#indigenous lifeways

[scamallach-1]

Excerpt of ‘What Is Indigenous-Rooted Direct Action?’ from Klee Benally’s “No Spiritual Surrender”

[airearthandsunfire]

You know what we should bring back? Offering animal sacrifices to the local gods (apex predators). You wanna know why? Humans continue to expand our living spaces and farm spaces into wildlife habitats. The biggest threat to ANY wildlife currently considered endangered, is the development of wildlife territory. Bcuz we destroy their home, disrupt their breeding grounds (cougars travel FAR to breed, then go their separate ways) and ultimately, demonize the animals for doing what they need to do to survive, ending in attempts to kill or contain them.

Everybody says "don't feed them! They will associate humans with food!" They already do!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm suggesting monthly offerings, at a specific phase of the moon, not a calendar day. The predators will take what they want from our farms no matter what we do, but if they happen to come upon one lone animal, that is somehow found in the same spot in the forest, at a certain time, every month? They will take notice, and go there, instead of our farms.

"How do we prevent them from tracking us back home???" You ask? Well, let's talk about superstition, and then mix it with science... used to, salt was enough to ward off ghosts and fae and whatnot. Well, what if we talked to some local hunters and find out what they use to disguise their scents when hunting?

There are ways to protect the human populations that will also help protect our animal neighbors. We don't have to just keep putting them down like it's their fault we encroached on their territory, but we also don't have to leave ourselves at the mercy of mother nature like in the old days. It's time we mixed the old ways with our modern science to find a true middle ground. It won't be perfect, but it'll be better, and that's the goal.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

genuinely, people feel free to say any shit to japanese folks online

i am constantly questioned on my own goddamn history by anime fans who think they are morally superior to me because they have uncritically consumed western perspectives on imperial fascism.

i’m not just learning history from books or online, i get to learn from my community and my relatives and my people who have built coalitions of resistance that have lasted for generations.

and not only that, i study how my ancestors and relatives walked on the earth. i keep seeds. i keep recipes. i keep fabric and crafts and stories and songs. history is so much more than the movements of the powerful, and it’s so, so much longer than the last 6000 years of nation states battling for dominance. the person who inspired this post blocked me for pushing back on their racism but i have a screenshot of their reply and their asks still show up in a search of their username. a lot of those asks had to do with anime fandom stuff. i’m so fucking tired of people who disdain the creators of what they consume.

[naivety]

So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.

[...]

Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities. What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those around us? This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our contradictions. We’re not rallying for a perfect prescription for “decolonization” or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture, it’s the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land? We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism, we don’t aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it. We seek nothing but total liberation.

Voting Is Not Harm Reduction - An Indigenous Perspective

[moniquill]

Watership Down - first the film, then the book, is one of the most formative media influences in my life. I’ve written about it briefly, here https://i-blame.tumblr.com/post/69030937937/moniquill-moniquill-kucala-moniquill

but having watched the above video essay, I want to say more.

The first time I saw a deer up close was in my grandfather’s back yard; I was about four years old. I don’t remember the reason that my mom dropped me off at my grandfather’s house for an afternoon, but I know that it was unplanned - because he was in the middle of processing a deer. It had been field dressed, organs already removed, and was hanging by its ankle tendons from the t-shaped steel pole at one end of the backyard clothesline. I was startled, worried, concerned that the animal was hurt. There was blood! There was flesh!

My grandfather responded by calmly explaining what he was doing, step by step. Explaining why he was skinning the deer, and quartering it, taking it from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venison

He talked about hunting, and about gratitude, and about humans and our proper place in the world - what meant to live in a good way.

By the time my grandfather was cooking tenderloin medallions and plating them up to me with grape jelly (don’t knock grape jelly on meat until you’ve tried it!) and instant mashed potatoes, I wasn’t startled or concerned anymore. I had a deeper understanding of the way the world worked, of my role as a consumer, a predator. Of the responsibilities that entailed. I couldn’t have explained it then, of course, with my 4-year-old mind and vocabulary - but Philosophy had been set into motion. This is a core memory for me. 

