Red Nation Rising (Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, David Correia)

Red Nation Rising is the first book ever to investigate and explain the violent dynamics of bordertowns. Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities. The difference is that these settlements get their name from their location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which separates the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed by the United States.

Bordertowns came into existence when the first US military forts and trading posts were strategically placed along expanding imperial frontiers to extinguish indigenous resistance and incorporate captured indigenous territories into the burgeoning nation-state. To this day, the US settler state continues to wage violence on Native life and land in these spaces out of desperation to eliminate the threat of Native presence and complete its vision of national consolidation “from sea to shining sea.” This explains why some of the most important Native-led rebellions in US history originated in bordertowns and why they are zones of ongoing confrontation between Native nations and their colonial occupier, the United States.

Despite this rich and important history of political and material struggle, little has been written about bordertowns. Red Nation Rising marks the first effort to tell these entangled histories and inspire a new generation of Native freedom fighters to return to bordertowns as key front lines in the long struggle for Native liberation from US colonial control. This book is a manual for navigating the extreme violence that Native people experience in reservation bordertowns and a manifesto for indigenous liberation that builds on long traditions of Native resistance to bordertown violence.

Red Nation Rising
Author	Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, David Correia
Publisher	PM Press
First published	2021
Type	Book
ISBN	978-1-62963-831-7
Source	Anna's Archive

Foreword by Radmilla Cody and Brandon Benallie

Prior to European contact, the area currently known as Albuquerque, New Mexico, was considered neutral territory by various Native societies located near the grand river flowing through it. Native people nourished by the river regularly met in the area to trade food, items (ceremonial, cultural, and practical), songs, and stories. It was an area of mutually agreed upon peace for the sake of kinship.

On July 19, 2014, two unsheltered Diné (Navajo) men named Kee Thompson and Allison Gorman were asleep on a soiled mattress in an empty lot when they were targeted by three teenagers continuing an old settler tradition called “Indian rolling.” Gorman and Thompson were savagely murdered, beaten beyond recognition. Although Albuquerque police stated the murders of Gorman and Thompson were not motivated by race, the grim implication was there, as it always has been since first contact with European settlers in this hemisphere. A few days later, a news reporter with the Associated Press interviewed the lone survivor, Jerome Eskeets, who was sleeping nearby when Gorman and Thompson were attacked. The video interview shows Eskeets crouching in the passenger seat of the reporter’s car, bruised, shocked, and in fear for his life. He keeps his head low, retelling the story of what happened to the men he called his “uncles,” pausing a few times to quietly sob. As he recounts the jeers of “homeless” that the teenagers yelled as they beat Gorman and Thompson, Eskeets finally turns his head toward the reporter’s camera and says, “We’re not homeless. Our home is right here on this land.”

The cosmic weight of these murders pulled together many fierce relatives, guiding seemingly distant paths of liberation into their own river of commitment to action. However, this is not another collection of stories about the tragedy of settler and Native relations. Red Nation Rising is the continuation of what we, as Diné, would call k’é hasin: everlasting kinship and hope. We enacted kinship as we sought justice for Gorman and Thompson and all unsheltered relatives on the front lines of the war against colonialism. Through kinship, we build solidarity and commitment to liberation for the Earth’s poor, displaced, and dispossessed people. Through kinship, we are strong.

Radical relationality is not a new idea, nor is it an “indigenized” theory of kinship, just as theories of mutual aid and dialectical materialism are not European inventions. Kinship and critical thinking have always been part of the foundations of Native lifeways, providing balance in our collective journey. There is now a monstrous disruption in the balance of all relatives who live above and below the surface of the Earth. Today, in our era of life, this monster is known as capitalism, the most threatening and successful force of death and poverty.

We must remind ourselves that borders on this hemisphere are recent lines drawn by the claws of capitalism. Borders preserve an imbalance, favoring those who benefit from the misery of broken kinship. Capitalism’s insatiable hunger for violence is manifested by every border structure it builds. The suffering and indignity Palestinian people experience when crossing an Israeli checkpoint is similar to that of Yaqui people held at gunpoint by US border patrol agents, with the same company providing walls and surveillance technology for both borders.

