Student Interview Series Part XI

Working Intersectionally to Abolish White Supremacy:

An Interview with Alyosha Goldstein

by Luis J. Beltrán-Álvarez

In what follows, I interview Alyosha Goldstein, who is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Goldstein dedicates his research to the study of colonialism and decolonization, critical race and Indigenous Studies, social movements, and social and political theory. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Duke University Press, 2012) and Editor of Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014). He also co-edited (with Alex Lubin) “Settler Colonialism,” a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 4 (Fall 2008) and (with Jodi Byrd, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy), “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism,” a special issue of Social Text 135 (forthcoming in June 2018).

 I chose to interview Professor Goldstein because he is a recognized academic on the topics of Native American Studies, settler colonialism, and dispossession and capitalism linked to race. Also, Professor Goldstein works hand-in-hand with the Native Americans groups, both in academic production and in current social movements. Another important aspect of interviewing him is that he links the studies of settler colonialism and black political thought to work on territories of the United States, including my home, Puerto Rico.

 Beltran (B): How did you become interested in studying settler colonialism and Native American communities? Why did you decide to pursue your research through the field of American Studies? How do your personal life and your academic work intertwine?

Goldstein (G): My first book, Poverty in Common, which began as my dissertation, sought to understand international development and modernization frameworks of the mid-twentieth century cold war era as part of the longer historical context of imperialism and colonialism. I began by asking how forms of liberal governmentality in the United States during this historical conjuncture relied on the construction of a single category of “the poor” and how liberal governance sought to secure its own authority and contain radical challenges to the capitalist world system (at “home” and “abroad”) through programs emphasizing the inclusion and participation of impoverished people. The community action programs of the War on Poverty exemplified this approach and were also directly related to more radical social movement groups such as the Black Panthers, the Young Lords Party, and the American Indian Movement, members of which had often worked in government-sponsored antipoverty endeavors such as Mobilization for Youth and became frustrated with their reformist orientation and wanted to make antipoverty organizing part of more expansive liberationist or revolutionary politics.The project emerged from an interest in scholarship on colonialism, subaltern studies, and postcolonial theory. I wanted, as someone situated in what is currently the United States, to better understand how this work could inform an analysis of the U.S. The field of American Studies appealed to me for this reason—not so much because I wanted to study “America,” as that I thought it was important to begin from my own location and situate this in a global historical context—and because, during the 1990s when I began graduate school, it was an interdisciplinary project significantly shaped by the Birmingham School of cultural studies (Stuart Hall, etc.). Work such as Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s edited collection Cultures of United States Imperialism provided me with a starting point, but, to a certain extent, seemed to sustain the idea of U.S imperialism as happening elsewhere or as exclusively past. I was interested in trying to understand how the Black Panther Party’s linking their community survival programs to a global “intercommunal” revolutionary project was part of a radical anticolonial internationalism discussed in books such as Penny Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire; how the Young Lords Party organizing among the Puerto Rican diaspora in the U.S. mainland was grounded in an ongoing anticolonialism and independence movement on the island; and how the emergence of the American Indian Movement against police brutality against Native peoples connected to the founding of the International Indian Treaty Council and global Indigenous coalition building.

When I started working on my dissertation I had relatively little knowledge of Native American studies. The faculty with whom I was working were not especially knowledgeable of this scholarship, but they were supportive of my developing the project and research in the directions that interested me. Reading work by Vine Deloria Jr. was an enormously important point of departure for me. A brief reference in Custer Died for Your Sins to the National Congress of American Indians delegation to Puerto Rico during the 1950s became a central part of one of my chapters. I learned how the War on Poverty community action programs were some of the first instances where federal funds went directly to tribes without the Bureau of Indian Affairs serving as an intermediary, which tribes such as the Navajo Nation used in important ways to further assert self-determination and challenge the prevailing norms of colonial administration. Working on my dissertation and then revising this into my first book was my introduction to Native American studies scholarship and, although I would not describe myself as a Native American Studies or Critical Indigenous studies scholar, made clear that the work of such scholars needed to be at the center of any critical inquiry into U.S. imperialism and colonialism.

While working on Poverty in Common, it also became clear to me that part of the specificity of the U.S. context was understanding colonialism as a historical condition in the present and work such as that of Patrick Wolfe was useful in further clarifying the particularity of the ongoing settler colonial dynamics in places such as the U.S. I was interested in maintaining the specificity of this focus but also trying to understand its broad global circumstances. To this end, I co-edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly with my colleague Alex Lubin on settler colonialism which brought together scholars using the analytic lens of settler colonialism to critically address Palestine, South Africa, Hawai‘i, Argentina, Ethiopia, Mexico, and the U.S. For the issue I wrote an essay that sought to place the politics of Native American self-determination and white settler racism in the context of the then recently established UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The more I worked in such areas the more I began to learn about the field-defining work of scholars such as Joanne Barker, Jodi Byrd, Mishuana Goeman, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Audra Simpson, among many others. I continue to learn a great deal from being in conversation with my UNM colleague and friend, the Diné historian and scholar Jennifer Denetdale. The book project that I’m presently completing seeks to think with this scholarship, as well as critical ethnic studies and Black studies, to focus on the entanglements of U.S. colonialism, racial capitalism, and economies of dispossession and conciliation in the historical present.

