After Picture: A Requiem for Auntie

it portends to represent her

this photo taken in the 1890s

of my Lenape Auntie Elizabeth

in her fine lily white Victorian blouse

collared up to her neck

and her long dark hair pulled up

and back

in a loosely controlled bun

behind her gloriously brown face

a refined, educated woman

is how she presents

is presented

the after picture of Indian Assimilation

while swirling all around her

of course

beyond the faded borders and the wrinkled edges

is the Indian Territory

being frauded out from under the Indians

who are being forced onto mono-cropped farms

and their taxes

their children stolen by boarding schools

to have their names beaten out of them

to have their knowledge made irrelevant

to learn that their bodies were worthless

but there for the taking

in the capitalist empire world expanding over them

somehow in the middle of it all

my Auntie learned to play the piano

and traveled across her peoples’ lands

and then the estates of others

to teach in hymns

and play in churches

I imagine my Auntie teaching the hymns in all their propriety

then playing them on Sunday, in late night hours,

in all kinds of Indian churches hidden

words transposed

to tell other histories

of Creation

and Migration

and Language

and Liberation

and I wonder if they nicknamed her

Beth or Betsy or some other derivation

to make this Elizabeth their own, a pet, unequal in nomenclature

to their royal namesake

and I wonder if in a thousand years

this picture will help them forget

again

the violence of their constant taking

of lands

and bodies

in pain

and grieving.

and just for the record

and just for her

this whole photo thing

cannot reveal

how Lenape people

lived with many names over their life times

to avoid speaking the secrets of their identities to outsiders

to avoid letting their enemies know where they were

so that one’s public name was beside the point

so change it all you want

remember it as you will

she was never merely Elizabeth
and even less so yours

Settled Contradictions, Necessary Boycotts: A Report From NAISA

Some incredibly smart and good people at NAISA, taking on complicated political issues from diverse theoretical and strategic perspectives…

Vince Diaz’s presentation on “sporting indigeneity” was an important call against indigenous complicities in sexist and militarized homophobias and masculinities.

Michael Preston’s presentation on “water was our first medicine” examined Winnemum Wintu struggles in California to protect the salmon and delta from agribusiness exploitation but insisted that those struggles had to follow from a focus on ceremonial responsibilities to the water and the land. This solicited a Maori participant’s contribution during discussion about the shared salmon relations and responsibilities of the Winnemum Wintu and Maori people, as California salmon were removed to Maori waters several years ago and the Winnemum Wintu have been working with the Maori for their salmon’s return.

For my critical work through settler colonial paradigms, several presentations were kick-ass inspiring and useful.

Settler Colonialism (S1) included Jessica Cattelino, Kevin Bruyneel, Boyd Cothran, and Ashley Hall. Bruyneel provided a powerful critique of the work of national events – including Thanksgiving, tax day, and 9/11 – in perpetuating the disavowal of indigenous oppression and criticisms of U.S. imperialism. Cothran examined the work of historical narratives of military conflict with indigenous peoples in the Klamath Basin in the racializations of indigenous savagery and conquest. Hall unpacked the negation of indigenous representations (not representatives) in the tea party movement’s reclamation of historical costume and patriotism. Cattelino offered provocative questions about the difficulties of the focus on structure within settler colonial analytics.

What was important for me in this panel was the emphasis on indigenous critical work against the narrative practices of U.S. nationalism and its history-making apparatus. This emphasis is necessary to countering the troubled focus within settler colonial studies on structure to the erasure of indigenous experiences and perspectives about colonialism even within analyses of the “logic of elimination” that fuels colonial processes of social formation.

This critical work was carried forward on Settler Spectacular (P60), which included Jodi A. Byrd’s provocative review of the “apotheosis” of the settler colonial out of post-colonial studies. She argued that this emergence is what has worked to reinscribe the re-centering within settler colonial studies of the white-settler subject as the central progenitor (protagonist) of current state formations. Therein the settler is represented as distinct from not only the juridical centers of the empire’s metropole but the ideological formations of empire building and placed into a condition of perpetual ambivalence to the lands and self-government the settler seeks and eventually appropriates. This distinction suggests a divorce of the empire and imperialism from the very privileges of whiteness that enable dispossession and domination in the formation of a non-empire born state.

I am, of course, not doing justice in my remarks here to what was an incredibly masterful review of the problematics of settler colonial disavowals of empire and imperialism. I found Byrd’s work critical in thinking about the intellectual genealogy of settler colonial subjectivities and analytics and have demanded that she immediately publish her critique so the rest of us can work with it further.

Indian Country and Palestine in Comparative Perspective (P34) included J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Gabriel Pitersberg, Joshua Reid, Steven Salaita, and Robert Warrior. Excepting Reid’s uncomplicated application of borderland studies to Makah struggles and a cursory comparison of them to Palestinian contexts, the panel was an excellent provocation of the potential for political alliances between indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Palestine on questions of imperialism.

Pitersberg provided a provocative review of the historical and ideological troubles of Zionist claims to the lands now defining Israel. Salaita offered both historical and cultural contexts for understanding Israel’s relations to Palestine in the context of South Africa’s apartheid system. His presentation provided powerful reasons to support the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel – a campaign he co-founded – and to demand human rights justice for Palestinians.

Warrior provided a moving revision of his decisive 1989 essay, “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” but discussing his experiences of working an archaeological dig in Israel for two summers before his graduate work at Yale University. He described what happened when the remains of an Arab individual were found, how the Israeli archaeologists dug him out of the ground and sent him off for study and disposal, and how that excavation and treatment differed from their protocols for dealing with Israeli remains. His passionate reaction to Israeli indifference and treatment of the Arab remains – comparing it to U.S. indifference and treatment of American Indian remains – led him not only to write the 1989 essay but politicized his perspectives about Palestinian human rights and Israeli imperialism. As I think about his presentation again now, I hope that he will publish this important story.

In the immediate, I have been inspired but also challenged by the presentations and discussions at NAISA this year. I am going to join the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. I will continue my research this summer for my next book project with all of this important work in mind.

And just think, I write this on the morning of the third day of the conference. So there is much more to go....

Settler Analytics

Still thinking through the politics of the “settler colonial” rubric. I very much appreciate Patrick Wolfe and Mark Rifkin – for engaging my blogomusings with such thoughtfulness and labor. I continue to read and be challenged by the scholarship. Currently working through the anthology edited by Elkins and Pedersen (2005).

I have unease with the etymological origins of the “settler” and its presumed qualification (or differentiation) of “colonialism” from a more “classical” formation. I understand this unease as related not only to the etymological roots of “settle” in “coming to rest,” finding a “seat,” and “reconciliation” but to what the qualification implies. Let me see if I can explain this with examples from the discussions in this blogosphere.

“Classical colonialism” (to borrow from Mark Rifkin, May 2), or colonialism proper, is the explicit juridical and territorial extension of an empire – a process that is always pointing “home,” to a juridical and economic metropolitan center. Its participants are “citizens” of the empire, bent on land and labor seizure in service of the empire.

“Settler colonialism” (to borrow loosely again from Mark Rifkin, May 2) is a state formation with an incoherent assertion of juridical and economic authority over indigenous lands and bodies. It is the permanent “structure of invasion” that demands the “elimination” of indigenous peoples (to quote Patrick Wolfe, 1999). It does not point to a “home” that is “not here,” its “citizens” are sovereigns of their own making, seeking lands and labor to bolster their juridical and economic power.

So, “settler colonialism” is disassociated from the empire? Then it is not about the United States, which is most decidedly an empire in all of the ways that matter – juridically, economically, militarily (as Patrick Wolfe so rightly observes, May 4). And the question that follows, then, because of how “settler colonialism” is applied in scholarship to cover such diverse states as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand/Aetorora is whether it applies to such diverse states as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand/Aetorora?

These are all states whose “settlements” were certainly directed and managed by the English empire (with profound historical differences between them, of course), though they now operate in various juridical, economic, and military ways as empires on their own terms (and I’m thinking here of the work of scholars like Audra Simpson and Winona LaDuke, who insist that Canada’s relationship to Native/Indigenous peoples is most definitely one of an empire to its subjects as well as describing the structure of this relationship as imperially militarized and capitalized).

