Why can we imagine the end of the world but not the end of colonialism?
RETHINKING THE APOCALYPSE:
AN INDIGENOUS ANTI-FUTURIST MANIFESTO
… This is a transmission from a future that will not happen
"The end is near? Or has he come and gone before?”
an ancestor
We live the future of a past that is not ours.
It is a story of utopian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization.
It is a pathogenic global social order of imagined futures,
built on genocide, slavery, ecocide and utter ruin.
What are the conclusions that should be drawn in a world
built on bones and empty metaphors? a world of endings
fetishized, calculated among the collective fiction of specters
virulent. From religious tomes to scientific entertainment
fictionalized, each predictably imagined timeline;
beginning, middle and lastly, The End.
Inevitably in this narrative there is a protagonist fighting an Enemy Other (a generic appropriation of African/Haitian spirituality, a “zombie”?) and spoiler alert: it's not you or me. So many are eager to be the lone survivors of the “zombie apocalypse.” But these are interchangeable metaphors, this zombie/Other, this apocalypse. These empty metaphors, this linearity, exist only in the language of nightmares, they are part of the apocalyptic imagination and impulse. Such a way of “life”, or “culture”, is also a form of domination that consumes everything just for its own benefit. It is an economic and political reorganization to accommodate a reality supported by pillars of competition, ownership, and control in pursuit of profit and permanent exploitation. It professes “freedom” while its foundation is defined by the theft of land, while its very fabric is made up of stolen lives.
It is this very “culture” that always needs an Other Enemy, to blame, claim, confront, enslave and kill.
A subhuman enemy upon whom all forms of extreme violence are not only permissible, but expected. If there is no immediate Other, it is meticulously constructed. This Other is not made of fear, but its destruction is driven by fear. This Other is made up of apocalyptic axioms and permanent anguish. This Other, this weitko disease (I), is perhaps best symptomatized in its simplest stratagem, which is that of our silenced remaking:
They are dirty, They are unfit for life, They are incapable, They are incompetent, They are disposable, They are unfaithful, They are unworthy, They were made for our benefit, They hate our freedom, They have no documents, They they are queer, they are black, they are indian, they are less, they are against us, until finally, they are no more. In that constant mantra of reformulated violence, it's You or Them.
This is the Other that is sacrificed for an immortal and cancerous continuity. It is the Other who is poisoned, bombed, left silently under the rubble.
This way of non-being, which has infected every aspect of our lives, which is responsible for the annihilation of entire species, the intoxication of oceans, air and land, the devastation and burning of entire forests, mass incarceration, the technological possibility of the existence of weapons of war that can end the world, and the warming of temperatures on a global scale, this is the deadly policy of capitalism, it is pandemic.
AN END THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED.
The physical, mental, emotional and spiritual invasion of our lands, bodies and minds
to settle and exploit is called colonialism. Ships sailed on winds
poisoned and bloodied tides across oceans, pushed breathlessly
short and an impulse to enslave, millions upon millions of lives were silently snuffed out before they could name their enemy. 1492.1918.2020…
Blankets as biological weapons, the killing of our relative the buffalo, the damming of the rivers that give us life, the razing of pristine land, forced displacement, treaty binding, coercive education through abuse and violence.
Day after day after the war, after the genocide, negotiating the postcolonial humiliation of our slow mass suicide on the altar of capitalism; work, income, pay rent, drink, fuck, procreate, retire, die. It's on the side of the road, for sale in Indian markets, serving drinks in the casino, restocking tents, it's the friendly Indians back there, you.
These are the gifts of the infested manifest destinies, which are the futurized imaginaries that our captors made us perpetuate and participate in. The ruthless imposition of their dead world was driven by a utopia idealized as an ossuary, it was “for our own good”, an act of “civilization”
Kill the “Indian”; killing our past and with it our future. “Save the man”; imposing another past and with it another future.
These are the apocalyptic ideals of abusers, racists and straight patriarchs. The doctrinal blind faith of those who can only see life through a prism, a fractured kaleidoscope of all-out, never-ending war.
It is an apocalyptic that colonizes our imaginations and destroys our past and future simultaneously. It is a struggle for mastery of human meaning and of all existence.
This is the futurism of the colonizer, of the capitalist. It is at the same time every future ever stolen by the looter, the rapist, the war propagandist.
It has always been about existence and non-existence. It's the apocalypse, accomplished. And with the only certainty of a deadly ending, colonialism is a plague (I prefer the effect too).
