Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Sun May 21, 2017 7:25 pm

Decolonization in the Caribbean #7: From Russia with...Solidarity?

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For those attached to the United States, whether as eager patriotic citizens or uncomfortable colonial subjects, the past week was filled with an unbelievable amount of revelations and insinuations about Donald Trump’s campaign, Donald Trump’s administration and Russia. The relationship between the US and Russia is at a point that would be almost unrecognizable to someone just a few years ago. There is a Republican president of the US, repeatedly praising the leader of Russia Vladimir Putin. And rather than align his statements with the underlying adversarial relationship between the two countries, he goes to any extent to not back down, even to the point of maligning the US rhetorically in order to maintain his praise for Russia and its leader. Early on, you could argue that this was due to Trump’s blind neophyte level of political acumen, but now it just looks suspicious.

This was even compounded to a degree that basically brutalized any possible commonsense understanding of the situation when the day after firing the Director of the FBI (and then admitting it was in part because of the investigation about any connections to Trump and his campaign), Trump had a smiling and friendly photo-op with Russian officials, including one who the US intelligence community argues is a spy. Whether or not he shared US intelligence secrets in his need to boast and impress random people is beside the point. While he is lamenting the non-stop "fake news" Russia story that keeps morphing, contracting and then expanding in the media, he then gives the Russia store more suspicious looking legs by having a photo-op with them?!? Laña', hekkua'.

But as I have been reading and following this, I have also been immersed in the past week in UN history and politics, of which Russia is a significant actor, and not in the way we, who live in the colonies of the US, would normally acknowledge. After all, Guam might not be on any list of colonies (or non-self-governing territories) if not for Russian pressure.

After World War II the US was adamant that every nation place their colonies in the UN system, but did not feel obligated to offer up their own possessions, such as Guam. After Russia drew attention to this hypocrisy, the US grudgingly agreed to list Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. During the following decades where the US engaged with the United Nations on decolonization in a very minimal way, Russia and other countries ideologically critical of the US and its policies, were often the loudest voices calling on the US to decolonize their colonies. Eventually the US stopped engaged completely and no longer attends most of the UN meetings related to decolonization. That is why for the past three seminars I have attended, the US did not even bother to send a representative.

But as decolonization is no longer an important ideological wedge issue, as there are few active independence or nationalism movements, or fiery decolonial challenges to the past and present world order, so too has the investment of countries such as Russia in pushing aggressively for the decolonization of colonies held by the US or its allies. The rhetoric is still there, and at each seminar or forum, there will be statements calling on all administering powers or member states to take seriously their obligations, but not much more.

This is one of the ways in which being from a colony and visiting the UN can be surreal. Growing up in Guam, you are unconsciously taught that the US and Uncle Sam hold a monopoly on freedom and liberty and justice, and that those who are its stated enemies, whether it be Iran, China, North Korea or Russia, are the antithesis, the places where all the beautiful things in the world go to die. I am not making an statements on the level of freedom or democracy in these countries. But within the UN context, the US offers no help, no kind words, no solidarity and simply tells you that you, your island and your rights all belong to us and so you will be happy with whatever you are given and that is the end of it.

Decolonization to the UN is seen as something that challenges its borders, its sovereignty, like a favorite pet achieving consciousness and then demanding better treatment and rights. Guam at the UN is seen as something that is trying to take away power, to steal away authority, to challenge who is boss. You love your pet, because the relationship gives you a particular power and authority, an ability to manage its existence, set the boundaries for your love. But few people would want their pet to suddenly become self-aware and demand their own rights and chance at determining their destiny or existence. All the love you felt, melts into feelings of betrayal at because the loss of the power differential makes you feel like you have lost the relationship as well.


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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 16, 2017 1:39 pm

A Basic Call to Consciousness

The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World

Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977


Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have great love for our country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations. Each of us were created in those lands, and it is our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will spring the future generations of the Ongwhehonwhe. We walk about with a great respect, for the Earth is a very sacred place.

We are not a people who demand, or ask anything of the Creators of Life, but instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of Life are still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all living things. To this day, the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and the other gifts of the Creation. In these places we still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth.

We have seen that not all people of the Earth show the same kind of respect for this world and its beings. The Indo-European people who have colonized our lands have shown very little respect for the things that create and support Life. We believe that these people ceased their respect for the world a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people of the world believed in the same Way of Life, that of harmony with the universe. All lived according to the Natural Ways.

Around ten thousand years ago, peoples who spoke Indo-European languages lived in the area which today we know as the Steppes of Russia. At that time, they were a Natural World people who lived off the land. They had developed agriculture, and it is said that they had begun the practice of animal domestication. It is not known that they were the first people in the world to practice animal domestication. The hunters and gatherers who roamed the area probably acquired animals from the agricultural people, and adopted an economy, based on the herding and breeding of animals.

Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."

The area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the homeland, in ancient times, of various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. The Semitic people were among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This development led to the early development of towns, and eventually cities. The manipulation of the waters, another form of spirit life, represented another way in which humans developed a technology which reproduced a function of Nature.

Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical social organization crystallized. The ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly because of the very nature of cities. Cities are obviously population concentrations. Most importantly though, they are places which must import the material needs of this concentration from the countryside. This means that the Natural World must be subjugated, extracted from, and exploited in the interest of the city. To give order to this process, the Semitic world developed early codes of law. They also developed the idea of monotheism to serve as a spiritual model for their material and political organization.

Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between the Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several millenia, the two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millenia B.C., some Indo-Europeans, most specifically the Greeks, had adopted the practice of building cities, thus becoming involved in the process which they named "Civilization."

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilizations. The Semitic peoples invented kilns which enabled the creation of pottery for trade, and storage of surpluses. These early kilns eventually evolved into ovens which could generate enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, tin and bronze. The Indo-Europeans developed a way of smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final meshing occurs. Rome is also the true birthplace of Christianity. The process that has become the culture of the West is historically and linguistically a Semitic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in the early development of this kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God. It was a religion which imposed itself exclusively of all other beliefs. The local people of the European forests were a people who believed in the spirits of the forests, waters, hills and the land; Christianity attacked those beliefs, and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. The Christian peoples, who possessed superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were able to militarily subjugate the tribal peoples of Europe.

The availability of iron led to the development of tools which could cut down the forest, the source of charcoal to make more tools. The newly cleared land was then turned by the newly developed iron plow, which was, for the first time, pulled by horses. With that technology many fewer people would work much more land, and many other people were effectively displaced to become soldiers and landless peasants. The rise of that technology ushered in the Feudal Age and made possible, eventually, the rise of new cities and growing trade. It also spelled the beginning of the end of the European forest, although that process took a long time to complete.

The eventual rise of cities and the concurrent rise of the European state created the thrust of expansion and search for markets which led men, such as Columbus, to set sail across the Atlantic. The development of sailing vessels and navigation technologies made the European "discovery" of the Americas inevitable.

The Americas provided Europeans a vast new area for expansion and material exploitation. Initially, the Americas provided new materials and even finished materials for the developing world economy which was based on the Indo-European technologies. European civilization has a history of rising and falling as its technologies reach their material and cultural limits. The finite Natural world has always provided a kind of built-in contradiction to Western expansion.

The Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal. The Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an unassimilable element to the civilizations of the West. The forests provided materials for larger ships, and some areas provided sources of slave labor for the conquering invaders. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century, North America was already a leader in the area of the development of extractive technology.

The hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared for the purpose of providing farmlands. Those forests were destroyed to create charcoal for the forges of the iron smelters and blacksmiths. By the 1890's, the West had turned to coal, a fossil fuel, to provide the energy necessary for the many new forms of machinery which had been developed. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, oil had replaced coal as a source of energy.

The Western culture has been horribly exploitative and destructive of the Natural World. Over 140 species of birds and animals were utterly destroyed since the European arrival in the Americas, largely because they were unusable in the eyes of the invaders. The forests were leveled, the waters polluted, the Native people subjected to genocide. The vast herds of herbivores were reduced to mere handfuls, the buffalo nearly became extinct. Western technology and the people who have employed it have been the most amazingly destructive forces in all of human history. No natural disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages counted as many victims.

But like the hardwood forests, the fossil fuels are also finite resources. As the second half of the Twentieth Century has progressed, the people of the West have begun looking to other forms of energy to motivate their technology. Their eyes have settled on atomic energy, a form of energy production which has by-products which are the most poisonous substances ever known to Man.

Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas of more efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet is the clearest of signals that our species is in trouble. It is a signal which most Westerners have chosen to ignore.

The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing. Our ancient teaching warned us that if Man interfered with the Natural Laws, these things would come to be. When the last of the Natural Way of Life is gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with it. And our Way of Life is fast disappearing, a victim of the destructive processes.

The other position papers of the Hau de no sau nee have outlined our analysis of economic and legal oppression. But our essential message to the world is a basic call to consciousness. The destruction of the Native cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet. The technologies and social systems which have destroyed the animal and plant life are also destroying the Native people. And that process is Western Civilization.

We know that there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the intent of our message. But experience has taught us that there are few who are willing to seek out a method for moving toward any real change. But, if there is to be a future for all beings on this planet, we must begin to seek the avenues of change.

The processes of colonialism and imperialism which have affected the Hau de no sau nee are but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world. The system of reservations employed against our people is a microcosm of the system of exploitation used against the whole world. Since the time of Marco Polo, the West has been refining a process that mystified the peoples of the Earth.

