PART ONE
RETHINKING RACE AND ECOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE
âWE ARE THE LAND, AND THE LAND IS USâ
Indigenous Land, Lives, and Embodied Ecologies in the Twenty-First Century
DIAN MILLION
On April 1st, 2016, tribal citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, & Dakota citizens, under the group name âChante tinâsa kinanzi Po,â founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), owned by Energy Transfer Partners, L.P., is proposed to transport 450,000 barrels per day of bakken crude oil (which is fracked and highly volatile) from the lands of North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois.
STATEMENT, CAMP OF THE SACRED STONES, 2016
The death of a traditional food system is the death of a nation ⌠physically and culturally. We can and must protect and restore practices that can make us healthy and well as indigenous people.
SECOND GLOBAL CONSULTATION ON THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND FOOD SECURITY FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, NICARAGUA, SEPTEMBER 7â9, 2006
i loved the fish
and now the fish are scarce here
i think i must believe it will better further north
at home whatever place you cannot bear to see stripped not
always somewhere else
what is left is sacred no reason is enough
no one can tell me this will not be about the water my
frantic love
laughs out loud
tells them not to spray paint their lawns green
DIAN MILLION
THE Standing Rock Lakotaâs 2016 effort to protect the Mni Sose, the Missouri River, from the Dakota Access Pipeline rallied Indigenous peoples and myriad ecological warriors of different stripes worldwide. In many ways, Standing Rock presents us with a heretofore unimagined assemblage in solidarity to protect water, the source of life on this planet. The Lakota people led with a powerful prayer of hope. As the winter of 2016 set in with unprecedented blizzard conditions, Donald Trump, a New York real estate baron, was elected president of the United States, and Energy Transfer Partners, the Dakota Access pipelineâs corporate sponsors, prevailed. The subsequent drilling beneath the Missouri River (at Lake Oahe) was an act of rape, a violence that ignored Standing Rockâs long-embodied sovereignty in that Lakota place. The amount of militarized police mobilized against the allied Lakota Water Protectors to âfinish the jobâ testifies loudly to the ongoing matrix of uneven power relations between the United States and the Lakota. These are relations that Standing Rock has negotiated and struggled with for over a century.1
Now, in late December 2017, the United States is again poised to invade an Indigenous place, Iizhik Gwatsâan Gwandaii Goodlit (the sacred place where life begins), as it is known in Gwichâin Athabascan, and in English as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The porcupine caribou calving grounds that have sustained a way of life for millennia are about to go under the knife, casually sacrificed as an add-on to a tax bill that few have read. Again, this move is about oil, and need, and places that are not imaginable to most of the citizens of the United States (and Canada).
Any appeal in this moment to liberal âhumanâ rights for the Indigenous can never bring the entirety of the Gwichâin or Standing Rock peopleâs full relations to entities like rivers, air, land, and other beings into its logic. A just inclusion of the nonhuman in this place already exists under Lakota law that far exceeds any ârightsâ-based appeal for states to be better actors. Thus, at Standing Rock, the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota obeyed their own sacred law, their ages-old responsibilities that they do not shirk. These Indigenous laws are often in direct opposition to national and international laws, whose primary responsibility is to protect the âpropertyâ of global enterprise and a settler imperative of emptying sacred places of Indigenous relations. This is settler colonialism as it is lived in our Indigenous places now, in this moment. The stepped-up intensity of our Indigenous-led resistance movementsâStanding Rock, Idle No More in Canada, and the Gwichâinâs defense of Iizhik Gwatsâan Gwandaii Goodlitâshould be understood as decision points, moments when we, as inhabitants, victims, and recipients of benefits wrought by the destruction of our own conditions for life on this planet, might do something different. It is critical that we imagine a future for more than âjust us.â
In this chapter, I join in conversation with others who foreground our lives lived, in different locations, ones that come from our racialized, gendered, and class experiences of ecological life and death in the presence of globalized capital. I seek first to acknowledge our relations as we come together, in this collection, rather than to just identify differences. At the same time, I believe that there is great worth in learning from the interstices, rivulets, and streams that represent meetings and differences that our peoplesâ histories and different economic, political, and cultural positions give us. The Indigenous peoples of this continent hold up a difference that is not fully captured by the matrix of race and âecology.â I enter the conversation titled âRacial Ecologiesâ by problematizing its terms. This chapter seeks to present Indigenous experience in its ability to complicate what we imagine as âjusticeâ if we cannot imagine our relations. I first examine the myth of our Indigenous absence but racialized presence in the heart of capitalism. I then turn to the land, to argue for what Indigenism means where it can be read, not through any pristine or primordial lens, but in its worth as a different matrix of values. I do so that we might ask harder questions about what âecologyâ is to any equitable, safe, or healthy lives we might desire. I end with a discussion of the relations of Indigenous survivance and presence in an Arctic âlast frontier.â Imagined as a great empty space, the Arctic is actually the site of one of the oldest ongoing struggles in North America.