In another direction, I wonder – given the seeming disassociation of “settler colonialism” with the empire, what its relationship is to imperialism? And my thinking gets muddled here by the use of “settler colonialism” to name other situations, like Israel’s relationship to Palestine. But perhaps I am over-reading or psychoanalyzing ideological intent where structure is the point? Because, from my understanding, the initial migration of Russian Jewish workers into territories they renamed and reclaimed through Zionism as the “Land of Israel” might not have been fueled by a cogent empire or “home,” pointing back to a state with a metropolis-juridic center, but it was certainly aimed at establishing a Zionist empire through land purchasing and Jewish labor.

So, we need better language for describing histories of imperialism and colonialism than we have. I disagree that “settler” more easily stresses Native/Indigenous peoples’ governance and territorial rights than “imperialism” (its etymological differences a case in point) but I agree that both terms are used far too loosely to describe very historically particular processes and structures as if the same.

A Note to T.S. from Patrick Wolfe Re: T.S. Note to Patrick Wolfe....

Hi T.S. –

Okay, to take these questions in order:

Why settler colonialism rather than empire/imperialism?

I hope you won’t think I’m ducking the question by simply turning it back on you, but I think that the language of empire/imperialism is generally used too loosely to be of much strategic or analytical value. For instance, without holding you to it, your on-line etymological version could apply to any number of diverse power relationships, so why not power relations (or, perhaps, hegemony) rather than empire?  In other uses, imperialism can be used interchangeably with colonialism, especially where it acquires a blue-water connotation so that it refers to one country dominating another or others. Or ‘empire’ can refer to the metropolis while ‘colony’ refers to any particular overseas site of invasion/exploitation, the empire in this sense being made up of colonies. In its strict Marxist-Leninist form, imperialism minimally connotes the use of state power to bolster monopolies for national companies, meaning that it isn’t necessarily an extranational project, which would appear to distinguish it from colonialism. Hobson used the term to describe how domestic surpluses generated a need for the industrial West to export capital to develop ‘immature’ overseas markets. And so on and so on. Please don’t think I’m patronizing you with an Imperialism 1A. I realise that you know all this full well. My point is that the language of imperialism is so imprecise and over-used that we need to make distinctions within it. Granted, the term imperialism has a particular potency in the USA. It seems to me that this is because the US is a shame-faced empire that’s vulnerable to being named. Rather than running around the world in feathered hats, US imperialists operate in denial, insisting on a semblance of hegemonic consent (at least, till push comes to shove, as it did the other day in Pakistan). So, yes, we do need to persist in naming US imperialism for what it is – and not only within the US. It’s also important for those of us who live in the humiliating predicament of having governments whose response to the US saying ‘jump’ is to ask how high. At the same time as we need to be able to talk about imperialism, though, we also need to be able to discriminate between the different relationships of inequality that together make up imperialist social formations. I don’t see it as a choice between settler colonialism and imperialism, then, but as a need to see settler colonialism as a distinctive component of imperialism. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there’s a major difference between the condition of being enslaved and that of being targeted for extermination. I don’t think it’s helpful to conflate such conditions (along with ones such as being a subaltern immigrant, voluntarily or otherwise) under the catch-all heading of imperialism. This isn’t just a matter of classificatory nicety. These distinctions undergird different regimes of oppression and different modes of racism that persist into the present and often require different strategies of resistance. For instance, until relatively recently, Aboriginal parents in Australia sometimes resorted to smearing sooty ointment onto their children’s skin so as to avoid the attentions of state officials bent on kidnapping lighter-skinned Aboriginal children in furtherance of the policy of assimilating Indigenous people into the Euroaustralian mainstream.  As I have argued, the assimilation policy continued the settler-colonial logic of elimination into the post-frontier era (I’ll come onto frontier in a minute). For obvious reasons, this Indigenous Australian strategy would not have much to offer Black people in the Jim Crow South. So far as I’m aware, US officials have not tried to force lighter-skinned Black people to ‘pass’ as White. Rather, the segregationist reverse has been the case. Underlying this basic distinction is the fundamental difference between the historical relationships into which Europeans co-opted the two populations concerned, relationships respectively centered on land and labor that continue into the present. Clearly, we don’t want to lose such basic distinctions, so the question becomes why use the term settler colonialism to mark the centrality of Indigenous dispossession to the formation of the settler state?

