"Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses. For my community alone, it was the destruction of the buffalo herds, the destruction of our animal relatives on the land, the destruction of our animal nations in the nineteenth century, of our river homelands in the twentieth century. I don’t want to universalize that experience; it was very unique to us as nations. But if there is something you can learn from Indigenous people, it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic society.
One of the positive meanings of the title of the book, Our History Is the Future, is that in times of great turmoil and destruction, people didn’t just stop being humans. They didn’t just give up. And while we think of resistance in many ways as a kind of act of defiance that’s spectacular and militant, it also happens in everyday realities, in how we keep alive these stories. People still had children in times of destruction. People still raised families. They did their best to keep alive the nation through genocide.
The passage you read is a critique of a trend in Indigenous studies and Indigenous organizing circles to focus on trauma and healing at the individual level. It’s not that people shouldn’t focus on trauma and healing, but that it’s been mobilized in this neoliberal moment to say that, once the individual heals, they’ll be able to go out and be a productive person in society. That becomes the horizon of struggle: healing at the site of the individual. The horizon of struggle is no longer liberation. I think it’s telling in this particular moment that healing and trauma discourse becomes almost an obstacle we have to overcome. It’s a tool of governance in many ways.
Just look at what’s happening in Canada with the reconciliation process. How messed up is it that the very perpetrators of that violence are now the ones who are going to remediate that violence, provide the care for those victims of violence? Hey, I’m sorry we kidnapped all of your children, sent them to residential schools, killed a lot of them, raped a lot of them, abused a lot of them. Now we’re going to say sorry, but instead of actually giving back land or giving back the resources for you to build yourselves as nations, we’re just going to provide the social services for you to get the help that you need from us. It’s this mentality of crying on the shoulder of the man who stole your land.
That’s reflected in the climate justice movement. We see the future in very bleak and pessimistic terms—that there is no future. That’s the perfect articulation of capitalism. Fredric Jameson, wrote that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” That’s very much our moment right now.
The climate justice movement is very diverse, and it’s all over the place. If there’s one thing I can offer, it’s to say: we know what it’s like to undergo apocalypse. Our worlds have been destroyed in many ways, and we’re trying to rebuild them, reclaim them, and reestablish correct relations. The severity of the situation shouldn’t undermine the willingness to act. Not to act, to succumb to a kind of paralysis, of inaction, is itself an action. Not doing anything is doing something. Howard Zinn said it best: you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
The second question that you have was about the left. To be honest, the left has failed to take seriously settler colonialism, and not just Indigenous decolonization but decolonization in general as a platform. I’ve had a lot of discussions with leftists, socialists, progressive trade unions. People are genuinely interested; they’re not hostile to it automatically. I think it’s just that how we define class in this country, by traditional or historical elements of the left, essentially erases Indigenous people because it prioritizes the needs of settler society over Indigenous nationhood. They’re often framed as competing systems. We’ve seen a lot of socialists and leftists asking about Indigenous reparations, which is funny because there’s never been an overarching demand by Indigenous people for reparations. [The demand is for] land return. Anishinaabe scholar and intellectual Leanne Simpson said it best (I’m going to paraphrase her): settler society always asks us for solutions to these problems, but they don’t like our answers, because they’re really hard. It gets to the root of this society. It would be like going back to the nineteenth century and advocating for class struggle without talking about the abolition of slavery. It would be absurd!"
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