Anarchist Realism – Unknowable – Klee Benally

Before i begin this post i think its important to position some things about me as the writer of the post. I am a settler, I am able bodied, I am trans, I am jewish, I am an anarchist. The way i see the world is influenced by these factors. I do my best but sometimes my best is not enough, and i can accept that. For these reasons I think its important that before you read this and my thoughts on this zine you read the zine for yourself.

https://www.indigenousaction.org/unknowable-against-an-indigenous-anarchist-theory-zine/

It’s relatively short and is definitely worth the read. Once you have finished come back and read what i have to say, or don’t.

In the last post i spoke about plugging some holes in Malatesta’s theory to build a Anarchist Realism. Part of this anarchist realism has to be understanding of Indigenous struggle. We in so called Canada are on stolen indigenous land. As such we must understand indigenous resistance and find solidarity and inspiration in it. We must be accomplices to Indigenous struggle.

This work by the Diné activist and artist Klee Benally is his answer to a bigger conversation about anarchism and Indigenous people, and if anarchism is any benefit to Indigenous people. It’s an exploration of why there isn’t and never should be an “Indigenous Anarchism.” Published in 2021 in Black Seed: Not on Any Map, it was republished as a zine and posted on indigenousaction.org.

Im not going to cover everything like i did for Anarchy, because i want to encourage people to read it for themselves. I can only show so much through a handful of quotes. The first few sections are an intro to civilization, colonialism, and capitalism.

When we ask the question “What does civilization want?” we are visited by the ghosts of our children. The specters of a dead future. Emaciated skeletons buried beneath vulgar stories of conquest upon conquest upon conquest. Civilization has no relatives, only captives.

Civilization is a cancer that spreads and destroy in its path. It tries to make the unknowable known. “Its essence is time.” Civilization consumes existence, it is a “war of wars against Mother Earth.” Im using a lot of quotes because i really cannot explain it better than he did. If you haven’t read it you should.

Civilization is a monster, and capitalism is the digestive tract, “it is a transmuter.” It divides and conquers, it prescribes our lives and turns everything into a commodity. We cannot live freely off the land because of capitalism. Civilization creates the state in its form to reinforce its hold over people and resources.

This is the etymology of colonialism; it is the language of domination, coercion, control, exploitation, assimilation, and annihilation. It expands and contracts in between breaths of unending wars, it colonizes memories to justify itself, this is what it calls History.

Colonialism subjects even time to its rule. The state is how civilization maintains its rule. In so called democracies like Canada, voting serves as a regular mandate for legitimacy by the state.

Throughout the world Indigenous Peoples live their mutuality on varied terms in complex (and sometimes conflictual and contradictory) social relationships. The cosmology of existence, the continually emergent worlds and manifestations of being and becoming, are all outside of “civilized” order and the state. They are unknowable.

Nature negates the state. It defies and resists being known. The state and civilization seek to put everything under their knowledge. He locates a connection between anarchist and Indigenous resistance, but rejects the idea of an Indigenous Anarchist Theory.

We do not seek that our ways of knowing, being, and acting ever be wrapped up into a fixed belief and presented as a pitiful rag. We do not wish that Indigenous anarchism ever be a flag that is planted anywhere on Mother Earth. The calcification of an Indigenous anarchist theory would precipitate all the merchandizing that relegates other political theories to banal dramaturgy, and we fanatically reject these conditions. 

Indigenous autonomy needs no theoretical foundation to justify itself.

No anarchist theory could represent all Indigenous people. There can be no Indigenous anarchism because there is not one unified Indigenous thought, there are many. Indigenous autonomy doesn’t need theory to justify itself because it is justified by the living practices of indigenous people and their “original (living) teachings.”

White Anarchists often have a blind spot around Indigenous autonomy. Many prominent anarchists throughout history have celebrated violence against Indigenous people in the name of direct action. Black Anarchists have pointed out for decades how anarchism lacked racial analysis.

This is not to argue that Indigenous Peoples should be considered solely as candidates for political alliance, this goes beyond solidarity, it is an assertion that any liberatory impulse on these lands must be built around the fire of Indigenous autonomy. Whether its performative allyship through land acknowledgements or adopting the label “accomplice,” settlers need to implicate themselves fully into the destruction of their social order.

Settlers need to understand what decolonization means, it is not a metaphor for slight change or reform. It is radical redistribution of power, and it is unsettling. We need to “implicate” ourselves in crushing the system. We need to be accomplices not allies.

Any real revolutionary struggle that will happen here must built around Indigenous autonomy. We have to learn from Indigenous struggle and Anarchism to beat this system, and we cannot let anarchism eclipse Indigenous autonomy.

Anarchism, with its flawed legacy, is dynamic enough to actually become a stronger position through the scrutiny; this is primarily due to the matter that as a tension of tensions against domination, anarchism has the unique character of resisting urges towards intransigence. It has been developed and redeveloped as a dynamic position that strengthens with its contortions. Anarchists have constantly looked inward and convulsed with (and even celebrated) their contradictions.

Anarchism is resilient, it is our strength. Recognizing and making use of this strength is important if we want to be effective accomplices.

When we ask the question, “What do our cultures want?” The response for Diné is hózhó, or harmony/balance with existence. This is expressed and guided through Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Házhóón.

Our culture is our prefiguration.

As anarchists we seek to prefigure a society based on freedom, equality, and solidarity. But for many Indigenous people, those values are baked into their culture. But we should not impose our own ideas of those values onto the Indigenous culture, nor should we fetishize it.

Indigenous Anarchists are an ungovernable force of Nature. We maintain that no law can be above nature. That is to say, how power is balanced and how we organize ourselves socially is an order that flows from and with Nahasdzáán (Mother Earth).

We are not separate from nature, as anarchists we must understand this. We are subject to the same natural forces as the rest of nature. Indigenous people understand this, and Indigenous anarchists especially.

Our project is to replace the principle of political authority with the principle of autonomous Indigenous mutuality. To live a life in conflict with authoritarian constraint on stolen occupied land is negation of settler colonial domination.

Here we find more common ground. We seek to live a life in conflict with the system. We seek to fight it on every front. But there can be no Indigenous anarchism, because it doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t. The drive to know and define is sibling to the drive to divide and conquer. We must accept the unknowability of nature, we must embrace it.

What we would like to offer is that we have already pronounced and located an Indigenous Anarchism, and it doesn’t and should not exist.

Civilization and the state are myths colonizers keep telling themselves and forcing others to believe. It is their ritual of power, their prayer is time. The settler imaginary, the civilized mind, is always haunted by everything in them that they have killed. Their State, their entire civilization, exists on the precipice of rupture. Their instability is possibility that can be made to spread. When their spirit is attacked and corrupted, they fail. When we shed the language of non-violence and embrace our dispossession, it becomes more clear how to precipitate that vital failure. When their imaginary cannot justify itself against its brutalities, it becomes so vicious and fearful that it attacks and consumes itself.

The very notion of civilization on which the state and capitalism build is rotten to the core. We must reject it and substitute in our own mutuality. We are living on stolen, occupied land. In order to overcome these systems of oppression we must be in solidarity with Indigenous struggle. Without it we will move in the wrong direction. Solidarity is the beacon of anarchism, so we must find comrades in strangers.

From this zine we take an understanding of Indigenous struggle that was lacking in Anarchism for so many years. We learn that this understanding must be at the core of our struggle, and inform everything we do. Without it we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.