Two weeks ago I followed the call of the Giniw Collective, an Indigenous and two-spirit led camp on Anishinaabe land, to join the frontline resistance to the patriarchal violence of constructing yet another pipeline on Indigenous land. Crossing under …
Archive for category: Indigenous
Utopia’s Settler Colonialism Problem
Geoffrey
Wed, 12/01/2021 – 18:18
New editorial from Indigenous Action on the need to confront root ideologies and structures of colonialism and capitalism.
Global warming is a direct consequence of war against Mother Earth.
Unless the root ideologies and structures that precipitate this crisis are confronted and done away with, we condemn ourselves and future generations to non-existence. ”Big Green” non-profit corporations and so-called non-governmental organizations (even the Indigenous ones) have set the terms for dissent and triage of this crisis in such a way, that through the claims of foresightedness where we can supposedly see a better future ahead of us, manifest as a shallow and short lived mirage blowing back at us the inevitable ends of our own extinction, or an existence in a desolate and decimated hellscape, what else can be expected from a series of cookie cutter tactics that keep us marching in circles?
In contrast to the genuinely lethal, even existential crisis that the whole of the earth and the species who depend and reside upon it face, the current tactics of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience fail precisely because those who employ it consistently misunderstand the urgency of catastrophe on the horizon and embrace the safety of a positional, tactical, analytical, strategic and structural half measure as “protest”, that materially manifests itself as a decorated acquiescence in the form of continually more symbolic protests and adventures in the comfort zone politics of a march toward catharsis, as if that will stop glaciers from melting and entire species from going extinct. This failed posturing of so-called “protection,” “preservation” and accumulation of “political power” (lobbying) instead serves to reinforce the State and its monopoly of violence more than challenge them. One can only assume a psychology behind this is one of creative exhaustion and conceptual blindness or more simply a reticence that is the fear of being labelled “alarmist” or “too radical.” While nearly the whole of the Neo-Liberal Environmental Movement for Climate Justice (and have no doubt it is “NeoLiberal” or does Green Capitalism and Green economics mean something else?), has been sounding the alarms for the absolute necessity of radical change. In our case, as Indigenous People, we’ve been sounding it out since before Columbus, to one another, and to the settler invaders when we reminded them that you can’t eat money.
The Climate Justice Movement’s tactics are limited in that they all are expressed fundamentally as some form of aggressive lobbying (on National and International levels). But we can’t expect much more when they wield strategies that rest on damage control through political and economic reforms to the very people, forces, powers, interests and institutions that created this crisis in the first place. Although the appearances of systemic issues like capitalism and colonialism may be addressed in press releases and written across banners on the streets, the underlying strategic aims rest on the reconfiguration of the dominant social order towards a more ecologically oriented environmentally conscious nation state, against the totalizing all encompassing force that is Capitalist Colonialism and Imperialism. “Just transition” is a strategy of economic redemption to further preserve ways of being that are unsustainable by design, you can’t Lobby away Colonialism and Capitalism, no matter how hard you try.
The “Green New Deal,” like its parent “Green Economics” are meant to sustain the U.S. settler colonial project and the capitalist relations whose interest lay within the specificity of continuing the ongoing “exploitation” (destruction) of the whole of the Earth, while cashing in of course. In the case of The Green New Deal, which in many ways begat its own child, that of the Red New Deal, who aside from outright plagiarizing, fronting, and co-opting longterm Indigenous Climate Justice work, the Red Nation’s “Red New Deal,” proposes an anti-capitalist and woefully limited anti-colonial response that not only reinforces industrialization but ultimately leads to the ongoing participation in Capitalism proper, just “renamed” and “reformed” under a “transitional” Socialist Rubric, that leads to their Marxist organization’s propositions for a “decolonized” authoritarian worker-run state as the best solution. So while we’re collectively dying from the air we can’t breathe, the water we can’t drink, or both priced out of accessibility in the here and now we are meant to await the building of yet another Socialist Utopia. A utopia built upon the current dystopia of growing wastelands and climate disasters on every continent. From deadly nuclear power to lithium and rare earth mineral mining, and the privatization of water, the greening of any economy is still a war against Mother Earth and all existence. But yeah, sure “we can transition program” our way out of it, you can’t. This isn’t a solution, this isn’t even intervention, let alone interdiction in or upon Global Disaster Capitalism, this is group fantasythink. It is accelerated death by suicide.
We don’t want an ecologically friendly settler colonial State, we seek to abolish its very existence.
The forefront of Indigenous Climate justice groups proselytize a narrative of their own victimhood, in terms that increase funding streams to their non-profit corporations to pay their bloated salaries and climate action protest-cations aka PR stunts with a legal team on retainer. All while they compete for the spotlight and rally with celebrities to build organizational recognition, and a homogeneity of popular purpose, not to mention a standardization of rote tactical and strategic stagnation.
The assertion that we protect 80% of the world’s biosphere has become a twist on the colonial idea of the “White man’s burden,” but here it is merely shifted to “the burden of the colonized.” This is the twisted colonial logic of climate activism: to reduce our ways of being and complex ongoing struggles to campaign talking points, only to prove we deserve “a seat at the table,” it’s “Change” through arithmetic by way of better self marketing, branding and advertising. Through ceremony, and a myriad of tactically dynamic direct actions we protect all of existence – not just percentages. Our power is not to be found at the colonizer’s table, it is to be found and rekindled in its well fed flames.
By calculating that Indigenous resistance to 20 fossil fuel projects has “stopped or delayed” carbon emissions equivalent to approximately 25% of U$ and KKKanada’s annual overall emissions, climate activists reveal the power of direct action, yet they also assign their campaigns more credit than is due. Particularly by citing significant losses such as DAPL and Line 3 projects in their reports, this statistic tends towards a deluded climate optimism that we view as a path fraught with peril and death. If we’re not being honest with and about the failings of our movements, what does shifting tactics, and more importantly adjusting our overall strategies, toward the end of yet more changing statistics matter? It rings as a dishonest sales pitch and sidesteps the important conversations of what is actually working to stop climate catastrophe. It also still provides a leeway, by which the prevention of climate change and the related catastrophic disasters it brings, as “optional.” Not existentially necessary, which it actually is. Every species residing on this planet is literally under threat of extinction and mass destruction. We’re not convinced about making this a numbers game to celebrate the disrupting of 25% of an industry, when we’ve lost over 98% of the battles in a war with such high stakes. Particularly when those activist campaigns have spent hundreds of millions of dollars with thousands of our relatives jailed and dragged through racist court systems.
We are not (entirely) pessimists, we want to have honest conversations about what is working and what is not. The crisis is urgent and the moment is desperate. It isn’t “pending,” the crises are here, now, everywhere and everywhen. If we ignore the failings and downplay or ignore the lessons we can learn from them, how can we shift and grow strategies and tactics that are more effective?
It is not our responsibility to sustain unsustainable ways of existence.