I try to approach academic work as one part of an interrelated set of commitments. I’ve found that working collaboratively on various kinds of projects is important. Also key is trying to develop alternatives to the narrow form of educational institutions beyond the typical institutional and disciplinary boundaries of cultural and academic work. So, for instance, I’ve been working with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Mark Harris (both of whom are now at UBC) to organize an annual multi-day workshop that brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers, architects, curators, and performers in a communally-run arts space. I’m also a member of the coordinating committee for the SouthWest Organizing Project’s Albuquerque “campus” of the Universidad Sin Fronteras—a community-based anticolonial and anti-capitalist initiative that originated from a series of meetings in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2009.

(B): What is the role of academic research on settler colonialism in the political and social struggles of historical and contemporary Native Americans? How can we, as academics, undertake scholarship in ways that are ethically responsible to the people we study and write about? Have scholars of Native American nations in the U.S. begun to do a better job of addressing Vine Deloria, Jr.’s scathing criticisms of past practices?

(G): Academic research and writing is always only a small part of confronting and contesting the common sense and material conditions of the colonial present. Academic interventions are neither uniquely important nor uniquely irrelevant to political contestation. Depending on the specific intervention and circumstances, academic writing and research can contribute to everyday struggles against colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy and for social justice and emancipatory collective life in a variety of ways. While it is necessary to continuously develop and reimagine the terms of critical inquiry in this regard, these terms and critical analysis more broadly must be informed by the everyday contexts and power relations of social struggle against the reciprocal entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and cis ableism. It’s not enough to read and write about such struggles. This work has to emerge in some way from the difficult messiness of interacting and working with different people and groups. Theory comes from grappling with the particularities of those conditions historically and in the present and is only ever mistakenly “applied” to places and peoples. It begins from social struggle and is a collective and collaborative process of thinking together. Theory is not something limited to academic discourse—everyone theorizes. Nonetheless, the deep and sometimes contradictory relationship between scholarship and social struggles or everyday life can serve to shore up the power and privilege of institutions and individuals as much as it can be a means of dismantling and reimagining the social relationalities of present and future collective liberation. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker puts it quite clearly when she says that at the end of the day it comes down to how we treat one another. Speaking, writing, or otherwise working toward collective liberation is at best disingenuous if you are abusive, exploitative, disrespectful, or dishonest—or otherwise invested in exercising power over others—in your everyday relationships and interactions with other people.

Non-Native scholars writing about Native peoples—or really anyone not of the communities they study and write about, and in certain respects even for those scholars writing about their own communities—must make themselves accountable to the peoples and communities we write about and in some way with. We must listen; must be self-critical and assume that we understand less than we think we do; must understand that there are things that we won’t or shouldn’t know or have access to. Too often scholarship reenacts colonial violence in extraction and taking. The hackneyed liberal rhetoric of “giving voice” to and “making visible” oppressed communities is a self-aggrandizement and evasion, and, in this sense, merely reaffirms the prevailing order of power and privation. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples is a good starting point for thinking about how to go about these questions in a responsible and respectful way for students and scholars. Audra Simpson’s discussion in her book Mohawk Interruptus of what she calls ethnographic refusal is a brilliant reflection on this dynamic as well. Conducting research and writing in an ethically responsible way also means continuously acknowledging the broader conversations from which your work emerges and to which you hope to contribute. For instance, being aware of the ethics of citational practice and the power dynamics of citation are significant in this regard—not just citing white men or scholars with established careers, but also working against the egotism encouraged in the style of academic argumentation which rewards the appearance of individual “brilliance” and imagines ideas as a form of individual property rather than something shaped through collective engagement.

I believe scholarship is most useful when it follows the lead of and collaborates in some way with the people most affected by a given ensemble of power relations. At the same time, white people—and white men especially—are often willfully ignorant of our presumed entitlement and structural advantages. Similarly, the problem with the idea of being an “ally” as it’s often invoked is that this fails to account for one’s own complicity and entanglements. Settlers (although not a very precise term, I’ll provisionally use this term here as a short-hand reference) and anyone living on stolen land or under structures of racism or heteropatriarchy are complicit to various extents with those structures of power in ways that exceed our conscious awareness. I don’t think, for instance in terms of colonialism, that it’s useful to understand the position of non-Native people as allies to Native people in contesting colonialism on behalf of Native people. We must work with Native peoples toward decolonization because we ourselves are variously situated in relation to colonial structures and dynamics of power and must collectively dismantle those structures and dynamics. It’s not a selfless or charitable act. These are violent and inequitable circumstances of which we are a part, and we must therefore contribute to their ending and playing a part in the difficult work of collectively creating futures lived in relations of difference (something akin to what Grace Kyungwon Hong calls the “impossible politics of difference”).

(B): What are the primary goals of struggles against settler colonialism by Native American communities in the 21st century? Faced with a growing White Supremacy movement, the so-called “Alt-Right”, and xenophobia in the United States, what are the obligations of academics toward excluded peoples and Native Americans?