How often have we heard from apologists for capitalism that this is the most peaceful time in history? Peaceful for whom? When the United States embarked on a new enterprise called treaty-making, they made sure to include promises of peace. History has proven the peace promised in treaties was never meant for Native people. Settlers militarized the borders drawn up during the treaty process with outposts we know today as bordertowns. These outposts, primitive bordertowns, were meant not only to contain “off the reservation” Indians, but to prevent Black relatives and other enslaved human beings from seeking refuge within Native societies.

Towns in general are designed by and for men; they are literal structures of patriarchy. There are more streets, towns, and landmarks named after dinosaurs than named after women. Bordertowns are sustained through the use of the four B’s: the bullet, the bottle, the bank, and the Bible. Bordertowns base their identity on the historical myth of the Wild West, a free market capitalist utopia for those seeking to fulfill an ultra-masculine, gunslinging fantasy. Anything that interferes with this fantasy is immediately eliminated, no matter how reasonable the appeal to reality is. And this reality is the immiseration and exploitation of Native lives, lands, and intelligence.

The bordertown is a reflection of every symbolic gesture made toward Native people to pacify currents of rebellion. Predatory lenders from payday loans to pawnshops ensure a constant stream of debt flows through capitalism’s maw. Vampires exist in bordertowns; they drain the life embedded within Native art and culture. Devoid of spirit, they are an insult to death itself. Every day we bargain with the beast so that we may buy groceries for the week, so that we are not pulled over by cops in the dark or followed home to where our children sleep. The time for bargaining is over.

As Diné, we continue to pray to Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water. We are comforted by Grandfather Fire, a direct connection to the cosmic flame: Nitsáhákees (critical thinking). We sing songs of rebellion and hope. We sing songs about monsters who were slain, because they brought illnesses to the mind and body. The songs are woven in a borderless blend of strategy and victory. They remind us of the strength of kinship necessary to defeat ancient enemies who have returned once again.

Our roots of resistance are strong and smooth as grandmother’s hands, burying our hearts deep within the Earth. These humble roots will always seek nourishment from those who remember the Beauty Way songs of their people. These roots are beyond borders and will always find you. They will always find you.

The Earth and Sky gave us all unique tools and abilities to slay the monster known as capitalism. This book is one of them.

Chapter One — "I Can't Fucking Breathe!"

Twenty-nine-year-old Zachary Bearheels, a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, needed to see his mother. He left his aunt’s house on the Rosebud Reservation, where he’d been staying, and boarded a Greyhound bus in Murdo, South Dakota, on June 3, 2017, bound for his mom’s home in Oklahoma City. He never reached her. The bus pulled into Omaha, Nebraska, late on a Saturday night, June 3, 2017. Bearheels, like most passengers, got off the bus to look for food or maybe a clean bathroom. While he was gone, another passenger complained to the driver that Bearheels was strange, his behavior erratic. The driver refused to let him back on the bus when he returned.

Bearheels suffered from bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder and required anti-psychotic medication to control his symptoms and stay well. He’d run out of the medication, and his symptoms returned. Abandoned in Omaha, without money or medication, Bearheels spent the night walking across the unfamiliar city. He walked past two of its hospitals and dozens of its churches. He walked past the Joslyn Art Museum, famous for its Native-themed architecture and its collections chronicling European conquest in North America. When the bus arrived in Oklahoma City without him, Bearheels’s mother, Renita Chalepah, filed a missing person’s report.

Bearheels walked all day and into the next. Sometime after midnight on June 5, he made it to a gas station and convenience store miles from where he’d started, exhausted, dehydrated, and hallucinating. A store clerk found him licking the windows of the store and dancing on the sidewalk in the dark. The clerk called the police, and two cops arrived, Jennifer Strudl and Makayla Mead. They handcuffed Bearheels and placed him in the back of Strudl’s cruiser. They ran a record check and saw he’d been reported missing. Strudl called Bearheels’s mother at 1:00 a.m. Chalapeh was up, so worried about her son that she hadn’t slept at all. She explained to Strudl that she was ready to drive to Omaha but needed to know her son was somewhere safe. He didn’t have his medication, she said, and he needed help. “Please bring him somewhere safe,” she pleaded, and suggested a crisis center, if possible. Strudl radioed her supervisor, Sergeant Erik Forehead, who refused Chalapeh’s request. “Take him back to the bus station,” he ordered.

