Interlude 1 The Colonial Episteme: Settler Biopolitics

As an arm of the settler state, the university has always functioned as a site of ideological transit; a handmaiden to the civilizing project codified in its mission. At stake was not only the promise that Indigenous souls signified for the church but also the bounty that their minds and bodies represented to the emergent state. Indeed, from the very beginning, Anglo-Protestant cupidities were so enmeshed with settler desires that “every attempt to ‘civilize’ was also one to Christianize; and every effort to Christianize, one to capitalize” (Grande, 2004). In other words, colonialist efforts to educate Indigenous peoples were motivated by Christian and Eurocentric ambitions of cultural hegemony and underwritten by the imperatives of capital accumulation.

Global investment corporations like The Virginia Company of London (1609) 1 and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629) were piqued by the business of converting “savages” into “civilized” subjects as a calculated strategy of governance. From their vantage point, “Indian education” posed a more sustainable and profitable mechanism of biopolitical control than endless war. As James Axtell (1986) writes: the idea of underwriting an educational institution with a potentially long corporate life appealed greatly to the class of entrepreneurs and gentlemen…who had never seen an Indian (but) felt comfortable in contributing to schools that promised to solve America’s native problem in a relatively inexpensive and appropriately civilized way (p. 216).

As such, most of the colonial universities, including Harvard, Dartmouth, William and Mary, and Princeton, were funded by and founded on the philanthropic ideations of “entrepreneurs and gentlemen” looking to turn a profit from the civilizing mission. As the venture unfolded, it became increasingly clear that the enterprise prioritized profit-making and land acquisition over genuine educational aims, with Harvard, the first university in colonial America, setting the template.

Founded in 1636, Harvard was established without a single building, teacher, or student, and teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for its first two years. In 1650, its inaugural president, Henry Dunster, made the calculated decision to include “the education of Indian youth…in knowledge and godliness” in the College’s first charter, aiming to attract financial support from the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (SPGNE). Dunster’s calculated appeal yielded significant returns as he was allocated resources to build an “Indian College.” Once built, it was ultimately repurposed for white students, thus exemplifying how extractive philanthropy and the political economy of early American higher education leveraged moral rhetoric to justify land

(…)by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government(…) acquisition, financial gain, and the consolidation of colonial power. ² In the next forty years of Harvard’s Indian College existence, it housed a grand total of four American Indian students, and in the next two hundred years following Harvard’s founding, only one Native American student (Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, Algonquin) obtained a degree.

Dunster’s opportunistic use of “the Indian cause” to secure English funds for white education set a precedent for an educational graft that extended into early primary schools. These institutions were less concerned with fostering literacy or civic knowledge than with advancing a Christian order, as reflected in the widespread use of The New England Primer, a text blending basic literacy with biblical doctrine and moral catechism. ³ Dominating early education for 150 years, The New England Primer was eventually supplanted by the more commercially successful McGuffey Readers (1836), which purposefully repackaged Protestant doctrine to be less sectarian and sell more books. While the Reader’s took a Calvinist-lite approach to Christian doctrine, it maintained its allegiance to settler-colonial and capitalist values: the self-made man, social hierarchies, and the manifest virtue of frontier logics. These lessons were strictly reinforced through didactic, rote pedagogies such as the federal catechism. ⁴

Nearly two centuries after their publication, the McGuffey Readers still sell tens of thousands of copies, remain central to Christian homeschooling, and are championed by the Christian Right as an exemplar of the kind of (anti-CRT) textbook that should be in the hands of every American schoolchild. ⁵ While no other school text has ever approached this level of hegemonic influence, the current moral panic is being fomented around Critical Race Theory, and not by the widespread permeation of Christian nationalism in schools. Politicians like Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota regularly condemn what they label as “woke” or “anti-American” indoctrination, while pledging to prevent the use of taxpayer dollars to teach kids to “hate our country” and restore “honest, patriotic education.”

