The Red Deal

Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth

The Red Nation

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781942173526
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When the Red Nation released their call for a Red Deal, it generated coverage in places from Teen Vogue to Jacobin to the New Republic, was endorsed by the DSA, and has galvanized organizing and action. Now, in response to popular demand, the Red Nation expands their original statement filling in the histories and ideas that formed it and forwarding an even more powerful case for the actions it demands.

One-part visionary platform, one-part practical toolkit, the Red Deal is a platform that encompasses everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. We—Indigenous, Black and people of color, women and trans folks, migrants, and working people—did not create this disaster, but we have inherited it. We have barely a decade to turn back the tide of climate disaster. It is time to reclaim the life and destiny that has been stolen from us and rise up together to confront this challenge and build a world where all life can thrive. Only mass movements can do what the moment demands. Politicians may or may not follow--it is up to them--but we will design, build, and lead this movement with or without them.

The Red Deal is a call for action beyond the scope of the US colonial state. It's a program for Indigenous liberation, life, and land—an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives. The Red Deal is not a response to the Green New Deal, or a "bargain" with the elite and powerful. It's a deal with the humble people of the earth; a pact that we shall strive for peace and justice and a declaration that movements for justice must come from below and to the left.

PART I

DIVEST

End the Occupation

Capitalism requires a powerful military industry for its processes of accumulation and imposition of control over territories and natural resources, suppressing the resistance of the peoples. It is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet.
—People’s Agreement, 2010

Introduction

The occupation of Indigenous land and settler colonialism has yet to end. Despite historical narratives of progress in the United States, colonization is not a thing of the past. It is what shapes our present. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, “To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much of US history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased.”¹ Settler colonialism is an ongoing project of erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to replace them with settlers, who claim to own and dominate the land. The occupation of this land has always been maintained by violence or by the threat of violence. The US invests billions of dollars in its tools of occupation: the military it uses to enforce its global domination and steal natural resources from the Global South; the police it empowers to repress domestic resistance to occupation; and the prisons it funds to warehouse and punish those who do not adhere to settler capitalist social norms.

These three institutions have coalesced into the military and prison industrial complex (MPIC), an occupying force on stolen land that operates by reinforcing settler dominance, white supremacy, and global imperialism. The military and prison industrial complex refers to the concentration of government spending into private interests for some perceived social good that, in reality, supports corrupt industries. The military-industrial complex takes public money to make war profiteers rich, and those private corporations are awarded lucrative government contracts to develop expensive technologies of destruction at the public’s expense.

Similarly, mass incarceration has risen in the United States with support of both the Republican and Democratic parties, to create jobs in devastated rural economies and move undesired populations out of cities. It serves as a population release valve for the contridictions of capitalism. Increasingly, private prisons are making money on the incarcartation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. To date, the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

With funds, equipment, and training from the federal government, police across the US employ armored vehicles, chemical weapons, and military tactics of counterinsurgency to suppress protests. They have exported these tactics, many of which they learned in the genocidal Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, to militaries and police forces of oppressive regimes across the world. Equally concerning, US police and military personnel have been trained by Israeli occupation forces in the most modern techniques and technologies of settler colonialism. On top of this international state violence, oppressed people in the United States face vigilante violence from settlers intent on defending white supremacy along the southern border, in towns surrounding Indigenous nations, and in cities across the country. As we have seen recently with the Black Lives Matter uprisings, the police and military are deeply entwined with white supremacist militias, far-right groups, and fascist formations.

The US MPIC is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. Given the immense power and resources that support the settler occupation of Indigenous land and global imperialism, we must find effective ways to diminish and defund these institutions. Without confronting the structures that murder, displace, imprison, and oppress us, we will not be able to create alternative ways of being, as these will be swiftly targeted and crushed as threats to the existing status quo.

Divestment is a strategy for dismantling these structures. At its most basic, divestment is the removal of funds, resources, and energy from what harms us. It has a long history in powerful movements against injustice, including: the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa; the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine; and the fossil fuel divestment delegations Indigenous women led as part of the #NoDAPL movement in 2016. The US Border Patrol employs Israeli technology developed for the walls of Gaza and the West Bank, and US police departments send officers to learn tactics of repression from Israel’s occupation forces. The exchange of technologies of violence must be stopped, for ourselves and for our Palestinian relatives.

We have identified five areas of struggle within the larger MPIC as priorities for large-scale, targeted divestment campaigns.

Area 1: Defund Police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and Child Protective Services

The first area of struggle we see in ending the occupation is defunding the occupational forces that oppress us. The US invests immense resources in policing its subjects, patrolling its borders, and enforcing colonial domination in order to maintain settler control over these lands it occupies. Rather than addressing the structural causes of poverty, displacement, and colonization, the state criminalizes Indigenous and other colonized people. The police in particular have historically brutalized oppressed communities and operate as an occupying force in poor communities. They serve the interests of the settler ruling class by protecting private property, evicting people from their homes, and, as we have seen with the various uprisings in the history of the US, crushing any resistance to colonial occupation and racism. Today’s police are well versed in military tactics and counterinsurgency, which they deploy on water protectors, land defenders, protestors against the murder of unarmed Black people, and anyone who defies the ruling class.

