The world that we inhabit bears the indelible scars of centuries of colonial violence.
The legacy of this historic violation lies at the root of many of today’s
most intractable problems.
Colonization is the military, economic, political and cultural subjugation
of one nation by another.
It is the domination of one people by another.
And there are few places on earth fortunate enough to have escaped its reach.
For thousands of years, land has changed hands according to
the aims and whims of conquering armies.
But beginning in the 15th century, the character and scope of this warfare shifted.
Europe’s genocidal invasion and pillage of the so-called ‘New World’ was an apocalypse
for the continents’ original inhabitants.
And from the ashes of these ancient civilizations
arose capitalism and the modern system of nation states.
Subsequent waves of European expansion saw the colonization of Australia and New Zealand,
along with large swathes of Africa and Asia.
Some of these colonies were chosen for mass European settlement, while others were delegated
as sources of hyper-exploited labour and resource extraction.
Colonial borders, drawn up by foreign aristocrats and dignitaries, were agreed upon through
diplomatic treaties and internecine wars.
Many of these arbitrary lines persist to this day, cutting blindly across tribes and major
ethnic groups, scattering peoples like the Kurds and Tuaregs over multiple states, and
planting the seeds for bitter sectarian rivalries and civil wars.
Successive national liberation struggles waged in the decades following World War II allowed
much of the world to cast off the shackles of the old colonial arrangement.
Yet in case after case, national aspirations for self-determination have been thwarted
by the emergence of a new neo-colonial ruling class, whose members remain subservient to
the imperial systems of global finance controlled by the colonial masters of yesteryear.
That is not to say that older forms of colonialism have disappeared, or that the flames of
anti-colonial revolt have died out.
Over the next thirty minutes, we’ll take a closer look at two such sites of active
settler colonialism and anti-colonial resistance: namely, the areas around the Great Lakes region
that make up the historic homeland of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
and the militarily-occupied territories of Palestine.
Along the way, we’ll talk to a number of individuals as they share their own experiences
of navigating colonial dynamics, fighting for self-determination...
and making a whole lot of trouble.
Indians, Natives, Aboriginal... there’s so many different terms that people use
just to address who we are.
But I feel that we need to address ourselves the way we believe we should be addressed.
And for me, I say I’m Kanienʼkehá꞉ka.
I’m not Mohawk.
I’m not an Indian.
I’m not an aboriginal.
Y’know... these are all different terms that have come after.
These terms decolonization and anti-colonial, I had to google them
because I don’t use those terms a lot.
We have no English terms to use but what’s there.
But in our own language we have all the words that we need.
How to explain it to someone who doesn’t have the language is what gets difficult.
Decolonization has become such a buzzword used by a variety of organizations, institutions...
I mean, the federal government is using the word.
And it certainly has been watered down in the context of universities and academics
clinging to this buzzword.
But in reality, decolonization is a very unsettling and disruptive force.
And so when I think about what that means to me, and how I should relate to it as
a non-Indigenous anarchist, I don’t have any straight-forward answers.
I have some reflections.
They’re always changing.
Decolonization is a very large and complex issue for me.
It involves decolonizing the way we think.
The way that we’re sort of wired to experience reality,
and the ideologies in which we’re saturated.
And taking steps to rectify the wrongs that were done, so that we can have
a just and equal society.
And a rich society, a diverse society, and a society that benefits
from the wisdom of Indigenous cultures.
For Palestinians that means the Israeli occupation that started in 1948 should be stopped,
and the Palestinian people should have their own rights for freedom, justice
and control of themselves.
Like all nations in the world.
Fundamentally, the Arab world lives in the aftermath of the colonial project.
The reason why these states are there is because of colonialism.
The borders were drawn up not by the people who live there, but by Sykes-Picot.
By the British and the French.
There would be no Israel without colonialism.
It is a western colony in the Arab world.
Just like Apartheid South Africa was a western colony in Africa.
Europe treats Israel as a European colony in the Middle East.
So in terms of the trade agreements that give it preferable conditions in trading.
Y’know, the arms that are being bought and sold.
Europeans are partners in the Zionist project.
