Middle passage neg
Indigenous middle passage turn
1nc natives
Their silence is strategic—failure to discuss the indigenous Middle Passage makes
them complicit in squo, racist educational systems
Aquallo 13 (Lechusza, Prof of Am. Indian Studies @ Palomar College, Indians in the Middle Passage(s),
http://alanlechusza.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/indians-in-the-middle-passages/)//mm
The essay “Representations” quoted the American cultural historian James Clifford. His critical
diagnosis of “traveling” was elaborated upon as a theoretical location of culture(s). “Traveling,” and
the act of diasporic motion, both required to be interrogated further in order to uncover the sociopolitical contexts of an ever-expanding global society. Clifford presented a complex yet seemingly
simple display of how cultures and races around the globe engage the notion of “travel” (100). These
intersections broadcast as much about the ever-growing process of globalization – which functions
under the current pseudo name “the 21st century” – as it does about the widening space(s) between
first and third world countries. This brought to mind the forced migration(s) that Native Peoples have
had to endure within the Western hemisphere. History has shown that Native/Indigenous Peoples
throughout the West have had to bear the burden of relocation. From traditional territories, through
the reservations era, and eventually into the urban centers, Native Peoples have been subject to a
complex diaspora. The American Education system has employed a recycled apology to all Native
Peoples by way of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” The viewpoint of the American Education system is
such that if an incident of horrific nature applied to Native Americans is presented, albeit however trite
and often down-played for audience approval, then, all Native Americans will be satisfied with this
acknowledgment. The result is that no further discussion is necessary about Native Peoples within the
U.S. Is it not common knowledge in the 20th/21st century that all Native Americans are presently either
deceased, drunk, or living on a reservation making a healthy monthly income provided by their casino to
the point that they no longer need to be recognized by contemporary non-Native society? It is this
encounter, the unscrupulous posturing dictated as an apology to Native Peoples through the historic
stereotype of the “Trail of Tears,” which has disturbed my research regarding this Middle Passage(s)
for Native/Indigenous Peoples. In fact, it goes without saying, but must be articulated nonetheless, that
all Native Peoples, regardless of tribal affiliation, have had to undergo some form of forced relocation.
Each tribe within North America has some form or another of their own “Trail of Tears.” Native
Peoples have had to endure unspeakable diasporic activities in order to survive. These actions are fixtures
within tribal histories and are still being taught within tribal educational circles. The focused attention to these specific
histories, and their subsequent limited expose to non-Natives, does not excuse the American Education system from discussing
the atrocities that underscore American Indian history. However, Native Peoples are not subject to hang their histories or
identities upon the literary implementation of the hyphen. It may be that due to the lack of this literary qualifier, the
American Education system has placed itself unilaterally in a hegemonic position of cultural power
when it comes to Native/Indigenous Peoples. Unlike other cultures that were brought to the Western hemisphere,
Native Peoples are indigenous to these locations. This knowledge is traditionally seated, taught, maintained, and, historically
fought for preservation. At their core, their land and territories define Native cultures. America applied the stigmata of a
hyphen to those alien cultures that were forcibly brought to the West. African People were transposed into “AfricanAmericans” and Japanese became “Japanese-Americans.” Native/Indigenous Peoples of the Western hemisphere did not need
this literary binder. What was applied to these indigenous cultures was a labyrinth of extensive termination policies dictated
physically, socio-politically, and emotionally.
The Middle Passage(s) for Native/Indigenous Peoples, therefore,
coincided with these legal structures of termination similar in scope as those of their developing and
future marginalized cultural cousins. Native/Indigenous Peoples have, and continue, to occupy a
forced sense of location. Urban and reservation Natives alike contain the knowledge that the U.S.
government has at one time or another challenged their traditional territories. These challenges expand
beyond the avenues of the urban ghettos or the borders of the reservation into the social minds of
non-Natives as stereotypes and the racist history (his-story) books of the American Education system.