Given the recounted history of American education, the claims to “honesty” and charges of “indoctrination” hit Indigenous peoples hard. The only state-sanctioned and widely coordinated effort to systematically indoctrinate a population in U.S. history was the well-funded, legally codified missionary-led education programs, which laid the groundwork for Indian boarding schools, aimed at eradicating Indigenous languages, cultures, and tribal identities. ⁶ From the 1860s to the 1970s, the Indian boarding school system forcibly removed Native American children from their families and communities and sent them to distant institutions where they were required to speak English, read the Bible, and attend Christian services, while being strictly prohibited from speaking

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/6/mcguffey-readers-19th-century-classic-offers-guida/ and also this blogpost in the American Minute, “Before CRT -McGuffey’s Readers sold a Million Copies a Year for 120 Years!” https://americanminute.com/blogs/todays-american-minute/before-crt-mcguffeys-readers-sold-a-million-copies-a-year-for-120-years-the-ten-commandments-are-basic-american-minutewith-bill-federer their Indigenous languages or practicing their cultural traditions. If children refused, they were subjected to an array of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse at the hands of priests, nuns, missionaries, and lay teachers. The recent “discovery” of thousands of unmarked graves and human remains on the grounds of old Indian boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada shed light on how many children suffered and died at the hands of the state. Ojibwe journalist Mary Annette Pember wrote about her mother’s experience at the St. Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School in an article for The Atlantic, whose first line reads: “My mother died while surviving civilization” (2019).

Although the early history of American education was undeniably shaped by processes of racialization, institutions of schooling were also deployed as tools of imperial statecraft, targeting not only oppressed peoples for exclusion or assimilation, but sovereign Indigenous nations for erasure and incorporation into the settler empire. The imperial disposition present from the beginning has gone relatively unchecked and unabated.

Interlude 2 Race and Empire

In the spring of 2024, students across the U.S. staged Gaza solidarity encampments on the grounds of their respective university campuses. Although the encampments were largely non-violent, 7 they elicited a wide range of disciplinary responses from university administrators, federal and state law enforcement, and surrounding communities. In a manner reminiscent of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980’s, students created makeshift encampments that reflected the conditions under which Palestinians are being forced to live. Inside the camps, they embraced freedom as a praxis by engaging in teach-ins, sing-alongs, interfaith and denominational prayer services, Jewish and Muslim religious exercises, activist trainings, collective meals, food distributions, community health care, dance performances, and film screenings. From their self-determined liberated zones,students explicitly called upon their institutions to disclose and divest from the war industry and join the global demand to stop the genocide. Implicitly, they called for an end to the imperial university.

While there were reports of violence, mostly in the form of antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate speech, students were largely found to be peaceful. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), an independent, non-profit, international organization that monitors global conflict and protest data, studied 533 protest sites and found that 97% were peaceful. ⁸ Similarly, a Princeton University study conducted by the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI, 2024) analyzed ¹ ,150 protest events across 150 university campuses and 35 states, including Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and found that most encampments were peaceful despite a pattern of outsized state and institutional responses. More specifically, the study documents a high degree of “counter-protest” and “engagement” by law enforcement, whereby “engagement” refers to the wide array of repressive technologies used against students, including tear gas, pepper spray, chemical irritants, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and tasers (BDI, 2024, p. 14–16). In total, over ³ ,000 arrests were documented, many involving the aggressive use of force or symbolic acts of violence, such as the forcible removal of Muslim religious garments. The patterns across studies suggest a convergence between university and state apparatuses of repression.