I did not have nightmares about the butchered deer. 

I was six when I first saw Disney’s Bambi. I DID have nightmares about that; between Bambi and The Land Before Time, I was absolutely convinced that my mother was going to die. That I was being presented with these media themes to educate and prepare me for that eventuality. I am the youngest daughter of a youngest daughter, and I have an extended tribal family. My grandfather died when I was six. His was one of many funerals I attended at that age; his generation succumbing to age and illness. I was aware of mortality. 

I wasn’t a ‘normal’ child, by the standard of the community that I went to school in. I was too poor, too indigenous, too very obviously autistic (without being diagnosed). I had very different media influences and interests than the other kids at my public school. No one else was deeply obsessed with David Attenborough’s documentaries (Life on Earth 1979, The Living Planet 1984, Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives 1989). No one else had even heard of Dot and the Whale. No one else in my class had Lifeways Lessons classes, because they didn’t have tribes.  

I wasn’t terribly interested in most media intended for children; it was boring because it was simple. I didn’t feel motivated to watch Disney movies over and over. Don Bleuth films had more staying power in my mind; An American Tale, All Dogs Go To Heaven, The Land Before Time. More complex stories, stories that confront suffering and death. My mom read me CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein, Jack London and EB White - lots of other stories that were not ‘age appropriate’, stories that were written for People, not Children.

I watched Watership Down for the first time when I was about five, and my mom read the book to me when I was about six. I was not disturbed by the violence, being far more interested in the themes explored in the video essay above. I had, by this time, seen a rabbit skinned IRL. I’d eaten rabbit stew. 

I did not have nightmares about Watership Down. 

I failed to make friends with the kids at school, for the most part - I primarily socialized with my cousins. In fourth grade (age 9), my class did a unit on tropical rainforests, and I brought in this video: I did not think that there was anything at all controversial about it, but at about 32 minutes in David Attenborough talks about the Guarani people and their traditional ways of life. There’s footage of an unclothed man climbing a tree. His penis is briefly visible. THE CLASS WENT WILD, and the teacher rushed to turn the video off, and I was sent to the office. It caused a school-wide incident, and bringing in videos was thereafter banned. I was deeply, deeply confused by this series of events. The video had come from the public library - how could it possible be offensive? But the incident became a vector of bullying that followed me until middle school - the adults had confirmed to the kids that I had done something taboo, that I was fundamentally wrong in some way. I quietly came to the conclusion that Most People(™) are very stupid and very reactionary, that one has to carefully coddle and explain things to them. 

It took me many years to only mostly overcome that conclusion.

Later that same year, I had my first real success in making a childhood friend - someone who came to my house after school and had sleepovers and such. She had transferred from another school and didn’t know I was THE WEIRD GIRL the way my other classmates did. I remember trying to introduce my favorite movies to her, as she introduced her favorites to me. She was a Horse Girl(™) and much more interested in Age Appropriate Girl Things than I was, but we shared a love of My Little Pony - I had a bunch of episodes on VHS, recorded off TV. She thought that https://mylittleponyg1.fandom.com/wiki/Rescue_at_Midnight_Castle was ‘too scary’ and preferred https://mylittleponyg1.fandom.com/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_The_Movie. 

I showed her Watership Down. She freaked out about it. It gave her nightmares.

She was, as many people, deeply disturbed by the violence of the film. She had not, at the age of nine, seen animals butchered. She didn’t seem to care about the deeper meanings and philosophical treatises presented; the fact that there was violence and death was too shocking.

I’m not sure how to conclude this essay, except with this: Watership Down is now a litmus test, for me. If a person is aware of it and appreciates it, we’re intellectual compatible. If a person’s whole reaction is shock and disgust and cries of ‘nightmare fuel!’ then we are not.

