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Title: Voting is Not Harm Reduction
Author: Indigenous Action
Date: February 5, 2020
Language: en
Topics: anti-colonial, indigenous, anti-voting, activism
Source: http://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/

Indigenous Action

Voting is Not Harm Reduction

When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never

clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many

millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we

add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the

highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred

sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare

sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians

who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?

Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent

parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the

same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over

stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives.

We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial

violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for

those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of

“voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial

violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more

effective ways to intervene in its violences.

At some point the left in the so-called U.S. realized that convincing

people to rally behind a “lesser evil” was a losing strategy. The term

“harm reduction” was appropriated to reframe efforts to justify their

participation and coerce others to engage in the theater of what is

called “democracy” in the U.S.

Harm reduction was established in the 1980s as a public health strategy

for people dealing with substance use issues who struggle with

abstinence. According to the Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) the

principles of harm reduction establish that the identified behavior is

“part of life” so they “choose not to ignore or condemn but to minimize

harmful effects” and work towards breaking social stigmas towards “safer

use.” The HRC also states that, “there is no universal definition of or

formula for implementing harm reduction.” Overall, harm reduction

focuses on reducing adverse impacts associated with harmful behaviors.

The proposition of “harm reduction” in the context of voting means

something entirely different from those organizing to address substance

use issues. The assertion is that “since this political system isn’t

going away, we’ll support politicians and laws that may do less harm.”

The idea of a ballot being capable of reducing the harm in a system

rooted in colonial domination and exploitation, white supremacy,

hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism is an extraordinary exaggeration.

There is no person whose lives aren’t impacted everyday by these systems

of oppression, but instead of coded reformism and coercive “get out the

vote” campaigns towards a “safer” form of settler colonialism, we’re

asking “what is the real and tragic harm and danger associated with

perpetuating colonial power and what can be done to end it?”

Voting as practiced under U.S. “democracy” is the process with which

people (excluding youth under the age of 18, convicted felons, those the

state deems “mentally incompetent,” and undocumented folx including

permanent legal residents), are coerced to choose narrowly prescribed

rules and rulers. The anarchist collective Crimethinc observes, “Voting

consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few

politicians.” When this process is conducted under colonial authority,

there is no option but political death for Indigenous Peoples. In other

words, voting can never be a survival strategy under colonial rule. It’s

a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and

historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. And while the

harm reduction sentiment may be sincere, even hard won marginal reforms

gained through popular support can be just as easily reversed by the

stroke of a politician’s pen. If voting is the democratic participation

in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps

us at the mercy of our oppressors.

While so many on the left–including some Indigenous radicals–are

concerned with consolidation of power into fascists hands, they fail to

recognize how colonial power is already consolidated. There is nothing

intersectional about participating in and maintaining a genocidal

political system. There’s no meaningful solidarity to be found in a

politics that urges us to meet our oppressors where they’re at. Voting

as harm reduction imposes a false solidarity upon those identified to be

most vulnerable to harmful political policies and actions. In practice

it plays out as paternalistic identity politicking as liberals work to

identify the least dangerous candidates and rally to support their

campaigns. The logic of voting as harm reduction asserts that whoever is

facing the most harm will gain the most protection by the least

dangerous denominator in a violently authoritarian system. This

settler-colonial naivety places more people, non-human beings, and land

at risk then otherwise. Most typically the same liberal activists that

claim voting is harm reduction are found denouncing and attempting to

suppress militant direct actions and sabotage as acts that “only harm

our movement.” “Voting as harm reduction” is the pacifying language of

those who police movements.

Voting as harm reduction is the government issued blanket of the

democratic party, we’re either going to sleep or die in it.

To organize from a position that voting is an act of damage limitation

blurs lines of the harm that settler and resource colonialism imposes.

Under colonial occupation all power operates through violence. There is

absolutely nothing “less harmful” about participating in and

perpetuating the political power of occupying forces. Voting won’t undue

settler colonialism, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, or capitalism.