And they are responsible.
When the west sees Israel, they see themselves.
And when the United States sees Israel, they certainly see themselves.
It’s a state where western white people came in and threw the native population
off the land — it’s a little baby America.
Rectifying the wrongs of the colonization of Palestine would first of all involve the
return of the Palestinian refugees and reparations for the suffering from being ethnically cleansed
from their homeland.
Palestinians, when they were forced to emigrate from here as refugees,
there were 800,000 at that time.
It will become around 8,000,000 now, after seventy or eighty years of occupation.
When we’re talking about colonialism in relation to the Canadian settler-colonial state,
I think it’s important to understand that the state is not a completed political
and economic entity.
In fact, the Canadian state is quite weak and vulnerable.
What you need to understand is that if you look at each reservation,
where we are, you need to poke a hole in that map.
Because we’re not a part of Canada, and we’re not a part of the United States.
The Mohawk people are a nation.
The whole Haudenosaunee Confederacy are all nations.
So what the United States and Canada wanna be is they wanna be a nation.
They wanna be like the Mohawks and the Seneca.
When they came on their ship, they brought that government and those ideologies with them.
They didn’t start nothing new.
They didn’t make up their own language.
They didn’t make up their own government here.
They copied ours and brought theirs with them.
So they can’t say that they’re their own nation.
They have no idea what it is to actually listen to us, and to listen to the reasons why
this land is so important to us.
They’ll never know.
Because they don’t even want to hear what we have to say.
To them, it’s like it’s all about money.
“Who the fuck gives a shit about what these Indians want with the land?”
This is their attitude.
Y’know, it’s like “Oh, sit down and negotiate.”
Sit down and negotiate.
What negotiations?
You sit down and it’s all of what they want, and everything that we come back with
— the importance of our culture, our land ...it don’t mean fuck all to them.
It doesn’t mean a thing to them.
Human history is a steady stream of massacres and bloodshed.
But when it comes to scope and scale of atrocities, nothing compares to
the colonization of the so-called Americas.
What is now tacitly acknowledged as a genocide against the continents’ original inhabitants,
was in fact a series of dozens, if not hundreds of different genocides carried out against
distinct nations by Spanish, Portuguese, French and British armies, who were aided in this
task by the copious and often deliberate spread of European-borne diseases.
While there’s no single definitive figure, most historians estimate that between
50 and 112 million Indigenous people were killed during the invasion and settlement
of the so-called Americas, or nearly 95% of the local population.
Many nations were entirely wiped out.
There’s also no recorded figure for the number of Africans killed during the four
centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, but most estimates range from 14 to 60 million.
This includes an estimated two million people that died on slave ships,
only to be unceremoniously dumped into the ocean.
The echoes of these crimes continue to reverberate to this day.
In the Great Lakes region of so-called North America, Dutch, French and British colonizers
first encountered the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a powerful alliance of five indigenous nations:
the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca – with a sixth nation, the Tuscarora,
joining in 1722.
These settlers were fascinated by the Haudenosaunee’s system of governance, which was much more
sophisticated than any found during that time in Europe.
So much so, that many of its principles eventually found their way into the US Constitution.
Yet despite signing treaties of mutual respect and co-existence with the Haudenosaunee, most
notably the Two-Row Wampum, or Guswhenta, settler populations in the territories now
ruled by the American and Canadians states have repeatedly failed to live up to their obligations.
This has been the source of sustained tensions, and several stand-offs that have galvanized
Indigenous anti-colonial resistance across Turtle Island.
I grew up seeing land struggles and struggles about land and being involved in it as a child.
My mother’s family were very, very involved in a lot of political struggles away from
the band council system.
I grew up hearing stories from my aunt and everybody about everything that happened.
Whenever I really started to get passionate about everything, I was like 16.
But, I got pregnant so that’s what put that off to the side.
Ten years down the road, I’m in a place in my life when I can actually do something
and that’s what brought me together with some like-minded people.
We’re not following band council, we’re not following Canada, and we’re not following Quebec.
We’re following our own rights as indigenous people, as native people,
as Kanienʼkehá꞉ka people.
