The Brilliant: Episode 93 - The Fight for Turtle Island

From The Brilliant

I (Aragorn! the host of this podcast) put together a book. It is not a book about me. It is about a dozen other people who are, in some way, the audience for and content of the book. It was a real challenge putting it together as the interview subjects did not conform to the framing I eventually put on the book. Most of the conversations were about people, biographies, and local challenges. The book is about an epic fight for Turtle Island that is invisible to most people. It is about memory, family, and the future of a livable planet.

It is also about anarchism. The original thesis of this book went something like this: The difference between indigenous and anarchist perspectives only requires some sort of keystone or translation guide; the two perspectives have so much in common that the only work is mapping the geography. But as the saying goes the map is not the territory. Clearly many, if not most, anarchists are happily married to Enlightenment thought and believe that the problem is not the production of widgets but how the widgets are produced. Similarly many indigenous people are not exactly on board with the kind of total social and material transformation alluded to by an anti-civilization, green anarchist perspective. To put this another way, I was wrong in my initial thesis and in face of that wrongness I am questioning both my anarchism and my relationship to indigeneity.

Couple this to the general exhaustion I am feeling in my seemingly complete transition from trickster to bear and it has been difficult to talk about this book. To get the word out. To care about how anyone not in the book feels about it. But this is how projects fail. This one deserves a full airing and luckily my friend Obsidian (along with peanut gallery) was up to the task. This is an hour interview with me about the book I edited "The Fight for Turtle Island." Enjoy and then pick it up at Little Black Cart.

There are 19 Comments

imma hear dat

To be honest, it would great to hear from Native anarchists who subscribe to the AntiCiv, nihilist, egoists, individualist anti-society, thought etc and not just the indigenous anarchists who continue to support tribal councils and the idea of a Native society

we exist, we are here, just no one pays us attention

But don't these people, who exist as a tiny minority of an already extreme minority, have long, complicated answers when you ask them if they even identify as "native" at all? I know I do.

What do you want to hear? That identity is ultimately bullshit but relationship to the land might not always be?

Better question, why would I want anyone to pay me attention, nihilist that I am?

PS: have yet to meet anyone who identifies, even a little, as native AND anarchist, who isn't highly critical of band council politics as obvious scams of "representation".

Yeah, I understand the complexity of "denying identity" and identifying as Native, I am a Native and I reject the idea of Identity as a political weapon, or as a "class identification"

more like, a lot of indigenous anarchists that are 'vocal' or given a small space is for the Rights of Natives, and upkeeping a "Native Society" and reforming and building the system back. more "social-anarchists"

Yeah, people are usually given platforms to speak with some kind of goal in mind. Nobody really gains anything from platforming the rejection of everyone else's positions haha! So I guess this tendency you speak of would have to work hard to broadcast themselves for their own reasons.

An Article some years ago about "Indigenous-Egoism" would have been something to expand upon

Downloaded to listen.

I really appreciate the kind of book this episode of the podcast is about (although I have yet to read it), because the motivation for making the book seems to be to try to connect with a younger version of himself, like if I could write something that could speak to me when I was younger and I didn’t have the words to describe how I now see and feel, how would it look? And interviews seems like a great way to write such a text.

And I like how Aragorn chose not to include native scholars and the rationale behind why. That part of the interview just seemed to really speak to how much I love it when people don’t get so wrapped up (or boggled down) in the terminology of academia and instead connect ideas to something tangible and for real people.

Also the origins of APOC! I never knew how that all happened and was happy Aragorn filled in some of the gaps. I do appreciate the ‘anti-blackness’ perspective that we’re all racist (even if we assume we’re not) because we’re raised in an extremely racist culture with so many unexplored assumptions and fucked up thought patterns that need to be undone.

Thanks again for this podcast, it’s always something that I look forward to!!

I would extend it past just anti-blackness, this whole binary white-black only focus is tired, and in its own sense anti-other

Basically, de-colonizing the consciousness requires the nihil-esque removal of the conquest mentality and its associated acquisition fetish.
These are the drives for. much of the consumerism.

Just a damn redneck here. I try not to be IdPol about it.
Would love to hear from Indigenous people who are regenerating the ancestral Way, regardless if they self-identify as anarchist. They would probably be called traditionalists. I know a Konkow Maidu woman who is involved in recovering/regenerating the language, as well as a 600 acre sanctuary that will include a pre-genocide village. Not far from where my sanctuary will be. She would love to see white "civilization"/capitalism gone, but is not involved in any anarchist polemic.

Anarchist is an ideological label (like nihilist and egoist). It is an identity, which is limiting, and can degenerate into its own version of IdPol. I think a lot of Indigenous people dismiss all this as a bunch of European thinking.

How dare you describe anarch and nihil consciousness as identity limiting. It is a process not a destiny!
*Rears back on back legs and snarls*

Al dente!

my case.

I enjoyed this more about hearing Aragorn's story than the book. It seems like a much needed tome. But not something that I might read. Read what FBI has their website (history of FBI section) A throwaway sentence about COELINTELPRO was wrong. Appreciate also Aaragorn's honesty throughout the episode and his saerch for meaning.

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