What is decolonization? What does the term mean, and what is entailed? In this conversation, we discuss the question of decolonziation with Sakej Ward.
Sakej (James Ward) belongs to the wolf clan. He is Mi’kmaw (Mi’kmaq Nation) from the community of Es-gen-oo-petitj (Burnt Church First Nation, New Brunswick).
Having taught, organized, advised and led various warrior societies from all over Turtle Island down into Guatemala and Borike (Puerto Rico) Sakej has made warrior-hood his way of life.
This conversation is excerpted from a recent episode of The Green Flame, a Deep Green Resistance podcast.
What is Decolonization?
Max Wilbert: Can you help define Decolonization for us and help us understand what this entails? I think a lot of people when they hear the term Decolonization, they think of a process that occurs primarily in the mind and that seems like a part of it to me, but I think there’s more to it. I’m just wondering if you can help us unpack that idea.
Sakej Ward: I don’t know what’s happening in the States, but here in Canada the term Decolonization is being hijacked, so we see institutions like even government institutions or universities in particular that are trying to redefine it and like water it down and use token measure of indigenous inclusion and then call it like a decolonizing initiative and it really isn’t right. So, let’s talk about this, what we really mean.
Now, to explain Decolonization I’ll do it in a simple way, I would just simply say it’s the undoing of the destruction of colonialism and it’s the undoing of colonial influences. So I’m talking about things like the undoing of the destruction of our lands, the destruction of indigenous culture, the destruction of even our governments, destruction of our population, our people, and as you mentioned even our minds, individual minds and our spirits.
Two Sides of Decolonization: Anti-Colonial Action and Cultural Resurgence Action
So I’m talking about reversing all that. So if Colonization was about the destruction of the indigenous way of life in our indigenous world, Decolonization is about ridding ourselves of all those efforts, initiatives, and influences. So the way I usually talk about it, there is basically two efforts or two actions that we could look at these broad spectrums of actions, and the first one is ANTI-COLONIAL ACTIONS and the other one is CULTURAL RESURGENCE ACTIONS.
So the ANTI-COLONIAL ACTIONS are actions we take to disempower or eradicate colonialism. CULTURAL RESURGENCE ACTIONS are the opposite; these are actions we take to rebuild indigenous nations, right? So we do some examples like, for instance, ANTI-COLONIAL ACTIONS, you know, right at the top of my head, here I would say anti-industrial initiatives.
Dismantling the Colonial Economy: Anti-Industrial Actions
So anything that is about destroying our homeland, and so, you know, opposing pipelines like in Wet’suwet’en they’re doing a great job taking on the pipelines, they’re opposing logging, commercial fishing, mining, all these destructive processes to the land and that’s ANTI-COLONIAL EFFORTS, right? Because, like I said, at the core of Colonialism is the idea of extracting the resources of another country or the benefit gain of what used to be referred as Motherland, a Metropole, nowadays is just a particular family or a particular group or particular corporation, right?
And also, anti-colonial actions do also include things like opposing colonial political authority, that’s where we really get down to the things like challenging colonial assertions of sovereignty, so these become actions where you help raise awareness around things like the Doctrine of Discovery and that’s where Europe particularly through the Vatican gave themselves permission to seize all non-Christian lands. So the idea of discovering the land and then claiming it as their own, now belonging to France or Britain or Spain or Portugal, with a colonial construct, right? This was something that the Vatican in their papal bulls Had said go ahead and do this and I’m giving you permission to go out and claim lands for the sake of the Christian Empire, right?
MW: Right
Dismantling Colonial Culture
SW: So we have to challenge those things like the Doctrine of Discovery, because that is at the heart of colonial assertion of sovereignty, when we say sovereignty we’re talking about absolute power, absolutely like governing power over land, and we’re talking about the idea of these Doctrines of Discovery are completely illegitimate, we know it’s based on racism, it’s based on the idea also that Christianity has security over the world or our right to rule the world, so we have to challenge these.