In point of fact it IS our responsibility to destroy them. Their maintenance as “sustainability” is the assumed burden of the current climate justice movement, the one in dire need of radical change in and of itself, which has become as project the “burden of the colonizer,” built upon the continued genocide of the colonized as resonating back to the beginning lo those 500 plus years ago. If we wish not to be enemies of Mother Earth, it is up to us to shift, and own our responsibilities and mutuality to the Earth and take action accordingly. This has always meant that we must seek to assert the ways of our ancestors through spiritual and practical interventions (from growing food to burning their forts and everything in between). It is the contention of harmony and disharmony that has always challenged us in this world.
To fully stop these mines, power plants, dams, and pipelines we have to stop the political machinery and systems that generate them at their root.
Our power is not in the spotlight with more talking heads negotiating for recognition and performing for the colonial gaze. It is not confined to social media word limits or shouting through a megaphone on a permitted march. Our power is in the shadows cast by the flames of this system burning to the ground, while we light another match.
photo: Klee Benally on Instagram
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is gradually replacing Columbus Day, and we as a culture are here for it. In fact, we have been for quite some time. This is a day of remembrance, a day to honor the ancestors and elevate the original people who walked this land.
It is only fitting — in this time of post-Floyd racial reckoning and a coming to terms with a shameful whitewashed American history and a legacy of genocide — that people renegotiate their relationship with America. This process includes a rejection of symbols and monuments to colonialism, theft, rape, plunder and mass murder.
It is only fitting — in this time of post-Floyd racial reckoning and a coming to terms with a shameful whitewashed American history and a legacy of genocide — that people renegotiate their relationship with America.
This is likely why President Joe Biden recently reversed Trump-era environmental protection cuts of sacred Indigenous spaces and signed a proclamation marking the first time a president has acknowledged Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a national commemoration.
“Our country was conceived on a promise of equality and opportunity for all people — a promise that, despite the extraordinary progress we have made through the years, we have never fully lived up to,” Biden’s proclamation reads. “That is especially true when it comes to upholding the rights and dignity of the Indigenous people who were here long before colonization of the Americas began.”
From its inception, Columbus Day has been problematic at best — a holiday in honor of white supremacy, to celebrate a man who “discovered” a land that had been inhabited by ancient civilizations for as long as 23,000 years. Columbus’ “discovery” brought on centuries of Indigenous genocide, African enslavement and global colonization. Let us talk frankly here. It was the holiday that made Italians white and truly American — after being regarded as an inferior race facing discrimination and even lynching — when there are many other Italians worthy of honor.
And let us remember the armed white vigilantes who guarded the Christopher Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza in Philadelphia when Black folks and racial justice activists sought its removal. When armed white supremacist thugs are the last line of defense for Columbus, what more do you need to know about Columbus? As statues of Columbus, Confederate terrorists, enslavers and colonizers are being toppled and beheaded — from Boston, Massachusetts to Bristol, England, it is not enough to declare what we abhor. The question is, what do we wish to uphold, and who do we hope to uplift? What are we building and who are we supporting?
Indigenous Peoples’ Day Should Resonate with Black People @davidalove https://t.co/hpOjwQgSFo Love: Columbus’ “discovery” brought on centuries of Indigenous genocide, African enslavement and global colonization. https://t.co/zKxaGXZsFJ pic.twitter.com/zWLriBRKFq
— Dick and Sharon (@DickandSharon) October 24, 2021
With over a dozen states and the District of Columbia celebrating the alternative to Columbus’ Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a perfect example of reclaiming history and centering the lives of those who are often rendered invisible.
And losing millions of lives, having your land dispossessed, your children kidnapped and placed in boarding schools designed to kill Indian language and culture — this is enough to render you invisible to the mainstream white society. After all, sports team mascots mocking Native people are still a thing, with the Washington Football Team changing its racially offensive name just last year after corporate sponsor FedEx demanded the change. Society behaves as if Indigenous people no longer exist, or as if they couldn’t care less.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a concept that should resonate with Black people. Black people are among Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world, and this is a long history. As the late Rutgers University scholar Ivan Van Sertima taught us, the African presence in the “New World” predates Columbus by centuries.
Honoring the culture and history of Indigenous people means honoring the ancestors. “One thing that makes Native Americans different from Whites is that most of us view our ancestors as close as our families today,” tweeted Native American lawyer Brett Chapman, whose relative Standing Bear was the first Native American to win civil rights in the U.S. “I see all the injustice done to my ancestors like Standing Bear and know that was something my family suffered. It’s more visceral for Natives.”
Chapman recalled what his great-great-great-grandfather Chief White Eagle told an Alabama church of racist Southerners in 1883: “He said they were selfish, he wasn’t Christian and Native Americans don’t believe in Hell because Hell is, in fact, living in America with the Whites.”
But Indigenous People’s Day is more than just remembering history. Our very survival as a planet depends on following what the ancestors did as stewards of the land who protected the Earth for thousands upon thousands of years, until the white man depleted the land, the resources and people — all for profit.
Indigenous communities hold over half of the world’s land, with 5% of the world’s population protecting 80% of the world’s biodiversity. The communities have legal rights over only a small fraction of that land and are under threat. Community and Indigenous lands have lower deforestation rates and store a quarter of the world’s carbon stock, making these lands crucial to fighting climate change. And the knowledge th
at Indigenous people have gained over the centuries is helping us understand weather changes.
This is why we must welcome Indigenous Peoples’ Day. If we want to know where we are going, we must understand and honor the people who came before us, and on whose land we live.
The post Time to Reclaim Black People’s Land appeared first on LA Progressive.
A team of researchers published a study on Thursday confirming what Indigenous people already knew: The colonization of North America resulted in near-total land loss for the continent’s original inhabitants.
One of the most detailed reckonings of tribal land loss to date, the study compiles a massive set of data on the lands that were taken from tribes and the migrations many tribes were forced to make. In the continental U.S., Indigenous tribes lost close to 99 percent of their combined historical land bases through European colonization and the expansion of the United States.
Justin Farrell, a sociology professor at Yale University and the lead author of the paper, said that not only were tribal lands stolen, shrunken or wiped off the map completely, but that tribes’ present-day lands face “increased exposure to climate change risks and hazards, especially extreme heat and less precipitation.”
Like the displacement of pre-American peoples, the disproportionate impact of climate change on tribal lands is not a novel discovery. But Farrell said the aim of the research was to create the foundation of a publicly accessible database on land-loss that could be expanded by others and used to inform future research and policy-making.
“In some ways, we’re looking at an issue that everyone already knows about,” Farrell said. “But we’re trying to start a research project where we’re really zooming out and looking at the full scope of change.”
Ruins and a petroglyph along a rock face in southeastern Utah, within Bears Ears National Monument. Mountain Girl Photography / Aurora Photos / Getty ImagesTo determine the extent of land loss and the impacts of forced relocation, the team first had to map the historical territories of tribes in the continental U.S. The researchers pulled information from a broad set of historical sources, including land cession treaties and judicial records, as well as tribal publications and archives. After estimating the historical territories of hundreds of federally- and state-recognized tribes, they compared the total area to the tribes’ present-day lands.
