NO SPIRITUAL SURRENDER

Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred

Link to printable pdf zine file: KLEE ANARCHY – Booklet

The following passages are excerpt selections from Klee Benally’s book “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred” (2023). RIP Klee.

THE ILLITERACY OF SETTLER COLONIALISM 

Civilization is socially constituted violence against the Earth. 

Civilization has always been the mission of colonizers. It is carved deeply throughout the text of their laws and into our flesh. The imposed literacy of settler violence is the way we learn to read and tend to the scars that track this chronology of colonial conquest named history. These are the unhealed and partly healed wounds spreading in all directions that map the specter of abuse that are documented as the progression of religion, capital, democracy, and civilization. It is unwritten in cultural knowledge buried in a shallow boarding school mass grave located in the vacuous space between mythology and sin. This literacy is what sanctions the destruction and desecration of the sacred. It declares, “I’m wearing this headdress because I appreciate your culture. “It declares, “The wastewater we’re spraying on your sacred site is clean enough to drink.” It insists, “That was in the past. I’m not responsible for the actions of my ancestors.” It admonishes, “They’re on the street because they’re lazy.” It contemplates “poor and angry Indians contrasted with respectable ones.” It declared utopia while slaughtering and enslaving millions. It wrote in blood and pus, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” It declared, “Tradition is the enemy of progress.” It shifts phrases and dresses the meaning in newly ironed clothes that smell of starch, piss, and appropriation.

It asserts and justifies itself advising the worth of all things. As it has so benevolently graced us with a cross, bible, and tried to kill the living spirits of the Earth. It incessantly reminds us of our place in the value of things (usually on the scale of most victimized) through gritted teeth, through its dispossessions, through its dehumanizations. The literacy of settler violence is what haunts those who are overcome by their pain and succumb in the silence of the slow terror that eats us from within. It is codified in laws that make sleep a crime. It is the recurring nightmare that is drowned in a bottle that is shattered on the roadside, its millions of green and crystalline shards reflecting the compounded horrors possessing the dispossessed. In this glittering world, it is only ever with more brutality that the dazzling literacy of settler violence is enforced. Colonial occupation is the constant promise of settler violence.

There is an illegible recalcitrance in the understanding of the way spirit and nature are interrelated. But the philosophizing of the spirit goes against my intentions. Too many disassociated and “enlightened” contemplations have left so many sleeping rocks overturned, land unearthed, and trails of dead and bloodied mysteries in the cartography that has mapped the mythology of Western history.

With the most modest examination of literacies of domination and exploitation, it’s plain that coercion and control are the foundations of institutions that perpetuate colonial social order and knowledge production. This is why “decolonizing academia” is a fallacy. Writing Indigenous knowledge systems into Western academic frameworks (aka “Indigenizing”) is a form of pedagogical syncretism that makes great careers for Indigenous academics (Who else could specialize?) while implicitly preferencing and furthering capitalist modes of knowledge sharing. This kind of “decolonial” salvage work intellectually hunts the very contradictions that it’s premised on, but it’s shooting rhetorical arrows at its own shadow. It spends more time studying and quoting long-dead Europeans like Marx than embracing the wisdom of our elders, medicine keepers, and the land.

This is the illiteracy of Setter Colonialism; it cannot envision itself anywhere but at the center of the progression of human understanding and meaning. It cannot truly speak of justice or freedom without vomiting the half-chewed bones of forests, extinct species, and generations yet to come.

It is both the consequence and goal of what it proposes as an order to dominate and homogenize all ways of being, this proclaimed garishly as civilization. A fevered monster that rabidly consumes its own flesh. It has not ceased destroying long enough to sense that the land suffers, that the land holds trauma and there are consequences. Refusing to read the sunsets. Not listening to the ground. Spruce bows beckoning to commune, it does not see.

This is the illiteracy of Settler Colonialism.

Who did you consult with? Did you confer with the yucca? Did you ask for consent?

When I would gather herbs with my father he would always caution, “We don’t just go pick herbs at random. We have to know their names and make an offering. Otherwise it’s like I, saying ‘Hey you!’ at someone. You might pick a fight.”

The imposed assumption of discursive occupancy is the unrelenting violence of settler colonialism. Indigenous cultural (as in knowledge and ways of and with the land) literacies have been displaced by the so-called literacies weaponized in the chronological hierarchy of the colonial sciences of its material history: namely archaeology and anthropology Indigenous social literacies have been superimposed by what has been prescribed as “Tribal sovereignty.” A politic rendered legible by violent imposition of settler authority and temporality in service of civilization. Indigenous autonomy is illegible to the civilized progressive because we are of antiquity, backwardness, primal, barbaric, tradition, the past, the uncivilized. Colonizers are fond of pronouncing temporal fascism. What? Do you want to go back to the Stone Age?!

Modernity is composed in neat typeface written on every surface imaginable as a container of dominance in this temporal arrangement. So I offer this belligerent rhetoric, these bitter words as collections of writings against time on the bathroom walls, alleyways, and dumpsters amidst the ruins of settler progress.

We cannot empathize our way out of this athenaeum of dehumanization and depravation.

Here I offer fragments of glass, bone, and thought that are ground together to make an illegible poultice. I offer that it is the responsibility of those who wage anti-colonial struggle to break the static infrastructures of settler colonialism and make it become an event.

Liberation is painted in red ochre on steep canyon walls. It is both radical reconnection and settler destruction made legible through its own cognitive distortions. This is to say that it should be made into a moment that we can place within the pictograph constellations of ancestral memory.

Bad colonizers, behind us.

DEFENDING THE SACRED

For Dine there is no dichotomy between spirit and nature, we are of this Earth, and so where there is an environmental crisis there is also a social crisis. No one can live without clean air, clean water, or clean land, these are the most basic terms of what it means to be “people of the Earth,” or Indigenous. We share the responsibility to care for and protect Nahasdzaan 

(Mother Earth).

