It's partway through an early spring evening, late in the pandemic. Neighbors and friends gather in the parking lot of a closed down fast food joint to host a community cook-out. Toni arrives and sees a group of old-friends they havent seen since the start of the pandemic, and joins them mid-conversation:
INTRO: where are the characters? Jade, Base, Toni, Nelt
j(A)de: ...is just another sort of rhizomatic neoliberalism, honestly. But speaking of conflicts, i just saw that "Another word for Settle" critique of Re-attachments and Inhabit. They kind of come out swinging.
base: Yeah, I saw that when it came out a couple months ago. And I mean, I get it. Race and settler colonialism go to the heart of the problem, especially here in Turtle Island, and it needs to be addressed head-on.
Toni: Wait what, slow down a bit. I know about Inhabit, but I havent had a chance to read re-attachements yet. Whats this new text?
base: Okay so basically. (insert the main critique from Another word for Settle focusing on the critique about settlers trying to be new indigenous people, and the critique that settlers claim Indigeneity to claim ownership over territory.) I think they bring up a really good point and we need to talk about how many of us are settlers and need to address how this leads to having implicit colonial thinkings when we talk about territory.
Nelt: Are you sure?
base: Um, what do you mean, Nelt?
Nelt: Well, "identity politics" has become a caricature of itself, right? People are acting as if using the right words, identifying in the right ways, dancing the oppression olympics with enough gold medals, is equivalent to the revolution. (bitterly) Fuck that. What it's going to take are people committed to something bigger, willing to live and die for something they believe in. And that something needs to be part of the earth, dammit. Or else we'll sacrifice everything on the altar of "human rights", whatever liberal thing that ends up meaning.
So yeah, maybe we need to stop the charade that getting all the "white settler colonizers" to say the right words and pay lip service to the right "accomplices" is enough. It isn't even helping. It's a fucking distraction.
j(A)de: Wow, you sound pissed.
Nelt: Damn right I'm pissed.
Toni: Help me understand, though. 'Cause you're the one that's taught me about the importance of Black Power and recognizing that the struggle we're fighting is fundamentally against the empire as such, not for representational power within it. So like this text makes sense when were talking about access to governmental resources, legal battles for land in the court system. even though people claim identities to try and negotiate with the state, these types of politics are still wrapped up in the apparati of empire.
Nelt: Yeah, that's exactly why I'm pissed. About the way that identity politics has ended up being a cudgel to keep people docile in the arms of sellouts.
base: Look, Nelt, let's not get too nasty here. I'm not denying that there's misuses and misunderstandings out there, but there's some really important wisdom here as well, in what it seems you're blanket-calling "identity politics".
Nelt: I get that, I guess by "identity politics" I mean the ways that university bubbles incorporate revolutionary and anti-colonial theory but then neutralize it. Once national liberation went through the echo chambers of the academy and became fodder for disciplinary border skirmishes, it ended up a kind of rhetorical device. A way to score points in some sort of ridiculous game within the confines of the empire's ivory jail.
Toni: Omg for real this reminds me of something Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui wrote a few years ago, where she criticizes the recent turn in the academy that tries to analyze the colonial roots in everything. Like at a certain point, they focus so much on finding the colonial roots in everything that the dont actually discuss any decolonial practices, whether it be Standing Rock, Idle no More, or the recent George Floyd rebellion in the US. University People are writing to other University People about decolonization, adopt a very structural analysis of the whole situation, but arent actually thinking about how people adopt decolonial practices on the ground.
Nelt: Yeah...
base: Let's get back to the specific arguments that "Another word" makes. It's specifically not just doing some sort of point-scoring that delegitimizes people for who they are, or aren't. In fact, I think you'd really appreciate that it's not really making an argument about individual "identity", but rather something like the balance of forces between different social collectivities, different peoples. The heart of the piece is that it's more politically effective for settler people to support indigenous peoples' sovereignty, because they have a huge head start in growing and maintaining living, breathing political economies that are part of the earth, and are resistant to empire. Rather than focusing so much on creating their own little "postracial" communes and territories off the grid, or under the radar, or whatever; which as new "peoples" are weak, and liable to fall back into navel-gazing.
