by M. Gouldhawke (Métis & Cree)
May 3, 2020
“We call Red Braid a ‘working class and Indigenous organization’ as a characterization of our politics.”
– Red Braid Alliance, Q & A about the “Stewart Squat,” April 28, 2020
“Look, I work for the phone company. I’ve had a lot of experience with semantics. So don’t try to lure me into some maze of circular logic.”
– A fictional service worker self-determining that the fictional customer, Elaine Benes, isn’t always right
The response by the Red Braid Alliance to recent criticisms by various Indigenous youths (including women/queer/trans/two-spirit youths), and other community members, sidesteps about as much as it clarifies.
In reply to a social critique, voiced by multiple Indigenous persons and their supporters, in real life as well as online, Red Braid retreats inward toward the individual who defends their personal membership within their specific organization and their word-wounded personal dignity. The organization, additionally, and incredibly, makes a political claim to a collective Indigenous identity through an individualized politics in their Q & A about their so-called “Stewart Squat.”
While our survival as distinct peoples is in fact tied up in “politics,” our own as well as that of the colonizers, Indigenous identity extends beyond the typical understanding of politics common to non-Native activists and the general population.
Indigeneity operates at multiple levels simultaneously (and differently at each level), consisting of both our own understanding of ourselves and also as something imposed on us and regulated by the colonial state. Indigeneity is a multi-faceted and multi-interpreted experience, but it is a collective one first of all, being both collectively constituted and also framed by the invading colonial society as a whole, not just by individual settlers.
Red Braid, in their written documents and statements, claim to reject an “essentialized experience” as the “only bellwether of anti-oppressive leadership” (see their document “White Abolitionist Multiplicity.”)
They also claim to not “essentialize marginalized identities as markers of political radicalism or authenticity” (see their Q & A about the “Stewart Squat”), and this analysis would logically seem to be applicable both externally to society at large and internally to the group itself.
But when it comes to Indigenous and supporter community criticism directed at them from the outside, Red Braid appears to do an 180 degree turn and deploy the same essentializing of individual Indigenous persons’ and women’s identities to defend themselves as an organization, and to defend their collective identity as a self-proclaimed “Indigenous” (as well as working class) group.
While “anti-oppressive identity politics” are criticized by Red Braid because they are said to contain at their core the “idealist assumption that recruiting racialized people into state and civil society institutions will somehow make Canadian and US society less racist,” the same analysis is not consistently applied to their own group.
It’s not at all clear how or why recruiting three Indigenous members after the organization’s formation would automatically transform the group into one that even had a basic understanding of Indigeneity or settler colonialism, let alone make them into an “Indigenous organization.”
Incredibly, Red Braid even republishes in their recent response a modified version of a facebook post by one of their white members, Teresa Dettling, who angrily and insultingly lashed out at an Indigenous person (who is also not a cis-gendered man, from my understanding at least), with Dettling claiming she had “survived far worse that [sic] you you fucking coward.”
Red Braid removed the last, most insulting part from the post, and publishes a backhanded apology, where Teresa says, “I apologize for saying that. It’s not appropriate for a white person to assume what an Indigenous person has suffered; I did not mean to claim I have suffered more than an Indigenous person.”
But it’s not at all clear here whether she didn’t understand that she was talking to an Indigenous person. At any rate, it stands as another example of Red Braid’s white arrogance and entitlement.
In the three statements released by Red Braid in response to criticism, a constant refrain is one of supposed erasure and false assumptions about the extent of Indigenous and women’s leadership and agency within the group.
However, choosing to allow a white man and white women to lead your group and act as it’s primary writers and spokespeople is also a form of agency that anyone can decide to exert, and it’s unclear why the wider Native community would supposedly be more responsible for those kinds of decisions than the persons within the group who are actually making them.
