The Deep Green Bush School is a participatory, technology-free, evolutionary and revolutionary school for ages 5-18 designed to raise intelligent, healthy, mature, responsible young adults who can think for themselves, meet their needs, live a meaningful life and challenge the current system in order to bring about a healthy world.
They are raising the dreamers, healers, rebels and the revolutionaries this world needs. There are no formal classes except by student request, no homework, no tests, and no grades. This piece comes from the DGBS student-authored newsletter.
It’s great that people are becoming more aware of climate change, but not enough is being done. Take the March 15 student strike, for example. We stood there and begged the government to do something for two hours. Then we walked down the road for five minutes, then on the foot path, and then many people went back on the the road and marched up and down the road for a little while.
This was a good start, but we have to be more disruptive. We need to toughen up and accept that begging the government won’t work! Examples of things to do:
Direct action. Take things into your own hands – don’t beg the government
More disruptive protesting, less symbolic protesting
Depave roads and replant with trees
Dismantle oil infrastructure
Shut down factories
Replace governments with autonomous neighbourhood councils
Blockades
Maori reclaiming stolen land
End the dairy industry and factory farms
One child per woman (to reduce the population)
Stop wasting your time in school!
Direct Action: some examples
Direct action means organising and doing what needs to be done, without waiting for someone else to do it, like corporations, charities and the government. Some examples of direct action needed to deal with Climate Change are:
shutting down factories
taking apart pipelines
removing dams
blocking off ports
removing roads and replanting with trees
organising free, local, natural health care
instead of relying on police, organise your own community watch group and peacekeeping system
replant golf courses with fruit trees
shut down corporations
dismantle cities
shut down nuclear reactors according to proper procedure
communities organising to deal with those who try to stop us
Some examples from history of when direct action was needed:
Personal things you can do, without waiting for the government
Turn off your screens
Avoid drugs, like sugar, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
Make a garden or join a community garden (or help start one)
Learn how to live with less
Learn how to hunt and fish
Go outside. Become more connected to nature – then you will see why it’s screwed up to be constantly destroying it!
Talk to your neighbours
Make a plan together
Spring 2020 Fundraiser
Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We Need Your Help.
Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.
Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.
Afeni Shakur is best known as the mother of the hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. What is less well known is that she was a member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, a dedicated revolutionary who served time in jail for her political activities. Freedom Archives says her work “shaped the political discourse of Black Liberation movements in the 70s.” Visit their article on Afeni to hear excepts of her speaking.
In 1968, 21 members of the Harlem Chapter of the panthers were arrested on alleged bomb conspiracy charges, with bail set at $100,000. The following is part of a letter that Shakur wrote from prison in January 1970, decrying the colonial jail system and the entire U.S. state apparatus that has oppressed people of color since colonization arrived on this continent, and brought the first enslaved Africans shortly thereafter.
Featured image: Afeni Shakur speaks at a Black Panther Party Rally. Image via Freedom Archives.
By Afeni Shakur
We know that you are trying to break us up because we are the truth and because you can’t control us. We know that you always try to destroy what you can’t control. We know that you are afraid of us because we represent a truth of the universe. We are not being tried for any overt act nor for [the] attempt to commit any overt act–we are being tried for bringing within our minds the focusing of the ideas of centuries and trying to bring this knowledge into a workable plan to liberate our people from oppression. We are being tried only because we know you and because we are not afraid of you. We know of your history of lies, deceit and slavery. We know that you now have 80% of the world in slavery. We know how you turn nation against nation, tribe against tribe, brother against brother. We know that you are blood-thirsty, pitiless and inhuman. We have seen you justify the most inhuman crimes–the worst of which was the destruction of men’s hearts and minds. We know of your greed. We know that 10,000 army bases does not make this a “free world” except free for your exploitation and imperialism. How many civilizations have you destroyed?
In this country we know that we are not 2nd class citizens–we know that we are not citizens at all. We know that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments did not liberate us–that they only legalized slavery and expanded the Dred Scott decision to include the Indians, Spanish speaking and poor whites. We know that things have not gotten any better–but only progressively worse. We know that this is the rich man’s courts, laws, and justice. It is his skies, and air–we can only look at it and breathe it if he says so. We know that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery. But you teach the poor workers to be honest. We know that the Almighty dollar which everyone is taught to revere is only guaranteed by slavery and exploitation. We know that we live in a world inhuman in its poverty. We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The U.S. that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. This is a nation of your laws, run by your police, and based on protecting your economic strength. The poor are politically, economically and legally non-existent that is why in jail, 80% of the inmates are non-white and all are poor. Yet even your sociologists and criminologists admit that 80% of these are innocent.
