Give Thanks for Native Resistance!
Give Thanks for Native Resistance
By the Red Guards - Los Angeles
Every year, around this time of Thanksgiving, we as communists within the settler-colonialist capitalist-imperialist empire of the United States come together with our native and indigenous comrades who mourn for the war waged against their people by the settler-colonialists 400 years ago.
The third Thursday of November is known as the National Day of Mourning, called forth by the Wampanoag Nation in 1970.
We as anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, anti-racists, as proponents of national liberation for all oppressed nationalities, we as communists, attempt to highlight certain points in our political work:
1.) This country’s founding was on the genocide of this land’s original inhabitants, the indigenous peoples and their nations. This colors all aspects of all structures built literally and figuratively upon the U.S. All institutions coming from this reality are poisoned by white supremacy.
2.) This genocide, the American Holocaust, contrary to mainstream education and rhetoric, did not end; there was no time during our history, including the present, where the settler-colonialists ceased in attacking the indigenous and native peoples. Instead, what happened were the implementation of more covert genocidal ways of destroying the native and indigenous peoples. Through the policy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” proposed by Capt. Richard H. Pratt, focused more on the annihilation of the education and culture of native and indigenous peoples. This policy continues in the U.S., most evident in the native and indigenous peoples of the Lakota whose children are systematically kidnapped by state forces who then send their children to Euro-American foster homes where they are brought up detached from their cultural and national identity.
3.) The land and territory of the native and indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada is still being stolen and under attack by outside forces. Most famous, up until recently, was the Keystone XL Pipeline/Tar Sands. However, President Obama said his administration would not go ahead with the final phase of construction. But President Elect Trump vows to continue it. This is just one area of struggle. Another area of land under attack is the Black Hills - He Sapa in Lakota - where the U.S. illegally seized the land after the discovery of gold. Till this day, the Black Hills remains an area where its native and indigenous people were displaced, having refused a federal settlement in lieu of that land actually returning to its people.
4.) For several months, native revolutionaries of approximately 200 indigenous nations, such as the Standing Rock Sioux, have gathered at Standing Rock in the Dakotas in opposition to the construction of the 1,200-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline by Energy Transfers Partners. Natives have suffered severe state repression at the hands of the pig-thug security guards for the construction company who sent in attack dogs, as well as local law enforcement agencies - all of which are defended by the state as the proper handling of rowdy natives, a legacy the U.S. settler-colonialist empire has gained violent and precise expertise in. The indigenous and their non-indigenous supporters have been beaten, shot at with rubber bullets and tear gas. They have been pepper-sprayed and sprayed with weaponized water during 20 degree below-freezing temperature.
5.) The native and indigenous people of the U.S. (and elsewhere) have the right to self-determination up to and including secession from the terrorist U.S. empire. Whether their struggle will manifests itself in this way, we do not know. Currently, native and indigenous people are at the forefront of revolutionary movements, including women’s rights, environmentalism, anti-gentrification, anti-capitalism, human rights, etc. Our duty as communists is to be with them in arms, literally and figuratively.
Four hundred years later after the first Thanksgiving, the white supremacist twisting of native traditions of many indigenous nations including the Wampanoag Nation, the resistance at Standing Rock proves, if you needed it, that while colonialism has been outmoded by a more vicious and normalize type of hyper-state-violence of capitalism-imperialism, the principle oppression for the Indigenous Nations remains white supremacist settler-colonialism.
Force only understands force. Violence only trembles in the presence of greater violence (which we should refer to simply as resistance).We don’t think the natives protecting the water and their land is nonviolent. It is a strategic defensive. What comes next will be an offensive and then ultimately victory - but what is needed, and what we should be mobilizing for, is emphasizing and working to connect the Standing Rock resistance with the larger strategy of proletarian-and-oppressed revolution to once and for all lay a fatal blow to the beast of white supremacist settler-colonialist capitalism-imperialism. Because just like in killing a snake, you must cut off its head in order to effectively neutralize it.
Long live the native and indigenous peoples of the U.S., Canada and the world!
Long live the native and indigenous resistance!
Long live national liberation for all oppressed nations!
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