Post by POA on May 18, 2005 13:36:18 GMT -5
Indigenism, Anarchism, and the State
......... by Ward Churchill April 29, 2005
Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists and scholars in North America and a leading commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many books include Marxism and Native Americans; Fantasies of the Master Race; Struggle for the Land; The COINTELPRO Papers; Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization; Pacifism as Pathology; and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. In his lectures and published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo.
Churchill has recently come under attack for views expressed in the article "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. An important part of the future of US academic freedom in the coming years will likely be determined by the outcome of the ongoing attempts to strip Ward Churchill of his academic position at Colorado University in Boulder. Two members of Autonomy & Solidarity sat down with Ward Churchill in Toronto in November of 2003 to do this interview. It was transcribed by Clarissa Lassaline and edited by Tom Keefer, Dave Mitchell, and Valerie Zink.
Upping The Anti: We want to start off by asking you about your thoughts on the anti-globalization movement which, in terms of anti-capitalist struggles, has been one of the most significant developments in the past decade. This movement has also been criticized in the US context, as being largely made up of white middle class kids running around "summit hopping." What's your take?
Ward Churchill: I think the anti-globalization movement, for lack of a better term, is a very positive development in the sense that it re-infuses the opposition with a sense of purpose, enthusiasm, and vibrancy. The downside is that it's a counter-analytical movement in that it thinks it's something new. We used to call it "anti-imperialism," just straight up. The idea that "globalization" is something new, rather than a continuation of dynamics that are at least 500 years deep, is misleading. That needs to be understood.
UTA: In your book Struggle For The Land, there's an essay called "I Am Indigenous." Can you elaborate a bit on the politics and genealogy of indigenism?
WC: Perhaps I can by way of your introduction of yourselves. You know, you say you're post-Leninists. Fine. But why are you something that goes beyond Leninism, rather than something that isn't?
UTA: It's a reflection of the roots of where our political grouping came from.
WC: But you top that off by describing yourselves as revolutionaries, and I'm saying "why?" Do you aspire to overthrow the presiding order in the Canadian state so that you can reorganize the state in a more constructive fashion?
Then you're a revolutionary. Do you want to see the Canadian state here when you're done in some form or another? If not, then you're a devolutionary and you might want to call it by its right name.
UTA: So would you say that no anarchists could call themselves revolutionaries?
WC: If they do, they're deluding themselves. They're not understanding themselves or the tradition that they're espousing in proper terms because, for starters, anarchists are explicitly anti-statist. And the object of a revolution is to change the regime of power in a given state structure. So I think "revolutionary" is a misnomer.
UTA: One of the issues with devolution is that, at least potentially, it represents an attempt to go back to some kind of ideal way the world once was. But we can't just roll back the clock of history.
WC: No, of course not. But again we're into this implicitly Marxist progression, and anarchists aren't especially progressive. In fact, you get a physical fight from some of them for using that term, because they consider it an insult. And I think properly so. There's no immutable law of history. The structures, however, aren't immutable either, and they can be devolved.
One conflation of terms that really bothers me a lot, which seems to be plaguing the discourse still, is the conflation of the term "nation" and the term "state." You have this entity out there called "the United Nations." It really should have been called "the United States," because to be eligible even for admission to the Assembly you have to be organized in that centralized, arbitrary structure. No "nations" as such are even eligible for admission to the United Nations. "The United States" was a name already taken, however, and this was very useful in obfuscating the reality.
But the upshot of that is that you've got a whole lot of anarchists running around thinking they're anti-nationalist, that nationality, nationalism in all forms, is necessarily some sort of an evil to be combated, when that's exactly what they're trying to create. You've got four or five thousand nations on the planet; you've got two hundred states. They're using "anti-nationalist" as a code word for being anti-statist. With indigenous peoples, nationality is an affirmative ideal, and it hasn't got any similarity at all to state structures.
You may have nations that are also states, but you've got most nations rejecting statism. So you can make an argument, as I have, that the assertion of sovereignty on the part of indigenous nations is an explicitly anti-statist ideal, and the basis of commonality with people who define themselves as anarchists. We've got to deal with our own bases of confusion in order to be able to interact with one another in a respectful and constructive way.
UTA: Are there correlations between your indigenous perspective and anarchism? Many people might make the argument that, in fact, indigenism is an ancestor to anarchism, and not vice versa.
WC: Well, that is precisely my argument. The two are not interchangeable, point for point, but they have far more in common than they have dividing them, if each is properly understood. And part of the task here is to make them properly understood. If you look at green anarchy, for better or worse, you're going to find all kinds of references to commonalities with indigenous peoples on every basis, from social organisation to environmental perspective. It will take some time, but you can make that conceptual bridge between indigenism and anarchism, and it's understood.
