If Your Anti-Trump Movement Is Not Anti-Colonial You Are Wasting Your Time And Ours

From The Decolonizer:

Donald Dump has been making a lot of people loose their shit these past couple of week he has been in office. Executive orders by his pen have forcefully approved the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines, initiated the U.S.-Mexico boarder wall, and even established a travel ban targeted at predominately Muslim countries. An order that froze funds for Obamacare will severely cut funding for Planned Parenthood and other birth control programs.

Many have protested, from the continued women’s protests following the Woman’s March to the emergency occupations of airports to help banned refugees. The politics of those who protest are varied and dynamic from the liberal reactionary to the anarchist black bloc, and everywhere in between. What unifies the masses in actions across the country is a general disapproval of Dump and his policies. Yet, this dissent, which does not even amount to a strong pro-impeachment stance, is still waiting for a unifying framework that will make its goals clear to itself.

So, while Standing Rock water defenders are being forcefully evicted via the Trump executive order, THE DECOLONIZER says:

That goes for you too anarchist. We are all for punching Nazis (really we are) but the pursuit of an anarchist agenda without the leadership Native peoples will only replicate settler relationships. Any insurrectionary organizing against Trump on this land (Turtle Island) that has been stolen by white Europeans, must be rooted in an anti-colonial framework. If you are punching Nazis let it be because they are fascists as well as white colonizers. If you are destroying public property let it be because it is white property that was stolen by the U.S. settler colonial state. If you seek the abolition of the state, let it also be the abolition of settler colonial power and the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty.

As for you liberals…

Many of you take issue with Trump, but are absolutely fine with the white supremacist settler colonial system that you and your ancestors have profited from for centuries. You have no real qualms about racism or misogyny, you just don’t want to be reminded of your investments by a loud and overt bastard. Your rallying cry is “make America subtlety racist again”. You would give anything in the world to trade Trump for Hillary Clinton or Obama. When the Obama administration’s drone strikes and bombings have caused the very war-torn conditions that refugees are fleeing from. You couple discontent with the Trump administration with a strange nationalist pride. You hold signs that say “this is not us” or “we are better than this”. But Trump is as American as it gets and everyone knows it.

Fuck “not my president”. How about NO PRESIDENTS

No presidents, no cabinet, no administration. NO COLONIAL STATE. It is time to let go of an America that is inherently racist, inherently violent, inherently imperialist. An America that is inherently patriarchal, that organizes itself via gendered violence, an America that was founded on genocide, land-theft, and the force labor of Black Africans.

No, we are definitely not all immigrants

Stop saying that. Some of us were brought here in chains against our will and some had already been here. For thousands of years before any European had touched this land. There are better ways of being in solidarity with immigrants and refugees. To say that we are all immigrants is Indigenous erasure.

A anti-Trump movement that fails to build anti-colonial foundations will be just another settler protest, impotent and unable to bring together the great masses people for the purposes of authentic liberation.

The border wall is about the securing of stolen settler territory along a border that crossed Mexicans, many of whom are Chicanx people Indigenous to the region. The travel ban is about Christian hegemony, a pillar of the U.S. settler colonial project. The racism, patriarchy, and anti-queerness come from colonial social relations that were imported by European settlers and institutionalized. The spearheading of DAP and Keystone are the clearest instances of colonialism and environmental racism.

There is but one commonality that cuts across all other concerns regarding a Trump presidency. That commonality is the situation of continued settler colonialism via U.S. occupation of Indigenous lands.

Don’t Just Organize, Organize Against Colonialism.

Angela Davis once said “radical simply means grabbing something by the root”. Your movement just aint radical if you are not getting at the root of the issue. On this land the root of the issue is settler colonialism. Dissent is at level where some real substantial organizing can take place. Many have been urging us to organize. But to organize without a sound basis is reactionary. THE DECOLONIZER SAYS: organize against colonialism!

Towards an anti-colonial anarchism

Eurocentricism, re-colonization, and settler colonialism

By Vanessa Sloan Morgan, Intercontinental Cry

Unnamed anarchist from Europe [interviewer]: Particularly in Canada, the term “First Nations” is frequently used to describe Indigenous societies. This tends to confuse radical Europeans who consider all references to “nations” as necessarily conservative. Can you shed some light on the Indigenous usage of the term?

Taiaike Alfred from the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawá:ke [interviewee]: Europeans should not transpose their experience with nationhood on others. I myself do not think the term accurately describes our people – only our own languages and words can do that – but it is useful in a sense; it conveys an equality of status in theory between our societies and that of the colonizer. And it reiterates the fact of our prior occupancy of this continent (Alfred, 2010).