Another anti-colonial action could be like opposing dominant culture ‘cause right now dominant culture is European, Eurocentric-based culture, right? So things like Western Liberalism which focuses on the individual. Indigenous culture was focused on the collective and the next generations, right? It wasn’t about the individual, so it was about thinking about externally, thinking about other people, your community, your nation, and generations yet to come.
Dismantling the Philosophy of Colonization
We also need to get away from things like Capitalism, Christianity, you know oppose all that stuff, as well as something that kinda throws people off is the idea of rights, right-based conflicts. Rights, at least from the dominant culture comes the idea, you could go back to critical theorists like Locke and Hobbes and you see that what they’re saying is rights come from the crown, that means the government, right?
And particularly Hobbes is saying that the crown owns all your rights in order to create a society, and they will tell you what rights you have to be able to function in a society, so you know your rights and your freedoms are all owned by the government and they’ll let you know which ones you can exercise in this model society they create, right? “So indigenous people talk about fighting for rights”, no, we’re really saying that we’re just fighting for the little morsels of political freedoms that the government will give us, right? We’re acknowledging that they have the right to even take them from us to create their society, right?
And, so a lot of times I talk about “no, we have to be more conscious of the idea of INDIGENOUS RESPONSIBILITIES not RIGHTS”, and our responsibilities are the idea of how we relate to the land in a good way, how we relate to the life of the land and our people and our next generation in a good way. Rights is something I can go my entire life without never exercising. The right to, say, “go fish”, and I never have to exercise it at all. A responsibility is a different thing, it’s an obligation, I have a duty to go out and protect that land, I have a duty to go and protect the next seven generations.
So, the dominant culture is really focused on this idea of rights, but really indigenous thinking should be more about responsibilities, and we have to be able to oppose these things. So, on the ANTI-COLONIAL ACTIONS think about imposing industrial initiatives, colonial political authority, dominant culture, we’re gonna oppose all that and that’s anti-colonial actions.
The Necessity of Cultural Resurgence
But, the CULTURAL RESURGENCE ACTION that’s more like indigenous nation building and that’s what we’re talking about healing our homelands, that’s, you know, obviously the ecology, and the environment that’s been utterly decimated under the last five hundred years of Colonialism.
So, we have to talk about how do we rebuild that, how do we rebuild the life in the lands, how do we re-establish a connection and the relationship with our homeland. And it’s understanding that being on indigenous land isn’t just a physical experience, it’s also a cultural-spiritual experience that we have with the lands and the life of those lands. How do we rebuild our ways of governance and how do we empower our traditional government.
Reclaiming Identity
Another thing we could look at in terms of CULTURAL RESURGENCE is reclaiming our identity and we spoke a little [about that] earlier because as colonial subjects or colonial citizens we are utterly controlled by their laws, and this was imposed on us, you know, there was never a vote for indigenous people to say “yes, we want to become part of the colonizer”, there was never a self-determining action to say we want to be part of that, it was always imposed.
Here in Canada, the word Aboriginal was used because after the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, Aboriginal became a legal definition when they talk about indigenous people, and what happens is because it’s a legal definition, they have to define the scope of what it means to be Aboriginal. So, they’re controlling the identity, and basically what it comes down to is an Aboriginal persona can practice non-threatening culture and you could go sing, you could dance, you could tell stories, you can entertain the colonizer as much as you want. You could put on what they always referred to as “our customs” are regalia or cultural clothing.
We could put that on and put on a show for the Queen when she come in to visit Canada and they love that, but the minute we say being indigenous means occupying our land, have access to our land, have a relationship with our land, that becomes threatening to the colonizer, that becomes threatening to the idea of private property.
So the concept, the legal definition of Aboriginal, it’s really about limiting the scope of what it means to be indigenous. So we don’t really have these political rights to access land, and we again we see this happening in Sudan, where the hereditary Chiefs who really are the legitimate leaders of that land are being challenged and faced with conflict of the Colonial States who are telling them by way of the Canadian definition of Aboriginal that they have no real power or no real consent over the land.
So we see in this idea of Indigenous versus Aboriginal being played out in the Wet’suwet’en, and then also in terms of the Cultural Resurgence, we have to talk about rebuilding our culture itself, the language, our history, our ceremonies, our rituals, our customs, and what it amounts to is rebuilding the framework that makes up a worldview, and within our culture, our culture was very spiritual, so we are talking about rebuilding that spiritualism that was part and parcel of our worldview.
Summary: What is Decolonization
And finally, by rebuilding our connection to the land, rebuilding our government and rebuilding our culture hopefully that will remind us about the need to rebuild our sacred responsibility to that land. I hope it fills in all those pieces so we understand how important that really becomes again and that’s what I think of when I think of Decolonization, it’s the Anti-colonial actions as well as these cultural resurgence actions that go on simultaneously.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Please contact us if you can help transcribe this podcast, or want to get involved.
Throughout the history of human civilization, imperialism has driven the conquest and colonization of indigenous communities, cultures, and land. The land that they hold sacred is turned into commodities and resources to be “managed” by the settlers. Colonization of the indigenous people continues to this day and will continue until serious political resistance is undertaken with solidarity from non-indigenous people. DGR has developed Indigenous Solidarity Guidelines for any non-indigenous people supporting the decolonization of indigenous people.
Columbus and Other Cannibals provides an indigenous perspective of violence and destruction caused by the dominant culture. For Indigenous Eyes Onlyhelps indigenous communities in the process of decolonization.
“Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.” (Premise 2, Endgame, Derrick Jensen)
The coronavirus is a disaster for many. As usual in this morally-backward global empire, the poorest and most vulnerable among us suffer the most. In the midst of this tragedy there are lessons worth learning. This poem from Kim Hill invites us to consider what society and our communities may learn from CoViD-19.
Make sense with our senses, our knowing and feeling
Release the mental blinds.
Burn down the speeding extinction machine
That traps us all inside
While converting vast jungles to money and trash
And selling us on the great ride.
Now return to the forests, the seas, the soils
Who form our breath and bones
And nourish our bodies from the womb of the Earth
And let life carry us home.
Wild beings are speaking: come home to your kind
Yet we slay them to feed our fears
Not feeling or hearing their horror and pain
Or their wisdom of infinite years.
Listen. They are speaking. We are speaking. Hear us.
Your cities don’t serve you, with their concrete and cars
Instead they use you as a tool
They drown out your longings in waves of disease
And madness, repression and school.
If all the world’s beauty can’t be heard
In thousands of years of yearning
Then maybe it takes
The tiniest being,
a microbe, to say
Come home.
This culture is based on a false assumption that humans as superior to and separate from the natural world. This, in turn, is used to justify violence and hatred towards the natural world. Crises like these remind us that, in fact, humans are an integral part of the natural community, not separate from it.
“From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.” (Premise 14, Endgame, Derrick Jensen)
We live inside a surveillance state that is unparalleled. As exposed in various leaks, the NSA, GCHQ, Chinese government, and other national spy agencies record and store every phone call, text message, email, and other signal that is available to them, then make these records easily searchable in databases cross-referenced with names, locations, buying habits, financial records, etc. We know that these agencies tap in directly to the data centers and undersea cables belonging to telecommunications corporations. And we know that these secret spy agencies are unregulated, operating outside the law and largely without oversight.
The combination of modern cloud computing, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, insecure communications technology, facial recognition, and machine learning has propelled the surveillance apparatus of the state to levels that would have been considered science fiction a decade or two ago. And leaked government documents show that these capabilities are used offensively or pro-actively to spread false information, discredit, intimidate, and cause discord for political opponents.
