Introduction

The argument that follows here is staged as a conversation about biopolitics, debility, and Canadian settler colonialism. I intend to respond to biopolitics as a prevailing analytic framework for theorizing racial violence and disability (in)justice. In so doing, I reflect on critical insights outlined by disability justice scholar Jasbir Puar. 1 I highlight why Puar's theorization of racial terror and biopolitics should not be easily discounted because it illuminates the interconnection of state-sponsored terror, racial violence, and colonial materiality. I will show, for instance, that many of the examples of what Puar refers to as maiming are similarly apparent in the Canadian context. The argument pursued here, however, intends to build into Puar's Foucauldian biopolitical analyses a theory of maiming that moves beyond a notion of violence as exclusively targeting corporeality and the remaking of materiality that has the effect of safeguarding the aims of neoliberal and colonial domination. Into Puar's theorizations of maiming, I build an understanding of it as also being an ontological project concerned with embodiment and the sacred. It is for this reason that I open with the conditions of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) communities in Northwestern Ontario. I will demonstrate that when the conditions of NAN communities are read alongside Puar and brought into conversation with post- and anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Anna M. Agathangelou, and Alexander Weheliye, as well as Indigenous scholars such as Janice Acoose (Saulteaux), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishnaabeg), and Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota), it becomes clear that maiming likewise takes place at the transcendental level.

Nishnawbe Aski Nations and Social Determinants of Health

In Thunder Bay, Ontario, in February 2016, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler and representatives of the Sioux Lookout Area Chiefs Committee on Health (CCOH) declared a health and public health emergency for First Nations in the Sioux Lookout region and across NAN territory. 2 NAN is a political territorial organization representing forty-nine First Nations communities within Northern Ontario. The total membership population (on and off reserve) is estimated at around 45,000 people. NAN encompasses the James Bay Treaty (Treaty No. 9) and Ontario's portion of the Winnipeg Treaty (Treaty No. 5). It has a total landmass covering two-thirds of the province of Ontario, spanning 210,000 square miles. The people traditionally speak one of four languages: Oji-Cree in the west, Ojibway in the central-south area, and Cree or Algonquin in the east. Importantly, "NAN First Nations have always asserted a Treaty Right to health care. Ontario was a direct signatory to Treaty No. 9; as such, NAN First Nations and Ontario are regarded as having a government-to-government relationship as Treaty partners." 3

The declaration by Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler outlined how the social determinants of the health of NAN First Nation populations constituted a state of crisis. 4 It detailed how NAN communities were experiencing high levels of illness including diabetes, rheumatic fever, hepatitis C, and invasive bacterial diseases. 5 Also cited were escalating rates of mental illness and addictions as high as 80 percent of the population in some communities, with users as young as eleven years old. The 2017 NAN Health Summit found that since 1986 there have been over 500 suicides among the First Nations in NAN territory, noting that the "legacy of Residential Schools and inter-generational trauma has resulted in devastating rates of suicide." 6 Likewise, the report concluded that "breakdown in the transfer of cultural knowledge and traditions appears to contribute substantially to widespread demoralization and hopelessness," 7 which is linked to suicide rates and mental illness. For NAN, this is exacerbated by the lack of medical architecture and support for the needs of NAN communities, pointing out that "the Auditor General of Canada supports that Health Canada does not consider the health needs of the community." 8 As is further outlined in NAN's 2019 progress report on health transformation:

The signatories of Treaty No. 5 and No. 9 (and its adhesion) understood that the Treaty contained a promise of health care. In fact, in 1905 and 1906, a physician who performed medical exams and assistance was part of the Treaty. This created a reasonable understanding and expectation that the Treaty included the provision of indefinite, quality health care. 9

NAN Grand Chief Fiddler—who has served as Health Director of Nishnawbe Aski Nation from 1998 until 2003 and was elected Deputy Grand Chief in 2012 and Grand Chief in 2015—thus declared a state of emergency:

The chronic failure of the health care system for First Nations in the Sioux Look region and across NAN territory has left our communities in a state of crisis. […] Children are dying, and lives are at risk. The fact that many First Nations still lack access to even the most basic health services is nothing short of a national tragedy. The many urgent and long-standing health issues that plague our communities are well documented and the time for action is now. 10

Echoing Grand Chief Fiddler, Solomon Mamakwa, then acting Health Director with the Shibogama Health Authority and Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority asserted the following:

The lack of mental health and developmental services for children and youth has never been acceptable. The health system provided to First Nations is an atrocious mess, which has led to the health crisis we are facing today. We are not even allowed to access all mainstream health services and supports. This has led to the loss of many of our people, including children. This type of system is not tolerated or acceptable in mainstream society. Why are we expected to accept this as Indigenous peoples? 11

NAN's reports draw to our attention a significant overrepresentation of Indigenous communities that are contending with mental health issues, special needs, addictions, and lack of access to basic health resources. As such, NAN communities are identified as suffering from endemic conditions related to disability and wellness. What these reports also point to is a relationship between Canadian settler colonialism and debility, and thus highlight an urgent need for more comprehensive approaches to understanding the experiences of Indigenous peoples of rural Northwestern Ontario when attending to the social determinants of Indigenous health.

Theorizing Debility: Foucault and Biopolitics

It has been argued that the field of disability studies has largely been concerned with critiquing models of disability rooted in pathology, framing it as a problem emerging out of questions concerned with "abnormal" bodies and "dysfunctional" minds that can be fixed if treated with medicalized intervention. 12 Critical disability theory, then, has been principally based on a model of disablement that advocates for social approaches to disability for the most part viewed as a sociological problem that underscores the societal organization of environmental barriers to participating in everyday life that render individuals "disabled." 13 Disability has thus tended to be characterized as a socially constructed phenomenon related to social barriers faced by people with bodies thought outside of the norm. 14 In thinking through disempowerment within ableist societies, Michel Foucault's work has been used to understand the governance of "disabled" people. Through him, disability scholars theorize the discursive production of "normality" and the daily life of confinement that documents the highly routinized life of institutionalized populations as well as the social organization of ableism. 15 For instance, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault theorized biopolitics as a technology that involves a set of mechanisms concerned with measuring and maintaining the economic and political problems within a society that became objects of knowledge and targets for regulation and control. 16 Elsewhere, Foucault takes up his theory of biopower, which he argues replaced public displays of torture with surveillance and self-regulation as a means of organizing and managing populations, to examine how governmentality also exists as micro-systems of societal regulation that exercise normative control over so-called deviant and abnormal individuals, and populations as a whole. 17

