All I want for Indigenous People's Day is a Free Palestine
“So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.”
– Saidiya Hartman
Last week, I wept before bed thinking about Palestine. A violence as extreme as genocide feels so massive that anything I do will be insignificant. Never enough.
I have been trying to come up with the words to describe my feelings about the genocide in Palestine and the worlds complicity. What is easy to say is that my feelings are not complicated: I want Palestinians and all Indigenous people worldwide to have vibrant, healthy, safe, loving futures in their homelands.
As we approach election day in the United States, I have thought more and more about the absolute unhinged violence that is American democracy. I became enraged soon after the Democratic Party announced Kamala Harris would be their new nominee for President. Overnight, so called leftists switched from posting about Biden’s horrific financial, political, and rhetorical support of the genocide to posting “brat” memes with coconut emojis. As a descendant of victims and survivors of genocide, I cannot justify voting for someone who actively supports and funds genocide. I cannot imagine telling my future children all that I tried to do to stop genocide in Palestine: the protests I attended, politicians I emailed and called, educational resources I shared, businesses I boycotted, money I donated — but that I still voted for Harris. Genocide is not just one small “con” on the pros and cons list of a candidate. It is a violence so extreme it will impact generations of Palestinians, just as colonial genocide in what is now the U.S. continues to impact generations of my family.
Yet people voting third party or writing-in a candidate are called naive, short-sighted, un-American. We are told that if we don’t vote for Harris, we are handing Trump the election. That only Harris can save our democracy. But how is being dismissive, condescending, and even criminalizing towards people against genocide not destructive to democracy? How are so many people unable to imagine a system outside our existing one? How are so many people unwilling to imagine a world without genocide?
“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction…All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds.”
– Walidah Imarisha, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
Last spring, hundreds of universities, colleges, and community colleges across the globe set up encampments against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Many had demands specific to their institutions – to divest from weapons manufacturers, stop study abroad programs to Israel, or increase transparency of investments.
The encampments were deeply organized. They had kitchens, medical tents, prayer spaces, separate spaces for people with allergies, and hosted teach-ins. Organizers shared what is needed online: more tents, food, medical supplies, people to protect organizers when police arrived.
Watching these encampments, both online and in person at the one near me, made me reflect on how not only the demands of organizers, but how they are organizing helps us shape new worlds. Organizing – good organizing – is constantly creating new worlds, not just pushing against or reforming existing systems. It’s restructuring our relationships to each other, relationships to the lands we exist on, and relationships to institutions (or abolition of institutions). It forces us to think: what kind of community do I want to live in; feel proud to contribute to? What new systems can we create each time we organize? In how we interact with one another? Show love to one another?
Creating new systems has long been a part of organizing against colonialism. The recent student encampments were reminiscent, to me, of occupations at Standing Rock in 2016 and Mauna Kea in 2014, 2015, and 2019. On varying scales, each encampment was resisting colonialism and simultaneously working to imagine a world without it.
In July 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota requested an injunction to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, part of which would run under the Missouri River on their reservation. In the preceding months, thousands of water protectors gathered on the construction site in protest, effectively delaying construction. Beyond the presence of the camps at the site of conflict, the economic and social system they developed to sustain the camps is a form of resistance in and of itself. Access to on-site emergency medical services or protection from police violence was denied by the federal or state governments. Even food and building materials were briefly blocked from entering the camp by local police forces. While some of the supplies to sustain the camp were paid for by the tribal government (like latrines and emergency medical services), much of the supplies, funding, and physical spaces (like a women’s health lodge and kitchen) were sustained and organized by the protesters themselves. When activists went to join the camp, even if only for a week, many would load their vehicles with needed supplies listed on the Sacred Stone Camp’s website like firewood, propane, or snowshoes. Veterans came from across the nation to protect the activists from police violence and intimidation. The camp provided a model for community organizing and community building, one that is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial.
Hawaiian organizers resisting the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at the top of Mauna a Wakea similarly built new worlds. Mauna Kea is considered one of Hawai’is most sacred places; it is named for Wakea, who helped birth the Hawai’ian islands, and historically, only Ali’i (high chiefs) were allowed to climb to the summit. This is where the construction of the TMT telescope is planned and other telescopes have already been built. Hawaiians have resisted construction of telescopes on the summit for decades, and recent protests have been successful in stalling construction of the TMT. In 2014, dozens of activists interrupted the live stream of the groundbreaking ceremony for the TMT. In 2015, activists began an encampment in protest of TMT’s construction. In 2019, a longer encampment began, and within three days of protests, thirty-eight kūpuna (elders) were arrested. Like at Standing Rock, protestors set up their own systems of support. As Kaniela Ing, Native Hawaiian former politician, described via Twitter: “11 days in, hawaiians have established: Free Healthcare [Mauna Medics], Free College [Pu’uhuluhulu University], Free Childcare [Kapunana] / 241 years in, America still no can. We’re not just stopping TMT, we’re building a nation.” (Some softly corrected him, noting they were rebuilding a nation.)
These organizers give me hope. Collective struggle for liberation of colonized peoples is not just about resisting structures, but creating or re-creating new worlds that center Indigenous knowledge and flourishing over colonial violence.
In 2020, I took a virtual class at the Loft Literary Center with Dr. SooJin Pate. On a weekly basis, we read a few chapters of the abolitionist sci-fi book Parable of the Sower and discussed how to dismantle existing systems of violence and oppression we live within and instead imagine and create communities of care and interconnectedness and empathy. We discussed how our world was dealing with its own dystopian reality, as millions of people were being infected with COVID and hundreds of thousands were dying.
Our final project in the class was to create our dream world. I made a digital collage with photos of my loved ones, plants, and a long wooden table against a sage green background. I wrote the following:
I am sitting at a long wooden table with everyone I love. We are laughing, passing around plates of nutritious food we grew, caught, or gathered ourselves, and everyone’s kids are running around in the soft green grass and moss, playing tag. Long we struggled, but now we are at peace. Everyone I love who was sick is healthy, everyone I love who was in prison is free. Everyone I love who did not have food is full. Everyone I love who has worked so, so hard for so little money is getting a foot massage.
Not because some politician passed a bill or a tax or funded a working group that solved racism and poverty and transphobia and ableism. But because we did.
We loved everyone so fiercely, with no strings attached to our care.
We abolished prisons, eliminated money bail, asserted that health was a human right, as is housing, childcare, eldercare, clean water and food.
And now every weekend, we gather at this big table. Some people get here by bike. Others walk or take the free bus. Sometimes we have a bonfire. Tonight, my mom, now an elder, is teaching us how to brew huckleberry and alum and blue root into medicinal teas, and my dad is singing to us with his guitar.
No one individual will be able to end colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, capitalism. But how can we create our own new worlds over and over again, with our friends, families, loved ones, and co-conspirators, while we resist existing ones? Create systems of interdependence rather than hyper individuality and isolation? Again and again and again, together and together and together and together?