There are many attempts by colonizers to define sacred sites in legal, anthropological, and sociological terms, but their nature remains elusive and unintelligible to Western under-standings. This illiteracy of the sacred is not for lack of equivalent references or study, it is in the cosmological dissonance that is of a way of unbeing of materialism that is rooted in domination, control, and exploitation.

While Indigenous Peoples can say the whole Earth and existence is sacred because there is a spiritual relationship with creation, we can also identify specific locations or areas (mountains, waterways, burials, features, etc.) that are places of spiritual distinction.

While Indigenous contexts are diverse regarding what constitutes a sacred place, most specifically they are places (a region including viewscapes) or specific sites of emergence, home of deities, offering site(s), a place where herbs are gathered that can’t be gathered elsewhere, home or origin to certain species, and much more. They are places that figure centrally in the relationships that Indigenous Peoples have with creation. Most often they are places of healing, guidance and renewal.

The defense of lands held holy by Indigenous Peoples are the frontlines in the struggles for our existence. If we desire to exist, we must continue to defend the sacred and liberate Mother Earth. Defending the sacred means fighting back to protect Mother Earth, which is to say existence itself.

From the holy San Francisco Peaks, Black Mesa, Red Butte, and beyond, the history of colonization is scarred into the sacred landscapes that I’ve grown up around. The edifice of western “civilization” is still being carved out and through sacred lands with acts of desecration that perpetuate spiritual invasion, occupation, and conquest. They are the targets of individuals and corporations who see Mother Earth as not a living entity but only for resources that can be exploited for material gain.

Every sacred site that is currently being threatened with desecration faces some form of resource extraction. Whether it’s coal beneath Black Mesa/Big Mountain, gold at Mount Tenabo, copper under Oak Flat, oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, natural gas at Chaco Canyon, uranium at Red Butte and Mount Taylor, geothermal energy exploitation at Medicine Lake, tele-scopes on Mount Graham and Mauna Kea, freeway expansions through South Mountain and Petroglyph National Monument, rock climbing at Bear Lodge, lithium mining at Thacker Pass, border wall construction at Quitobaquito Springs, recreation at the San Francisco Peaks, or oil transportation from the Bakken Formation through Lake Oahe; these sacred places are threatened by forms of resource or extractive colonialism that are all due to the commodification of nature.

The brutal progression of what constitutes modernity has been both constant physical and spiritual war.

SACRED AUTONOMY 

IT IS OFTEN ASSERTED BY DiNE THAT DziL NaTAANII (THE SACRED mountains) are our leaders. They represent the living covenant materialized in Dzit leezh, or mountain soil bundles, that we are guided by. Our existence flows with the momentum of their cyclical teachings, which compel us towards S^’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoo (onward towards harmony in old age). This of course is adversarial to the imposition of the cis-heteropatriarchal Navajo Tribal government that was solely established as a business council in 1923 to facilitate resource colonialism.

The nation-state structure is incompatible with Dine autonomy. Dine disposition against centralized governance (to the great frustration of colonial forces) is well documented going back along the invader’s chronology. This is clearly observed in the book The Navajo Political Experience by David E. Wilkins:

From a Western European political perspective, the Navajo Nation was nonexistent as a representative political body until the 1920s. The Navajo people were, of course, cohesive in that they had a common linguistic and cultural heritage, lived within a well-de­fined territory, and referred to themselves as Dine. But their pohtical organization, in general, did not extend beyond local bands which were led by head­men [sic], or Naataanii. We will soon discuss a po­litical/ ceremonial/economic gathering known as the Naachid which did, in fact, wield a more regionahzed sphere of influence, but it is important to remem­ber that even this body had no coercive powers and apparendy never represented all Navajos. To put it another way, before the arrival of the Americans in the nineteenth century, the Navajo people did with­out a tribal-wide representative government that resembled the governments of the United States or Western European countries.

There is no point in trying to decolonize the Navajo government—it was not right for us from the start. Its structure and process is a replica of the American sys­tem, and the American system appears to be edging toward the possibility of failure, like the great Roman Empire. — Dine activist, scholar, and farmer Larry Emerson

To understand Dine defiance to centralized authority we can further look to elders resisting coal mining and forced relo­cation on Dzil Yijiin (Black Mesa).

Pauline Whitesinger, a Dine elder of Big Mountain (an area located on Black Mesa), once said, “In our traditional tongue, there is no word for relocation. To relocate is to move away and disappear and never be seen again.” Her life was a powerful testimony of resistance against resource colonialism. She strug­gled alongside hundreds of other Dine families and supporters for decades to stop coal mining, sacred sites desecration, and forced relocation induced by US law PL93-531, the so-called Relocation Act. This law, passed in 1974, was challenged in court (Manybeads v. United States) but ultimately more than 20,000 Dine have been forcibly relocated. A scattering of famihes continue to resist, asserting that they wiU not leave their ancestral lands, that Dine autonomy is sacred and by extension, so is its defense.

In 1979, Dine of Dzil Nitsaa’ (Big Mountain) declared them­selves sovereign from Tribal and “US” governments stating, “The sacred laws of the Dine give no authority for the federal government and its related agencies to intrude and disrupt the sacred lands of Big Mountain.” They held that no man-made law can be above nature.