j(A)de: Ouch. That hit a bit close to home there, base. i mean, haven't you been critiqued for exactly that? Isn't your whole thing that some of us settlers need to leave empire now, to become ancestors of earth people?
base: Wait, Im sorry what? What critique are you talking about? And what do mean by earth people?
j(A)de: insert what you mean by Earth People, and what this critique is
Toni: In my opinion theres no outside of empire, there's only the ways you can make lines of flight, however imperfect, and experiment in new ways of doing things.
base: Yeah, that's exactly why I'm a bit touchy about it. If people act as if it's this easy, natural thing that happens with a combination of some fancy words and some wine among friends, then it's easy to see it as a cop out.
Nelt: Hey, pretty words and prettier wine is pretty good among friends, I say. (grabs the space bag and air-guzzles a few gulps.) That said, Is the critique of these two texts legit? Haven't read 'em. I prefer my French theory in French.
j(A)de: (laughing out loud) Oh shit, Nelt, Rattachements is in French, originally.
Nelt: Oh fuck, yeah, right: Québec! (groans) Will I never get superciliousness to go down right? OK, educate me.
a pregnant silence.
j(A)de: Look, honestly, i thought it was pretty beautiful. i mean, "eco-anxiety will be the ill of our generation." (Well, that's my translation of the first line, anyway.) Like, yeah. Yeah, it will. And i'm not really into all the high-falutin' theory crap that's often out there, especially some of that French stuff. Even when it's talking about ecology and the earth, it's fucking abstract, with extended literary allusions and shit. Not much about the fuckin' daily human struggle to face the situation.
Toni: I know what you mean. I literally have no idea what eco-anxiety means, is that something like insert some definition?
j(A)de: Yeah, basically it means insert the definition re-stated in another way maybe with an example
Not that this piece is entirely lacking in a few bells and whistles. A few latinate blur-words, a few grand pronouncements. But whatever. It's ok. The basics were there, I thought: Fuck. The whole world is dreaming apocalypse, and the options are hand-wringing, recycling, or videogames. Will-sapping stuff.
We need something else, and that something else is being ready and willing to become part of the earth. To live and die in its defense. To become a people of the earth.
We need presence, i guess they say, which means really being a part of the land where you are, through reattachments.
Toni: That totally makes sense, I just feel the whole focus on earth seems so hippy, like those flags that white liberals love with the picture of earth on it. Or that really annoying mantra no race but the human race. Like we live here in this city, were currently hanging out with a bunch of neighbors who have no idea what the hell were talking about. For me to quote-unquote be a person of the earth means building these connections to the people I live with, the history of the place we live, and the way people live in this place that no macro-structural analysis of power and how people "should" be living according to their identity can explain when they are living in their territory.
base: Well, fine enough, but don't they also say that the way to do this is basically just getting together with your friends and living in the cracks of the system? Or maybe eventually to seize a "territory" that looks an awful lot like some white supremacist secession or something?
Nelt: Hmmm, those seem pretty different. What's the deal with this "territory" business, anyway? Always seemed a strange word, so much like what a state or an empire controls, or something.
j(A)de: Yeah, it's a bit of a strange word, I guess. I think in the French it has the connection to "earth", ie. terre. But I think what it means is something like "dual power", like inhabiting a place, relating with the people there, not only humans I suppose, the flows of power, to the point that the state and capital aren't the only ones that have an ability to operate. Like, there's two different ways of seeing it: the empire overlay, everything "normal"; and then also the "us" overlay: a whole different city, a different countryside, a different territory.
base: A bit like moving through the city, and seeing streets and billboards and power lines; and then shifting your gaze, and seeing hills and waterways and habitats?
j(A)de: Yeah, something like th...
Toni: I like the way youre looking at it Jade. I dont know shit about French, but my friends in Mexico always talk about territory as the place you live, the relationships you have with the others who live there. Its not just a bordered area, but its the place where for better or worse you have relationships with people. Like when Im visiting my fam in Guadalajara, I think about that territory as the fruit vendors in the streets, the mariachis playing in the plaza, and the way people deal with the fucked up police. Really it's how people almost like "hack" their built environment against the way they are told to live and then fight to defend their lives when a development project comes to try and impose some new order.