The majority of the world does not find its roots in Western culture or traditions. The majority of the world finds its roots in the Natural World, and it is the Natural World, and the traditions of the Natural World, which must prevail if we are to develop truly free and egalitarian societies.

It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical analysis of the West's historical processes, to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance which has rendered their people insensitive to the true nature of their lives.

We must all consciously and continuously challenge every model, every program, and every process that the West tries to force upon us. Paulo Friere wrote, in his book, the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," that it is the nature of the oppressed to imitate the oppressor, and by such actions try to gain relief from the oppressive condition. We must learn to resist that response to oppression.

The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support Life -- the air, the waters, the trees -- all the things which support the sacred web of Life.

We feel that the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can continue to contribute to the survival potential of the human species. The majority of our peoples still live in accordance with the traditions which find their roots in the Mother Earth. But the Native peoples have need of a forum in which our voice can be heard. And we need alliances with the other peoples of the world to assist in our struggle to regain and maintain our ancestral lands and to protect the Way of Life we follow.

We know that this is a very difficult task. Many nation states may feel threatened by the position that the protection and liberation of Natural World peoples and cultures represents, a progressive direction which must be integrated into the political strategies of people who seek to uphold the dignity of Man. But that position is growing in strength, and it represents a necessary strategy in the evolution of progressive thought.

The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world's surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.



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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 12, 2017 3:14 pm

Aztlan Underground: Sacred Circle


https://youtu.be/8_BLB2mqsLM
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 08, 2018 10:04 am

https://indigenousx.com.au/amy-mcquire- ... s-racism/#


AMY MCQUIRE: MAINSTREAM FEMINISM STILL BLIND TO ITS RACISM


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AMY MCQUIRE IS A DARUMBAL AND SOUTH SEA ISLANDER. SHE IS BUZZFEED AUSTRALIA’S INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS REPORTER AND WORKED AS A RESEARCHER ON JOHN PILGER’S FILM UTOPIA.


Racism is one that all women in the women’s movement must start to come to terms with. There is no doubt in my mind that racism is expressed by women in the movement. Its roots are many and they go deep.” – Pat O’Shane

Those words were written by former magistrate, First Nations woman Pat O’Shane more than two decades ago and yet still represent an uncomfortable truth for mainstream feminism. Similar criticisms have also been made by First Nations women like Jackie Huggins, Judy Atkinson and Aileen Morton-Robinson and are revived and re-spoken by younger feminists like Larissa Behrendt, Celeste Liddle, Nayuka Gorrie and many more who continue the fight to hold mainstream feminism to account.

The roots of racism within mainstream feminism are still there, under the soil. But that’s not to say there haven’t been changes in the mainstream feminist movement. Rather than outright denial on racism and how race impacts gender, an even more damaging phenomenon has taken hold: co-option.

Intersectionality, grounded in critical race theory, is now used by many white feminists but has been watered down to a buzzword: a superficial display of “inclusiveness” whereby it is used to deflect rather than interrogate the way race impacts the lived experience of gender, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability. An example of this, is the way Aboriginal women are consigned to a footnote with no context in articles about domestic violence, aligning the staggering statistics with the continuing colonial portrayal of the Aboriginal ‘other’ as inherently violent.

Much like International Women’s Day, which has become a day for corporates and fancy breakfasts that few women outside of the upper and middle classes can attend – the term has been re-purposed to fit into a limited type of white feminist thought.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time being angry at the failings of white liberal feminism, largely because it is the type of feminism that finds the loudest voice in mainstream media. Because it has this voice it has become synonymous with ‘feminism’, despite the movement itself being a broad church. I even questioned whether to continue calling myself a feminist.

I have realised that as an Aboriginal feminist, I don’t have to continue reacting to these failures. There is already a foundation built by brilliant black women which allows us to continue developing an Aboriginal feminism. And the reason this is so important is because the unique experiences of Aboriginal people, the way racism impacts our lived experiences as women, brotherboys, sistergirls and non-binary peoples, is a matter of life and death.

While the national conversation around domestic violence and sexual assault is undoubtedly important, often Aboriginal voices are bypassed altogether. An example of this was the recent Our Watch media awards, where a white male journalist was given an accolade for reporting on “the violence no one talks about”. Aboriginal women have been talking about violence for decades – the ‘silence’ is not the issue. It is that no one listens unless it is spoken in a way that bypasses the role of white Australia, and places blame right back onto Aboriginal people themselves.

That is why arguments about Aboriginal culture being inherently violent are so appealing. There may have been instances of violence in pre-colonial Aboriginal society – but from my perspective, if Aboriginal people were participating in the level of violence we see now in many communities, we would not have survived for tens of thousands of years, and we would not have developed a sophisticated system of land management, astronomy and science that intertwined with our spirituality.