In an attempt to amend this literary punishment, the American Education system outlined the apology
toward its Native/Indigenous inhabitants. This apology was designed to be the perfect pan-Indian patch
that would also function as the strategic apparatus to discuss Native Peoples in the past tense. Since the
Middle Passage(s) of Native/Indigenous Peoples took place upon traditional lands currently occupied
by cities and other environments of presumed higher culture, there is, therefore, no need to speak of
or qualify a Native holocaust. It is precisely this point in modern time where we find the youth of
today (2013) contacting Native/Indigenous Peoples, as relics or shards of a time long gone. Will America’s his-story books ever
take a higher road and note the importance of the Middle Passage(s) that nearly removed Native cultures from the Western
hemisphere? That time may well be a footnote in the future. But, given the technologically advances today, the time may come
when we can purchase an app for such knowledge to review upon our smartphones or tablets. Who would generate such an
app to shed a proverbial light upon the tragic histories of Native/Indigenous Peoples? Tribal entrepreneurs are certainly hard at
work bridging traditional histories with technological reality for sale to the largest market available, the non-Native community.
The 1ac’s understanding of the events of the Middle Passage is an active exclusion of
its founding in the indigenous slave trade—must begin our histories with the native—
makes colonialism inevitable
Flint 9 (Kate, Provost Professor of English and Art History at USC, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930,
Princeton University Press, pages 23-25)//mm
Nineteenth-century transatlantic studies are a huge and complex terrain, and their importance is
increasingly being acknowledged, despite the disciplinary binarization that takes place on both sides
of the Atlantic. Too frequently, the internal organization of our national academies has meant that
British and American studies have been regarded as separate entities, failing to enter into sufficient
dialogue with one another. This book adds to the calls that have already been made by Joseph Roach to
pay full attention to the "amplitude of circum-Atlantic relations,"51 and by Paul Giles to acknowledge
how "conceptions of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic emerged through engagement with
- and, often, deliberate exclusion of - transatlantic imaginary."52 Focusing on the figure of the Native
American in this context brings a number of advantages with it. In the first place, it grants Indians a
part not previously fully acknowledged in relation to the field.53 They have the important roles as
subjects of fascination, as figures of dread, and as symbol of a difference that is complicated and
sometimes contradictory amalgam of national and racial components. From a British point of view, the
fact that narratives made them particularly malleable figures. As this book seeks to show, the national
Indian could be readily adapted, in a number of disparate contexts, to demonstrate a great range of
clichés, presuppositions, considered analyses, and hypotheses about the nature both of the United
States and the Americas more broadly. Most frequently, the Indian served the role of an ahistorical
Other against which various narratives of modernity could readily be written. But examining
transatlantic relations from the single forms only part of my project, for Indians had a varied and
significant presence in Britain and were analytical, commentating voices in their own right. They not
only provided a particular slant, or slants, on British society, but were living proof that, in their capacity
to react and respond to modern life, they refused to be cosigned to the role of the mythical and
prehistorical that was so frequently assigned them. Despite the frequent and familiar need of the
modern to erect ideas of the temporal Other against which it could define itself, this Other was also
undergoing a process of transformation. Of course, this is, in broad terms, a point made very familiar
through contemporary histories of postcoloniality. But there are some significant differences. Native
American contacts with British culture in the Victorian period demonstrate not only transformation on
the part of the Indians, but also well-articulated resistance to the process of appropriation and
assimilation that equate with cultural genocide. These Indians are quite definitely not allowing
themselves to be cosigned to oblivion, nor to occupy the mythical status of the time-less, but see
themselves as members of a race that has every intention of surviving. Engagement in this transatlantic
contact zone is unequivocally a two-way process, unfolding in a way that disrupts those apparently
neat binaries of "traditional" and "modern" on which conventional narratives of national progress
have depended. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic,54 explores how at a slightly later date, in the context
of African American culture, we see modernities evolving on several fronts simultaneously and at
several, nonsynchronic speeds.55 Looking at the Victorian period, we see how in what we may call the
space of the Red Atlantic, the process is already well underway.