(G): I cannot speak on behalf of Native peoples’ goals in the twenty-first century. I think the work of groups such The Red Nation (https://therednation.org), Idle No More (http://www.idlenomore.ca), the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (http://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com), and Tohono O’odham Hemajkan Rights Network (https://www.facebook.com/pg/tohrn520/about/), as well as the initiatives to address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (#MMIWG) in North America are exemplary as anticolonial endeavors. The coalitional work of No One Is Illegal in Canada (http://www.nooneisillegal.org) is an important model as well.

I believe that academics need to de-exceptionalize our work as scholars. Academic scholarship can complement and work in tandem with activist knowledge production, journalism, community-based social engagement, and various forms of cultural work. Although there certainly are a small number of college and university faculty who are relatively privileged and can imagine themselves as in some way aligned with or are invested in reproducing an earlier era’s notion of academia as disengaged from the rest of the world, most are simply educational workers in an increasingly deskilled and underfunded “service”-oriented industry. (Currently in the U.S., according to the AAUP, more than 50 percent of all faculty appointments are part-time and over 70 percent of all teaching appointments in higher education are non-tenure-track positions.)

We have to work intersectionally and in coalition toward the abolition of white supremacy. It’s important not to disconnect the recent visibility of white supremacy and upsurge of racist authoritarianism and fascism from intensifying regimes of global capitalist predation and militarism. This is not to say that these are equivalent, but to insist that, in the U.S. context, Obama-era neoliberalism and the Democratic Party status quo are not the solution to Trumpist white nationalism.

(B): Recently, you have been writing about “Racial Capitalism.” What is the relationship between capitalism and race historically and in contemporary society? How can the concept of racial capitalism be a tool that helps to illuminate the ongoing struggles of those dispossessed by colonialism and neocolonialism?

(G): “On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism, and Settler Colonialism” is a paper that I presented at UCLA in October 2017 addressing the relationship between capitalism, race, and settler colonialism (https://www.academia.edu/35446492/_On_the_Reproduction_of_Race_Capitalism_and_Settler_Colonialism_).

As I note in that paper, following the work of Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Jodi Melamed, among others, the term “racial capitalism” is not intended to differentiate between capitalism in general and racial capitalism in particular, but to foreground racialization as constitutive for capitalism. Gender and sexuality are likewise not external but central to capitalism as well. As such, capitalism is a historically specific ensemble of social relations that change over time and in response to social antagonisms that remain unsettled and unsettling, as much as they are shaped by uneven control of resources and the means of production and distribution. Colonialism and neocolonialism remain historical formations distinct from racial capitalism. Yet understanding the racial, gendered, and sexual constitution of capitalism necessarily entails the historical and present-day role that colonization and colonialism play in relations of dispossession and possession more broadly. Moreover, this involves understanding that “so-called primitive accumulation,” as often equated with colonialism and slavery, is not simply the historical foundation of capitalist development but describes an ongoing relationship of forced incorporation—of land, labor, life, the more-than-human world—into capitalist social relations that is both reproduced and contested in the present.

(B): One of my first encounters with your work was with a paper you wrote about debt in Puerto Rico and the “Promesa Act.” What motivated your investigation of the case of Puerto Rico? How do you understand its relationship to your other work and research interests?

(G): Puerto Rico was at the center of my book, Poverty in Common. Throughout, chapters focus on the División de Educación de la Comunidad (DIVEDCO/Division of Community Education), the role of the Luis Muñoz Marín administration in making Puerto Rico a “showcase” of democracy and development, the exchange between Puerto Rico and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) already noted above, Peace Corps training on the island, and the Young Lords Party (especially the 1971 “Ofensiva Rompecadenas” [“Break-the-Chains Offensive”] on the island). This focus evolved after I came across the work of DIVEDCO, which seemed to me to bring together the liberal governmentality of local participation and self-representation with efforts to manage anticolonial movements and expressions of Puerto Rican sovereignty against U.S. colonial rule in very interesting and contradictory ways. Subsequently finding out about the NCAI delegation prompted me to think further about the simultaneously radically dissimilar circumstances and shared context of U.S. colonial rule facing Puerto Ricans and Native Americans, as well as the strategic negotiation of U.S. colonial rule under conditions where thorough-going decolonization didn’t seem an immediate or pragmatic option. My interest in the heterogeneity of U.S. colonialism—in grappling with the multiplicity of colonialisms, settler colonialisms, and imperial horizons that comprise the U.S. and that, as such, must be understood in relation to one another and, in some sense, as mutually constitutive—is what motivated editing the collection, Formations of United States Colonialism. This heterogeneity belies the supposed coherence and settled character of the United States as a uniform and self-evident geopolitical entity. I also hope to expand the research I did for the essay on PROMESA into a book-length project at some point because of the ways in which the complexities of the Puerto Rican context can be especially generative for thinking further about the constraints and possibilities of the U.S. colonial present, as well as addressing the Puerto Rican context in its own specificity. The current schemes of venture and finance capital to further opportunistically plunder the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, as well as the concerted forms of Puerto Rican resistance to this intensified pillaging, also make Puerto Rico a crucial flashpoint in this regard.

