This is a peculiar time of year for Native people. Colonial holidays & massacres go hand-in-hand with consumerism. Two old white imperialists colonized the first two weeks of #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth. Here are Indigenous political projects you should check & support (thread):
We don't get paid for podcasts. The resources we gather goes towards community feeds, paying rent & light bills at our community spaces, & keeping comrades in homes. A $1/month Patreon subscription goes a long way. Plus, you get early access to episodes: patreon.com/therednation
We have comrades & relatives holding space it down w/ @CampMniLuzahan, emergency shelter for relatives on the streets so they don't die of exposure. The goal is longterm housing. For now, they need firewood & supplies. Donate here: campmniluzahan.org
Our relatives w/ Warriors of the Sunrise, from the Shinnecock Nation, have setup a #SovereigntyCamp in the so-called Hamptons, their homelands. They're squaring off with some of the richest people. They need your help to get their #LandBack: warriorsofthesunrise.wordpress.com
@The_Red_Nation in Tiwa Territory has slowed down but still distributing survival resources to relatives hardest hit by the pandemic, as part of 5 years of the #NoDeadNatives campaign. Donate directly via PayPal to abqtrntreasurer@gmail.com.
Our relatives w/ @KeInfoshop are collecting resources for critical mutual aid in Dinetah (Navajo Nation). Donate: keinfoshop.org/donate/
Our Patreon encompasses most of our ongoing projects. We're currently creating a publishing platform called Red Media for Indigenous books. We're publishing two books next year: The Red Deal & the memoirs of John Redhouse, the Navajo revolutionary: patreon.com/therednation
I'll add more tomorrow. Stay tuned.
For the long history of Native resistance in the Southwest, check out Seven Generations of Red Power in New Mexico, an online exhibit I curated w/ @abqmuseum.
A favorite from the Seven Generations exhibit: New Mexico Students Give Black Power Salute during the US National Anthem (1968)
📸: Anthony Louderbough
Every year, since 1970, United American Indians of New England have hosted a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, MA in protest of the genocidal Pilgrim mythology & the US holiday of Thanksgiving. Follow @Kisha890@mahtowin1 Support their work. uaine.org
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The first Secretary of State to overthrow a foreign gov’t was John Watson Foster (who overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii). He told his grandson of his exploits: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA, the man who orchestrated the bloody Guatemalan coup in 1954.
I’ve seen sooo many US Indigenous “get out the vote” campaigns — “Indigenize the vote” “voting is sacred” — but zero solidarity from those same campaigns and politicians with Indigenous Bolivians voting today. Is a vote only “sacred” when it’s for empire?
The US backed the right wing military coup to depose of Evo Morales, the Indigenous president, and MAS, a movement with many Indigenous people. None of the elected US Indigenous politicians opposed the coup. Not a single one.
Bolivian Indigenous movements brought us some of the more revolutionary environmental politics such as the rights of nature movement, first codified in the Bolivian plurinational constitution, and the 2010 People’s Agreement that center the Andean cosmovision of Vivir Bien.
The veneration of a jurist who used the racist legal fiction of the Discovery Doctrine to describe *all* American Indians is appalling. Her thinking was that we’re still too incompetent to manage our own lands, and we need the US to do it for us, like wildlife...
No religion should determine law, whether it’s abortion or Indigenous rights. Yet, RBG upheld a fifteenth century papal bull that said Indians barely possess faculties that distinguish them from animals.
Colonialism is authoritarian by nature. In the US, the highest jurists are appointed, not elected, by a president who is also not directly elected by the people, in system premises on Indigenous elimination. We should be challenging these systems not normalizing them.
I was a research assistant at an oral history center, when my boss showed us the 2007 video, "Collateral Murder." Apache helicopter pilots radio a second chopper, "Crazy Horse One-Eight," before gunning down six Iraqis. "Look at those dead bastards," one says.
I had long opposed the Iraq war. The idea that Indigenous names, Crazy Horse and the Apache people, those who had died fighting US imperialism, however, had become military codewords in the bloody massacre of Iraqi civilians made me throw up. It is the never-ending Indian war.
Later, I read the WikiLeaks US embassy cables, showcasing the zeal with which the US imperialism destroys nations and movements it sees as threats, literally holding back the rest of the world from advancing any social alternative to the world-destroying machine of capitalism.
“The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, & the family & the autonomy of the individual substituted. The allotment of land in severalty, the establishment of local courts & police... & the universal adoption of the English language are means to an end.”
— Thomas Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889)
Indian policy wasn’t an accident. It unfolded by design and specifically targeted the communal aspect of Indigenous social relations, which were broken by breaking up the land.
I can’t speak on whites pretending to be Black in the academy. But I see similarities with how whites have adopted a Native identity in the academy. Yes, there’s a question of resources. What’s not often spoke about is the politics of injury tied to these make-believe identities.
The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity.
Who’s the audience for the politics of injury? It certainly isn’t for those who are marginalized. Mostly it’s for white audiences or institutions of power. It’s non-threatening to be a traumatized person, especially when those dishing out the trauma become those who solve it.