proven; if you want to see what happens when there is no state to control
capitalism, just look at the 3rd world.
Richard Moore, Political Scientist, 1996,
[THE FATEFUL DANCE OF CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY,
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/Fateful%20Dance%20of%20Democracy%20and%20Capitalism.html]
The strong nation state has become more of a hindrance than a benefit to the modern megacorporation. It is the dominant nations which advance the standards in environmental protection,
worker's rights, and other such "emotional" and "inefficient" measures. Small, weak nations are more
amenable to rape and pillage by corporate developers, and the Third World is the elite's prototype of how
they'd like the whole world to operate.
39
First Priority
AFF: Reverse Genocide

Historically, indigenous groups displayed genocidal tendencies against colonizers. The
alternative results in a world of genocide against non-Indians.
Jones, Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, 2005
(Adam, Genocide: A Personal History, Sept, http://www.genocidetext.net/personal_journey.htm)
For the ensuing five-and-a-half years, 2000 to 2005, I
lived in Mexico City, by some estimates the largest
metropolis on earth. There, a legacy of genocide can
still be sensed in the ruined temples of the
prehispanic civilization. Those temples presided over
both the genocidal atrocities of the Aztec conquerors,
and those inflicted upon them -- and other indigenous
nations -- by the Spanish conquistadores. Shortly
after my arrival I was able to spend two weeks in the
sweltering Yucatn peninsula -- glorying in the
region's magnificent archaeological sites and colonial
architecture, but also tracing key sites involved in
the little-known Caste War of the mid-nineteenth
century. Between 1847 and 1849, taking advantage of a
civil war that divided the white elite, Mayan rebels
launched a millenarian uprising that bore strong
similarities to the massive rebellion in Upper Peru
(today's Bolivia) in the late eighteenth century. Like
that earlier revolt, the Mayan campaign displayed
genocidal tendencies from the outset. It aimed
explicitly at killing any whites, combatant or
non-combatant, who came within range of rifle or
dagger. By this means, the hated colonizer and his
brood would be banished forever.
40
First Priority
AFF: Identity/Land K
Tying identity to land reinforces the topography of powerit essentializes identity and
attaches it to discrete territorial units, repeating the very logic of the nation-state
Gupta and Ferguson, 1992. (Akhil, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University; James, Department of
Anthropology, University of California, Irvine; Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,
Cultural Anthropology 7.1 page 6-7, JSTOR.)
Representations of space in the social sciences are remarkably dependent on images of break, rupture, and
disjunction. The distinctiveness of societies, nations, and cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic
division of space, on the fact that they occupy "naturally" discontinuous spaces. The premise of discontinuity
forms the starting point from which to theorize contact, conflict, and contradiction between cultures and
societies. For example, the representation of the world as a collection of "countries," as in most world maps,
sees it as an inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each
"rooted" in its proper place (cf. Malkki, this issue). It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its
own distinctive culture and society that the terms "society" and "culture" are routinely simply appended to
the names of nation-states, as when a tourist visits India to understand "Indian culture" and "Indian society,"
or Thailand to experience "Thai culture," or the United States to get a whiff of "American culture." Of
course, the geographical territories that cultures and societies are believed to map onto do not have to be
nations. We do, for example, have ideas about culture-areas that overlap several nation-states, or of
multicultural nations. On a smaller scale, perhaps, are our disciplinary assumptions about the association of
culturally unitary groups (tribes or peoples) with "their" territories: thus, "the Nuer" live in "Nuerland" and so
forth. The clearest illustration of this kind of thinking are the classic "ethnographic maps" that purported to
display the spatial distribution of peoples, tribes, and cultures. But in all these cases, space itself becomes a
kind of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization are inscribed.
It is in this way that space functions as a central organizing principle in the social sciences at the same time
that it disappears from analytical purview.
This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture results in some significant problems. First, there is
the issue of those who inhabit the border, that "narrow strip along steep edges" (Anzaldua 1987:3) of national
boundaries. The fiction of cultures as discrete, object-like phenomena occupying discrete spaces becomes
implausible for those who inhabit the borderlands. Related to border inhabitants are those who live a life of
border crossings-migrant workers, nomads, and members of the transnational business and professional elite.
What is "the culture" of farm workers who spend half a year in Mexico and half a year in the United States?
Finally, there are those who cross borders more or less permanently- immigrants, refugees, exiles, and
expatriates. In their case, the disjuncture of place and culture is especially clear: Khmer refugees in the
United States take "Khmer culture" with them in the same complicated way that Indian immigrants in
England transport "Indian culture" to their new homeland.
A second set of problems raised by the implicit mapping of cultures onto places is to account for cultural
differences within a locality. "Multiculturalism" is both a feeble acknowledgment of the fact that cultures
have lost their moorings in definite places and an attempt to subsume this plurality of cultures within the
framework of a national identity. Similarly, the idea of "subcultures" attempts to preserve the idea of distinct
"cultures" while acknowledging the relation of different cultures to a dominant culture within the same
geographical and territorial space. Conventional accounts of ethnicity, even when used to describe cultural
differences in settings where people from different regions live side by side, rely on an unproblematic link
between identity and place.' Although such concepts are suggestive because they endeavor to stretch the
naturalized association of culture with place, they fail to interrogate this assumption in a truly fundamental
manner. We need to ask how to deal with cultural difference while abandoning received ideas of (localized)
culture.
41
First Priority