Indian dissident Arundhati Roy warns that “Our digital coordinates [now] ensure that controlling us is easy. Our movements, friendships, relationships, bank accounts, access to money, food, education, healthcare, information (fake, as well as real), even our desires and feelings—all of it is increasingly surveilled and policed by forces we are hardly aware of.”
However, this article aims to explore one small way that ubiquitous surveillance can actually be leveraged to increase the security of resistance movements.
Cell Phone Tracking and “Geofencing”
Each time a cell phone connects to a cell tower, its location is logged. This is true for both old school “dumb” phones and smartphones. Modern smartphones exacerbate this issue via GPS tracking and other signals which are transmitted through mobile internet networks and recorded in apps.
So let’s say there was a crime committed. Something serious; an armed robbery, for instance. In a situation like this, one common tools used by law enforcement is called geofencing. This technique involves taking a subpoena to the major internet and telecommunications companies—Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Apple, Google, etc. This subpoena directs these companies to provide the state with a list of all cell phones recorded within a certain geographic area during a certain time. This geofencing procedure is used to narrow down the list of suspects and is admissible in court.
Geofencing and Obfuscation
I am not advocating that any of you in particular go out and commit crimes. I am advocating for privacy. And the ubiquitous nature of cell phone tracking makes it possible to obfuscate movements relatively easily. A simple example: if someone were about to engage in activity that they wished to keep secret, they could give their cell phone to a trusted accomplice and send them on, for example, a long drive through a rural location—preferably somewhere without cameras. Cell phone location data, which is being constantly recorded by each telecommunications provider, would then provide “false data” on the location of that phone’s owner.
This is a simplified example, but is meant as a starting point to more deeply explore this topic. While the surveillance state is powerful, it is not all-powerful. J.R.R. Tolkien once said that the “one bright spot” of the present world is “the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations.” Our situation today is similar to the “roving eye of Sauron” in Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings.
We are happy to announce that the DGR book is available in German! Our thanks goes to the volunteer translaters, editors and the Austrian publisher who did very good work.
The book can be ordered as print and e-book from the publishers website:
Wir freuen uns mitteilen zu können, dass das DGR-Buch in deutscher Sprache erhältlich ist! Unser Dank gilt den ehrenamtlichen Übersetzern, Redakteuren und dem österreichischen Verlag, die sehr gute Arbeit geleistet haben.
Das Buch kann als Print- und E-Book auf der Website des Verlags bestellt werden.
„In diesem Buch geht es darum, zurückzuschlagen. Die vorherrschende Kultur, genannt Zivilisation, tötet den Planeten. Und es ist längst an der Zeit für diejenigen von uns, denen das Leben auf der Erde etwas bedeutet, die notwendigen Maßnahmen zu ergreifen, um diese Kultur daran zu hindern, alle lebenden Wesen zu zerstören.“
Tiefenökologischer Widerstand („Deep Green Resistance“) beginnt dort, wo die Umweltbewegung aufhört: Denn für die Anhänger dieser Idee ist die industrielle Zivilisation unvereinbar mit dem Leben. Sie glauben nicht daran, dass irgendeine Form von zukünftiger Technologie dem Klimawandel, dem Artensterben, der Luftverschmutzung, der Bodenversiegelung oder irgendeiner anderen ökologischen Katastrophe, die die Menschheit ausgelöst hat, Einhalt gebieten kann.
Auch mit „bewusstem“ Konsumieren oder „nachhaltigem“ Wirtschaften lässt sich der Planet Erde nicht retten, sondern nur mit einer ernsthaften Widerstandsbewegung, die die zerstörerische industrielle Wirtschaft zum Erliegen bringt.
Die AutorInnen Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith und Aric McBay vertreten diesen radikalökologischen Ansatz, der in den USA und an anderen Orten immer mehr AnhängerInnen findet. In ihrem erstmals auf Deutsch übersetzten Manifest erzählen sie davon, wie täglich 200 Spezies von der Erde verschwinden, jährlich eine Fläche im Ausmaß des Aral-Sees verwüstet wird und wie pro Jahr 23 Millionen Menschen an den Folgen von Wasser-, Luft- oder Erdverschmutzung sterben. Sie erzählen von einer Welt, die kurz vor dem Ableben steht – wenn wir uns nicht sofort organisieren und handeln.