According to their analysis, Indigenous people had a documented presence in more than 2.7 million square miles of what is now the contiguous U.S. The government-recognized tribal land base of today is 93 percent smaller, at roughly 165,000 square miles. Because many areas historically contained multiple tribes, the team also computed a cumulative sum for the ancestral lands of all the tribes in their study. They estimated that tribes held sway over a combined total of more than 21 million square miles — an area that was subsequently reduced by 98.9 percent.
Roughly 42 percent of the Indigenous groups from the historical period have no federally- or state-recognized land base, such as a reservation. Of the tribes that still have a land base, their territories are an average of 2.6 percent the size of their ancestral lands.
Kyle Whyte, who is an author on the paper and an environmental justice professor at the University of Michigan, said the history of land reduction and forced migration has resulted in unintended environmental consequences for tribes. The study found that present-day tribal lands experience more extreme-heat days — those with a maximum temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — and nearly 23 percent less precipitation annually, compared to the historical period.
A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Whyte said studies like this are a critical step toward a fuller understanding of the indirect impacts that centuries of displacement have had on Native populations.
“Whether it’s within the U.S. context or in other parts of the world, Indigenous people are calling for recognition that the reason why they are often facing more severe climate threats than other populations is because of the impact of land dispossession,” Whyte said.
The team also concluded that tribes’ present-day lands are less economically valuable in that they are less likely to contain subsurface oil and gas resources. Although Indigenous rights advocates have rallied widespread opposition to extractive fossil fuel projects in recent years — from Standing Rock to Line 3 to a proposed gas pipeline in North Carolina — Whyte said it was important to note that tribes have been largely excluded from a highly profitable energy industry that was built on stolen land.
“While we don’t support extractive fossil fuel industries, the study demonstrates that tribes were never part of the game plan to build the U.S. energy system,” Whyte said.
Cross-checking their information with crowdsourced data compiled by Native Land Digital, an Indigenous-led organization that maps tribal territories, the researchers amassed hundreds of thousands of records over the course of the project.
“When you think about Indian removal and displacement to reservations, it is so complex and covers such a long period of time that, to take all that evidence and put it into one dataset is almost inconceivable,” said Donald L. Fixico, a regents professor of history at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. The ethnohistorian, who is a member of the Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee and Seminole tribes, wrote an analysis piece that accompanies the article in Science.
While the research team hopes to build on the dataset for future projects, the authors acknowledge the limitations of their records and the need to gather more information from Indigenous people themselves, as opposed to relying on settler-colonial records. They plan on incorporating oral histories, tribal documents and archaeological records in future analyses.
Noting the historical exclusion of Indigenous voices in scientific literature, Whyte said the study’s importance extends beyond its findings on land loss and climate impacts.
“I think it’s important to tell stories in a lot of different ways,” he said. “And by telling this story in a scientifically rigorous way, I really think this study can empower further Native scholars and others to see how some of these methods we’ve been excluded from can actually be used to support our sovereignty and self-determination.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Indigenous tribes lost 99% of land to colonization on Oct 28, 2021.
A medic walked around the circle of 50 people occupying the lobby of the Department of the Interior, squirting water into our eager mouths before the police hauled us away. At the time, I had no idea that I wouldn’t be released until midnight, 12.5 hours after the action began. I just knew it was smart to stay hydrated, so I accepted every squirt of water offered, grateful for the care our Indigenous-led group was showing each other in circumstances designed to dehumanize us.
The Oct. 14 action occurred during the People vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization in Washington, D.C., a historic week of civil disobedience to pressure President Joe Biden to stop fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency. For Indigenous people, the protection of Mother Earth is deeply intertwined with the long struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, as destructive fossil fuel projects — like Line 3 in northern Minnesota — continue to be built through their territories without their consent.
Previous Coverage
Everyone has a role to play in stopping the Line 3 pipeline
Asserting that “Another world is possible,” they went to the Department of the Interior, home to the regressive Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was last occupied by Indigenous people about 50 years ago. While the media emphasized the conflict that ensued, one aspect went overlooked: how we water protectors treated each other during the tense hours of the action and arrest, illustrating the more caring world that Indigenous leaders say is possible.
Eleven Indigenous leaders from diverse territories entered first and sat in a row in the lobby, their hands linked together with plastic ties and duct tape. When a wave of approximately 45 more people joined them, we formed a large circle, holding hands, as someone swiftly linked each of our wrists to our neighbors’ with thin plastic ties. We quickly learned to adjust our hands to keep each other comfortable, moving in sync when someone needed to change position or scratch a nose.
In the middle of the circle was a bowl of burning sage, an herb used for purification. At the Line 3 resistance camp — where I spent three weeks this summer — sage was brought to each person, who then put out their hands to invite the smoke toward them, especially before actions and ceremonies. It was one of many expressions of care stemming from Indigenous understandings of interconnection. In the cavernous Department of Interior lobby, someone carried the sage clockwise around the circle, and we took turns breathing in the sweet, calming smell.
A bowl of burning sage was used for purification during the BIA occupation. (Twitter/@JenniferKFalcon)
I was especially grateful for this centering practice as uniformed men congregated at the edge of the lobby, the yellow DHS on their dark uniforms indicating they were from the Department of Homeland Security. Indigenous leaders took turns leading chants like “Stop Line 3!” which reverberated between the hard marble floor and the high ornate ceiling. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Deb Haaland over!” they called, referring to the current head of the Department of the Interior — and the first Indigenous person to hold the position. We later heard she was out of town.
When a much older woman joined us in the lobby, a young Indigenous woman yelled for those in uniform to get the elder a chair, which they eventually did after others picked up the chant. Our ages spanned at least five decades, probably more. We also had other physical differences. The friend next to me had slid out of her wheelchair to join everyone on the floor and was nervous about whether she would be separated from her chair and medicine. As arrest grew closer, two diabetics on my side of the circle assessed whether it was safe for them to stay, not knowing when they might be able to access food or medicine. After the medic helped her test her blood sugar, the diabetic with the more severe case chose to be cut loose and leave, while the other stayed. The pain in my hip from sitting cross legged on the checkerboard marble floor was increasingly uncomfortable, but not life threatening, and not nearly as bad as what others suffered during the arrests.
DHS went first for the row of Indigenous leaders, tasing two women in long ceremonial skirts who were simply holding onto each other. One later told me that she had a finger broken in the ordeal. A baton was used on someone else. Most people, including a media photographer, were dragged away roughly, sometimes by the shoulder or by the backpack. Later, I read reports that police had also been injured in the action. If that’s true — and from experience I can attest that not everything police report is true — I suspect they threw out their own backs by not carrying people properly, which would have required helping each other. In contrast, we continued to support one another, chanting, “We see you. We love you. We will get justice for you!” each time someone was dragged away.
