Lazy_Dally09

This statement may or may not be true, but either way its declaration is largely anecdotal, and only acknowledged when it's perceived as beneficial to them, i.e. a job, a scholarship, a new boyfriend's Pocahottie fetish, or as an excuse for why it's ok for them to wear a headdress while half dressed and drunk on Halloween or at a concert, festival, or sporting event.

These folks will go weeks, months or years without considering their Native ancestry and it's certainly not a part of their everyday lives.

That's why they don't care about the tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, treaty rights, or extreme poverty in Native communities.

While not a “full blood” others with mixed ancestry can and do embrace their Native roots and a sense of ownership takes place.

When they see race based mascots or ridiculous Native caricatures, they don't see some remote extinct group being "honored." They see that they personally are being mocked, and know they are not a buckskin pantied sexbot, or a silly redskinned stereotype.

They know Natives are alive, human and real because they are Native. They also understand that the land and water and our ceremonies must be protected, because it is theirs as well as their grandparent's, and children's, and children's children.

They are not just descendants- they are Native. As such they will seek out the truth of their heritage and you will find them thirsting for knowledge about their people, culture, language, and ways. They become part of the whole- from tiospaye to Oyate."

With Particular Regard to the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Kevin Carson

Introduction

The central thesis of this paper – one which will be restated throughout – is the problematic nature of the nation-state, in the sense of a state or polity built around an official ethnicity. The ideology of ethnonationalism, as the basis for the nation-state, is a relatively modern European invention.

Before the rise of the modern nation-state, states were typically imperial and/or dynastic, with communities of different language or ethnicity commingled in the same territory and interacting on a regular basis. This includes precolonial states in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. According to Mahmood Mamdani:

Writers on African affairs often bemoan the artificial nature of boundaries drawn by colonial powers – artificial in that they cut across cultural communities. This criticism reinforces colonial modernist ideology by suggesting that internal boundaries between ethnic groups territorialized as tribes were somehow natural. Yet the ethnic nations these writers cherish did not necessarily exist as territorialized groups before colonialism. Ethnic political communities were created by colonizers drawing lines between culturally distinct peoples and subjecting them to law said to be customary. The tribal governance that activists seek to protect reflects the politicization of cultural identity.1

This state of affairs persisted in many places for long after the initial rise of nation-states in Western Europe: a 19th century linguistic map of Eastern Europe, with islands of ethnic Germans, Magyars, and Slavs in Austria-Hungary, or of various eastern Slavic languages in the Russian Empire, resembles a shotgun scatter.

The state form itself, whether national, imperial, or dynastic, was by no means foreordained either. The “transnational politico-commercial complex, centered upon one or several cities” (e.g. the Hanseatic League) was also a possibility.2

The first national, or ethnic, states to emerge in modern Europe adhered to official ideologies based on a constructed national identity. National states, Etienne Balabar writes, “project beneath their political existence to a preexisting ‘ethnic’ or ‘popular’ unity (into the past, into the depths of ‘civil’ society). …”3

But most modern “nationalities” are indeed artificial constructs, in that they erase the actual ethnic and cultural identities of a majority of the national population. For every such nation that is artificially constructed, many more ethnic groups must be suppressed within its boundaries. The “French” national identity was constructed around one local langue d’oeil dialect in the Ile de France region, and entailed the suppression of cultural identities of speakers of Provençal and other occitan dialects, Breton, and virtually every other dialect spoken outside the environs of the capital. Likewise the “Spanish,” or Castilian, national identity, which erased Aragonese, Catalan, Leonese, Galician, and Basque identities. So far from empowering a popular majority within a given territory, ethnonationalism and “national self-determination” have been tools for violent assimilation of majorities by minorities.

To illustrate how arbitrary modern-day “national” identities are, consider France, which most people think of as a natural entity, and consider what other entities might have taken its place had, say, the Hundred Years War gone differently. Within the present-day boundaries of “France,” there might instead be a western Plantagenet kingdom united with England, a Burgundian state in the northeast including Belgium and Luxembourg, and an Occitan state in the south – possibly united with Aragon and Catalonia.

