“This is a system, this wonderful creation that needs all of us, including human beings. We are part of it, even though this culture has worked to systematically destroy those good relations and those ecosystems.”
Derrick Jensen: Waziyatawin is a Dakota writer, teacher, and activist committed to the development of liberation strategies that will support the recovery of Indigenous ways of being, the reclamation of Indigenous homelands, and the eradication of colonial institutions.
I think it’s crucial that, when it comes to anything concerning sustainability or resistance, Indigenous Peoples must have the final say.
Waziyatawin: The problem that we’ve been facing for 518 years is that every city in the Western Hemisphere has been built on the lands and over the bodies of Indigenous people. They continue to suffer and the land continues to suffer so that cities can be here, so that this university can be here, and so that we can be here today. We should never, ever forget that.
Derrick: How do we begin to talk about the process of colonization?
Waziyatawin: It’s important that we think about colonization as a process, and conquest as a component of that process, but it begins with invasion. Certainly, in the Western Hemisphere, we have experienced what I think is the most brutal period of colonization in world history, and it has lasted for more than five centuries. I think we are coming to the end of that period, so in some ways I’m filled with a sense of hope, and in some ways I’m filled with a sense of absolute rage.
Derrick: Tell me more about the processes of colonization. What are its effects on the self-image and social image of conquered people? Also, could you tie that together with what Vine Deloria Jr. said about how this is a crucial time, because the last people who talked to people who were born free are now dying?
Waziyatawin: In my life, I’ve never known freedom. I’ve never known liberation. I’ve only dreamt of it a million times; I’ve imagined it. I’ve never experienced it. In fact, the elders with whom I grew up also never experienced it directly, because they had all died long before I was born. The process of colonization has obviously had a devastating effect on the land, but it also has a devastating effect on the capacity for Indigenous Peoples to live our role as defenders of the land.
One of the women who fought fearlessly and courageously in Canada was named Harriet Nahanee. She was also a residential school survivor. She has one of the best quotes about the colonization of the mind, one that occurred to her during her residential school experience. She said, “We were keepers of the land. That is the special job given to our people by the creator. And the whites wanted the land, the trees, and the fish, so they had to brainwash us to forget we had to guard and preserve the land for the creator. That’s why they put us in the residential schools and terrorized us: so we’d forget our language, and our laws, and allow the land to be stolen. And it worked; the whites have 99 percent of the land now, and our people are dying off. That’s why it’s never been about God or ‘civilizing’ us. It’s always been about the land.”
When I think about what has happened in the Dakota context—that’s what I can speak about with the most authority—it’s clear that according to our conceptions of the world, we were Indigenous in the most fundamental sense. One of the reasons that I always prefer the term “Indigenous” is because of its connotations of coming from the land, emerging from the land. According to the Bdewakantunwan Dakota creation story, which is a story that I grew up with, the place of Dakota creation occurs at a place we call Bdote, which literally means the joining or junction of two bodies of water. In a place like Minnesota, the place where I come from and where we have almost fifteen thousand rivers and streams and another six thousand lakes, there are a lot of places that we could refer to as that junction. But, I was always taught that the primary junction is the place where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi River. It’s filled with silt and topsoil. According to this story, our Mother Earth opened up her body and our people were created from red clay from that location. We are Indigenous in the most fundamental sense, and we were taught that our way of life and everything about who we are is central to that landbase. It doesn’t make sense to be Dakota in any other place, because that’s where our people were created. Our language, our ceremonies, our sacred sites, our worldview are all connected to that particular place. It’s no wonder that when we faced invasion, land theft, and colonization, our people eventually went to war. Our major war occurred in 1862 when our people declared war against not just the United States government as an entity, but its citizens, because they were the face of the United States government and the ones who were actually invading our lands.
Colonization of the mind, which has been conducted very successfully in the context of the United States and Canada, is really about disconnecting us from our landbase, disconnecting us from our responsibility to defend the land, even though I would say that is our very first obligation as Indigenous people. We have, in many ways, succumbed to settler society’s ideas about what a proper relationship with the land is, and that’s about exploitation. So, we have people within our own communities—our tribal leaders, our own band council leaders—who are now essentially selling our landbase for exploitation. We’ve become complicit. We’ve become complacent, as a whole.
