Pitfalls of Anarchist Solidarity with Indigenous Communities | Adam Barker | Anarchist Essays Ep 27

In this essay, Adam Barker discusses recurrent problems around non-Indigenous anarchists involved in land reclamation actions, along with Audra, a Kanonsionni'on:we (Ga-noon-soon-knee-on-way) resident of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and Delee, a Wet’suwet’en activist who has been involved in ongoing struggles in several communities. Audra and Delee's experiences and encounters with anarchists seeking to work in solidarity with Indigenous land reclamation struggles reveal patterns of patriarchal aggressions, disruptions of community relationships and internal dynamics, and poor reputation among Indigenous communities, but with suggestions for how some groups have done better solidarity work that can inform anarchist activists.
Adam Barker is a Research Assistant in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Adam's most recent publication is Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America, with UBC Press.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at / user-178917365
Artwork by Sam G: / passerinecreations

[@RayyanKesnan]

This is a wonderfully nuanced critique. It's clear it comes from a lot of actual on the ground experience, which is very unfortunate, but great that you guys put it into clear words for people to learn from.

[@Jacobxiong613]

Excellent work

[@PetersonSilva]

Not only the content of this episode is marvelous, I must say I was taken aback from the beginning by how much Barker's voice resembles Tony's from Every Frame a Painting. So hearing this was not only great for the insight, it was also delightful.

[@MrBrindleStyle]

WELL DONE!! Same in regional Australia.

[@AlexanderSy]

I looks like a lot of our fellow anarchists have either never learned or have forgotten some key foundations of anarchism. Like pushing ideologies or campaigns on others who do not want them is, by-definition, authoriarianism. Anarchism generally promotes voluntary-based bottom-up communities, where each community develops its own culture and works out its own solutions. By going in and disrespecting these cultures, by imposing outside standards upon what they have been doing for their own liberation, these "ararchists" are practising the very dictatorship they claim to abhor. The principle that only by practising freedom can you attain freedom, is somehow forgotten on these men. Freedom is celebrated in the unique self-expressions of all parts and individuals in a community as they work together for their well-being, and that is not yours to dictate or control. And if a community, who's fighting for their autonomy, didn't ask for your help, then by pushing your "help" on them, you are violating their freedom and their autonomy. You become no better than those state-capitalist Vanguard parties which oppress others "for their own good".

[@RayyanKesnan]

Well said. There's a Eurocentric bias at the heart of all leftist ideologies, just like there is with right wing ones and Western radicals have to be careful about "colonizing" other groups with their ideology.

[@Birbface]

shocking, but very important to hear, thank you.

[@matildaswaltz]

This is a brief description of the experience I have which is consistent with the essay. Dot points as follows: 1) I arrived at a major National protest camp January 1988 as a white settler anarchist, who had to swap out what car I got a lift in, and that was how I was in company of an affinity group called “women against racism” (W.A.R.) instead of the affinity group my friends are in; 2) WAR women got an invitation they shared with me, to attend a traditional indigenous Corroboree which got made for reinstating traditional indigenous Kinship throughout Australia and among all persons with any amount of indigenous ancestry, (the reason WAR women got invited was because one member had lived in a remote indigenous community in the 1970s); 3) I attended the Corroboree, and at the event felt a strong internal calling to participate among indigenous folks to a greater extent than any of the other WAR women felt, or the other woman from my own affinity group who came along also, (we were 6 or 7 white women among close to 1000 indigenous, many from remote communities); 4) Thereafter I ran away overseas then had children with an Irish anarchist, who I stayed with for about ten years; 5) Little did I know I had been aligned into a traditional indigenous betrothal, with a black activist, and after the Irishman and I separated, I began to realise that the indigenous connections I had are unusual and valuable to me, including an understanding that it is unusual that the studies I had done in anthropology had all already become direct links into the Kinship groups I had studied, and that as a sole parent I wanted my children to experience a strengthening of those ties; 6) After another ten years of strengthening those ties, I met the indigenous activist who had become betrothed with me in 1988, and it turned out he was running away from the consequences of the Corroboree; 7) Then I spent the next ten years attempting to communicate properly within traditional indigenous protocols, about how I had witnessed the man I am the betrothed wife of contravening the rules of his own Kinship group, but hiding his infringements behind the facts of his relationship with me, (although after refusing to take responsibility as a husband should, and so he didn’t get all the facts in hand about me which he needed, . . . for example, he imagined that because of my pale skin, that was a certain indication of my politics being more right wing than his, but when he also worried he was in trouble with the union for not paying award wages to his employees, . . . about which I had thought no wonder he didn’t want me around); 8) It took all of twelve years so far to convince the indigenous community that the man I was betrothed to was who was infringing their patterns of social governance by Kinship, and it isn’t me who had set him up into how he fell, (but I won, after in 2020 another indigenous man asked me to make a report to the police, and then in 2021 the man I was betrothed with killed another woman in his own community). So the question will be, am I still an anarchist. I don’t especially identify with a role as an activist although sometimes turn up to events organised by activists. I still have anarcho-syndicalist politics if I have to have any political label upon my beliefs. Although I am a very strong adherent of indigenous Kinship as means of social governance, and I don’t know that all anarchists would want to recognise Kinship within Anarchy. In my understanding Kinship is a set of rules which provide a series of rules for social relations, defined by our biology as much as by any other factor. The biological factors are by ancestry and by location of birth, and are inherent in all persons even if not born into an overt Kinship system and connected codes of conduct. For example, (this my own father pointed out, just so I knew he knows what Kinship is), scientists in the field of immuno-genetics have discovered molecules on the surface of the skin of all mammals, called “Major Histo-compatibility Complex” (MHC) molecules. And in studies on rats and mice they find that MHC molecules define a natural pattern of two exogamous moieties, (only the immuno-geneticists have not yet put their information together with the language of anthropology), which indigenous folks call Crow and Eaglehawk. So the answer is that I am an anarchist only to the extent to which other anarchists can honour my need to obey Kinship lore about how Crow and Eaglehawk are distinct and need to be exogamous.