Red Braid says in their Q & A that they deleted a comment from someone who said they felt a “woman is being exploited,” in regards to Red Braid’s live stream from their occupation, because according to Red Braid, “the assumption that Indigenous people from poor and homeless communities are incapable of political agency, leadership, and vision goes against everything we fight for.”
However, exploitation, as I explained in my previous article about Red Braid’s occupation, is not a form of mind control or hypnosis, but the daily bread of capitalism, a conscious decision of participation that most of us make each day in order to get by.
When I go to my job (when I have one to go to, which also depends more on the capitalists than on me), I don’t think of myself as being an absolute fool under the spell of my boss, who is in actual fact a secret wizard or cult leader capable of melting my mind. I think of myself as someone who needs to get paid, and who only has certain options, as laid out by society more than anything else, more than just by my personal wishes.
Of course, capitalism promotes an ideology of the formal freedom of the individual, but this is also something we reproduce through our daily activity, a kind of “common sense” reinforced by a lived reality we must rationalize one way or another (see the writing of Christine Delphy and Barbara Fields for example.)
Red Braid, in their response statements, also seem to be trying to give off the appearance that they are only being criticized by a tiny few people on the internet, when the actual fact is that these criticisms have been circulating among the wider Indigenous community in real life, and in semi-private social networks for a while now. And you know what they say about appearances.
Who Made Who? Ain’t Nobody Told You?
In their Q & A, and the “Indigenous dignity” statement by one of their members, Red Braid admits to being a majority white and non-Indigenous group of “about 25 active members,” with only three Indigenous members, two of whom form an Indigenous Leadership Council under the Red Braid umbrella.
Red Braid’s claim to be an “Indigenous organization” (as well as a working class one) remains contorted and contrived, based simply on individualized political choices of group affiliation, the superficial self-adoption of Indigenous “politics” by each non-Native member, and the active participation as a “Leadership Council” of two Indigenous members (now adding a third since their “Stewart” occupation statements were released).
According to themselves, the two (at the time) Indigenous Leadership Council members joined Red Braid around a year after the group had renamed itself as the Alliance Against Displacement (AAD) in 2014 (moving on from its previous name as the Social Housing Alliance.)
Indigeneity is a multi-faceted and multi-interpreted thing, and politics is a part of that, but it is not generally accepted by the wider Native community (or specific nations) as something which non-Natives can simply apply to themselves as a self-help remedy, just because it sounds like a good idea in their heads.
Indigeneity is not a political homeopathic treatment for feelings of alienation (or whatever) that non-Native activists may be experiencing. Magical thinking in regards to identity only goes so far, and frankly appears absurd to actual Indigenous people.
Métis scholar Darren O’Toole (2020) and settler scholar Darryl Leroux (2019), building on the work of professor Circe Sturm (2011), have written about social movements of white people involved in “race shifting” and “racial homeopathy,” such as the fabled “Eastern Metis”, in which individuals believe they can make a personal choice to move away from their own whiteness on the basis of real or imagined Native “blood,” no matter how distant or how little, a form of blood quantum that has no minimum.
Red Braid’s claim differs from those kinds of movements in content, if not in form, since they instead seem to be saying that it’s possible for a non-Indigenous group to become Indigenous as a matter of personal political choice, no matter how few Indigenous members their organization has. Here we have a kind of political quantum with no minimum. A voluntaristic and individualistic assumption of a previously existing collective identity, to serve a political end.
The “Eastern Metis” movement, although starting from a racial definition of Indigeneity, also follow a political trajectory in their fruitless search for “Native” rights as defined under Canadian law. This movement partakes of Canada’s social and legal construction of Indigeneity as ‘race,’ and Canada’s defining and re-defining of Indigeneity follows a political purpose as well, that being the elimination of Indigenous peoples as distinct political collectives who possess a type of sovereignty that undermines Canada’s claims.
As peoples rather than ‘races,’ Indigenous nations can and did adopt other persons, but there is no precedent of self-adoption by individuals or groups, and there is no possible adoption of a predominantly white political group by a Native individual or even three individuals, independent of a wider community.