I want to qualify that by also saying that we also have Indigenous people who haven’t forgotten that fundamental obligation, and who continue to fight and challenge power on a daily basis in defense of the land, in defense of our people, in defense of our ways of life.
Derrick: What do you see as the root problem of the dominant culture? And—this is a question I think a lot of Indigenous people have asked for the last 518 years—why do they act the way they do?
Waziyatawin: That’s a really important question. When I think about the context of the Western Hemisphere, and the devastation brought to the lands here, I think it’s really important for all of us to understand that Judeo-Christian thought is at the center. There is a quote from Genesis 1:26 that states that God said, “Let us make men in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all of the earth, and over all of the creatures that move along the ground.”
It’s such a captivating section, I think, because it’s so visually clear. It’s about domination. It’s about the subjugation of all beings and about man being at the pinnacle of this hierarchy of creation. I think that concept, that idea, is so pervasive and deeply embedded in this society; so deeply embedded that it is the cultural paradigm by which the United States government operates and this whole society operates. I don’t think Christianity is salvageable in any way. I don’t think the United States government is salvageable; I’m not interested in preserving American democracy.
From my perspective, this culture and its people have absolutely forfeited their right to participate in envisioning what a different world should look like. That’s why I think Indigenous alternatives have to be explored. Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with the land have to be given primacy. One of the things that is rarely mentioned when people talk about creating alternative communities—or even when they invoke the rhetoric of utopian societies—is that Thomas More’s society displaced Indigenous populations, moved Indigenous populations out of the way. We can’t forget that. As soon as we start to imagine a future based on that kind of model, we’re running into the same problems. We’re assuming that the original people of the land are expendable, don’t have something to teach, and I think that is a very grave mistake.
When I think about indigeneity, I think about what is at the core of our spirituality. It’s the idea of Mother Earth and kinship with creation. In Dakota tradition, we have a phrase that I think has been largely co-opted or appropriated by many circles: mitakuye owas’in, or “all my relations.” People sometimes use it as a quaint phrase today, or invoke it when they want it to serve their political, personal, or spiritual agendas, but in fact it goes much deeper than that in our traditions. That phrase refers to our spiritual obligation to establish good relations with all of creation.
Embedded in that phrase are a couple of assumptions. One is that all beings have a particular role and particular purpose in the world, and we have an obligation to respect that, even though we may not have yet discovered what that role is. We have to assume they have their own gifts and something they are bringing to the world that is necessary.
The other assumption with that is that there is recognition of the fundamental interconnectedness of all of creation. I think this is something that Western societies are only starting to comprehend now; that when one population is affected, all populations are affected. This is a system, this wonderful creation that needs all of us, including human beings. We are part of it, even though this culture has worked to systematically destroy those good relations and those ecosystems. From a Dakota perspective—and I would think that most Indigenous populations would share this—we are part of that, we aren’t separate from nature or the land. We are, in fact, the land. We are also needed. As Indigenous populations, I think we’ve fulfilled those roles in oftentimes ceremonial or spiritual ways, where we understand that things operate in a particular landbase in a particular way, and that it’s our obligation to perform certain ceremonies or sing to the salmon or sing to the buffalo. It’s one of the reasons why I think that no alternative community or future can be created on this landbase without consulting and working with Indigenous populations, who are just as important to the land as other species.
Derrick: When you say that no future can be created without consulting, some problems come up. The first is that the dominant culture has a long history of consulting before taking. Also, who is doing the consulting?
Waziyatawin: I’m referring to giving primacy to Indigenous populations in their determining what should happen on any given landbase.
Derrick: Given that and given the fact that those in power have tanks, guns, airplanes, and the full force of the law behind them, as well as a mass of zombies who watch television a lot, what does this mean for Indigenous sovereignty or the future of the land?