At one point during the arrests, an older white woman who was completely new to this kind of action leaned toward me (also a white woman) and said nervously, “I want to remain nonviolent,” expressing a common confusion about what does or doesn’t constitute violence. I explained that all of the water protectors being arrested were being nonviolent. Not one was hitting or trying to hurt the people arresting them, even in the face of police brutality. What they were doing was refusing to assist in their own arrests.
In contrast, during the actions that took place at the White House all week, the majority of the more than 600 people arrested had followed the Park Police willingly, without even being put in handcuffs. Even there, it was mostly Indigenous people who had been dragged out, illustrating both how they are routinely treated by police on the frontlines, and the fact that those experiencing the desecration of the Earth up close are also those willing to risk the most to stop it.
The People vs. Fossil Fuel movement assembled in front of the Capitol on Oct. 15. (Twitter/@jamieclimate)
While there was an undeniable racial dynamic in who was dragged away — and how roughly — there was also an age dynamic. I told the older white woman, who was in her 70s, that I planned to stand up myself when the police came for me, since I had injured my back only a few weeks earlier and, at age 59, had a history of painful and expensive shoulder problems. I felt supported in making this choice, along with most of the older folks in the group.
When I was put in plastic zip-tie handcuffs, one side was tighter than I would have liked, but nothing compared to the younger people near me who screamed that their fingers were going numb as we waited in the basement garage. Some had their zip ties replaced, only to have them tightened again just before we were loaded into vans, which took us to different precincts across the city. The medic stayed with my friend in the wheelchair until she was released on site because no accessible police van was available.
After more than an hour in handcuffs, nine of us arrived at the 5th precinct, where (uncuffed) we waited another seven and a half hours with no food, phone calls or information on when we would be released. The four women in my small cell shared two narrow metal beds, stacked on top of each other with no ladder, except the metal rails of the cell door. By serendipity, my bunkmate was a young Indigenous woman new to this type of action, whom I had been told to look out for by a mutual friend arrested earlier in the leadership group.
While creating an activist culture of care is not enough to force Joe Biden to use his power to stop fossil fuel infrastructure for the common good, it can help build a broad and diverse movement with that kind of power
When my bunkmate got cold, I took off the long skirt I had worn over my cargo pants, and she used it as a blanket. When my sore hip repeatedly needed a change of positions, she graciously shifted positions, too. When a person in the next cell was taken to the hospital to examine the thumbs that had turned blue from tight handcuffs, we sang to the remaining cell mate, now left alone. We also sang to reduce the awkward sound of pee hitting the metal toilet only a foot and a half away from the lower bed, and turned our heads to give each other privacy. As the hours wore on, someone named the enormous cockroach roaming between our cells “Archibald,” and told funny stories to help the time pass.
While we were kind to each other, and experienced moments of kindness from the police who held us, we glimpsed the cruelty of the system they worked for — from the hard, cold beds with no blanket or pillow to the slow inefficiency that dragged on through the night. No one offered us water, although we were brought small cups twice when we asked (which we promptly shared with those most thirsty).
When I inquired why our processing was taking so long, one policeman confessed his surprise that we hadn’t been cited and released already. He speculated that, in addition to our large numbers — 55 arrested, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network — we had occupied a federal building, which made D.C. police especially nervous in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. I asked him to explain — if he heard people make this comparison — that we were nonviolent, unarmed, and had sat in a circle in the lobby, not run around private offices, threatening to kill elected officials.
Two hours later, when we finally walked out of the precinct garage door, each with a sheet of paper announcing our January court date, there was a group waiting for us with hugs, snacks and rides back to the different places where we were staying. My hotel roommates were asleep by the time I got in at 2 a.m., but one had left a bottle of juice on my pillow, a small gesture of care that symbolized much of what I experienced during the action and among the water protectors opposing Line 3 more broadly.
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While creating an activist culture of care is not enough to force Joe Biden to use his power to stop fossil fuel infrastructure for the common good, it can help build a broad and diverse movement with that kind of power. Several non-Indigenous friends who’d been part of the Line 3 camps acknowledged that missing that community was part of what motivated them to travel, in some cases across the country, to join the mobilization in D.C. These were the same people who stayed when other actions during the week got scary, looking for ways to keep everyone safe, while many white people without deep connections left. We were reminded by Indigenous leaders that having their backs was crucial in such situations, where police violence was likely to fall disproportionately on BIPOC frontline leaders. As a movement, we still have much to learn about this.
Amid police violence and a lukewarm “we’re listening to advocates” response from the Biden administration, it can be hard to believe that “another world is possible.” But Indigenous people are pointing to their traditions, based on cooperation and care, and reminding the rest of us that it is. To move toward that world based on care, we need to continue building pressure on Biden, especially as he prepares to tell other countries to do more at the upcoming global climate discussions. We also need to carry support for frontline leaders from the sidewalk in front of the White House, back to the frontlines, where resistance continues, no matter what Washington does. And we need to notice that how we do that work is itself part of creating the world we want to bring forth.
An interview with the guard leaders of the Peasant, Cimarrona and Indigenous communities about the processes they have implemented since the beginning of the National Strike in Colombia. For them, self-justice goes beyond exercising authority; it means protecting their territory and the lives of those who inhabit their lands.
The post Community Guards: Self-Protection And Peoples’ Autonomy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
On this episode of It’s Going Down, we speak with Lakota ‘Black Elk’ Maroon, an Indigenous organizer in so-called Minnesota and the author of a recent piece on resistance to the Line 3 pipeline. Recorded as the pipeline neared completion, we discuss the scope of the various resistance camps, the role of non-profits, the impact and legacy of Standing Rock, moving social movements beyond pressuring Democrats, and how anti-pipeline struggles could serve as the launch pad for greater self-organization, mutual aid, and action in Native communities.
After nearly 8 years of fierce resistance, we learned that Line 3 will become operational this weekend.
This fight is not over, only shifted, so it’s a good time for a refresher: what is Line 3, why should it be stopped, and how can you help? A thread 🧵 (1/9)#StopLine3 pic.twitter.com/kCNpCna7wV
— Resist Line 3 (@ResistLine3) September 29, 2021
More Info: Perspective from the Bordertown, Against Colonial Logics: Rethinking Resistance to Resource Extraction on Indigenous Action, Stop Line 3 Bailfunds
What the recent actions of the Mi’kmaq land and water defenders at Elsipogtog demonstrate is that direct actions in the form of Indigenous blockades are both a negation and an affirmation.
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – Sep 12, 2021
The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state.
On George Washington’s birthday, 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, changed the agency’s official mission statement, dropping the language of “a nation of immigrants” to describe the United States. The previous mission statement had said the agency “secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”1 The revised mission statement reads: “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”2
The Trump administration’s official negation of the United States as a nation of immigrants was unlikely to change the liberal rhetoric. During Joe Biden’s 2020 bid for the presidency, the campaign issued a statement on his immigration plan, titled “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants,” asserting that “unless your ancestors were native to these shores, or forcibly enslaved and brought here as part of our original sin as a nation, most Americans can trace their family history back to a choice—a choice to leave behind everything that was familiar in search of new opportunities and a new life.”3 Unlike the previous “nation of immigrants” statement, the Biden campaign did acknowledge prior and continuing Native presence, as well as specifying that enslaved Africans were not immigrants. However, the new rhetoric continues to mask the settler-colonial violence that established and maintained the United States and turns immigrants into settlers.