This land is a sacred land. The man’s law is not our law. Nature, food, and the way we live is our law. The plans to disrupt and dig out sacred sites are against the Creator’s law. Our great ancestors are buried all over, they have become sand, they have become the mountains and their spiritual presence is still here to guide us.. .We resist in order to keep this sacred land in place. We are doing this for our children. – Roberta Blackgoat

We explain our beliefs as a natural law, an order of ceremony; as the laws we walk with, live with, and breathe in. It is inside us. A Blessing Way ceremony is done for a renewal of yourself. You breathe again. You can be strong. The bloodstream is strong and after a ceremony you can go again. – Mae Tso

…this white government, their laws, it’s a law that doesn’t care about life. It affects life, instead of caring for life. It affects the old people, instead of making them live longer. It affects your dreams, instead of sleeping peacefully at night, and having your rest. So it affects everything in every way. The relocation, the desecration of the Mountain here. The Mountains are important to the Dine people. When it’s abused, that’s abuse to our Prayers, our Way. Just as it has been said, they have been digging into our Sacred Medicine Bundles, our belief system. They’re digging in there and disrupting the order of our Ways. The reason why this mountain is special to us, is that we make offerings to the Mountain. That we call her our Mother. And also, she represents the Mother Earth. This rain, the moisture for the Earth, for the land, we need to all see, be on the same level, realize that we all need Her. We all live on top of Her. Underneath Her. That She nourishes us, all of us. She does not discriminate. She provides everything for all of us. All the rain drops and all the rain is provided for everybody. And then in turn, we live off that nourishment. We grow crops. We gather medicines from this. And some day, all our children will be needing all these resources, all these connections, to the Mountain. – Elder Rena Babbit Lane

We cannot choose to live against the Earth and not expect consequences.

The natural laws and the Indigenous People were already here in a good relationship before the coming of the colonial society who draws law and boundaries. However, we Indigenous Peoples will always have ties with these lands, we will continue to live that way with nature and we will carry on. – Louise Benally 

The struggle at and around Big Mountain has been led and held down by strong and fierce Indigenous women (mostly elders) for more than 40 years. Though forced relocation has taken a very severe toll, the coal mines are now shut down and some of the scarred Earth is being reclaimed. The coal-fired power plants have been demolished. Though they continue to face removal, the remaining resisters to forced relocation have outlived the monster that was consuming our lands, steal­ing the water, and polluting our lungs. From when Pauline Whitesinger physically fought and evicted workers building the relocation fence in 1977 and whipped one with a rope, to 1979 when Katherine Smith shot her lever-action rifle at another fencing crew (an act that she was charged for,, and later acquitted), elder women of Big Mountain have never been distracted by respectability and legitimacy of settler politics. They didn’t live as victims pleading for colonizers to recognize and end their suffering. They were not compelled by State or ecclesiastical mandates. In their sacred defiance they asserted Indigenous autonomy, in spite of the State and Tribal authority.

There is nothing sentimental or performative about the sanctity of their lived autonomy in defense of the sacred.

DIRECT ACTION

For more than two decades I’ve participated in and organized various types of actions, from prayer vigils, marches, banner drops, blockades, and brief and long-term occupations. All in a range of communities from occupied-Ohlone lands in so-called San Francisco to occupied-Piscataway lands in “Washington, DC,” and in other parts of this world (particularly during the anti-globalization movement).

In its most raw definition, direct actions means that instead of getting someone else to act for you like a politician or institu­tion, you act for yourself It can be applied individually, in small groupings like a couple of friends, families and collectives, and in larger communities.

As a well-established core principle of anarchism, direct action is also articulated as a way of life. Direct action, as unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, chal­lenges the dependencies, dispossession, and alienation created by hierarchy.

The nature of direct action compels us to get at the root- cause of any problem we might be facing. As a principle it urges us to constantly dig deeper and ask. What do we get from this system that we cannot directly provide for ourselves? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our Iives and the Iives of those around us? How can we Iive our Iives unmediated by authority?

The more I’ve contemplated direct action, the more pro­gressive activism becomes a repetitive deadening sound of flesh against brick as heads bang against walls expecting them to crumble (or to be allowed within them to have a “seat at the table”). Why do Indigenous organizers continue to mirror social justice “Nonviolent Direct Action” strategies and tactics centered on civil acts of disobedience that have largely remained the same since their development in the 1960s?

These outdated formulas communicate that it only matters if you are peaceful, you get arrested, and the media coverage is good. Why is it a point of veneration to subject more of our people to the police, court, and prison system (aka the carceral State)? Don’t get me too wrong. I’m all for escalation, risk, and preparedness, but there has to be a good reason to submit to capture (unless it’s really, really inconvenient for the pigs). I appreciate those who spend as much time thinking through and rehearsing arrest scenarios while also planning on getting away with it. Any strategy that begs politicians to enact change through mass arrest should be ferociously scrutinized. Perhaps it’s branded as “direct action,” but it’s really just aggressive martyr/victim complex lobbying. In the context of liberal social and environmental justice organizing. Indigenous suf­fering (and death) is a tactical resource, we are valued as the dignified victims, objectified as the ecological, manifest; ripe for extraction (there’s a good audience and packed house for this performance). Our mouths stuffed with carbon copy agen­das and talking points. Our teleological agency is colonially circumscribed (even if it feels like we have set the terms. The spotlight feels good though, doesn’t it?). The game of colonial activism is rigged. It plays a politics that no matter the side you’re on, colonialism always wins. And so, why do we continue to play this game? Those that rule and profit from and through colonialism and capitalism will never be morally persuaded to make decisions to benefit anyone but themselves. Those that stand for the Earth and existence will always be in their way. This is an “absolute” that continues to be written in the blood of Indigenous Peoples throughout the world.

How do we contend with the violences of settler colonial power? Certainly not through strategies informed by logics and frame­works that reinforce it.

What is Indigenous-rooted direct action?

The following section is the architecture for an Indigenous-rooted direct action that I’ve established with friends and through challenging experiences over the years.

Indigenous-rooted direct action (IRDA) is a framework to develop strategy and tactics to intervene in and end colonial violence against the land and all our relations. We assert that our cultures are our first framework for action and that our power comes from our relationships with the natural world. We organize in cycles not campaign timelines. IRDA does not rely on colonial political systems or institutions and fiercely rejects and challenges the non-profit and ally industrial complexes. IRDA is informed, guided, and supported by Indigenous cul­tural knowledge and is a continuation of the deep history of Indigenous resistance to colonial domination. IRDA is inter- relational (see the section on “Decolonial Solidarity”) and recognizes that colonialism is facilitated by white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. IRDA directly challenges and disrupts the ideas, institutions, and behaviors that main­tain colonial power. IRDA is about directly (without a mediating entity) asserting and maintaining Indigenous lifeways and power to inform and shape the relationships and narratives that impact our ways of being. Additionally, IRDA:

• Empowers cultural communication methods.