But the cultural arguments around Aboriginal violence find an audience in a white Australia that denies its continuing role in the current circumstances affecting our people. And white feminists can often be complicit in the perpetuation of the myth, particularly when it comes to ‘saving black women and children’ from the hands of Aboriginal men. The fact is, Aboriginal communities are not inhuman – we care deeply about violence and the impact on our people, particularly our children. But the conversation has become dangerous due to the centring of white outrage and the appetite for black pathology which borders on pornographic.

Meanwhile, Aboriginal women are painted as depraved for this perceived silence. Like the colonial images that rendered Aboriginal women as uncaring ‘infanticidal cannibals’ who did not love their children, we are again caricatured as powerless and unconcerned about our children. This is the real silence: the silencing of the strong Aboriginal women all across the country who have worked day in and day out on this problem in the face of continual slander.

One of these women is Aboriginal early childhood development expert Dr Janet Hammill, who talks about ‘biological genocide’, whereby foetal programming began as early as 50 years after the initial invasion into Aboriginal lands.

Dr Hammill has been writing on violence against Aboriginal women for decades, particularly in the context of trauma and foetal alcohol syndrome, and the impact it has on the developing brain.

The impact of alcohol, drugs, malnutrition and childhood trauma and stress on a developing brain can result in epigenetic changes that affects not just this generation, but the health and wellbeing of future generations.

This is where the arguments around ‘responsibility’ fall flat and why blaming both Aboriginal men for violence, and Aboriginal women for parental neglect, is not just unhelpful, but dangerous.

In an environment centred on demonising our men, the voices of Aboriginal women who want to speak out against violence also become conflicted. Our experiences as women become secondary to defending our men – because we have seen, particularly in the case of the NT Intervention, how moral panics around the safety of women and children can lead to policies that perpetuate violence.

The NT Intervention, which stripped rights away from Aboriginal communities, did not solve the issue of child abuse, as we have seen most recently. It also led to increases in suicide and self-harm rates, and also jailing rates. It is well known that the justice system is violent, and that Aboriginal men who are incarcerated for violent, and even non-violent crimes often come out not healed but traumatised, resulting in anger and rage. This often manifests in further violence, wrought on the self, or on the most vulnerable – Aboriginal women, children and the elderly.

One of the most common critiques of white liberal feminism is how, when talking about violence, it rests heavily on solutions through the justice system and police. For many Aboriginal women, the justice system is structurally violent, and the police are aggravators rather than protectors.

This is not an unfounded fear. We have seen in the case of Ms Dhu and Ms Maher, how our women, who are the fastest growing incarcerated group in the country, are killed, injured and traumatised within its walls. In the case of Ms Dhu, we also see the structural violence of the health system, where nurses and doctors ignored her pain as she slowly lost her life to septicaemia. Ms Dhu’s Aboriginality impacted on the way WA police and the health system viewed her as a woman. She was vulnerable, and hurt, and she needed help, not punishment.

In Tumut, two hours from Canberra, 27-year-old Aboriginal woman Naomi Williams, who was six months pregnant, died after being turned away from the local hospital. The Guardian reported that rather than take her pain seriously, staff referred her to drug and alcohol and mental health workers. Just like Ms Dhu, who was referred to as a ‘fucking junkie’, Naomi’s life and the life of her unborn child were endangered by racist and sexist assumptions.

Race and gender also play a part in the way Aboriginal victims are viewed by the police, the DPP and the courts. If the victim is an Aboriginal woman her humanity is stripped away, regardless of the race of the perpetrator. This is true in the cases of Lynette Daley, Therese Binge, Karen Williams, Petronella Albert, Kwementyaye Green and so many others.

Closer to my home, the injustice surrounding the 1991 murder of an Aboriginal woman named Lynda on the banks of the Fitzroy River was influenced by her Aboriginality. The arresting officer at trial admitted that he had wanted to get “a black for a black”, and so after they had accused one Aboriginal man, they closed all other lines of investigation. The result was a continuing injustice, an open wound on the community: the man they convicted is innocent and is still locked up in the Rockhampton jail.

Another Aboriginal woman who died a similar death on the banks of the same river in 1975 was dehumanised in the media, and again in the justice system. The non-Indigenous man who was with her before she died, and who left her severely injured by the river because he couldn’t be bothered to get an ambulance, had his charges of murder dropped. The case was never reopened.

These women did not inspire national protests and marches through capital cities. Their lives were devalued due to their Aboriginality, both in life and in death.

I write these names down to show that these are not individual incidents. The deaths of these women were due to the structural violence within our institutions that impacted them throughout their lives.