It appears ironic that Trump positioned himself as anti-immigrant, being the son of an immigrant mother (from Scotland) and the grandson of an immigrant paternal grandfather (from Germany), as well as being married to an immigrant (from Slovenia). But Trump was not against European immigrants. In a January 2018 staff meeting on temporary immigration status, Trump asked, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.… Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries.… We should have more people from Norway.”4 The month before, referring again to Haitians, Trump said that they “all have AIDS,” and about Nigerians, he said that once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.5
In his quest for the presidency, Trump made immigration the center of his campaign, focusing on the exclusion of Mexicans, promising to build a border wall and militarize the southern border. He claimed that “the U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” and railed that, “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards.”6
Democratic Party politicians and liberals in general insisted that Trump and his supporters were un-American in denying the nation-of-immigrants ideology that has been a consensus for more than a half century and remains a basic principle of the Democratic Party. Most people around the world viewed the United States as a nation of immigrants, while questioning if the country was backsliding on its promise in electing Trump.
With the Democratic Party back in power in 2021, the nation-of-immigrants rhetoric appears to be firmly back in place, although the exclusionary policies of the United States will continue as they did during the Barack Obama administration.
As Osha Gray Davidson, who has collected dozens of examples of how “nation of immigrants” is used, points out, the phrase is generally used to counter xenophobic fears.7 But the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism and the lives of Indigenous peoples. “We in America are immigrants, or the children of immigrants,” is the refrain.8 The theme of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech as the Republican nominee for president in 2012 included “a nation of immigrants”: “Optimism is uniquely American. It is what brought us to America. We are a nation of immigrants.”9 Speaking at a Nevada high school to a large audience, President Obama said: “We are a nation of immigrants, and that means we are constantly being replenished with fighters who believed in the American dream, and it gives us a tremendous advantage over other nations.”10 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2016, evoked a nation of immigrants, with “the Statue of Liberty reminding us of who we are and where we came from. We are a nation of immigrants, and I am proud of it.”11
“A nation of immigrants” was a mid–twentieth-century revisionist origin story. The United States emerged from the Second World War undamaged by bombs and heavy population loss, which was the experience of most combatant nations. In fact, the United States became a beefed-up industrial powerhouse exhibiting military might, including the atomic bomb. It was poised to become the economic, military, and moral leader of the “free world.” The Soviet Union, the country that actually defeated the army of the Third Reich, was the new adversary. U.S. postwar administrations scrambled to conceal any trace of the U.S. colonialist roots, system of slavery, and continued segregation as they developed military and counterinsurgent strategies to quell national liberation movements in former European colonies. The Soviet Union and Communist China, which took power in 1949, denounced Western imperialism and colonialism in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.
In 1958, then U.S. senator John F. Kennedy, surely informed by liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., published the influential and best-selling book A Nation of Immigrants, which advanced the notion that the United States should be understood or defined through the diversity of the immigrants it had welcomed since independence.12 This thesis was embraced by U.S. historians and found its way into textbooks and school curricula. It is neither coincidental nor surprising that Kennedy would introduce this idea, as, at the time, he was strategizing how to become the first president born of immigrants—albeit very wealthy ones—and the first Catholic president in a Protestant-dominated culture. Aspiring to the presidency, Kennedy introduced a clear context and narrative in which he could transform this negative into a positive. This founding text of “a nation of immigrants” was published during Kennedy’s 1953–59 first term as U.S. senator from Massachusetts, two years before he was elected president.
Given that, in the twenty-first century, immigration is practically synonymous with the México-U.S. border established in 1848, it is striking that Kennedy never mentioned México or Mexicans or the U.S.-México border in the text, nor did he use the terms Latino or Hispanic. Yet, this was 1958, late in the period of the contract labor Bracero Program, which began during the Second World War. A total of two million Mexican citizens, with the participation of the Mexican government, migrated to the United States, particularly California, as de facto indentured agricultural workers under time-limited contracts. Meanwhile, the burgeoning agribusiness industry in California recruited even more Mexican workers outside the program, without documentation or civil rights, and subject to deportation. More egregious than Kennedy’s omission of any mention of México or the border is that the federal program known by its offensive official name “Operation Wetback” began during Kennedy’s first year as senator and continued beyond his senatorial career through his presidency. “Operation Wetback” began in 1954 to round up and deport more than a million Mexican migrant workers, mainly in California and Texas, in the process subjecting millions—many who were actually U.S. citizens—to illegal search, detention, and deportation, forcing them to forfeit their property. Workers were deported by air, trains, and ships far from the border, leaving those who were U.S. citizens stranded and without the documents enabling them to return to their homes in the United States. “Operation Wetback” was a repeat of the Herbert Hoover administration’s deportation of a million Mexicans in the 1930s, dubbed “Mexican Repatriation.”
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Regarding the status of Indigenous peoples in Kennedy’s nation-of-immigrants scheme, the then senator wrote: “Another way of indicating the importance of immigration to America is to point out that every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.” The exception, Kennedy went on, was “Will Rogers, part Cherokee Indian, [who] said that his ancestors were at the docks to meet the Mayflower.” But Kennedy disagreed, claiming that “some anthropologists believe that the Indians themselves were immigrants from another continent who displaced the original Settlers—the aborigines.” This is the bogus speculation of U.S. white nationalists who claim that those imagined original aborigines were in fact European, possibly Irish. A few pages on in the text, in the only other mention of Native Americans, Kennedy refers to them as “the first immigrants,” while dismissing their presence as “members of scattered tribes.”13
Equally unsettling, Kennedy includes enslaved Africans as immigrants, although the book contains the infamous drawing of a slave ship, with humans chained down on their backs, scarcely an inch between each, packed like sardines. It is striking to read how profoundly Kennedy whitewashed history by noting that “the immigration experience was not always pleasant” or that “the Japanese and Chinese brought their gentle dreams to the West Coast.” He failed to mention the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or its extension a few years later to all Asians.
This idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants was hatched in the late 1950s, and while Kennedy was its ambassador, it came to reflect the U.S. ruling-class response to the challenges of the post-Second World War anticolonial national liberation movements, as well as civil and human rights social movements domestically. In the United States, the National Congress of American Indians was founded in 1944 by D’Arcy McNickle, Helen Peterson, and other longtime Indigenous activists. At the same time, African-American attorneys and other professionals were developing a legal strategy for desegregating public schools, while in 1951, more radical African Americans, including Paul Robeson and members of the Civil Rights Congress, petitioned the recently established United Nations with the detailed document We Charge Genocide, based on the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A mass movement against segregation was emerging. Around the same time, Native American activists were contextualizing the situation of Native nations within the decolonization/national liberation context, and Mexican farmworkers were organizing in the fields, defeating the Bracero Program and forming unions.