Indigeneity is not a political ideology that one can shop around for on the capitalist marketplace of ideas, or a club one can be inducted into by a single person, or even a few people. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
If Red Braid didn’t mean to say that they became Indigenous because of their political preferences, then maybe we have an unfortunate case of a Marxian slip, and they meant they are simply anti-colonial, as even white people can be, at least in theory if not always in practice. Under their former group name, Alliance Against Displacement, they tended more toward framing themselves in this way.
The Nuu-Chah-Nulth member of Red Braid, Ma Maa Tea, who wrote the recent statement “Indigenous dignity” in response to community criticisms, says she was part of the re-naming of the group as “Red Braid,” based in part on the Indigenous teachings given to her by an elder when she was a youth about “the braid.” What’s not made clear, and perhaps doesn’t need to be, is what if anything these teachings said, or didn’t say, about the relationship between white-majority groups and the Native community in general.
Many Indigenous laws and treaties across this continent, such as the Two Row Wampum and the Numbered Treaties, from an Indigenous perspective are meant to maintain some level of separation, at least politically, between Indigenous nations and the white settler nation-state and population, so that we are not being legislated over by white leaders.
Strategic unity does not require uniformity, or organizational integration. Different societies and social struggles can work in parallel and in harmony with each other without having to all be thrown into a melting pot together.
When the Métis of Red River (now Winnipeg), in defiance of Canada’s threatened invasion, formed their Provisional Government in 1869, they included more than just their own people, also allowing white people and the local Anishinaabe people to participate, however imperfectly.
In 1885, during the Northwest Resistance, the Métis and Cree (and other Indigenous people) mostly had to go it alone, despite some valiant efforts by settler supporters like Honoré Jaxon.
Some Métis, even some of my own extended family members, fought on the side of Canada against our own people in 1885 and afterwards. Individual Indigenous identity on its own, as a panacea, is a bit more than a tough sell for me, personally. Who we are is important. But so is what we do, how we do it and why.
There is no one formula for Native and non-Native collaboration, or respectful distance and parallel co-existence, that will be universally applicable across all space and time. And there is no one organization capable of synthesizing Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles within it, and it’s not clear why we would want that even if we could have it. Diversity is strength just as much as it’s a fact of life.
One thing that is clear though, is that as peoples, from our perspective, we’ve yet to cede our sovereignty to others, by treaty or otherwise.
The Politics of Visiting
Indigenous people are the original and the real social network on these lands. We know each other and talk with each other in real life, most of which non-Natives will never see as they browse the world wide web.
When not self-isolating due to the latest pandemic, we practice a politics of visiting, which is indispensable to not only our collective cultures, but our own personal sense of self (see the The Mamawi Project zine, “kîyokêwin.”)
Even if Indigeneity did consist of an essentialized personal political commitment, it’s not at all clear why it would be to a very specific white-majority membership organization located in a suburb of a city in the Pacific Northwest, rather than anywhere else, rather than to one’s own people, to the wider Indigenous community in the area where one lives, and to the Indigenous peoples of the continent and the world.
The politics of kîyokêwin (visiting) asks that one spend time with their relatives, not that one work to make a white-majority membership organization comfortable with their own political claims, aspirations and sense of personal and group identity.
Contrary to the politics of visiting, where Indigenous people share with and support each other, Red Braid appears to engage first of all in a politics of organizational top-down synthesis, where they attempt to recruit new members through their engagement with what they call their “social base” and to bring already existing social struggles into their orbit.
In fact, going beyond the realm of superficial appearances, one can even dive into Red Braid’s own organizational documents and newspapers and find much of this analysis laid out by the group themselves, if you can make it through their convoluted language and their self-declared importance. They write of their “social base,” which they conceive of as being separated into “tangible” and “conceptual” portions, and the need of their organization to draw from both, while moving the latter toward the former.