We see that inhuman treatment but are told that we do not. We see men beaten to death in jail but are told that they died of “natural causes” but we are liars. Just as we are always presumed guilty. We heard the judge tell us that “The law didn’t apply to us,” but it isn’t in the record–and of course we lie. We are born criminals and liars. We know we are innocent but we are liars. The people know we are innocent but they don’t count. The prisoners know we are innocent but they too are liars. The guards and even the captains of the guards know we are innocent but they can’t testify. They will lose their jobs. We can prove we are innocent. But we wonder does it really matter. We can prove it in detail and we will, but just in general the charges against us in this indictment are ridiculous and are contradictory to our basic beliefs. We have never been asked as a people whether we wanted to be governed by your God, your laws, your justice, your customs, your speech, dress, and ethics. We do not. We have no respect for them. We have no respect for your laws, taxes, your gratitude, sincerity, honor and dignity–you have no respect for them yourself. You don’t respect us–thus we don’t respect YOU…
Editor’s note: this piece began circulating in the wake of the raids on Wet’suwet’en territory. We have covered these topics and discussed strategic approaches to escalation in recent weeks. This piece contributes to this ongoing discussion. Featured image via Unist’ot’en Camp. #ShutDownCanada #ReconciliationIsDead #RevolutionIsAlive. As with all cross-posts, sharing this does not imply that Aphonika Distro endorses Deep Green Resistance.
By tawinikay (aka Southern Wind Woman)
If only one thing has brought me joy in the last few weeks, it began when the matriarchs at Unist’ot’en burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Out of their mouths, with teeth bared, they echoed back: reconciliation is dead! reconciliation is dead! Their eyes are more keen to the truth so many of our older generation have been too timid to name. The Trudeau era of reconciliation has been a farce from the beginning. It has been more for settler Canadians than natives all along.
“Reconciliation is dead” is a battle cry.
It means the pressure to live up to our side of the bargain is over. The younger generation have dropped the shackles to the ground. Perhaps we are moving into a new time, one where militancy takes the place of negotiation and legal challenge. A time where we start caring less about what the colonizer’s legal and moral judgement and more about our responsibilities.
Criticizing reconciliation is not about shaming those elders and people who participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it’s about attacking a government that used that moment of vulnerability to bolster it’s global image. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I do not blame our older generation for being hopeful about a more peaceful future. Those who lived through the horror of residential schools and the 60s scoop and the road allowance days and the sled dog slaughters could only have wanted a better life for the coming generations. It is the responsibility of those younger generations to stand up and say that what is being offered is not good enough. It is up to us to say that we would rather another hundred years of struggle than to accept the gentle assimilation being offered. It is up to us to give thanks to our elders for their service and then to turn to the frontlines with our feathers and drums and fists.
Because ideas on their own don’t make change. That is a liberal lie. It takes action behind words to make a difference. That action needs to be undertaken together. Neither ideas or practice are created by individuals. Everything written here is the result of discussion and interaction with other land defenders, lovers, anarchists, mothers, children, and resistors. We need to be accountable to the things we say while also recognizing that knowledge is created by communities. It has to always be seen that way in order to subvert hierarchy, to never allow one person to be elevated over any other.
So what is written here is all of yours. Take it and do with it as you please.
Argue it. Defend it. Decry it. Make it your own.
Forget the rules.
Canada is a colonial state. It exists to govern territory and manage the resources of that territory. It is nothing less and nothing more. It has done an excellent job convincing its citizens that it stands for something, something good. This is the way it maintains its legitimacy. The national myth of politeness and civility wins the support of its constituents. This has been carefully constructed over time and it can be deconstructed. In fact, the rules of Canada change all the time. I would write more about this but the truth is I could not do a better job than something I recently came across online. @Pow_pow_pow_power recently wrote the following:
Settler governments have been making up the rules as they go from the beginning of their invasions. While each generation of us struggles to educate ourselves to the rulebook, they disregard it and do what they want when they want. This should not be a surprise. It has always been this way because they prioritize themselves about all – above other people, above animal relatives, above the balance of Nature, and certainly above “what is right”. Laws have always been passed to legitimize their whims and interests as the intentions of seemingly rational rulers, and to keep us in compliance with their needs.
