Melondrop’s Reviews > No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred > Status Update

Yet the settler anthropologist wants more evidence, more rationale, more comparison, more information, and more justification to feed itself on the unknown. It scavenges for barbarity to justify its own violent social urges: “this is how it’s been, this is why we dominate and destroy.”The living world is sacrificed and consumed on the altar of progress; this is the sacrament of Darwin.

“Tribal sovereignty” is not possible while colonial authority exists, and perhaps a more pressing concern is that it is fundamentally a colonial political concept. While calls to “honor the treaties” on one hand could be viewed as assertions of indigenous political authority, on the other, they are a myopic urge to revisit forced negotiations made under duress to benefit the colonial order.

Perhaps this is the US political machinery’s method of reducing harm or impact from effective social and environmental justice movements. If they can’t kill or imprison the organizers, then fold them into the bureaucracy or turn their struggles into businesses. At the end of the day, not everyone can be white supremacists, but everyone can be capitalists.

Just as our strongest medicines are those that are the most bitter, sometimes our greatest lessons are our deepest scars.

How is kinship established? It is not just the politics of common enemies and leftist unity; it is an anti-political recuperation of who and how we are, with each other and existence, in this world. Interrelationality compels us to turn our solidarities inward, to directly address how we are and how we are not relating in harmony with existence.

To realize Land Back means to end the ways humans have profaned all of existence and imposed their will upon the land and reasserting that the land belongs to no one.

If we interrogate the promises of Land Back, we are brought back to an ancestral perspective that the land belongs to no-one but itself. Land Back then becomes a question of unmapping “legal” terrain, tearing down walls, and cutting through fences. It becomes an undoing of the forceful imposition of the capitalist idea of private property and…domination or dominion over mother Earth and existence.

If a Christian church and a sacred Mountain are intentionally destroyed, one is morally and judicially decried as terror while the other is considered progress. This is what is meant when we assert, “no justice on stolen lands.” Colonizer laws are constructed to benefit settler society.

Federal land management agencies’ inconsistent application of NEPA, varied interpretations of 13007, and view of consultation as a formality to be checkboxed, demonstrates the hostile design of the administrative architecture of “justice” for indigenous peoples lifeways relating to sacred lands.