Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: Octas | Opponent: Westminster HH | Judge: Sam Haley-Hill, Clara Purk, Chris Rodriguez
*all our evidence is modified to eliminate any discriminatory language
During Spanish and European colonization of the US-Mexican borderlands, native wolves represented wilderness and savagery. Boundaries had to be drawn to distinguish the savage from the civil, the wolf from the livestock in order to protect the project of the Settler. The Settler only valued nature insofar as he could control it. When wolves crossed the physical boundaries of ranch fences and town lines, they were also crossing ideological boundaries. They became matter out of place, threatening European control of the borderlands. The consequences for wolves were lethal – in order to perform his dominance over the howling southwest, the Settler killed out the Mexican wolf species to near extinction with the permission of the US federal government. this spectacle of violence demonstrates how economic engagement with mexico historically naturalizes settler privilege by literally inscribing it on the earth.
Horn ‘08 (Gavin, PhD in philosophy at university of florida. His graduate dissertation (this ev) was based on thorough interviews with conservationists and small farmers. Summary of research methods available on request., “Howling about the land: religion, social space, and wolf reintroduction in the southwestern united states,” University of Florida, 2008, http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0022428/vanhorn_g.pdf)
The iconic pedigree of wolves has deep historical roots
AND
domestic spaces as visual testimony to the conquerors’ power over the wild.
tessa reads some narratives about her settler and white privileges, and somee poetry about being the legacy of genocide ecocide and slavery
Modernity has left us trembling and alone on the precipice of ecological collapse. Our instrumental environmental ethic has caused the near-death of the wild. It now exists only in pockets – in between fences in the Southwest, howling at night in the Sonora desert. We face something so devastating and profoundly tragic that it terrifies us to the point of inaction.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto, 09 (The Dark Mountain Project, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/)
We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence
AND
We believe it is time to look down.
more narratives
The impact to disarticulating your theory from your body is horrific – it leads to violent universalization that escapes interrogation
Yancy 2000 (George, Western Journal of Black Studies 24.3 (Fall 2000): 156-166.)
In the light of the influence of postmodernist and social constructionist thought
AND
how it might be possible to resist racialiZing regimes and accompanying privilege: to resist the power of whiteness. (Cuomo and Hall, 1999, p. 3)
Advocacy
As two White women living near the Mexican borderlands on land that was stolen from the Aztlan nation, our analysis of the resolution must begin with an interrogation of the ways that power structures interact with environmental destruction. The question is not a yes-no, but one of how we should ethically position ourselves in a world that has fallen apart.
excerpt from poem “Meditation on a false spring” by Bob Hicok (gender modified)
So how hope or why hope, what is hope, I want hope. Seventy three degrees and I’ll go running and think while I’m running, I am the sensual beneficiary of carnage, I am the last woman who will romp through these woods wearing factories on my feet, who ate a factory for breakfast, who has a factory at the end of everything she touches, I will believe that, I believe that, and that recycling is comedy, that turning off the lights is like wearing a pillow over my chest to battle, how hope, I have hope, somehow hope. Maybe its just bloodbreathrhythm, the physical optimism of the heart, sys- and diastole, maybe it’s that I haven’t shot myself in the fucking head yet, as we have almost not. Maybe hope’s what I’ve long thought, a choice, a decision I have to make as often as my heart decides yes, until my heart decides no, and I mean the actual heart, the actual world, the actual gun I touch to ask myself to prove this is a day I want in on.