• Is culturally and spiritually appropriate and accountable.

• Challenges all assumptions of victimhood.

• Recognizes that Indigenous Peoples are not monolithic but incredibly diverse.

• Does not perpetuate recolonization, invisibilization, or direct colonialism of other Indigenous People’s lands.

• Seeks to address and heal land trauma.

Does not use ceremony or spiritual practices as publicity, theater, or a prop.

Other points that have been added at times:

IRDA is responsible to ancestors and future generations. It cultivates cultures of resistance and liberation.

• Is about asserting and maintaining Indigenous power (power with and of the Earth) and lifeways to inform and shape power relationships and narratives impacting our j ways of being.

• Facilitates warrior morale and power for fighting forward > and back.

• Asserts that security culture must also mean adopting j culturally informed proactive processes of transforma­tive and restorative justice (or more plainly accountabili­ty and responsibility).

There are cultures of direct action that are informed by those establishing the theories, critical analysis, and most important j by those who implement them. They’ve set the terms, which in 1many instances shape the over and underlying narratives, this is why an Indigenous-rooted direct action is necessary: If we j have an end to any system of oppression without the conclusion being Indigenous liberation on these lands, it just amounts j to a reorganization of our domination.

The organizing framework we utilize is based upon Dine iina I (our life/lifeways). So it goes beyond activist interventions and tactics and applies to how we live our lives. We start with Ke’ I (our relations/connection) and organize around the four primary directions that are situated within the cosmology bounded by our sacred mountains: Nitsahakees (thinking, intention, I prayer), Nahat’a (planning, coordination and logistics), Iina (living our plan and intention, action, implementation), and Siihasin (outcomes, review, debrief). It is non-linear and so once an action is completed, the cycle can be renewed. There are lifetimes of teachings that relate to ceremonies and medicines within these teachings.

When we assert these contextual frameworks, we build on the understanding that action is our prayer when we live our lives in accordance with our beliefs, or our reverence with the sacred. This means we intimately operate with the spiritual dimensions of our fights as well as the material, emotional, and psychological. We affirm that our power is rooted within our mutuality with existence, with the sacred.

Indigenous-Rooted Direct Action means being a force of Nature.

Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory 

Ya’iishjááshch’ilí 

If we understand that European Anarchism is “1) A history of iconic figures. 2) A set of increasingly radical ideas about social transformation. 3) A practice that has only been uniform in its rejection by those in power.” And that it is also a dynamic politic that invites its very destruction yet maintains composure of core principles: Direct Action, Voluntary Association, and Mutual Aid. 

Then we build on this dynamic an understanding that Indigenous Anarchism is 1) An anti-history of ancestral memory. 2) A set of radical (as in total negation) ideas that are not a detour but a bridge between anti-colonial struggle and Indigenous liberation. 3) A practice that expresses and asserts autonomy in the context of where it is located. As Aragorn! observed, “An indigenous anarchism is an anarchism of place.” 4) Is not an identity. 

And that its first principles as articulated by Aragorn! are: “Everything is Alive, The Ascendance of Memory, and Sharing is Living.”

For distinction, I would add that an Anarchist would pronounce, “There is no authority above yourself.” An Indigenous Anarchist would offer, “There is no authority but nature.” 

…When pressed against many of these words I don’t find myself. When I’m not home I call myself an Indigenous Anarchist to agitate against assimilation and shitty liberal politics. When I’m home I am a child of Yoolgai asdzáá (White Shell Woman). I am in her arms, where the constraints of colonial political control and categories are totally meaningless. 

“This land is a sacred land. The man’s law is not our law. Nature, food and the way we live is our law.” – Roberta Blackgoat, Diné matriarch from Big Mountain. 

The Unraveling

My actions are clumsy and deft. My hands are shaking. I have a fever. These are the convulsions of bitter medicine and the spirit. 

We have become entangled in words that are not our own. They cut our tongues as we speak. They eat our dreams as we sleep. This is a reluctant offering. 

A thread that weaves a story, pulled gently at first. So focused on the line that we become disoriented in the delicate tension. When we remember to breathe. When we step away from these stars and into constellations, we see new symbols have emerged. 

The idea of “civilization” was translated to Diné bizaad, as it was in many other languages of the land, in the brutal and fractured words of imposition that were spread through a multitude of ruptures throughout the world and refined in Europe. This is not an evaluation of what has proceeded as the depths of its telling has been surveyed acutely in other spaces. Though it is important to speak of its stark shadow as it was announced in the eclipsing language of domination, control and exploitation. And when it consumed and it did not swallow us whole, it voraciously welcomed us into its folds. Our ancestors knew this was the language of non-existence, they attacked it. 

That we cannot live freely from the land is the ultimatum of capitalism, it is the banner waving over the death march of progress across the world. That the earth has been scorched so we submit, that our children were stolen so we forget. It has not solely been that our existence is what has been the target of civilization though, in terms of commodities and productivities; we can exist with the condition that our world ends within us. So long as we shed our skin and unravel that which has been woven since time immemorial. 

Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá taught us how to weave. 

Each thread has memory and recoils towards its restoring. When it is so tightly woven it holds water, that is how familiar, how deep our mutuality is. Place, beings, each other, ourselves, this depth is beyond the reaches of memory. 

It is what has always made us a threat. 

Treaties are dead words on dead pieces of paper that were negotiations of the surrender of our ancestors. [ENL]

Nature negates the state

As we trace tree rings and dust turned stone carved by powerful waters into vast canyons, we are comforted with the unknowledge that nature has always negated the State. As it controls and consumes existence to sustain and build itself, the State, as a constitution of civilization, exists against nature. 