(B): Following from the previous question, how would you compare the situation in Puerto Rico with other struggles of indigenous an in the Americas and globally against dispossession, debt, and racial capitalism?

(G): This question is a bit beyond the scope of what I can respond to here. In terms of combining an inquiry into race, Indigeneity, and colonialism, excellent work on the Caribbean to begin thinking about this question would be the brilliant books Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment by Yarimar Bonilla, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean by Shona N. Jackson, and Sheryl Lightfoot’s Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution, which reflects at length on the category of indigeneity itself in world politics. Each national context is so distinct and, broadly speaking, the treaty histories of the U.S. and Canada make for very different terrains of struggle than in many places throughout the Americas. The conferences of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association are an important forum for examining this question, especially as the participation of the Abiayala working group continues to expand, although discussion of Puerto Rico has not to my knowledge been addressed at any length in this context. Although it provides little in the way of a focus on Indigeneity per se, the Puerto Rico syllabus project (https://puertoricosyllabus.com) is an excellent resource for beginning to ask questions about the relationship among dispossession, debt, racial capitalism, and colonialism. The essay you mentioned that I wrote on PROMESA was my attempt to ask how the conditions of Puerto Rico can inform a variety of anticolonial struggles more broadly. I also wanted to examine the tension between Indigeneity as a strategic category in global anticolonial politics and as a heterogeneous category that resists equivalence in important ways—such as Indigeneity in the context of tribal membership in North America that contends with a particular set of colonial regimes of recognition as distinct from, for instance, the Chicana/o claims to Indigeneity that María Cotera and Josie Saldaña-Portillo theorize in their essay “Indigenous But Not Indian?: Chicana/os and the Politics of Indigeneity” as “mestizo mourning,” which is a relation of incommensurability under conditions in which colonial genocide has effectively severed living forms of kinship and obliterated manifest genealogies of Indigenous political community.

(B): Considering the continued legacies of oppression, the complexity of the structural and direct violence of contemporary capitalism, how can or should we envision an intersectional struggle among Black people, Native Americans, immigrants, and other oppressed groups and peoples? How would you describe the current challenges to forging a collective struggle of the oppressed against the systems and forces that dominate them?

(G): These are precisely the sort of questions that I seek to address in my current book project The Colonial Bind: A History of Dispossession in the Present Tense. My focus is on intersectional struggle and the complex relationalities that comprise this historical present. The book is a study of the entanglements of U.S. colonialism, racial capitalism, and the economies of expendability and inclusion. The Claims Resolution Act of 2010 (CRA) serves as the primary lens through which I examine how these genealogies of dispossession are mutually constitutive, persist, and significantly shape contemporary struggles over historical injustice and present-day inequalities. The CRA assembled and funded a series of class-action lawsuit settlements that were milestones for civil rights and Native American claims litigation in the United States, including: In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, a suit against the USDA that was the single largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history; Cobell v. Salazar, a case against the Interior and Treasury Departments for the mismanagement of American Indian trust accounts created by the 1887 General Allotment Act; and four monumental American Indian water rights settlements. This legislation also authorized an extension of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grants, which I analyze for the ways in which TANF’s time-limited promotion of “healthy families” and “responsible fathers” serves to amplify the class, patriarchal, and gendered terms of the assembled settlements.

Although I wouldn’t suggest that the book provides a full or adequate response to the questions you’re asking, I hope that it will contribute to a critical engagement with such concerns. In the book I focus on the connections and differences between the “settlements” included in the Claims Resolution Act in order to show how racialized and colonial dispossession have been in tension and mutually constitutive in various ways over time.  This study emphasizes the transnational context as a means to address the expansive afterlives of slavery and dynamics of racialized labor as not only national but globally interconnected, the significance of inter-imperial geopolitics for national and regional economies and social conflicts, and the political collectivities of Indigenous peoples as never truly subsumed under the status of “domestic dependent nations.” This book demonstrates how attending to the changing dynamics of these relations provides scholars with ways to differently comprehend social inequalities historically as they are manifest and reshaped in the contemporary United States. The Colonial Bind argues that the mechanism of legal settlement in these cases aims to foreclose colonial and racial dispossessions as being definitively past and to stabilize federal authority through recognition of historical wrongdoing. Yet, rather than concluding and reconciling historical injustices, taken together, the settlements reveal salient ways in which specific forms of liberal property, conjugal domesticity, economic and inter-group competition, and the differential devaluation of racialized groups link the conditions and practices of past and present dispossession. I aim to show how histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery and its racialized afterlives previously treated as fundamentally distinct are in fact profoundly entwined in ways that significantly shape the dynamics of social inequality today.

Luis J. Beltrán-Álvarez is from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. He earned his bachelor degrees in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus. Recently, he started his Ph.D. Studies in Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His general research interests are in Political Theory, Political Subjectivities, Social Movements, Decolonial Thinking, Necropolitics, Populism, and Discourse Theory.