Their lives were devalued by Australia’s refusal to provide the rights of citizenship that so many women in this country take for granted. It impacted their families, and their children, and entire communities who remain mourning under dark clouds of injustice. And it impacted them due to their experiences as Aboriginal women in a society founded on white supremacy, on the theft of black lands and the killing and dispossession of our peoples.

That means that our struggles are often drastically different from those of the white feminist movement, and so we must continue developing our own Aboriginal feminism.

One of the strong black women I look up to, Larissa Behrendt put it beautifully: “Black women will have to fight their own battles; after all, we have been doing so all along…. Black women have created a separate political movement. Our political future will continue to be one that is propelled by the strength of black women. “
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:18 am

Is There No Alternative's blog

The settler-colonial control of Treaty in Aotearoa

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An article which critiques treaties as a formalised mechanism legitimising settler-colonial control in Aotearoa, instead positing autonomous insurrection as an alternative means of collective emancipation.

To have been one of the Ariki (paramount chief) or Rangatira (chief) who signed the Treaty of Waitangi, would’ve been horrifying or relieving, full of reluctance or full of optimism, a desperate scribbling or an unknowing surrender to a deceptive snake-state.

My great-great-great grandancestor Rawiri Awarau was one such Ariki who signed the Treaty of Waitangi at Kaitaia on the 28th of April 1840. I know for a fact, that they signed reluctantly.

As a side note before I begin, I’d like to make clear my use of gender-neutrality when describing ‘male’ Maori ancestors in this article, seeing as “man” and “father” are too tied up in the eurocentric conception of the masculine subject, and seeing as we know that translation can be deception and imposition. Besides, the Maori conception of men, as people might call them today, is far superior to the european conception, for reasons I can’t go into here.

As for how my fellow Maori might react to this, I just say: decolonise your mind by decolonising your use of capital’s language and imperial signs. Or alternatively, as I’ve only just recently started peering into: learn your language.

He Wakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (the declaration of independence) is a stronger document than the Treaty of Waitangi, yes. If we’d had a United Tribal Confederation to interact with the British Crown, Maori would be far better off and Aotearoa wouldn’t be subject to heavy resource extraction, or the establishment of disciplinary institutions like the police, the courts system, and the prison. In fact, settlers and visitors would be treated with a lot more manaakitanga (hospitality) than they are now. But no, instead we have two treaty versions. Both of which, I posit, are completely invalid.

Treaties are pieces of shit. They are literally pieces of shit. Here’s why:
1. A treaty is the formalisation of an exploitative relation, so that a higher power softens their hard-power tactics of domination, and dilutes the negations between oppressor and oppressed onto an agreeable plane. They are necessarily a deception.
2. A treaty is the crystallisation of not just a binding politics of recognition, but a double-binding mutual recognition. This means the oppressed concedes that the oppressor has some amount of validity or legitimacy.
3. A treaty becomes the gold medallion of progress, yet it is nothing more than a fickle promise to be broken over and over.
4. A treaty is the ability for an oppressor to recuperate resistance and institute mediators (blood-traitors) who act as quellers and calmers of fervour.

Treaties, I think, can be seen everywhere. They are the result of a view that all social and political-economic grievances can be resolved through discourse, and synthesis. The capital-labour relation as mediated by trade unions, for example, is one such treaty. All treaties are asymmetrical tools for legitimising psychic repression and physical oppression. But all that treaties can do is postpone the inevitable: revolution.

Although direct causation can never really be proven, I’d argue that the Treaty of Waitangi is actually the reason behind the bikie gang warfare of Aotearoa. Since we became objects (the usual word ‘subjects’ would be giving the oppressor too much merit) of the British Empire, and because New Zealand as its own state was allied in World War II, the fast succession of the need to industrialise the country and urbanise Maori led to a huge loss of identity and connection to whenua (land). This urbanisation and proletarianisation of Maori farm workers, who are surprisingly comparable to the peasants of Tsarist Russia, created a void of self which quickly became filled by contrived whanau-identities (whanau, family) built around the idealised vision of African-american gangs/unions whose political operandi was to fight against the consumerist culture of the United States of Amerikkka. But of course, I’m giving a story of origins, not trying to excuse acts of violence against women which Aotearoa’s and Amerikkka’s gangs have been known for.

I’ll just be honest with you here, my agenda for this piece has always been to urge people to stop working within the framework of the oppressor. Whether that be a racial, gender-based, sexual, or political-economic oppressor, or all of them together. This means exiting the dialectic, and by dialectic I mean the idea that a more objective truth should be abstracted out of the process of disagreement, negation, and binary opposition in discourse. We don’t need to talk through the oppressor-oppressed treaty relation, we just need to get rid of it, the oppressor himself, and any possibility that another might take his seat.