Third, there is the important question of postcoloniality. To which places do the hybrid cultures of
postcoloniality belong'! Does the colonial encounter create a "new culture" in both the colonized and
colonizing country, or does it destabilize the notion that nations and cultures are isomorphic'! As discussed
below, postcoloniality further problematizes the relationship between space and culture.
Last, and most important, challenging the ruptured landscape of independent nations and autonomous
cultures raises the question of understanding social change and cultural transformation as situated within
interconnected spaces. The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of
topography to conceal successfully the topography of power. The inherently fragmented space assumed in
the definition of anthropology as the study of cultures (in the plural) may have been one of the reasons
behind the long-standing failure to write anthropology's history as the biography of imperialism. For if one
begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally
disconnected, then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but
one of rethinking difference through connection. To illustrate, let us examine one powerful model of cultural
change that attempts to relate dialectically the local to larger spatial arenas: articulation. Articulation models,
whether they come from Marxist structuralism or from "moral economy," posit a primeval state of autonomy
(usually labeled "precapitalist"), which is then violated by global capitalism. The result is that both local and
larger spatial arenas are transformed, the local more than the global to be sure, but not necessarily in a
redetermined direction. This notion of articulation allows one to explore the richly unintended consequences
of, say, colonial capitalism, where loss occurs alongside invention. Yet, by taking a preexisting, localized
"community" as a given starting point, it fails to examine sufficiently the processes (such as the structures of
feeling that pervade the imagining of community) that go into the construction of space as place or locality in
the first instance. In other words, instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need
to examine how it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already
existed. Colonialism, then, represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another. This is not
to deny that colonialism, or an expanding capitalism, does indeed have profoundly dislocating effects on
existing societies. But by always foregrounding the spatial distribution of hierarchical power relations, we
can better understand the process whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place. Keeping in mind
that notions of locality or community refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction,
we can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of
hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a community or locality.
42
First Priority
The Negatives criticism of colonialism depends on a spatialized understanding of
difference that incarcerates the native in the past, reinforcing colonial myths
Gupta and Ferguson, 1992. (Akhil, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University; James, Department of
Anthropology, University of California, Irvine; Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,
Cultural Anthropology 7.1, p. 13-14, JSTOR.)
Changing our conceptions of the relation between space and cultural difference offers a new perspective on
recent debates surrounding issues of anthropological representation and writing. The new attention to
representational practices has already led to more sophisticated understandings of processes of objectification
and the construction of other-ness in anthropological writing. However, with this said, it also seems to us that
recent notions of "cultural critique" (Marcus and Fischer 1986) depend on a spatialized understanding
of cultural difference that needs to be problematized.
The foundation of cultural critique-a dialogic relation with an "other" culture that yields a critical
viewpoint on "our own culture"-assumes an already existing world of many different, distinct
"cultures," and an unproblematic distinction between "our own society" and an "other" society. As
Marcus and Fischer put it, the purpose of cultural critique is "to generate critical questions from one
society to probe the other" (1986:117); the goal is "to apply both the substantive results and the
epistemological lessons learned from ethnography abroad to a renewal of the critical function of
anthropology as it is pursued in ethnographic projects at home" (1986:112).
Marcus and Fischer are sensitive to the fact that cultural difference is present "here at home," too, and that
"the other" need not be exotic or far away to be other. But the fundamental conception of cultural critique
as a relation between "different societies" ends up, perhaps against the authors' intentions, spatializing
cultural difference in familiar ways, as ethnography becomes, as above, a link between an
unproblematized "home" and "abroad." The anthropological relation is not simply with people who
are different, but with "a different society," "a different culture," and thus, inevitably, a relation
between "here" and "there." In all of this, the terms of the opposition ("here" and "there," "us" and
"them," "our own" and "other" societies) are taken as received: the problem for anthropologists is to use our
encounter with "them," "there," to construct a critique of "our own society," "here. "
There are a number of problems with this way of conceptualizing the anthropological project. Perhaps the
most obvious is the question of the identity of the "we" that keeps coming up in phrases such as "ourselves"
and "our own society."
Who is this "we"'! If the answer is, as we fear, "the West," then we must ask precisely who is to be
included and excluded from this club. Nor is the problem solved simply by substituting for "our own
society," "the ethnographer's own society." For ethnographers, as for other natives, the postcolonial
world is an interconnected social space; for many anthropologists-and perhaps especially for displaced
Third World scholars-the identity of "one's own society" is an open question.
A second problem with the way cultural difference has been conceptualized within the "cultural
critique" project is that, once excluded from that privileged domain "our own society," "the other" is
subtly nativized-placed in a separate frame of analysis and "spatially incarcerated" (Appadurai 1988) in
that "other place" that is proper to an "other culture." Cultural critique assumes an original
separation, bridged at the initiation of the anthropological fieldworker. The problematic is one of
"contact": communication not within a shared social and economic world, but "across cultures" and
"between societies."
43
First Priority