We currently live in a time where our Imperialist structures have been deeply concerned with appearing ordered and civilized to fellow regimes of power to cultivate a sense of superiority. This is why the violence we have become accustomed to is no longer mass slaughters and public torture and exiles but night raids and disappearances, criminalizations and being locked into systems of neglect. It has become more reliant on structural violence & erasure than direct violence, and therefore more insidious. Insidiousness is more tidily effective and harder to pinpoint as a source of injustice.
This is why when we approach them, lawful and peaceful and rational and fair minded and smooth toned, as gracious and calm as can be, we are easily dismissed with polite white smiles of “best intentions” “deepest regrets” and “we’re doing our best”, in fact “we’re doing better than most”. And when we insist, more firmly, more impassioned, more justified, the response from Settler Governments is as clear as we see now: “Why can’t you people just obey?”
Canadians want to believe that colonial violence is a thing of the past, so the government hides it for them. That is why the RCMP doesn’t allow journalists to film them as they sick dogs on women defending their land. That is why they will get away with it.
The time has come to stop looking for justice in settler law.
For Indigenous people in Canada, it is impossible to avoid the violence inflicted on us by the state. When we raise our fist and strike back, it is always an act of self-defense. Always. Committing to non-violence or pacifism in the face of a violent enemy is a dangerous thing to do. Yet, attempting to avoid using violence until absolutely necessary is a noble principle. One which carries the most hope for a new future. But what does violence mean to the settler state?
They don’t consider it violent to storm into a territory with guns drawn and remove its rightful occupants. They don’t consider it violent to level mountaintops, or clearcut forests, or to suck oil out of the ground only to burn it into the air. They don’t consider it violent to keep chickens and pigs and cows in tiny crates, never allowing them to see sunlight, using them like food machines.
But smash a window of a government office..
Well, that goes too far.
It is time we see their laws for what they are: imaginary and hypocritical. Settler laws exist to protect settlers. We are not settlers. We are Michif. We are Anishinaabek. We are Onkwehón:we. We are Nêhiyawak. We are Omàmiwininì. We are Inuit. We are Wet’suwet’en. So why are we still appealing to their laws for our legitimacy?
Time after time, communities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal challenges to land rights. Chippewa of the Thames First Nation used money won in a land claim to launch a legal challenge against Canada to say they were never properly consulted, nor did they consent to, the Line 9 pipeline through their territory. The Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that Indigenous peoples do not have the right to say no to industrial projects in their territories. Line 9 is still operational. The Wet’suwet’en won probably the most significant legal challenge in Canadian history. The Delgamuukw verdict saw the courts acknowledge that the We’suwet’en territory is unceded, that they hold title and legal jurisdiction, and yet look at how Canada honours that. Legal victories are not the way we win our land and dignity. Canada cares as little about Canadian law as they do Indigenous law.
The same goes for the United Nations and their precious UNDRIP. We have seen that the state will adopt United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) principles and interpret them to suit their needs. That document says that governments and companies need free, prior, and informed consent to engage in projects in their territories. BC adopted it and, yet, says that it does not mean they have to gain consent from the Wet’suwet’en. Consent will never actually mean the right to say no. And the UN has no way to enforce it.
The time has passed for legal challenge in their courts that does nothing but drain our resources and slow us down. I honour those relatives and ancestors who attempted the peaceful resolution, who trusted in the good intentions of other humans. But the settlers have proven that the peaceful options they offered us are lies. Fool us once, shame on you.
This is not only about Unist’ot’en anymore.
This is about all of us. Any day now the RCMP could attempt to move in and evict the rail blockade at Tyendinaga. I stand in solidarity with them as much as I do with the Wet’suwet’en. This moment is not just about getting the government and their militarized goons to back down at Unist’ot’en and Gitdum’ten, it’s about getting them to loosen their grip around all of our necks. This moment is about proclaiming reconciliation dead and taking back our power.
This is not to say that we should forget about Unist’ot’en and abandon them when they need us most. It is a proposal to widen our scope so that we don’t lose our forward momentum if what happens out west doesn’t meet our wildest dreams. This is about crafting a stronger narrative.
