This time we’ll discuss a crucial text by the late Klee Benally, an indigenous activist and artist from so called Flagstaff on occupied Diné land.
In this offering Klee reflects on the euro-centric character of ‘classic anarchism’ and how many anarchist as well as left activists to this day are prone to not challenging a colonizer’s mind-set and so upholding the construct of white supremacy.
Reading and listening to radical indigenous thoughts and perspectives, can help to unlearn and demask concepts, that are so normalized and hence invisible in settler society and even emerges in seemingly ‘liberatory’ views and praxis unnoticed (by those unaffected or privileged by it).
Let’s dismantle ‘settler futurity’ and build inter-relationality against colonial progress/destruction of all life on earth.
Our intention is to create true solidarity, resistance and autonomy for Life… nothing less than
TOTAL LIBERATION!
You don’t have to read the text to attend the discussions, though we highly encourage it!
The process of bringing people and lands that have not been civilized into civilization is the essential and vicious role of colonialism. When a State has consumed its available resources it is compelled to look elsewhere and to others. This is the etymology of colonialism; it is the language of domination, coercion, control, exploitation, assimilation, and annihilation. It expands and contracts in between breaths of unending wars, it colonizes memories to justify itself, this is what it calls History. Its corroded conscience constructs a national identity out of its insecurities: stories of greatness, of the world before and the world to come. It emerges entitled and assembles against its persistent enemies, the menace of those who refuse captivation, those fluctuating threats it names as “others.” The maintenance of this internalized violence is its nationalism. When it becomes so pervasive that it has no need to pronounce its dominance and authority, this is what we also call “fascism.”
(Klee Benally, No spiritual surrender, Detrius Books, 2023)