Das Buch „Deep Green Resistance“ erläutert bis ins Detail unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten des tiefenökologischen Widerstands, von gewaltlosen Aktionen bis zur Guerilla-Kriegsführung. Und es nennt die Bedingungen, die für den Erfolg dieser Optionen erforderlich sind. Es ist ein Handbuch und Aktionsplan für all jene, die entschlossen sind, für diesen Planeten zu kämpfen und den Kampf zu gewinnen.
Die AutorInnen
Derrick Jensen, geboren 1960, ist ein US-amerikanischer Autor und radikaler Umweltaktivist. Er hat über fünfzehn Bücher verfasst, zu den bekanntesten zählen: „Endgame“, „A Language Older Than Words“ und „What We Leave Behind“ (gemeinsam mit Aric McBay).
Lierre Keith, geboren 1964, lebt als Schriftstellerin, Kleinbäuerin und radikal-feministische Aktivistin in den USA.
Aric McBay ist Autor mehrerer Sachbücher, Aktivist und Kleinbauer und lebt in Ontario, Kanada.
For years, Derrick Jensen has asked his audiences, “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life?” No one ever says yes.
Deep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can’t fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play.
Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the book Endgame Vol. 1 by Derrick Jensen. The seventh premise of this book is: “The longer we wait for civilization to crash – or before we ourselves bring it down – the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.”
By Derrick Jensen / Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization (Seven Stories Press, 2006)
Had somebody snuffed civilization in its multiple cradles, the Middle East would probably still be forested, as would Greece, Italy, and North Africa. Lions would probably still patrol southern Europe. The peoples of the region would quite possibly still live in traditional communal ways, and thus would be capable of feeding themselves in a still-fecund landscape.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we can say the same in Europe. Somehow stop the Greeks and Romans, and the indigenous people of Gaul, Spain, Germany probably still survive. Wolves might howl in England. Great auks might nest in France, providing year-round food for the humans who live there.
Salmon might run in more than token numbers up the Seine. The Rhine would be almost undoubtedly clean. The continent would be forested. Many of the cultures would be matrifocal. Many would be peaceful.
Had someone brought down civilization before 1492, the Arawaks would probably still live peacefully in the Caribbean. Indians would live in ancient forests all along the Eastern seaboard, along with bison, marten, fisher. North, Central, and South America would be ecologically and culturally intact. The people would probably have, as always, plenty to eat.
Had someone brought down civilization before the slave trade took hold, 100 million Africans would not have been sacrificed on that particular altar of economic production. Native cultures might still live untraumatized on their own land all across that continent. There probably would be, as there always was, plenty to eat.
If someone had brought down civilization one hundred and fifty years ago, those who came after probably could still eat passenger pigeons and Eskimo curlews. They could surely eat bison and pronghorn antelope. They could undoubtedly eat salmon, cod, lobster. The people who came after would not have to worry about dioxin, radiation poisoning, organochloride carcinogens, or the extreme weather and ecological flux that characterize global warming. They would not have to worry about escaped genetically engineered plants and animals. There probably would have been, as almost always, plenty to eat.
If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, “Why did they not take it down?” Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying, “If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.”
I know someone whose brother demolishes buildings. The trick, he says, is to position the charges precisely so the building collapses in place, and doesn’t take out the surroundings. It seems to me that this is what we must do: position the charges so that civilization collapses in on itself, and takes out as little life as possible on its way down.
Part of the task of the rest of this exploration is to discover what form those charges will take, and where to put them.
Derrick Jensen (2006): Endgame Vol. 1 The Problem of Civilization, p 92
