Fire Walk With Me: a report back from the indigenous anarchist convergence

from phoenix anarchy

I answered a call to gather around a fire with Black, Indigenous, People of Color in Kinłání at Táala Hooghan Infoshop. Somewhere at the gathering, I expected to be in the presence of indigenous anarchism. I did not know if indigenous anarchism was the fire we would gather around, if it was the individuals converging, or if it was an empty space where individuals were to ignite the flames. It’s safe to say, my expectations were met. I witnessed an indigenous anarchism but it was unfamiliar to me, a Diné anarchist.

Truthfully, it’s inaccurate to say that the indigenous anarchism I saw was unfamiliar because that implies it possessed unidentifiable attributes. I, very much, recognized the features of the fire and I recognized the methods to build that fire. In this case, the features were global indigenous justice and the methods were university jargon of the humanities discipline. The social movement that will be the fires of this indigenous anarchism require more and more indigenous resistance as the fuel to grow and grow the burning. What happens when we run out of fuel? Who do we reach out to for a fresh supply? I ask myself those questions knowing full well they will be answered quickly, meaning uncritically, by any individual enthusiastic with my premonition. Admittedly, the fire I had gathered around was not so much unfamiliar as it was unappealing.

This was unappealing because I also answered the call as an indigenous anarchist [“sickened by fascinations with dead white-men’s thoughts (and their academies and their laws), reformist & reactionary “decolonial activisms”, and the uninspired merry-go-round of leftist politics as a whole”]. However, I found that many of the people in attendance were academics, activists, de-colonizers, and leftists that were in very good health despite their proximity to these toxic superstructures. Academics vigorously drawing from their learning curated by western liberal intellectualism while being hungry for another direction with an agreeable pan-indigenous guide. Activists energetically sharing their praxis acquired from footage of Standing Rock while local indigenous struggles remained unknown. De-colonizers robustly calling out problematic land acknowledgements for not being inclusionary while missing the value of being specific to the land they’re on. Then finally, leftists focusing on their vision of centralized solidarity as one voice united to change the world while the incoherence from every voice making individual demands to exhaust authority was never considered.

Yes, the indigenous anarchism I saw was kind of unfamiliar and mostly unappealing but I would not say the gathering was unsuccessful. I believe people will grow this indigenous anarchism. An ideology succinct enough for Instagram stories, 280 character limit tweets, and vibrant screen printed art, excuse me, memes. A movement global enough to essentialize a racial, humanist, and material struggle of indigeneity so others will comfortably speak for any absent voice. A resistance so monolithic the powers that be could easily identify then repress all indigenous anarchists.

For me, success would be more disagreements that are challenging and hopefully with humor. I’d rather agree or disagree with a new suggestion rather than dispute laudatory presumptions grounded in radical liberalism that has been indigenized, north american style, only for flair.

I understand an indigenous person can have a complicated personal relationship with their indigeneity and their role within the violent dominance of capitalist settler-colonialism. Additionally, I understand an individual’s linear journey to Anarchism began somewhere and maybe they still sympathetically carry ideological mementos from their past. Facetiousness aside, I am glad people may have found potential from this gathering to develop their indigenous anarchist ideas.

The potential I have discovered at the convergence is the particulars of Diné anarchy. Fires made from crystal and fires made from turquoise. Fires bright enough to find the light of other Diné anarchists in this dark world I find myself in. A world sickened from the industrialization of civilized humans whose culture of control and destruction forces all living things to adopt, adapt, or die. I suggest that Diné anarchy offers the addition of a choice to attack. An assault on our enemy that weakens their grip on, not only our glittering world, but the worlds of others. An opportunity for the anarchy of Ndee, of O’odham, and so on, to exact revenge on their colonizers. Until all that’s left for Diné anarchists is to dissuade the endorsements of the next idol expecting our obedience.

There are 42 Comments

thank you very much for the report back, i was hoping for one

I read "An ideology succinct enough for Instagram stories, 280 character limit tweets, and vibrant screen printed art, excuse me, memes." and thought of this account:

https://twitter.com/anarchistsocal

I believe most native anarchists knew what to expect, especially those of us that walk the individualist/egoist path

Its impossible for a native anarchist to be an individualist/egoist. Even the term "native anarchist" is a tad oxymoronic, considering that "native " implies a tribal loyalty and cultural encumberance, which likewise excludes the individualist's freedom.
And these "nihilist" beserkerists pushing for their crypto-nationalist sovereignty, I doubt if they could even comprehend Kierkegaard's concept of "levelling".

It’s possible to know where you come from and be an individualist/egoist?

"Where you come from,,,," ? One emerges from a cultural-less womb, the infantile conscious has not formed. Identity, culture and ideology are all false reifications of structured moral containment. I would burn my copy of The Ego and Its Own if believers in ideological and cultural facades thought themselves to be true individualist/egoists!