Xenophobia against people of color is a staple of white supremacy in the United States. Since the creation of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003 in the wake of 9/11, the police have increased cooperation with federal agents to capture, incarcerate, and deport migrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. CPB and ICE were created out of the Patriot Act as part of the “War on Terror.” This war targeted Muslims in the United States and abroad. The reforms gave ICE agents un-precendented powers to harass US citizens, often people of color traveling on public transit. Agents have carried out many murders, sexual assaults, and human rights abuses while patrolling the southern borders and detaining migrants. Obama expanded the war to targeted assisnations with drone strikes, including the assassination of US citizens abroad without due process. Obama earned the name “deporter in chief” for ramping up immigrant deportations. In 2016, Trump expanded on Obama’s deportation infrastructure and began a policy of family separation that imprisoned migrant children and parents in detention centers and in county jails.

An example of state violence is Child Protective Services and its removal of Indigenous children from their families and tribes. Throughout the long and ongoing history of Indigenous genocide, one of the tactics of settler society is the removal of Indigenous children. From the late nineteenth century until as recently as 1973, Native children were taken away to boarding schools to be stripped of their identity and assimilated into settler society, which falls under the UN Convention on The Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”² Today, Native children are taken away by Child Protective Services at disproportionate rates and families are separated due to poverty and criminalization. Since 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) gave tribes some protections from child removal by requiring that Native children removed from their families be placed with other family members, a family within their tribe, or an Indigenous family of another tribe before being adopted by white families. However, the ICWA has come under legal attack. In 2013, in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, the US Supreme Court started to whittle away at the protections in the law, denying a Cherokee father custody of a child his white wife put up for adoption after separating from the father.

Altogether, the police, immigration agencies, and Child Protective Services use immense resources to discipline, exclude, and disrupt Indigenous people along with everyone targeted by state violence. We seek to defund these institutions first. Ending the occupation means taking away the power of the state to oppress us. There are many ongoing campaigns to defund municipal police so that cities can spend their money on other projects that will actually benefit the masses and we encourage you to join them. With the 2020 uprisings against police murders, calls for disbanding and abolishing police, ICE, and CBP have coalesced into a coordinated movement led by Black and Indigenous organizations, trans rights and feminist groups, and advocates for incarcerated people. Support your local Black Lives Matter organization and the many others who are actively organizing campaigns to reallocate funds. Check if your city has a campaign to stop the deadly exchange or start one yourself.

Coinciding with the struggle to materially weaken police departments, we must also work to fight the glorification of police benevolence and the idea that “blue lives matter” more than ours. We must refuse the cooptation of our movements through reformist calls for community control or diversity hiring of police officers. Since the Civil Rights Movement, the police have recruited from minority communities to induce us to brutalize our own people, yet we have seen no material improvement to our treatment by the police. This speaks to the trap of seeking representation within oppressive systems: having cops who look like us will not change the underlying relationships of violence that maintain the status quo. This is partly due to the power of the police unions, which serve to shield police officers from accountability and which do not, like labor unions, serve the needs of workers. Instead, police unions protect the violent defenders of private property and white supremacy.

We must also turn our attention to the violence that is occurring along the US-Mexico border, both in the deserts where agents and vigilantes chase and murder asylum seekers and in the detention centers imprisoning those fleeing violence and economic despair. We urge you to join efforts to close the detention centers and to release all migrants and the reunification of families. If you are able, you can organize your communities into networks of support for migrants and asylum seekers and provide material support, shelter, legal representation, and deportation defense. We must fight for the freedom of all migrants, without exceptions or “good immigrant” narratives that would exclude some and ultimately justify the criminalization of all.

The police and border patrol tactics and technologies we are facing here are very much connected to global patterns of war, occupation, and border enforcement. We draw your attention to the collaboration between US police agencies and the Israeli occupation forces that displace, harass, and murder Palestinians in their homelands.

Ultimately, we must take our communities’ safety into our own hands since we know that the settler state will not protect us and will only harm us in its efforts to maintain dominance. We have seen the rise of community self-defense such as that of the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the Indigenous communities that have faced off with the Klan and colonial military in the US and Canada. One tactic that we have seen used successfully is what is known as “cop watch,” where community members observe and record interactions between police and people in their neighborhood. It is legal to film police in most cities as long as you are in a public space and maintain enough distance. In fact, many of the cases of police brutality that have sparked the global Black Lives Matter movement and recent calls for police abolition did so because they were recorded. While many people film arrests and other interactions with police, it is important to focus cop watching on the police themselves and care should be taken to not endanger or incriminate the targets of police harassment. For this reason, it is often paired with know-your-rights trainings and pamphlets that can be given to community members who witness the arrests and harassment by police, explaining to them why you are filming the police and how they can protect their community from police brutality.