Consider how arbitrary the “Russian” national identity is. In late medieval times the Mongols withdrew from the area north of the Black Sea and west of the Volga, leaving an emerging patchwork of many related, overlapping, and more or less mutually intelligible dialects with common Old East Slavic roots. Depending on which of the principalities finally managed to unify the region – if they ever did – the official common language might just as easily have been based on the Novgorodian or Smolenskian dialect. Had Kievan Rus persisted with no Mongol disruption, modern-day Moscow might be an eastern frontier state seeking autonomy from “Russia.” But either way, children today would be taught to view that version of Russia as a natural, unified entity, with a continuous history and foreordained destiny.

As Nandita Sharma points out, the very idea of the nationally-defined state simultaneously entails the transformation of substantial populations into the Other.

National forms of territorialization transform land, water, and air into the territory of a nationally sovereign state and, in the process, forge a naturalized link between a limited group of people and a certain place. As each nation imagines that it has its own place on earth, Nationals come to see themselves as the “people of a place.”… Those excluded from the heaven of national belonging in the actual places they live come to be represented as foreign bodies contaminating the national body politic. They are made into the “people out of place.”4

This tendency is further intensified by “the discourse of autochthony” which “restrict[s] national belonging to those who can show they are Native to the nation.”

…[E]mbedded in each idea of national sovereignty – or home rule – is the notion that “true” Nationals are those who are Natives of its territory. By restricting the making of claims to sovereignty, territory, and rights to those who are National-Natives, discourses of autochthony produce borders even more fortified and difficult to cross than those between National and Migrant.5

The construction of nationality is a violent process. “Partitions, expulsions from nationalized territory through “population transfers,” and social and legal exclusion from the nation are par for the course.”6 This was demonstrated in the policies of the victorious Western Allies in partitioning the former territories of the disintegrated Habsburg Empire after WWI, and in the forced expulsion of ethnic Greeks from the Anatolian coast by Turkish nationalists. The same tendencies again manifested themselves in the Balkan wars, after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. “In each national territory, people targeted for ‘ethnic cleansing’ were said to be Migrants and thus foreign elements in the national homelands of others. A total of 140,000 people were killed, with another two million people displaced.”7

Nationalism and the nation-state had their origins as a modern European ideology; but – much as the expropriation and enclosure of common lands began in early modern Europe and then spread to the colonial world – the ideology of nationalism was used by European colonial powers to remake the colonial world. And, since 1945, it has contaminated and sabotaged most efforts at genuine self-governance in the former colonial world. Ultimately, the only solution is to challenge the nationalist principle itself, and break the link between ethnicity and territorial governance.

Of course, a white Westerner commenting on such issues in the former colonial countries of the Global South should tread lightly. Anarchists are rightly hostile in principle to the idea of exclusive rights to extended territory grounded in ethnicity. As Center for a Stateless Society comrade William Gillis notes, the concept of Indigenous anarchism, of territorial sovereignty enforced by borders, “causes a lot of suspicion and ire from anti-nationalists” – himself not least among them.

Nevertheless, both he and comrade Emmi Bevensee are agreed on the need for nuance, and for extra care in speaking on matters outside of many of our experiences. As Gillis writes, we should “be nuanced in how we attack nationalism, how we distinguish and interact with expressions of “indigenous nationalism,” and what critiques we prioritize with our time….”

I am not urging western anarchists to intrude on indigenous activists like some kind of colonial anthropologist to sneer and offer peanut gallery advice from immediate perceptions. Those of us on the outside of any tradition or culture or discourse should generally follow the lead of those anarchists on the inside. Becoming familiar enough with a space to critique in detail productively rather than wasting people’s time is an arduous journey….