For Diné, our lives are guided in relation to six sacred mountains that are the pillars of our cosmology. Each of these mountains is adorned in sacred elements and presents a teaching of how we maintain and restore harmony as we exist in this world. Through our ceremonies and prayers we maintain a living covenant (physically maintained as Dził Leezh or mountain soil bundles) to exist in harmony with nature. 

At points in our existence, a collective social process called Naachid (to gesture in a direction) has been implemented to address significant matters facing our people. Naat’aáni (the one who speaks) have been misinterpreted by colonial anthropologists as “leaders” of Diné yet their role, as those responsible for the medicine bundles for their families, was ceremonial and not absolute or coercive. This way of being is incompatible with any form of centralized governance. It is incoherent to the State. 

Throughout the world Indigenous Peoples live their mutuality on varied terms in complex (and sometimes conflictual and contradictory) social relationships. The cosmology of existence, the continually emergent worlds and manifestations of being and becoming, are all outside of “civilized” order and the state. They are unknowable. 

To unmap Indigenous social relations from the colonial political geography means to become unknowable again.

Our existence is organized in cycles that have rejected coercion into the static geography of settler-colonial understandings. We find more affinity with the juniper and sage that grow through impossible sandstone. We locate ourselves in the springs where our ancestor’s footprints have worn a path like an umbilical cord. We know the land and the land knows us. Where and who we are mean the same thing. This is an understanding that is cultivated through generations upon generations of mutuality. This is where our thinking comes from. It is a place where no government exists. Indigenous liberation is the realization of our autonomy and mutuality with all life and the Earth, free from domination, coercion, domination, and exploitation. This is also an anarchist assertion, so we locate a connection. 

Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory

After a political theory is solidified, a banner is waved, a flag is planted, and allegiance is due. 

We do not seek that our ways of knowing, being, and acting ever be wrapped up into a fixed belief and presented as a pitiful rag. We do not wish that Indigenous anarchism ever be a flag that is planted anywhere on Mother Earth. The calcification of an Indigenous anarchist theory would precipitate all the merchandizing that relegates other political theories to banal dramaturgy, and we fanatically reject these conditions. 

Indigenous autonomy needs no theoretical foundation to justify itself. 

The modern leftist political urge towards unified (centralized) revolutionary struggle, with meticulously identified “points of unity” and check box manifestos outlining programs, are all propositions of philosophical, ideological, and political homogeneity. This is a tendency that the Zapatistas — who are romanticized ad nauseam for their particularly wonderful sustained insurrection — were very aware of. Much to the frustrations of leftists seeking legitimacy and to have their political theories confirmed, the Zapatistas were intentionally elusive about their politics due to the trappings of modern leftist political projections. While it was clear that the assertion of Zapatismo by Ch’ol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolobal, Mam, and Zoque people embodied autonomous anti-capitalist anti-colonial struggle, land back, and mutual aid, the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee Zapatista Army of National Liberation asserted, “Zapatismo is not a new political ideology, or a rehash of old ideologies. Zapatismo is nothing, it does not exist. It only serves as a bridge, to cross from one side, to the other. So everyone fits within Zapatismo, everyone who wants to cross from one side, to the other. There are no universal recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, rules, or slogans. There is only a desire – to build a better world, that is, a new world.” 

The disharmony of Anarchist identity & solidarity

We reject the identifier of “anarcho-Indigenous” for this reason. We are not an appendage of a revolutionary ideology or strategy for power for someone else’s existence. We do not seek to merely be acknowledged as a hyphen to anarchism or any liberation or resistance politics only to be subsumed into its counter movement against a dominant culture. 

From capitalism to socialism, the conclusion towards an affinity with anarchism is in part made due to the anti-Indigenous calculations of every other political proposition. 

Marxism’s theoretical inadequacy as a strategy for Indigenous autonomy and liberation lies in its commitment to an industrialized worker run State as the vehicle for revolutionary transformation towards a stateless society. Forced industrialization has ravaged the earth and the people of the earth. To solely focus on an economic system rather than indict the consolidation of power as an expression of modernity has resulted in the predictions of anarchist critics (like Bakunin) to come true; the ideological doctrine of socialists tends towards bureaucracy, intelligentsia, and ultimately totalitarianism. 

Revolutionary socialism has been particularly adept at creating authoritarians. Anarchists simply see the strategy for what it is: consolidation of power into a political, industrial, and military force pronouncing liberation to only be trapped in its own theoretical quagmire that perpetually validates its authoritarianism to vanquish economic and social threats that it produces by design. 

To be required to assume a role in a society that is premised on colonial political and economic ideology towards the overthrow of that system to achieve communalization is to require political assimilation and uniformity as a condition for and of revolution. Marxist and Maoist positions demand it, which means they demand Indigenous People to reconfigure that which makes them Indigenous to become weapons of class struggle. The process inherently alienates diverse and complex Indigenous social compositions by compelling them to act as subjects of a revolutionary framework based on class and production. Indigenous collectivities exist in ways that leftist political ideologues refuse to imagine. As to do so would conflict with the primary architecture of “enlightenment” and “modernity” that their “civilized” world is built on. 

This is why we reject the overture to shed our cultural “bondage” and join the proletariat dictatorship. We reject the gestures to own the means of production with our expectant assimilated role of industrial or cultural worker. Any social arrangement based on industrialization is a dead-end for the earth and the peoples of the earth. Class war on stolen lands could abolish economic exploitation while retaining settler-colonialism. We have no use for any politics that calculates its conclusion within the context of these kinds of power relations. 