2nc impact – genocide
Forgetting is genocide
Smith 3 (Andrea, Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples, Hypatia, Volume
18.2, Spring 2003, pgs 70-85)//mm
Ann Stoler argues that racism, far from being a reaction to crisis in which racial others are scapegoated for social
ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric. “[R]acism is not an effect but a tactic in the internal fission of
society into binary opposition, a means of creating ‘biologized’ internal enemies, against whom society
must defend itself ” (1997, 59). She notes that in the modern state, the constant purification and
elimination of racialized enemies within that state ensures the growth of the national body . “Racism
does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical state,
woven into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric” (1997, 59). Similarly, Kate Shanley
notes that Native peoples are a permanent “present absence” in the U.S. colonial imagination, an
“absence” that reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and
that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam describe this absence as “an
ambivalently repressive mechanism [that] dispels the anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very
presence is a reminder of the initially precarious grounding of the American nation-state itself . . . In a
temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to perform a narrative
of manifest destiny in which their role , ultimately, was to disappear ” (1994, 118–19). This “absence” is
effected through the metaphorical transformation of Native bodies into a pollution of which the
colonial body must purify itself. As white Californians described in the 1860s, Native people were “the dirtiest lot of
human beings on earth.” They wear filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with
vermin” (Rawls 1984, 195). The following 1885 Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap also illustrates this equation between
Indian bodies and dirt: We were once factious, fierce and wild, In peaceful arts unreconciled Our blankets smeared with grease
and stains From buffalo meat and settlers’ veins. Through summer’s dust and heat content From moon to moon unwashed we
went, But IVORY SOAP came like a ray Of light across our darkened way And now we’re civil, kind and good And keep the laws
as people should, We wear our linen, lawn and lace As well as folks with paler face And now I take, wherever we go This cake of
IVORY SOAP to show What civilized my squaw and me And made us clean and fair to see. (Lopez n.d, 119) In the colonial
imagination, Native bodies are also immanently polluted with sexual sin. Alexander Whitaker, a minister
in Virginia, wrote in 1613: “They live naked in bodies, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no
covering: Their names are as naked as their bodies: They esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive and steale as their
master the divell teacheth them” (Berkhofer 1978, 19). Furthermore, according to Bernardino de Minaya: “ Their
[the Indians’] marriages are not a sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous, and commit
sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols, and commit bestial obscenities” (cited in
Stannard 1992, 211). Stoler’s analysis of racism in which Native peoples are likened to
a pollution that
threatens U. S. security is indicated in the comments of one doctor in his attempt to rationalize the mass
sterilization of Native women in the 1970s: “People pollute, and too many people crowded too close together
cause many of our social and economic problems. These in turn are aggravated by involuntary and irresponsible
parenthood . . . We also have obligations to the society of which we are part. The welfare mess, as it has been
called, cries out for solutions, one of which is fertility control” (Oklahoma 1989, 11). Herbert Aptheker describes
the logical consequences of this sterilization movement: “The ultimate logic of this is crematoria; people are
themselves constituting the pollution and inferior people in particular, then crematoria become really
vast sewerage projects. Only so may one understand those who attend the ovens and concocted and conducted
the entire enterprise; those “wasted”—to use U. S. army jargon reserved for colonial hostilities—are not really,
not fully people” (1987, 144). Because Indian bodies are “dirty,” they are considered sexually violable
and “rapable .” That is, in patriarchal thinking, only a body that is “pure” can be violated. The rape of
bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count . For instance, prostitutes have
almost an impossible time being believed if they are raped because the dominant society considers the prostitute’s body
undeserving of integrity and violable at all times. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead,
makes it clear to Indian people that they are not entitled to bodily integrity, as these examples suggest: I saw the
body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco-pouch out of them.
(cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 113) Each of the braves was shot down and scalped by the wild volunteers, who out with
their knives and cutting two parallel gashes down their backs, would strip the skin from the quivering [ esh to make razor straps
of. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 90) One more dexterous than the rest, proceeded to [ ay the chief’s [Tecumseh’s] body;
then, cutting the skin in narrow strips . . . at once, a supply of razor-straps for the more “ferocious” of his brethren. (cited in
Wrone and Nelson 1982, 82) Andrew Jackson . . . supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses—the bodies of
men, women and children that he and his men massacred—cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead,
slicing long strips of [ esh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. (Stannard 1992, 121) Echoing this mentality was
Governor Thompson, who stated in 1990 that he would not close down an open Indian burial mound in Dickson, Illinois,
because of his argument that he was as much Indian as are current Indians, and consequently, he had as much right as they to
determine the fate of Indian remains.1 He felt free to appropriate the identity of “Native,” and thus felt justified in claiming
ownership over both Native identity and Native bodies. The Chicago press similarly attempted to challenge the identity of the
Indian people who protested Thompson’s decision by stating that these protestors were either only “part” Indian or were only
claiming to be Indian (Hermann 1990).2 The message conveyed by the Illinois state government is that to be Indian in this
society is to be on constant display for white consumers, in life or in death. And in fact,
Indian identity itself is under the
control of the colonizer, subject to eradication at any time . As Aime Cesaire puts it, “colonization = ‘thingi>
cation’” (1972, 21). As Stoler explains this process of racialized colonization: “[T]he more ‘degenerates’ and
‘abnormals’ [in this case Native peoples] are eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be stronger,
more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not political adversaries, but those identified as
external and internal threats to the population. Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put
[certain people] to death in a society of normalization ” (1997, 85). Tadiar’s description of colonial relationships as
an enactment of the “prevailing mode of heterosexual relations” is useful because it underscores the extent to which U. S.
colonizers view the subjugation of women of the Native nations as critical to the success of the economic, cultural, and political
colonization (1993, 186). Stoler notes that the imperial discourses on sexuality “cast white women as the bearers of more racist
imperial order” (1997, 35). By extension, Native women as bearers of a counter-imperial order pose a supreme threat
to the imperial order. Symbolic and literal control over their bodies is important in the war against Native
people, as these examples attest: When I was in the boat I captured a beautiful Carib women . . . I conceived desire
to take pleasure . . . I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard screams that you
would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed
to have been brought up in a school of harlots. (Sale 1990, 140) Two of the best looking of the squaws were lying in such a
position, and from the appearance of the genital organs and of their wounds, there can be no doubt that they were first
ravished and then shot dead. Nearly all of the dead were mutilated. (Wrone and Nelson 1982, 123) One woman, big with child,
rushed into the church, clasping the alter and crying for mercy for herself and unborn babe. She was followed, and fell pierced
with a dozen lances . . . the child was torn alive from the yet palpitating body of its mother, first plunged into the holy water to
be baptized, and immediately its brains were dashed out against a wall. (Wrone and Nelson 1982, 97) The Christians attacked
them with buffets and beatings . . . Then they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most powerful ruler of
the island had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer. (Las Casas 1992, 33) I heard one man say that he had cut a
woman’s private parts out, and had them for exhibition on a stick. I heard another man say that he had cut the fingers off of an
Indian, to get the rings off his hand. I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females,
and stretched them over their saddle-bows and some of them over their hats. (Sand Creek 1973, 129–30) American Horse said
of the massacre at Wounded Knee: The fact of the killing of the women, and more especially the killing of the young boys and
girls who are to go to make up the future strength of the Indian people is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very
sorely. (Stannard 1992, 127)
2nc Indians first – framework
Must bring indigeneity front and center—this ev is comparative
Byrd 11 (Jodi A.; citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American
Indian studies and English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Transit of Empire: Indigenous
Critiques of Colonialism; preface xii - xiii)//mm
This book, then, is a journey of sorts, its method mnemonic as it places seemingly disparate histories,
temporalities, and geographies into conversation in the hopes that, through enjambment, it might be
possible to perceive how Indianness functions as a transit within empire. My method here suggests a
reading praxis inspired by Blackfeet novelist Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory, in which he