Our ancestors understood that this way of being could not be persuaded or negotiated. It could not be mitigated or redeemed. They understood that the apocalyptic only exists in absolutes.
OUR ANCESTORS DREAMED AGAINST THE END OF THE WORLD.
Many worlds existed before this one. Our traditional histories are tightly woven into the fabric of the rising and dying of worlds. Through these cataclysms we received many lessons that shaped who we are and how we are with one another. Our modes of existence are informed in the search for harmony through the destruction of worlds. The Ellipse. Birth. Death. Rebirth.
We have countless stories about the stories of the world that are part of us. It is the language of the cosmos, it speaks through prophecies long carved into the scars where our ancestors dreamed. It's the ghost dance, the seven fires, the birth of the White Buffalo, the seventh generation, it's the five suns, it's written in stone near Oraibi and beyond. These prophecies are not only predictive, they are also diagnostic and instructive.
We are the dreamers dreamed of by our ancestors. We cross the time between the sighs of our dreams. We exist at the same time as our ancestors and generations to come. Our future is in our hands. It is our mutuality and interdependence. They are our relatives. It's in the creases of our memories, gently opened by our ancestors. It's our Dreamtime, and it's Now, Before, Tomorrow, Yesterday.The anti-colonial imagination is not a subjective reaction to colonial futurisms, it is an anti-colonizing future. Our life cycles are not linear, our future exists without time. It is a dream, uncolonized.
THIS IS THE INDIGENOUS ANTI-FUTURE.
We are not concerned with how our enemies name their dead world and how they recognize and certify us or our lands. We are not concerned with reworking the ways in which they manage control or honoring their dead agreements and treaties. They will not be compelled to stop the destruction that is planned for your world. We do not advocate with them to end global warming, as that is the conclusion of their apocalyptic imperative and their life rests on the death of Mother Earth. We bury right and left together in the land they are so hungry to consume. The conclusion of the ideological war of colonial policies is that indigenous peoples always lose unless we lose ourselves. Capitalists and colonizers will not lead us out of their future dead.
Apocalyptic idealization is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the linear world ending from itself. Apocalyptic logic exists in a spiritual, mental, and emotional dead zone that also cannibalizes itself. It is the dead rising to consume all life.
Our world lives when their world ceases to exist.
As anti-futurist Indians, we are the consequence of the history of the colonizer's future. We are the consequence of your war against Mother Earth. We will not allow the specter of the colonizer, the ghosts of the past, to haunt the ruins of this world. We are the fulfillment of our prophecies.
This is the re-emergence of world cycles
This is our ceremony.
Between silent skies. The world breathes again, and the fever subsides.
The earth is quiet. Waiting for us to hear.
When there are fewer distractions, we go to the place where our ancestors emerged.
And their/our voices.
There is a song older than worlds here, it heals deeper than the settler's blade could cut.
And there, our voice. We have always been the healers. This is the first of the remedies.
Colonialism is a plague, capitalism is a pandemic.
These systems are anti-life, they won't be forced to heal themselves.
We will not allow these corrupt and diseased systems to recover.
We're going to spread out.
WE ARE THE ANTIBODIES.
Addendum: In our past/your future it was unsystematic, non-linear attacks on vulnerable and essential infrastructure such as gas stations, transportation corridors, energy sources, communication systems and more that made colonialism impossible to happen in these lands.
Our organization was cellular, didn't need any formal movement
The ceremony was/is our release, our release was/is our ceremony.
We honor our sacred teachings, our ancestors and generations to come.
We don't credit ourselves for anything. We do not send any communication. Our actions were our propaganda.
We celebrate the death of leftist solidarity and its myopic apocalyptic romanticism.
We demand nothing from our colonizers/capitalists.
Note
I - Weitko, Wintko, Windgo, Wiitiko: non-humans that populate the cosmologies of some North American native peoples. Beings that were human but have turned into insatiable anthropophagic non-humans, with icy bodies inside and who see, hear and smell humans like prey. Some reasons can lead a human to transform into a weitiko, such as: having eaten human flesh out of necessity in periods of starvation, witchcraft or through dreams in which they are led by weitkos metamorphosed into humans to eat human flesh that appeared to be meat. of hunting.
Indigenous Action was founded on August 25, 2001 for the purpose of providing strategic communications and direct action support to defend the sacred lands of the indigenous community. It is a radical volunteer group of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist indigenous media creators and agitators working collectively for the liberation of Mother Earth and all her beings. Over the years, they have organized hundreds of actions, marches, workshops, conferences, etc.