I witnessed how a police raid unfolded at my own university. On the sixth day of a small 35-student encampment at 7 a.m., roughly 50 armed officers from six different regional precincts descended upon the students who were still asleep in their tents. The blare of police bullhorns issuing dispersal orders in rapid five-minute intervals pierced the otherwise quiet morning air. At the same time, dozens of other officers formed a human blockade around the perimeter, severing the encampment from the amassing crowd of onlookers, peacekeepers, and legal observers. In under an hour, the entire camp was dismantled, and 26 students were corralled, zip-tied, charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, and shuttled off to the campus precinct. ⁹ While the students were spared some of the more extreme levels of violence present on other campuses, there were incidents of police aggression: one student suffered a dislocated shoulder, and two Muslim women were subjected to public humiliation, as they were pulled from their tents before they could re-veil.

In the wake of the de-campments, many questions have been raised about the use of extreme force, the extent of state-university collusions, the efficacy of preemptive escalations, and the associated psychic and material costs on students and community members. On the one hand, the dominant narrative suggests that the encampments fomented antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate against members of the university community; therefore, the removals, use of force, and subsequent punishments were all warranted. The counter-narrative, on the other, claims that Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism were just as prevalent and that students should have been able to exercise their rights to free speech without the threat of harassment, physical violence, or professional/academic consequences. Invariably, the discourse devolves into the moral relativism of both-sideism, the nihilism of everything is bad and irreconcilable, or the liberal emptiness of institutional neutrality policies.

In some ways, CRT was made for moments like this, designed to speak back to and against ahistorical and decontextualized analyses of race and racism that relegate what is fundamentally structural and systemic to the realm of hurt feelings. As a legal and rights-based framework, it could assist analyses of the “Palestine exception,” by examining the patterns of selective enforcement and institutional exclusion of Palestinian scholars, organizations, peoples, and allies in and beyond the university. A more robust CRT analysis could delve even deeper into the non-neutral, deeply partisan, monied interests that undergird both the state and the university, by asking: what are the throughlines across elected officials, corporate donors, university trustees, defense contractors funding the war, and state-sponsored bills calling for an end to Critical Race Studies?

At the same time, the sheer scale and intensity of violence encompassed not only conventional forms of repression but also federal investigations, congressional hearings, public terminations of university presidents, and the mobilization of billions in federal, state, and municipal funds, suggesting that more than just infractions of free speech were at play. The continued activation of this disciplinary apparatus, even in the absence of encampments, suggests that the students’ true offense was not the violation of free speech codes, but their challenge to the settler order. Their unwavering refusal to accept Western imperialism as normative or ignore U.S. complicity in genocide transposed their encampments into diasporic nodes of Palestinian refusal. It was precisely this political stance that rendered the encampments, like “the Indian,” to be inherently unlawful, before any alleged violations of law. Consider how the ongoing response to the encampments has been shaped less by the familiar logics of exclusion and more by the intensified regimes of expulsion.

Interlude 3 Continuities of Land and Place

The last time a similarly disproportionate response was directed at an unarmed, non-violent encampment was in 2016, when Indigenous water protectors gathered at Standing Rock to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from crossing their ancestral lands. At their height, the prayer camps swelled to the size of a small town, becoming a temporary home to over ⁸ ,000 people. Seemingly overnight, Standing Rock was transformed into a powerful site of Indigenous decolonial praxis. Relationality to land was experienced through practices of prayer and protection, and expressions of resistance through living in an otherwise world already in motion. While for some the occupation was temporary, for the Oceti Sakowin, the camps were a sovereign assertion of their ancestral responsibilities to return and stay home. In this spirit, they (re) created an expansive homeplace for all, including a communal kitchen, spaces for legal counsel, health care, media and communications, ceremonial practice, and a school —the Mní Wiˇchóni Nakíˇciži ŋ Owáyawa or the “Defenders of the Water School.”

The price for living as Indigenous peoples on Indigenous lands was swift and severe. Within weeks, a full-scale, state-backed, militarized coalition of local, federal, and private police and security agents descended upon the camps. They were equipped with a full arsenal of lethal and less-than-lethal weaponry, including armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, drones, water cannons, tasers, guard dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and sound cannons. The aim was not to simply dismantle the camps, but to remove/eliminate the Native.