Voting is not a strategy for decolonization. The entire process that

arrived at the “Native vote” was an imposition of U.S. political

identity on Indigenous Peoples fueled by white supremacy and facilitated

by capitalism.

The Native Vote: A Strategy of Colonial Domination

Prior to settler colonial invasion, Indigenous Peoples maintained

diverse complex cultural organizations that were fairly unrecognizable

to European invaders. From its inception, the U.S. recognized that

Indigenous Peoples comprised distinct sovereign Nations. The projection

of Nation status was committed on the terms of the colonizers who needed

political entities to treaty with (primarily for war and economic

purposes). As a result, social organizations of Indigenous Peoples faced

extreme political manipulation as matriarchal and two-spirit roles were

either completely disregarded or outright attacked. The imperative of

the U.S. settler colonial project has always been to undermine and

destroy Indigenous sovereignty, this is the insidious unnature of

colonialism.

In 1493 the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” was issued by Pope Alexander VI.

The document established the “Doctrine of Discovery” and was central to

Spain’s Christianizing strategy to ensure “exclusive right” to enslaved

Indigenous Peoples and lands invaded by Columbus the year prior. This

decree also made clear the Pope’s threat to forcibly assimilate

Indigenous Peoples to Catholicism in order to strengthen the “Christian

Empire.” This doctrine lead to successive generational patterns of

genocidal and ecocidal wars waged by European settler colonizers against

Indigenous lives, lands, spirit, and the living world of all of our

relations. In 1823 the “Doctrine of Discovery” was written into U.S. law

as a way to deny land rights to Indigenous Peoples in the Supreme Court

case, Johnson v. McIntosh. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John

Marshall wrote that Christian European nations had assumed complete

control over the lands of “America” during the “Age of Discovery”. And

in declaring “independence” from the Crown of England in 1776, he noted,

that the U.S. had in effect and thus by law inherited authority over

these lands from Great Britain, “notwithstanding the occupancy of the

natives, who were heathens…” According to the ruling, Indigenous Peoples

did not have any rights as independent nations, but only as tenants or

residents of the U.S. on their own lands. To this day, the ”Doctrine of

Discovery” has not been repudiated and Johnson v. McIntosh has not been

overruled.

The genealogy of the Native vote is tied to boarding schools, Christian

indoctrination, allotment programs, and global wars that established

U.S. imperialism. U.S. assimilation policies were not designed as a

benevolent form of harm reduction, they were an extension of a military

strategy that couldn’t fulfill its genocidal programs. Citizenship was

forced onto Indigenous Peoples as part of colonial strategy to, “Kill

the Indian and save the man.”

There was a time when Indigenous Peoples wanted nothing to do with U.S.

citizenship and voting.

Katherine Osborn, an ethnohistorian at Arizona State University states,

“[Indigenous] polities hold a government-to-government relationship with

the United States. Thus, their political status is unique, and that

means that they are not just another minority group hoping for inclusion

in the U.S. political order. For indigenous communities, protecting

their sovereignty as tribal nations is the paramount political concern.”

When the U.S. constitution was initially created, each state could

determine who could be citizens at their discretion. Some states rarely

granted citizenship and thereby conferred the status to select

Indigenous Peoples but only if they dissolved their tribal relationships

and became “civilized.” This typically meant that they renounced their

tribal affiliation, paid taxes, and fully assimilated into white

society. Alexandra Witkin writes in To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of

United States Citizenship on Native Peoples, “Early citizenship policy

rested upon the assumption that allegiance could only be given to one

nation; thus peoples with an allegiance to a Native nation could not

become citizens of the United States.” The preference though was not to

respect and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, but to condemn it as

“uncivilized” and undermine it through extreme tactics of forced

assimilation.