To affirm our brave difference in the face of an oppressive and mutually binding mediation would mean, not a declaration of independence, but a declaration of war. More than ever, our land needs us to fight against the colonial-capital powers who should be killed with the elegant stylings of the Hawaiian slaughter of Mr. James Cook. Just, instead of a single man, we need to slaughter a set of relations between people: that of domination, exploitation,dispossession of ourselves, our land, and our self-activity. Instead of internalising oppressive social relations and being interpellated as subjects and objects of the state rather than individuals of the land (tangata whenua), we should fight to reignite the power of our people.

True autonomy comes from the ability to alter the mythologies surrounding the self. Maori now are frozen as pre-colonial proletarianised hybrids stuck between two worlds. But we are more than a subscription to a paralysis of culture, we are people who can shed the oppressor, give up the ghost of our internalised contradictions, and destroy the colonial-capitalist complex set upon us by the fools of the Empire.

What we need is to do is stand upon our koru (fern spiral) green hills and snowy mountains in the mist, to burn the New Zealand flag, the Treaty of Waitangi, and the Declaration of Independence, and to begin an insurrection within which the exploited and alienated multitude of white and immigrant underclasses, and the dispossessed Maori of Aotearoa will find the future waiting beyond every limitation put in front of us by the ruling relations. We need to enter a new stage of our culture, that of free association, mutual aid, and access to resources based on the drive to create new knowledge.

Our people are the great ocean navigators, who saw the whole Pacific and even Antarctica.
And now we must navigate this moana (ocean) again, out of prisons, away from astounding suicide rates (especially in Kaitaia, where my family is from), and onwards from health deficiencies similar across indigenous people worldwide. Aotearoa requires a decolonising, communising continuum of insurrectionary and creative action which powers beyond any 'progressive' reconfiguration of colonial-capital relations. Aotearoa begs us to teach the ways of our social ecology, and to take humanity from technology of production and military, to technology of cooperation with our lands and sea.

My last note is a call for all people in Australia who have been colonised but might not necessarily be indigenous to Australia to form autonomous gangs around tribes and countries within which a healthy dose of radicalisation can take place. Already, a network of radical youth grows in the shadows with the intention of bringing together Indigenous people from all around the world who’ve settled in Australia in order to bring forth the radical spirit of our ancestors. We will not be the same, not united under a homogenising banner or a party line, but we will be freely associated barbarians and omens of the future.
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:33 am

https://therednation.org/2016/08/23/nat ... the-front/

AUGUST 23, 2016
Native and Trans People to the Front

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by Stella Martin

This speech was originally given at the Albuquerque Trans March on June 9, 2016, just three days before a gunman murdered 49 (mostly Puerto Rican and Latino) people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida. Stella Martin is from Gallup, New Mexico and is a healthcare worker whose focus is HIV-AIDs and LGBTQ advocacy. She is also an organizer with The Red Nation.


The sun gleams itself down upon us, and the earth brings us stability and life. Across its beautiful existence we stand; brown coffee skin to beige golden bodies. We are beautiful as ourselves, my sisters and brothers of color.

Yet all around us whiteness pervades and dominates our world, our homelands as indigenous people, our relationships with service and a mask of goodwill.

As indigenous people we were not supposed to be here, but we are. As transgender, unidentified, naadleeh, winkte, llahmana, and all the other genders our ancient tribes have embraced and loved, we are still here.

But whiteness showers its hatred and guilt over our bodies, our existence as systemic oppression, as violence.

This violence has claimed our health, wellbeing and lives. I speak specifically to my Trans indigenous sisters, whom face the most suffering and the most violence.

Here on our indigenous lands our blood has been spilled and tilled into foundations of cities and white supremacy. Today our blood is still being spilled. The bodies of my sisters have been slain, abused, raped, hurt, injured and minds scarred, and traumas enhanced. I am one of these women. I am one of those abused and blamed. You are not alone. I am not alone. So let us stop hiding and lying.

This is to all my Trans sisters who walk these city streets surviving on a dream, and those in higher education, seeking equity in this imbalanced world; and all those working day to day to feed not only yourselves, but your nieces, nephews and families. For all of us, I speak.

We are still here tall, thin, pretty and plain, sun-kissed skin or soft beige. We are indigenous, beautiful, powerful and with purpose. Yes you have purpose, my sisters. Your existence and need is ancient, beyond the white history books, beyond the white gaze. You are the dreams and hopes of the brown eyes of grandmother and grandmothers before that.

We are here to create a revolution, for we are still breathing and moving forward. So embrace one another, my sisters, embrace your time. In the huddle of our own company we are strength. And within a space of oppression we are ultimate. Yes we may grieve the lost lives of our many trans-relatives locally and nationally… but you are here. Take care of your greatness my beautiful darlings.

One life is too many lost. Your life is too precious to be lost whether it is in death or simply just giving up. I love you. Your sisters Mattee, Renee and so many others love you. We fight for you and ourselves. We are creating a new dynamic, a new story— for us.