The languages that we speak build walls. The English language, for instance, is noun-based, territorial and possessive by nature. Behind this language, however, is a distinct way of relating – one that is exemplified by the interview excerpt above. Sharing a language does not imply consensus or commonality. In this case, although Taiake Alfred does not agree in full with the term ‘First Nations’, he does differentiate First Nation and Indigenous Nationhood from European, Westphalia conceptions of nation-state. He dually describes why, from his perspective as a member of the Mohawk Nation from Kahnawá:ke, this terminology resists Eurocentric impositions of governance but also responds to colonial power-imbalances. Social movements, especially in North America, often fall carelessly into colonial traps of Eurocentric thought and colonial universalism, as exampled above[1]. On the surface, though, it is clear why anarchist movements and anarchic theory may be attracted to anti-colonial struggles.

Opposition to the state and to capitalism, to domination and to oppression, are at the core of anarchist and autonomous movements; they are also at the core of anti-colonial struggles that see the state, and by mutual extension the capitalist system, as de-legitimate institutions of authority that ‘Other’ and colonize by way of white supremacist notions of cultural hegemony (see Fanon, 1967; Smith, 2006). Anarchist movements, however, often fail to account for the multiple layers of power that are at play, both contemporarily and historically. As Barker (2012) critically contends, many of the Occupy sites, for example, recolonized by uncritically occupying already occupied lands. The settler privilege of autonomous organizers within these movements upheld hegemonic/colonial territoriality. Romanticized for stewardship and place-based relations to land, Indigenous peoples have even been idolized as the ‘original’ anarchist societies (Barker & Pickerill, 2012). Indigenous Nationhood Movements actively seek to rebuild nation-to-nation relations with settlers by re-empowering Indigenous self-determination and traditional governments (Indigenous Nationhood Movement, 2015). Nation-to-nation, though, cannot be taken in its settler colonial form; indeed, this assumption concerning a homogenous form of government was, and is, at the core of colonialism: “modern government…the European believed, was based upon principles true in every country. Its strengths lay in its universalism” (Mitchell, 2002: 54). Respecting Indigenous Nationhood as a culturally, politically, and spiritually distinct movement propelled by and for Indigenous peoples is integral. Reasons for and tactics in support of these movements may vary, however they inevitably overlap in many offensives with anarchist anti-authoritarian agendas.

With Eurocentric understandings of an anti-colonial anarchism at the core of many activist oriented renditions of such thinking, activists and scholars alike have heeded words of advice to those amidst struggles against colonial forces in settler colonial contexts. As stated by Harsha Walia in discussing autonomy and cross-cultural, colonial-based struggle:

“Non-natives must recognize our own role in perpetuating colonialism within our solidarity efforts. We can actively counter this by… discussing the nuanced issues of solidarity, leadership, strategy and analysis – not in abstraction, but within our real and informed and sustained relationships with Indigenous peoples.” (2012)

By respecting difference, even spatializing autonomy, settler peoples would do well to not transplant – to settle – their perceptions of autonomy, of solidarity, of leadership, and of strategy onto Indigenous movements. Alternatively in settler colonial contexts, anarchist struggles against colonial authority, and thus capitalistic systems, invariably require respectful engagement with Indigenous movements. This is integral if re-colonizing tendencies of anarchist movements–oftentimes primarily driven by European settlers–are to be prevented. Anarchist actors, especially when operating in settler colonial spaces, must understand the nuances of place specific histories and colonial processes. As Lasky suggests, there is “potential for directly relating to each other and changing our relationships with each other in ways that withdraw consent from ‘the system’ and re-creates alternatives that empower our collective personhoods now” (2011: np). As Alfred mentions however, Eurocentric tendencies have oftentimes perpetuated colonial relations of power. As a result, the very structures of oppression that anarchic thought starkly opposes, but also stemmed from, creep into relational geographies.

References

Alfred, T. (2010). Interview with Gerald Taiaiake Alfred about Anarchism and Indigenism in North America. Retrieved from http://www.alpineanarchist.org/r_i_indigenism_english.html

Barker, A. (2012). Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America. Social Movement Studies, 11(3-4), 327–334. doi:10.1080/14742837.2012.708922

Barker, A. J., & Pickerill, J. (2012). Radicalizing Relationships To and Through Shared Geographies: Why Anarchists Need to Understand Indigenous Connections to Land and Place. Antipode, 44(5), 1705–1725. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01031.x

Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Indigenous Nationhood Movement. (2015). About. Retrieved from http://nationsrising.org/about/

Lewis, A. (2012). Decolonizing anarchism: Expanding Anarcha-Indigenism in theory and practice (Masters thesis). Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. Retrieved from http://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/7563/1/Lewis_Adam_G_201209_MA.pdf

Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

Smith, A. (2006). Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy. In Incite! (Ed.), The colour of violence: The INCITE! anthology (pp. 66–73). Cambridge, UK: South End Press.

Walia, H. (2012). Decolonizing together: Moving beyond a politics of solidarity toward a practice of decolonization. Briar Patch, January/February. Retrieved from http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together

[1] Adam (Lewis, 2012) explores this topic in depth.