For me, one reason is that, unlike imperialism, colonialism necessarily involves geographical separation. Colonizers by definition come from somewhere else. A corollary to this is that the only people who really belong in a colony are the Natives. Using the term colonialism serves to stress Natives’ prior rights and prior belonging, precipitating settler anxieties and contradictions that can, I believe, be turned to good use.  So far as the settler part is concerned, I favour the term because it stresses the drive to permanence that’s built into the settler project. For me, settler colonialism has two inseparable aspects. It seeks both to destroy and to replace Native societies. The replacement part – constructing a settler society in place of Native ones – is just as central as the destruction/dispossession. As I’ve said, settlers come to stay. This is where settler colonialism differs from, say, franchise colonialism à la British Raj or the Dutch East India Company and from slavery. While – as was usefully pointed out at UCLA – enslaved Africans were dispossessed of Africa, their captors did not seek to replace them in Africa (the Dutch in Southern Africa being a partial exception). The use of the term settler in relation to the violent dispossession of Indigenous people also serves to undo settlers’ routine claim to being peaceful and civilized. Settlement is neither peaceful nor a thing of the past. Settler societies continue to rest on and (in multifarious ways) to reproduce Indigenous dispossession – hence invasion being a structure not an event. All of this disrupts the legitimating frontier-cabin folksiness of the settler self-image.

Okay, so, onto the frontier (your second question):

This is a highly deceptive and misleading term that I only use for a very specific purpose. In its vernacular usage, the frontier depicts a neat and tidy line in space that hermetically separates Indigenous country from the settled realm. I take it that I don’t have to elaborate on what’s wrong with that image. For me, in any event, the frontier’s ideological significance is not so much as a line in space as a line in time - specifically, in the time of the settler nation-state. The frontier represents the pre-national time that is nonetheless the post-Native time. This contradictory representation is a way of talking about the disorder of violent dispossession (if you must, the space of the exception) without allowing that disorder to compromise the settler rule of law. The settler state both traces itself back to the frontier and disavows the frontier, which is disowned as the work of irregular mavericks rather than as the primary means of settler expansion (as I’ve put it, when the dust settles on the frontier, settler officials characteristically deplore its violence while helping themselves to the fruits of dispossession). Accordingly, I stress the continuation of the settler-colonial logic of elimination into ‘the post-frontier era’ to undo this disavowal, to stress that elimination isn’t a one-off event that disappeared with the frontier mavericks but remains a continuing structural lynchpin of settler society. This doesn’t entail endorsing the tendentious spatial binarism inherent in the ideological image of the frontier.

In regard to your third, concluding section, I don’t think we disagree either and, like you, I endorse Malinda Lowery’s excellent remarks at UCLA. There are one or two other aspects of your very rich set of comments that I could raise – in particular, my reservations about the conflation of nation and empire in the cases of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (which seem to me to be at least as much part of other people’s empires – first Britain and now the US – as empires in their own rights), but I think I’ve probably said enough for now!

In solidarity,

Patrick.

On the Capitulation of Obama's "Operation Geronimo"

Born in 1829, Goyaałé was a Chiricahua Apache warrior who fought against Mexico – whose soldiers killed his wife, children, and mother – and the United States during what is now known as the Apache Wars.

The story goes that "Geronimo" earned his name from Mexican soldiers, whose bullets he defied by attacking them with a knife. In terror, the soldiers cried out to Saint Jerome ("Jeronimo!"). The name stuck, as did fear of the man. So much so that the U.S. Army sent an entire troop to capture him. He became a prisoner of war in 1886, incarcerated first in Florida, then Alabama, and then Oklahoma. He died of pneumonia in Oklahoma in 1909.

U.S. President Barak Obama, as Commander in Chief, approved the naming of the Navy Seal Team Six mission to kill Osama Bin Laden “Operation Geronimo.” They used “Geronimo” specifically to refer to Bin Laden, who they claimed was like Geronimo in his ability to avoid capture. When Bin Laden was identified visually, and Team Six moved in, the commander of the team cried, “For God and country, Geronimo! Geronimo! Geronimo!"