When the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868,

it granted citizenship only to men born or naturalized in the U.S., this

included former slaves but was interpreted to not apply to Indigenous

Peoples except for those who assimilated and paid taxes. The 15th

Amendment was subsequently passed in 1870 to ensure the right of U.S.

citizens to vote without discrimination of “race, color, or previous

condition of servitude” but was still interpreted to exclude Indigenous

Peoples who did not assimilate. In some ways this was an act of

disenfranchisement, but more clearly it was a condition imposed upon

Indigenous Peoples facing scorched-earth military campaigns and the

threat of mass death marches to concentration camps. The message was

clear, “assimilate or perish.”

In 1887, U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act, more commonly

known as the Dawes Act, which was designed to expedite colonial

invasion, facilitate resource extraction, and to further assimilate

Indigenous Peoples into the colonial social order. The Dawes Act marked

a shift from a military strategy to an economic and political one where

reservations were separated into individual lots, with only male “heads

of households” to receive 160 acres with any remaining lands put up for

sale to white invaders who flocked in droves to inherit their “Manifest

Destiny.” Indigenous Peoples who accepted allotments could receive U.S.

citizenship, and although this was the first congressional act to

provide the status, it came at the expense of sacrificing Indigenous

People’s cultural and political identities in many ways, particularly by

further fracturing the integrity of Indigenous matriarchal societies.

Under the Dawes Act, Indigenous lands were reduced from 138 million to

52 million acres. In 1890, the overall Indigenous population was reduced

to about 250,000 from tens of millions at the time of initial European

invasion. In contrast, the colonizer’s U.S. population had increased to

62,622,250 the same year.

The legal destruction of Indigenous sovereign nations was fulfilled in

Supreme Court decisions by judge John Marshall who wrote in 1831 that

the Cherokee Nation was not a foreign nation, but rather that “They may,

more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations…

Their relationship to the United States resembles that of a ward to its

guardian.”

The U.S.’s genocidal military campaigns known collectively as the

“Indian Wars” supposedly came to an end in 1924. That same year U.S.

Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA) which granted

citizenship to Indigenous Peoples but still allowed for states to

determine if they could vote. As a result, some states barred Indigenous

Peoples from voting until 1957. Until passage of the ICA, which was a

regulatory action approved with no hearings, Indigenous Peoples were

considered “Domestic Subjects” of the U.S. Government.

The Haudeneshonee Confederacy completely rejected imposition of U.S.

citizenship through the IAC and called it an act of treason.

Joseph Heath, General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation, writes, “The

Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee have never accepted the authority

of the United States to make Six Nations citizens become citizens of the

United States, as claimed in the Citizenship Act of 1924. We hold three

treaties with the United States: the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the

1789 Treaty of Fort Harmor and the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. These

treaties clearly recognize the Haudenosaunee as separate and sovereign

Nations. Accepting United States citizenship would be treason to their

own Nations, a violation of the treaties and a violation of

international law…”

They rejected the ICA and “resisted its implementation immediately after

its adoption, because they had the historical and cultural understanding

that it was merely the latest federal policy aimed at taking their lands

and at forced assimilation.”

Heath further adds, “For over four centuries the Haudenosaunee have

maintained their sovereignty, against the onslaught of colonialism and

assimilation, and they have continued with their duties as stewards of

the natural world. They have resisted removal and allotment; they have

preserved their language and culture; they have not accepted the

dictates of Christian churches; and they have rejected forced

citizenship.”

It’s important to note, and paradoxical, that the colonizing architects

of the U.S. constitution were influenced heavily by the Haudeneshonee

Confederacy.

Zane Jane Gordon of the Wyandotte Nation critiqued the ICA at the time

it was passed, “No government organized . . . can incorporate into its

citizenship anybody or bodies without the[ir] formal consent…The Indians

are organized in the form of ‘nations,’ and it has treaties with [other]

nations as such. Congress cannot embrace them into the citizenship of

the Union by a simple act.”

In Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the “Gift” of

U.S. Citizenship, Kevin Bruyneel writes that Tuscarora Chief Clinton

Rickard, who strongly opposed passage of the ICA, “was also encouraged

by the fact that ‘there was no great rush among my people to go out and

vote in white man’s elections.’” Rickard stated, “By our ancient

treaties, we expected the protection of the government. The white man

had obtained most of our land and we felt he was obliged to provide

something in return, which was protection of the land we had left, but

we did not want to be absorbed and assimilated into his society. United

States citizenship was just another way of absorbing us and destroying

our customs and our government. . . . We feared citizenship would also

put our treaty status in jeopardy and bring taxes upon our land. How can

a citizen have a treaty with his own government. . . . This was a

violation of our sovereignty. Our citizenship was in our own nations.”

Haudeneshonee also voiced opposition to imposition of U.S. citizenship

policies due to separation of their Nation by the Canadian border. These

impacts are still faced by Indigenous Peoples whose lands are bisected

by both the Canadian and Mexican borders. The imposition of citizenship

has politically segregated their people along colonial lines.

Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of assimilationist strategies

regarding citizenship and voting comes from Henry S. Pancoast, one of

the founders of the Christian white supremacist group, the Indian Rights

Association (IRA). Pancoast stated, “Nothing [besides United States

Citizenship] will so tend to assimilate the Indian and break up his

narrow tribal allegiance, as making him feel that he has a distinct

right and voice in the white man’s nation.”

The IRA’s initial stated objective was to “bring about the complete

civilization of the Indians and their admission to citizenship.” The IRA

considered themselves reformists and successfully lobbied Congress to

establish the boarding school system, pass the Dawes Act, reform the

Bureau of Indian Affairs, and pass the Indian Reorganization Act of

1834.

U.S. citizenship was imposed to destroy Indigenous sovereignty and

facilitate mass-scale land theft. To this day, the “Native vote” is

bound to assimilationist conditions that serve colonial interests.

Assimilation: The Strategy of Enfranchisement

Historic acts of voter suppression appear to contradict the strategy of

assimilation, after all, if white settler politicians desired so much

for Indigenous Peoples to become citizens, why then would they actively

disenfranchise them at the same time? This is the underlying

contradiction of colonialism in the U.S. that has been articulated as

the “Indian Problem,” or more bluntly, the question of annihilation or

assimilation?

As previously mentioned, it wasn’t until 1957 that Indigenous Peoples

could vote in every U.S. state.

According to Katherine Osborn, “Some states borrowed the language of the

U.S. Constitution in Article 1, Section 2, which bars ‘Indians not

taxed’ from citizenship and used it to deny voting rights. Legislators

in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico and Washington withheld the

franchise from their Indigenous citizens because those who were living

on reservation lands did not pay property taxes. In New Mexico, Utah and

Arizona, state officials argued that living on a reservation meant that

Indians were not actually residents of the state, which prevented their

political participation.”

Osborn adds, “Article 7, Section 2, of the Arizona constitution stated,

‘No person under guardianship, non-compos mentis, or insane shall be

qualified to vote in any election.’ Arizona lawmakers understood this as

prohibiting Indians from voting because they were allegedly under

federal guardianship on their reservations.”

Early U.S. citizenship policy regarding Indigenous Peoples was clear;

disenfranchisement would remain until we assimilated and abandoned our

tribal statuses. Disenfranchisement was and is a strategy that sets

conditions for assimilation. Suppression of political participation has

historically been the way the system regulates and maintains itself.

White supremacists that controlled the politics of areas where large

Indigenous populations feared that they would become minority subjects

in their own democratic system. They often subverted enfranchisement in

violent ways, but this was never really a threat due to how embedded

white supremacy has been in the totality of the U.S. settler colonial

project.

It’s not that settler society has capitulated to Indigenous interests,

it’s that Indigenous Peoples–whether through force or attrition–have

been subsumed into the U.S. polity.