So let us march with dignity, with light, with grief and with resilience. We may not be able to heal but we sure aren’t going to give up, my beautiful brothers and sisters. For healing is only an excuse to not talk about why we are marching today. It gives the oppressor, the perpetrator, the abuser, evil— a way out. I am not here because I am healed; I am here because I have experienced violence, pain and oppression. I have changed, grown and adapted with the guidance and support of family and community.

Yes the hope is to function and navigate our way through this chaotic world which aims to eliminate us. Many of us are getting through, and knowingly that one day we as a community will no longer have to hurt one another, ourselves or be hurt at all. Your ability to stand up after being pushed, punched, thrown, cussed at, spit on, or manipulated is your power. The power to stand back up and live — that is what matters.

Your survival is so important because it says “fuck you” to white supremacy, and says to our fallen family, our lost ones to the manic twisted world, we are the honored memory of you that no one can erase.

Survive and share together for we are here.
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 1:10 pm



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umNEnyxxFxE

"Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái" (Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain) is a dream of freedom from Western civilization's oppression of minorities. Mari Boine portrays a woman who tries to escape from the darkness, the bleak conditions of the Sami people after the Norwegian colonization.
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:23 am

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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 25, 2018 5:55 am

From Embers: No Pride In Genocide

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Anarchist podcast and radio show, From Embers, discusses Native resistance to colonial celebrations in Canada and Australia. A post-Canada Day reflection on resistance to colonial...


https://itsgoingdown.org/no-pride-in-genocide/
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:04 pm

https://therednation.org/2018/08/11/pri ... -of-unity/

Principles of Unity

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This is the Preamble to The Red Nation’s Principles of Unity ratified by the first General Assembly of Freedom Councils in Albuquerque on August 10, 2018–Pueblo Revolt Day. In the spirit of Popay!


We are Indigenous revolutionaries. We are comrades and relatives first and foremost. We practice radical democracy and compassion for all relatives. Despite differences in organizational role or affiliation, we are equals in struggle.

We are anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. We are Indigenous feminists who believe in radical relationality. We do not seek a milder form of capitalism or colonialism—we demand an entirely new system premised on peace, cooperation, and justice. For our Earth and relatives to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.

We belong to long traditions of Indigenous resistance. We claim our rightful place among all freedom fighters around the world. We are not the first, nor will we be the last. We are the ancestors from the before and the before and the already forthcoming. By carrying this history forward, we actively create the world in which we want to live.

We seek to not just challenge power, but to build power. We are not simply a negation of the nightmarish colonial present—colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy—we are the embodiment and affirmation of a coming Indigenous future, a future in which many worlds fit.

We believe that all oppressed nations have the right to self-determination—to decide their own destinies. We, The Red Nation, are self-determining peoples. We enact the principles of freedom and integrity in how we seek to live as good people of the earth.

We organize through education and agitation for revolutionary change. We encourage our relatives and comrades to believe in revolutionary change. We advocate for global decolonization. We agitate among the poor, the working classes, the colonized, and the dispossessed to instill the confidence to fight back and take control of our destinies.

We believe in pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. We remain accountable to our people and our nations. We do not have “perfect” politics. We do not believe in factionalism or rigid ideology. We can die having had the “correct positions” but having accomplished nothing and freed no one. The desire to be “right” or “perfect” is the highest form of cynicism. Our role as revolutionaries is to cheerlead the movement at all turns. Above all else, we desire to be free and believe we will win. Optimism will thrive so long as we struggle for freedom.

We believe in correct ideas, which only come through revolutionary praxis and struggle. Our power and judgement comes from the labor of our struggle.

We are not “above” the people. When the people move, we move with them. We are the “permanent persuaders” who believe revolutionary change is not only possible but inevitable. Like our hearts, our politics are down and to the left. And because we are the “five-fingered ones,” our fists are the size of our hearts. We raise our fists to lift the hearts of our people. We give everything and take nothing for ourselves.

We uphold personal and organizational integrity at all turns of the movement. Change is dialectical and full of contradictions. It often comes without notice or without being noticed. Reactionary tendencies and contradictions will seek to destroy our momentum, diminish our optimism, and test our integrity. They will come in many, and oftentimes unexpected, forms. Even when in doubt, we pledge to remain faithful to our political principles and steadfast in our commitment to revolutionary struggle and optimism.

We are The Red Nation.
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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:06 pm

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Re: Singing her to life - the indigenous peoples' revolution

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 21, 2018 6:08 am

What White Supremacists Know

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
November 20, 2018
Boston Review


The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native Americans.