All this stuff if just sneaky nationalistesque essentialism by another name with the usual structural maoist infection. Capitalist Settler-Colonialism is a branching problem of capital and state which is itself a branch from deeper habituated reifications and compulsions. That's what you take on.

Indigenous is simply psycho-geographic endogeneity, not a bad thing to be or become in itself but not some tonic against the problems that agents of anarchy face against history civilization and leviathan. Frontier orientation can be useful as well so long as there is not state identity and apparatus backing it up. Indigenous can be defined by a statist leviathanic character(Coast Salish, Maya, Aztec ect just to name a few).

"ethnogenesis: the emergence of a subculture or counterculture which, if able to continue on its line of flight (or détournement ), would become a different culture entirely (New Travellers and, historically, Irish Travellers are good examples). The emergence of new cultures through ethnogenesis is well-documented, and often stems from flight from state power (Scott), a process which begins with a choice to differ from the majority of an existing group. In other words, forming a counterculture is the first step in becoming non-white. Ethnogenesis is a problem for essentialists because it entails fluidity in the very formation of the structural basis; it frustrates border-policing. IPs denounce both dropping-out and cultural hybridity, dismissing the latter as cultural appropriation." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity...)

" That impossible task set I share with you is the closest thing I would put forward as a recommended practice. A world-weary rebuilding of the very reasons we should do things together at all. A practice I am myself incapable of participating in because I have been broken by the same things as you. My mind is no longer limber enough to learn a new language. My heart is too scarred to do something so honest with a group of new people and too experienced to do it with the monsters I surround myself with (for other reasons). To go deep enough to subvert the conditioning and violence of this world is just impossible enough that I can imagine the kind of person who would attempt it but I have no idea what will result, even in a best case scenario.

I dream of free actors who live without fear. I imagine words that speak beyond comprehension. I imagine the same goals that I have expressed lived by people who care for one another, who laugh at the empty sociability of our era, who are the anarchy unleashed unto the world. I imagine connections to the world that I am not capable of. This impossible set of conditions and potentials is why a nihilist animism appeals to me at all. It names capabilities I don’t have in a world I can’t imagine living in. That’s all one can ask of oneself." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aragorn-nihilist-animism)

Animism has atleast a non-anthropocentric cosmology and if one must need a creationist myth (I cannot fathom this condition of inadequacy myself) it is the less malignant one of many choices. Çombining animism with nihilism doesn't make sense, but nihilism has become the fashionable scene lately, it often just replaces a negation of some remote existing institution, and not the annihilation of the totality and religions like animism which is its actual intention. Carry on if you must.

Yup, and may I compliment you on nailing the expression "psycho-geographic endogeniety"! I have been on the verge of erasing the word "indigenous" from my lexicon.
Sure, I can positively appropriate some pragmatic native mores and fashions and feel safe that a relapse into leviathan will not occur, and as a stepping stone for novices they may acquire from the frontier some survivalist skills which can serve them well. I myself honed my knowledge of reciprosity and barter economics from natives.

Don't feed the troll, ok?

LeWay attempts yet again to sound cultured and astute, but he's just fireworks. He exposed himself already by farting out of his fake intellect, saying with conviction how Cocteau invented Absurdism.

The regular troll is just a zombie protocol by now.

No I said Cocteau and Camus crossed paths at the Theatre of the Absurd. Camus introduced the philosophy of Absurdism.
Also, as a zenist, I don't acknowledge your category called "intellect", and I can't prevent ppl reacting to my comments favourably.
I prefer Le Wut to Le Wank, because the latter is a philistine!!

> He exposed himself already by farting out of his fake intellect, saying with conviction how Cocteau invented Absurdism.

Literally could not care less about how much or how little you or LeWay know about Cocteau or Absurdism. Seriously are we fucking undergraduates trying to win the big brain of the year award? gtfo

I don't care either, but Le Wank comes up with entertaining phrases pulled out of the whatever shit is going on inside his malevolent twisted mind's head, It makes me chuckle, so I feign indignation to deliberately feed his psychopathology.

But you're a sheep in disguise, a herd beast who runs to the top of a hill and exclaims,
"Look at me, I'm an individualist"
And then runs back to the herd, tribal council, whatever.

you have no idea what you are talking about... the idea of "native anarchy" would then also eliminate the "tribal council"

I get that alot. There was also" whatever," whether that be the complexity of indigenous identity, the politics of "the native" land occupation. If the tribal council is eliminated, then native and indigenous identity and culture is also ended.
You fail to understand the psychology of identity! The "indigenous anarchist" is no different to the "Viking Beserker", the "Freemasons" , or Nationalist Socialist Party.