Finally, the police cannot be the solution to the problems our communities face. Taking inspriration from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits (MMIWG2S) movement, which demands the investigation and prevention of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirited peoples, we must not rely on the police. Rather than relying on police and increasing their funding and power to investigate crimes against Indigenous people that the police themselves often commit, we should organize community defense initiatives against violence. Part of the problem of protecting ourselves from settler state violence is that many Native people find themselves away from their communities or in bordertowns, where tribes have little to no jurisdiction or power.

Area 2: End Bordertown Violence

Bordertowns emerged from the dispossession, relocation, and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people. Borders manifest themselves outside of the common understanding of national boundaries marked by fences, walls, and checkpoints. They are also found within the settler nation itself, at the boundaries between Indigenous and settler communities.

Bordertowns are those that surround Indigenous nations, often with significant populations of Native people, yet they are typically marked and policed as white spaces; in the same sense that suburbs were originally (and still are) perceived as spaces for whiteness. The function of a bordertown is to exploit the identity, labor, and death of Indigenous people. Indeed, often a bordertown’s economy relies on Native workers and white tourism to museums and stores that contain our art, ceremonial objects, and even the remains of our ancestors. On one hand, settler occupation is always built on Indigenous death, and on the other, bordertowns trade in a narrative of an Indigenous “past” for tourism.

Territories held by Indigenous nations came under settler control during the several centuries of European settlement and westward expansion through war, massacre, treaty negotiation, and privatization followed by forced selling, all of which forced Indigenous peoples off their homelands and onto reservations. The Homestead Act of 1862 and Dawes Act of 1887 served to divide entire nations into individual landholdings that, coupled with threats of violence and increased dependency on the European capitalist economy, could be transferred to private settler ownership. Many Indigenous people were forced to sell their parcels of land in order to settle debts, pay taxes, or feed themselves and their families.

The Homestead Act gave large tracts of these lands as well as those recently secured by US Army violence to white settlers for very cheap and was repealed only in 1975, after transferring millions of acres of land to white settlers. As Indigenous nations became dislocated from their lands and forms of subsistence, they increasingly became forced into wage labor for the very settlers who stole their land. They also were forced to rely on nearby trading posts and mercantile stores to exchange rug weavings, pottery, and wool for everyday necessities. Settlers, on the other hand, were largely dependent on Indigenous labor in the early years of westward expansion and, to this day, bordertowns rely on Indigenous people to work, shop, and create products to sell in stores or markets that profit off of Native art and culture.

Many of these lenders, pawnshops, and trading posts offer Indigenous people a small profit for family heirlooms or artwork while selling these items at a higher price to white collectors, museums, and wealthy individuals. Car dealerships, payday lenders, and other predatory businesses prey on Indigenous people on and off reservations by locking them in an endless cycle of debt. This relationship of capitalist exploitation in bordertowns continues the long history of colonial extraction from Indigenous peoples, lands, and labor. These bordertowns, like those along the southern border, are locations of extreme levels of surveillance, policing, and violence in order to contain the “threat” of Indigenous existence that contradicts the myth of settler society. The continued presence of Native people signifies the incompleteness of the settler project, which responds with anti-Indigenous violence. Violent interactions with the police are common, along with the enforcement of laws restricting Native peoples’ movement and behavior that proliferated as bordertowns arose across the West.

In many cities, laws prohibited Indigenous people from living within the city limits unless they were servants to wealthy whites who agreed to house them on their property, out of sight. While these laws have since been repealed or evolved into anti-vagrancy laws that criminalize homelessness, panhandling, and even resting in public, bordertowns have a long history of violent anti-Indian sentiment. A common form of violence inflicted upon Indigenous people is “Indian rolling,” or the targeted assault, torture, and murder of Native people. The term was first used in 1974 to describe a gang of white teenagers’ murder of three unsheltered Diné men in the bordertown of Farmington, New Mexico. The history of anti-Indian violence is, of course, much older than this.

In addition to the state violence enacted by the US military during the Indian Wars, private settlers, militias, and companies engaged in decades of unilateral violence against Indigenous people. State and federal governments paid these settlers for their service in volunteer militias that hunted, killed, and captured Indigenous people throughout the western states. They collected bounties for scalps and body parts and often took it upon themselves to organize and arm these militias to wage genocide against Native people.

This anti-Indian violence has evolved over the centuries into the forms of bordertown violence we face today. For example, “Indian rolling” is an ongoing issue in bordertowns, where mostly white and Hispanic teenagers and men target Native people because of these deep, underlying logics of anti-Indianism. In 2014, three Hispanic teenagers attacked three Diné men in Albuquerque, New Mexico and bludgeoned two of them to death while one ...