Their romanticism of indigenous peoples immobilizes and incarcerates them in the past.
This essentializing of culture mimes the language of colonialism, flipping the K.
Arjun Appadurai, February 1988 (Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Pennsylvania, Cultural Anthropology, Volume 3, No.1, Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory,pp. 36-49,
Putting Hierarchy in Its Place, JSTOR)
.
So what does it mean to be a native of some place, if it means something more, or other, than being from that place?
What it means is that natives are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places, but
they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places.' What we need to examine is
this attribution or assumption of incarceration, of imprisonment, or confinement. Why are some people seen as
confined to, and by, their places? Probably the simplest aspect of the common sense of anthropology to which
this image corresponds is the sense of physical immobility. Natives are in one place, a place to which
explorers, administrators, missionaries, and eventually anthropologists, come. These outsiders, these
observers, are regarded as quintessentially mobile; they are the movers, the seers, the knowers. The natives
are immobilized by their belonging to a place. Of course, when observers arrive, natives are capable of
moving to another place. But this is not really motion; it is usually flight, escape, to another equally confining
place. The slightly more subtle assumption behind the attribution of immobility is not so much physical as
ecological. Natives are those who are somehow confined to places by their connection to what the place
permits. Thus all the language of niches, of foraging, of material skill, of slowly evolved technologies, is
actually also a language of incarceration. In this instance confinement is not simply a function of the
mysterious, even metaphysical attachment of native to physical places, but a function of their adaptations to
their environments. Of course, anthropologists have long known that motion is part of the normal round for
many groups, ranging from Bushmen and Australian aborigines, to Central Asian nomads and Southeast Asian
swidden agriculturalists. Yet most of these groups, because their movements are confined within small areas
and appear to be driven by fairly clear-cut environmental constraints, are generally treated as natives tied
not so much to a place as to a pattern of places. This is still not quite motion of the free, arbitrary,
adventurous sort associated with metropolitan behavior. It is still incarceration, even if over a larger spatial
terrain. But the critical part of the attribution of nativeness to groups in remote parts of the world is a sense
that their incarceration has a moral and intellectual dimension. They are confined by what they know, feel,
and believe. They are prisoners of their "mode of thought." This is, of course, an old and deep theme in the
38 history of anthropological thought, and its most powerful example is to be found in Evans-Pritchard's
picture of the Azande, trapped in their moral web, confined by a way of thinking that admits of no fuzzy
boundaries and is splendid in its internal consistency. Although Evans-Pritchard is generally careful not to exaggerate
the differences between European and Azande mentality, his position suggests that the Azande are especially confined by their
mode of thought: Above all, we have to be careful to avoid in the absence of native doctrine constructing a dogma which we
would formulate were we to act as Azande do. There is no elaborate and consistent representation of witchcraft that will account
in detail for its workings, nor of nature which expounds its conformity to sequences and functional interrelations. The Zande
actualizes these beliefs rather than intellectualizes them, and their tenets are expressed in socially controlled
behavior rather than in doctrines. Hence the difficulty of discussing the subject of witchcraft with Azande, for
their ideas are imprisoned in action and cannot be cited to explain and justify action. [Evans-Pritchard
193753243; emphasis mine] Of course, this idea of certain others, as confined by their way of thinking, in itself
appears to have nothing to do with the image of the native, the person who belongs to a place. The link between the
confinement of ideology and the idea of place is that the way of thought that confines natives is itself somehow
bounded, somehow tied to the circumstantiality of place. The links between intellectual and spatial
confinement, as assumptions that underpin the idea of the native, are two. The first is the notion that cultures
are "wholes": this issue is taken up in the section of this essay on Dumont. The second is the notion, embedded in
studies of ecology, technology, and material culture over a century, that the intellectual operations of natives
are somehow tied to their niches, to their situations. They are seen, in Levi-Strauss's evocative terms, as scientists
of the concrete. When we ask where this concreteness typically inheres, it is to be found in specifics of flora, fauna,
topology, settlement patterns, and the like; in a word, it is the concreteness of place. Thus, the confinement of native
ways of thinking reflects in an important way their attachment to particular places. The science of the concrete can
thus be written as the poetry of confinement.'
44
First Priority
Their description of native culture as rooted in tradition and tied to the land romanticizes
it and reinforces colonialist attitudes about the superiority and complexity of our culture.
Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this
question is that the native is a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is
observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly, and neutrally, tied to its Latin
etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places and, thus,
belong to them? We do not. We have tended to use the word native for persons and groups who belong to those
parts of the world that were, and are, distant from the metropolitan West. This restriction is, in part, tied to
the vagaries of our ideologies of authenticity over the last two centuries. Proper natives are somehow assumed
to represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue. We exempt ourselves from this sort
of claim to authenticity because we are too enamored of the complexities of our history, the diversities of our
societies, and the ambiguities of our collective conscience. When we find authenticity close to home, we are
more likely to label it folk than native, the former being a term that suggests authenticity without being
implicitly derogatory. The anthropologist thus rarely thinks of himself as a native of some place, even when
he knows that he is from somewhere.
45
First Priority
AFF: A2 Colonialism=Root Cause