delineates genre as mnemonic device in order to retell the Medea story through horror narrative.' The
story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime. To read mnemonically is to connect the
violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions and political movements in order to
disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical
traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion. Such a reading practice understands
indigeneity as radical alterity and uses remembrance as a means through which to read counter to the
stories empire tells itself. Lumbee scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. has argued that "the American Indian
emerges as a distinct problem in Western legal thought," but I contend here that ideas of the Indian
and Indianness—the contagion through which U.S. empire orders the place of peoples within its
purview—emerge as distinct problems for critical and postcolonial theories.' As a transit, Indianness
becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be
colonized into "Indians" through continual reiterations of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the
Caribbean, or the Middle East. The familiarity of "Indianness" is salve for the liberal multicultural
democracy within the settler societies that serve as empire's constituency. In the wake of this transit,
and indeed as its quality as colonialist practice, one finds discordant and competing representations of
diasporic arrivals and native lived experiences—what I call cacophony throughout this book—that vie
for hegemony within the discursive, cultural, and political processes of representation and identity
that form the basis for what Wendy Brown has identified as the states of injury and Foucault and others
have termed biopolitics. Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions of U.S.
empire as it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this
historical moment, precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures, enjambments, and
repetitions of Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land,
life, and grievability.
2nc Indians first – history
Indigeneity first—the enslavement of native peoples made the transatlantic trade
possible—impact is erasure of native histories
Taylor 13 (Lucy, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK, 2013,
Southside-up: imagining IR through Latin America,
http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/taylor-lucy-southside-up-imagining-ir-throughlatin-america.doc)//mm
Taking a view of international relationships from the long sixteenth century also redirects our attention
to another world-transforming experience played out in the Americas – transatlantic slavery – and the
closely associated yet surprisingly overlooked issue of racism1. Transatlantic slavery developed
because the indigenous women and men of the Americas, enslaved to service the conquistadores,
had been decimated by brutality, slaughter and disease. Enslaved Africans were then caught up in
the coloniality/modernity whirlwind by the demands of capitalist expansion and in turn their
experience further deepened and spread its impact. The consequences of slavery profoundly shaped
the contemporary world order, not only in terms of the massive population movements, the
establishment of slave societies and the social holocaust in Africa, and not only for its intimate role in
generating and sustaining the European industrial revolution and enduring patterns of global
capitalism. It was also a central plank of coloniality/modernity’s normative framework and the hidden
racialisations of liberalism 2. Taking an Americas perspective places slavery centre-stage in world politics and
history. To do so asks big questions of an IR – especially the mainstream kind – which seldom takes race seriously.
Moreover, it marks slavery as an Americas-wide phenomenon and, if we look closer, as a highly variable one. It is
overlooked by many – including Latin Americanists – that slavery made a significant impact on Latin American
society. By 1800 slaves were not only a majority of Brazilian society but large Black populations also existed in
Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama and Venezuela, and significant populations developed in Chile, Ecuador,
Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay3. African slaves were central to the development of capitalism in Latin
America: their forced labour produced the goods for international trade, but they also worked as enslaved petty
entrepreneurs and fought in the wars of independence, some rising to the rank of General4. If nation states of the
Westphalian model were being forged in Latin America, Afro-descendants were integral to this process. The
position of Africans in the Americas is complex from a postcolonial point of view, in that they are neither colonizer
nor colonized. Well, they are colonizers in that they are not originario or original peoples and they are integral to
the operation of capitalist modernity. Yet they clearly occupy a subordinated and racialised position in the global
1
For a critique, see: Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ‘Race in the Ontology of International Order’, Political Studies,
vol.56, (2008), pp.907-927; Robert Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in
American International Relations’, Millennium, vol.29, no.2, (2000), pp.331-356.
2
Mignolo Idea of Latin America, pp1-50. See also: David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, (Oxford: Blackwells,
2002); Inayatullah and Blaney International Relations..., pp.47-91.
3
4
George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), map1.