This means that we should think before claiming that the Wet’suwet’en have the right to their land because it is unceded. Do we not all have a right to the land stolen from our ancestors? For land to be unceded it means that it has never been sold, surrendered, or lost through conquest. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 urged Canada and the dominion to only take land through the making of treaty. And so agents of Canada set out to do so. They continued to make treaties across the continent, sometimes lying about the content of the treaties to ancestors who didn’t speak english, sometimes finding whoever the hell would sign the treaty without much concern for if that person was acting with the support of the community. After the signing of the last treaty, Canada made it illegal for Indians to hire lawyers to challenge land claims. And then they stole the rest of what they wanted. They continued to flood the land with settlers until native peoples had only 0.2% of the land they once protected and lived on.
I don’t care about appealing to the legitimacy of unceded territory. All land is stolen land. Canada has no jurisdiction on any of it because they have broken any agreements they ever made in the process of taking it.
The same critique rings true for holding up hereditary governance as the only true leadership of Indigenous peoples. I am not advocating for band council. But it is important to understand that many of our relations have lost the hereditary systems that once helped them live good lives. We are going to have to rekindle our governance. Some we can pull from the past, some we will have to make anew. All freely chosen forms of Indigenous governance are legitimate. Our legitimacy does not flow from the mouths of our leaders, but from our connection to the land and water and our commitment to our responsibilities to all life today and generations to come.
This is a good thing if we let it be. It is foolish to think we would not have changed and grown in 300 years. Our systems would look different today no matter what. This is an opportunity to combine new and beautiful ideas with the time-honoured traditions and ceremonies of our ancestors, spiritual communities where hierarchy is subverted and gender is liberated!
It is time to shut everything the fuck down.
Canada has always been afraid of us standing in our power. Reconciliation was a distraction, a way for them to dangle a carrot infront of us and trick us into behaving. Now is the time to show them how clear our vision is. Being determined and sure is not the same as being unafraid. There are many dangerous days ahead of us. It is dangerous to say, “I will not obey.”
The first thing we need to do is stop stabbing each other in the back. Take a seat on band council if you want, but stop letting it go to your head. Don’t ever see yourself as more than a servant, a cash distributor, a rule enforcer. Being elected is not the same as earning a place of respect in your community. It does not make you an elder. Let me take this time to say a giant “fuck you” to the Métis nations who sign pipeline agreements because they are so excited the government considered them Indigenous. The Métis have no land rights in Ontario and yet they continue to sign agreements as if they do, throwing the Indigenous nations with actual territory under the train. Let me extend that “fuck you” to the Indigenous nations who signed pipeline agreements and stand by in silence as their relations are attacked for protecting the water. Or even worse when they do interviews with pro-oil lobby groups and conservative media decrying the land defenders in their midst. Can’t they see the way Canadians eat up their words, drooling over the division amongst us, using it to devalue our way of life? I do not condone attacking our relatives who have lost the red path, but we need to find a way to bring them back home. Not everybody has to take up a frontline in their community, but at the bare minimum they should refuse to cooperate with the colonial government and their corporate minions.
The second thing we need to do is act. But we do not have to limit ourselves to actions that demand the withdrawal of forces from Wet’suwet’en territory. The federal government is the one calling the shots, not just at Unist’ot’en but at every point of native oppression across all the territories. Any attack on the state of Canada is in solidarity. Any assertion of native sovereignty is in solidarity.
It’s time to start that occupation you’ve been dreaming up.
Is there a piece of land that has been annexed from your territory? Take it back. Is there a new pipeline being slated through your backyard? Blockade the path. Are their cottagers desecrating the lake near your community? Serve them an eviction notice and set up camp. Sabotage the fish farms killing the salmon. Tear down the dam interrupting the river. Play with fire.
When we put all of our hopes and dreams into one struggle in one spot, we set ourselves up for heartbreak and burnout. Let’s fight for the Wet’suwet’en people, yes! But let’s honour their courage and their actions by letting them inspire us to do the same. Let’s fight for them by fighting for the manoomin and the wetlands and the grizzlies.
Choose your accomplices wisely. Liberals who read land acknowledgments often have too much invested in this system to actually see it change. Communists envision a system without a capitalist Canada, but they still want a communist state. One that will inevitably need to control land and exploit it. Find common heart with those who want to see the state destroyed, to have autonomous communities take its place, and to restore balance between humans and all our relations. Choose those who listen more than they talk, but not those who will do whatever you say and not think for themselves. They are motivated by guilt. Find those who have a fire burning in them for a more wild and just world. Most of them will be anarchists, but not all, and not all anarchists will come with a good mind.
