Indigenous Solidarity An (Un)Settler's Place

Gord Hill: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism

Read the Full article here on the Upping the Anti website

For those not familiar with the AFN, could you provide more detail about your analysis and critique of the organization?

The AFN is comprised of all the Indian Act band council chiefs across the country, so it’s a national organization representing those chiefs. The Indian Act was imposed by the federal government in 1876 as a way of controlling indigenous people in Canada. It has three main components: the reserve system, where natives are to be concentrated; Indian status, which determines who is or is not “native”; and the band council system, which provides a local governing structure to implement the Act. It is through these three structures that Canada has historically imposed control over indigenous people, and it is how they have maintained control to this day. The band council system works as an arm of the federal government, which funds it. Its mandate is to implement the policies of the federal government at the local reserve community level. This is why we oppose the AFN: it’s working in the interests of the government and big business.

Are the Native Friendship Centres co-opted like the AFN?

Socialism, Solidarity, and Indigenous Liberation
By Deborah Simmons
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.newsocialist.org/index.php?id=1323

In Canada, a new radical movement of indigenous people is emerging that refuses to be co-opted by the “aboriginalist” policies of the state. This movement aims to resist the destructive, corrupting and oppressive aspects of the system that has been imposed on indigenous peoples since the arrival of the Europeans. At the same time, the new radical indigenism reaffirms and renews the positive aspects of the sovereign societies that existed on this continent before colonization. Inherent in this strategy is a strong sense of autonomy. Indigenous people are responsible for making their own revolution, in their own way.

Visioning Decolonization: an Analysis of the Native Youth Movement from Western Canada
By Alex Paterson

The purpose of this paper is to present native youth voices on the question of Canadian colonialism that are not represented by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). This paper utilizes content and discourse analysis of various Native Youth Movement (NYM) texts produced by chapters in North-western Turtle Island. The NYM members of Western Canada view themselves as in an existential conflict both materially and ideologically with the Canadian state. They see themselves as representing the pursuit of authentic Indigenity and as knowing the path to freedom and harmony with the earth. The conflict between the NYM and the Canadian state is rooted in different relations to the land, co-constituted by an ideological pursuit of the ideal. Firstly, the paper analyzes the identification of NYM members as warriors and collective self-understanding of what it means to be Indigenous and a social movement. Secondly, the paper critically evaluates the type of relations the NYM imagines having with its others. These others include the Canadian state, transnational corporations, the Wasáse Movement, the AFN/band councils and non-native peoples. Lastly, this paper assesses the internal debates and proposals the NYM envisions for a campaign of authentic decolonization.

It's easy enough to hedge about politics. It comes naturally and most of the time the straight answer isn't really going to satisfy the questioner, nor is it appropriate to fix our politics to this world, to what feels immovable. Politics, like experience, is a subjective way to understand the world. At best it provides a deeper vocabulary than mealy-mouthed platitudes about being good to people, at worst (and most commonly) it frames people and ideas into ideology. Ideology, as we are fully aware, is a bad thing. Why? Because it answers questions better left haunting us, because it attempts to answer permanently what is temporary at best.

http://www.greenanarchy.org/index.php?action=viewwritingdetail&writingId...

Text of a 1997 talk by Amor y Rabia (Mexico) member on the theme of Indigenous Autonomy

As a collective, Amor y Rabia has wanted to address the theme of Indigenous Autonomy, because we understand that in this time, as in other eras of history, it is the best model for organizing a movement of resistance and struggle that includes not only indigenous people, but also everyone who is convinced of the need to live in a different world.

On the eve of a new millennium, we meet once again, to look for the correct paths in the endless struggle to transform this society into a world of justice, of freedom, and of hope. Today, more than ever, in the presence of the possibility and the conditions for participating in a revolutionary process in Mexico, in the presence of the idea of changing the current forms of human community into new forms, more aware and therefore more egalitarian, and in the presence of the challenge of being ourselves part of this transformation, once again, for these reasons and many more, we allow ourselves to dream that utopia can be realized.

this post/article explores the need for placing colonialism properly in our theory and action, and the proper place is central."

this is a draft. (please don't reproduce)

My Thoughts on Leftism: thinking unsettling.
By Alex

There is a problem with the moral verbosity of Canadian leftists and their eurocentric political dogmas imported from England and France etc. They are problematic in the respect that the calls for egalitarianism are based on a specific historical context for a specific culture.

What We Believe

The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in US society.

The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse.