"We won."
Not more than a couple centuries ago, a different order of peoples populated the Pacific Northwest. Writ large, they did not practice borders or property like settlers do. They didn't practice it all the same way, either. By the time the Mayflower landed, North America was a metropolitan place full of different cultures. Even those conflicts that did exist, could not compare to the savage brutality that settlers brought to their New World. Of course, these people's descendants are still around. They have been displaced, disgraced, and disregarded, but they are still here. Tribal confederacies group survivors across many tribes, governing in a strange reflection of settler statehood over land they were forced to occupy. They have not forgotten. I have not forgotten, but most settlers have.
A recent conversation with an organizer friend has haunted me. Democratic whispers (and loud pundits) argue that “identitarianism” (whatever the fuck that is) lost Harris the presidency. Apparently, trans rights are not only unrelated to, but a distraction from, addressing the material conditions of the people. Settlers voted fash because eggs are expensive and that's my fault as a tranny faggot, I guess. So, I asked my friend about it. As someone professionally adjacent to the DNC, his career depends on being able to reflexively deploy appropriate rhetoric to align people with the Democratic party line in order to foster coalition. He knocks on doors to move votes. He runs local campaigns that obtain real material benefits for people. I respect his expertise and perspective because my place on the broad front is elsewhere. So, it surprised me when, rather than be skeptical of this anti-intersectional party line, he launched into a defense of it. In particular, he cited land acknowledgements as academic theater. They certainly can be, such as when REI used them during strikebreaking efforts, but well-studied folks and Native peoples have written extensively about their importance within a greater decolonial framework. My friend had either never read those analyses, or didn't care about them. To him, these acknowledgements of theft and genocide are meaningless, because, “There was a war, and we won.”
We. We who? We who brought smallpox and spread it knowingly? We the trappers and emissaries who helped the US displace the Siletz through military force? We the cavalry and the pillagers? We the frontiersfolk who erected Oregon as a white homeland? Do you really count yourself among their ranks?
My ancestors have been living on Turtle Island for five centuries, mostly in and around New England. When I go back east, I'm treated to streets named after the tycoons of my line, whose northern industrial wealth was inextricably linked to the slave trade and the extraction of resources from stolen land. You don't get rich in a basis of wealth predicated on genocide without affirming that genocide. It's where that wealth comes from; it's what grants that money any power. The echoes of their deeds produced me, as pale as the Picts of Alba, because not once in half a millennia did my people choose integration with Native peoples in any way that mattered. They chose complicity over and over and over again. Then I was born.
My father moved out west to pursue a degree from Reed, but he stayed because he fell in love with the land. He loved it so much that he built a career in marketing, inviting corporations to build campuses in the exurbs of Portland. Campuses that, today, lay in ruin. The green swallows them. We travel there to collect blackberries from the thickets invading concrete ziggurats. My father has a fascination with Pacific tribes, but it is only a fascination. Sometimes he forgets they are not gone.
My people weren't in Oregon until he came here. Our involvement in the genocide radiated from a distant center. By my father's time, he was not alone in considering the blood suffusing the ground to be ancient history. I am a settler, born and raised, but I am not the we that won. We do not have to be. Can you show a pale devil that it has made a grievous error in privileging you?
Most of my ancestors emigrated here more recently, from European war, famine, and other genocidal regimes. By the time they arrived, the war, as my friend puts it, was over. When he says, “We won,” he shows his assimilation. His career in politics necessitates his foundational identification with settler power. I don't know if he realizes, that is a choice.
Precolonial history is a rich tapestry of alternatives to a hegemony of capital. They may not map neatly to modernity, as industrialization and computerization have transformed our world, but they are reminders that the very basis of our society can be reimagined and practiced from distinct fundamentals. Settlers tend to look to European communism for these alternatives; they forget that even Marx drew inspiration from the egalitarianism of some Native peoples. There is a revolutionary tradition rooted in Turtle Island itself, as communists like Mariátegui of Peru are eager to articulate. We who live here need import nothing to find the paths that do not belong to settlerism.
To me, settlerism is a kind of systemized ignorance that relies on cruelty to reify itself. Settlers brutalize each other to fortify brutalization as a way of life, and then they can't remember any other way of doing things, so they beseech power to brutalize them less or differently. They see precolonial life, the world over, as a savage prehistory, no matter how recent it was. A primitive foolishness, best forgotten. The incidental emergence of capital as a world order is neither inevitable nor immortal. Even the corporatists see it ending. They fear for their lives and ask experts whether ensuring loyalty in a bunker with bomb collars is feasible long-term. There will be opportunity within our lifetimes for fundamental transformation, of creating a new basis of our shared society that approaches the boons and bonds of industrialization and computerization with a sober compassion. These decrepit orders will not survive the crises they created. Something will rush into the vacuum. Let it be us.
…
We won.
We won, and now you are in the ground. You, and the coyote, and the buffalo, and the wolf, and too many others to name in a lifetime. You will remain there, inert, and we will turn your flesh into meal for cattle, and we will torture the cattle, we will produce them for torture, and we will torture the people who eat the cattle. We won. We won. We won.
A friend reminds me, Coyote remains. They all remain. Genocide is so alien to the human spirit that it can never be total, both owing to the weak-but-not-absent heart of even the genocidaire, and the grit of the living.
...
Genocide is a tricky concept, these days. It seems mass slaughter of civilians across many borders is either a great and obvious atrocity or an unavoidable part of managing wayward subjects. Other times, a genocide requires no extermination at all but only a severity of exploitation. Maybe the word will tell us: gen, meaning a kind; cide, meaning murder. The murder of a kind. The murder of a people.
What is a people? This is tricky too. One might say a person can be of many peoples. Sometimes my people are my blood-ancestors, sometimes they are settlers altogether; sometimes they are my siblings in the immortal tradition of chosen becoming, or the peers of my disciplines. Perhaps I am of all these peoples. All of them can be destroyed. My relatives can be buried, the tools of my trade lost to time. The phenomenon of the tradition of becoming is called immortal because it is embedded in the cycle of decay: so long as the living may choose, so long as the dead return to soil, and so long as the soil is fit for life, then I will recur. As for settlers they can, as a category, be destroyed without violence. We can dismantle and disarm the institutions that organize settlerism into a people, that exert their power in terrible ways. We can topple the titans of capital and colony. Without institutions to unite and perpetuate the category, it would cease to be. Despite the psychosis of whiteness, the light-skinned race remains human: an animal of comfort and habit. They, we, will adapt.
Settlerism is closely associated with the political project of whiteness. White people tend to think whiteness is about skin color alone, and that prejudices about melanin, and indigeneity, and gender, and ability, are both inevitable and mutual. All of these are political beliefs that gird a universe of policy and practice, and they are taken for implicit fact by ignorant millions. Racism, and all the prejudices whiteness unites, are neither inevitable nor mutual. One finds common the fear that the wronged will simply return the favor. You sweet child, we are not all barbarians. There will be truth, and then reconciliation.
The practices we associate with being transgender, including altering one's body and endocrine system, have ancient histories. The goddess Inanna who ruled Uruk through her cult, seven thousand years ago, was responsible for changing people's genders. Premarin can be synthesized with rudimentary tools. Antiandrogens can be found in herbs. We have been doing hormone-replacement therapy for a very, very long time. So I consider us a people, a sort of unlanded phenomenon embedded in the possibility of living volition. Today we are a category of exclusion, but there have been times and places, as there will be such things to come, that these practices have been so mundane as to sublimate our distinction. Why would “coming out” exist in a society where choosing your hormones, or altering your body, is a sacred, personal, even trivial choice? There is a living future in which our people do not seem to exist because our differences have become unremarkable. Settlers may fear the day their nation falls, but to me even the disappearance of my own, this fading into a greater compassionate people, will be a day of peace.
...
My friend and I exist in very different political milieus. It is hard for him to understand mine: when I reject the authority of settler powers, he hears a generic anti-authoritarianism that is not particularly distinct from rejecting bedtime. I go to work, I pay rent, I pay taxes, and I keep my ID up to date. I even vote. The consequences of spurning American legitimacy are invisible to him, because its dangerous substance is unimaginable. The compromises we are forced to make only convince him that axiomatic refusal is short-sighted and empty; childish. What does rejection call you to do? Get hit in traffic because road safety laws are bogus? Die of botulism because food regulations are a crock? Skip work forever and then flip the eviction crew the bird? Who does this feed? Who does this help? Why does it matter? He concludes it doesn't.
Land acknowledgements are a flashpoint where my realm meets his. They are the tip of an iceberg: by recognizing the atrocities that shape our present, we can come together to restore each other and heal how they have scarred us all. These acknowledgements are neither the beginning nor the ending of a great transformation that whiteness will not survive. To me, they connect us to a history that precedes and outlives the settler menace. To him, they are the pinnacle of something worth nothing: sheer theater from academic blowhards, as if sentimentality might resurrect the dead just to give them property titles. That would be ridiculous — so stop asking about it!
When an acknowledgement is only an acknowledgement, it is useless. It is why REI and oil-fueled universities both find them palatable. They can be used as a signal without any commitment or consequences. It is classic western centrism to recognize a problem only to do nothing about it. The sycophants of liberal democracy can look right into the face of their fundamental contradictions -- the racism of borders juxtaposed against democracy's need for pluralism, the economic requirement for "growth" despite the well-understood reality of profit's inevitable decline, the harms of marginalization remedied with celebrity tokenization -- and conclude that the monsters spun from their own deeds are just misunderstandings, as if one could pratfall into lifetimes as a slaver.