Creating a battlefield with multiple fronts will divide their energies. The rail blockades are working! If the night time rail sabotage and the copper wire and the blockades keep coming, it will shut down all rail traffic across this awful economy. More is better. But do it not just for the Wet’suwet’en, do it for the rivers and streams that weave themselves under the rails. Do it for the ancestors who saw the encroaching railroad as their coming demise.
And as a critique out of Montreal wrote: don’t settle for symbolic and intentional arrest.
When they come to enforce an injunction, move to another part of the rail.
When they come with a second injunction, block the biggest highway nearby.
When they come with a third injunction, move to the nearest port.
Stay free and fierce. The folks at Unist’ot’en and Gitdum’ten didn’t have the option to, but you do. Anticipate their next move and stay ahead of them.
This is a moment among many moments. Our ancestors have been clever, sometimes biding their time quietly, sometimes striking, always secretly passing on our ceremonies and stories. I honour them as I honour you now. We are still here because of them and our children and our children’s children will still be here because of us. Never forget who we are. Fight in ceremony.
I suppose this is a proposal for adopting a strategy of indigenous anarchism here on Turtle Island. A rejection of tactics that demand things from powerful people and a return to building for ourselves a multitude of local, diverse solutions. This is a rejection of Idle No More style organizing, let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past (for a detailed critique of INM, see https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/idle-no-more-speak-for-yourself/ and while you’re there read everything else). It is a plea for us to choose our own leaders and create governance that refuses hierarchy. An ask for us to reject reconciliation and move towards a militant reclamation. The idea of indigenous anarchism is still in its infancy. Write me about it.
This is one of our moments. Let’s make it not about demanding for them to leave Unist’ot’en alone, but about demanding that they leave the land alone. Don’t make it about stopping CGL from making money, make it about denouncing the idea of money. This is about colonization everywhere. This is about all of us.
To the settlers inevitably reading this zine.
What is written here is meant for you too. Not in the “rise up and take back your land” kind of way. Been there, done that.
But I have been reading the messaging on the reportbacks and in the media and I see you falling into all sorts of tired traps. You are not just cogs in the solidarity machine, you too can take up struggles in the cities you live. Remember the Two Row: you can fight parallel battles towards the same goals.
I have heard many an elder say that we will not win this fight on our own, and that is most certainly true. Thank you for the ways you have attacked the economy and the state. Thank you for answering the call. Now take this and run with it.
You too should look for ways to defend the land and water in the places you live. You too should look for ways to undermine and weaken the power of the government over these lands. Don’t let yourself be disheartened if the RCMP don’t leave Unist’ot’en. That is only one fight of many. That is only the beginning. Don’t fall into the traps of appealing to Canadian or international law.
See yourself for what you are, for who your community is. Act in ways that bring about a world where reconciliation is possible, a world in which your people give back land and dismantle the centralized state of Canada. Don’t romanticize the native peoples you work with. Don’t feel that you can’t ever question their judgment or choose to work with some over others. Find those that have kept the fire alive in their hearts, those who would rather keep fighting than accept the reconciliation carrot. Don’t ever act from guilt and shame.
And don’t let yourself believe that you can transcend your settlerism by doing solidarity work. Understand that you can, and should, find your own ways to connect to this land. From your own tradition, inherited or created.
Long before the Civil War, black abolitionists shared the consensus that violence would be necessary to end slavery. Unlike their white peers, their arguments were about when and how to use political violence, not if.
Reviewing “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence,” by Kellie Carter Jackson. University of Pennsylvania Press. Featured image: Mabel and Robert Williams, advocates and practitioners of armed self-defense, a longtime tradition in the Black community, during the civil rights movement.
Although Thomas Jefferson opined to James Madison in 1787 “that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” he did not have in mind a rebellion by his own forced laborers at Monticello. In fact, when the Second Amendment was drafted two years later, it was intentionally Janus-faced: it aimed to preserve the fruit of U.S. rebellion by arming citizens against an English invasion, even as it also empowered local militias to squash Native and slave rebellions.