Waziyatawin: My sense of hope comes from my belief that everything is in place for collapse to occur soon. I think we’re seeing the failure of capitalism and, as William Catton pointed out, we are in overshoot. We are running out of fossil fuels to exploit, and this can’t go on much longer. Unlike my ancestors, who fought a war of resistance in defense of the land, our people, and our way of life in 1862, we’re now positioned for a kind of success that is unprecedented. I am a historian by training, but I think in many ways we cannot look to historical examples to be our models for what is going to happen. We exist in a particular point in world history and human history that is absolutely unique. Everything about this way of life is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. When that is taken away, this is all going to collapse. This way of life as we know it will not exist anymore.
We’re in a different place with different opportunities available to us, and if we measure success by the collapse of industrial civilization, I absolutely believe that we will be successful.
Derrick: It reminds me of something I wrote in What We Leave Behind. We were fighting a developer—a killer, a person who was going to put a bunch of houses into a forest—and we in the neighborhood fought knowing that all we could do was make sure that everything was perfect in his permits. We ended up stopping him from putting houses in because we were able to delay him long enough for the economic collapse to hit. This wasn’t actually our strategy; our strategy was just to hold him off as long as possible. A few months ago his house was foreclosed for back taxes and the main forester’s house was foreclosed for bankruptcy, which is great.
We are speaking positively about the collapse of industrial civilization. I was recently in a public forum where I was accused of being unethical for simply saying that this way of life is unsustainable. What do you say when someone critiques you for looking forward with anticipation to the end of civilization?
Waziyatawin: This is one of the few times when I think being an Indigenous person might be an advantage, because people have a hard time saying that to me with a straight face. Indigenous populations suffered an extermination rate of 98.5 percent in the Western Hemisphere.
Derrick: So, we shouldn’t use past tense.
Waziyatawin: Absolutely. We’re still suffering.
Indigenous populations are no doubt recovering, but we’re also still under assault in what can only be called ongoing genocidal campaigns to either directly attack our bodies physically—especially Indigenous women—or through ongoing assaults to our lands and way of life, which continue to affect our capacity to feed ourselves in the most basic sense.
The question you are asking me is, how do I morally respond to the idea that there will be millions of deaths as a consequence of collapse?
Derrick: Yes. Part of my answer is, what people are we talking about? Is it the salmon people, the hammerhead shark people, the coral people, the bison people? Indigenous languages are disappearing at a relatively quicker rate than Indigenous nonhumans. The arguments don’t really hold there.
Another answer is that years ago I asked Anuradha Mittal, former director of Food First, if the people of India would be better off if the global economy disappeared tomorrow. She laughed and said of course, because there are former granaries of India that now export dog food and tulips to Europe.
The question for me becomes, which people are dying? That doesn’t alter the fact that a lot of people are going to die.
Waziyatawin: I feel like the question misses the point. It’s irrelevant, because it doesn’t matter what I think. If I could dictate how the world should be, I would be making all kinds of changes. But, I didn’t personally create the situation that we’re in, so to talk about how dire the situation is, is not a responsibility or sense of guilt that I take on.
Derrick: So, to say it’s unethical to say that that a lot of people are going to die in the crash is like saying that if you jump off a cliff, you’re going to die?
Waziyatawin: Exactly.
Derrick: One argument made in support of industrial civilization continuing is that we can’t go “backward,” and that nobody wants to live in caves or mud huts or any of the insulting clichés. I’m sure you get this all the time.
Waziyatawin: I love this question, when people ask it of me, because I think it reveals one of the dominant paradigms of this society, which is an investment or subscription to the notion of linear time. Vine Deloria wrote extensively on the relationships between science and religion and Indigenous populations, particularly Indigenous cosmologies. He wrote about linear time as being something deeply embedded in Judeo-Christian thought. In the Bible, it’s the way time is described and the way our relationship with the world is described. It starts with the origin, an act of creation by god, and presumably ends with the coming of Jesus Christ. There is a beginning and an end. Even science, which has broken off from religion and become what is supposed to be a secular tradition, it’s still using that same paradigm, still searching for the origins.
In Dakota, there is not a direct translation of linear time, and I suspect it’s the same in many Indigenous societies, because we didn’t subscribe to a notion of linear time. There are thousands of cultures around the world who don’t see time in a linear way, but instead see things in cycles, in ages, in transformation between birth and death, and those cycles repeat themselves, but there is no beginning or end. When people ask a question about something being “backward,” then there has to be something that is “forward,” and you start to see it’s deeply intertwined with this notion of “progress.”
