Liquor Sovereignty: A Manifesto and Call to Action

Having smashed the offensive against the people’s right to liquor, We the People, have launched a large-scale counter-offensive against the lies of the enemy. We are on the advance, working through the World’s Dives Handbook, moving out from our centers in all directions. United, the enemy flees before us in fear and trepidation.

The situation between the enemy and the people has fundamentally changed over the last several hundred years.

The enemy would like the people to believe that there were no intoxicants or hallucinogens in the Américas before they arrived with theirs. The enemy would like the people to believe that -- unacquainted with such substances the people quickly became addicted and lost their self-control. The enemy wants the people to believe that they killed all the animals for their fur to trade for the enemy’s liquor. That the people gave up their women to trade for the liquor. They want the people to believe that, over time, the people became drunk, lazy, and useless. All because of liquor.

The enemy is good at telling lies. Especially about itself. They want the people to believe that hundreds of years ago the enemy was reformed by a new consciousness as radically democratic revolutionaries. That they warred against the evil empires of the day and were victorious, forcing the empires to withdraw and establishing a New Nation (a “united states”) based on the democratic principles of personal freedom, liberty, and brotherhood (yes, brotherhood, for the New Nation was misogynist and sexist!).

But this New Nation quickly passed its oppressive laws to take away the people’s rights. They called these laws the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts (from 1790 to 1847) and said that the people needed them because they had become lazy, stupid, and useless on liquor (ignoring its own criminal indiscretions during the prohibition era).

These laws did not help the people. They forbade the people from enjoying their rights, to possess liquor on their own lands and in their own homes. They criminalized the people’s rights to liquor. They forced the people to trade only at posts where the enemy could be present to control them. They took away the people’s rights to control their own trade, lands, and economies. All because they said the people were powerless to resist the liquor—prone to addiction as the people were, without any immunity to resist against such a disease, succumbed to and even demanding liquor as currency.

The enemy tells lies about the people that are not even clever. It tells these lies so the people will blame themselves for the poverty and the despair they live in. These lies work to legitimate the violence, fraud, and greed of the colonial-imperial state that is still at the heart of the New Nation. These lies represent the people as inferior and weak, sexually wanton and lazy, violent, given to impulsive and self-destructive behavior. After all, if the people are these things, then certainly the New Nation is justified in responding with all its force to civilize them.

The people must tell their own histories about liquor to be truly liberated. They must be united and aligned with others committed to the truth!

They must tell how the colonial and imperial structures of domination made them poor and engendered violence between them.

This is not a lie.

It is not to say that poverty and violence were absent before the enemy came (that would be stupid and wrong). This is to say that the image of the people as naturally and culturally inferior refuses to acknowledge the ways that the New Nation’s colonial and imperial forces produced the conditions in which liquor was used as currency with the people. That the enemy enabled and then exploded control of the fur trade across the continent with liquor; that liquor as currency was responsible for the people’s economic indenture and exploitation; that the illegal sale of lands by the people’s councils to speculators, and then their cessions by treaties to the New Nation, meant in part to alleviate those debts and secure foods and supplies to alleviate the people’s poverty and despair.

It was all part of the New Nation’s attempt at total genocide of the people.

The people must be liberated from the lies of the enemy!

They must overthrow the enemy’s lies!

Take back the liquor!

Every person must rise up, their shot glasses held high in the air, and pronounce together in spirit:

Liquor sovereignty is decolonization by the exercise of self-determination over what one puts in one’s body.

The people and their allies demand:

(1) The people unite amongst themselves and with their allies against the enemy’s racist lies to proclaim that the people are not biologically or culturally inferior or prone to alcoholism or the interpersonal violence it engenders. These lies about the people fuel structures of oppression and exploitation. There is no post-colonial! No post-imperial! No “settler society.” There is only Empire.

(2) The people proclaim that sobriety and abstinence in and of themselves are not their goals. True self-discipline is an ethic of personal and collective responsibility. Drink and play responsibly!

(3) The people do not believe that anyone “gets off” (forgiven or otherwise excused by the enemy’s religion) for the interpersonal violence and other crimes committed when drinking or drunk. Take responsibility for yourself and your drink!