I reject American authority because recognizing it is incompatible with my values of compassion, plenitude, and equity. Just as I cannot in good faith recognize the murderous state of Israel's claims over lands it seized through settler violence, how can I say that the United States has legitimacy? This is foundational: the rejection is not the goal, but a precept. Do you fess to the Great Satan because you align with its genocidal history, or because it is politically expedient to moving in the halls of power? Do you hope its edifices shall stand for a thousand thousand years, or are you merely abiding a well-armed demon? Does the ethos you espouse, that of a free and just society, not call you to oppose the brutality rendering it impossible? I cannot in good faith say that I hope America persists. I hope it falls away like sloughed skin.
"We won." Did you? Or is it just apologia holding together the untenable constructs of a ravenous beast?
...
What misunderstanding I most encounter about decolonization is the universe of tactics it opens up. The challenge for militants of a compassionate world is to lay roots and take sure footing under an obliterating eye. Thus, is it not of tactical importance to remain centerless, without leaders; imperceptible? When the eye turns, the rebels vanish. We will build centers later, networks of nexes to uphold a wiser, more loving covenant on the earth.
Most of that won't be up to me; my sliver of those parallel institutions the future requires, has to do with data architecture and userland software. I'm too much of a bitch loner to play nice with others, and crazy besides, but that doesn't mean I -- or anyone like me -- can't contribute. As a craftsperson, I know there are ethics embedded in my practices. Even the technical problem of who stores what is rife with questions about privacy and autonomy and stewardship. Capitalism directs us to answer these riddles with jealous paywalls and psychohazard adtime and data centers that drain lakes. We do not need to play such foolish games.
I sometimes tell people about the 24-month development cycle. A dev team building a new service will spend the first six months building a prototype, which more or less works. It doesn't meet every user story, and it definitely isn't ready to ship, but it proves some essential value proposition. But, before you can really polish things, you have to implement the paywall. Track users. Railroad them into signups and subscriptions. Rig the backend to estimate VAT. Store and forget PII, if you care about following the law. This takes eighteen months. The project still doesn't meet every user story, and it still isn't ready to ship, but it does, because it has a paywall. That's what capitalists really want you to build. The value proposition is just a means.
If you reorient yourself as a craftsperson, you can see how that year and a half is wasted. Capitalists bring their form of organization with them in the shape of corporations, but open source dweebs like me must supply our own institutions of stewardship in order to rebuff their invitations with collective power. That eighteen months should be spent getting the thing ready to ship -- as that readiness reflects accountability to the value prop -- and organizing the labor and expertise that can shepherd the service and assist the people that use it, to ensure its perpetuity in accordance with its usefulness. If you're making something people self-host, then make a business selling managed hosting. Charter foundations that represent the userbase and hold copyright in escrow. While you're at it, hire a fucking moderation team. There's always money in convenience, and CREAM is just a tactical reality. Until life doesn't cost money, you're going to need it.
Can you think of any ways that sidestepping capitalist and colonialist framings multiplies your power? This labor of mentally and spiritually breaking out, many experience as a chore to be punted out of perpetual misery. To most, it is not in itself liberating. It is as though a cold has settled deep in their core, and so they cannot warm themselves with their heart. They shiver; the text falls from their quivering hands. They do not feel the fire of the sacred word, the shared word. It cannot penetrate their spirit, but oh, when it does...! When it does, the world opens all over again. One pays witness to a dawn of the means our enemies cannot perceive and the paths they cannot travel. We do not have to play their games. We can seize the places, the powers, they do not realize they have abandoned.
...
I hope that this essay, and my writing in general, helps to illuminate a militant spirit, to kindle it as it already lives in you. I am not some mastermind; mine is merely a synthesis, and you'd best check my sources to get the whole context. I just need you to understand what crazy things are possible in crazy times. I want you to hold that dim fire of unbreakable dignity and breathe new life into it. I want the struggle for compassion to power you up.
I want to bury capital and colony and live for the world that rises from their grave.
PS:
I sometimes think of myself as a spirit of the land. Not Native, of course not. Just, a being made of here, literally constructed from the wealth of its soil. It will be a kind of honor, when my ghost joins those of this region. My allegiance stands with this place, more than any mortal power. Its history is long; my enemies, brief.
When I lived in Boston, I felt a keening absence. I was accustomed to such thick green that roads and sidewalks were always full of cracks, that maintaining them was a race against time to hold back a force of nature, a lung of the world. The forest was underneath the city, waiting. Beneath Boston was only more stone and city. The trees were scraggly and managed; lonely. Deforestation was total, and only a token zoo remained. So I moved home.
I'm sure another spirit would be more attuned to New England's earth. More impassioned by its bright autumns, deep winters, and wide scrublands. I'm just not that spirit.