“We aim to politicize the struggles of the subaltern by offering infrastructure, analytic lenses, and support as individuals continue to develop consciousness through action and study,” says Red Braid. What they don’t explain is who asked them to do this, and to do it in this way, whether struggles can be political and politicized without Red Braid’s enlightened guidance, and if anyone really calls themselves a “subaltern.”
From the perspective of synthesis, other organizations and social struggles can come to be seen as competition if they can’t be controlled or drawn from, which may have played a part in Red Braid’s escape from Vancouver to the suburbs in 2014, in the wake of the 2013 solidarity actions for the Mi’kmaq of Elsipogtog and the 2010 anti-Olympics resistance.
Here we can also take into account Red Braid’s (partially understandable) aversion to the entrenched connection between government social workers and social movements in the Downtown Eastside and Vancouver’s status as an “imperial metropole,” as Red Braid puts it (but again, it’s not clear how Surrey, as a suburb, is not part of the imperial metropole of Vancouver.)
Red Braid, crucially, has yet to even address the concerns brought up by several Indigenous youths about the organization’s recruitment methods and their disrespectful and tokenizing behaviour toward these same youths. Social struggle is all well and good to some people, up to a certain point. The point of diminishing returns on investment. Then it becomes time, apparently, to move on and leave other people in your dust.
Accountability is not just an activist concept of recent vintage for Indigenous peoples. Métis and Cree writers and organizers like Maria Campbell, Sylvia McAdam, Harold Cardinal, Art Napoleon and Jesse Thistle have explained in their writing and speaking the concept and principle of wâhkôhtowin, where humans are not the centre of the universe but are instead placed in a web of reciprocal relations between all living and non-living things.
Connected to wâhkôhtowin are several other principles or laws, such as miyo-wîcêhtowin, which is the intentional cultivation of good relations, as opposed to the tolerance of just any way of relating to each other, however harmful. Another law or principle is sihtoskâtowin, which means supporting each other and pulling together to strengthen each other (Napoleon 2014).
In a survey of Cree elders conducted by Art Napoleon, all Cree laws or principles were considered important, but the “most consistently identified were tapahtîmisowin, a form of humility roughly implying, ‘to never think higher of yourself than others,’ and kihciyimitowin, ‘an ultimate, sacred-like respectful thought for one another.’”
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the qualities that Red Braid appears to be lacking most of all are precisely tapahtîmisowin (humility) and kihciyimitowin (sacred respect). But one thing that is clear is that Cree, Métis and other Indigenous cultures are not a free for all, where just any behaviour goes, but a collective community of material and social sharing, of reciprocal responsibilities as well as freedoms.
The Ingredients of Indigeneity
The largest gathering of Indigenous people I ever attended in Vancouver might not have been a demonstration or “traditional” cultural gathering, but an AC/DC concert. Nobody who’s a fan of AC/DC (and not all of our people are, of course) feels they’re any less Native because of it, just because the band isn’t Native, but nobody thinks they really need to take out a membership card in the official AC/DC fan club either.
Sometimes you have to have been there to really get it. Sometimes the superficial appearance of things to the non-Native doesn’t really represent the Native reality underneath. The internet, even books, even meeting a few Natives, can’t tell you the whole story.
In their “Indigenous Leadership Council” statement, Red Braid interestingly puts forward a definition of Indigeneity and colonialism that in some ways is the opposite of the one put forward by Red Power movement organizer and writer Howard Adams, who was active from the 1960’s up to the ‘90s.
Red Braid says that “to be Indigenous means we have not been colonized,” and “Indigeneity is not defined by colonial dispossession.”
Adams, in contrast, frequently referred to our people as having been colonized, while also still fighting against colonialism in the present day.
Red Braid claims that “As nations, Indigenous peoples are outside the regular production and reproduction of capitalism.”