[auressea]

Learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only with permission and or in certain situations.

~First Peoples Principles of Learning

Native American spirituality isn't your jumping off point for New Age. It's not your resource for New Age talking points. Our myths are not your's to mine for "proof" for your conspiracies or to change for your "prophecies". Our spirituality has nothing to do with "vibrations", negative of otherwise.

Stop trying to swallow Native American spirituality. Stop using it to justify your surface level spirituality.

Most of all, stop acting like New Age is the natural successor to Native Spirituality- we're the natural successors, because we're still here.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Within this sacrificial cosmology, no single hierophant or high priest needs to wield the fatal blade, and no one need bear witness to the horror. The sacrifice transpires in the clinical anonymity of market relations. An increase in demand for snack food in India triggers a chain of market decisions that see the forced displacement of an indigenous community in West Puapa and, with it, the liquidation of their entire lifeway and cosmology. The anonymous demands of shareholders in a cosmetics firm for greater returns leads to land grabbing by entrepreneurial smallholders or their hyper-exploitation of migrant workers. A subtle shift in policy to encourage markets to turn to biofuels triggers a wave of peatland burning that releases massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to murderous impacts on global human and non-human populations via the vicissitudes of climate change.

Max Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire

[vonclosen]

that edward sallow was an anthropology & linguistics student is so important and cannot be understated. i can see how he'd easily (in the beginning) be of the salvage anthropology school of thought. we have to go to the grand canyon to record these peoples lives before they all disappear! (big indigenous eyeroll from me here)

its probably easy to see how that mutates into this horrific assimilation where he's "saving" people from "destroying themselves and each other" (without regard to the fact that the people he's coming into contact with have survived since the war and, assuming real indigenous roots, for hundreds of years before *that*). he sees these lifeways as lesser and the people who he's assimilating into the legion as salvage (and savage).

and then he gets a power trip. people are looking to him for guidance and support. maybe he's been overlooked for most of his life as a dumb, poor jock (he's just the cook/cleaning lady's son, easily written off)

(and maybe that being constantly written off because of his mother's status makes him start to hate her. his misogyny is allowed to run rampant as this beast he's created gets bigger and bigger, as the calf becomes the bull)

he turns to the roman empire. its always been his favorite. he emulates their assimilation, and continues "saving people from themselves", but really, in the end, its about him. and his ego. because it always is.

[auressea]

These children kept a one year old alive for over a month after a plane-crash.

Four Indigenous children survived an Amazon plane crash that killed three adults and then braved the jungle for 40 days before being found alive by Colombian soldiers — bringing a happy ending to a search-and-rescue saga that captivated a nation and forced the usually opposing military and Indigenous people to work together. Cassava flour and some familiarity with the rainforest's fruits were key to the children's extraordinary survival in an area where snakes, mosquitoes and other animals abound. The members of the Huitoto people — aged 13, 9 and 4 years and 11 months — are expected to remain for a minimum of two weeks at a hospital in Bogota, Colombia, receiving treatment after their rescue on Friday.

Continue Reading.

[autogyne-redacted]

what’s wrong with building codes?

Ok fair, this isn't a line of critique ppl talk about much and probably isn't intuitive from lots of positions.

But they're a fundamental piece of how capitalism (tries to) force us to play its game and of how it destroys alternative lifeways!

Also worth noting that nearly all traditional indigenous dwellings are gonna be illegal by most building codes. That alone should make you real skeptical of them.

//

For most of human history, in most places, people could build dwellings at the individual or small group level out of readily available, natural materials. (Eg from what I've read 1-2 people can build a wigwam in 3 days that'll last well over a year).

This kind of set up gives individuals way more power over their housing and isn't conducive to landlording or housing debt. Readily available housing means way less pressure to stay with shitty family/housemates/partners/jobs. It removes one of the primary forms of leverage.