Crucially, to this field, Jasbir Puar contributes a theory of sovereign power and debility that reflects on the structural conditions of racial violence. 18 Puar draws on Foucault to bring biopolitics into conversation with affect theory and critical race theory to situate disability studies at the register of biopolitical population control within racialized contexts. 19 For Puar, bringing together biopolitics and debility opens up room to theorize about the living/dying pendulum that foregrounds much of her discussion of affective economies of debility and settler colonial state violence. Explored is how the domain of biopolitics modulates which bodies are constituted by institutions to represent the professed progress made by liberal rights-bearing subjects and which are slated to bear the brunt of endemic violence to make progress possible. Puar, then, is concerned with how disability is produced and how certain bodies and populations come into biopolitical being through having greater risk of becoming disabled than others. She draws on Foucault to illustrate how variations of bodily health and vulnerability underwrite disability theories, as Foucault's metrics of biopolitics are also metrics of debility and capacity. Biopolitics, Puar notes, deployed through its neoliberal logics, seeks social capacitation for some as a liberal rationale or foil for the debilitation of many others as "it is, in sum, an ableist mechanism that debilitates." 20

By way of illustration, Puar indexes Security, Territory, and Population (1977–78) and Society Must Be Defended (1976), where Foucault lays out the regimes of power associated with distinct illnesses. She emphasizes the ways in which Foucault theorizes slow death, which does not take place within a scale of crisis—an event or as epidemic—but rather in a temporal zone of ongoing and durational "death becoming." 21 Slow death, therefore, is a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing everyday life so that the domain of dying and the reproduction of ordinary life necessarily coexist to sustain colonial state sovereignty. Underscored is how biopolitics derives its knowledge and power field of intervention in terms of birth and death rates, biological disease, and environmental effects to theorize disability as not only socially constructed but as indispensable to examining a durational debilitation of chronicity that shifts our understanding from illness as epidemic to endemic. 22 Thus, within the context of forms of social welfare that Foucault points to, illness, for example, is understood as something that is to be managed or contained, as it makes vulnerable the thriving of the "make live" vector. This is because, in his contemporary biopolitics, economic life cannot grow without the flourishing of human life, which means that illness is implicated in "making live" rather than simply being a hindrance to it. Importantly, Foucault's work indexes the right of sovereignty as first the right to take life or let live that later became the right to make live or let die. It is in this context that Puar questions which bodies are made to pay for progress and which bodies reserve the right to futurity.

As an example, Puar turns her gaze to what she identifies as "control societies," where discipline and control are centripetal while apparatuses of security are centrifugal; that is, "the intense oscillation occurs between the following: subject/object construction and the microstates of differentiation; difference within and difference between; policing of profile and the patrolling of affect; will and capacity; agency and affect; subject and body." 23 Puar suggests that while discipline and control both work to maximize bodily extraction, control, unlike discipline, does not work at the level of the body itself. Rather, it is not a matter of taking the individual at the level of individuality but of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve states of regularity and equilibrium, taking control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species. For Puar, this is clearly demonstrated in Israel's complex program of rehabilitation through the debilitation of Palestinian life and land. 24 The dilemma identified here relates to the rehabilitation economies of the Israeli state that function as part of a biopolitical assemblage of control to instrumentalize a network of capacities and debilities that support the occupation of Palestine through which Israel manifests its sovereign power by its sanctioned maiming of Palestinian bodies and environments. This, Puar belabors, is central to Israel's human economy.

Sanctioned maiming is therefore a source of value extraction from populations that are usually considered disposable. It exemplifies the most explicit forms of biopolitical debilitation, insofar as maiming operates as a sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule that is central to aiding some populations at the expense of the further perpetuation of debilitation for others. Capacitated in part through the deflection onto debates of collateral damage of Palestinian deaths, sanctioned maiming bespeaks a profound failure within a global human rights framework. It is a practice that escapes definition within both legal, biopolitical, or necropolitical conceptualizations because it does not proceed through making live, making die, letting live, or letting die. Instead, deliberate maiming is "a status unto itself, a status that triangulates the hierarchies of living and dying that are standardly deployed in theorizations of biopolitics." 25 The right to main supplements the right to kill as a primary vector through which biopolitical control is deployed in a colonized space.

Puar thus highlights how this is evidenced by Israel's infrastructural warfare waged against Palestinians, which characterizes a colonial architecture that demands the modulating of calories, megawatts, water, and telecommunication networks that provide the minimum for survival in Gaza. The collapsing of Gaza's water systems and the further deterioration of water infrastructure and waste treatment services, for instance, or the emphasis on Gaza as an open-air prison, which is crafted through an assembled regime of spatial control and the manufacturing of humanitarian collapse, speak to this. This is underscored by the productive functions that assaults and infrastructural violence serve in achieving the tactical aims of settler colonialism. It means that debilitation becomes an extremely profitable organization of power, both economically and ideologically, because, on the one hand, various humanitarian actors who are ultimately beholden to the geopolitical and economic legitimation of the state of Israel can capitalize on the debilitation of Gazans within a neoliberal economic order that thrives on the profitability of debility. Palestinians come to constitute a source of extractive value and accumulation that bends towards the strategic goal of regenerating the structure of occupation. Hence, if slow death is constituted through the vector of "let die" or "make die," then maiming operates as the power to "not let die," and humanitarian compliment "will not make die." It replaces all together the "make live" or "let die" so that it is not only the right to kill but also the right to maim that is being exercised as the domain of sovereignty. Importantly, we become aware that the target here is not life itself but also resistance itself, as well as the productive function asphyxiation and debilitation play in securing the structures of the occupying state.