I would see the main distinction, on this continent, as being a detachment from base. Indigenous peoples are grounded, quite literally. There's a relationship to the land that has evolved over thousands of years, and that's completely denied to the people from the settler culture who self-describe as anarchists. With that distinction made, however, we've got all kinds of principles in common, aspirations in common, perspectives in common, and we need to build upon those in order to develop a respectful set of relations that allow us to act in unity against that common oppressor that we share.
UTA: After the Seattle actions, you were part of the debate around the whole question of "diversity of tactics." Do you see the Black Bloc as being an interesting or relevant political phenomenon?
WC: It's not that I think that breaking the windows of Starbucks is somehow going to bring the system crashing to its knees, or that they even had a conception of what they were actually up against. Clinton deployed Delta Force for that one in case things really did start to get serious. I mean that's as serious as it gets in terms of repressive capacity in the United States.
These are the surgical assassination units, and they were deployed in Seattle.
But if you're going to go up against that, or if you're actually going to do serious damage to the structure of things, it isn't going to happen in some sort of a frontal confrontation with whatever deployment of force the state makes. So it is symbolic, in the sense that it's educational and kind of empowering. But if you're going to engage with that force, you're not going to simply wake up one morning, take a pill along with your glass of water and go out prepared to do it. You have to build the consciousness, you have to build the psychology, you have to build the experiential base, and you have to build the theoretical base, and that happens step by step by step. Maybe the thing that happened in Seattle was a sort of, "let's get out of the chat rooms and see if we can't actually make a physical confrontation." There hasn't been anything significant along those lines for 25, 30 years in the US.
Now, on the level of street confrontation, what can we deduce from that experience? Well, maybe a first lesson would be: if you actually want to engage in street confrontations as part of a further building trajectory, you might want to ditch the uniforms and stop self-identifying as somebody the police want to neutralize immediately. Unmask yourself, put on a phony beard, or a clean shave. Mask yourself in another way. Just this level of tactical evolution, they've refused. And this is part of what leads some people to purport that the Black Bloc is more of a fashion statement than it is a serious political tendency. I'm not convinced of that, but people are clinging to their signs and symbols at a very basic level, in a way that precludes taking the action further. You get these cataclysmic statements of what is necessary, and yet they won't even ditch the funny little signifier of their identity as a Black Bloccer.
UTA: Is there a correlation between the militant tactics and direct confrontation against the state proposed by the Black Bloc, and the ways in which the Weather Underground evolved from the Days of Rage in Chicago? Do you see a similar kind of progression? What are the lessons to be learned from how those movements failed in the 60s?
WC: The Weather Underground is another thing that I will completely defend. Of the spectrum of responses mounted by the white left at the time, Weather was the most valid response of all, which does not mean that it actually had a viable strategy. But the response pattern was entirely legitimate. But ultimately, they got boxed into symbolic actions, and that is explicitly the case now as well.
Brian Flanagan and Mark Rudd, who are in this new film about the Weathermen, are saying "you know, we made a conscious decision to do only property actions," which was not the original impulse and not the original understanding. It was a sort of wounded response to having three people killed in the Greenwich townhouse explosion. Well, in human terms I understand that these were their friends and all that, but if you are actually serious about engaging in an armed struggle and plan on testing the capacity of the United States, you have to anticipate that you're going to incur casualties. And three is hardly an insurmountable toll that's been taken. So again, you had middle class kids who were posturing as something else, and legitimately wanted to be something else and tried to transcend their origins. But they couldn't do it in and of themselves, and they didn't really have an interactive relationship with other movements, organisations, or people coming from a different experiential background and temper. They were a sort of bourgeois response. So you're saying you're going to do one thing, but actually you're unprepared to do it. I can understand that, but I don't accept that as being a model.
I'm more encouraged by the fact that people are looking seriously at the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and such, despite the valid critique that there was a certain Stalinist content to the organization. And that raises the question of how exactly, without getting into a centralized, arbitrarily disciplined organization, you mount a clandestine struggle. That's a serious question.
How do you go about it? It's not laissez-faire, it's not everybody do your own thing. It can't be, or you're dead. But the BLA and other such organizations were willing to sustain casualties in a serious way over a protracted period. And they were ultimately burnt out because they had no basis for recruiting additional members from some broader context or mass movement to replace the casualties, and that's a lesson to be learned and addressed as well.