HUBS
One increasingly antithetical split created in our minds is that there is an âurbanâ and a ârural.â What exactly do these terms mean? In the 2016 US presidential election, that split was imagined by one political party as a racial and class divide, between âmulticulturalâ and âeducatedâ white urban dwellers and poor rural uneducated âwhites.â We should be suspicious of this oversimplification.
In the configurations of race, class, and gender that map the megacities that now cover huge swaths of the United States, Indigenous peoples are disappeared. In the statistics that account for the racial and economic fabric of the United States, the racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples disappears them. These cities rose in the ashes of Indigenous places and gained their prosperity from capitalizing on the same abundance that nourished our economies for thousands of years. These megacities, the âurban,â now serve as hubs for a capitalism that operates transnationally and globally. These are places that are served up as imaginary nodes of progress, cited as epitomes of âfreedomâ for a mobile âcreativeâ class.
In 2002, Richard Florida, the economist author of The Rise of the Creative Class, graphically illustrated five major cities, with their âcreativeâ classes surrounded by poorer, suburban âserviceâ classes, and with small pockets of âworking classâ residents in their peripheries. These âclassâ geographies reflect the intensity of financial centers, surrounded by those there to service them while being pushed to the periphery, unable to live in the intensified gentrification created by housing-market values and shifting racial codes.2 This core embedded in these inner cities represent âcreative classâ jobs and housing that are 73.8 percent white.3 The racial and multicultural are mostly accounted for in âservice classâ jobs, which they are often pushed into once white suburbs are transformed by immigration, while any âworking classâ thins.
In the United States and Canada, capitalist interests have sought to represent their labor policies as benign among peoples pushed into diaspora. Capitalism in North America presents in the establishment of multicultural democracies that have promised equity, progress, and opportunity for all. This benign reading of capitalism has become eclipsed in the twenty-first century as the facts of capitalâs voracious needs and the violence of resource wars have now pushed myriad peoples into the realities of established settler-colonial xenophobia.
The Indigenous peoples of the North American continent are not represented in these megacities (even when they are greatly present) because they are associated with another narrative, that of âfrontiersâ and of a past rather than a future. Indigenous peoples, characterized as the primitive past, anchor the narratives of progress that built these megacities on their lands, cities that disappear their difference within the hierarchies that keep our capitalist relations in place. Indigenous peoples are very present in these cities and the environments that they are also a part of. A US Census report states that âin 2010, the majority of the American Indian and Alaska Native alone-or-in-combination population (78 percent) lived outside of American Indian and Alaska Native areas.â In this same report much is made of race: âNearly half of the American Indian and Alaska Native population reported multiple races.â4 The US Census produces a ârationalizedâ statement of the nation-stateâs biopolitical interest in the management of its âpopulations.â In the above assessment, the United States declares that the population deemed âAmerican Indian and Alaskan Nativeâ statistically exceeds a state expectation of its place and composition. It is a âpopulationâ that exceeds the boundaries of its colonization and its racialization. When the myriad peoples of Turtle Island were colonized, they were rationalized, singularly reduced to a race, âIndian,â putting a numerical quantity on their bountiful multiplicity.
The implication of this constant numerical assessment of the assimilation of Indigenous peoples reveals an ardent hope. The nation-state (the United States, in this case) dutifully accounts for the moment when such people are no longer numerically significant; until the moment when no âpureâ population defined by the original âcontractsâ of their status exists. At that time, âIndiansâ pass into the general population with âotherâ mixed, minoritized, and racialized populations without claims to treaties and sovereignties. In the face of this rational epistemology, those who attempt to live on as Indigenous often report the affective weight of being an ontological and moral challenge to the dominant order. In this setting, the relations that inform the fight for the Mni Sose at Standing Rock and for the Arctic seem absent, or unrecognizable. In urban settings Indigenous peoples suffer from the same kinds of âenvironmentalâ disasters that have become familiar to many. We suffer from the failure of systems that serve capital but not people who are insignificant to it, from the fate of those whose labor is not needed, or who are no longer legibleâthe homeless, the addicted, and the old. These great hubs of capitalist life have relations and a âlifestyleâ that is now so ascendant that we might mistake it as a natural force. Yet, these lives we live, however nourished or abandoned by capitalist infrastructure, are actually lives with profound relations.
What are these relations? How do they make us? Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellow Knives Dine) reminds of these relations in his Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition in his Indigenous reading of Marx: â[A] mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce [it].â5
The modes of life that capitalism produces are profoundly anchored by hierarchies of race, class, and gender. They present as places of great excitement, great extremes of income and consumption, and the capitalist vie joyeuse for some. Yet, these are increasingly âurban,â cities within cities that are themselves only nodes in great streams of capitalist activity that stretch across our worlds. As sociologist and geographer Deborah Cowen points out, our cities are now shaped by their roles in the three great flows of capital: production, consumption, and distribution.6 The wars that nations like the United States now fight are primarily those in protection of these flows, those of data, of goods or energy. The outsized presence of a state and corporatized (and militarized) police force in protection of the Black Snake at Mni Sose, the Missouri River, makes more sense when you understand the needs of global capital to protect ...