These cracks in the racial order of settler colonialism and capitalism constituted a radical departure in a society locked down in patriarchal white domination and obsessed with “real” Americanism. At the end of the Second World War, the U.S. social, economic, and political order was solidly and confidently a white patriarchal Protestant republic, dominated by corporations with worldwide investments and financial reserves, along with a massive military machine far greater than that of any other country in the world. Unionization movements, primarily made up of white workers, were seduced by home ownership and middle-class status, their unions becoming business oriented with their own profit-making privatized health care, while the United Kingdom and Western European states responded to militant union demands to institute universal, public health care. Black descendants of enslaved Africans lived under a totalitarian Jim Crow system in the former Confederate states and were ghettoized and discriminated against when they escaped the South in migrations for northern and coastal industrial urban areas that were stalked by police forces resembling slave patrols. Native Americans were abandoned on shrunken land bases that could not support life, forcing many to find work in nearby or faraway cities, while Congress began reversing New Deal reforms that had acknowledged the Native land base and governments. This culminated in the congressional termination of Native status and land bases in 1953, an erasure that took the Red Power movement two decades to reverse. Meanwhile, Irish and Central, Southern, and Eastern European immigrants, mainly Catholics and Jews, had made gains in being accepted as equal—that is, as white. But on the West Coast, U.S. citizens of Chinese and Mexican descent were discriminated against and subject to deportation, while U.S. citizens of Japanese descent had been incarcerated in wartime concentration camps, stripped of their property and citizenship rights. Ads for jobs segregated men and women as well as white and Black, with lower wages for women and Black workers. Ivy League universities were overwhelmingly white and for men only, with quotas to limit the number of Jewish men.
The explosion that cracked the white republic was the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who ironically, as the wartime attorney general of California, had facilitated rounding up Japanese Americans for federal incarceration. Based on decades of organizing for African-American desegregation, the order for school desegregation under Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a great achievement, but the backlash commenced immediately. White Citizens’ Councils organized all over the United States, linking racial integration with communism and labeling it un-American. Within three years of the Supreme Court desegregation decision, the white nationalist John Birch Society was launched by Robert Welch, the heir to the Welch candy fortune in Massachusetts, along with others such as Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers, who, in the twenty-first century, have funded legislation and movements to end all government benefits and promote the privatization of public goods. The Supreme Court composition was the target of this white nationalist movement, using the Republican Party as the vehicle, and had largely achieved its goals with the Trump administration’s appointment of three justices, shifting the court’s ideological spectrum to five ultraconservative justices, one moderate conservative, and three liberal ones.14
The promise of permanent progress was the context within which the Black civil rights movement grew and contributed momentum to other ongoing movements for liberation, including Puerto Rican independence and Native American self-determination, as well as the Mexican farmworker unionization movement of the 1960s, the women’s and LGBTQ rights movements, and the rising student anti-imperialist and antiwar movements that grew in opposition to the accelerating U.S. war to overthrow the government of Vietnam. The counterrevolution against these advances brought Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, to the presidency. By the 1990s, capitalism and militarism were triumphant in dissolving the Eastern European socialist bloc and organized liberation movements that had taken state power in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, which became shadows of their former aspirations.
The first highly visible sign of a well-organized counterrevolution inside the United States vying for political power was the evangelical anti-abortion mass movement that soared following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion in 1973. And, significantly, the relatively benign, century-old National Rifle Association was taken over by the Second Amendment Foundation, a white nationalist organization that had been founded in 1974 by Harlon Carter, who had been the border chief of the 1950s mass deportation of Mexicans in “Operation Wetback.” This is the moment when the Second Amendment became a white nationalist cause, relying on the right-wing ideology of originalism—that is, interpreting the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Parallel to postwar liberation movements, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency ran counterinsurgent operations against national liberation movements before and after they took power in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Africa, while J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation ran similar operations against domestic movements, including COINTELPRO, a domestic counterintelligence program. Anticommunism was the connective tissue among these organizations until the socialist bloc collapsed in 1990, although anticommunism remained a social and political weapon of control domestically and internationally.
In the mid– and late 1960s and early ’70s, while the U.S. war in Vietnam raged, the then liberal U.S. ruling class and its brain trust sought ways of responding to social demands while maintaining economic, political, and military domination. They settled on multiculturalism, diversity, affirmative action, and, yes, the nation-of-immigrants ideology in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, public spending on social welfare, and an end to U.S. imperialism, counterinsurgency, and overthrow of governments. Given attempts to offset an exclusive emphasis on white settler history and the winning of the West as the nationalist triumphal narrative, “a nation of immigrants” fit the multicultural agenda. No longer was the United States a “melting pot” of assimilation to whiteness but rather a many-colored quilt. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants had called the United States “a nation of nations.” Despite the surging of white nationalism during the twelve-year period of the Reagan-Bush administrations, by the early 1990s, the “waves of immigrants,” “nation of immigrants,” and Native peoples as “the first immigrants” narrative Kennedy had conceived was a consensus concept as it entered public school textbooks. This neoliberalism also triggered textbook wars over history standards, with the right wing pushing for and demanding a return to the original narrative, especially founding fathers iconography to support their constitutional philosophy of “originalism.”
During the nearly two centuries of British colonization of the North Atlantic coast and up to U.S. independence, the great majority of European U.S. settlers were Protestant Anglo-Saxon, Scots-Irish, and German-speaking (before Germany was a nation-state). From 1619 onward, there was a steadily increasing number of enslaved Africans. When the United States won independence, the founders inscribed in the Constitution the requirement that citizenship could be held by white males only. Despite expressed fears, especially by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party regarding immigration and the Alien and Sedition Acts, no immigration laws or procedures existed, not even during the arrival in the 1840s of 1.5 million Irish famine refugees. In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that only the federal government, not the states, could create immigration laws and that regulation of immigration was a federal matter, though the federal immigration service was not established until 1891. Tellingly, the first federal immigration law, which created the foundation for U.S. immigration, was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is crucial to recognize that when and how “immigration” as such began, it was based on overt, blatant racism and a policy of exclusion, and it has never lost that taint. Although immigrant bashing is not new, and has long targeted Asian and Mexican workers, it has become a more fraught issue as it crystallized in the late twentieth century and accelerated in the early twenty-first century, targeting Mexicans, Asians, and Arab Muslims.
Yet, those who defend immigrants and immigration, mostly metropolitan liberals, often immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, employ the idea of a nation of immigrants naively without acknowledging the settler-colonial history of the United States and the white nationalist ideology it reproduces. Such advocates were caught by surprise and in shock when Mexican hating led to a successful presidential campaign in 2016, and even more surprised by the January 6, 2021, white nationalist violent takeover of the U.S. capitol.
