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<h1 id="reader-title">Native Liberation: The Way Forward</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">August 17, 2016<br>
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<p><strong>by Nick Estes</strong><em></em></p>
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<p><em>These were the concluding remarks to the first
annual Native Liberation 2016 Conference convened at
the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, NM on Aug. 13,
2016. Nick Estes is a co-founder of The Red Nation and
a member of the Leadership Council.</em></p>
<p>The Red Nation formed in November 2014 out of a
collective desire to create a platform for revolutionary
Native organizing and to fight back against this settler
colonial system that seeks our annihilation. That very
summer, two Navajo men, our relatives Allison “Cowboy”
Gorman and Kee “Rabbit” Thompson, were brutally murdered
by three non-Native men. The story is familiar to most
of us. Our relatives — our aunties, uncles, cousins,
brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and
even ourselves — are cast as outsiders, exiles in our
own homelands in places we call border towns, the
white-dominated settlements that ring Indian
reservations where persistent patterns of police
brutality, rampant discrimination, and violence against
Natives define everyday life. The men who murdered
Cowboy and Rabbit later admitted to committing similar
violent acts against 50 others in a one-year period.
They told investigators they were looking for a “good
time,” and Native people were their playthings, just
like the white boys in Farmington who attacked and
murdered Navajo men “for fun” in what they call “Indian
rolling,” or like how rich, racist white men like Dan
Snyder, the owner of the infamous Washington football
team, use Natives as playthings for entertainment and
mascots that celebrate the scalping and mutilating of
Native bodies. Natives become entertainment objects for
sport and killing because in this society we are unreal
and not fully human. Cowboy and Rabbit’s killers spent
more than an hour mutilating their bodies to the point
they were unrecognizable. It was so bad authorities
could not identify them and neither Cowboy nor Rabbit
carried personal ID. All-too-common among Albuquerque’s
unsheltered community, the Albuquerque Police Department
(APD) confiscated and destroyed the men’s IDs — which
included drivers’ licenses and CIB cards — to prevent
them from buying alcohol or receiving basic human
rights, such as access to housing, food, medical care,
and employment. Even before they were killed, the APD
and this settler society had marked and sentenced Cowboy
and Rabbit to a certain kind of death, a social death,
where they were excluded, like most Natives, from the
realm of the living and relegated to a place where they
were considered killable and disposable.</p>
<p>When we founded The Red Nation, this was our primary
concern, to address the common experience of Natives:
four of every five Natives lives off-reservation in
border towns, which include places like Gallup,
Farmington, Winslow, Albuquerque, Denver, Rapid City,
and Phoenix, to name just a few. Why is this
significant? Typically, Natives living off-reservation
are considered unauthentic or somehow less Native. They
are derisively referred to as “Urban Indians.” The truth
is that reservations were created as open air
concentration camps, to contain and limit our movements
across land that was rightfully ours. Our ancestors did
not choose reservation life; it was forced upon them.
Natives who “went off the reservation” were the
revolutionaries and rebels who refused confinement. In
those days, those who willfully crossed the reservation
borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles.
They were usually hunted down, summarily shot, hanged,
or imprisoned by law enforcement or by vigilantes. In
other words, Natives off the reservation have always
been deemed criminal, deviant, and in the way. Today,
the recent police killings of Loreal Tsingine, Allen
Locke, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, Jacquelyn Salyers, and
many more are evidence that the criminalization and
extermination of Native life is fundamental to settler
society. And border towns literally thrive on Native
death.</p>
<p>This is our common experience and our common struggle.
This is why we formed The Red Nation.</p>
<p>In fact, police killings of Natives have increased in
just the last year and some predict that number will
double by the end of 2016, unless we take action now.
Native women make up 30% of all the police killings of
women just this year, even though Natives make up barely
%1 of the national population. On top of this, Natives
are killed by police at the highest rate. Some attempt
to parse out these horrible statistics to suggest that
Natives have it worse than other groups, as if being
murdered by the police is a competition. The truth is
that Natives, Blacks, and Latinxs have historically been
the targets of the racist police state, the colonial
system that enslaved Blacks for their labor, killed
Indians for their land, and created a cheap, exploitable
labor pool from Indigenous-descended people, now called
Latinxs. And because of this reality, as stated in Point
4 of our 10 Point Program, The Red Nation stands with <em>all</em>
victims of police brutality. We recognize that undoing
the system that oppresses everyone requires
multinational unity and class solidarity among the
racialized poor, colonized, and working class peoples.</p>
<p>To understand why the Native struggle is essential,
then, we must first begin with why Natives are targeted
for elimination: to gain access to territory. Despite
popular belief, Natives are not targeted and killed for
our culture, spirituality, religion, or civilization. We
are eliminated so that corporations and the settler
state can gain access to our territory and resources.