On the other hand, because eventful killing is no longer desirable, the profitability and productivity of maiming reflect Israel's right to exercise the sovereign "right to repair" that is framed in collateral damage and promotes a humanitarian economy that is simultaneously predicated on occupation as explicitly a process of debilitation. Infrastructural violence is therefore indicative of assaults on life-giving capacities that constitute a central component of biopolitical regulation, which Puar indexes as "the epitome of an asphixatory regime of power." 26 This means that through asphixatory control, the state of Israel can create a crisis at will, having already set in place the bare minimum requisite for life that can be withheld or extinguished at any moment. As Puar notes, "the capacity to asphyxiate is not a metaphor: while the West Bank is controlled largely through checkpoints, the Gaza Strip is suffocated through choke points. The intensification of policing and control thus happens through, and not despite, 'disengagement' and disinvestment, not through checkpoints but through choke points." 27 Through biopolitics, Puar shifts analyses about debilitation from the production of populations available for injury to the targeting of populations to be injured. In this way, the case of Palestine highlights how settler colonial occupation is legitimized through geopolitical technologies of securitization and sovereignty through the intensification of biopolitical modes of control that are continuous and that resonate with historical modes and across geopolitical spaces concerned with the profitability of debilitation. Thus, Palestine is positioned as "an epistemological blueprint, one that opens up the connective tissues between regions, regimes of power, sites of knowledge production, historical excavations, and solidarity struggles for liberation." 28

Canada's Right to Maim: Asphyxiation and Metropolitan Profiteering

In this section, I outline continuities between Puar's biological analysis of the production of Palestinian debility and the conditions of the Indigenous peoples of Canada to give context to global designs of colonial violence and debility. Indigenous communities in Canada have made similar observations about asphyxiation and the role of settler colonialism in debilitating First Nations people for neoliberal profits. For instance, following NAN's 2016 declaration of a state of emergency, NAN also released reports on mental health and special needs of children across their territories. In a 2016 report titled The Forgotten People: Children and Youth with Special Needs Preliminary Engagement Report, NAN identifies a health care crisis for First Nations children and youth with "special needs" in their communities. 29 The report addresses the deplorable social and medical infrastructures across NAN communities, asserting how such conditions are responsible for debilitating and traumatizing children and youth, exacerbating existing conditions of subjection, and highlighting new emerging areas of crisis. It also links special needs to heightened risks of youth suicide, addictions, and mental health issues, as well as to conflict with criminal justice.

To give an example, the report points to First Nations child and youth suicide rates that are alarmingly higher than the rest of Ontario youth, with "children as young as 10 years old [having] taken their own lives." 30 Moreover, Pikangikum First Nation, a remote NAN community roughly 676 kms northwest of Thunder Bay and reached by fly-in and ice roads only, has been dubbed the suicide capital of the world. 31 A community of roughly 2,400 people, it was cited in 2011 as having a suicide rate equivalent to 250 per 100,000—nearly twenty times the rate of Canada and the highest in the world, a trend that has remained uninterrupted for nearly twenty years. 32 The Washington Post similarly reported on a group of First Nations youth who undertook a "suicide pact" in Wepakeka—another remote fly-in NAN community—that resulted in the loss of three lives in a community populated with less than 400 people. A "death review" was also performed by the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario and the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs after sixteen youths took their lives across NAN communities between 2006 and 2008. It identified what the coroner's report called "cluster deaths, 33 concluding that "[w]hen First Nations communities assume greater control over their economic, health, social, policing and educational services and have retained the use of Indigenous languages and related cultural infrastructure, they experience lower rates of suicide, overall." 34

NAN also highlights a connection between prescription drug abuse, specifically oxycodone, and an epidemic in the communities that has culminated in hundreds of babies being born and suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) and children impaired by prenatal substance abuse. 35 Critically, it points to the prevalence of children exposed to opioids and other substances, discussing the absence of culturally appropriate supports including medical infrastructure and identification and assessment services for community members who require disability and other health supports, forcing NAN populations to seek assistance outside of their communities. Thus, with respect to administration and "accesses" to mainstream rehabilitative and critical care infrastructures, NAN First Nations experience geographical isolation and institutional and systemic barriers including endemic blocked referrals based on priority pooling, lack of adequate training for nurses and doctors about Indigenous-specific needs, lack of respite and support for families, lack of accessibility for the physically disabled, inadequate numbers of workers, and lack of cultural competency and cultural safety in all service providers. The Standing Committee described how Indigenous youth testified to experiencing racism and discrimination in health care service provisions. They noted that service providers lack adequate knowledge of historical and intergenerational forms of trauma and the ongoing effects of colonialism's impacts on Indigenous youth today. 36

These concerns are also addressed in Jordan's Principle, 37 which is a legal rule named in memory of Jordan River Anderson, a First Nations child with complex medical needs from Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba. Jordan died in 2005 at age five in a hospital as a result of payment disputes between federal and provincial governments over service provisions in First Nations communities. 38 Jordan's Principle recognizes the overrepresentation of First Nations children with complex needs and their systematic disadvantage in accessing health and medical support due to legacies of colonialism and racism in the organization of Canadian society. More importantly, Jordan's Principle addresses neoliberal funding models in Canada designed to service First Nations communities and the inherent violence to the economic rationality of colonial bureaucracy. 39 This is because while provincial and territorial governments may both fund and supply health and social services to most children in Canada, services for First Nations children tend to be funded by the federal government but are regulated by territorial/provincial, federal, or First Nations service systems. As well, the federal government funds some health and social services for off-reserve, Status Indian children. What this means is that First Nations youth and children in Canada face unique challenges in accessing health and social services. Some challenges are so extreme, like in the case of Jordan River Anderson, that the concentration of wealth and services within the metropole can result in death. Jordan's Principle thus exposes the colonial zoning of the racialized First Nations Other as well as how a system of colonial confinement preconditions the state's neoliberal funding models with respect to First Nations health and neocolonial profiteering and wealth accumulation.

NAN's 2016 report similarly speaks to the failure of the current health care system, which has resulted in many NAN First Nations members only first being identified as having special needs when they enter the criminal justice system as youths and adults. Moreover, the unidentified and unaddressed needs NAN is seeing in children are further compounded by trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, which often result in youth and children experiencing multiple concurrent disorders. For instance, NAN estimates that 70–80 percent of NAN First Nations children and youth have unaddressed special needs, 40 emphasizing that this is one of the ways in which many Indigenous children become vulnerable to exploitation and violence. According to this report, the long-term impacts in the Sioux Lookout region, which covers one-third of Ontario, has marked a significant increase in anxiety neurosis, neurasthenia, obsessive-compulsive neurosis, depressive or other non-psychotic disorders, manic depressive psychosis, involutional melancholia, and schizophrenia. 41 Moreover, risk factors for children and youth with special needs include "isolation, low literacy rates, low self-esteem, high risk of drug abuse, high risk of suicide, risk of becoming victims of violence, high risk of incarceration and coming into conflict with the criminal justice system." 42 Like Puar, NAN also documents infrastructure assault on First Nations communities. In 2020, for instance, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) reported that forty-one First Nations communities remained under boil water advisories. 43 This situation is further exacerbated by NAN's findings of extreme food security emergencies across First Nations communities in Northern Ontario, citing, for instance, the high cost of food and other basic necessities (e.g., a box of diapers, CAD$100; bag of milk, CAD$15). 44 Poor nutrition rates in NAN communities are linked to high rates of diabetes and associated complications due to the loss of capacity to harvest and prepare traditional foods, which is associated with disconnections between elders and youth, disconnections between parents and elders, and the loss of parenting skills and knowledge transfer.