Indigenous populations were always backward, according to this framework, because it is believed that there was a natural progression from savagery to civilization, and that all peoples eventually traverse that trajectory. In effect, that’s not true; if Dakota people were left in our homelands for the next ten thousand years, I would expect that our people would look very similar to the way they did prior to invasion. Again, it’s about a different set of core values. Rather than being invested in the idea of “progress” or some kind of advancement, the fundamental values are instead rooted in concepts of balance and reciprocity, establishing good relationships, upholding what is sustainable in the long term. That’s why there are Indigenous populations around the world who can live on the same landbase for thousands of years. They understand these core principles.
When you expose that reliance on a concept like linear time, then the paradigm flips. If you start to examine societies from a different lens, you see the wisdom of having a life based on balance, reciprocity, and sustainability, versus the folly or idiocy of continuing to work toward a notion of progress that is based on the ruthless exploitation of finite sources and in destroying the land upon which you need to live.
Derrick: What has been your process of decolonization?
Waziyatawin: Like all Indigenous Peoples today in North America, decolonization for me has been, at times, a very painful process, because all of us have now been indoctrinated in the same kinds of values and beliefs as settler society. If we were fortunate enough to be raised in a family or community where there is an alternative narrative, then we approach colonizer values and ideas with a critical perspective. Or, if we’ve experienced some kind of critical intervention along the way that causes us to question our adherence to settler ideas and values, then we’re better positioned to work on our own decolonization.
For me, it feels like it’s been a very slow process. I was fortunate enough to be raised in a family with alternative ideas about things, but I clearly was influenced by other ideas as well. One example is my work in truth-telling. I’m a professional educator, and one of the reasons I went into the field of history and teaching was because I believed that if people just understood the truth about what happened, that they would change. That’s really hard to let go of, because what I’ve learned from firsthand experience in efforts of truth-telling is that people really don’t care, for one. They care about power and privilege. They care about investing in a particular way of life, and the truth is irrelevant to that. The older I get and the more experiences like that I have, the more I’ve come to believe that there isn’t any way you can work within the existing system to radically change it. It’s flawed at the core. That’s what I mean when I say it’s not salvageable. It all needs to come down. All of it.
Derrick: How would you define decolonization for a white person? What do you as an Indigenous person want from white allies?
Waziyatawin: When I talk about decolonization or the process of colonization and how that’s carried out with different populations, the logical pathway to decolonization involves the colonizers leaving, going back, ending their colonization of other people’s lands. This is something that was advocated in other parts of the world when Indigenous populations engaged in decolonization movements. I think we’re in a different situation here, in the United States and Canada, largely because Indigenous populations still are so small in comparison with the rest of the population. Given the extermination rates of our people already, I have no doubt that if we advocated that, then a more aggressive campaign of extermination would be waged against us. What I believe is that we’re going to have to work something out.
When I talk about decolonization today, I talk about overturning all of the systems and institutions of colonialism. That means everything in American society and this way of life. It means the economic system, the governmental system, the education system, the criminal injustice system, everything. All aspects of it need to get taken down; that’s what decolonization looks like.
I think in an academic context, especially when we’re talking about the Western Hemisphere, people get funny ideas about what decolonization is; they think that it’s about tweaking the existing system or reform. When I use the term decolonization, I mean all of it has to go. If people are interested in being allies in a struggle for decolonization—which is closely aligned with the need to take down industrial civilization—then it means they need to take seriously the responsibility to help bring about the collapse of all these systems and institutions.
As an Indigenous person, I am advocating for the development of a resistance movement for Dakota people in Dakota homeland. That’s what this shirt I’m wearing is about; it says “Defend Minisota.” Minisota is our ancient name for our homeland: Minisota Makoce, which might translate as “land where the waters reflect the skies.” It’s a geographically specific term. When I’m talking about defending Minisota, I’m talking about Dakota people rising up and defending our land, because it’s currently being destroyed. One of the realities we face as Dakota people is that Minnesota’s and the U.S. policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing were so extraordinarily successful that many of our people live in exile today. Our people who do live in Minisota are confined to such small pieces of land. We have a total of about five or six thousand acres, which is about 0.012 percent of our original landbase. If we had to rely on our landbase today for survival, we would starve within a matter of days. What does it mean when we live in a society that continues to disallow our people to return from exile—to return home—and to live as original people on our landbase?