Indigenous peoples’ refusal to disappear and strident resolve to live as self-governed peoples rooted in land and place render them the constitutive subject of elimination. Or, in the words of Lakota scholar Nick Estes (2016), America will always be haunted by the Indian who persists as the only “living proof of a counter and prior claim to the land” and, thus, by the fact of its own criminality (p. 25). The very existence of the Indian is a fundamental threat to a settler-state that perceives itself as the shining exemplar of democracy in a world it deems less civilized. This is what Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Anishinaabe) refers to as the settler paradox: the contradiction in which states must recognize the persistence of Native Nations to legitimize their own democratic claims, while simultaneously working to erase their political existence, which threatens the very basis of those claims. Israel is currently struggling to maintain this paradoxical balance, contributing to the growing erosion of its democratic legitimacy in both global and domestic spheres. While animated by different circumstances and rooted in distinctive political genealogies and epistemologies, the Gaza Solidarity and Standing Rock prayer camps are conceptually linked by their shared refusals of the settler order, challenging the states’ claim to moral and political authority, not by seeking recognition or inclusion, but by rejecting its terms altogether. As the history of Native peoples shows, the consequence for refusal is elimination.

Strategies of elimination are more than structural: they are a pervasive condition, part of an ambient surround that saturates the literal and conceptual air. ¹⁰ Paiute scholar Kristen Simmons (2017) uses the term “settler atmospherics” to describe the ubiquity of its presence. Sometimes, like at Standing Rock and in Gaza, settler air is literally weaponized into an instrument of atmospheric terror (i.e., tear gas grenades, sound cannons) and, other times, like in the solidarity encampments, the air is made metaphorically thick with fear and apprehension (Simmons, 2017).

To be clear, my aim is not to conflate the Standing Rock and Gaza solidarity camps, nor to suggest that they operated through identical organizing frameworks. Rather, I seek to highlight how landand placebased movements against settler dispossession, and social justice movements against racialized oppression, emerge through different epistemologies. ¹¹ As such, neither the protest nor the prayer camps present contradictions that can be simply resolved through a “radical critique of the law,” “right reason,” or juridical recognition, because the law is not just an instrument of racial hierarchy, but a transit of settler logics. Perhaps their most profound transgression was not their refusal to comply or disappear, but their audacity to live the praxis of freedom out loud and in plain sight, enacting mutual aid, collective care, democratic governance, horizontal organizing, radical inclusion, and non-violence; that is, enacting sumak kawsay.

It is not surprising that this generation rises against the settler imperative. Their formative years were shaped by a global pandemic, the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a tidal wave of anti-trans and anti-queer legislation, relentless attacks on academic freedom, unlawful ICE raids, and the ever-intensifying violence of climate disaster. These are not isolated injustices; they are interconnected, racialized assaults that demand refusal of the false divides between land and people, and between human and morethan-human life. The genocide in Gaza and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples unsettle the epistemic landscape, thus compelling new critical frameworks that link oppression to dispossession, individuals to collective struggle, human rights to relational ethics, and race to place and land.

Interlude 4 Indigenous Terrapolitics

Lately, I have been thinking about how historian Christine Delucia’s (2019) applies Morgan Brigg’s notion of terrapolitics to the context of New England in the 19 th century. She begins by recalling protest signs from the 2018 Land Sovereignty Walk and Rally in Washington, D.C., organized by the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to oppose a federal ruling that threatened to remove their land from trust and dismantle their reservation. The signs read, “our people = our land = our people,” a formulation that, according to Delucia, encapsulates the core logics of terrapolitics that land, life, and liberation are inextricable.