Nelt: Or like the middle of a riot, when the cops can't come in without a massive snatch squad, and even then half the time get beat, and the deathly world of cookie-cutter boutique shops gets turned into a wilderness of tags and slogans?
j(A)de: Yeah, i think something like that too.
base: OK, but how does this relate to indigenous territory, the struggle for actually-existing peoples of the earth to reclaim their autonomy and power to inhabit the land. Look, those texts may be bringing the Appelist ideology into relation with Turtle Island, but they really do kind of ignore the peoples here.
j(A)de: (a bit awkwardly) Well, not completely ignore. I mean, there is that paragraph that acknowledges the inspiration of the Zapatistas and the Kanien'keha:ka: ...
base: Yeah, as "feeding our imaginary".
Nelt: Ouch.
base: I mean, this is where the critique that this seems an awful lot about just not feeling bad or guilty, comes in. There's lots of pretty words, but if the end result is to make people comfortable never leaving their comfort zones, not actually doing the hard work that solidarity with indigenous peoples (and other colonized people) requires, then I really don't see how it's not a cop out.
Nelt: Well, I guess the real question then is: what is the end result. I mean, getting people spun out on ideological purity and self-flagellation also has problems, it mostly just turns people off, or gets them caught up in "radder-than-thou" debates. When I was with my auntie's people for the road blockade, they didn't want white people there who came alone, without a crew, without a sense of why they were doing what they were doing, on their own terms. Most of the time those folk end up being useless hangers-on always looking for a way to join our ceremonies or community activities, or begging for compliments. Or they just bail when things get tough.
(pauses and thinks)
Well, honestly, not all of them. Some of them were amazing. But over time it seemed to me they got a lot less preachy about what they were doing, a lot more invested in helping other white people get it in their bellies why helping our encampment is also about helping themselves.
Toni: Yeah Nelt, your experience in the road blockade was interesting because while a lot of our non-Indigneous friends engaged in a movement for Indigenous territorial autonomy, it also feels really different than how myself and others think about territorial autonomy when were not talking about Indigenous communities. Like in the case of Canada and the US, so many of the movements are around treaty lands and the history of nation-to-nation relationships. This isnt the kind of territorial autonomy that base is talking about, right?
Jade: If anything, it may bear more resemblance to the Zapatistas only because its specifically an anti-neoliberal movement that envisioned itself as a model that could be replicated elsewhere. It is social movement in the sense of "idle no more" in Canada instead of the struggles of an Indigenous community over land. Ive already shared my love of the Zapatista movement so I wont go down that rabbit hole again, but along with what they do in Chiapas, they coordinate at an international level to teach people about their experiment in territorial autonomy that they could incorporate into the struggles in the places they live.
(pause)
base: Look, I hear you. There's a lot of pitfalls out here. And goddess knows I want people to find that fire in the belly, that deep sense that the life of the land is our life too. However it happens. By hook or by crook.
Nelt: Yeah. That. And I guess it just doesn't surprise me so much that a bunch of white settlers would look to each other (and some French "friends") to understand the times we're in, and what to do about it. In a way, I trust it more, it's people finding their motivation really in themselves, not borrowing it.
j(A)de: They're not all white.
j(A)de: They're not all white. There's a bunch of different ethnicities or races or whatnot involved.
Nelt: OK, still. Point is, people have to find whatever sources of connection they can, starting where they are. Then they need to get in motion to put that sense of connection, that solidarity and sense of commune, into action. That's what I get from this. Not so much squabbling over words: more real listening to what's going to work to get deeper, broader crews in actual fucking fighting formation with each other. More action. And that action requires relationships between crews. And those relationships require not getting our underwear in a bunch over ideological purities. They require lived, daily, struggle.
base: Yes.
j(A)de: Yes.
Nelt: OK then. (drains the space bag) So what are we gonna do about it?
base: Maybe we start by leaning into actually learning from the peoples of the earth that we're goddamn lucky enough to already be living around.
j(A)de: Maybe we start by finding a crew and breaking some of the fucking chains.
Nelt: Maybe we start by all of the above. And praying that we have eyes to see each other, and ears to hear.
The camera pans to the window, where the gibbous moon is rising.