George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1980).
hierarchy which stems from the sense (and sometimes the reality) of absolute domination by the ‘master’ – a kind
of individualised colonization. The complexity of the patterns of domination is still significantly under-theorised, in
my view, and I’m not sure that I am the one to do it. But at the very least, understanding that there are at least
two ‘others’ in this colonial scenario breaks down the binary of colonizer/colonized which continues
to characterise a lot of postcolonial thinking and so easily writes-out less obvious colonial experiences
5.
5
For example, those of Chinese indentured labour in nineteenth century Peru or South Asian Indians in Guyana.
Even more obviously excluded are mestizos/as who embody the colonizer/colonized tension. But that is another
story.
2nc Indians fist – o/w the aff
The reprioritization of the body of the native forces us to rethink the narrative of
racism in America—outweighs the aff
Cleveland Search No Date (Racism, “Justice and the American Indian - Racism against Native
Americans - Forgotten Story of Indian Slavery,” Accessed online via http://clevelandsearch.com/NativeAmericans.html) RH
When Americans think of slavery, our minds create images of Africans inhumanely crowded aboard
ships plying the middle passage from Africa, or of blacks stooped to pick cotton in Southern fields. We
don't conjure images of American Indians chained in coffles and marched to ports like Boston and
Charleston, and then shipped to other ports in the Atlantic world. Yet Indian slavery and an Indian
slave trade were ubiquitous in early America . From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, tens
of thousands of America's native peoples were enslaved, many of them transported to lands distant
from their homes. Our historical mythology posits that American Indians could not be enslaved in large numbers because they too
readily succumbed to disease when exposed to Europeans and they were too wedded to freedom to allow anyone to own them. Yet many
indigenous people developed resistance to European diseases after being exposed to the newcomers for well over a century. And it
is a
racist conception that "inferior" Africans accepted their debased position as slaves - a status that American
Indians and Europeans presumably could never have accepted. This is a gross misconception of history. We are just
scratching the surface of what this all means. For the enslavement of Indians forces us to rethink not
only the institution of slavery, but the evolution of racism and racist ideologies in America . Scholars long
have known about the Indian slave trade, but the scattered nature of the sources deterred a systematic examination. No one had any
conception of the trade's massive extent and that it played such a central role in the lives of early Americans and in the colonial economy.
Indian slavery complicates the narrative we have created of a white-black world, with Indians
residing outside on a vaguely defined frontier. The Indian slave trade connects native and European
history, so that plantations and Indian communities become entwined. We find planters making more
money from slave trading than planting, and if we look more closely we find Indians not only enslaved on
plantations but working as police forces to maintain those plantations and receiving substantial
rewards for returning runaway slaves. We are also learning a great deal more about American-Indian peoples. Most importantly
we can now tell the stories - the tragedies - that befell so many who were killed in slaving wars or spent their days as slaves far from their
homes. They and their peoples have been largely forgotten. The
Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa
are among the dozens of Indian peoples who fell victims to the slaving wars, with the survivors forced
to join other native communities. These are tales that Indians themselves have not told: Just as the story of Indian slavery was
excluded from the European past, it was largely forgotten in American-Indian traditions. Americans often wish the past would just go away,
save for those symbols we celebrate: Pocahontas saving John Smith, the "noble savage," and the first Thanksgiving. The image of Pilgrims and
Indians sharing a meal is one of the most cogent images we have of American Indians and of the colonization of this continent.