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The elephant in the room of immigration is the U.S. military invasion and annexation of half of Mexican territory that spanned more than two decades, from 1821 to 1848. During that same period, the eastern half of the United States was being ethnically cleansed with the forced removal of Native nations. White supremacy and settler-colonial violence are permanently embedded in U.S. topography. The United States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that was not new to Nixon or Reagan or Trump.
White nationalism was inscribed in the founding of the United States as a European settler-colonial expansionist entity, the economy of which was grounded in the violent theft of land and in racial slavery, and with settlers armed to the teeth throughout its history, presently numbering over three hundred million people with the same number of firearms in civilian hands. Yet only a third of the population own those guns, an average of eight each, and 3 percent of the population own 50 percent of the guns in civilian hands. A great majority of this minority of gun owners are white men who are descendants of the original settlers, or pretend to be.15 These descendants are most obvious in the former Confederate and border states, but are also in reality scattered in clusters and communities in all parts of the United States. They are the latter-day carriers of the U.S. national origin myth, a matrix of stories that attempt to justify conquest and settlement, transforming the white frontier settler into an “indigenous people,” believing that they are the true natives of the continent, much as the South African Boers regarded themselves as the “true” children of Israel, powered by Calvinism; the Calvinist Scots settlers did in Ulster, Ireland; or Zionist settlers in Palestine—all established by an imaginary God-given covenant making them the chosen peoples.
Given the powerful influence of this cultural, religious, and demographic minority, it is essential to acknowledge its existence in order to understand persistent white supremacy and mistrust of non-European immigrants as well as Indigenous North Americans, descendants of enslaved Africans, and Mexicans. Since the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, the United States has launched counterinsurgent wars in Afghanistan and Arab countries, accelerating anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States. And although U.S. evangelicals enthusiastically support the settler state of Israel, which matches their religious belief that Jesus will return when Jews return to Jerusalem, there is an underlying anti-Semitism in U.S. white nationalism, mostly centered on a narrative of imagined Jewish domination, which works to transfer responsibility for capitalist exploitation from European and European U.S. ruling classes to a behind-the-scenes Jewish conspiracy and control. The sacred text of U.S. white nationalists, The Turner Diaries, first published in 1978, is a fictional illustration of that anti-Semitism. It is mixed with hatred of Black Americans and all people of color, the argument being that Jews use people of color to conceal their devious plan of dominance, and that the Black civil rights movement was controlled by Jews, because white nationalists deem people of color as not fully human and incapable of theory or action on their own.16
Those current realities and their history underlie the narrative of the nation of immigrants. We can see this, for example, in the contemporary neoliberal celebration of founding father Alexander Hamilton. During the Obama administration, the nation-of-immigrants chorus became a best-selling musical, celebrating Hamilton as an immigrant. More than a year after Hamilton premiered on Broadway in 2015, writer and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, staged a private performance at the White House for President Obama and his family and invitees. Before the show began, Obama spoke in praise of the work, saying that, “in the character of Hamilton—a striving immigrant who escaped poverty, made his way to the New World, climbed to the top by sheer force of will and pluck and determination—Lin-Manuel saw something of his own family, and every immigrant family.”17 Portraying Hamilton as an immigrant, although he was a British colonial settler in New York and virulently suspicious of “aliens,” obfuscates while celebrating his role, as a federalist, in structuring the fiscal-military state, a capitalist state created for war. Further, portraying continental-based Puerto Ricans as immigrants obscures the continued U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico.
Yet, the genesis of the first full-fledged settler state in the world went beyond its predecessors in 1492 Iberia and British-colonized Ireland, with an economy based on land sales and enslaved African labor, and the implementation of the fiscal-military state. Both the liberal and right-wing versions of the national narrative misrepresent the process of European colonization of North America. Both narratives serve the critical function of preserving the “official story” of a mostly benign and benevolent United States as an anticolonial movement that overthrew British colonialism. The pre-U.S. independence settlers were colonial settlers just as they were in Africa and India or like the Spanish in Central and South America. The nation-of-immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against the Native nations in conquering the continent. Buried beneath the tons of propaganda—from the landing of the English “pilgrims” (Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James Fenimore Cooper’s phenomenally popular The Last of the Mohicans claiming settlers’ “natural rights” not only to the Indigenous peoples’ territories but also to the territories claimed by other European powers—is the fact that the founding of the United States created a division of the Anglo empire, with the U.S. becoming a parallel empire to Great Britain, ultimately overcoming it. From day one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance, which preceded the U.S. Constitution, the new “republic for empire,” as Thomas Jefferson called the new United States, envisioned the future shape of what is now the forty-eight states of the continental United States. The founders drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to conquer as the “Northwest Territory.” That territory was the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was already populated with Indigenous villages and farming communities thousands of years old. Even before independence, mostly Scots-Irish settlers had seized Indigenous farmlands and hunting grounds in the Appalachians and are revered historically as first settlers and rebels, who in the mid–twentieth century began claiming indigeneity.
The narrative of the nation of immigrants also excludes the history of enslaved Africans, who were hauled in chains thousands of miles from their villages and fields, naked and with no belongings, and forcibly denied not only their freedom but also their languages, customs, histories, and nationalities. Not only were they used as forced and unpaid labor, but their very bodies were legally private property to be bought and sold, soon creating a thriving, legal domestic slave market, which by 1840 was of greater monetary value than all other property combined, including all the gold in circulation, all bank reserves, and all real estate.18 The Cotton Kingdom was the fiscal-military center of U.S. capitalist development with the industrial production of cotton, giving rise to a permanent racial capitalism, even after legalized slavery ended. Plantation owners and managers maintained a military-like counterinsurgency to control the enslaved workers, often calling in the U.S. army to quell insurrections. During Reconstruction, following the Civil War, Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black political and economic power was the result of the inadequacy of the U.S. army occupation of the former Confederate states. Army divisions were being shifted west of the Mississippi to destroy Native nations and seize the rest of continent. With the end of the occupation, Jim Crow segregation laws gave rise to a form of policing that spread in the twentieth century to major urban areas as African Americans fled the South and that continues in the twenty-first century. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified after the Civil War, changed all-white citizenship to include those African Americans freed from enslavement (although still male only), but continued segregation, discrimination, and police killings, creating a kind of contingency of full citizenship.
Anglo settlers seized the agricultural lands of Indigenous peoples of the Southeast for plantation agribusiness in cotton and importing enslaved people from the original slave states for the grueling labor. One group of U.S. slavers moved into the Mexican province of Texas soon after the Mexican people won their decade-long war for independence from Spain. The two-year U.S. military invasion of México that began in 1846 finally seized México City in 1848. Under U.S. occupation, the Mexican government, through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was forced to relinquish the northern half of its territory. What became the states of California, Arizona, New México, Colorado, Utah, and Texas were then opened to Anglo settlement, and in the process legalizing those Anglo slavers in Texas who had already settled there illegally. The Indigenous nations in the seized territory—the Apache, Navajo, Kiowa, and Comanche—resisted U.S. conquest for decades, as they had resisted the Spanish empire. The small class of Hispano elite in New México had welcomed and collaborated with U.S. occupation, which led to late-twentieth-century Hispano claims of indigeneity while living on lands their ancestors had forcibly taken from the Indigenous pueblos. This then was another site of the fiscal-military state and racial capitalism taking hold to contribute to U.S. imperial dominance.