This resistance struggle is originating among Dakota people in our homelands, and I think we do have some allies who will join this struggle and fight with us. I also believe in the need for Indigenous populations to resume their roles as defenders of the land, but in some ways this is very scary, because while Indigenous populations have and continue to put their lives on the line in defense of the land, most people who have benefited most from our dispossession still take no action. My biggest fear in advocating that Indigenous Peoples resume that role in a very serious and committed way is that largely white allies who know what needs to happen, but who are too cowardly to take action, will allow us to take the bullets again.
Derrick: What do you think is necessary for Indigenous Peoples to revive, develop, or engage in strategies of resistance?
Waziyatawin: A couple of things. First, I want to say that decolonization for Indigenous populations has two major components. One is resurgence, and the other is resistance. When I talk about resurgence, it means putting faith, once again, in the traditions, values, belief systems, stories, and prophecies that have sustained our people for thousands of years. There was wisdom in those. Settler society has tried to make us forget that wisdom, and we need to embrace it once again. Resurgence is about recovering those ways of being, those ways of thinking, those ways of praying.
The other component is resistance.
Derrick: Which, as we’ve talked about, can be as straightforward as learning to tan a hide.
Waziyatawin: Absolutely, we’ll need all of those skills. When we talk about resistance, there are a few quotes that I want to bring up.
The first is a quote from Tecumseh, who was a Shawnee leader of resistance in the early nineteenth century. At one point, he was trying to rally support from other Indigenous populations to create a united resistance effort. His speeches are amazing. Here is one quote from him: “Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle; give up our homes, our country, given to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead, and everything that is dear to us? I know you will cry with me: never, never.” It’s that cry that we need to revive among our people again.
But there’s also another kind of effort that needs to be taken up today, because we’re in a unique historical time period. We’re facing a unique situation. I want to bring up a quote by Lee Maracle, who is a Stó:lō Indigenous intellectual in Canada. She says, “To win, we must plan in the cellars and attics, lurking in the dark with one eye cast about for the enemy. In our heart of hearts, we know the enemy is a beast that will stop at nothing to keep his world intact. We know that his money comes to him dripping from every pore with the blood and toil of millions. We know the enemy is ever-watchful, on guard day and night against the potential threat we all pose. To plan, we must learn to sum up our history; not the history of betrayal, but the history of our resistance. We must learn from our mistakes, and chart the course for our eventual victory.” What I love most about this particular quote is that she’s talking about a strategy that Indigenous people here haven’t taken up in quite that way. She’s also talking about our resistance fighters, and we’ve realized that in the context of defending Minisota, that is precisely what we’ve been doing; we’ve been going back to the historical records. I’ve already written about the crimes against humanity perpetrated against Dakota people: the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the bounties, the land theft, the dispossession, and the concentration camps. We know those things and have talked about them. Now it’s time to invoke that spirit of resistance.
There are some lessons from our historical experience that we can now bring forward and work with. One of the lessons that we learned from our war in 1862—which we lost, obviously, in a matter of about five and a half weeks—is that it made no difference whether someone was considered a hostile to the United States government and its citizens, or whether one was considered a friendly. In the end, we were all subjected to the same treatment: we all lost our homeland, we were all colonized. If we know that today, then the lesson is that we should all be fighting, because you aren’t going to curry favor within this society by going along. You’re only going to help defeat the resistance.
Derrick: One of the main German resisters in World War II was the mayor of Leipzig, I believe, who was a stout pacifist, but nonetheless believed that Hitler was terrible. He believed that he could just talk to Hitler and that he would be able to talk him out of policies. When the whole final coup attempt failed, he was tortured and killed along with everyone else, even though he was an absolute pacifist who refused to go along with any plan that was possibly violent.
Waziyatawin: You may as well take up arms.