There are of course significant differences between variants of “indigenous nationalism,” “global south nationalism,” and the direct colonial settler nationalisms of the west. Many more important subdivisions, distinctions, and addenda are possible. Pragmatism and strategy are frequently called for. Even while anarchists should resolutely say what only those with our aspirational… values can say, there is a place for collaboration and holding our tongues….8

And despite the historical connections of Indigenous nationalism to imperial divide and rule strategies and to the earlier European ideologies of ethnonationalism, Bevensee notes, the differences of Indigenous nationalism “are dramatic enough to warrant much greater nuance than the discourse currently has….”9 Further, colonized and Indigenous people may feel they have little choice in adopting the language of nationalism and sovereignty.

Even when Indigenous and global south radicals are forced to play the game of settler nationalism, we must acknowledge the power differentials at play. In most cases they are faced with the choice of genocide, both cultural and literal, or playing the colonial game.10

And despite his less ambivalent hostility toward nationalism, Gillis to a considerable extent concurs:

Today it’s common for indigenous activists to use “nationalism” in self-identification. The conscious embrace of the western term was intended to emphasize an equal status that westerners didn’t recognize with terms like “tribes”. Nationalism is seen as a language and framework that can be appropriated and redefined. Further many see it as one thrust upon them.11

Nevertheless, nationalism is a conceptual straitjacket insofar as it “collapses the vast diversity of perspectives that I’ve heard from my indigenous friends and comrades.”12 Perhaps worst of all, it accepts a essentializing, Orientalist narrative imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonizers, and in so doing suppresses the richness and complexity of actual precolonial history and identities. “Imperialist and settler-colonial practice thus shaped and constructed indigenous subjectivities….” It “removed all fluidity and activity” from subject populations, “[r]atcheting up the definition and immobilization inherent to any construct of nativeness, hoping to impose such to the point of rigor mortis.”13

Both the colonial project of imposing essentialist identities for the sake of divide-and-rule considerations, or for simplification and legibility,14 and the adoption by the colonized of those identities in self defense, obscure all the historical nuances of commingling and interpenetration, cultural diffusion, and cosmopolitanism, between actual peoples. For example:

Pushing back against the limited carrying capacity of their environment, peoples of the great plains sought to transcend and surpass the micronationalisms of tribes, coming together in great cosmopolitan convergences. This attempt to move beyond nationalism is deeply inspiring. Just as there were empires and problematic societies across Turtle Island before the genocides, so too were there myriad projects of human liberation shining through….15

All things considered, I thought it best in this paper to highlight the voices of the colonized or formerly colonized themselves as much as possible, in examining the problematic aspects of Indigenous nationalism. Fortunately, three such voices – Edward Said, Nandita Sharma, and Mahmood Mamdani – are also three of the finest scholars of the subject. As such, I have relied heavily on them in writing this study.

Nevertheless, nationalism is a conceptual straitjacket insofar as it “collapses the vast diversity of perspectives that I’ve heard from my indigenous friends and comrades.”12 Perhaps worst of all, it accepts a essentializing, Orientalist narrative imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonizers, and in so doing suppresses the richness and complexity of actual precolonial history and identities. “Imperialist and settler-colonial practice thus shaped and constructed indigenous subjectivities….” It “removed all fluidity and activity” from subject populations, “[r]atcheting up the definition and immobilization inherent to any construct of nativeness, hoping to impose such to the point of rigor mortis.”13

Both the colonial project of imposing essentialist identities for the sake of divide-and-rule considerations, or for simplification and legibility,14 and the adoption by the colonized of those identities in self defense, obscure all the historical nuances of commingling and interpenetration, cultural diffusion, and cosmopolitanism, between actual peoples. For example:

Pushing back against the limited carrying capacity of their environment, peoples of the great plains sought to transcend and surpass the micronationalisms of tribes, coming together in great cosmopolitan convergences. This attempt to move beyond nationalism is deeply inspiring. Just as there were empires and problematic societies across Turtle Island before the genocides, so too were there myriad projects of human liberation shining through….15

All things considered, I thought it best in this paper to highlight the voices of the colonized or formerly colonized themselves as much as possible, in examining the problematic aspects of Indigenous nationalism. Fortunately, three such voices – Edward Said, Nandita Sharma, and Mahmood Mamdani – are also three of the finest scholars of the subject. As such, I have relied heavily on them in writing this study.

read the full study here:

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...