The planter class understood that enslavement required complete dominance, including a monopoly on violence. South Carolina’s 1739 Stono Rebellion still loomed large in their memories: enslaved Kongolese warriors had raided guns and ammunition from a local store and killed more than two dozen whites before being defeated. And in 1791, the ink barely dry on the Constitution, Haiti erupted like Mount Vesuvius and challenged the dominion of slavocracy throughout the Americas. The brutally shrewd U.S. leaders realized that slave rebellions were always possible and that firearms had to be kept out of the hands of the enslaved.
Blacks understood this too: slavery was done through violence and would only be ended through violence. Enslaved men and women on the German Coast of Louisiana (today the East Bank of greater New Orleans), for example, inspired by The Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man, sought to emancipate themselves in 1811 by marching toward New Orleans with agricultural tools repurposed as military weapons. Though unsuccessful, they knew that the only certain way to destroy the institution of slavery was to destroy the people who owned their bodies. In a different sort of way, it is a view that was also held by black revolutionaries, in the United States and abroad, in the twentieth century.
Kellie Carter Jackson’s brilliant new Force and Freedom constructs a bridge between these two moments—between the slave rebellions of the early Republic and the armed self-defense and revolutionary violence of twentieth-century black radicals—by filling in the less familiar history of how nineteenth-century abolitionists articulated their support for black armed self-defense and political violence. Her book stands well alongside other recent histories, such as Richard Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (2017); Martha Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018); and, Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). Like these, Carter Jackson places African Americans centrally as agentive in shaping the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, her book serves as a kind of prequel to histories of armed resistance during the civil rights era, including Charles Cobb, Jr.’s This Nonviolence Stuff Will Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights MovementPossible (2014), Lance Hill’s The Deacons of the Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (1964), and Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (2013). These works vividly describe how armed self-defense was used in discrete locales in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to advance democratic freedoms, in a militaristic forerunning of Oakland’s Black Panther Party.
What sets Carter Jackson’s book apart as both unique and challenging is her focus on how nineteenth-century black women and men specifically used and thought about political violence as a tool in defense of themselves. In this way, Carter Jackson shows how they—with varying degrees of fretfulness—muddled distinctions between small acts of private armed self-defense and more expressly political forms of violence. Her book therefore helps us to also better understand historical continuities between black perspectives on revolutionary violence in the early Republic and the era of civil rights.
Long before the National Rifle Association (NRA) came in to being, Americans of African descent understood the need for arms to protect themselves. They lived in a slaveholding society where escapees and free people were daily jeopardized by slavery’s federal statutory enforcements. The original Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Art. IV, § 2) stated:
No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.
This clause in practice deprived alleged runaways of anything like due process. It placed bounties on the heads of fugitives and was frequently a justification for the kidnapping of the freeborn and manumitted. Thus, while the Constitution ostensibly protected individual liberties, it also codified the coercive force necessary to keep enslavement intact. This is why abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison vehemently charged that the Constitution was “the source and parent of all the other atrocities—‘a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.’”
It would of course eventually take violence to terminate this “covenant with death”—indeed, the deaths of over half a million Americans. All subsequent generations have sought to better understand the precise course that led to the Civil War, and for much of that time, the perspectives of whites on both sides, including white abolitionists such as Garrison, have dominated historical inquiry. Until quite recently, very little had been written about how black communities, enslaved, manumitted, and freeborn, thought about the politics of violence. Just what did autonomy and political freedoms mean to them? How precious was it to protect? How did their communities actively defy the laws that protected slavery?
Force and Freedom dives into the debates among disparate communities of free and enslaved people about when and how to use political violence. Contrary to Kanye West’s bizarre notion that slavery was “a choice,” blacks frequently fought their enslavement by whatever means available to them, including arms, and theorized openly about the salutary nature of political violence. Carter Jackson begins with freeborn abolitionist David Walker’s 1829 publication of his Appeal. The Appeal was a riotous Molotov cocktail. It radically called for slavery’s destruction. Walker’s flammable prose set planters on edge:
The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of the earth. They shall have enough of making slaves of, and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which they have.
Two year after Walker published his clarion call for violent self-manumission, a version of it was attempted by the men and women who organized alongside Nat Turner in South Hampton County, Virginia. Turner’s band attempted to annihilate slaveowners and with them enslavement itself. Turner and Walker were both inspired by Haiti’s success with the violent and complete eradication of enslavement.
Following in the footsteps of Eugene Genovese’s influential Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Carter Jackson offers further evidence that there was never such a thing as a negotiated acquiescence among U.S. slaves to the condition of their enslavement. But whereas Genovese argued that the numerical size of the enslaved population in the United States limited mass rebellions, Carter Jackson demonstrates that the U.S. freeborn population continuously fostered armed rebellion and that political violence was always a widespread topic of conversation among both enslaved and free blacks. And she connects armed actions, debates, and public conversations together to demonstrate a growing collective radicalism among black abolitionists.
Between 1830 and the start of the Civil War, freeborn blacks and former slaves collectively asserted their political freedoms in increasingly direct and forceful ways. By then, black abolitionist had arrived at a loose consensus that slavery’s systemic violence would require systemic retaliatory violence if it were to be destroyed. In other words, Carter Jackson shows that when and how to use political violence—rather than if—was the persistent topic of debate, and the answer was always a moving target, with varied opinions among abolitionists. Abolitionists of all stripes faced dangers, but black abolitionists faced more dangers. So they debated questions such as: What were the relative political advantages of various ways of deploying violence? When was the time to skirt an escapee across the Canadian border, when to raid a jail to rescue a fugitive, and when to have a shootout with slavecatchers?
A missing component in Force and Freedom is the religious context for abolitionists’ discussion of both moral suasion and armed violence. Many of the black abolitionists discussed by Carter Jackson based their ideas upon their black Protestantism. We must take seriously, for example, Frederick Douglass’s foray into becoming Methodist clergy, as well as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s and Harriet Tubman’s spiritual motivations for freedom. Though she writes of Henry Highland Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion” speech at the 1843 Negro Convention, Carter Jackson does not mention his “unflinching Calvinist ethics” that framed his understanding of human liberty. My point, borrowing from an unpublished paper by historian James Bratt on Garnet’s ethic of self-defense, is that there were many ways that political violence was understood by abolitionists, and religion influenced them all. My criticism here is aimed less at Carter Jackson than at U.S. cultural studies in general, which tends to insufficiently explore how religion illuminates African American history. In this case, religion motivated some people to armed insurrection—included Nat Turner—even as it informed broader conversations about whether political violence was justifiable, and, if so, when. Radical white abolitionist John Brown’s last words during his 1859 sentencing for trying to capture the federal Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, testifies to the religiosity that prevailed:
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!
Force and Freedom would have also been enriched by a sustained engagement with Cedric J. Robinson’s argument, in Black Movementsin America (1997), that freedom meant slightly different things among those who were enslaved and those who had been born free. For Robinson, this meant that views about the aims of force could be sorted into class tiers: a privileged one—mainly what is covered in Carter Jackson’s history—which aimed for a use of violence that would perfect rather than abolish the existing order; and one held among the masses, who saw little worth preserving and hoped for the violence of a cleansing flood. Whether or not Robinson was absolutely right in his assessment is a matter of debate, but he was correct that the sometimes-uneasy dialogue between the freeborn and the enslaved shaped the terrain upon which the black politics of the Civil War and post-Emancipation eras have played out.
Nonetheless, Carter Jackson’s rich history stands as evidence that, whatever differences of opinion existed between freeborn and enslaved blacks, their views were more similar to each other’s than they were to those of even many abolitionist whites. John Brown notwithstanding, as W. E. B. DuBois noted in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), most whites—including abolitionists—were terrified of the idea of armed African Americans:
Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. . . . But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.
And that has largely remained the case, as Robert F. Williams noted in 1962 in Negroes with Guns:
When people say that they are opposed to Negroes ‘resorting to violence’ what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists.
This is perhaps most dramatically embodied by the NRA’s persistent silence on the issue of black gun ownership. Williams directly challenged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Congress on Racial Equality’s reliance on nonviolent protest as, in effect, a form of false consciousness. And set within this genealogy, it becomes clear that Malcolm X’s speeches on armed self-defense were not an aberration, but in keeping with a long tradition.
In James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird, Onion, the chief protagonist, offers this observation of John Brown:
He knowed what he wanted to do. But as to the exactness of it—and I knowed many has studied it and declared this and that and the other on the subject—Old John Brown didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do from sunup to sundown on the slavery question.