We don’t all agree on everything, but at the same time we bring our strengths together.
And we’re taking back our land.
The mayor of Oka came and brought this proposal and said they wanna expand the golf course
into the pine forest where right at the line of where the golf club ends and the pine forest
begins, we have a graveyard there of graves that have been there for hundreds of years.
And the pine forest is like, thousands of years old, I mean the pines are huge.
The native people in Kanehsatake said “No.
You’re not building a golf course and tearing up our graveyard and cutting down all the pines."
The answer was no immediately.
And that’s what sparked everything.
I didn’t go to the meetings in the beginning but by May, I jumped in a car with a bunch
of ladies and we all took off and went to Kanehsatake.
In my early twenties I was trying to give my son at the time who was just only like
2-3 years old a better example of what a role-model that I could be.
That time came to stand there and say “I’m gonna be part of this because now I’m a
woman, I’m not a child where my mother had to just bring me.”
We can’t stop fighting for this because land is like, one of the most important things
to native people.
How do you practice a culture when you don’t have a land base?
How do your survive a culture when you don’t have a land base?
This is what we used to teach our children and our people.
It was just a regular day.
It was like really early in the morning, people weren’t even really awake yet.
There was a few people puttering around or whatever you know, either fixing a fire or
making coffee or doing something you know not everyone was awake at the time.
And then, all I remember the women telling me is that they just heard cars and car doors
and then they looked up towards the highway, because they were in the pines,
and they looked up towards the highway.
It was just SQ cars.
Just kept pulling up, pulling up, pulling up, pulling up.
And then they just started getting out of the cars fully dressed with all their bulletproof
vests and their assault rifles.
The women just looked and they were like “what the fuck is going on?”
And then they just decided to run to the front and they all locked arms and they stood across
the dirt road that came into the pines, and the police were telling them “you have to
get out, you have to leave.”
And they said “we’re not leaving.
We’re not going anywhere.
We’re staying right here, this is our land we’re not leaving.”
And of course they didn’t listen to them you know, they just started throwing tear
gas and I think that’s when all hell broke loose.
Reporter: I don’t know if you can hear any of that.
News Anchor: Yes.
It sounds like shots.
Reporter: Uhh they launched, I don’t know, about half a dozen or a dozen canisters of tear gas.
There’s smoke.
Anchor: Ivan, as much as you can see are the warriors pulling back now?
Reporter: Oh, uhm, everybody was.
I mean we’re cars, we’re moving tents, we’re moving people.
Uh reporters are-
News Anchor: Are those shots?
Ivan?
Hello?
It was a bloody day at the Mohawk Indian community in Oka, Quebec near Montreal.
Provincial police in riot gear stormed the barricades the Mohawks had set up.
There were clouds of tear gas, a hail of bullets,
and in the midst of the battle a policeman was killed.
For us as Ongwehonweh, or native people that have already been here.
We have a culture, we have a way of life, and we have a connection.
And all of that is a combination of what we stand for and how we stand up for our beliefs.
And going as far as having a physical confrontation with police forces, Swat teams, Army,
we’ve done it. And succeeded.
You got other people trying to say there’s no place for the warriors or no place for
weapons and we’re all peaceful forever.
That’s not how it’s supposed to be.
We’re not here to kill people.
We’re here to protect our land, we’re here to protect ourselves and that’s always,
always the goal.
If it comes to those extreme cases like in 1990, of course people are gonna have weapons.
But the weapons are not to be used.
This is our understanding that we have in our culture.
We’re not there to hurt, we’re not there to kill anybody.
In my belief, I’m traditional, and that’s all there is to it.
But, what comes with being traditional?
It comes with the political aspects and it comes with the ceremonial aspects
so we have to take care of both.
Practising sovereignty is not holding a band card.
It doesn’t mean anything, it means that you have a number form the government to say
that you’re registered and you’re on their list.
Practising sovereignty is practising your culture, your beliefs and you’re standing
up for what you believe in.
There are few geopolitical conflicts more intractable than the decades-long struggle
for the establishment of a Palestinian homeland in the areas claimed by the Israeli state.