Echoing Puar, the neocolonial and neoliberal profiteering off anti-Indigenous debility can be elucidated elsewhere, including the 2016 Ontario public sector salary disclosure, or the "Sunshine List" report, released by the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario, which outlines the municipality's major employers. As the largest metropolitan centre in Northwestern Ontario, Thunder Bay has a population of approximately 110,000 residents and houses the headquarters of Nishnawbe Aski Nation. Historically Thunder Bay played a significant economic and political role in the settlement of Canada. As a gateway to the North, it played a vital role by giving settler populations access to vast tracks of wilderness that made it a stronghold for participating in resource industries such as the fur trade and forestry. Of its residents, approximately 12.7 percent identify as Aboriginal, making it Canada's most densely populated city of Aboriginal people. 45 While this number includes the 860 residents of Thunder Bay's closest First Nations reserve, Fort William First Nation, the number does not include the thousands more Indigenous people living in rural and remote communities outside of the city centre—for example, fly-in only communities—who rely on Thunder Bay to gain access to fundamental health services, including many of the 45,000 Indigenous people represented by Nishnawbe Aski Nation. Additional First Nations communities that rely on the city but may not be represented in this figure include Eabametoong First Nation (population 1,014), Ginoogaming First Nation (population 167), Long Lake #58 First Nation (population 367), Marten Falls First Nation (population 190), Neskantaga First Nation (population 265), Nibinamik First Nation (population 382), and Webequie First Nation (population 1,300), all of which are members of Matawa First Nations Management and are also dependent on Thunder Bay for critical care infrastructures.

The significance of the Sunshine List is that it underscores the municipal economy's dependence on medical and rehabilitative economies geared towards servicing Indigenous populations. Included in this report is the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, which is one of the city's largest employers, employing roughly 2,824 people servicing the roughly 250,000 residents scattered over the region of Northern Ontario, a geographical area the size of France. 46 This also includes St. Joseph's Care Group, which employs approximately 2,200 people and specializes in addictions and mental health, long-term care, rehabilitative care, and chronic disease management. 47 When the 2016 Sunshine List, the report of the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, and NAN's declaration of a health emergency are read alongside one another, the economically productive function of anti-Indigenous debility is immediately obvious. 48 For instance, recent reports of the Ontario public sector salary disclosure indicate that while First Nations people are living without access to basic health care services—resulting in epidemics of "third world disease" to such an extent that two four-year-olds from NAN First Nations passed away in 2014 from rheumatic fever, an infection stemming from strep throat, a relatively minor ailment that any child in an urban area could easily be treated for with antibiotics 49 —Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre president and CEO Jean Bartkowiak made a cool CAD$340,055 in 2016 and St. Joseph's Care Group president and CEO Tracy Buckler made CAD$315,134, a modest CAD$3,138 more than the year before. 50 While NAN communities lack access to even basic health infrastructure including clean/running water, antibiotics, basic health care, and food security, literally resulting in the death of children, the municipal economy of Thunder Bay health and rehabilitative services is thriving.

This is consistent with what Puar previously characterized as the extremely profitable—both economically and ideologically—organization of rehabilitative power. On the one hand, colonial materiality structures the debilitation of Indigenous peoples that is then capitalized upon by a neoliberal economic order that thrives on the profitability of debility through various medicalized actors that are ultimately beholden to the geopolitical and economic legitimization of Canadian colonial materiality and settler colonial state sovereignty. The apartheid conditions described by NAN show how the reserve system can function as Puar's "control societies" insofar as the durational debilitation of First Nations communities cannot be obscured from the fact that colonial zoning translates into profit for contemporary capitalism and its metropolitan service centres. The municipal, provincial, and federal states function as part of the biopolitical assemblages of control to instrumentalize capacities and debilities in manifesting sovereign power through the sanctioned maiming of sovereign First Nations under occupation. These examples of racial dehumanization point towards the reality that the status of health in NAN communities embodies a biopolitics of debilitation, where maiming First Nations people is a strategic goal of regenerating the structure of occupation through neoliberal and neocolonial pursuits for profit.

The Fact of Settler Colonialism: Biopolitics and Combat Breath

In this section, I build into Puar's discussion of biopolitics and debility a theory of maiming that examines the role of transcendental violence. As discussed above, critical disability scholars have used Foucault in important ways to draw out insights that are vital to understanding how a population available for injury is debilitated in the service of colonial sovereignty. The experiences of NAN First Nations evidence this by providing an important snapshot into the material realities of biopolitics, debility, and colonial domination. When read alongside the status of the health of First Nations communities of Northern Ontario, Paur's work highlights how the sovereign right to maim and the materiality of infrastructure assaults geared towards debilitation are key elements to safeguarding racial capitalism and the brutal exercise of sovereign power through transfers of wealth to metropolitan services centres that are then disguised as benevolent liberal humanitarian interventions within "helping professions." If we recall, this is what Puar calls an "asphixatory regime," which refers to how colonialism's function is the constriction of life through debilitation, as opposed to the elimination of colonized life itself.