As Indigenous Peoples we are compelled to go deeper and ask, what about this political ideology is of us and the land? How is our spirituality perceived and how will it remain intact through proposed liberatory or revolutionary processes? As any political ideology can be considered anti-colonial if we understand colonialism only on its material terms as colonized forces versus colonizer forces. When the calculation is made; all other propositions such as Communism, revolutionary socialism, and so forth become obsolete in that the core of their propositions cannot be reconciled with Indigenous spiritual existence. Anarchism, with its flawed legacy, is dynamic enough to actually become a stronger position through the scrutiny; this is primarily due to the matter that as a tension of tensions against domination, anarchism has the unique character of resisting urges towards intransigence. It has been developed and redeveloped as a dynamic position that strengthens with its contortions. Anarchists have constantly looked inward and convulsed with (and even celebrated) their contradictions. 

Dislocating an Indigenous Anarchism

When we ask the question, “What do our cultures want?” The response for Diné is hózhó, or harmony/balance with existence. This is expressed and guided through Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Házhóón. 

The idea of collective care and support, of ensuring the well being of all our relations in non-hierarchical voluntary association, and taking direct action has always been something that translated easily into Diné Bizáad (Navajo language). T’áá ni’ínít’éego t’éiyá is a translation of this idea of autonomy. Nahasdzáán dóó Yádiłhił Bitsąądęę Beenahaz’áanii (the natural order of mother earth and father sky) is the basis of our life way. Many young people are still raised with the teaching of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego, which means if it is going to be it is up to you, that no one will do it for you. Ké’, or our familial relations, guides us so that no one would be left to fend for themselves, it is the basis for our mutuality with all existence, not just human beings. 

Our culture is our prefiguration. 

I only share this to assert that the principles of anarchism are not at all unfamiliar to Indigenous ways of being: a harmonious life without coercion based upon mutual aid and direct action. 

“We are an autonomous, anti-capitalist force that demands free movement and an end to forced dislocations for all people… We categorically reject the government and those who organize with its agents. And we likewise oppose the tendency by some in the immigrant movement to police others within it, turning the young against movement militants and those whose vision of social change goes beyond the limited perspective of movement leaders. Their objectives are substantially less than total liberation, and we necessarily demand more. Also, we strongly dispute the notion that a movement needs leaders in the form of politicians, whether they be movement personalities, self-appointed police or elected officials. We are accountable to ourselves and to each other, but not to them. Politicians will find no fertile ground for their machinations and manipulations. We have no use for them. We are anti-politics. We will not negotiate with Capital, the State or its agents.” — the Diné, O’odham, Anarchist Bloc  

“Anarchism is a political philosophy – some might say a beautiful idea – that believes in self-governed societies based on voluntary association with one another. It advocates for non-hierarchical decision making, direct participation in those decisions by affected communities, and autonomy for all living persons. Furthermore, it leaves space for the valuation of non-human entities beyond their monetary worth or usefulness to human beings. My Indigenous teachings have communicated to me that our communities are important, but so are we as individuals. Traditional ways saw decision making as a participatory process, based on consensus, where communities made choices together. My teachings tell me that the land can offer us what we need, but never to take more than that. I see these ideas as fundamentally compatible. I’d like to see an anarchy of my people and the anarchy of settlers (also my people) enacted here together, side by side. With an equal distribution of power, each pursuing healthy relationships, acting from their own ideas and history. Just as the Two Row imagined. I would like to see the centralized state of Canada dismantled. I’d like to see communities take up the responsibility of organizing themselves in the absence of said central authority.” — Tawinikay speech, “Autonomously and with Conviction: A Métis Refusal of State-Led Reconciliation” (2018)

An Ungovernable Force of Nature

Indigenous Anarchists are an ungovernable force of Nature. We maintain that no law can be above nature. That is to say, how power is balanced and how we organize ourselves socially is an order that flows from and with Nahasdzáán (Mother Earth). This is what we are accountable and what we hold ourselves responsible to. Our affinity is with the mountains, the wind, rivers, trees, and other beings, we will never be patriots to any political social order. 

As a force, we defend, protect, and take the initiative to strike. Indigenous anarchism presents the possibility of attack; it is the embodiment of anti-colonial struggle and being. 

Our project is to replace the principle of political authority with the principle of autonomous Indigenous mutuality.

We offer that in the incompatible brilliance between understandings of anarchism and Indigenous existence, a space is revealed where we can shed the poisoned skin of formal political entanglement in the dominant social order. 

In this way we view anarchism as a sort of dynamic bridge. A set of radical (as in total negation) ideas that are a connecting point between anti-colonial struggle and Indigenous liberation. 

The Re-Bundling/Weaving Again

Ours is a radical incoherence. 

Only by experience will you understand what is taking place in ceremony. 

When we ask, “why and how are we dispossessed and by what forces?” it is natural that what follows is the question, “what can be done?” 

Civilization and the state are myths colonizers keep telling themselves and forcing others to believe. It is their ritual of power, their prayer is time. The settler imaginary, the civilized mind, is always haunted by everything in them that they have killed. Their State, their entire civilization, exists on the precipice of rupture. Their instability is possibility that can be made to spread. When their spirit is attacked and corrupted, they fail. When we shed the language of non-violence and embrace our dispossession, it becomes more clear how to precipitate that vital failure. When their imaginary cannot justify itself against its brutalities, it becomes so vicious and fearful that it attacks and consumes itself. 

The myth ends in powerful unraveling disbelief. 

Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá still speaks. She shared her fascination and we began to weave, she said if we have forgotten, she will teach us again. The restoration is itself a ceremony. We pull at the thread and unbind ourselves and each other. We unravel one story and reweave. This is the pattern of the storm, it is carried by sacred winds. 

As it blesses us and our breath mixes with the breaths of our ancestors, we are rewoven and bundled into its beauty. We are reminded, “There is no authority but nature.” 

Hwee’díí’yiń déé’ haazíí’aanii, éi’ ńí›hxéé’ bééhaazíí’ áánįį aat’eeh. Baalagaana, Bíí’ Laah’ Áshdlaa›ii, bééhaazíí’ áánįį bíí’jíí’ niinii, éi’ dóh’ áálįįdaa’.