Their genealogy of colonialism is conveniently selectiveconnecting all violence to
colonialism denies native diversity and agency by exoticizing and totalizing indigenous
history
The recent wave of reflexivity among anthropologists, especially those practicing in the United States, has already
created a backlash, founded on many reservations, including temperamental and stylistic ones. But one of the
reasons for the backlash has been the suspicion that the self-scrutiny of ethnographers and fieldworkers might be a
prologue to the extinction of the object of our studies. Faced with the disappearance of natives as they imagined
them, some anthropologists run the risk of substituting reflexivity for fieldwork. I belong to that group of
anthropologists who wish neither to erase the object in an orgy of self-scrutiny, nor to fetishize fieldwork (without
carefully rethinking what fieldwork ought to mean and be in a changing world), in the way that Victorian educators
fetishized cold baths and sport as character-building devices for the public-school elite. So why engage in any sort of
genealogy? All genealogies are selective as any good historian of ideas would recognize. They are selective,
that is, not through sloppiness or prejudice (though these could always creep in), but because every genealogy
is a choice among a virtually infinite set of genealogies that make up the problem of influence and source in
intellectual history. Every idea ramifies indefinitely backward in time, and at each critical historical juncture,
key ideas ramify indefinitely into their own horizontal, contemporary contexts. Nontrivial ideas, especially,
never have a finite set of genealogies. Thus any particular genealogy must derive its authority from the moral
it seeks to subserve. The genealogy I have constructed in the case of Dumonts conception of hierarchy is one such
genealogy, which subserves my interest in the spatial history of anthropological ideas. Thus my genealogy, like any
other genealogy is an argument in the guide of a discovery. There is another way to characterize my position. The
sort of genealogy I am interested in has something in common with Foucaults sense of the practice he calls
archaeology, a practice which, when successful, uncovers not just a genetic chain, but an epistemological
field and its discursive formations. The discursive formation with which I am concerned, at its largest level, is
the discourse of anthropology over the last century, and within it the subdiscourses about caste and about India.
This sort of genealogizing is intended to occupy the middle space between the atemporal stance of certain
kinds of contemporary criticism (especially those affected by deconstruction) and the exclusivist and genetic
assumptions of most standard approaches to the history of ideas. In Dumont's (1970) conception of hierarchy as
the key to caste society in India, we see the convergence of three distinct trajectories in Western thought. These
separate trajectories, which come together in recent anthropological practice, are threefold. First there is the
urge to essentialize, which characterized the Orientalist forebears of anthropology. This essentialism, which
has a complicated genealogy going back to Plato, became for some Orientalists the preferred mode for
characterizing the "other." As Ronald Inden has recently argued (Inden 1986a), this led to a substantialized view
of caste (reified as India's essential institution) and an idealized view of Hinduism, regarded as the religious
foundation of caste. The second tendency involves exoticizing, by making differences between "self" and other
the sole criteria for comparison. This tendency to exoticize has been discussed extensively in recent critiques
of the history of anthropology and of ethnographic writing (Boon 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983)
and has its roots in the "Age of Discovery" as well as in the 18thcentury "Age of Nationalism," especially in
Germany. The third trajectory involves totalizing, that is, making specific features of a society's thought or
practice not only its essence but also its totality. Such totalizing probably has its roots in the German
romanticism of the early 19th century and comes to us in all the variations of the idea of the Geist (spirit) of
an age or a people. Canonized in Hegel's holism, its most important result was the subsequent Marxian
commitment to the idea of totality (Jay 1984), but it also underlies Dumont's conception of the "whole,"
discussed below. In this sense, the dialogue between the idealistic and the materialistic descendants of Hegel is
hardly over. In anthropology and in history, particularly in France, it is to be seen in Mauss's idea of the gift as a
total social phenomenon and in the Annales school's conception of histoire totale.
46
First Priority
A2: Colonialism=Root Cause