Perhaps no place is this more clear than through the establishment of

Tribal Councils. For example, in 1923, the Navajo Tribal Council was

created in order to legitimize resource extraction by the U.S.

government. According to a report filed by the U.S. Commission on Civil

Rights, the tribal council was “created in part so that oil companies

would have some legitimate representatives of the Navajos through whom

they could lease reservation lands on which oil had been discovered. The

Navajo Nation Oil and Gas Company’s website states, “In 1923, a Navajo

tribal government was established primarily for the Bureau of Indian

Affairs to approve lease agreements with American oil companies, who

[sic] were eager to begin oil operations on Navajo lands.”

In order to fulfill and maintain colonial domination and exploitation,

colonizers shape and control the political identity of Indigenous

Peoples. Capitalists facilitated and preyed on the dissolution of

Indigenous autonomy. The cost of citizenship has always been our

sovereignty, the conditions of citizenship have always been in service

to white supremacy.

That Indigenous Peoples were granted the right to vote in 1924, yet our

religious practices were outlawed until 1979 is one of many examples of

the incongruency of Indigenous political identity in the so-called U.S.

Suffrage movements in the U.S. have fought for equal participation in

the political system but have failed to indict and abolish the systems

of oppression that underpin settler-colonial society. After decades of

organizing, white women celebrated suffrage in 1920, which was granted

in part as a reward for their service in World War 1. Hetero-patriarchy

was not dismantled and Black folx were purposefully disregarded in their

campaigning.

Lucy Parsons, an Afro-Indigenous anarchist was among many who critiqued

suffrage at the time. Parsons wrote in 1905, “Can you blame an Anarchist

who declares that man-made laws are not sacred?…The fact is money and

not votes is what rules the people. And the capitalists no longer care

to buy the voters, they simply buy the ‘servants’ after they have been

elected to ‘serve.’ The idea that the poor man’s vote amounts to

anything is the veriest delusion.The ballot is only the paper veil that

hides the tricks.”

Black folx suffered decades of white supremacist “Jim Crow Laws” that

enforced racial segregation and were designed to suppress their

political power. These racist laws didn’t end until the powerful

mobilizations of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The U.S.

government handed down legislation in the 50s and 60s including the 1965

voting rights act, which was critiqued by revolutionary Black

Nationalists such as Malcom X, “The ballot or the bullet. If you’re

afraid to use an expression like that, you should get on out of the

country; you should get back in the cotton patch; you should get back in

the alley. They get all the Negro vote, and after they get it, the Negro

gets nothing in return.”

Radical movements have either faced extreme state violence and

repression or have been systematically assimilated into the U.S.

political milieu. The non-profit industrial complex has operated as an

unspoken ally of U.S. imperialism in efforts of suppression and

pacification (see The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by INCITE!). Perhaps

this is the U.S. political machinery’s method of reducing harm or impact

from effective social and environmental justice movements. If they can’t

kill or imprison the organizers, then fold them into the bureaucracy or

turn their struggles into businesses. At the end of the day, not

everyone can be white supremacists, but everyone can be capitalists.

So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter

enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is

still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political

arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can

occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the

occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is

the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically

bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and

autonomy.

The ongoing existence of Indigenous Peoples is the greatest threat to

the U.S. settler colonial project, that we may one day rise up and

assert our sovereign position with our lands in refutation of the

Doctrine of Discovery.

In Custer Died for your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. idealized “Indigenous

peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into

the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding

decolonization.”

You can’t decolonize the ballot

Since the idea of U.S. “democracy” is majority rule, barring an extreme

population surge, Indigenous voters will always be at the mercy “of good

intentioned” political allies. Consolidating the Native vote into a

voting bloc that aligns with whatever settler party, politician, or law

that appears to do less harm isn’t a strategy to exercise political

power, it’s Stockholm syndrome.

The Native vote also seeks to produce Native politicians. And what

better way to assimilate rule then with a familiar face? The strategy of

voting Indigenous Peoples into a colonial power structure is not an act

of decolonization, it’s a fulfillment of it. We have a history of our

people being used against us by colonial forces, particularly with

assimilated Indigenous Peoples acting as “Indian Scouts” to aid the

enemy’s military. In only one recorded instance, Ndee (Cibicue Apache)

Army Scouts mutinied against the U.S. when they were asked to fight

their own people. Three of the Ndee scouts were executed as a result.