WE WILL CRUSH YOU LEWAY YOU LOWLIFE SCUM, YOU ARE A SOLITARY STIRNERITE, ALL ALONE AND NO FRIENDS, AND WE ARE UNITED IN A BESERKER UNION OF MUTUAL CRUSHING POWER, AND WITH OUR NATIVE NIHILIST BROTHERS, WE WILL FEED YOU TO THE VULTURE GODS!!!!

You've actually unwittingly exposed the real ugly nature of tribal collectivism's inherent mob sentiment, no matter what disguise it lurks under, Nazi pogroms, Viking pillage, leftist revolution, they all share the same base psychology of the herded beast ŕeacting blindly and viciously, from lack of any individual autonomous actions from its own volition, but rather cowering, mute and enslaved, until some mass populist xenophobic hysteria stirs its dull mind, and combining like a stampeding herd of manbeasts, destroys and annihilates everything which shines or stands out as different or unique

"If the tribal council is eliminated"

again you are proving you have no idea on what you are talking about, are you saying We didn't exist before Tribal governments?

NATIVE IS NOT AN IDENTITY

Before tribal councils or parliaments, for want of a better word, natives (but not natives, because the binary of colonial had not reached those shores then)may have existed as clans which had no central system of management or association of chiefs. Maybe some clans met at watering points or when food was abundant in a certain region, and certain laws and grievances weŕe discussed, and some offenders, rapists or murderers were identified, and some retribution resulted in vendetta culture to evolve, with elders sitting as judges etc etc, there are myriad variations around this same theme. This is true life, humans are asses, in every culture, because when a common language formed, culture was also formed, and cultural identity also, including the geographic endogeniety of those that shared the same language.
I'm happy to have non-binarized natives doing their thing away from capitalist politics and the nationalist socialist identity mentality rhetoric they are being brainwashed with. They are going the path of the Aryan nation, or the Viking brothers, it sounds now like the Native First Nation, vèry scary and no different to the totalitarian arrogance of Genghis Khan.
I will not be silenced or intimidated by your hordes!

So you have no knowledge of Natives then

I have native friends, and have had relationships, though I reluctantly use the term native or indigenous, rather, the pre-colonial term before the binary political nomenclature, i.e. friend, or, person who was born here, or just stranger, but nothing which puts them into a minority identity, other than to add some explanation should it be in the context of any pressing concern, that my friend's ancestors preceded the arrival of the so and so who colonized the land, for an historian, or to make anecdotal conversation about the habitats of certain animals and how to trap or kill them for food and skins, if it was permitted. But otherwise they are just like everyone else and I treat them so.
I know you are the same one anon, I think I know who, and I suspect another instance of Le Way Deranged Syndrome.

this is my first time posting here in this topic

the "I have Native friends" argument... Natives are not monolithic,

IdPol has made them monolithic, to the extent that "native" has adopted leftist values of an imperialistic bent.

apparently you're cheerfully participating in that process ...

How can one have knowledge of something that does not actually exist. "Natives" is a construct, initially formed by colonialists, now further reinforced by IdPol by its act of removing them from their former binary relationship i.e. colonialist/Native, and placing them within the IdPol minority identity folder.
They perpetuate the identity, albeit as a minority monolithic identity construct.
I cannot make it any clearer than this for you, how are your comprehension skills, "Natives" do not actually exist, and therefore there is no knowledge to be had of them.

I am not asking, I am telling you, you can act like you have this advanced knowledge and you have Native Friends so you must know more than... an actual Native

Anon 02:27 RE:Le Way so as to not be confused by other RE:Le Way respondents,
I guess you've explained in length the multiple facets within the indigenous identity complex, and I feel you have answered them very well, thanks for taking the time to reply :)

Kind of a clunky idea as defined by aragorn on his show as an "anarchist of their place", a redundant term for "a person"

no wait seriously, WHAT distinction being made. The article is about wonky conversations between various groups of people, and then beneath it is the typical "fuck you LeWay" type banter because clearly we need to take all these ridiculous labels seriously. That means me not referencing an anarchy bang show where they talked about IA at length and what that would theoretically mean to use that label.

Anyone else here that looks aren't a very lasting possession! I'm probably a 6 or or 7, but not for long.

I'm saying you let the pot boil dry in your analysis there, nothing but useless burnt shit at the bottom ;)

i love our atmosphere, and the moisture in it, the evaporated water, i love water

Maybe this is a bad way to troll le way? We can all see the (not verified).

between anyone on this site then hats off to you! It's all still ultra vague to me what anybody is saying half the time

Most people don't create accounts, they just trust that no one else will use their handle (or remain a cowardly anon, like me), but Le Way eventually had to make one because of posts like this.

But in general it's common for me to read a post on here and have no comprehension of what's going on. Sometimes it's fun!

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