TOWARD THE SETTLER COLONIAL NOTHING

In subtle teachings that followed the contours of sand paintings and emergence narratives, I was raised with the grounding, “There are not two worlds, there is just one world crossed by many paths.”

As Nohoka Diyin Dine’, our teachings share that many worlds have anteceded this one.

Dine Bahane’ (our creation account) informs us that through destruction of that which harms us (naayee’, or monsters), balance with existence can be restored and generated. Destruction and creation is part of the cycle woven into the stories of these lands. We carry Hozho ji’ (way of harmony) in our right hand and we carry Anaaji’ (way of protection/enemy way) in our left hand. When we urge towards S^’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoo, we are not choosing between siloed dichotomies, we are embodying the dimensions (which include the four directions, upwards, below, and within) of proceeding cultural augmentations that comprise existence.

Harmony, or balance isn’t as simple as equalizing the positive with the negative, our cosmology isn’t rooted in such antinomies. In this way I was taught not to pray against our enemies (as some do), but prepare with prayers, medicines, and ceremonies of protection as spiritual weapons. We have an aggregate of cultural taboos or what could be better understood as spiritual consequences that relate to hochxoo’ji’ (way of evil), that which we do not casually discuss (do’ jiniida’) as it invokes disharmony. This is how we carry certain medicines and why we have a vital ceremonial structure of protection.

Many elements of Hashkeeji Nahat’a (War Way) have been largely erased from Dine collective memory with the exception of Ndaa’ (enemy way ceremony). This ceremony is a living extension of the liberation of Dine Bikeyah from monsters that made early existence nearly impossible. The pathway of Naayee’ Neizghani (Monster Slayer) and Tobajishchini (Born for Water) are still traveled within the ceremony itself. While somewhat documented and translated, its many complex teachings and medicines are not the romantic notion that can be translated into marketable phrases such as “Walk in beauty” and dressed in velvet and silver. Balance, or harmony with existence as it is, also means addressing the spiritual and corporeal dimensions of protection and attack. There are monsters, there are enemies, and there is correspondent violence to end their threat. These are not historical artifacts, they are the complex pathways of life we still walk (as Holy Earth surface People) in this world.

While I will not disclose more than what has already been, I feel it important to note that within the Ndaa’, the patient embodies Monster Slayer through ritual blackening with ashes. Ashes, within the context of the ceremony, negate spiritual harm.

As far as I know there is no way to positively translate colonial violence and the resistance to it in Dine Bizaad. This implies that there is primarily (though not exclusively) a negative way to engage it.

Liberation of the Earth and her beings has never been and never will be a progressive, peaceful, or positive proposition. These systems of conquest, domination, coercion, and exploitation will not cede or be receded. The warrior twins knew this of their enemies and so they sought the pathway of Johonaa’ei (the sun) to slay them (though some were left to maintain harmony).

There is an unpretentious intelligibility and beauty in an autochthonous dissonant pedagogy. It smells like gunpowder from the lever action rifle fired by Katherine Smith at government employed fence builders at Big Mountain. It smells of a freshly cut winter Tse ch’il stalk being prepared to make a bow. It feels like white corn meal between your fingers and chiih’ being ground to the dust that we will use for spiritual armor.

We navigate and survive through the violence imposed, turn llrin on itself, and locate a dissonant harmony; an insistent anti-colonial dissonance. Our ceremonial offerings of hopelessness become the destruction of faith in the transformation of a social order manufactured on our destruction, in other words, a degeneration of settler colonial progress. The most bitter medicines are the strongest.

When we ask, “What made the Warrior Twins warriors?” ceremony responds with teachings. Prayer (intention) responds with vision (direction). These sacred lands are painted with the blood of monsters slain. Here is red Earth crushed to dust. It is our paint for battles within and without. Before sunrise we pray. Our first armor is our medicine. Our first weapons are those weapons of Nature. A call to ceremony is a call to action.

When we speak of the sacred we speak of our power, it is within the sacred mountains, sacred rivers, and places where we are most connected with the essence of existence and our cosmology. Those that hold coercive power don’t care about notions of “truth” as with the idea of “speaking truth to power.” When speaking with the sacred, we are speaking with and asserting that power.

It is the most exquisite manifesto: destroy what destroys us. Indigenous despair and anti-colonial action are (de)generative settler destruction. Our dreams are filled with unrestrained temporal assaults on settler memory, capitalist property, and the critical infrastructure that sustains occupation. Through the cycle of fire and ash, they become regenerative. The ceremonial cycle of mutuality (mutual aid) and protection (mutual defense) to maintain harmony is a radical reconnection that has the deepest roots. But there is only so much we can build up through alternative systems while being stifled into non-existence.

Unsettling interventions target all points of critical colonial infrastructural operations (including machinery and institutions) and the resources that sustain them; from extraction (mining, drilling, clear-cuts, etc.) to manufacturing (production sites, research facilities, etc.), power plants (coal, solar, wind, gas, etc.) and the lines and hubs that connect them, communications towers, lines, digital and cyber infrastructure, transportation (trains, planes, airports, ships, docks, vehicles, pipelines, etc.), storage facilities, processing plants and supply and distribution warehouses, research and testing facilities, to water sources, dams, and reservoirs, and even the narrative terrain that upholds the underlying assumptions of colonial power.

Consider the possible scale of anti-colonize criminality. The potential coordination and pressing of advantage offered with the contours of the Earth’s agitations that naturally destabilize these infrastructures. How unsettling those natural forces can be.

In 2014, The New York Times reported that the so-called US “could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine of the country’s 55,000 electric-transmission substa­tions… according to a previously unreported federal analysis.” The electrical grid is comprised of 450,000 miles of transmission lines, 55,000 substations and 6,400 power plants. Since 2020, the FBI has been investigating at least forty-one incidents of railway sabotage in “Washington” state reportedly connected to anti-oil pipeline resistance.

