As several people have mentioned, this text is flawed in many ways; I believe it’s still worth discussing, but we will move on to another text next week unless there’s significant disagreement.
Unfortunately, due to the politics of the author Eve Tuck, the text is basically liberalism; for the author, decolonization ironically IS a metaphor. When I originally read it when it came out I was very skeptical of how it portrayed China, but not being a scholar of decolonization I just deferred to others who were more knowledgeable on the subject. However, recent information about the author came to light on social media, namely their silence on Palestine and then condemnation of Hamas, their marriage to a cop, and the aforementioned comments on China, Tuck is just another lib academic that comes across as radical for clout. This is what a lack of Marxist understanding does those in this space which imo is very pervasive.
Yeah there was some pretty cringe stuff in there. The colonialism of tibet line made me laugh with incredulity. But there is some good analysis in there too. There is a lack of resolution in the text which is a classic example of liberalism. Point at the problem and describe it in detail without highlighting the root cause or the way to fix it.
I think analyzing a problematic text with good ideas in it is more interesting and useful than re-reading the building block books of Communist Theory.
On this, I agree.
Point at the problem and describe it in detail without highlighting the root cause or the way to fix it.
The root cause is the need for “rescuing settler normalcy, rescuing a settler future”, the methods to create that normalcy are outlined in the text. In a word, the way to fix that root cause is: decolonisation.
In order to reach the point where decolonisation is a possibility, which is mentioned in the text several times, what is necessary is “abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples”. After reaching that point, obviously many many question will arise, which again is mentioned in the text: “these are questions that will be addressed at decolonization, and not a priori in order to appease anxieties for a settler future”.
the need for “rescuing settler normalcy, rescuing a settler future.”
That is not the root cause of colonization. The root cause of colonialism is the capitalist desire to find new resources and peoples to exploit.
the way to fix that root cause is: decolonisation.
and the way to not being sick is to be healthy. This is pure idealist nonsense.
You can’t just say “decolonisation” like its an action like “juggling” or “chewing gum” or “seizing the means of production.” Those things have a method implied for their execution. There is a history of completion to refer to. There isn’t a rewind button on the colonialism machine.
Are we discussing the text?
The text is aiming to address treating decolonisation as a metaphor. That is what I was talking about.
I don’t expect to hit the magical decolonisation button and decolonisation occurs overnight. What is the implied method for decolonisation that you’d like to discuss?
Are we discussing the text?
This comment chain was more of a meta discussion of the work as a whole and the problems it has.
Point at the problem and describe it in detail without highlighting the root cause or the way to fix it.
This was a general statement at how liberal “progressives” prefer to navel gaze, theorize, and expound everything except the real solution. Treating decolonization as a metaphor isn’t a real problem… unless you think you can decolonize while maintaining capitalism.
Decolonization without a socialist revolution is just way to make another layer of exploitation in the form of a indigenous bourgeoisie and government which will collaborate with international capital to form Neo-colonial systems.
The authors go out of their way to not blame capitalism and say (incorrectly) that “socialism does colonialism too.” That is done in order to talk about something in detail instead of addressing the real issue.
I basically agree with all of those points. There are some ties in the text between the settler nations and their sources of capital i.e. land/nature/slaves, but not explicitly.
Treating decolonisation as a metaphor is a real problem…especially if you are planning to overthrow/dismantle Capitalism. Acknowledging the challenges that will come and trying to shatter those illusions about decolonisation is critical. Decolonisation is only ever going to be a metaphor in a world dominated by Capitalism.
Personal Anecdote
My Grandmother was adopted and as a result is still learning things about her family history into her 80’s. About 10 years ago, she met a sibling for the first time who was constructing a family tree. What do you know?! There is an Indigenous great-great-Grandmother. My Grandmother wasn’t impressed and said “doesn’t matter, we are mostly Anglo-Saxon; that is the important part”…UNTIL we learned about the loopholes that you can exploit by being (in our case) quasi-Indigenous. Now several aunts and uncles have the paperwork in-hand to take advantage of these loopholes. We are irredeemable.
For anyone who would like an introduction to the text, there is a Red Menace Episode which gives a great summary of the key points.
Idiocy
These quotes just made me laugh.
Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet).
white people can stay white, yet claim descendance from an Indian grandmother. In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which enforced the one-drop rule except for white people who claimed a distant Indian grandmother - the result of strong lobbying from the aristocratic “First Families of Virginia” who all claim to have descended from Pocahontas (including Nancy Reagan, born in 1921). Known as the Pocahontas Exception, this loophole allowed thousands of white people to claim Indian ancestry, while actual Indigenous people were reclassified as “colored” and disappeared off the public record.
Vine Deloria Jr. discusses what he calls the Indian-grandmother complex in the following account from Custer Died for Your Sins:
During my three years as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians it was a rare day when some white [person] didn’t visit my office and proudly proclaim that he or she was of Indian descent. …I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone. …I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.
Does this mean that the incessant false accusations that spoiled Native Americans are misusing ‘free stuff’ from the government were projection by European immigrant? If this projection is true, then the leaders of European immigrant community are lazy drunk alcoholic dropout who misuse taxpayers’ money for their personal luxury while their people suffer starvation and homelessness. It also means that European immigrants are thugs, rapists, vandalists, and free riders by their own choice.
When you consider that every source of wealth held by settler nations is stolen, it can’t be anything but projection.
