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1. There is an idea circulating Indian Country that Indigenous cultures align with capitalist ideology. Was that the thought going through our ancestors’ minds as the calvary came down on them to clear the land? “If we were only better entrepreneurs,” said no one.
2. That’s not to say Indigenous people can’t be capitalist—many are. But capitalism and the class system were neither inevitable nor natural. To paraphrase Marx: capital arrived to these lands dripping with blood and soil from head to toe.
3. Since inavasion, expropriation hasn’t stopped. And Indigenous nations and peoples themselves have become part of that system—whether as workers, the underclass, bosses, owners, or captains of finance. To say otherwise is to say we exist outside of history.
4. A common, if not near universal value, of many Indigenous cultures is to take pity on the neediest among us not to exploit them. It is to make allies—Lakota means friend and ally—not just with white supremacist empires but with human and nonhuman nations as partners.
5. But I don’t believe our culture alone prepared us for the onslaught of capitalism and the genocide of our human and nonhuman relatives. What could have? Counterfactual histories are not useful for understanding what actually was and is, or the nature of capitalist societies.
6. Indigenous socialist societies existed not in opposition to capitalism. But rather they existed in its absence. The economic bases of those societies have been gutted, while we retain the remnants of an egalitarian culture. And capitalism has accommodated Indigenous culture.
7. As a result, like most nations, Indigenous nations are class societies, with a tiny, but influential ruling class elite. What is distinct about Native nations, however, is the settler colonial relation. The predominant struggle is about the land, which is anti-colonial.
8. A socialist decolonization movement in a settler colonial society is two-fold: 1) restoring Indigenous land, territory, nationhood, and soveriegnty; and 2) waging an internal class struggle within and beyond Native nations allied with other working class and oppressed people.