The fertile lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, have been fought over
for thousands of years.
Their capital, Jerusalem, is considered holy by all three Abrahamic religions
– Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Zionism, an ideological movement based around the imagined return of Jews to their biblical
homeland, Israel, began to pick up steam in the early 20th century.
It was seen at the time as a potential solution to the centuries of anti-semitic persecution
the Jewish people had faced at the hands of European Christians.
Following the horrors of the Holocaust, in which two-thirds of European Jews were killed,
support within the colonial ruling classes swung behind the establishment
of a Jewish homeland.
But rather than establish it within the restructured borders of Europe, the Zionist movement was
granted a sliver of the Arab World, in an area the Ancient Greeks referred to as Palestina.
Since then, the Israeli state has methodically expanded its borders, while tightening restrictions
on its internal Arab population.
Under the unquestioned protection of the Trump regime, they have largely abandoned any pretense
of seeking a lasting peace with their Palestinian neighbours, seeking instead to increase the
pace of settlement construction in the territories they occupied in 1967.
But Palestinians displaced during the Nakba of 1948 have never given up their dreams of
returning to their homeland.
And the brave resistance of the Palestinian people to Israeli occupation
is famous all around the world.
I was born in Tel Aviv a long time ago.
Growing up, initially I bought everything that I was told.
That we, the Jewish people, were constant victims.
We’d never harmed anyone.
But then, as I was getting close to the age where every Israeli is supposed to go to the
army – every Jewish Israeli – I started hearing about things that were happening.
And it... uhhh... yeah it was incredibly painful.
It really ripped up my illusions about what I was a part of, and what my people were doing.
And I did not understand much.
But I knew that people were fighting for their freedom.
And we were killing them for it.
Palestine is not just about statehood.
It’s about the return of the Palestinians to their historic homeland,
which is from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
The Jewish colony in Palestine — the Jewish state — was created by the British,
who promised the Palestinian land, that they had colonized, to Jews.
So this colonial act, the fact that Britain felt that they could promise this land to
whoever they wanted was the kind of original sin here.
At the same time the British were crushing popular Palestinian uprisings.
Between 1936 and 1939 – it’s called the Great Revolt – ten percent of the male population
of Palestine was either exiled or killed.
So by 1948, the population was depleted.
So that’s how thirty percent of the population of Palestine, which by that time was Jewish,
could overpower, and displace, and disenfranchise, and throw out
the Palestinian people from these areas.
That the security of the Israeli people will be reconciled with the hopes of the Palestinian people,
this brave gamble that the future can be better than the past, must endure.
It was a big mistake that the PLO made this foolish Oslo agreement.
The Palestinian Authority, in entering into the Oslo Accords, effectively surrendered
its right to armed struggle.
And from that moment on, they’ve worked with the Israeli state to control and actually
dampen popular resistance inside Palestine.
They took the role of local affairs.
All the main issues – the borders, the independent state, the settlements, Jerusalem, water even...
energy – and sixty percent of the lands stayed in the hands of the Israeli occupation.
Nothing changed.
There is no legal system in the Palestinian Authority.
The security forces here – which have different names, different factions, different brigades
— they just... without any kind of law, they arrest people.
The Israelis?
There’s a system... not a real system, but a military system.
They charge the Palestinians for any reason, a long time.
As long as the Palestinian Authority arrests whoever Israel tells them to arrest,
shares intelligence, proves its worth ... it’s allowed to exist.
If the role of the Palestinian Authority becomes like this, only taking the dirty work from
the occupation, it becomes a very corrupted authority.
Thousands of demonstrators advanced on the border fence that separates Gaza from Israel.
The Israeli military accused some in the crowd of being terrorists.
Soldiers opened fire, killing more than fifty Palestinians, including eight children.
The Great March of Return is a popular act of resistance that’s organized by
a large swathe of actors within Gaza.
It is popular resistance, and it has been slightly misrepresented as somehow being created
by Hamas, which it was not.
Many of the protesters that go out every week are not members of Hamas.
The people killed are from all political parties, and many are not affiliated with a political party.
Y’know, not to mention the number of children who have been murdered that are not, obviously,
politically affiliated.