Student Interview Series Part X

Glen Sean Coulthard received his PhD at the University of Victoria and is an associate professor in the First Nation and Indigenous Studies Program and Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Coulthard is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in Canada.  He has written articles and a book and co-edited a volume on First Nation political theory and social and political movements as well as on recognition and sovereignty.

I chose to interview Dr. Glen Coulthard because I attended a panel discussion on Indigenous resistance and activism where he read a portion of the book he is currently completing (that he mentions in answer to question 5). His (2014) Red Skin, White Masks was a source in my honors thesis. I have been interested in some specific aspects of that book and how it relates to my thesis as well as his perspective on capitalism and the role of radical political models, such as communism and anarchism, in indigenous political thought and practice and as approaches for gaining more rights. I wanted to learn more about these topics, as well as how his perspective as an indigenous person in Canada compares to challenges facing indigenous people in the United States.

Einsiedel: Many indigenous nations in the United States have been seeking greater political autonomy by working to become less dependent on federal funding. They have typically done so by aligning with corporations to generate profits necessary to fund projects in their communities. You consider indigenous life to be firmly and fundamentally anti-capitalist. Is there a way for tribes in the United States to disengage from both the federal government and deeply rooted capitalism and to survive?  Are Canadian tribes also working within the capitalist system in pursuit of greater political autonomy? If so, how and what are the implications?

Coulthard: There are a range of economic strategies that Indigenous peoples engage in to mitigate economic dependency. I focus on those struggles that challenge capitalism because of its inherently colonial character – i.e., its drive to unlimited expansion and accumulation. Most Indigenous communities, however, are forced to adopt economic planning that facilitates this model of development because of settler-colonial capital’s ultimate dependency on the land as a resource base. Under such a system Indigenous peoples’ stubborn attachments to land become a major threat to accumulation. This is when we see the state resort to violence as a means of ensuring capital’s access to land, like at Standing Rock.

Einsiedel: Do you think that federally recognized or federally unrecognized tribes in the United States have a better chance of achieving meaningful self-recognition and independence? How do you compare the relationship between state recognition and self-recognition of tribes in Canada with those in the United States?

Coulthard: While there are significant differences between the two states, there are also similarities.  Both economies, for example, are increasingly dependent on their land-resource base as a means of accumulating capital, the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the state itself, and for the purposes of ongoing settlement. In other words, at their cores, both states are colonial entities. This will always structurally determine any recognition-based approach that is negotiated through these very powerful institutions. This is why I am much more interested in forms of Indigenous protest and organizing that does not take recognition to be its end game. I’m interested, to paraphrase Audra Simpson’s critically important work, in struggles that refuse recognition as a means of creating something else.

Einsiedel: You write and speak about the necessity of solidarity among tribes in combating the settler colonial state. How can tribes who have to scramble and compete for resources and funding from the federal government work toward unification and solidarity?

Coulthard: This is part of the problem with recognition when it’s mediated by and distributed through the colonial-state. It is divisive by design. It also subtly imposes forms of territoriality (strictly demarcated nations that claim control over a land-base and population) on Indigenous nations that resemble the colonial state more than they do nations in the traditional sense. This is not decolonization.

Einsiedel: Could a world where indigenous tribes have their own independent nations with self-determined laws, borders, and citizenship requirements exist within the territory of  countries like the United States and Canada? If so, how?

Coulthard: I don’t think so. The type of transformation you are speaking of cannot coexist with a settler-state. Decolonization will transform these entities beyond all recognition. There will cease to be a “Canada” or “United States.” It is difficult to even imagine what this might look like. This is why our artists are so important. It is through their cultural production that we get glimpses of other worlds.  

Einsiedel: Do you think that there are non-Native allies of indigenous communities? If so, do you believe they can play a role in helping indigenous communities in the fight for indigenous rights and political freedoms? What advice do you have for non-Native scholars and future scholars who are interested in writing about and working with indigenous communities in their efforts for political sovereignty and cultural heritage protection?

Coulthard: Demographically speaking, non-Indigenous ally-ship is critical. Indigenous peoples are too numerically small within these states to decolonize completely on our own. I also think we need to keep thinking and acting internationally as well. Indigenous nationalism has always been simultaneously international in scope. The new book I am currently writing looks at this history of radical Indigenous internationalism, especially as it was articulated in the 1960s and 70s. Back then, Red Power activists drew similarities between their movements and those of the Third World: Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Neyerere’s Tanzania, etc. They even travelled to and collaborated with these nations, sharing ideas and material resources along the way.  I also think Indigenous peoples and other communities of color need to be able to forge stronger alliances, which we started to see happening again at Standing Rock with the strong contingent of Black Lives Matter support. This is critically important and exciting.

Einsiedel: What main goals do you have for the future of indigenous communities in Canada and the United States? What is the best path to achieve these goals?

Coulthard: Land-based direct action gets the goods. We need more people and more allies willing to put themselves between the land and the corporations and states that want to devour them of their worth. This has always produced the most significant political changes and I don’t see why that is still not the case today.