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Soldiers posing with Hotchkiss guns used in Wounded Knee Massacre, Library of Congress


The United States has been at war every day since its founding, often covertly and often in several parts of the world at once. As ghastly as that sentence is, it still does not capture the full picture. Indeed, prior to its founding, what would become the United States was engaged—as it would continue to be for more than a century following—in internal warfare to piece together its continental territory. Even during the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate armies continued to war against the nations of the Diné and Apache, the Cheyenne and the Dakota, inflicting hideous massacres upon civilians and forcing their relocations. Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few historians trace their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The origin of the United States in settler colonialism—as an empire born from the violent acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives—lends the country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA.

The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or bloodshed when compared to colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. Elimination of the native is implicit in settler colonialism and colonial projects in which large swaths of land and workforces are sought for commercial exploitation. Extreme violence against noncombatants was a defining characteristic of all European colonialism, often with genocidal results.

Rather, what distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology attached to that violence and its political uses, even to this day. The post–9/11 external and internal U.S. war against Muslims-as-“barbarians” finds its prefiguration in the “savage wars” of the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. And when there were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the practice of “savage wars” remained. In the twentieth century, well before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged invasions and occupations in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Columbia and Southern Africa. In all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in war against savage forces.

Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the first British settlement in Jamestown, pitting “civilization” against “savagery.” Through this pursuit, the U.S. military gained its unique character as a force with mastery in “irregular” warfare. In spite of this, most military historians pay little attention to the so-called Indian Wars from 1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846–48 invasion and occupation of Mexico. Yet it was during the nearly two centuries of British colonization of North America that generations of settlers gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution. While large, highly regimented “regular” armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the continent’s indigenous nations to seize their land, resources, and roads, driving them westward and eventually forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the U.S. conquest of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions, then west of the Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces and are, perhaps, what most marks U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers.

By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), whose lust for displacing and killing Native Americans was unparalleled, the character of the U.S. armed forces had come, in the national imaginary, to be deeply entangled with the mystique of indigenous nations—as though, in adopting the practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become the very thing they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identification with the Native enemy, marking the settler as Native American rather than European. This was part of the sleight of hand by which U.S. Americans came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the continent: they had fought for it and “become” its indigenous inhabitants.

Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropriating Native American lands were then applied to fighting the Mexican Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain in 1821, the territory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence, Mexico continued the practice of allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large swaths of land for development under land grants, with the assumption that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples. By 1836 nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting the enslaved), had moved to Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the eradication of the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples in Texas. Mounted and armed with the new killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they did so with dedicated precision.

Having perfected their art in counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other Native communities, the Texas Rangers went on to play a significant role in the U.S. invasion of Mexico. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico, engaging in the Battle of Monterrey. Rangers also accompanied General Winfield Scott’s army and the Marines by sea, landing in Vera Cruz and mounting a siege of Mexico’s main commercial port city. They then marched on, leaving a path of civilian corpses and destruction, to occupy Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils. In defeat and under military occupation, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory to the United States, and Texas became a state in 1845. Soon after, in 1860, Texas seceded, contributing its Rangers to the Confederate cause. After the Civil War, the Texas Rangers picked up where they had left off, pursuing counterinsurgency against both remaining Native communities and resistant Mexicans.

The Marines also trace half of their mythological origins to the invasion of Mexico that nearly completed the continental United States. The opening lyric of the official hymn of the Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, is “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War of 1801–5, when the Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, shelling the city of Tripoli, taking captives, and blockading key Barbary ports for nearly four years. The “Hall of Montezuma,” though, refers to the invasion of Mexico: while the U.S. Army occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and marched to Mexico City, murdering and torturing civilian resisters along the way.

So what does it matter, for those of us who strive for peace and justice, that the U.S. military had its start in killing indigenous populations, or that U.S. imperialism has its roots in the expropriation of indigenous lands?

It matters because it tells us that the privatization of lands and other forms of human capital are at the core of the U.S. experiment. The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse of the United States derives from real estate (which includes African bodies, as well as appropriated land). It is apt that we once again have a real estate man for president, much like the first president, George Washington, whose fortune came mainly from his success speculating on unceded Indian lands. The U.S. governmental structure is designed to serve private property interests, the primary actors in establishing the United States being slavers and land speculators. That is, the United States was founded as a capitalist empire. This was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional, though not in a way that benefits humanity. The military was designed to expropriate resources, guarding them against loss, and will continue to do so if left to its own devices under the control of rapacious capitalists.

When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible—as they have for the past decade, and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist president—they are dismissed as marginal, rather than being understood as the spiritual descendants of the settlers. White supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about. Indeed, the origins of the United States are consistent with white nationalist ideology. And this is where those of us who wish for peace and justice must start: with full awareness that we are trying to fundamentally change the nature of the country, which will always be extremely difficult work.
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