No solvency for the Alt and Turn/ Blaming colonialism for all of Africas ills disguises and
excuses status quo violence caused by authoritarian leaders. Their history cannot account
for all instances of oppression. The plan is key to solve.
Charles Mangongera, research fellow with the Mass Public Opinion Institute, September 19, 2002
[Should We Continue to Blame Colonialism? Financial Gazette (Harare),
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2002/0919blame.htm]
But one cannot afford to be blind to the damage that African leaders have inflicted on their own continent.
Yes colonialism retarded Africa's growth but this has been exacerbated by a culture of irresponsible
leadership that believes in using political power to amass wealth and to build rich empires while the
generality of the people bear the brunt of poverty.
The civil wars and conflicts that engulf Africa today have primarily stemmed from the manipulation of
people's frustrations by some unscrupulous Western powers. These frustrations have emanated from
persistent failures by the people to change unpopular and corrupt governments through legal means as leaders
have manipulated constitutions to hold onto power even when they have lost the legitimacy to rule.
Zimbabwe is a classical example of an African country that has seen its potential for growth destroyed by the
suppression of democratic governance for selfish reasons. There is no doubt that the country had its mineral and
agricultural wealth looted under a century of British imperial domination. But to continue blaming the
British for the country's problems today is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
When Zimbabwe attained independence from the British in 1980, it had the potential for development, and indeed the first decade of Mugabe's
rule was a period of economic growth. But Mugabe adopted IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies that he had very little knowledge
about and this resulted in a significant downturn in the economy that saw unemployment, inequality and poverty rising.
Meanwhile the people had been paying a blind eye to Mugabe's intensification of his grip on power and when they eventually felt the pinch of the
austerity measures, Mugabe became very unpopular. Several years of frustration with Mugabe's regime resulted in the birth of a very strong
opposition which threatened to end ZANU PF hegemony and that is when the crisis began.
Faced with growing opposition and the prospects of losing power, Mugabe has suppressed democratic
governance. He has caused mayhem and has suspended the rule of law to maintain his grip on power. He has
silenced voices of dissent by gagging the media and clamping down on the opposition. He is chasing away white
commercial farmers because of his mistaken impression that they are the opposition in Zimbabwe. It has not dawned to him that the opposition in
Zimbabwe is a strong force that is bound by nothing but a desire to end his wayward policies.
This has been the scenario in many other African countries. After years of destruction under imperial forces,
African countries have been ruled by a bunch of idle and thieving leaders who continue to blame colonialism
and neo-colonialism for their persistent failures. Their governments are usually very corrupt and they have
no respect for democratic ideals in their endeavour to remain in power.
Africa therefore faces a dilemma in that while the West seeks to maintain its economic superiority over the continent
through unorthodox means, Africa itself has contributed to the tragedy that it is today because its own sons and
daughters have failed to steer the continent to economic development. They have instead pursued personal
enrichment through plundering their economies. They have engaged in several unnecessary wars into which they have been
manipulated by powerful gun manufacturing conglomerates that are making billions of dollars of profit in the lucrative guns-for-minerals trade.
Until African leaders realise that they have to build a strong coalition among themselves and the people in
resisting neo-colonial forces, the future of the continent is doomed. It is time leaders stopped harping on neocolonialism as the only cause of Africa's problems and looked at themselves and the damage they have done
to the continent. They have been equally destructive.
Colonialism does not explain most status quo problems in Africa