Hannah Einsiedel is a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut as a dual anthropology and political science major. Hannah completed her senior honors thesis on Native American political rights and acts of anarchism among tribes in the United States. She plans to pursue a PhD in anthropology with the hopes of working as an advocate for the preservation of natural, historic, and indigenous landmarks as well as working toward decolonization of museums and increasing representation of indigenous art and artifacts in art and history museums. Her areas of interest include colonial history and studies, decolonization efforts, alternative political philosophy among Native American tribes, anthropology/archaeology and historic preservation. 

Student Interview Series Part IX

“Give back at least as much as you are given”: An Interview with Joseph Bruchac

by Steven Colon

Dr. Joseph Bruchac is an author, performer, educator, and activist who works to preserve and share indigenous culture. He has directed a college program for a maximum security prison and founded both a literary center and review press. 

As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the United States. His work centers Native experiences and culture. He has authored over 120 books, including poetry, short stories, novels, anthologies, and music that reflect his Native American heritage and traditions.

I chose to interview Dr. Bruchac as his work is a unique form of resistance to settler colonialism. His performances and books offer a glimpse of the vibrant civilizations that have been reduced, but still survive in the wake of colonization. Dr. Bruchac offers resistance through art.

Colon: When did you start writing? Did your creative writing always center on Native American experiences? How has your writing evolved throughout your life and career?

Bruchac: I started writing when I was in grade school. What I mostly wrote then were poems and short stories—often about animals. My first career choice was to be a naturalist and, at Cornell University, I spent 3 years majoring in Wildlife Conservation. However, after taking two courses in Creative Writing, I switched my major to English and spent an extra year getting a degree in English with a minor in Zoology.

My first published poems—in student literary magazines at Cornell—focused on nature and a Native American perspective, such as an often-anthologized poem of mine called “First Deer.” While in graduate school at Syracuse University, where I had a writing fellowship, one of the poems I wrote—in 1966—was called “Notes of a Part-time Indian.” My first collection of poetry, published in 1971, was titled Indian Mountain.

I have certainly written—ever since my first published poems in 1963—about other things than the Native American experience. For example, I have a Young Adult novel that draws on my Slovak heritage, called Dragon Castle. But the Native experience—in all its complexity past and present—has been a major focus. I have written about my three years as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, West Africa, from 1966-1969. And I continue to write about nature, sometimes from a Native angle, but sometimes not.

In terms of how my work has evolved, I have to admit that a major stage in my evolution as a writer came in the early 1980s when I got my first computer, an Eagle II in 1982. That made it possible for me to write much more prose—because whatever I write goes through many revisions and until then I mostly wrote poetry and some short fiction.

I also have to say that I have, over the years, become much more confident as a storyteller. One of my major influences was Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author. His book Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece of storytelling and an example of how one can draw on one’s own folk culture. Chinua was a close friend and an advisor for my PhD.

Colon: Based on your research and writing, what criteria, if any, needs to be met for an individual to possess and claim an indigenous identity? Must this be based on blood, lineage or heritage, familiarity with and commitment to culture, or any other requirements?

Bruchac: I do not believe a claim—as an author—to an indigenous identity is based solely on blood. I do regard that as part of the criteria, however. One may learn about one’s culture all through one’s life and no one is born knowing any language or culture.

Indigenous identity as a writer is a combination of blood, heritage, and deep personal commitment, which includes connection to your community and your elders.  “Give back at least as much as you are given,” as Stephen Laurent, an Abenaki elder who was a dear friend expressed it to me.

Colon: Your work has been critical to the preservation of Abenaki culture. What specifically have you done to contribute so successfully to keeping it alive? Do you work with other tribes or indigenous groups in the efforts to preserve their cultures and history?

Bruchac: I’ve tried, through my storytelling and writing, to draw attention in an accurate way, to our traditions and those of other Northeastern Native nations. It’s meant a great deal to me to see my books used in Native communities over the years—my retellings of (Haudenosaunee) Iroquois stories being used in rez schools throughout New York state and being referenced by Haudenosaunee storytellers and my retellings of Abenaki stories being used in Wabanaki communities throughout New England, for example. And I have been a storyteller-in-residence at a number of Native Schools over the years.

One thing I am immensely proud of is the way other members of my family have contributed. My son James founded our Ndakinna Education Center, where he teaches traditional Native skills and wilderness programs. Among other things, we run the yearly Saratoga Native American Festival, a free event that draws from 3,000 to 5,000 attendees and focuses on the traditional Native cultures of the Northeast through dance, music, storytelling, and indigenous arts and crafts.

We also offer free immersion weekends in Abenaki language. My son Jesse is a fluent speaker of the Abenaki language and teaches it all over New England, as well as doing Native language writing, translation, and coaching for films. My younger sister Margaret is both a tradition bearer and the head of the Native Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. I like to think that I have been a positive influence for them.

I’ve also been very supportive of other Native American writers and storytellers—too many to mention—in part through publishing books through a press I founded, The Greenfield Review Press.

And I have worked with other tribal nations in projects involving cultural retention, Native language revival and retention, and I’m always looking for ways to be more helpful.

Colon: You use books and storytelling (for all ages) to educate and raise awareness about indigenous history and traditions. What other mediums would you like to see used to spread knowledge about Native American culture?