Historical accuracy turn
1nc genealogy turn
The 1ac tells a compelling narrative of the trip from the coasts of Africa to the bustling
urban centers of the east coast—it leaves a number of questions unanswered, though:
how did slaves get to African port cities? How long did that journey take? What
languages did they pick up along the way? The 1ac’s failure to address the internal
passage within the African continent makes it an incomplete history
Alpers 7 (Edward A., Prof of history @ UCLA, the Other Middle Passage: the African Slave Trade in the
Indian Ocean, in “Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World,” Univ.
of CA press 2007)//mm
At this point, I want to make several observations about the experience of capture and enslavement
within Africa. First, the several accounts I have presented illustrate the different ways in which
individual Africans came to be caught up in the slave trade, ranging from warfare to large slave raids
to kidnapping, debt pawnage, stealing, and subterfuge. These accounts also reflect the different
processes by which individuals were transported from the interior to the coast. In some cases, these
individuals were marched directly from the time of capture to the coast in the clutches of their original
captors or were seized near the coast. In other cases, captives passed through the hands of several
owners. For some, the passage to the coast was relatively short, a matter of only a few weeks; for
others, passage could take years and involved several distinct African experiences of enslavement. In
the most extreme of these cases, individuals such as the unnamed Nyasa boy whose story is recorded in
Kiungani, and Petro Kilekwa, this process involved the breaking and refashioning of social bonds as
these children adjusted to what they thought would be a new life within the family and society in which
fate had deposited them. Although we feel deeply the expressions of the severing of real kinship bonds
in some of these narratives, we can also see the ties of fictive kinship slowly beginning to form.
Sometimes captives were apparently able to speak their native language from the moment of their
seizure to the point of their sale at the coast, but others had to learn new languages in moving from
the interior to their ultimate destinations, and some lost their mother tongues altogether. Thus, Petro
Kilekwa learned Nyasa, and the Nyasa boy learned Yao and had begun to learn Swahili, even as he
forgot his own language. Their experiences con- firm what is known from other sources about the
importance of language acquisition in the Angolan slave trade, for example, where Kimbundu became a
lingua franca for captives on the long passage from the interior to the coast.16 With the exception of the
Makua woman from Cabaceira who was seized near the coast, the one element missing in these
particular narratives is the experience of being held at the coast in barracoons, or holding pens, which
many contemporary sources reported at the coast. Indeed, the need for captives to communicate
among themselves under these circumstances also would have encouraged a process of language
change.17 Taken together, these adjustments during the initial period of capture and transportation
are significant because they anticipate the larger processes of adaptation that came to dominate
African cultures in the diaspora. Recent scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade suggests that, rather
than being a caesura that separated Africans in the diaspora from all meaningful Africa cultural
memory, the middle passage represents an extension of adaptations already begun in Africa from the
time of initial capture and a transition to those that would evolve in the different places of the
diaspora. For example, the Nigerian historian Okun Uya speaks of “new ties of kinship during that cruel
journey” and gives as evidence a variety of names signify- ing a kinship born of sharing the experience
of the middle passage.18 This phenomenon, I would add, more generally reflects a kind of fictive
kinship that also served to incorporate strangers (including slaves) into African fam- ily structures. In the
case of the Kiungani children, such community was found, if not during the middle passage, then in their
common experience within the community created by the UMCA on Zanzibar. For cargoes that included
captives from more than a single language group, as was usually the case, the process of learning
other languages, both African and Euro- pean, would also have continued during the middle passage.
In other words, for those who survived the middle passage, the likelihood is that they would already
have begun a process of cultural transformation that we can call creolization, or hybridization, before
leaving the ship, a process that, as I have suggested, began even before they left the continent. In the
case of the mis- sion boys whose stories I have examined here, that process seems to have ended with
their Christianization and their adaptation of a different kind of life that was based, at least in part, on
their acceptance of a mixture of British missionary and East African coastal (i.e., Swahili) social and
cultural norms. Similarly yet differently, Swema found her family within the Catholicorder into which she
was admitted as a novice.