Robert Calderisi, World Bank 1997-2002, 2006
[THE TROUBLE WITH AFRICA: WHY FOREIGN AID ISNT WORKING, 2006, p. 43.]
Slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, international institutions, high debt, geography, the large number of
countries, and population pressures all have had an effect on Africa. But none of these can explain why the
continent has been going backward for the last 30 years. African economies were expanding after
Independence. They have been contracting until very recently and are growing again only very slowly.
47
First Priority
AFF: State Key to Solve Genocide

The Alternative fails--Nation-states are critical to stopping genocide
Kenneth Campbell, asst. professor of political science and international relations, University of Delaware, 2001
[Genocide and the Global Village, p. 15-16]
Regardless of where or on how small a scale it begins, the crime of genocide is the complete ideological
repudiation of, and a direct murderous assault upon, the prevailing liberal international order. Genocide is
fundamentally incompatible with, and destructive of an open, tolerant, democratic, free market international
order. As genocide scholar Herbert Hirsch has explained: The unwillingness of the world community to take action
to end genocide and political massacres is not only immoral but also impractical. [W]ithout some semblance of
stability, commerce, travel, and the international and intranational interchange of goods and information are
subjected to severe disruptions. Where genocide is permitted to proliferate, the liberal international order
cannot long survive. No group will be safe; every group will wonder when they will be next. Left unchecked,
genocide threatens to destroy whatever security, democracy, and prosperity exists in the present international
system. As Roger Smith notes: Even the most powerful nations--those armed with nuclear weapons--may end
up in struggles that will lead (accidentally, intentionally, insanely) to the ultimate genocide in which they
destroy not only each other, but mankind itself, sewing the fate of the earth forever with a final genocidal
effort. In this sense, genocide is a grave threat to the very fabric of the international system and must be
stopped, even at some risk to lives and treasure. The preservation and growth of the present liberal international
order is a vital interest for all of its membersstates as well as non-stateswhether or not those members recognize
and accept the reality of that objective interest. Nation states, as the principal members of the present international
order, are the only authoritative holders of violent enforcement powers. Non-state actors, though increasing in power
relative to states, still do not possess the military force, or the democratic authority to use military force, which is
necessary to stop determined perpetrators of mass murder. Consequently, nation-states have a special
responsibility to prevent, suppress, and punish all malicious assaults on the fundamental integrity of the
prevailing international order.
48
First Priority
AFF: Churchill Indicts