Bruchac: Film is an extremely important medium—an area where my son Jesse is doing terrific work. Jesse created a website westernabenaki.com where one can hear and learn the Western Abenaki language. So, too, is social media. I have a little presence on Facebook and have been using Twitter recently.

Several years ago, I co-wrote and produced a film about the life of Jim Thorpe that was shown on PBS: Jim Thorpe: The World’s Greatest Athlete.

I also think music cannot be discounted. I’ve been writing and performing music for many years, both traditional and original songs I’ve written.

Two years ago, with my friend Brent Michael David, we created a short historical opera called Purchase of Manhattan.

I have also done plays, including one for the anniversary of Hudson’s voyage called River of Tides.

Colon: Earlier in your career, you spent eight years directing an academic program inside a maximum security prison. What was the most insightful thing you took away from this experience?

Bruchac: In addition to that eight years creating and coordinating the Skidmore College University Without Walls (UWW) program at Great Meadow Correctional Facility from 1974-1981, I have also done many writing workshops since 1971 in prisons from Maine to Alaska. Further, for two decades, my late wife Carol and I sent donated poetry books and magazines to men and women in prison all over the American continent.

I think my main insight—aside from the futility and inadvisability of incarceration for 90% of the people in prison—was that the creative spark lives in all of us. To see men and women classified by society as worse than worthless grow and blossom as poets has been deeply inspirational and meaningful for me. I recommend seeing a film about one such man, Jimmy Santiago Baca, who rose from illiteracy to becoming a major American poet. It is called A Place to Stand.

Colon: You have performed across the nation and in Europe. Is there any one performance that has particularly resonated with audiences?   Why do you think it had such special significance for them and for you?

Bruchac: To be totally honest, it’s hard to think of any one single performance that stands out in my memory. My focus is always on the now, the eternal moment that exists when you are in the midst of a story that is telling you as much as you are telling it.

But because I often have performed with my two sons, I suppose one of the most memorable ones for me—and for audiences—was one of the first times when Jesse, then 21 years, and I performed for an audience of 500 teachers at a conference at a Catskill hotel 24 years ago—having them see us on the stage, a father and son sharing from their heritage together.

No, wait, something else just came to mind. My son Jesse’s two children, Carolyn who is 12 and Jacob who is 10, have been raised speaking the Abenaki language. Five years ago, when Jesse and I took the stage at the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community’s annual Strawberry Festival, we had just started a welcome song in Abenaki when we looked out and saw my grandson Jacob, a rattle in one hand, a little chair in the other, approaching the stage. He climbed up the stairs, set up his chair, and started playing and singing with us. My heart was full and so, I think, were the hearts of everyone in the audience.

Colon: If a person could read only one of your works, which one would you recommend and why?

Bruchac: Perhaps my autobiography— of my early life —Bowman’s Store.
 

Steven Colon is an honors graduate of UConn with a double major in political science and history. He is interested in studying the effects of different forms of indigenous resistance.  He can be reached at steven.colon@uconn.edu. 

Student Interview Series Part VIII

Donna Edmonds Mitchell is an inspirational poet and storyteller who is a Perry Clan Descendant of the Pocasset Wampanoag Peoples.

I choose to interview her because she has done an amazing job of inheriting the responsibilities connecting the Perry Clan and the original Watuppa Reservation. She shared her family’s rich story of survival from the early 1700s to the present, in ways that keep alive indigenous people’s history and spirit.

Chu: Your family's history of survival dates from the early 1700s to the present day.  What specific wisdom and other resources enabled them and you to survive and to thrive? Was the ability to have and then to retrieve rights to the original homestead essential?

Edmonds Mitchell: We never lost the wisdom of our elders. In fact, our forced assimilation created an inner, secretive way of being that keeps us connected to our cultural relationships with all life forms. We think every human and animal and even plants have their own life, their own heartbeat. So we treat them with respect. Shortly after the invaders arrived, we developed strategies, as clans of indigenous nation peoples, to maintain our traditions while adhering to the invaders’ westernized philosophies and lifestyles because our survival depended on it. Even though their intention was to “take the Indian out of the child,” the plan was never 100% effective.  To this very day, they continue to do the same, but now nearly all nations are working together to take our stolen lands back.

Chu: Are the Perry Clan and the original Watuppa Reservation unique in how they kept their memories and legacies alive? 

Edmonds Mitchell: Yes. Absolutely. Its uniqueness is that the lands were put into trust under the guardianship of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by the infamous Indian-killer Benjamin Church for the 13 Wampanoag clans living on their ancestral territory from what is now called Tiverton, Rhode Island to Freetown, Massachusetts.  The Perry clan has followed and will follow the matriarchal ways of our culture. 

Chu: You use photographs and original stories and poetry to bring the past into the present. What are some examples of past indigenous practices that remain highly meaningful to Native people living today? 