That simplification of history turns the case—vote negative to rewrite the 1ac
Alpers 7 (Edward A., Prof of history @ UCLA, the Other Middle Passage: the African Slave Trade in the
Indian Ocean, in “Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World,” Univ.
of CA press 2007)//mm
My intention is to bring a measure of balance to this historiography by examining evidence from
eastern Africa in order to shed some light on the middle passage in the Indian Ocean. In addition, I
contend that the sea voyage from Africa west to the Americas or east across the Indian Ocean was
only one leg of the traumatic journey that forcibly removed free Africans from their homes in Africa
to their ultimate destinations. Indeed, I believe that it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle
passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast
as though they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into
slavery actually began with the moment in which they were swept up by the economic forces that
drove the slave trade deep into the African interior. I also seek to demonstrate that the middle
passage encompasses a much more complex set of forced migrations than is usually assumed. From
the moment they were seized and began their movement to the coast, captive Africans had to begin
the process of personal survival and cultural adjustment associated with the diaspora. They learned
new languages, received new names, ate new foods, and forged new bonds among themselves
before they ever had to adjust fully to the work of slavery or the conditions of liberation. I will
illustrate how some of these processes worked by presenting an album of individual experiences—of
capture, enslavement, and movement to the coast and then across the water—from nineteenth-century
eastern Africa. All these accounts refer to events at the height of the slave trade in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and must be understood as products of the abolitionist movement.
Drexciya
1nc Drexciya = colonizer
Drexciya ensures colonialism and juridical interventionism—your author
Eshun 3 (Kodwo, British-Ghanaian writer and theorist, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism, The New
Centennial Review vol 3.2, summer 2003 pgs 287-302)//mm
Drexciya’s project has recently extended itself into space. For their Grava 4 CD, released in 2002, the
group contacted the International Star Registry in Switzerland to purchase the rights to name a star.
Having named and registered their star “Grava 4,” a new installment within their ongoing sonic fiction
is produced. In wrapping their speculative fiction around electronic compositions that then locate
themselves around an existing extraterrestrial space, Drexciya grant themselves the imperial right to
nominate and colonize interstellar space. The absurdity of buying and owning a distant star in no way
diminishes the contractual obligation of ownership that the group entered into. The process of
ratification therefore becomes the platform for an unexpected intervention: a sono-fictional statement
that fuses the metaphorical with the juridical, and the synthetic with the cartographic. Contractual fact
meets sonic fiction meets astronomical mapping in a colonization of the contemporary audiovisual
imagination in advance of military landing.
Science fiction leads to control over the future—ensures determinism—your author
again… ouch!
Eshun 3 (Kodwo, British-Ghanaian writer and theorist, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism, The New
Centennial Review vol 3.2, summer 2003 pgs 287-302)//mm
Science fiction is now a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams
of the prediction and control of tomorrow. Corporate business seeks to manage the unknown
through decisions based on scenarios, while civil society responds to future shock through habits formatted by science fiction. Science fiction operates through the power of falsification, the drive to
rewrite reality, and the will to deny plausibility, while the scenario operates through the control and
prediction of plausible alternative tomorrows. Both the science-fiction movie and the scenario are
examples of cybernetic futurism that talks of things that haven’t happened yet in the past tense. In this
case, futurism has little to do with the Italian and Russian avant-gardes; rather, these approaches seek
to model variation over time by oscillating between anticipation and determinism. Imagine the All-African
Archaeological Program sweeping the site with their chronometers. Again and again, they sift the ashes. Imagine the readouts
on their portables, indicators pointing to the dangerously high levels of hostile projections. This area shows extreme density of
dystopic forecasting, levels that, if accurate, would have rendered the archaeologists’ own existence impossible. The AAAP
knows better: such statistical delirium reveals the fervid wish dreams of the host market.
1nc Hall is silly
Their hall ev is about Easter Sunday – this comparison is ridiculous and just says that
enslavement was worse than Jesus’ crucifixion
Hall 9 (Delroy, Prof of Phil @ U of Birmingham, the Middle Passage as Existential Crucifixion, Black
Theology: An International Journal vol 7.1, Jan 2009)//mm
In describing the suffering, Dianne Stewart makes reference to the Jesus story in regards to his
undeserved agony and crucifixion.'^ The experience of unjust suffering, persecution, and death was
chronic, visceral, and immediate within the daily experience of the enslaved population. Some of the
forms of corporal persecution that was unleashed on enslaved Africans were cruder forms of
crucifixion than that of Jesus.'^
Red Atlantic