The report is in: Not only did Churchill refer to 9/11 victims as Little Eichmanns, but a
study done by the committee of the Associated Press shows clear evidence of plagiarism.
You should be suspicious of all of their evidence.
The New Criterion, 2007 (http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/06/a-footnote-on-ward-churchill/ )
Who can forget Ward little Eichmanns Churchill, the ethnic studies professor at the University of
Colorado whose odious remark comparing the victims of 9/11 to Nazi bureaucrats sparked a firestorm
of eminently deserved criticism? The closer one looked into the case of Ward Churchill, the worse it got.
This tenured radical had been battening on the public purse for decadesand for what? A congeries of
radical political diatribes masquerading as scholarship in a bogus discipline. Much of what Churchill
published was simply fabricated. Much else turned out to have been plagiarized. A university
committee went to work to investigate it all and to recommend disciplinary action. On May 16, the
Associated Press reported on the committees findings. Yes, Churchill committed multiple acts of
plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification and his work was below minimum standards of
professional integrity. Nevertheless, the committee recommended that he be suspended for a year, not
fired. Why? Because although his case shows misbehavior, it does not show the worst possible
misbehavior. Yes, thats right: you can be mad, bad, and dangerous to knowyou can lie, fabricate
research, plagiarize, and turn your college classroom into a center for anti-American propaganda: all
thats just fine. So long as you are not the worst, your tenure at the University of Colorado is
inviolable. Or so the committees report suggests. But wait: what would count as the worst? According to
the AP story, the report mentions fabricating data for grant money or endangering peoples lives by not
following appropriate research protocols. But surely that betrays a stunning lack of imagination. What about
arson, mass murder, or widespread mayhem? Most people would agree such activities are worse than
fabricating data to get a grant, which by definition means that such fabrication is not the worst possible
behavior. Sancta simplissima! Has it come to this at the University of Colorado?

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Link: Foreign Aid

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Link: Disease Prevention

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Links: Intellectual Property Rights

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Indigenous peoples right to their heritage is violated by the development of biotechnology.

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With the invention of technologies which control and re-engineer nature,

Because profits and

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Genetically engineered organisms are

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bioprospectors become the new "owners".

Western intellectual property rights bear little

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Capitalizing on public knowledge often comes into conflict with

"Knowledge is proprietary. It belongs to corporations and is not accessible

A number of food ingredients and

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Link: Human Rights

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Link: Human Rights

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Link: International Law

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Link: International Law

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Impact: Colonialism T/ the Case

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Impact: State Key to Capitalism

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Impact: State Key to Capitalism

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A2: Nuclear War

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A2: Cap Good

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Land is the center of Indigenous culture

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A2: Churchill Indicts

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A2: Churchill Indicts

where the committee acknowledges that "damage done to the reputation of

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