As historically defining experiences, emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call a process of “inculcation”. Settler perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by economic and normative conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal strategies of dominant society into the quotidian [everyday, common] understanding of events…These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates collective experience of emergencies always to the advantage of the settler state.

Infrastructures of settler perception obfuscate the ways in which Native communities experience environmental emergencies as cycles of settler colonial violence and ecocide .Emergencies such as global warming are described as “human-caused” rather than directly linked to settler colonialism, capitalism, and White supremacy. Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with the planetary ecological collapse. In a White logic of death, or “necropolitics,” the structures of colonialism, genocide, war, and slavery represent not the beginning of crisis, but rather the end of violence and disorder.

The infrastructures of settler perception tend to deflect away from fundamental causes and consequences of emergencies. What is perhaps most notable is the refusal to come to terms with emergencies insofar as they are characterized by social formations rather than isolated events. The invisibility of deeper social emergencies is coupled with the exploitation of disasters to further settler colonial capitalist accumulation. In an op-ed for Teen Vogue, Jenn M. Jackson writes “Rather than seeing this pattern [of displacement, houselessness, and criminalization] as an emergency, Whiteness treats ongoing disasters afflicting these communities as economic opportunities”. This tactic of White supremacy is afforded in part by a linear/progressivist perception of time that can only conceive of emergencies as caused by historical events or trends rather than embedded in social structures characterized by cyclical patterns that defy linear causalities. For example, the “climate crisis” is said to be “human caused.” We can point to various historical events that lead us here to the “Anthropocene.” But if there is a switch to thinking of emergencies as social structures, then, for example, we can consider White supremacy an emergency. It is a self-perpetuating social emergency that is both cause and effect of the disasters it produces.

For the United States and other settler nations, there is no “environmental crisis” that is not both a cause and effect of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is the environmental crisis. There is no “climate crisis” that is not caused by capitalism. Capitalism is the “climate crisis.” There is no “humanitarian crisis” that is not caused by xenophobic heteropatriarchy. Xenophobic heteropatriarchy is the humanitarian crisis. Hence, emergencies in this structural sense serve precisely to subordinate and control whatever groups stand in the way of White settler colonial capitalist domination. Emergencies are not just events. They are also self-perpetuating material-perceptual infrastructures that create ongoing conditions of death, disease, vulnerability, and servitude.

When “emergencies” are constructed through the lens of White supremacy, many emergencies are never seen at all. So powerful are the infrastructures of perception that even an “apocalypse for Africans and the indigenous” disappears into abstraction for the Whitestream. As Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues, the irony of White obsessions with dystopic futures imbued with environmental chaos is that the past and present dystopic realities of Native people go unnoticed. In “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now” he writes “we consider the future from what we believe is already a dystopia.” If colonial infrastructures of perception produce the erasure of such dystopic realities, to what extent can Whitestream understanding of emergency be trusted, accurate, or even said to approach the reality of death, loss, and disaster in a minimal sense?