Building codes make it difficult or fully illegal to live in anything other than a modern, conventional home.*

///

Modern homes are convenient in tons of ways. But:

Older tech gets portrayed as way worse than it was, and:

A lot of that convenience primarily matters if you're spending most of your time/energy working because you're living thoroughly inside the market and if you're separated from the skills and knowledge to take care of your shit without modern conveniences.

Civ has a gravity to it. You (theoretically/legally) have to pay a certain amount in taxes, at the point at which you're working a little, probably you find at least some things you want to buy. As you work more you handle less shit yourself and pay more so other people handle it for you. As more people are doing this community becomes harder and harder to find if you're holding out. And the skills, knowledge and lifeways for living outside of civ are harder to access.

While mass violence is needed at times, that's not needed or sustainable long term.

With the commons enclosed, the genocide and forced relocation of indigenous people enacted, industrialization and urbanization complete, more mundane and bureaucratic forms of coercion tend to do the trick for the few hold outs and breakaways.

Shit like telling you you have to install a septic system you can't begin to afford, or condemning your house.

//

*while the details of what's allowed and what's prohibited vary massively from place to place, it is a practical tension I and friends come up against with the state, and even if it wasn't I think it makes sense to object on principle/with an eye towards the future.

Child custody standards (what's grounds for the state taking your kid/what's gonna count against you in a custody battle) often go above and beyond building codes in requiring normative dwellings.

I'm thinking of details like: septic/sewer standards, requiring electric/water hookups, requiring buildings made to last decades vs easy to build structures that are rebuilt every few years or require more active maintenance, making it difficult or impossible to use natural materials, etc.

//

Qualifier: I think building codes serve a purpose in landlord-tennant relationships but without them it'd be way easier to escape renting

[sandybuny]

archaeologists and anthropologists talk abt ur admiration for ancient cultures outside europe without being incredibly racist n chauvinist towards the descendents of that culture and their lifeways challenge

trying to read abt the upano valley sites in the ecuadorean amazon and this french guy (who calls himself an archaeologist but from his bio im p sure is just the "ideas guy" who secures their funding) cant stop shit talking indigenous life ways while making unwarranted comparisons of the upano valley to rome or egypt. like come on why are u even there if u dont appreciate them for what they were and are? are u that unserious abt this?

hoping the actual research paper is better cause its got a lot mroe authors and actually connects the site to current lifeways

[becoming0with]

Ecology, the evolutionary sciences and studying indigenous knowledges and lifeways bring you into something that I can only call god.

Knowing the webs of support, entangled giving, the kissing, the shelter under the wing and the world of siblings, all in affection against the great swelling emptiness underpinning. Science only enhances it, knowing the intricacy of the threads, the chains, the fucking MIRACLE that there is any of this. It is a fucking MIRACLE, we live in a dying miracle.

It is so painful, it is bleach in the bloodstream, wreckage and landfills in the all-connecting everything, knowing the cost

I have found something whom's hugeness, whom's offer I could devote myself entirely to. Something worth giving to. The fact of the collapse is incomprehensible in the face of that, beyond pain.

I know it shouldn't arrest me to be able to look at critique and postulation and graphs that depict the collapse, I should be celebrating and grieving and hospicing. I just want to be able to give back in a way that means something. The reality of that is arresting and destroying.

[fatehbaz]

The “khoai” is the name colloquially given to [...] landmasses in and around the Chotanagpur Plateau in eastern India. Rich in iron oxide, these [...] soils are marked by a rugged and often undulating topography, resulting from millennia of erosion from monsoon rains, the many winding rivers that populate the region and action of winds from summer thunderstorms, popularly termed in Bengali as “Kalboishakhi.” The winds and the rains of the kalboishakhi dance across the lands adjoining the Bay of Bengal, often arriving at the horizon with ominous dark clouds right before sunset. [...]