However, Michel Foucault's work, despite its important contributions to the study of power, violence, and governmentality, has been critiqued by postcolonial scholars as an epistemological project that is embedded in the French liberal and supremacist tradition that fails to attend to colonization and imperialism in a meaningful way. Part of the dilemma is that while Foucault's work recognizes modernity and its liberal humanist foundations as a problem, as Anna M. Agathangelou rightly points out, he is also wary about undertaking a critical genealogy of the emergence of liberal sovereignty to show how capitalism is a zero-sum game in the exploitation and colonization of territories and their peoples. Foucault's "analyses are delimited by a universalization that is not truly global because it presumes the structure and subject of politics to be ontologically European, masculine, and propertied. For instance, he does not explicitly address French colonialism." 51 Consequently, while Foucault's theorization of biopolitics may open a space for a larger genealogy of geopolitics, he remains ambivalent about the nature of colonialism, its sovereign power, and its conditions of violence that generate maiming or killing colonized subjects. Thus, while Foucault may ultimately shift our thinking on neoliberal paradigms by placing the political-ontological component of the discourses of power within the framework of biopolitical power, he does so without interrogating the geopolitical hegemony of Europe, which secures the boundaries of the biopolitical power that he interrogates and which is preconditioned by colonial and imperial rule. Hence, Foucault's genealogy of the birth of biopolitics does not adequately attend to ethical considerations concerned with global designs. It depends on corporeal alienation and the structural impossibility of those deemed ontologically impossible and made fungible to articulate its Western liberal political imaginaries. 52 Foucault's genealogy of the birth of biopolitics, then, limits our understanding of anti-colonial ethicality.

Instead, Agathangelou proposes an articulation that "begins with understanding the processes through which the intertwining of the neoliberal market, the use of force and neocolonial penetrations by homo economicus as the 'enterprise men' and 'radical individualists' (i.e. neoconservatives) of bodies, ecologies, lands and frontiers becomes possible." 53 We must thus turn to Frantz Fanon, who seems to have anticipated Foucault. Fanon, however, does not begin with the prime effects of power but rather observes power through social relations, racism, and economies of violence to think through the impossible place of the slave and the colonized. In other words, "the living being whose existence is already assumed as structurally impossible and, hence, as breath which can never be synonymous with life." 54 The basis of the (inter)state structure of colonial occupation as shown by Fanon is the juristic sovereign person whose essence is already secured from the threat of mutilation. Hence, while Foucault questions how power could exercise its highest prerogative by putting people to death when its primary function was to ensure life and put life into order, Fanon had already made explicit that the matrix of violence requires that species are zoned as Black and colonized. Individualism "is the first to disappear … the colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual." 55

Fanon, therefore, emerges from a different locus of enunciation that demands that attention be given to the effects of the imperial, colonial, and slave orders and their vertical relations, or what he calls "combat breath." Combat breath refers to Fanon's understanding of the lived struggles of the slave or colonized subject who contends with foreign violence, securitization, and the "monopolizing notion of humanity that gives to the colonizer's values all ontological weight." 56 Freedom in this context is a structuring ontology and not only a political experience and practice. Thus, we are invited to read Fanon's combat breath as neither an event of the past or the remainder of slavery and colonialism, nor as an "end" to anti-colonial projects, but as living practices made possible by the involuntary constriction of colonized people's lives. Agathangelou, alongside Fanon, articulates combat breath as live existential struggles, the breath of which disrupts and exceeds the dominant spatial schism of "ecology and body, sovereign subject and its soma or flesh, person and living being (the phenomenon and the noumenon) in political projects and their desired contingent orders." 57 Fanon thus appears to have anticipated Puar's asphixatory regime. Fanon had previously theorized the centrality of suffocation and starvation in world politics, the consumption of flesh, and the subsequent redistribution of its vital energy that is turned into wealth. For example, in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon identifies as the cause of revolt in Indochina the impossibility to breathe. He states, "It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of its own that he is in revolt. It is because 'quite simply' it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe." 58 This quote has elsewhere been taken up and applied to anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in a general sense. 59

Thus, I emphasize the importance of reshaping our epistemic and disciplinary blueprints about the colonial landscape and our capacity for anti-colonial disciplinary ethics. I contend that this is imperative to apprehend how enforcing the right to liberal life of the radical individual (i.e., the propertied man of a structure of white supremacy that is contingent on colonized and slave relations) authorizes thanatopolitics as well as necropolitics, which it accomplishes by assaulting ecologies and "deploying practices of disfigurement and destruction." 60 In this way, Fanon's work not only anticipated that of Foucault, I argue, but it also provides something that Foucault cannot; that is, Fanon exposes the imperial European reassemblage of power based on the structural impossibility of Indigenous ontologies and shows the way in which state power shifts are connected to an international order and apparatuses that make possible a sovereign-master-colonized subject. Fanon notes that "the colonized peoples realize that neither clan remains outside incident. They no longer limit themselves to regional horizons, for they have caught onto the fact that they live in an atmosphere of international stress." 61 Fanon thus demonstrates that war and subjection involve political-ontological claims, whereas Foucault is concerned with the war that gives birth to the state. Ultimately, Fanon maintains the importance of apprehending the slave-colonial order and its violent traumatic effects, which "allows a nuanced understanding of its genesis, violence, and offers the possibility of transforming systems of valuation ranging from one's breath to universal orders." 62

Critically, this reading of Fanon's concept of combat breath raises questions about the epistemological ethics of using Foucault to apprehend the scales of colonial debilitation. Such an analytic move calls into question the matrices of colonial violence previously unaccounted for through analyses of biopolitics. This is critical, because, in the absence of Fanon's theorizations, Foucault's theorizations of war and biopolitics remain entrapped within the paradigm of European and intra-settler relations, when in fact the processes of war and security are contingent on the originary and continued amputation of those who are deemed structurally impossible. Moreover, this amputation "re-monumentalizes the [white man] because it sutures, rather than cancels, formal stagnation by fortifying and extending the material life." 63 It goes without saying, that the states shift into biopolitical forms of control was made possible through the regeneration of one's own race including the material structuring of whiteness and improving or regenerating one's race necessarily depends on colonial forms of racism. To meaningfully apprehend the complexity of this thus requires more than biopolitical functions like managing bodies, debility, and things, life and wealth because "its fundamental grounds are inter-antagonistically and inter-existentially set up. It is a relationship that depends on the slave-colonial-racist dynamics that create and systematically dehumanize and black(en) the person." 64 This is not to suggest, however, that Foucault's ideas or what Puar has presented in the study of debility, sovereignty, and power should be discounted. Rather, my intent is to provide a backdrop for considering what additional insights could be provided into colonialism and debility if we extended our reflections to include theories of violence beyond Foucauldian biopolitical theorizations and ground our understandings in the analysis of anti-colonial political-ontological realms.