Adams and his Métis colleague Ron Bourgeault, in contrast, repeatedly developed an analysis of colonialism as an evolving process (not a singular event), which eventually forced capitalism upon our territories and people, after an earlier fur-trading stage of colonialism that was more akin to mercantilism and feudalism. This was also an analysis backed up by Adams’ comrade at the time, Lee Maracle in Vancouver, also of Métis parentage on her mother’s side.
During an interview with Adams in 1980, Hartmut Lutz asked him to define what makes an “Indian” an Indian. In response, Adams broke it down, somewhat categorically and in point form.
Here I’ll paraphrase Adams’ points:
1. Whether you look ‘Native.’ Here Adams admits that he can pass as white to the outside observer, that he doesn’t experience the racial oppression his relatives do.
In his writing, apart from the interview, Adams explained that in his home community in Saskatchewan he experienced a different form of racism based on local knowledge. White people knew he came from a Métis family and discriminated against him because of this, even if, as Adams admitted, the racism was not as extreme or of the same kind.
In the interview with Lutz, Adams is very clear and open about feeling he has to admit that he doesn’t experience racial oppression due to how he looks (as all of us who are somewhere on the subjective spectrum of being “white coded” should, myself included.)
Here, Adams identifies a primary aspect of the Indigenous experience as the imposition, from the outside, of colonial racism. We can go even further in our description and say that Adams is describing a form of ‘abjection’ (or oppression) and racial ‘ascription,’ by which we mean the construction and application of racial criteria by an outside (white) group to Native peoples in general, based on appearance, rather than on the specifics of individuals or different Indigenous peoples.
However, we can also admit that appearance plays a role within Indigenous societies, as Adams did as well. Appearance is not the sole arbiter of Indigeneity, in our societies or the colonizers’, but it’s not irrelevant either.
2. Indigenous culture and way of life, but also not as an absolute, as Adams says he means living “relatively close to a lot of things” in regards to Indigenous culture and lifestyle. Here we shift from the colonizers’ viewpoint back to our own.
3. The value system held by Indigenous people, what we consider to be important. Values such as sharing, collective living, and our relationship to the environment. In contrast to the white mainstream which is competitive and profit oriented.
4. “Nationalistic” sentiment, that is, having a strong sense of “Indianess about you,” a strong feeling of identity, not just personally, but also of collective identity, of belonging to a collective.
There can be contradictions here too, says Adams, as he recounts being on stage with people who looked more ‘Native’ than him but who tried to partly pass as white and claimed to not have been discriminated against in society.
“In Canada, if you look Indian, you’re going to be discriminated against, and to deny that is really to commit a lie,” says Adams.
Moving beyond Adams and looking at Canada’s legal construction of Indigeneity as ‘race,’ we can see how the manufactured categories of “First Nations” (Indian), Métis and Inuit correspond to the political needs of the settler state more so than any real distinction made by Indigenous peoples themselves. Métis and Inuit are nations or peoples, for example, while “First Nations” is a pan-Indigenous category that includes all other Native peoples.
Canada’s status system for First Nations people also follows a type of political quantum with no minimum, like Red Braid’s in form if not in content, rather than using the blood quantum system of the United States (which is also political).
The way this political quantum works in Canada is that if you are a Métis or Inuit person (or First Nations person whose family lost status somewhere along the line), you don’t have “Indian” (First Nations) status. If you marry and have children with a status “Indian,” your children will be reduced to the second-tier status, despite both parents being Indigenous, and your grandchild can lose their status entirely if one of their parents is a non-status person, even if all four grandparents are Indigenous.
We can also elaborate here how racial oppression stretches beyond just the targeting of persons with a “Native appearance” (itself socially constructed under colonialism) as some Natives in what is now known as Eastern Canada, who were long ago “mixed” in ancestry and at times falling somewhere on the subjective white-coded spectrum, were still taken and forced into residential schools because they lived in and were part of Native communities, not because of how they looked.