The khoai is a charismatic frontier in an ongoing conversation within South Asian developmentalist imaginaries that call for optimal land use for the purposes of economic growth. [...] As the lateritic soil of the region is not suited for intensive agriculture, efforts have been made to make vast sections of the region arable [...]. And so, slowly, the red soils get taken over the green [...]. This is often done by breaking gullies and hoodoo-like structures [...] to flatten the lands [...]. The ongoing project to turn such “deserts” green has a long history. Yet alongside these projects, is the place that the khoai have in the literary, cultural, and spiritual imagination of many [...] that inhabit the Chotanagpur Plateau. The vastly open and hilly topography, dotted with sal forests [...] has often been the fodder for songs of longing [...]. The horizon of the sky meeting the red gullies of the badlands also form many a narrative that appear in local folk songs and stories. [...] They have also been sites of community-based agroforestry.

---

Recently, such badlands have been termed unproductive in and around my hometown of Santiniketan, India.

As South Asian developmental imaginaries wholly absorb the understanding of terra nullius from modern Euro-American conceptions of land, the idea that “badlands” are necessarily “wastelands” become cemented. Once beloved [...], the dark brown-red hoodoos and gullies today are seen as wasted potential that are depriving the public of much-needed resources, and the possibility of the coming of civilization in accordance with upper-caste aspirations. Khoai today have become sites for proposed plantations facilitated by local forestry authorities, holiday homes and cafes [...], luxury resorts [...].

The ethos of invoking terra nullius has travelled into discourses surrounding “practicality” and the absolute necessity for villagers and small town folks in the area to be saved by their urban-dwelling upper caste counterparts [...] who are interested in their cultural practices, seemingly idyllic agricultural lifeways and the simplicity away from the stresses of cities such as Kolkata. But in this framework, the imaginaries of development are necessarily embedded in compulsory extraction, whether that be of cultural economies, minerals, timber, or land for development. [...]

[B]adlands get turned into places that need saving from being “wasted” by the carelessness and unimaginative shortsightedness of villagers and Adivasis, who are simply seen as ill-equipped to deal with the progression of the global economy.

These days, it is hard to find a piece of the “khoai” that has not been subjected to projects of agriculture, forestry, or have been subjugated to [...] property ownership [...]. As the figures of the plantation and its attendant cultures of enclosure and theft of commons creep into places previously overlooked by the tentacles of global extractive forces, many, if not most khoai areas are mobilized to be “redeemed” into productive little plots legible to capital.

I have to wonder about the processes of consent and negotiation that have informed such projects. [...] These areas were in the past predominantly inhabited by Adivasis or Indigenous peoples of India, who had resisted the [...] hierarchies [...].

Badlands such as the “khoai” present a challenge to capitalist imaginaries because they defy its temporalities and its compulsion to make all aspects of being productive and legible to exchanges that foster logics of uninhibited growth. [...]

What, then, does it mean to care for wastelands? [...]

What histories are paved over by concrete? What does development mean in places where inequality is still rife, but there are shiny new roads? What does a future look like, where we can let badlands and “wastelands” just be, as part of ecological and cultural commons?

---

All text above by: Aadita Chaudhury. "Caring for Badlands". The Otter, Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). Emotional Ecologies series. Ed. Jessica M. DeWitt and Sarah E. York-Bertram. 14 July 2023. [Photography by Aadita Chaudhury, included in the original article. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[digitalnewberry]

Indigenous food sovereignty

Alcatraz-Indianland : occupation, Nov 20, 1969, to the "rip-off", June 11, 1971, 1971

“If you’re walking through a supermarket, bring your ancestors home with you.” – Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot)

Since time immemorial, Indigenous food systems have nourished and continue to nourish Indigenous communities and cultures. From harvesting corn and wild rice to picking berries and plants or hunting buffalo and deer, the diverse cuisines of Indigenous people are influenced by their geographic locations.