Debility and Theories of Cognition

Anti-colonial theorizations about the relationship between ontology and coloniality build into this intervention further understandings about the role of settler colonialism in the production of disability ontologies by underscoring the significance of political-ontological claims in consolidating structures of dominance. Zahir Kolia's discussion of misanthropic skepticism, which is constitutive of the colonial underside of René Descartes's ego cogito and refers to a Cartesian subject and the definitive self as a thinking substance, speaks to this. 65 In this regard, the question of coloniality is also about the production of colonial forms of human difference via racist Eurocentric theories of European cognitive superiority that articulate differing degrees of humanity as a justification for colonial enterprises. For example, Kolia points out that the modern European subject is conditioned by an unquestioned certainty of its subjectivity, reason, and self-consciousness, which necessarily demands the questioning of non-European forms of humanity and their capacity for rational cognition and self-actualization. This is punctuated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who discusses the construction of the secular modern European subjectivity as articulated by Descartes's thesis of dialectical subjectification:

Beneath the "I think" we can read "others do not think," and behind the "I am" it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that "others are not" or do not have being. In this way, we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From "I think therefore I am" we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: "I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable). 66

In this formulation, the ego conquiro precedes the articulation of ego cogito, as the ego cogito can only be understood against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal expressed in the conception of the ego conquiro. This underscores an assumption about the unquestioned modern subjectivity of the self as conqueror. 67 As Maldonado-Torres notes, "the certainty about the self as a conqueror, of its tasks and missions, preceded Descartes's certainty about the self as a thinking substance (res cogitans) and provided a way to interpret it." 68 In this sense, misanthropic skepticism extends towards the domain of self-existence and the human status of colonized people by foregrounding a distinction between mind and body, human and nature; misanthropic skepticism is articulated as colonial forms of human difference. 69 This important distinction is made, on the one hand, by the rational self-conscious European subject, while on the other hand, the underside casts the irrational colonized subject as largely incapable of abstract modes of inquiry, reason, and self-actualization. 70 Misanthropic skepticism is thus "conditional to the production and typological ordering of racialized forms of human difference and integral to the power configuration of coloniality that links place of origin, bodies and consciousness." 71 The "analytics of raciality as a strategy of power and knowledge, locates Europe as the origin for beings that actualize as the fundamental agents of historical progress through the indubitable self-conscious reason of the ego conquiro and ego cogito." 72

This reading of misanthropic skepticism gestures towards coloniality being a prerequisite to the production of subjectivity. The supposed superiority of European cognition (implicit within Foucauldian French liberal humanism) is premised upon ego conquiro as the philosophical expression of Europe's unquestioned certainty of its capacity to think, which is founded on the suspicion of the impossibility of the colonized Other's capacity to self-actualize, to think, or to think properly. My contention, then, is that embedded within the analytics of raciality is a structure of thought that pervades contemporary philosophical expressions that act as the basis of social organization and settler colonial zoning. There is the presumption of a racist-ableist pathological and cognitive dysfunction of the colonized subject. The assumption simply reads as follows: "I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, require assistance into proper being)."

In the Canadian context, this resonates with disability scholars Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison Carey, who have traced how the emergence of the Canadian settler colonial state is predicated on assumptions about the cognitive dysfunction of Indigenous peoples. Their discussion of "feeblemindedness" speaks to this when read alongside Foucault's genealogy of biopolitics and the rise of the confinement of "disabled" peoples in medical institutions across Canada. Chapman, for instance, underscores how "the use of 'race' to articulate a diverse realm of otherness preceded the use of 'feebleminded,'" 73 as indicated by scientific justifications for dominance and violence. Theories of rationality, human agency, and spatiotemporal locations of human civilizations across historical "stages" underwrite what became the dominant paradigm of feeblemindedness and, as such, must also be understood within their larger historical pretexts of discourses of colonialism and racism that were extended to justify the killing and torture of those who were considered threats to European imperialism. Secular and scientific accounts of human progress "offered new narratives for justifying continuities of earlier targeted social elimination." 74

The emergence of the medical establishment, abusive custodialism, and the modern nation-state thus provide a historical backdrop to trace shifting practices of racial and colonial confinement spanning from the sixteenth century to contemporary social formations. Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe discuss, for instance, how eighteenth-century and early colonial Canada began constructing institutions of penalty designed to contain those deemed "mad" or a deviation of secular humanity's idea of individual transformation. This became a dominant ideology following the Enlightenment that served to safeguard capitalist requirements of cheap labor and the expropriation of stolen Indigenous land, based on moral economies of racist progressive reformation. 75 For them, organizing social life following the period of the gradual secularization of Christian Europe—a time when violence was sanctioned through discourses of holy war, salvation, and the redemption of the "heathen savages" of the Americas—punctuates this. Custodialism served the interests of the new "helping professions." These "institutions centralized treatment, research, and funding, and thus played a key role in the advancement of professionals concerned with the feebleminded." 76 As they note, following this period a significant discursive shift took place. Secular law enabled state violence to be justified based on scientific theories of social progress to articulate a realm of Otherness characterized by "feeblemindedness." Discourses of feeblemindedness, then, were used to justify poorhouses, asylums, hospitals, and country jails, which often operated as primary sites for racial confinement and torture based on an ideological shift to social and human progress, marked by secular evolutionist theories of medical, psychological, and educational frameworks. Such frameworks "took on the task of sorting productive from unproductive (or unworthy from worthy) and managing appropriate 'treatment.'" 77 Thus, the idea of individual and social transformation coincided with discourses about the "treatment" of degenerate and undesirable populations and the rise of medicalization that culminated in eugenics theories intended to "protect" society from social dangers. Moreover, notions of "feeblemindedness" and "insanity" increasingly became designations for non-European peoples. Such practices justified the denial of social and political rights, as well as systems of confinement such as the reserve system, criminalization, and pathologies, which "were politically rationalized as a means of 'saving' [Indigenous] children from the 'death of their race.'" 78

These scholars thus highlight that the application of the norms of cognitive dysfunction and feeblemindedness would not have taken place without the preconditions of settler colonialism, its accompanying racist epistemological impositions, and temporal civilizational projects. They point this out as the prerequisite to the emergence of modern colonial states and dominant modes of Eurocentric cognition and underscore that the racialized and colonized Other was always automatically assumed to be inherently feebleminded. This suggests that legacies of colonial violence must be accounted for alongside the timeline of Foucault's genealogy of madness and institutionalizations, to the extent that these legacies of racial violence got codified into secular interpretations of colonial law and medicine, and therefore narrated as discourses of terra nullius.

Importantly, Talal Asad has also discussed the relationship of secularity to theories of cognition and trauma with respect to the colonization of the Americas. 79 He demonstrates that the emergence of secular pain as the dominant framework for conceiving human and social relations required redefining the healthy/unhealthy mind and behavior through a doctrine of morally based medical sciences, where coloniality reconceptualized pain as being increasingly understood as having an origin internal to a mechanistic world and therefore was susceptible to the action of the elements of the world. This stems from early contact with Indigenous peoples that saw Europeans become increasingly interested in explaining away the "occult power" of the shamans they had encountered. Pain came to be labeled as "secular" as the myth of punishment for original sin (a sort of divine pain) was translated into the myth of punishment for transgressions against the laws of nature. Nature came to be endowed with and personified, the agency originally possessed by God. This was attributed in part to the "vitalist" school of thought and the increasing vivisection through the work of early anthropologists and philosophers. Vivisection was used to formulate this framework insofar as pain was inflicted upon animals (assumed other than human being) to understand the physiological basis of a particular experience. It became secular pain because pain and illness were now seen as nature's punishment for omission in one's regime, whereas mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of the individual and the constraints of the social order. Pain came to inhabit a discourse between physician and patient and a de-ontologized language in the context of experimentation.

However, rather than being outside of the secular domain, the shaman's claims to power helped constitute the secular domain of physiological knowledge through written reports of experimentation. It was also through this that the concept of "experiences," which was now being put to the test to be used in larger theories of identifying an internal state through external manipulation, would come to ground secular notions of corporeality. 80 The "natural body" could now be incorporated into a social demonstration of mechanistic philosophy that would change the conceptual grammar of pain into natural terms. Still, Asad maintains that pain is not merely a private experience but a "public relationship." 81 Pain expresses how particular relationships are inhabited and enacted. As he reminds us, it can be agentive in the sense that it can be an active practice relationship inhabiting a space and time, such as the pain of childbirth or phantom limb syndrome. 82 In these instances, physical and cultural dichotomies cease to be explicitly delineated along distinct lines. This is because when and how a subject experiences painfulness are not simply mediated culturally and physically but are themselves modes of living in a relationship. The ability to live such relationships over time transforms pain from passive experiences into active ones, and this redefines the ways of living "sanely" in the world. The body and self, then, do not exist merely as objects of power. With this understanding, we must consider not only embodiment (that human action and experiences are sited in a material body) but also ensoulment—the idea that the living human body is an integrated totality having developed capacities for activities and experiences unique to it. 83

Secular Debility and Ensoulment: Spiritual Dis-membering and the Soul Wound

Indigenous scholars have also made similar observations with respect to understanding secularity, sanctioned violence, and the production of debility in Indigenous communities. For some, this necessarily includes assaults on the core of sacred modes of being. Janice Acoose punctuates the debilitating violence of settler colonialism as a mode of Indigenous subject reconfiguration. 84 She asserts that at the core of colonial violence is a crisis of Indigenous spirituality that is sustained by settler colonialism's project of dis-membering Indigenous modes of life. "Dis-membering," she explains, "refers to the strategic removal from cultural bodies signifying relations"—in other words, the spiritual, other-than-human agency and human relations central to Canada's First Nations understanding of being "as culture-specific individuals." 85 Speaking specifically to the growing number of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, Acoose points to the more than four generations of dis-membered relations under a rigid, racist, and sexist colonial regime, which underwrite the ideological apparatuses that violently sever Indigenous women from their cultural bodies. She emphasizes the dis-membering effects of her imprisonment in the Indian residential school system and the accompanying conditions of spiritual, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse that conditioned it. As well, she highlights the strategic programmed terrorism disguised as education that resulted in her diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is likened more to a collective trauma of residential school survivors, described as "post-apocalyptic stress disorder," when "PTSD lives in an entire culture over many generations." 86 This, she notes, has resulted in an epidemic of violence directed at Indigenous women, which is further exasperated by the crisis of physical, sexual, spiritual, cultural, and mental health across Indigenous families and their communities. It is indicative of an ontological politics related to dis-membering threats to colonial empire through cognitive modes of subject reconfiguration.

Acoose's account of Indigenous dis-membering also resonates with the work of Eduardo Duran, who theorizes the way that colonial violence inflicts a soul wound. 87 For him, the soul wound conditions the expressions of ethno-stress and historical and intergenerational trauma:

At the core of Indian awareness was the place where the soul wound occurred. This core being essence is the fabric of soul and it is from this essence that mythology, dreams, and culture emerge. Once the core from which the soul emerges is wounded then all emerging mythology and dreams of a people reflect the wound. The manifestations of such a wound are then embodied by the tremendous suffering that the people have undergone since the collective soul wound was inflicted half a millennium ago. 88

Indigenous worldviews thus understand trauma as exceeding secular contemplation in that trauma also includes spiritual and cultural harms that produce collective and compounded forms of psychological trauma. 89 Soul wounding, instead, foregrounds the injury, oppression, and dehumanization of colonialism. It speaks to the reality of spiritual injury, ancestral hurt, and soul sickness that requires an approach to debilitation as a response to cultural and spiritual domination rather than characterizing Indigenous communities in states of exclusively material and existential dysfunction. 90 As Duran highlights, soul wounding gives context to the high rates of suicide, family breakdown, alcohol and substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse, and lateral violence across Indigenous communities that are the results of colonial projects like residential schools, ecocide, and other colonial practices aimed at subduing and pacifying Indigenous peoples, as seen in the various reports of NAN and the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs discussed above. It frames the sociohistorical factors that cause the systemic destruction of Indigenous lifeworlds by inflicting a wound that resonates over time and space, manifesting at the level of spirithood. It thus describes ancestral injury that is concurrent and passed down through generations that relates to the incursion of harm of Indigenous persons, peoples, and communities at a very deep, transcendent level, or what NAN and the Standing Committee refer to as "historic" and "intergenerational" forms of trauma.