(4) The people seek to abolish the enemy’s dictatorships over their bodies and spirits and those of their allies. Personal freedom and liberty are the desired values, but not when their terms are dictated by the enemy and privilege heterosexual domination (aka the brotherhood). Non-heterosexuals and women (not necessarily mutually exclusive) must be empowered!

(5) The people assert that true liberation will come when the status-quo order is steadily and non-violently disrupted and disturbed. Liberation takes stamina!

(6) The people and their allies seek to abolish (not to co-opt) the institutions and policies of the enemy’s regimes, they are what is responsible for the people’s oppression. Self-administration is now self-determination!

(7) The people proclaim that the terms of all personal desires must be reclaimed. Rediscover your bodies and spirits, your intellects, your passions and desires, your eroticism and play. That is decolonization!

[This manifesto seeks comrades and collaborators to contribute and edit......]

Beginnings

It is the morning of February 22, 2011. I have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for 10 days, staying with my friend and colleague MKN, modestly working on the introduction to a new book (which I currently call The Science of Rights), reading Lyons’ X-Marks and Alfred’s Wasáse, visiting Taos and the Rio River Grande Gorge, meeting amazing people in Native foods, education, and documentary film, hanging with old friends from UNM, and essentially eating and drinking my way through northern New Mexico.

It has been a good and important break from my life in the SF Bay Area. Which, admittedly, has been abnormally restful, though busy, this past year while on fellowship (with a much needed break from administration and teaching). Still, I can’t help but wonder why our perspective on our lives, relationships, and work seems to be so much clearer when we are away from them? Around new places, people, food, and drink?

Not that I have any mind-boggling observations or revelations to offer. That would be too easy.

But, I do feel myself coming into a blog to solicit more external conversations in my life than those internal ones I seem to retreat into when ‘at home’.

Me? I am a progressive, forty-something, Lenape/Norwegian/Irish (Delaweigish, as MKN would say) anti-racist feminist who lives in the east bay area. I profess in Native studies at San Francisco State University. I undertake this blog because I desire to see more progressive, Native, anti-racist feminist perspectives in blog-space. I take my immediate inspiration from colleagues and friends with similar aspirations (see queerblackfeminist.blogspot.com).

Not, of course, that I am representative or representable as/by any of those identity-markers that I listed above. I would no more claim to represent what it means to be progressive, forty-something, Lenape, mixed-blood, anti-racist, or feminist than I would—say—a woman, a heterosexual, or a middle-class professional. I am only trying to suggest that I write with a deep sense of ethical responsibilities to those communities I identify with and am identified by.

So, why ‘Tequila Sovereign’? Why not something more serious to reflect my politics or ‘the times we live in’?

Because this blog will not be reverent.

And because, after hundreds of years of federal, state, and social regulation of every kind imaginable over every single aspect of our lives (from food and drink to lands and skies) in this thing we call the “United States of America”, I think it’s about time we reclaimed our rights to be self-determining: over ourselves, our collective communities and polities, our bodies and minds, our spiritualities and desires, our responsibilities.

Decolonize That!

Over/after (not under) The Grand Revolution at Maria’s Restaurant in Santa Fe last night (a margarita of Revolucion 100% agave añejo tequila and Grand Marnier) with MKN, I couldn’t help but think of Alfred’s words: “A true revolution is spiritual at is very core,” because—as history has shown us all too well—materialist and legalist approaches to social change have often only replicated the hierarchies of power and oppression against which they have fought. Even Native efforts at self-government and land claims bind us interminably and dependently to the structures of capitalist-empire, the nation-state who mets out said ‘rights’ to Natives as favors or apologies, and always with the reserved power to change their terms and conditions.

Real revolution is not found in colonial scraps but spiritual transformation.

Can you muse that kind of transformation through a blog? Class-based as access to the internet and literacy is?

I don’t know.

I am moved by the words of a friend of Alfred that our spiritualities, intimately constituted by and connected to our ancestors, are reflected not only in cultural practice (songs, dances, baskets, pottery), but in the “faces and bodies” of one another.

Powerful words about our responsibilities in relationship.