We are forces of nature. If we also move with the forces of nature, we strike when nature strikes. What better coordination and affinity is needed? The eco-incited insurrectionary impulse comes with the storm and destabilizes chances of settler recuperation, of sustaining occupation.

This is the specter of an Indigenous anarchism, an unsettling and ungovernable spiritual force of nature that makes colonizers afraid again.

When we converse with the sacred, we shed the dead skin of settler time.

We are compelled to ask, What does the Earth teach us to do?

Before the medical industrial complex and bio-colonialism and privatization of medicines, before industrial pollution precipitated diseases that consequently further exploitative technologies, before the commodification of treatment and consequent mass enslavement to debtors, Indigenous Peoples of these lands effectively healed our bodies, minds, spirits, and communities, with and through these sacred lands.

There is a reason that colonizers were so viciously fearful of Indigenous Peoples singing and Ghost Dancing. That their medicines were such a threat. Though fields were burnt and buffalo slaughtered, the invaders knew that they could never contend with the power of the force of nature. That Indigenous Peoples would not be fully defeated unless our spirits were severed from sacred ground. And so desecrations anteceded massacres. The unrelenting spirits of the land and our ancestors still live, and so our spirituality and sacred places are still under attack to this day. These are the places where medicines still grow. These are the places where creation still restores and renews.

Sacred waters also know how ruins were made.

Sacred winds blowing through ghost towns know how they collapsed upon themselves.

Sacred mountains know what causes states to fail.

The sun has risen and set on massive insurmountable empires that are now coruscant dust.

Settler time dies when we stop imagining its futures and histories. Indigenous cycles of existence continue. One path ends so that others can proceed. This is how the story of empire inevitably unravels: in ruins and ashes as a cautionary tale, a stoic myth we reserve for the most bitter of wintery nights.

Tending Sacred Fires

Your eyes reflect the same stars and we sing. An unrecognizable song of mourning. Low, nearly unintelligible between clenched teeth that chatter in the frozen waters of our insecurities. The world before this one. Seeds were carried forward and planted. A familiar space that weave traveled through that someone rigidly said was “time.” Our fingers held delicate needles with threads of stories weaving. We were given weapons adorned with lightning. A sacred fire was made.

Red ochre figures move, flickering in flame with shadows from meticulously arranged spaces on canyon walls. Guardians of abandoned silent stone ruins. Soft clay, iron rust, and smoke breath. In the fragments of memory without time, their stories have resisted decay. We open our eyes in the darkness of the ta’chee’ (sweat-lodge), bitter herbs seep from our pores. Preparing for conflict, we adorn ourselves with red Earth.

One crystal night our ancestors (the Holy ones) spoke back to us from the darkness, “Embody settler colonial negation.”

We responded.

We are the nightmares of colonizers coming to haunt the existence they have stolen. There are enemies that the progression of civilization cannot kill. We are unyielding anti-colonial spiritual weapons.

The answers from ceremony have always been found in the space between the sacred and the profane.

Here between these words and pages, they are simple, complex, varied, and purposefully incomplete because what we’re already doing with radical education and interventions, mutual aid, community defense, and autonomous infrastructure is medicine.

There is deep affinity in this conflicting relationality that resonates within those that the Earth also claims to be of and with. There are agitating points strung together that comprise a constellation of liberated moments. The more we share and make these irrational and inconsequential possibilities grow, the less space between them there is until there’s no space at all. From afar it looks like one fixed point. Up close, we breathe its atoms. It still feels incomplete (empty) so it is echoed, What is to be done? The response, What is to be undone?

We study the contours of our emergence narratives. We trace the lines in the rough hands of our ancestors who guide and shape the frameworks for our actions. They instruct “There is no perfect state of decolonization because there is no perfect state of human existence.” They remind us to also celebrate our incompleteness. We trace footsteps back to gather sacred medicines. We patiently watch the light and the way the rains flow and collect so we know where to gently place the seeds so many hands have carried. We listen intently when the Earth shifts and the moon is covered by the sun. And power takes another form. We reconcile the doing/undoing and what works through these sacred relationships. We welcome our relatives back into the circle, we do/undo interrelationally.

We warm our spirits on the sacred fires at frontlines throughout occupied lands. From those tended by Gidimt’en land defenders to those lit by elders resisting forced removal in Big Mountain, Winnemucca, and those tended by Indigenous trans and two-spirit youth at Camp Migizi. The sacred fire of Black rage that burnt down the Third Precinct police headquarters in so-called Minneapolis. The sacred fires that burnt military vehicles at Backwater Bridge. The sacred fire that burnt Vail to the ground. The sacred fires that made ashes of churches responsible for boarding schools. We nurture and carry the flames in our hearts (it will not be said that our vengeance did not have a heart).

We are still tending sacred fires.

For Dine, the negative experiences and crises that precipitated the endings of worlds in Dine Bahane’ made us whole, they brought us the living teachings of Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoo. They inform that weaponized despair (which becomes an instrument of ceremony) is a transformative force. Deep mutuality (the expression of ceremony) is a restorative one. This colonial nihilism is an affirmation of the wondrous impulse towards harmonious existence, the harmonizing, or simultaneous embodiment, of affirmation and negation.

If history is written by the conquerors, it will be unwritten by those who refuse to be conquered.

The doing? The undoing.

To live a life in conflict with authoritarian constraint on stolen land is a spiritual, mental, and material proposition; it is the negation of settler colonial domination.

It is the embodiment of direct action as healing and as a way of life (we carry protection and healing medicines).

It is a restoration of, and continuance of, ancestral mutual aid.

It is a continuous ceremony of destruction and creation. It is the discourse of the unceded sacred against civilization. It is the heat washing over our skin from the rocks in the ta’chee. It is the quiet prayer crafted from spit and blood in the back of a cop car. It is two sacred middle fingers up. It is a soft cracking voice from and to the darkness that both comforts and torments. It is why you’ll find me at the fire as it will not let me rest this night. From the beautiful darkness of negation it whispers,

“No spiritual surrender.”