What if “survival” still allows colonial power to define Indigenous peoples through damage, victimhood, and disappearance?
Survivance Kritik: Indigenous Presence Beyond Survival gives debaters a powerful framework for challenging narratives that treat Indigenous life as vanished, passive, or meaningful only through suffering. Survivance names more than endurance: it emphasizes active presence, resistance, continuance, self-representation, and the ongoing creation of Indigenous futures.
The kritik turns attention toward how debate language, advocacy, scholarship, and policy framing can reproduce colonial stories of absence—even when they claim to help. It offers a way to contest those narratives while affirming living agency rather than reducing Indigenous peoples to objects of rescue or historical tragedy.
This debate-ready resource helps students:

Explain survivance clearly and distinguish it from simple survival
Develop links involving absence, victimry, representation, and colonial framing
Build impacts, framework arguments, and an alternative
Answer permutations, framework objections, and defenses of policy action
Prepare strategic extensions for later speeches
Use cross-examination to expose assumptions within an opponent’s advocacy
Adapt the position across topics and debate events

Designed primarily for Lincoln-Douglas debate, with concepts and arguments adaptable to Policy/CX, Public Forum, classroom debate, and instruction in Indigenous studies and critical argumentation. The package supports students learning kritiks for the first time while providing the strategic depth needed for advanced rounds.
Digital ZIP download. Kritik, strategy, and evidence resource.