Edmonds Mitchell: In my opinion, it seems that the only peoples allowed to bring their past into the present are ones who claim European descent and western ideologies and philosophies. However, one's bloodlines are not necessarily reflected in their skin hue. Most nation clans did not live within racially-biased societies. The color of one's skin was not thought to correlate to the character attributes of truth, honor, respect, compassion, or reciprocity.  The deeds of the invaders reflect none of these attributes.  Rather their actions reflected how they treated each other on their ancestral lands in Europe. When one comes from a conquer-and-control mentality, one’s conscience has been suppressed at such a young age that one is incapable of building relationships with others whose culture, tradition, or spirituality differ from one’s own. Of course there are wrong-thinking persons within all nationalities and ethnicities. However, the majority of indigenous peoples living on their ancestral lands of North, South, and Central America as well as the African continent still live in communal clans and nations.  In short, we rarely forget our original teachings of living in oneness or sacredness with all life forms. We continue to bring our ways into the present.

Chu: While the largest museum in the U.S. dedicated to Native peoples is based in Connecticut and many people have heard of the King Phillip’s War, many Americans assume that indigenous people of the northeast of the United States were more completely obliterated than in other regions of the United States.  What would you like people living in the U.S. today to understand about the Native people of Rhode Island and Massachusetts and the larger northeast region?

Edmonds Mitchell: Throughout our histories, pre- and post-colonization or the KPW, we have always maintained relationships with our neighboring nation peoples.  Hence, most of us have bloodlines mixed with other nation peoples as well.  Our languages stem from the same linguistic root of the Algonquin language as far north as Canada and South to the Mississippi.  Our waterways provided easy travel along the outer coastlines, and lakes and rivers where trading took place or solstice and seasonal ceremonies were performed as part of our spiritual beliefs.  Once the invaders arrived here, all nations observed how dishonorably they treated each other and the natural surroundings.  They spoke of “their God”, yet, to them, nothing was sacred. Everything and everybody was a commodity to be conquered, controlled, or killed with a specific intention— to make as much money as possible.  Even though it took over forty years to commence the KPW, the indigenous nations communicated with each other about their observations.  When word got out about the destruction of a village, while burning our elders, women, and children, our survivors sought refuge with our surrounding nations that had not yet been affected.  If you have ever attended a powwow, you’ll see all indigenous nations of the North continent and beyond represented. Many dances are intertribal.  We are still here, strong and vibrant, continuing our sacred ceremonies while individually and collectively honoring and living in harmony with our natural surroundings.  We are still never taking more than we need and still sharing our ways of being one with nature in hopes we can together protect all of life.  We taught the invaders how to survive on our lands, so only a fool would believe that we all died off.  We are still here!

Chu: You are very committed to giving voice to your ancestors while bridging the gaps between Southeastern Clans, Bands, and Tribes.  How do you foster collaborations between different clans and bands of people?  What are the major obstacles? What are the most effective resources?

Edmonds Mitchell: We have never lost our clan, band, or nation collaborations. They have always been and will continue to be a crucial part of our being. The system built by the invaders’ government was meant to divide and conquer. There was a time when such tactics were successful. However, we have always been adaptable with our surrounding. Because of this, we still maintain the roots to our culture, traditions, and spirituality. Our biggest obstacle is to get non-indigenous people to listen to and believe our truths. The history books written by the invaders are believed to be the truth while ours are believed to be the myth. However, their writings are the myths used to have others believe they were justified in their actions. Very few are willing to admit that they got where they are today off the deaths or enslavement of indigenous peoples. Our time for truth is now. Our most effective resources are the continuation of our nation-to-nation collaborations. Red Power is on the move across all nations.

Chu: You aim through storytelling to communicate the multiple effects of colonization and forced assimilation on indigenous people.  What are those effects?  Does understanding them better change the lives and self-understanding of Native and non-Native people?

Edmonds Mitchell: One cannot change the reality of what was done.  But one can admit to the wrong-doings and take the appropriate actions to build a mutually beneficial way of living. Such actions would include honoring our treaties or agreements, our traditions, culture, spirituality, and relationships with the natural world.

Chu: Many Native American people are very mixed in racial and ethnic terms. You are an Afro-Native American. Are there many Afro-Native Americans?  Do they face distinct challenges that non-Afro Native Americans do not share or that non-Native African-Americans don’t experience?  How do you understand these distinct and overlapping elements of who you are?

Edmonds Mitchell: First and foremost, we are all mixed race. Every race, from the beginning of time, is mixed.  All European peoples have traveled across the many oceans to different continents to trade resources. Many of them had relationships while there. Indigenous peoples very rarely sought to travel from their ancestral continents. Most were taken from them by colonization or enslavement.  The color of one’s skin does not reflect one’s ancestral bloodlines. Race ideology originated from the European philosophy of divide-and-conquer. However, the culture and traditions of your clan, band, or nation are passed generationally.  I was raised in the culture, traditions, and spirituality of my Wampanoag nation by my ancestors who survived colonization and assimilation. I am neither Black nor White. I am indigenous First Nation!

Hanli Chu is a student in the Masters of Science program in Quantitative Economics at UCONN where she is also enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.  She observes that injustice makes her sick and that she hopes many things can be done to address it, even if doing so will be a long haul.  She can be reached at hanli.chu@uconn.edu.