A Reality Check

In 2008, I supported Obama’s candidacy for the Office of the President (financially even, for the first time in my life, contributing to the election campaign).

I celebrated Obama’s win – symbolically because of its defeat of everything that Bush/Cheney represented, but literally because I honestly believed that he would bring real change to the White House.

I was encouraged to continue to believe by Obama’s immediate call to close Guantanamo Bay prison within the year and his policy declaration that the U.S. would no longer engage in torture; his lifting of the ban on federal funding for international organizations that perform/provide abortions; his passage of legislation making it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination; his reversal of Bush’s ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research; his allowance of Cuban Americans to transfer money and visit relatives in Cuba.

But then… there was Obama’s bailout of corrupted and criminal big banks; his continuing of Bush/Cheney war strategies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; his much compromised health care reform bill to the health industry; his international call to suspend nuclear armament while arguing that the future must include nuclear power; his promise to prosecute CIA employees for harsh interrogation techniques while he suspended the appointment of an independent commission to investigate those crimes; his refusal to call Turkey’s genocide of Armenians “genocide”; his signing of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with a provision that it would have no legal force; his appointment of big bank and big oil leaders in prominent positions with responsibilities to oversee their own businesses. All while – I might add – Obama dismantled the community-based movement that got him elected in the first place and to whom he had promised to remain accountable while in office. And since as he has refused to take a proactive position on the wave of anti-union, anti-collective bargaining rights sweeping across the United States, even as he promised during his campaign to stand up for labor.

The truly radical economic reform needed in this country is one that includes a fair, equitable tax responsibility for the rich and their corporations, including banks and oil. I see no evidence of Obama supporting this.

Capitulation

I don’t want to contribute to the right-wing, conservative, uncritical tirade against Obama that floods the internet and cable news. I voted for him 2008, I will vote for him again. It's not about that.

But this whole “Operation Geronimo” thing makes obvious what has been the case all along.

Bin Laden and Geronimo have nothing in common. Bin Laden was a multimillionaire fundamentalist radical with international support and complicity in terror. Geronimo was a poor, relatively isolated Apache warrior fighting against Mexican and U.S. colonial forces that were murdering, enslaving, raping, and stealing the land of Apache people. And Geronimo was most certainly captured and incarcerated.

The uncritical, stupid comparison of these two men is an instance of Obama’s repeated capitulations to other interests. He could have insisted on another name. He could have assumed some leadership and care in what a targeted assassination mission would be called now and in the history books. Instead, he gave in to the Navy Seal Team Six to appease their “raw-raw” proclivities and encourage their bravado as they “went into battle."

These are leadership choices. They are bad leadership choices.

Some Thoughts on International Worker’s Day and Marx’s Worker's Inquiry

·      the top 1% to 5% of income/profit earners in this country pay absolutely NO federal or state income taxes

·      numerous corporations, including big oil and big banks, including the ones behind the market collapse of 2008 that resulted in insane levels of unemployment and foreclosures, not only paid NO federal or state taxes on their earnings and paid exorbitant $100+ million bonuses to their top executives but actually received federal and state tax refunds (on top of already enjoyed federal assistance)

·      the corruption, maleficence, and duplicity of congressional representatives, federal agencies, and lobbyists, such as exposed by the Abramoff scandal or the Gulf Oil spill, working to protect the rights of the rich against labor rights, including collective bargaining rights, public education, and public health care

·      the growing number of individuals and families who are unemployed, bankrupt, indentured to minimum wage and/or part-time jobs, in foreclosure, or homeless

·      the growing number of individuals turned away from higher public education institutions

·      the ever growing number of states – including Wisconsin, Ohio, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Florida – that provide tax breaks to the rich while attacking minimum wage, public health care, education, and unions

·      the ongoing assault on women’s reproductive rights

What is it going to take to get people genuinely angry about these and so many other social disparities and injustices and mobilized to demand change?

I have been reading Kevin D. Anderson’s  book, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (2010). It prompted me to read some of Marx’s lesser known writings, including a pamphlet he wrote in French entitled “The Worker’s Inquiry” (1880). And you know what, he and others were asking this same question 131 years ago.

