5-25-06, 11:15 am
… Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity.… The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process.… Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, 137.
I am only a simple gringa writing today from a small native community north of Chicago, near that “other” border, between the US and Canada. But I speak without hesitation in asserting to you that the US cannot be located in a global scene in these times of war without reference to the inseparable, irreducible geopolitics of indigenous America.
Such a proposal could not be further from the tired plotlines circulating in the US regarding indigeneity; the exhausted narratives whose force lies precisely in their manners of construing Native America as inconsequential on every national front and irrelevant, really unthinkable, in a global scene. But if we must surely resist co-optation in the face of national silence, we would do well to read this national hush as a sign of “the potency of the insignificant” in US imperial politics. Indeed, it seems vitally and potently “insignificant” that, as I write, Blackhawk and Apache helicopters are aiming Tomahawk missiles armed with depleted uranium on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The local always being essential in indigenous scenes, let me begin by saying that I write today from one of several native communities to which the US has affixed the name Chippewa, one of several Chippewa communities that have just emerged victorious on the other side of decades of violent struggle over rights to harvest native foods, medicines and other resources off of their reserved lands, in large parts of three US states. While that struggle unfolded in the media and courts as a local (i.e. nationally and globally irrelevant) “Indian-white” conflict, it was fueled not least by mining multinationals with fears of the limits such “Indian rights” might place on their unfettered access to underground riches. Indeed, as in nearly any genealogy we might trace the dichotomy of “Indian and white” hardly suffices. This simplistic racial formula and its partner concept “settler colonization” are chief among the plotlines that obscure the complex positions native peoples have occupied in webs of globalized trade and war over natural resources that are as old as colonial modernity.
To be clear about this let me now tell you that Chippewa is an English and US derivation of the French name Ojibwe – the French having been the first Europeans to have encountered these people who reside today in three Canadian provinces and five US states, and who, thus, dramatically exceed US and Canadian boundaries and imaginaries. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, first the French and then the English were utterly dependent on these Ojibwe peoples, who were saavy middlemen in the globalized trade in animal furs and hides that played an extraordinary role in the colonization of North America. First the French and then the English, consciously positioning themselves against the specter of Spanish Cruelites, entered into great native-nonnative alliances and wars, and verbal but recorded trade and war treaties, that constituted a violent but reciprocal form of other-than-settler colonization.
But, of course, alongside most Americans you have likely never heard of these peoples who call themselves Anishinaabe, and who, with over 150 communities in the US and Canada may well make up the largest indigenous peoples in North America. Nor have you likely heard of the treaties where Anishinaabe “reserved” rights to strategic swaths of North America, or of similar treaties entered into by the Colville Confederated Tribes, from whose lands I also often write. The very name, Colville Tribes, can be taken as an icon for the “other-than” or “more-than-settler” forms of colonial relations toward which I am struggling to gesture in a few words. For this “American Indian” name derives from one Andrew Colvile, a 19th century “big wig” in the British fur trade. Thus, the Colville Tribes bear the distinction of being the only native peoples named by the US after a non-native who was, ironically, among the CEOs of a Britain-based multinational corporation.
Located on Wanapum lands downstream on the Columbia River from Colvilles, it was at Hanford that uranium mined largely by Navajo-Dine men on their reservation was processed before being installed in weapons that were then tested on Shoshone lands. In the ebb and flow of “things US” in a global scene, Grand Coulee, Hanford and many other locales in indigenous America are not only the sources of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are sites of origin for much of the now recycled uranium with which the US arms its Tomahawk missiles and other weapons … the so-called safe depleted uranium that is settling, as I write, on the bodies of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children, and the multiracial US and coalition forces waging wars “against terrorism.”
There are, then, direct other-than-romantic genealogical links from US killing machines bearing idealized native names to the bodies and destinies of US indigenous peoples, their nonnative neighbors, US soldiers, and Iraqis and Afghans. And yet I challenge you to identify one among recent left critiques of the war in Iraq and the “US as empire” that locates itself with reference to these or any other relevant genealogy from indigenous America. I challenge you to name one account that recalls, for instance, that it was in the midst of oil frenzy in 1923 that the US first overtly entered the business of regime change, when a democratically recognized Navajo-Dine religious leadership refused to sign a contract with Standard Oil. It was at this moment (nearly simultaneous to US clandestine efforts to undermine the post-World War I nationalization of Iran’s oil industry) that the US unilaterally intervened, installed a new Navajo Council (that signed the Standard Oil contract), and established an interim constitutional regime. Out of this scene hundreds of native constitutional governments have been wrought across the US premised on a religious-secular divide.
Bearing no small linkage to “regime change” and constitutional developments in Iraq, the point in invoking this scene is not that “it happened first in Native America.” Important works have reconnoitered that terrain – have tracked American “Indian fighters” into the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars, and followed the political-legal-military discourses of “uncivilized foreigners” and “territorial acquisition” with which the US first encountered indigenous Americans into Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Vietnam – all the while leaving indigenous America utterly in the past.
The point is: it matters in the present tense that a dramatic (if completely unreported) movement of constitutional reform is afoot today across indigenous America that is being played out to no small degree through a religious-secular divide. The point is that the destiny of much more than indigenous Americans is at stake in these struggles for reform, and in ongoing struggles between local native communities (often not their governments) and marauding multinational corporations and state institutions.
The point is that it matters that members of the Colville Tribes and nonnative allies, drawing on Colvilles’ legally reserved rights to hunt and fish, recently scuttled plans for a cyanide-leach gold mine off of their reservation, which means hundreds of tons of cyanide won’t be transported across US highways. It matters that Anishinaabe north of Chicago recently forever closed a proposed cyanide-leach copper-zinc mine adjacent to their reservation on the basis of their recent treaty rights victories and, finally, by purchasing that mine site with Indian casino profits. It matters too that Anishinaabe leaders, many of them veterans of US wars abroad, moved seamlessly in their struggle borne of a consciousness that mining is everywhere directly related to generating global wars. And it surely matters in the face the “god-fearing” Bush regime’s newly hatched plan to violate international treaties by developing and testing new “smart” nuclear weapons, that Dine veterans of US wars and natural resource wars recently outlawed uranium mining on their reservation, and that Shoshones, who have been said to constitute the world’s most bombed nation under the regime of US nuclear testing, scored recent treaty victories against the US in the Inter-American Court.
These so-called local (but also national and global) stories far exceed narratives about “settler colonization,” Indian victims, national guilt, and the shape of dominant discourses of the right and left discourses about Iraq. They would count for much more in a mass-mediated global scene if the left in and beyond the US would refuse its ongoing complicity with the forgetful, romantic and dangerous consumption of indigenous America. Surely, in this atomic age in the history of our constitutional democracies, and these times of war, we can at least begin to revolutionize and attune our consciousnesses to the potent colonial-postcolonial simultaneities at work across indigenous America and the US as I write today.