The stuff about “blood quanta” is really well stated. The idea that indigenous people are a community not a race and the members of that community are known to the community and not questionable by those outside.
A few of the “moves to innocence” would have been really uncomfortable reading for me not that long ago and really made me cringe at past me. in my Ignorant Lib days I really wished I wasn’t white and dug into my family history looking for an ancestral link to the land to legitimize my occupation which is a perfect example of “Settler Nativism.”
The critisism of the Occupy movement is really on point. I was involved in occupy for a few months in 2011 but I never really considered how it really was just a demand to get our share as settlers.
Except there were many people involved in the protests from 2011 to 2012, not just white people in New York.
And it did have real demands, but no real movement or orgs to represent them, not many anyway.
Castigating the protests are popular nowadays. But that is only because it’s easy to make up shit about something that was pretty much forgotten about due to the news cycle shortly after it happened. It’s sort of like how people have foggy memories of the Iraq war protest movement, if at all; people start making up interpretations and nonsense about the facts and sometimes they’re just fabricating or even lying. Or worse, they get the last word in and THEN they bury it so no one remembers or hears about the events again.
Collective amnesia.
African Americans and immigrants of color are settlers too. (this is covered very early in the text) Just because they are also subjugated peoples under white supremacy does not mean they are not taking a share of stolen land. Nobody is saying that there were no “real demands” from occupy. (I kinda feel like you haven’t read the criticisms of Occupy in the text because you are batting at straw men)
I stayed at 5 different occupy camps over the course of 11 months and I never once do I recall hearing anyone speak about indigenous rights or Land Back. I never once heard a speaker for the occupy movement recognize that the protest was taking part on stolen land. (that’s not to say it never happened but that it was not the majority or even a common stance.)
Occupy was not a decolonial movement. There were many ideas that tried to hijack Occupy, decolonialists were among them but nowhere near the majority. The primary focus was specifically on wealth inequality. Occupy did not call for the abolishment of capitalism or racism. The protests started as anger over banks getting bailouts, while families (settlers) who lost their homes (on stolen land) got nothing.
If america divides up all the wealth equally among its people it would still not be justice because all the wealth in america was stolen from the indigenous people. That’s not to say the first and only priority is land back but the problem of wealth inequality is bound up in the issue of capitalism and white supremacy. These things can only be fixed if you address the root causes, capitalism first and white supremacy second.
The land back slogan didn’t exist back then but Indigenous people and calls for land reclamation did happen and have happened year after year. It does not matter if it was not a decolonial movement; it encompassed the entire world. That was its significance.
Also, capitalism and white supremacy should be dealt with both at the same time.
This paper gives Paolo Freire bad representation, tbh.
that’s not the only bad part…
Yeah, I was showing my friends it and there are several errors regarding the academic paper.
But honestly, Paolo Freire is cast as mysteriously pulling things from thin air, even though he has explained his methodology time and time again and, besides that, is a Marxist and clearly comes, from that philosophy while also taking ideas from Gramsci.
The paper does not necessarily say all this out loud, but I think it gives a bad misrepresentation, whether intentional or not.
Ignorance
The standard settler mythology of conquering vast unsettled, uncultivated lands and making them productive makes my blood boil. The plough is the only way to work the land according to the settler…anything else is ignored.
The Puritan Work Ethic could not comprehend that Indigenous people were able to understand and master a plethora of challenges including: natural plant/animal cycles; farming techniques; methods for obtaining and storing drinkable water; seasonal changes; landscapes (and soils); relationships within the ecosystem and hunting techniques, but still only “work” for several hours per day to sustain themselves.
settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives - repackaged as data and findings - are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures.
The settler is making a new “home” and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because “civilization” is defined as production in excess of the “natural” world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). The settler positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural.
Indigeneity prompts multiple forms of settler anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous peoples - who make a priori claims to land and ways of being - is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete (Fanon, 1963; Vine Deloria, 1988; Grande, 2004; Bruyneel, 2007).
Seeking stolen resources is entangled with settler colonialism because those resources were nature/Native first, then enlisted into the service of settlement and thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land. Furthermore, the postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject.
The front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism.
We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes.
For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization non-metaphorically, they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of United States. Decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people.
it is no accident that the U.S. government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery. Likewise, indentured European laborers were often awarded tracts of ‘unsettled’ Indigenous land as payment at the end of their service (McCoy, forthcoming).
Communal ownership of land has figured centrally in various movements for autonomous, self-determined communities. “The land belongs to those who work it,” disturbingly parrots Lockean justifications for seizing Native land as property, ‘earned’ through one’s labor in clearing and cultivating ‘virgin’ land.
Violence
Acknowledging that the violence of the settler-colonial structure must be reasserted every day is an easy way to highlight that it is temporary and unsustainable. Unfortunately, there are many places across the world where this violence is asserted gleefully.
This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event.
The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror.
The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.
Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native, disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964. The management technologies of North American settler colonialism have provided the tools for internal colonialisms elsewhere.
The largest human trafficker in the world is the carceral state within the United States, not some secret Thai triad or Russian mafia or Chinese smuggler. The U.S. carceral state is properly called neo-slavery, precisely because it is legal. It is not simply a product of exceptional racism in the U.S.; its racism is a direct function of the settler colonial mandate of land and people as property.