In other words, humans are just one being in a complex and intricately woven system of beings (human and otherwise). For instance, the term in Quechua for humanbeing can be used as a verb to describe the “reciprocal exchange” between and among “natural, social and cosmological forces” in the universe (Pedersen et.al. 2010, p. 294). Across the cosmological web, well-being or health is achieved through the restoration and maintenance of balance, harmony, and equilibrium; while illness and death are marked by relations of instability, imbalance, and disharmony. The complex and multivalent system resists singularity and individuation, as well as linear, unidirectional time, as expressed in the Quechua language. For example, the word for land —pacha— can also be used for earth, cosmos, the universe, time, space, consciousness, and even different registers of space-time: kay pacha, hana pacha, ukhu pacha.

In this space-time, the slow violence of (settler) biopolitics —“to make live and let die”— gives way to the relational imperative of terrapolitics —to make kin and keep alive. This shift demands an ethic of care that is rooted in an obligation to achieve good conditions and high quality in existing relations with each other, the land, the ancestors, the elders, and all beings across the interwoven webs of relation.

This is not to suggest a denial or suppression of tension and contradiction, quite the contrary. The notions of tinkuy and chi’x’i express how antagonism is both necessary and ontological. There is no life without death, no joy without sadness, no love without indifference, and no creation without destruction. Such understandings are nearly impossible in a settler imaginary that only perceives in terms of dualisms, hierarchy, and linearity, and desires “unity” through absorption.

Terrapolitics begins with and in plurality. Land, life, and liberation are all multivalent —without center or margin. As such, it raises different questions about governance: What if the state were not the center of political life? What if the coordinates of struggle do not lie in the analytics of rights, reason, or recognition but in relationality, kinship, and responsibility to land? Land, in this sense, is not a staging ground or backdrop for human beings; she is a co-actor, a witness, and a guide. Epistemologically, terrapolitics foregrounds collective, communal, ancestral, land and place-based knowledges. As a political framework, it is not only anti-capitalist but also rejects the productivist logics of extraction, expansion, and accumulation.

Such desires were on spectacular display at Standing Rock and in the Gaza Solidarity encampments. Despite the violent settler atmosphere, or maybe because of it, students found new modes of being, peace, relief, affirmation, fulfillment, and purpose in their learning. Their different but related claims to place and land enacted a spatialized praxis of freedom. But, encampments, by definition, are temporary, and while some may grieve the loss of community, support, and advocacy, as well as wonder, then, what’s next? It is unclear if such dynamics could (or should) be made more permanent or institutional.

There is little sign that the settler state (or university) will ever divest from the war industry that gave it birth. It is not just unlikely, but contradictory to its primordial mission: empire. Whether the settler state or university collapses again under the weight of its own hubris or shapeshifts to consume another generation is not the concern of terrapolitics. Rather, it is to resituate life and learning on land and in place, make more life possible, gather with others, be with the ancestors, tend, cultivate, listen, remember, and, most of all, to be, stay home (land).

Interlude 5 Land = People = Land

I recently attended a birthday party for my friend Beth, who was Al’s second youngest daughter. It was the first time I saw the family since the wake and the funeral. I spoke at length with his oldest daughter, Mary, who was his primary caregiver up until and through his passing. As many times before, we shared stories of the relentless joys and sorrows of caregiving, but this time, our focus shifted from the struggles of making a life to the complexities of letting die. In settler society, the liminal spaces between life and death are marked by a relentless backand-forth: back-and-forth between home and rehab, rehab center and nursing home, nursing home and hospital. Mary shared that every time they boarded the ambulance, Al would give her a thumbs up and, in his signature dad voice, say, “Another road trip!” She would smile and say, “Yes, pop, we’re going on another road trip.” Eventually, those times —the back and forth— come to an end. The last trip is often from the hospital to hospice. It is a “choice” structured by institutions of biomedical care that, up until death, dismiss the constitutive relations between body, mind, soul, spirit, and land/place. Al’s final days were hard but wondrous. He was surrounded by love and family, visiting and telling stories. And, when the time drew near, he turned to Mary and said, “No more road trips, Mary. No more road trips.” Al chose instead to stay home. To go home. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Land = People = Land. Ã