If my Dakota ancestors would have been able to see the devastation that would occur within our homeland—if they could have seen a vision of what our homeland looks like today and know what this society would do to our beloved homeland—they would have fought a lot harder. Certainly, in 1862, we had people who betrayed our resistance fighters, and we paid a price because of that. Now, today, I think that we all know that this culture is not going to give up this way of life voluntarily. It’s not going to happen through persuasion. Knowing that and knowing the trajectory we’re on, we need to stop that trajectory by any means necessary and be serious and strategic about it. The longer this culture is allowed to continue on this trajectory, the worse it will be. It’s in everyone’s best interest to act as quickly as possible. We need to prepare and get ourselves trained. If we don’t have skills, we need to develop them. But, we can all start with smaller actions right away.
The other thing that makes our situation today unique is that we’re going to have major windows of opportunity, because the system, the culture, is already collapsing—it’s teetering. The economy, as you pointed out, is one weak area. Infrastructure and other things reliant on cheap oil are going to provide windows of opportunity where our actions can have the most impact. We need to prepare for big actions when those windows of opportunity arise.
Today, I talk often with young people. I have three children—one is twenty, and two are teenage boys—who are all aware that we’re going to be engaged in a serious struggle. When I talk to them, my beloved children, what kinds of things do I tell them? I tell them that we need to stop symbolic actions. I’ve engaged in my share of symbolic actions. Even now, today, things will come up in Dakota territory and I think to myself: I can’t be silent about this. I’m here, and it hurts me to be quiet. It’s difficult to not want to engage in some kind of symbolic action. But, it’s not going to do any good, I’m firmly convinced.
If you’re going to invest in resistance, take action underground. Don’t talk to another person about what you’re doing, unless it’s the people you’re going to be taking the actions with. I’ve made the mistake of being very public about what I’m advocating, which means that I’ll be one of the first people caught. Don’t get caught; prevent yourself from getting caught as long as possible.
When I think about the work I’m doing, I think about indigeneity as people and lands and plants and animals and waters. They are the audience to whom I direct most of my work and energy, because they are who I’m committed to. For Indigenous populations, we really need to revive that spirit of resistance.
One quote that has taken on additional meaning to us as Dakota people in thinking about reviving a resistance movement comes from Little Crow, who was our leader of resistance in 1862. The quote is in English, although he originally would have spoken this in Dakota. It’s going to sound a little more awkward here because I’m going to change the pronouns a little bit. In Dakota, when we use pronouns, they can be male or female; they aren’t gender-specific. Even when we use the word that can be translated as “man,” it can also be translated as “people.”
These are words that Little Crow spoke in 1862. He said, “I tell you, we must fight and perish together. A man is a fool and coward who thinks otherwise and who will desert his nation at such a time. Disgrace not yourselves to those who will hang you up like dogs, but die, if die you must, with arms in your hands, like warriors and braves of the Dakota.”
When I think about that, and when I think about the struggle that we all face, I know it is time for everyone to come forward and be willing to risk something. Eventually, even people engaged in permaculture, if they are feeding a resistance movement, are going to be targeted for persecution. They are going to risk torture, imprisonment, and death. We are all going to have to risk something, so get over it. This is a long-term struggle, and you have to be thinking beyond yourself. You have to be thinking about future generations and animals and plants. It is way beyond you as an individual, so get over it and engage in struggle.
Derrick: You have a shirt—and you also gave me a shirt—that says “Fuck Patience.” Can you briefly talk about fucking patience?
Waziyatawin: That comes from a conversation among Indigenous people. One of the favorite quotes that I have of yours is the “too kind” quote. Vine Deloria Jr. used to talk about something similar as well. He talked about Indigenous Peoples being too polite, saying that we have been afraid of “offending” others. I had a conversation among an Indigenous group of people, and one of the elders talked about the need for having patience. He said we need to have patience with little brother, with white people, who are screwing things up because of immaturity, because they are still babies, really. We need to help bring them along.
It was in that context that I thought: we don’t have time. I feel the urgency way too strongly. We don’t have time for this society, for this culture to come to its senses. We need to take action and we need to do it now. I thought of this message: “Fuck Patience.”