Canada’s pan-Indigenous policies, laws and court decisions, from Section 35 to Indian status, also in part lay the groundwork for the fraudulent claims to Indigenous rights made by white people such as the mystical “Eastern Metis,” who in actuality are making a claim as Canadians to Canadian rights, often in open conflict with actual Indigenous peoples (respect due to the Mi’kmaq and other nations who are defending themselves from these phonies and allying with the actual Métis of the Prairies who also oppose this identity theft.)
Canadians want to get rid of us one way or another. If they can’t beat us, they want to join us, but only in order to drain Indigeneity of any specific meaning, to ‘equalize the rights of all Canadians’, to take advantage of (steal) educational supports earmarked for Indigenous people, and to quash any opposition to the Canadian state.
Settler colonialism is not just the overt physical violence of the police, military and racist settlers, although that remains very common, but is also the attempted political and cultural assimilation of Indigenous peoples out of existence. Violent attacks leave memories and can provoke a forceful retaliation from surviving family and group members.
Assimilation works at a deeper and more insidious level, as it seeks to wipe out our memories and sense of collective belonging, and thereby a strong potential source of resistance. Organized identity theft by white posers appears as a kind of reverse assimilation, attempting to drain Indigeneity of any specific meaning by over-generalizing it to all Canadians, using an individualized rights framework that is alien to the Native worldview.
Nice to meet you! Where are you from? And can I see a membership card please?
Red Braid’s understanding of the urban Indigenous experience also appears contorted in their position statement on “Decolonization and the anti-colonial struggles of urban Indigenous kin” (Indigenous Leadership Council.)
The Métis Nation, who came to be and survived as a people in large part due to being the majority population of what would become the city of Winnipeg, are not even mentioned in this Red Braid document (the Métis also being among the founders of the cities of Prince Albert and Edmonton.)
In another of Red Braid’s documents, their Organizational Strategy, the Métis are in fact mentioned, but the Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 is confused with the later Northwest Resistance of 1885, which took place in a different part of our territory, as Red Braid also incorrectly claims that the RCMP’s fore-bearers, the North West Mounted Police, were the ones who overthrew the Provisional Government at Red River (Winnipeg) despite the force not even being formed until three years later, in 1873 (spoiler alert, it was actually the army who rampaged through Red River in 1870.)
The esoteric and disconnected knowledge of the non-Native activist or academic often isn’t much of a match for the local knowledge of Indigenous people. Even after the activist group or educational institution has recruited a few Natives.
This lack of understanding of Indigenous dynamics is in fact a pattern with Red Braid, as I previously showed in an article I wrote in response to a statement (as Alliance Against Displacement at the time) of theirs where they confused Indigenous law with Canadian law and made mistaken claims about the ruling of a Canadian judge on an injunction against the Wet’suwet’en people. But this isn’t just about me, it’s also about the wider Native community. Red Braid’s mistaken claims on the injunction ruling could have easily been disproven by anyone, since the text of the ruling is public.
Personally, I would not have met one of Red Braid’s three current Indigenous members, despite having attended some of their events (and events which Red Braid members attended), if I hadn’t gone to last year’s Hobiyee, the Nisga’a New Year celebrations which are also held in East Vancouver and which have nothing to do with Red Braid. We briefly met and interacted in a group situation, as regular people, from my perspective at least, not as members of whatever organizations, and that was that.
My intuition later (wrong or not) was that I was being gate-kept from the Indigenous members of Red Braid, and that the white and non-Native majority membership of Red Braid wasn’t actually interested in Indigenous peoples or movements except for what they can extract from us for their own purposes. There was a very clear disconnect between Red Braid’s method of organizing and the already existing Native community and movement.
Despite this, I previously did not concern myself too much with the two Indigenous members of Red Braid, let alone harbour any qualms with them. Only now that one of them has published a misleading statement in concert with others by Red Braid does it concern me, beyond just my general take on Red Braid as a majority non-Native membership organization.