I draw this quote in to return to the point that there is a fundamental difference between acts of armed self-defense and revolutionary violence to overthrow a state. Here a distinction must be made—and although black radical abolitionists were not always fully transparent about the distinction in their public writing and speaking, they were certainly attentive to it in private. John Brown’s plan to capture the arsenal at Harpers Ferry would have come nowhere close to hobbling the U.S. government; he would have needed to control the mass manufacturing of weapons. This is why black abolitionists he attempted to recruit, including Frederick Douglass, were so cautious about his plan. They feared, with varying degrees of consternation, that attacking the state might bring even more hell into their lives. Small acts of armed resistance in the cause of freedom were one thing, full-scale war was another.
Brown’s raid, however, anticipated—and likely sped—the nation’s unraveling over enslavement. The dam, which black abolitionists had steadily tried to crack, finally broke. And when it burst, 600,000 people lay dead. Carter Jackson’s book does not consider this question of scale and cost, but it is one that we as democratic denizens must always keep in mind as we critically think through the levels of armed resistance we are willing to engage in freedom’s name.
Randal Maurice Jelks is an awarding winning Professor of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His most recent book is Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. This piece has been republished here with permission.
Excerpted from Endgame by Derrick Jensen / Featured image: River Grass by Max Wilbert
If you’ve gotten this far in this book—or if you’re simply anything other than entirely insensate—we probably agree that civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about. If you don’t agree with this, we probably have nothing to say to each other (How ‘bout them Cubbies!). We probably also agree that this crash will be messy. We agree further that since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down (whether or not we help it crash) the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and nonhumans.
If you agree with all this, and if you don’t want to dirty your spirituality and conscience with the physical work of helping to bring down civilization, and if your primary concern really is for the well-being of those (humans) who will be alive during and immediately after the crash (as opposed to simply raising this issue because you’re too scared to talk about the crash or to allow anyone else to do so either), then, given, and I repeat this point to emphasize it, that civilization is going to come down anyway, you need to start preparing people for the crash. Instead of attacking me for stating the obvious, go rip up asphalt in vacant parking lots to convert them to neighborhood gardens, go teach people how to identify local edible plants, even in the city (especially in the city) so these people won’t starve when the proverbial shit hits the fan and they can no longer head off to Albertson’s for groceries. Set up committees to eliminate or if appropriate channel the (additional) violence that might break out.
We need it all. We need people to take out dams, and we need people to knock out electrical infrastructures. We need people to protest and to chain themselves to trees. We also need people working to ensure that as many people as possible are equipped to deal with the fall-out when the collapse comes. We need people working to teach others what wild plants to eat, what plants are natural antibiotics. We need people teaching others how to purify water, how to build shelters. All of this can look like supporting traditional, local knowledge, it can look like starting roof-top gardens, it can look like planting local varieties of medicinal herbs, and it can look like teaching people how to sing.
The truth is that although I do not believe that designing groovy eco-villages will help bring down civilization, when the crash comes, I’m sure to be first in line knocking on their doors asking for food.
People taking out dams do not have a responsibility to ensure that people in homes previously powered by hydro know how to cook over a fire. They do however have a responsibility to support the people doing that work.
Similarly, those people growing medicinal plants (in preparation for the end of civilization) do not have a responsibility to take out dams. They do however have a responsibility at the very least to not condemn those people who have chosen that work. In fact they have a responsibility to support them. They especially have a responsibility to not report them to the cops.
It’s the same old story: the good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done. Do what you love. Do what you can. Do what best serves your landbase. We need it all.
This doesn’t mean that everyone taking out dams and everyone working to cultivate medicinal plants are working toward the same goals. It does mean that if they are, each should see the importance of the other’s work.
Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.
By contrast, the work of renewal must be local. To be truly effective (and to avoid reproducing the industrial infrastructure) acts of survival and livelihood need to grow from particular landbases where they will thrive. People need to enter into conversation with each piece of earth and all its (human and nonhuman) inhabitants. This doesn’t mean of course that we can’t share ideas, or that one water purification technique won’t be useful in many different locations. It does mean that people in those places need to decide for themselves what will work. Most important of all, the water in each place needs to be asked and allowed to decide for itself.
I’ve been thinking a lot again about the cell phone tower behind Safeway, and I see now how these different approaches manifest in this one small place. The cell phone tower needs to come down. It is contiguous on two sides with abandoned parking lots. Those lots need to come up. Gardens can bloom in their place. We can even do our work side by side.