However, centuries of colonization have separated Indigenous communities from their traditional foods. Federal policies promoting settler colonialism, land theft, and forced removal of Native people disrupted food systems and lifeways. Native Nutrition Educator Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot) explains this as: “…a loss of land, a loss of rights, a loss of knowledge, environmental toxins, cultural oppression and a modern lifestyle that impedes our access to traditional foods.” As a result, Native people have had to reimagine their existence after being forced onto reservations, often on lands that are foreign to them...

Read the full post at newberry.org

[111seedhillroad]

If you call yourself an animist, you aren't one. Not trying to True Scotsman about this. animist is a label invented by anthropologists to understand people whose spiritual practices, cosmology, symbolic vocabulary and so on are inseparable and indistinguishable from their subsistence lifeways. In the context of so-called animist cultures, "the spiritual" is a nonsensical category, as is "the material".

People taking up the label are at best interpreting what we know anthropologically about these cultures and turning it into yet another religious system. It takes truly an enduring shift in one's state of consciousness that is situated in natural environments to approach what animist indigenous and ancestral cultures experience(d).

This isn't to discourage people, but to clarify. I think its still important to engage with what we regard as the spiritual as its always been a way that humans have tried to make the journey back home.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Connecting Spinozan currents to Indigenous resurgence

While we hope some of the affinities between Spinozan currents and Indigenous worldviews are emergent throughout this chapter, we want to spend some time thinking about them directly, especially in light of the relational conceptions we have outlined above. We think the relational conceptions of anarchism and friendship are resonant with (though necessarily distinct from) the lifeways of Indigenous peoples and many other societies that ground their worlds in connectedness to each other and the places they inhabit. For instance, writer and facilitator Zainab Amadahy offers a “relationship framework” that sees all life as fundamentally interconnected:

We two-leggeds are inter-connected with each other and with other life on the planet — indeed, even to the planet itself and beyond. What we think, say, and do impacts, directly and indirectly, everything and everyone else, which also affect us. We are further impacted by ancestors and will impact generations to come. Some of us even believe the reverse; that we can impact our ancestors and that our descendants impact us. In any case, we are clearly “in relationship” whether we acknowledge, fully understand and respect the concept or not.[81]

In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he elaborated on his notion of place-based Indigenous ethics, which he calls “grounded normativity.” Coulthard shows how Indigenous resistance and values are literally grounded in the ongoing renewal of reciprocal relationships with land:

I don’t think you come to these things on your own. We’re always kind of embedded and constituted by what’s around us. The whole book I wrote [Red Skin, White Masks] is based on this. I’m nothing; I’m just a product of the messy relationships that have formed me over time. And the point about the book is, we’ve tended to think of these relationships as anthropocentric. But we’re also shaped by the other-than-human relations that we’re thrown into, including relationships to place and land itself, and that can have an effect on our perspective; it can shape our normativities, or what we think is right or wrong.[82]

Red Skin, White Masks shows how these relational webs have been foundational for Indigenous resurgence against settler colonialism, and inexorably connected to the struggle over land:

The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.[83]

From this perspective, settler colonialism is an attack on Indigenous bodies and lands, and on the grounded normativities that sustain them. It is an attack on Indigenous forms of life. For the same reason, Coulthard suggests that recovering, sustaining, and defending these forms of life becomes crucial to decolonization and resistance:

