[On January 24th, 2019 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted the lecture "Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow" by Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar Audra Simpson (Columbia). Below is a response to the lecture by Professor Jodi Byrd (English/Gender and Women's Studies).] Response to Audra Simpson's lecture "Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow" Written by Jodi Byrd (English/Gender and Women's Studies) This weekend, and as I was reading Audra Simpson’s paper and thinking about how I might begin to frame my response, I was also watching how that now iconic moment of confrontation between Omaha elder Nathan Phillips and the Covington Catholic high school student in a MAGA hat unfolded on my social media feeds to the shock and horror of many. From the initial videos that seemed to tell a story of white supremacist antagonism to the full-length videos that, the media now insists, tells a story of white innocence aggrieved by a handful of Native and Black men, I found myself thinking with and through Simpson’s talk as a way to hold the tectonic shifts she is asking us to make with her analysis of business as usual within the savage states of North America. Why is that moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial circulating as iconic at all and why was it even shocking? Does it really tell us anything new or different about the state of the settler nation that now surrounds us? In her talk, Simpson asks us to consider, among many things, what exactly are the stakes of participation in electoral politics at this particular juncture and for indigenous peoples especially, and why do it at all “if you can stand in full recognition of what has been done to you?” These are the questions that unfold a number of the key interventions that Simpson makes to Patrick Wolfe’s now axiomatic truism that “settler colonialism destroys to replace,” that its pure goal is to eliminate the native and that elimination is the structuring logic beyond any event of invasion. To that, Simpson posits a counter by affirming “that there are other structures that comingle, assert, push and survive outside of invasion or settlement.” Indigenous resistance and refusal, of knowing politics, governance, and sovereignty, and doing them differently, sustains life and presence outside the circuits of settler recognition by remaining, Simpson tells us, “in the way” as a failure to be eliminated or refusing to go away. The questions that she poses center on the quality of the world that we exist in and what we hope for and are worth extending further: What does it mean to invest in institutions, to hold up respect for service in this country’s military, to fight for normativity, recognition, legibility, or respect in the context of “dispossession of land from people that also intersects with alienated labour from bodies,” or what Simpson refers to as the “double helix of resourcing settlement?” But how might refusal stand in counter to recognition when it is too often dismissed as a not a failure to be eliminated but as a failure to succeed? Or, more bluntly, what happens when refusal to participate or being “in the way” is recast as illiberal, selfish, too emotional, or just bad faith, bad behavior, or bad politics? With our focus always on the animosities of race and savagery—and the contrapuntal civility we are told moments like these demand if we expect to have a voice—we can lose sight of how it is the taking of territory, waters, and peoples that we must refuse. What has been lost in the noise of the multitude mocking a native drum in prayer this past weekend is the meaning of settler colonialism for the United States. Reduced to the minoritization of race and confronted with political agendas that seek to “make America great again,” to “build that wall” against unwanted intruders, and to prevent all women from having freedom over their bodies, stolen Indigenous lands become the unknowable ground that binds the figurations of subjectivity, race, and civility all together in the political theater of public emotions and opinion. In other words, lost is the very core of what Simpson gives us in her talk, that there is always a long view of such moments of structural and historical violence and that there is no amount of electoral participation that will change the fundamental truth of Haudenosaunee political thought, for instance, that recognizes the U.S. president, no matter what form they might take through time, as “Town Destroyer,” or town eater. The full context for what happened last Friday is not a two-hour video posted to YouTube that shows another angle of white male high schoolers forming a mob to confront five Black Hebrew Israelites; the context is conquest, the doctrine of discovery, the Papal questions over who has a soul to save, and the structures of settlement that recursively transform land into property and bodies into labor to be stolen to birth nations. Elegantly and forcefully, then, Simpson’s talk asks us to not only reflect on the affective investments of settler states that stage the structural management of lands into property but she gives us the tools to begin to understand how the management and containment of history at play here in North America depends upon emotions as they coalesce into narratives, stances, and politics to be repeated, digested, and like land, stolen. Through the affective attachments of settler governance—specifically, “the angry, vitriolic, fact-rejecting, hamburger loving current US President” or the “loving and yoga posing, telegenic pro-pipeline Prime Minister of Canada,” Simpson discusses how things like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Canada and calls for more sensitivity training and more education here in the US perhaps perpetuate pain and dispossession under another form. “It is crazy-making some might say to expect Indigenous people to play this game of pain for healing of a sublimation of legitimate anger so that things are not disturbed.” What Audra calls “the dangerous sense of insignificance” that accompanies any discussion of Indigenous peoples “within the very place of their belonging” is part of that crazy-making, and emotions, she tells us, “serve the place of those rocky hard facts, they appear to smooth them over, but they also can dis-serve the facts.” In this past week, we have seen exactly how it is that, in the US, we disappear. Rendered and remaindered to the ground that is stolen, even the act of a native Elder can become the will of a smirking white boy who claims it was he, after all, who was the one trying to diffuse things as his friends around him laughed and jeered as they evoked school spirit as tomahawk chops, hakas, and other forms of native mascotry. It is in this moment of a national spin to innocence that Illinois chose to open its public survey on the intent of Chief Illiniwek and the impact of Illinois spirit on communities. Business as usual. Simpson ends her talk with a beginning credo, and a place to start: “I believe that colonialism is bad, period.” That is met very succinctly by the antagonism of the settler, and in the words of an Owensboro Catholic High School student from this past Friday, “Land gets stolen, that’s how it works. It’s the way of the world.” Until we can get closer to the first and refuse outright the white supremacist alibi of the second, towns will continue being destroyed and Indigenous peoples will continue to be “in the way.”