People go to protest because the situation is unbearable.
And they do it even when they’re told not to.
Because they see no other option.
There is no other option of a life with dignity right now in Gaza.
So it’s accepting a life without dignity, or trying to fight for a different life.
These decentralized, but coordinated actions go back to the First Intifada, which is why
the First Intifada was so special.
This moment of popular resistance.
A groundswell of resistance from all sectors of Palestinian society.
Regardless of class, gender ... everyone was involved.
The Second Intifada started, after a few months, to become an armed resistance.
But they discovered that it cannot lead to anything.
Even Hamas, which is dependent on military resistance, or armed resistance,
found that in order to continue their control, their position,
they need to depend on popular resistance.
So the First Intifada is the big example for the coming future for the Palestinian community.
In the West Bank, I think the situation is going to be the Third Intifada.
And this situation will not remain as it is for a long time.
There’s this continuity of Palestinians resisting occupation since 1948.
Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian.
Obviously Palestinians live in the West Bank, Jerusalem – which is their capital –
and Gaza.
And then there are Palestinians living in refugee camps throughout the Arab world.
And of course the global diaspora.
This is one people.
The Palestinians are one people.
The Palestinians know that.
The Palestinian Revolution is there to break the status quo.
And the status quo won’t crush them.
Anarchists have a mixed history when it comes to anti-colonial struggle.
We are generally critical of nationalism, seeing it as an ideology that allows for the
papering over of other contradictions within a given society.
According to this line of thought, buried within the national aspirations that animate
anti-colonial struggle, are the seeds for the reproduction of oppressive hierarchies,
and ultimately a new state.
That said, this criticism has, unsurprisingly, been markedly less common among non-European
anarchists with first-hand experience of national oppression.
From the famous Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh,
to the Cuban revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos...
many prominent anti-colonial figures have either identified as anarchists,
or drawn inspiration from anarchist teachings.
And countless other lesser-known anarchists have participated in struggles for national
self-determination, or continue to do so today... from those waged by the Mapuche in Wallmapu
to the Kurds of Rojava.
So the international solidarity movement is international volunteers that come to support
the Palestinian popular struggle.
Yesterday there were homes under threat of demolition, the volunteers were in the homes
with the families trying to, you know, resist them being removed from their homes.
There are demonstrations.
Areas of Hebron that are under Israeli control, Tel Rumeida, the children are under constant
risk of attack and harassment, the volunteers take the kids to school and bring them back
from school.
I see that those activists in solidarity with the Palestinian people helps give us hope
that we are not alone, opens the eyes of the world about the human rights issues and the
occupation happening in Palestine.
I think there's a problem with Western and white particular anarchists, that they're
not able to distinguish identity from national aspirations.
Anarchists tend to say, well they're anti-national so why do you want to fight for a nation state?
This is an incredibly facile and white way of looking at things.
It is also arrogant.
Fannon understood the importance of national liberation struggles as defined as national
liberation struggles, because that is how they were confronted by settler-colonial regimes.
They were controlled as Bantu, as Algerian Arabs, as Palestinians, as whatever.
You become those identities, all our identities are constructed, but those are the identities
in which the Palestinians are acting now.
I feel it's impossible to talk about the dangers, right now, you know of Palestinian nationalism.
Palestinians are stripped of their agency to determine so many aspects of their lives
and their self-determination...
When power shifts, and Palestinians are in control of their lives and of their land and
of their state, uh... then maybe we can revisit this..?
But I don't feel that it's relevant to the current situation
If you achieve your rights, justice, freedom and others, you can think how to deal with
your neighbor.
Maybe united, cooperating...
I dunno.
But without this solution happening, nothing.
That conflict will continue.
The more racist Israelis will be going, and the more religious or Salafist under the occupation
people in the Palestinian situation.
Palestine is the litmus test of a true revolutionary in this country.
And if you're not one hundred percent on board, then shut the fuck up.
And that goes for fucking anarchists, and I don't care, or any sort of leftists.
Shut up and listen, and listen to the people on the ground, listen to the people conducting
the BDS, listen to the revolutionaries in Palestine.
