#when posted amongst the slew of voting as harm rediction aritcles that've gone up the last several years
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
what part of the article says people can't do both, let alone encourage them not to for 'political points' ?
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
#srb#genuinely wanna give you the benefit of the doubt but that is a long ass read and even the tidbit quoted doesn't say you can't do both#in fact i think this article is exactly what's necessary to get more people to do both#when posted amongst the slew of voting as harm rediction aritcles that've gone up the last several years#while you'd be hard pressed to find one that brings up direct action being just as vital if not Essential for voting as harm reduction#to mean anything substantial in the long run#this article is providing an essential perspective to the very idea to ballot praxis imo#the sooner we start seeing the left's diversity as different organs serving different but just as essential fuctions to a greater body#the better#a voting leftist will never be better than a notvoting leftist by principal alone the real world just doesn't work like that#so maybe we should stop making it All About That and start building each other up with every form of aid and resistance voting or otherwise#what part of pretending this isn't a huge part of voting in the US despite what ways it can prolong our continued survival helps anybody?
321 notes
·
View notes