These insights are further echoed by Indigenous community members and human rights organizations that detail how the legacy of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada, both in law and in social policy, has created debilitating conditions for First Nations communities. For instance, the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls ("the Inquiry") names this as a form of structural violence "due to injustices, inequalities, and other forms of violence embedded in everyday life that privilege some people to the detriment of others." 91 Robyn Bourgeois (Cree) speaks to this, suggesting that

[y]ou have to recognize that all of the systems, whether it's class exploitation, whether it is disability and ableist privilege, whether it's racism or colonialism—they all work in and through one another. So, they work in mutually sustaining ways. So, this framework really requires that we pay attention to how all of those things work together. 92

The Inquiry is clear that patterns of spiritual and cultural violence thus include "the seizure of traditional lands, expropriation and commercial use of indigenous cultural objects without permission by Indigenous communities, misinterpretation of Indigenous histories, mythologies and cultures, suppression of their languages and religions, and even the forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their families and denial of their Indigenous identity." 93 This has resulted in the increased overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls, for instance, struggling with "physical or mental disability." 94

Likewise, for many Indigenous communities, women and girls are "sacred." Situated within Creator-centred thinking, Indigenous women embody the sacredness of life and women's ability to bring new life into the community, acting as sacred portals between modes of life. Leanne Simpson expands further: from "a Nishnaabeg perspective, we have to engage our entire bodies: our physical beings, emotional self, our spiritual energy, and our intellect." 95 The interconnection of these components gives rise to Nishnaabeg ways of knowing and their processes for living in this world and others. Women's sacredness pertains to how Nishnaabeg women's freedom relates to the land and their neighboring human and non-human nations. It structures a powerful spiritual, cultural, political, and economic relationship that extends beyond mother and child, families, clans, and communities and highlights how breastfeeding as treaty, for example, supports peaceful coexistence, respect, and mutual benefit for this world and others, which is designed to bring about lasting ethical relationships that correspond to women's roles in the recreation of life. Thus, attacks on Indigenous women and girls' spiritual and cultural well-being constitute attacks on the entire community and its relationships to non-human nations and agencies. It is for this reason, among others, that Indigenous peoples are critical of mainstream colonial characterizations of trauma that individualize pain in suffering, which is not in line with Indigenous worldviews related to pain, suffering and grief, and wellness. This approach does not "acknowledge the source of people's suffering within the systems that have provoked it." 96 Indigenous peoples have thus adapted the concept of "trauma" to recognize the distinct experience of colonialism as a source of trauma to include the notions of sacredness and spiritual harm.

This is a quite different interpretation of maiming than secular-liberal biopolitical ones, which understand violence and trauma as an exoteric form of discursive and material alienation related to corporeal transgressions framed within liberal conceptual grammars. 97 It makes explicit that anti-Indigenous debility requires understanding attacks on the sacred. Thus, in reading NAN's reports and Indigenous theories of trauma alongside Fanon, Duran, and others, we can obverse sanctioned maiming as attacking non-secular transcendent forms of Indigenous self-consciousness on both individual, communal, and sacred registers. Attention, then, must be given to political-ontological antagonisms of spiritual violence, which tend to get conflated with social conflicts that are thought to emerge from material constraints, normativity, and corporeal transgressions alone—that which Puar has attributed to asphixatory regimes of biopolitical control.

Final Thoughts

The aim of this intervention is to invite readers to extend their reading practices beyond biopolitics, which I have argued is an epistemic blueprint that is insufficient for apprehending the complexity of "maiming" in the Canadian settler colonial context. I argue this negation is the result of the inherent secularity of biopolitics, and, thus, it implicitly negates the unique conditions of transcendental violence Canadian neoliberal and settler colonial sovereignty wields. With that said, let us bring this paper to a close by reflecting on what this paper is not. This is not a paper about access or inclusion as a means to mediate the conditions of debility that exist across Nishnawbe Aski Nation communities. Access/inclusion ambitions only advance the goals of colonial dehumanization by further expanding the settler state, colonial architectures of "helping professions," and, thus, racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies. 98 Likewise, this paper is not a prescription for saving Indigenous peoples from trauma, grief, or injury. Indigenous peoples have vast and rich healing philosophies that are based on their own knowledge systems, and those taking up these questions should default to their expertise, as I have sought to do here. This paper is, however, about a theory of debility that requires undertaking reflection on the relationship between secularity and settler colonialism in apprehending neoliberal and neocolonial imperatives of sanctioned maiming.

I have thus attempted to contribute supplementary thoughts on sanctioned maiming by way of the Canadian context that suggests that anti-Indigenous debilitation is a product of, but also exceeds, biopolitical formulations. Instead, postcolonial and anti-colonial thinkers invite us "to take a hard look at the myriad ways we avoid the inter-existentially onto-politically structured violence in our everyday lives." 99 As demonstrated by Fanon, the relationship between Indigeneity and debility is dependent on global colonial-racist dynamics that create and systemically dehumanize colonized persons. These assemblages of power are likewise networked with international apparatuses and structures of domination that seek to produce a "sovereign-master-colonized subject," 100 which points to the centrality of politico-ontological antagonisms and how anti-Indigenous debilitation involves politico-ontological reconstructions. Evidenced are the multiple human, spiritual, and cultural costs of colonialism in the service of neoliberal profitability and settler metropolitan conditions manifested as a Northwestern Ontario brand of debilitating racial apartheid.

Theories of misanthropic skepticism, I have argued, are also compatible with the Indigenous soul wound theory. Misanthropic skepticism speaks to a racist-ablest European system of cognition that underwrites colonial enterprises, while soul wounding identifies the assimilation practices of Canadian settler colonialism and the material conditions of colonial zoning that seek to produce the desired outcome of non-European pathological dysfunction, which is then used to justify ongoing occupation by seeking to confirm such racist-ablest cognitive assumptions, inherent to the ego conquiro and ego cogito. Both, then, comment upon structures of colonization as well as heterogeneous modes of non-secular consciousness that remain threatening to colonial sovereignty. Taken together, soul wounding and misanthropic skepticism are not suggesting that the fact of colonialism confines Indigenous life chances to a structural straitjacket of inevitable debilitation. Rather, they suggest that debility must be understood as inseparable from racist theories of cognition dominance and sacred embodiments of spiritual trauma related to Indigenous alternative forms of agency that remain intact and flourishing.

I have therefore outlined why biopolitics is too limiting for understanding the complexity of Canada's right to maim. As I have attempted to show here, biopolitics maintains a limited conception of power and violence and, therefore, cannot entirely elucidate the practices of Canada's sanctioned maiming. By discussing attempts to suffocate Indigenous ontologies and ecologies via practices of destruction and disfigurement, I have tried to expand the horizon of our thinking to also include reflections on Indigenous heterogeneous and transcendent forms of consciousness to encourage critical disability studies to develop alternative reading practices when attending to racialized and colonial forms of dehumanization.