Meanwhile, the English colonization of Ireland led to the 1840s famine and the first mass migration to the United States. The Irish refugees were mostly Catholic and despised by the majority U.S. Anglo-Protestants, but they quickly became the nation’s second-largest European national group, a political force with which to be reckoned. Many settled in urban slums and had few skills, having been agricultural workers. They took whatever unskilled jobs they could find, the men and boys working on the docks, pushing carts, digging canals, and constructing the railroad, and obtaining work as slave patrollers in the Cotton Kingdom and early urban police forces. Women worked as housekeepers and nannies, in factories, and often in sex work. How subsequent generations of Irish Americans became settlers, even one of their own ascending to the presidency in 1960, is a tragic story.19 As well, the nearly cult-like formation of twentieth century urban police forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation drew on Irish recruits until they became dominant and definitive as police. Racialized urban policing increasingly became a major component of the fiscal-military state.
Then there were European immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, who were considered not quite white. During the 1880s alone, more than five million Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in search of jobs in burgeoning industrial and mining sites in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Many Jewish immigrants were fleeing pogroms, while other immigrants, particularly German, were driven out by political repression and brought with them strong organizational experience that was socialistically inclined. The immigrant-driven workers’ movements forced the reformulation of industrial capitalism, but their status as immigrants made them vulnerable to political deportation in the early twentieth century. During that period, Italian immigrants arrived, mostly from southern Italy. Suffering the stigma of being Catholic and also dark complected, they were subjected to extreme discrimination. Italians and other Catholic immigrants became Americanized and accepted as white through the Roman Catholic Church and a process rooted in the myth of Columbus, especially with the 1882 founding of the Knights of Columbus and the subsequent four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean. This, too, was another self-indigenizing process, with the Catholic Columbus being positioned as the original founding father of the United States.
The origins and staying power of the Western panic against Asian immigrants moved from medieval Europe to the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, and into the twenty-first century. All European U.S. trade unions were corrupted and weakened by their anti-Chinese bigotry and support for barring Chinese workers, which accelerated the spread of yellow peril racism. In Oakland, California, socialist, union activist, and celebrity writer Jack London was among the loudest voices spewing hatred. Yellow peril suspicions also led to the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent under the liberal Franklin Roosevelt administration. Fear of Asians in general and of the Chinese in particular persists today with the U.S. reaction to China’s economic development.
Since the early twentieth century, immigrant hating in the United States is primarily about Mexicans (not Latinos in general) and is directly related to the unsettled border established in 1848 when the U.S. annexed half of México. The fact that a third of the continental territory of the United States today was brutally annexed through a war of conquest is inscribed on that international border. The cold war against México has never ended, and the border is an open wound. There is a history of U.S. aggression against México and Mexicans, militarily and economically as well as ideologically, from Walt Whitman to Patrick Buchanan and Trump. In fact, the United States is responsible for the waves of refugees from Latin American countries, due to imperialism, who are then criminalized and their children deported, dispersed, and even lost in the ongoing situation at the US-México border.
What, then, is the position of immigrants in a settler state? One of the unspoken requirements for immigrants and their descendants to become fully “American” has been to participate in anti-Black racism and to aspire to “whiteness.” With the post-Second World War work of civil rights, Black Power, and other antiracist movements, whiteness lost much of its desirability for several generations. This process coincided with and influenced the 1965 immigration reform law that removed restrictions on immigration that had been in effect since the 1924 immigration law, which limited immigration to Western Europeans. Thereby, since the late 1960s, greater numbers of immigrants have come from the Global South, mostly from formerly colonized countries, and many of them refugees from civil wars or U.S.-instigated wars in their countries. The “new” immigrants are more likely than past immigrants to be college graduates or professionals. They often experience racism and “othering” in their daily lives, and for Muslims in particular, virulent hostility, which for some leads to solidarity with antiracist movements. How they as immigrants experience and react to settler colonialism varies, with some becoming dedicated to solidarity with Native peoples’ resistance while most remain indifferent or even negate the demands of Indigenous communities and the reality of settler colonialism. Although immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean are not pressured to become “white,” as immigrants were in the past, they do automatically become settlers unless they resist that default. Antiracism and diversity are widely accepted, but the problem is the general denial or refusal to acknowledge settler colonialism. As Mahmood Mamdani observes, “the thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state.”20
Notes
1.- 
Safia Samee Ali, “S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Drops ‘Nation of Immigrants’ from Mission Statement,” NBC News, February 22, 2018.
2.- “Mission and Core Values,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, accessed July 26, 2021.
3.- “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants,” Biden-Harris, accessed July 26, 2021.
4.- “President Donald Trump Calls Haiti and African Countries ‘Shithole’ Nations | NBC Nightly News,” YouTube video by NBC News, January 11, 2018.
5.- Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld, “Stoking Fears, Trump Defied Bureaucracy to Advance Immigration Agenda,” New York Times, December 23, 2017.
6.- “Donald Trump Presidential Announcement Speech: US Became Dumping Ground | China | Mexico,” YouTube video by Mango News, June 18, 2015; “Fact Checking Donald Trump’s Immigration Comments,” YouTube video by CNN, July 2, 2015.
7.- Osha Davidson, The American Project (podcast), season 1, January 15, 2020–January 21, 2021.
8.- “A Nation of Immigrants,” YouTube video by BuzzFeedVideo, March 2, 2017.
9.- “Transcript: Mitt Romney’s Acceptance Speech,” NPR, August 30, 2012.
10.- “NV: OBAMA-WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS,” YouTube video by CNN, March 31, 2016.
11.- “Clinton: ‘We Are a Nation of Immigrants,’” YouTube video by AP Archive, November 16, 2016; “Tim Kaine: ‘We’re a Nation of Immigrants’ | NBC News,” YouTube video by NBC News, October 4, 2016.
12.- John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1958; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2018). This is the most recent of dozens of editions of the book, following its first printing in 1958.
13.- Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, 2–3.
14.- Erwin Chemerinsky, “Chemerinsky: Predicting the Supreme Court in 2021 May Be Dangerous and Futile,” ABA Journal, December 18, 2020.
15.- See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights, 2019).
16.- Andrew Macdonald (pseudonym for William Pierce), The Turner Diaries (Mountain City, TN: Cosmotheist Books, 2018). See also Brad Whitsel, “The Turner Diaries and Cosmotheism: William Pierce’s Theology,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 1, no. 2 (1998): 183–97.
17.- Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at ‘Hamilton at the White House,’” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 14, 2016.
18.- Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 252–53.
19.- See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
20.- Mahmood Mamdani, “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 607.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.
Featured image: Fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 10, 2020., By Tony Webster – Flickr, CC BY 2.0
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