No matter what you are led to believe by any politician seeking office,

at the end of the day they are sworn to uphold an oath to the very

system that was designed to destroy us and our ways of life. The oath

for members of Congress states, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I

will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against

all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and

allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any

mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and

faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to

enter: So help me God.”

Even if we assume that their cultural values and intentions are in line

with those of the people, it is rare that politicians are not tied to a

string of funders. As soon as they get elected they are also faced with

unrelenting special interest lobbying groups that have millions and

millions of dollars behind them and, even if they have stated the best

intentions, are inevitably outnumbered by their political peers.

Today we have candidates that were elected making promises to stop the

mass scale kidnapping and murdering of Indigenous women, girls, and

two-spirit people and what do they propose? They don’t indict the

resource colonizers destroying our lands whose very industry is

precipitating this crisis of human trafficking and extreme gender

violence. They don’t propose ending capitalism and resource colonialism.

They propose laws and more cops with more power to enforce those laws in

our communities, so although we have an epidemic of police violence and

murders against our peoples, Indigenous politicians address one violent

crisis by making another one worse for our people. It’s the fulfillment

of the assimilationist cultural genocide of “killing the Indian to save

the man.” With that vote, the willful participation and sanctioning of

the violence of this system, you kill the Indian and become “the man.”

Tribal, local, and regional politics are situated in the same colonial

arrangement that benefits the ruling class: politicians are concerned

with rules and ruling, police and military enforce, judges imprison.

Regardless of who and on what scale, no politician can ever represent

Indigenous lifeways within the context of a political system established

by colonialism.

A less harmful form of colonial occupation is fantasy. The process of

colonial undoing will not occur by voting. You cannot decolonize the

ballot.

Rejecting settler-colonial authority, aka not voting.

Voting in the colonizer’s elections keeps Indigenous Peoples powerless.

Our power, broadly speaking, does not come from non-consensual majority

rule top-down man-made laws but is derived in relation with and

proportion to all living beings. This is a corporeal and spiritual power

that has been in effect since time immemorial and is what has kept

Indigenous Peoples alive in the face of more than 500 years of extreme

colonial violence.

The late Ben Carnes, a powerful Choctaw advocate, is quoted in an

article about the Native vote by Mark Maxey stating, “My position is

that I am not a citizen of a government who perpetuates that lie that we

are. Slavery was legal just as well as Jim Crow, but just because it is

law doesn’t make it right. We didn’t ask for it, the citizenship act was

imposed upon us as another step in their social and mental conditioning

of Native people to confiscate them of their identity. It was also a

legislative method of circumventing the ‘Indians not taxed’ clause of

the Constitution, thereby justifying imposing taxes. The U.S. electoral

system is a very diseased method where candidates can be purchased by

the highest corporate (contributor) bidder. The mentality of voting for

the lesser of two evils is a false standard to justify the existence of

only a two-party system. Checks and balances are lacking to ensure that

public servants abide by the will of the people. The entire thing needs

to be scrapped as well as the government itself.”

Voting will never be “harm reduction” while colonial occupation & U.S.

imperialism reigns. In order to heal we have to stop the harm from

occurring, not lessen it. This doesn’t mean simply abstinence or

ignoring the problem until it just goes away, it means developing and

implementing strategies and maneuvers that empower Indigenous People’s

autonomy.

Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make

decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it

ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or

collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we

change the conditions of our communities.

What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for

ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions

that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense

amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to

vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What

ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into

efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those

around us?

This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our

contradictions. We’re not rallying for a perfect prescription for

“decolonization” or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a

great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United

States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with

Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous

anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical

infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly

enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by

resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture,

it’s the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful

as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced

assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know

themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it

impossible for this system to govern on stolen land?

We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European

politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of

the abstraction of settler colonialism. we don’t aim to seize colonial

state power but to abolish it.

We seek nothing but total liberation.