ABSTRACT
This chapter twists my longstanding concern with the origins of dysfunctional social policy in Indigenous affairs into a belated recognition of the co-dependencies such dysfunctions speak to, tracing the laminations of policies past and present to the existence of militarized mining economies within our collective bodies. Extraction feeds and shelters us, via ripped sacred sites and polluted waterways. Should we be damaged, cyborg technologies might pull us from death, or return some ability, or drag the life that sits inside one body into new forms, organs donated that others may breathe another day. Indigenous people are at the front lines of the extractive industries which both service the architectures of population density and fuel the forces of climate change. As a settler beneficiary, it is difficult to voluntarily give any of this up, given how our subsistence is dependent upon extractive tributaries. Rather than pointing to Indigenous relations to land as a remedy for anthropogenic catastrophe, we could instead learn from how they have forced sense out of the insensibilities of (militarized, extractive) social policy. These lessons of resistance and refusal amid chaos and weighted interests may help ground otherwise vague calls for ‘better policy’ to tackle racialized inequality and climate change alike.