That requires the liquidation of our societies, the
forced removal of our people from the land, the creation
of a blood quantum system that dilutes our identity and
decreases our population, the confinement to
reservations or prisons, the breaking up of our land
base and collective identities, and the hyper-policing
of our people. Elimination also requires that Natives in
border towns like Albuquerque are seen as nuisances and
are commonly referred to as “drunk Indians” or
“transients.” Both stereotypes are criminalized,
although by definition neither is illegal. Police and
settlers often tell us to “Go back to the reservation!”
or “You’re not from the community!” In those moments,
Natives become a criminal element, as if <em>we’re</em>
the ones who don’t belong. It’s what Native bodies
off-reservation represent that makes us a threat. Native
bodies off-reservation represent the unfinished business
of settler colonialism; we’re physical reminders that
this is not settler land — this is stolen Native land.
Despite their best efforts to kill us off, confine us to
sub-marginal plots of land, breed us white, or to beat
or educate the Indian out of us, we remain. We remain
because we resist.</p>
<p>We remain as evidence that this is still, and will
always be, Native land. We represent a challenge to the
legitimacy of the colonial project of border towns and
cities because we refuse to quit being Indians when we
leave the reservation. We refuse to obey colonial
borders. We refuse to disappear and to be quiet.</p>
<p>The Red Nation represents the unification of Natives
outside of the institutions of power — taking the
struggle back where it belongs: in the hands of the
people. Our ancestors did not establish corporate
foundations and boards. They fought for their dignity,
lands, and lives. They expect the same from us.
Corporate and colonial state institutions still dominate
our present condition and, as a result, they structure
and contain the free will and humanity of Native people.
We have to transcend these power structures that, by
design and intention, ultimately limit and strangle our
lives. To achieve this new humanity, we have to refuse
the false promise of capitalistic development — <em>which
is commonly disguised as tribal economic
self-determination</em> — and state-sponsored colonial
reconciliation — <em>which is commonly disguised as
community healing and individual self-fulfillment</em>.
You cannot <em>heal </em>from a system that continues
to violate and kill the land and our relatives unless
you dismantle that system. Although seductive, these
“solutions” do nothing more than carry on, and carry
out, the same power structure that Native people have
been resisting for the last five centuries: colonialism
and capitalism. The healing of our wounds can only
happen if we annihilate profit-making and colonial
enterprises.</p>
<p>Instead of non-profits, we need anti-profits organizing
independent of corporate influence and state
co-optation, and embedded in the true power of every
society: the common people. The poor. The oppressed. The
marginalized. In the Lakota language, we call our common
people ikce wicasa. In Native societies, our common
people are those who face the highest rates of violence
and discrimination: our youth, our women, our LGTBQ, and
our poor relatives. In other words, the broad swath of
Native societies today. This is the common experience of
Native people.</p>
<p>The current landscape of struggle pits organizations
and groups of people against each other, vying for
control over resources made scarce by austerity measures
and corporate monopolies. Our struggle is not for
funding streams or profit-making off the misery of the
powerless. We see how organizations and movements mimic
corporate and bourgeois competition over brands, logos,
name recognition, clientele, and power. We refuse to
participate in this corporate model that dominates
community organizing. Instead, we organize according to
a principle of unity to unite Native peoples and all
oppressed peoples in a common struggle beyond national
borders and racial and gender identities. That’s what
separates revolutionary organizing and Native liberation
struggles from entities that pit marginalized
populations against each other, to compete for funding
and resources, without attacking the true source of our
collective misery: colonialism and capitalism.</p>
<p>We share an enemy that we must unite against. This is
the organizing philosophy of The Red Nation.</p>
<p>Capitalism is the enemy of all life. Climate change,
because it envelops the entire planet, makes all life
precarious. Poor, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples,
however, bear the brunt of rising seas, record droughts,
and abnormal weather patterns. As Native people, our
kinship with human and nonhuman relatives is fundamental
to our being. As I speak, an alliance of Lakota and
non-Lakota are laying their bodies on the line to halt a
crude oil pipeline from crossing the major fresh water
source for millions on the Great Plains, the Missouri
River. Our relatives and allies are enacting the sacred
duty of the Lakota belief of Wotakuye, or kinship.
Kinship, in this way, is unconditional because it is
revolutionary love. It is the love for our human and
nonhuman relatives and the love for the land that will
always trump profit. But the land can no longer sustain
us if capitalism continues to stalk the earth in search
of new markets, bodies, and resources. For life to live
on this planet, capitalism must die. For us Lakotas, it
is the owe wasicu, the way of the fat-taker capitalist,
that must die for our people to live.</p>
<p><em>The Great Spirits have declared: capitalism is
organized crime and must be destroyed.</em> It is our
obligation to act accordingly.</p>
<p>As Native people, we possess an essential tradition to
sustain us — a tradition of resistance. From this
tradition of resistance arises The Red Nation. In
Lakota, we call ourselves and all Native peoples, Oyate
Luta, the Red Nation. We are red because we come from
the red earth. We are a nation because we have our own
laws, language, territory, and customs that have
persisted since time immemorial. We claim the land and
the land claims us. While the same could be said today,
The Red Nation also takes on new meanings. We are red
because red is the color of all oppressed peoples’
revolution against their masters; and we exist and are
united as a Nation not because of a proven culture, but
because we struggle against occupation and exploitation.