Exasperated with capitalist exploitation of workers in the name of profit, Marx asked repeatedly and loudly why the structure and its effects had not resulted in a people’s revolution.

Where did he say to start? Education. Investigation. With a “far-reaching investigation into the facts and crimes of capitalist exploitation.” Focused on the position of the worker (or in today’s situation, the unemployed and homeless). He argues that the results of this education, and the published findings of the investigation, resulted in his time in legislation that restricted the working day to 10 hours, addressed the rights of women and child laborers, et cetera. Marx maintains that the investigation must be a collaborative one – with those whose knowledge and experiences of capitalist exploitation being used directly to “prepare the way for social regeneration.” He believed, honestly, that revolution would occur as a result of better understanding this knowledge and experience.

To help facilitate the broadest possible investigation, Marx provided 100 questions and an address to send the replies to, qualifying that, “It is not essential to reply to every question, but our recommendation is that replies should be as detailed and comprehensive as possible. The name of the working man or woman who is replying will not be published without special permission, but the name and address should be given, so that if necessary we can send a communication.”

Setting aside for a minute my own political inclinations for a post-structural deconstruction of Marx’s assumptions (not an easy thing to do), I would like to consider this idea that education and investigation are the beginning of revolution. Of mobilizing. Of organizing. Of change.

Could this be why public education has come under such virulent attacks as of late? Parallel with massive budget cuts and efforts at privatization and “deliverology”? Could it be an attempt to curtail that kind of knowledge that might result in radical social change? To keep us from understanding one another’s experiences, histories, perspectives, goals? To keep us from working together?

I give you the first section of his questions  here. You can find the remaining questions at Marxist.org. You decide….

I.

1. What is your trade?

2. Does the shop in which you work belong to a capitalist or to a limited company? State the names of the capitalist owners or directors of the company.

3. State the number of persons employed.

4. State their age and sex.

5. What is the youngest age at which children are taken on (boys or girls)?

6. State the number of overseers and other employees who are not rank-and-file hired workers.

7. Are there apprentices? How many?

8. Apart from the usual and regularly employed workers, are there others who come in at definite seasons?

9. Does your employers’ undertaking work exclusively or chiefly for local orders, or for the home market generally, or for export abroad?

10. Is the shop in a village, or in a town? State the locality.

11. If your shop is in the country, is there sufficient work in the factory for your existence, or are you obliged to combine it with agricultural labor?

12. Do you work with your hands or with the help of machinery?

13. State details as to the division of labor in your factory.

14. Is steam used as motive power?

15. State the number of rooms in which the various branches of production are carried on. Describe the specialty in which you are engaged. Describe not only the technical side, but the muscular and nervous strain required, and its general effect on the health of the workers.

16. Describe the hygienic conditions in the workshop; size of the rooms, space allotted to every worker, ventilation, temperature, plastering, lavatories, general cleanliness, noise of machinery, metallic dust, dampness, etc.

17. Is there any municipal or government supervision of hygienic conditions in the workshops?

18. Are there in your industry particular effluvia which are harmful for the health and produce specific diseases among the workers?

19. Is the shop over-crowded with machinery?

20. Are safety measures to prevent accidents applied to the engine, transmission and machinery?

21. Mention the accidents which have taken place to your personal knowledge.

22. If you work in a mine, state the safety measures adopted by your employer to ensure ventilation and prevent explosions and other accidents.

23. If you work in a chemical factory, at an iron works, at a factory producing metal goods, or in any other industry involving specific dangers to health, describe the safety measures adopted by your employer.

24. What is your workshop lit up by (gas, oil, etc.)?

25. Are there sufficient safety appliances against fire?

26. Is the employer legally bound to compensate the worker or his family in case of accident?

27. If not, has he ever compensated those who suffered accidents while working for his enrichment?

28. Is first-aid organized in your workshop?

29. If you work at home, describe the conditions of your work room. Do you use only working tools or small machines? Do you have recourse to the help of your children or other persons (adult or children, male or female) ? Do you work for private clients or for an employer? Do you deal with him direct or through an agent? .......

P.S. Why are American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians, and First Nation peoples rarely considered "workers" or a part of needed labor movements and reforms? Why are we socialized into thinking that the only indigenous worker in this country comes from some place else?