And that's the way you do it.
Don't start something you can't finish.
You know?
Don't start trying to be something you're not either, so whatever you're good at, find
if that's what you're passionate about and find a way to mix it with your talents so
you're enjoying yourself because it does get hard.
You know it's emotionally exhausting and there comes a point where you just have to take
a step back and to remember to take care of yourself.
Anarchist have to be careful to nuance how they relate to the concept of sovereignty.
It shouldn't be fixed.
It needs to be a dynamic understanding of the ways struggle demands from non-indigenous
anarchists to constantly rethink and reevaluate their relationship to a set of ideas and practices.
Be aware of how whiteness functions in various spaces of struggle.
You can be super down, and you can have a great understanding of how whiteness operates
in the world, but you don't have control over how people react to your whiteness.
So you've gotta be humble and understand that no matter who you are, whiteness will always
be triggering for some people.
So know when to step back, when to be quiet and know when just to walk away.
It's like, the way I envision it is like two braids.
Like you have the boat here and you've got like all your intermingling and all your people
and ideas, and over here we have our braid going on.
And people have to realize that it's not just one straight and narrow path that everyone
has to take, there's a weaving going on and we're all connected one way or another.
You have to get away from colonialism's way of thinking and you have to start thinking
on your own.
The main intention is not yourself as the priority.
The main intention for this to work is the priority of the other generations coming,
that we keep this equality and peaceful practices going for them, not just for me.
Capitalism continues to fuel the aggressive extractive projects snaking across the continent.
Anarchists fighting against exploitative processes of capitalism should think about how important
it is to link their struggle to anti-colonial resistance.
And for many, I think this means rethinking post-revolutionary ideas of industrial societies.
You have to go back to the beginning, to the Royal Proclamation, if we're going to get
rid of Canada, that's what it comes down to.
Because if they're not upholding their agreements then they need to leave.
That government system, I'm not saying all non-native people have to leave, but that
political structure and that government system need to go.
The Zionist State, Israel, would have to be dismantled and a new system based on equality,
equal rights would have to be created.
One in which we could all live together as equals.
And I believe that, I mean, I know how wonderful that can be because my life is an example
of that.
So I'm really looking forward for that day, for the refugees to return, the prisoners
to be freed and the occupation to end and apartheid to be dismantled, where I can meet
my friends from Gaza on the beach of Haifa, and have a cappuccino
We have a date for that day. So, we're looking forward to it.
There are few struggles with higher stakes than those waged by Indigenous peoples against
their colonial occupiers.
This is because the assertion of collective self-determination that they represent is
a direct attack on the legitimacy of the dominant colonial power structure.
For states, they are therefore existential threats... and tend to be treated as such.
The intense level of conflict that often result from these clashes can in turn rupture the
illusion of social peace.
This poses opportunities for revolutionaries, but also considerable risks.
It draws clear battle lines, allowing states to mobilize their own national identities,
in order to allow for the intensification of repression.
Non-indigenous anarchists must be well aware of these dynamics, both in order to anticipate
and help combat nationalist reaction, and to be able to act in complicity with all those
who take up determined struggle against our mutual enemies within the ruling class.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in getting more involved with Indigenous solidarity work in your area,
or starting a group to provide sustained material support to folks on the ground in Palestine?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing
where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community
center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
Just a reminder that we’re still in the middle of our 2019 fundraiser.
Thanks to everyone who’s chipped in so far... with your help, we’re now more than half-way
to our goal of raising two thousand dollars in monthly donations.
If you haven’t donated yet, but you like what we do and want to see more of it, please
go to sub.media/donate and sign up to be a monthly sustainer for as little as $2 per
month.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Chelsea, Whitney,
B, Mos'ab and the good folks at the International Solidarity Movement.
Stay tuned next month for Trouble 22, as we take a closer look at the rising tide of xenophobic
anti-migrant hysteria sweeping the so-called United States...
...they want all the rights and privileges of being United Sates citizens and they don't
have those rights and privileges, they're here illegally.
...and what people are doing to fight back.
Now get out there…. and make some trouble!