It is the struggle against the colonial and corporate
occupation of Native lands that unites all Native
peoples in a common fight alongside other oppressed and
marginalized peoples. Settler society and even some of
our own relatives, however, use culture and tradition as
a weapon to renounce the present and the future of our
people in attempt to reclaim a mystical past — a history
and time that never was. For example, hetero-patriarchy,
the belief of male superiority and heterosexuality,
dominates current views on Native “tradition” and
“culture.” Most Native societies are matrilineal; never
had marriage customs that privileged relationships
between only men and women; and possessed multiple
genders beyond the binaries of male and female. Yet, we
have adopted coercive, sexist, and homophobic Christian
and Western values, masking them as our own “traditions”
and “cultures.” This is pure bigotry, not tradition,
that alibis discrimination, violence, rape, and torture
against children, women, and LGBTQ2 relatives. For
Native people to live, hetero-patriarchy must be
abolished.</p>
<p>This brings us to the last point about Native
liberation: <em>treaties</em>. Natives are thought to
be a backwards people living in the past. Likewise, the
promises made through treaties, agreements, and other
arrangements between our people and the colonizers are
thought to be ancient documents. After the colonizers
broke every treaty, we are told to “Get over it.” The
truth is: it’s the U.S. and settler colonial states that
have not “gotten over it.” Otherwise, why invest so much
time and energy into covering up the fact that this
country sits atop stolen Native lands? Treaties are the
evidence of our sovereignty. After all, you do not enter
treaty negotiations with “domestic” or “dominated”
peoples. Treaty-making is one of the oldest
international and diplomatic traditions between and
among sovereigns. And if we return to the treaties, we
see that they are not <em>just </em>historical
documents. In fact, they are future-oriented documents.
They promise in the future Natives would receive
healthcare, employment, education, land, and protection
for the partial relinquishing of territory — the
material basis for our sovereignty. Those promises have
yet to be upheld. It should also be noted, those
promises are fundamental human rights for all people,
not just Natives. So the upholding of treaty law will
surely benefit all humanity because we entered into
treaties with the U.S. as equals with the belief that we
possessed a common humanity. The U.S. and the corporate
interests it represents, however, have refused that
humanity. They act as if they have no relatives, no
relations, which is the highest insult in Native
societies. When we talk of treaties, we speak for that
lost humanity. We are the wave of the future, not the
past.</p>
<p>We are prophecy.</p>
<p>Four of five Natives do not live on reservation lands,
but that doesn’t mean that they have relinquished their
treaty rights or their sovereign political identities as
Native peoples. It means that we exercise our rights to
live where and how we want in our own homelands because
that is the ultimate definition of self-determination
and sovereignty, collective independence and autonomy.
It is important to remember that no people in the
history of this world were ever granted their freedom by
begging for it from their oppressors. They had to fight
for it. They had to win it. Freedom is actualized not
given.</p>
<p>We cannot simply “return” to our reservations or
“return” to the land to recuperat precolonial lifestyles
— however real or imagined they may be — because most of
us are simply dispossessed of land and we don’t possess
the capital to buy it. The majority are landless and
poor. It is admirable that some of our relatives are
privileged enough to still live off the land. For the
majority, this is simply impossible. What is possible is
collective organizing and struggle to transform society
to meet the collective needs of Native people and all
oppressed peoples, to once again live with the land.
Action, however, demands that we build movements outside
the structures of power and prioritize everyday people
who possess the real power to make these changes.
Reforming a system premised on our demise has proven
unsustainable. One could argue, in the twenty first
century Native people are <em>worse off</em>. We have
more people in prison. We have lost more land, not
gained it. Our water is being polluted and sold off. Our
children are dying at catastrophic rates. Our women are
being tortured and murdered by the thousands. And our
LGBTQ2 relatives continue to face some of the highest
rates of violence anywhere. What little land we still
possess is being contaminated and sold off to the
highest bidder. Education and employment opportunities
have decreased. Access to adequate healthcare is
pipedream. We do not have access to healthy foods.
Violence in our communities has increased. These are not
just headaches that if we ignore they will eventually go
away. We can’t fundraise or lobby our way out of this.
We can heal as individuals, but the world we inhabit is
still bent on our destruction. This is the reality of
the ikce wicasa, the common people, our relatives.</p>
<p>It is time to name the systems that kill us —
capitalism and colonialism — and call for their
destruction so that our people may live. We will not
apologize for this, relatives. It is the only right
thing left to do. The Red Nation is a movement for life,
not death. And for us to live, capitalism and
colonialism must die.</p>
<p>Join us in this movement for life!</p>
<p>In the spirit of Popé and in the spirit of Crazy Horse!</p>
<p>Hecetu Welo!</p>
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