We are taught by our elders to approach others with a good heart and a good mind, and this is something I try to take to heart, maybe not always practising it perfectly, but trying to always stay open and learning.
Personally, I had been somewhat wary of Red Braid from the start, having seen first hand one of it’s primary white leader’s past behaviour (very purposefully organizing against the Indigenous movement, and others, for which he has yet to be accountable for), going back to the early 2000’s in Vancouver. But with some new membership and time passed I thought there might be a possibility for change.
After seeing the group’s workings and hearing about Indigenous youths’ negative experiences with Red Braid from before the “Stewart” occupation, during the Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement, my earlier intuition was re-affirmed, socially not just personally.
Red Braid talks a lot about a “strategic unity” between Indigenous people and non-Native working class people, but without engaging at all with the long and well documented history of this dynamic in Vancouver as described by Lee Maracle for example, from her 1975 book Bobbi Lee up to her 2017 book My Conversations with Canadians (and even before that, in Native movement newspapers.)
Lee Maracle, in her writing, even constructively criticized Rolf Knight’s book “Indians at Work,” praising it for dismantling the myth that Natives don’t work, but also pointing out that Canada’s residential schools made manual labourers out of Native children too, by design.
The history in Vancouver of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the working class, and of being workers themselves, for instance in forming the “Bows and Arrows” longshoremen union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Vancouver in 1906, is also seemingly irrelevant to Red Braid at this point in time, in light of how they construct the working class and Indigenous peoples as separate categories with a supposedly essential strategic unity.
Previously, Red Braid members were a little more humble and themselves proposed this unity as something that has to be constructed, that doesn’t come automatically.
“It’s not enough to say that our struggles are united,” wrote two Red Braid (Alliance Against Displacement) members in 2016, “we have to find better ways of practicing what we preach and participating in both of the struggles against colonialism and capitalism.”
However, this also puts forward a false line that in effect denies the history of the Indigenous resistance movement in Vancouver and its relationship to the anti-capitalist movement in the city, attempting to present Red Braid as re-inventing the wheel when it comes to combining the two struggles.
Now it seems times have changed, and “enough” is whatever Red Braid decides is enough, Meanwhile, Indigenous people better just watch what they say and get used to it.
Red Braid appears to put forward the “working class” as an affirmable identity on equal footing to the “Indigenous,” despite the former being almost purely a creation of capitalism and a category which a social revolution, led by the workers themselves, would need to dissolve in order for the workers to liberate themselves. This is unlike the Indigenous movement, where we can and do re-assert our identities through struggle. A struggle that can also contribute to generalized anti-capitalist resistance.
Unfortunately for Red Braid, Natives aren’t prone to respecting grandiose claims to white entitlement or enlightened white leadership. We support our people, and we support collective resistance, not organizational obedience.
“To make the liberal an individual took a cast of thousands, most of them in the wings.”
– Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History, 2016
References:
Pandemics, Schools and Squats in a Civil Society built on Stolen Land, by M. Gouldhawke
A Materialist Feminism Is Possible, by Christine Delphy (PDF)
Racecraft, by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields
Racial Homeopathy, and “Eastern Métis” Identity Claims, by Darren O’Toole
Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, by Darryl Leroux
Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, by Circe Sturm
We need to return to the principles of Wahkotowin, by Maria Campbell
Kîyokêwin, the Act of Visiting, by the Mamawi Project
“Wâhkôhtowin is like ‘love thy neighbour’ on steroids,” by Jesse Thistle
Pekiwewin (coming home): advancing good relations with Indigenous people experiencing homelessness
Key terms and concepts for exploring Nîhiyaw Tâpisinowin, the Cree worldview, by Art Napoleon
Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, by Sylvia McAdam
Capitalism, the Final Stage of Exploitation, by Lee Carter (Maracle)
Land Back: The matrilineal descent of modern Indigenous land reclamation, by M. Gouldhawke
Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land, by Tania Willard and Andrew Parnaby