Repetition, doing things, shapes how you see things. And depending on what that practice is, it can double back and shape how you do things. And in a land-based context, that kind of cyclical, dual conditioning—how we produce the necessities of our lives shapes our spiritual understandings and those can, over time, double back and shape how we go about doing things in the material sense. What we’re seeing now to validate this is that Indigenous people have been dragged away from those practices violently, into other ones oriented around a different mode of production, a different way of producing the necessities of life, through resource extraction, and that is now shaping our normative worlds; what we see as right or wrong. And it’s because these long-standing practices are being disrupted. Now what we’re doing with Dechinta and other land-based practices is we’re re-establishing—in an impure form because we’re all learning again—these different normative practices and worlds. And an important part of that is our relationship with land and other-than-human kin. So prefiguration is that emphasis on the importance of practice, and shaping even what we think our ends should be … it’s a very practical ethics … That’s not to devalue it; I actually hold this more valuable than abstract normative traditions where you have to dissociate yourself from your relationships in order to come up with pure principles, and that just results in a never-ending, always-there gap between what our ideals are, and where our shitty world is at. It justifies that. In theory we have it nailed down, we just haven’t quite approximated that in our lives and institutions. In contrast, the grounded normativity, practical, prefigurative starting place is saying no, those ideals are formed by what we do with our lives—by the relationships that we sustain and renew.[84]

In a way that resonates with the relational conception of anarchism we explored above, Coulthard speaks to the importance of prefiguration: nurturing relationships informed by reciprocity with human and other-than-human kin. Similarly, in her book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Leanne Simpson writes that she is “not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house, or our own houses.[85]

Recovering forms of life that have been subjugated or ruled out entails resistance and transgressing of laws or norms, but these negations are only what is visible from the perspective of Empire. It is clear that this is not resistance for its own sake, or (only) because Empire is monstrous: resurgent forms of life are also about values and connections worth defending and nurturing.

While there may be resonances with anarchism, Coulthard and Simpson are speaking about the resurgence of specific, Indigenous forms of life. Where we live, resonances and affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous forms of life are always marked by the violence of settler colonialism. Our lives are inextricably linked to structures bent on the eradication of Indigenous life and the exploitation of Indigenous land. Navigating these uncertain connections requires dealing with difficult ethical questions.

In our part of the world, it is clear that we are living in the midst of Indigenous resurgence. All over Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples are reasserting their ties and responsibilities to their lands, refusing the racist and heteropatriarchal divisions imposed by Empire, and recovering relationships based in care and consent. This is an intensification of what has been happening since colonization began.

For non-Indigenous people—and for white, European-descended settlers who live on Indigenous land, specifically—this can be profoundly unsettling. Can non-Indigenous people support Indigenous resurgence? Can alliances productively stretch across the colonial divide? Through messy, uneven processes, settlers and Indigenous peoples are answering these questions together. Many non-Indigenous people are beginning to see themselves as settlers, complicit in ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous forms of life. Black and Indigenous communities are forging alliances to resist the intertwined violences of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. As Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau write,

These dreams of freedom mean that our acts of resistance are inextricably linked as Afrikan peoples and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. But fundamentally, what this means is that we need to seriously, purposefully and with urgency begin to look to each other—not to the state—for our self-determination.[86]

As Indigenous resurgence and Black uprising reshape life throughout North America, new affinities and new forms of co-resistance are emerging. It is increasingly clear that decolonization is fundamental to all struggles to dismantle Empire and live differently here and now in North America. Decolonization has fundamentally shifted the values, priorities, and organizing practices of many anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and other radicals. As Harsha Walia writes,

A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women and environmental justice.[87]

Indigenous people have forged alliances with ranchers and farmers resisting pipelines, with migrants resisting border imperialism, and with Black communities resisting criminalization and the prison industrial complex. They have linked up with anarchists while challenging them to rethink colonial conceptions of nation, territory, tradition, and authority. Some settlers are learning to take responsibility for developing relationships with the people whose land they are on, and learning to support Indigenous leadership. Indigenous resurgence has pushed non-Indigenous people to learn the histories and protocols of the lands where they live, to ask what it means to honor treaties, and what it means to live on land where treaties were never signed. In our conversation with Coulthard, he spoke to the potential of recovering Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjugated knowledges and forms of life, and exploring affinities between them:

Coulthard: If those [Indigenous] relationships to land and place and those sustaining connections are destroyed, then our views change on what’s good, what’s just. So what we’re trying to do in terms of land-based decolonizing education is to ensure that those practical relationships that inform our philosophical systems and vice versa are maintained to the best of our ability, and that requires a struggle and conflict with the forces that are trying to destroy it. Nick and carla: It seems like white settlers are the ones who’ve allowed their own grounded normativities to be destroyed, or they have been destroyed, at least mostly. And we’ve been invited to participate in the destruction of Indigenous peoples’ grounded normativities. Coulthard: I think the point that’s important here is that we’re talking about hegemonies. So grounded normativities are being wiped out by a hegemonic system—a system of dominance. So when you say “the problem with settler life is that it’s doing this,” I would say, in my more generous moments, that the hegemonic settler form of life is destroying Indigenous forms of life, but settlers have a whole host of other grounded normativities that have themselves been violently ruled out of existence. Whether that’s radical ecological stuff to anarchist stuff to Marxist stuff—whatever: they’re subaltern knowledges and practices. And there are affinities between those that we can map out and explore. There’s a lot within non-Indigenous settler traditions that have suffered their own erasure that might be brought back to the fore. And that’s way better than the alternative, which is stealing what we’ve got. So what Foucault would refer to as a resurgence of subaltern knowledges. There’s a rich history of overlap and affinities that I think need to be drawn on, and crucial to avoid the violences of cultural appropriation and “becoming Indigenous.”[88]

Exploring affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions and forms of life raises a lot of questions. There is a deep ambivalence to the recovery of non-Indigenous traditions, or the creation of new alternatives, especially those that involve direct connections to land. Deepening these relationships—with seasons, territories, plants, and other-than-human forces where we live—can end up entrenching dispossession and colonization.

From conservation to farming to fishing, many settler (especially European) traditions have evolved or been sustained through Indigenous dispossession and an attack on Indigenous forms of life. Settler colonialism has always included a project of attaching white bodies to Indigenous land, and attempts to “reclaim the commons” can erase Indigenous presence.

At the same time, there are emergent alliances and relationships between settlers and Indigenous people, based in consent and shared responsibility. Settlers are critically revaluing some of their own traditions in ways that enable new affinities and solidarities. Settlers have been able to offer their own practical land-connected skills and knowledge like herbalism, bioremediation, cooking, carpentry, ecological gardening and more, alongside the skills and knowledges held by Indigenous people.

In our experience, it has been settlers rooted in their own traditions and values who are most capable of building strong relationships with Indigenous peoples, showing up in meaningful ways, and decentering themselves and staying on the sidelines when it is appropriate. It is people with strong friendships—their own webs of care and support—who are able to consistently support decolonization, whether that means supporting frontline land defense struggles or urban Indigenous initiatives, or cultivating meaningful, long-term relationships with local Indigenous folks where they live.

These capacities are not based on abstract morality, nor are they about having the most bang-on anticolonial analysis. They are based on a web of connectivity that enables people to think and act differently. One thing that is clear to us about Indigenous resurgence is that it is driven and sustained by these deep connections and relationships that colonization seeks to destroy. Rebuilding and sustaining these connections is clearly at the root of decolonization—for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, differently.

How can settlers and Indigenous people explore affinities between autonomous forms of life? What are the potentials and pitfalls of revitalizing non-Indigenous traditions (or inventing new ones) on stolen ground? These questions cannot be answered in the abstract, but are already being asked and answered collectively, over and over again, in multiple ways, across different territories, movements, and struggles. Hanging onto these as ethical questions, we think, helps get beyond the shame and guilt of moralism that can be so immobilizing (and counterproductive) for settlers—especially white settlers. Instead of the narcissistic shame that impels settlers to ask for and demand absolution from Indigenous peoples, ethical questions can shift people towards active responsibility that is rooted in consent, as Indigenous people often emphasize. For us, this means finding the wiggle room of freedom—the capacity to work on our relationships—and participate in new and old forms of nurturance and resistance.