Just then another cop, Scotty Payne, arrived. He pulled into the convenience store lot just as Strudl was opening the cruiser door to talk to Bearheels. But Bearheels was having none of it. He slipped past her and out of the cruiser, his hands still cuffed behind his back. The three officers chased after him. A fourth cop, Ryan McClarty, arrived, just as the others grabbed Bearheels and pinned him against a bottled water display on the sidewalk outside the store.

Some of this we know from lapel camera video, but all of what follows was captured by a camera in Strudl’s cruiser. The officers briefly release Bearheels, who turns away from them and stands facing the store. The four cops discuss something off camera, and then suddenly Strudl appears in the frame, walking toward Bearheels. She turns him around, back toward the cruiser and then the other cops join her, putting hands on Bearheels. The video is grainy but Bearheels looks confused and quickly grows alarmed. McClarty grabs Bearheels roughly by his ponytail, while another officer pushes him toward the cruiser. Bearheels isn’t fighting back, but he struggles to get their hands off of him. As they approach the open cruiser door, walking toward the camera, Bearheels drops to the ground, his hands still cuffed behind his back. The officers circle him. Scotty Payne yells, “Taser! Taser!” and fires at Bearheels. The violent jolt of electricity knocks Bearheels onto his back. Only his legs and torso are visible. He lays momentarily still, breathing heavily, gasping for air. What looks like convulsions begin, but it’s more likely the electricity coursing through his body.

Most Tasers that police carry can be used in one of two ways. On drive stun mode, an officer presses the Taser directly into a person’s body, delivering the electrical potential of 50,000 volts. Payne, however, fires the Taser like a gun, launching electrically charged darts toward Bearheels. The darts are attached to the Taser by wires and they attach to their victim like the fangs of a snake. In this mode, a cop can deliver the pain of electrocution over and over again. Bearheels lies on the ground as Payne cycles the Taser, twelve times in all, electrocuting Bearheels repeatedly over the course of nearly sixty seconds. The maker of the Taser, Axon, claims it is a nonlethal weapon, but this is true only if police use it as a nonlethal weapon. They don’t. Police kill dozens of people with Tasers every year.

Payne stands over Bearheels holding the Taser, pulling the trigger every few seconds. Bearheels writhes on the ground, kicking at him with his unlaced, high-top sneakers. It’s unclear if Bearheels is trying to fight Payne off or simply convulsing from being electrocuted. Suddenly, McClarty lunges toward Bearheels and grabs him again by the hair. He lifts him off the ground and slams him down, driving his body into the pavement. “You’re gonna get it again,” Payne hollers. In the violence of the attack, Bearheels slips his cuffs and his right hand comes free. He frantically tries to defend himself against McClarty, but the cop spins him onto his back and pins him to the pavement. With his left hand McClarty holds Bearheels down, and with his right he unleashes a flurry of punches to Bearheels’s head. These are vicious punches, shocking in their force and efficiency. McClarty throws thirteen punches in eight seconds, each directly to the head. Each punch sends Bearheels’s head snapping back onto the pavement. Punch, pavement, repeat.

The other three officers stand over Bearheels, watching—and doing nothing—as McClarty kills Bearheels. A woman’s cries are heard in the background. Bearheels says, “I can’t fucking breathe!” and then goes limp. The other officers continue to throw Bearheels around while Payne radios for a rescue squad. The police place cuffs on Bearheels’s limp arms and put flex cuffs on legs no longer kicking. Paramedics arrive. They find no pulse. He is not breathing. They bring him to a hospital, one that he’d walked past just hours earlier, where doctors pronounce him dead.

The coroner’s report determines that Bearheels died from excited delirium syndrome, despite the fact that there is no such thing as excited delirium syndrome. Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognize it as a legitimate medical condition. It is a euphemism that coroners use for people that police kill with their tasers or in chokeholds.

Omaha police chief Todd Schmaderer fires Payne, McClarty, Strudl, and Mead. Payne and McClarty are charged with assault, but a jury acquits Payne, and prosecutors later drop misdemeanor assault charges on McClarty. Police “experts” convince the prosecutors that McClarty was justified in punching Bearheels. When Bearheels slipped his cuffs, they explain, he posed a threat, and McClarty was justified in eliminating that threat. Apparently handcuffs, that most common of carceral tools, are a lethal weapon when not in the hands of cops. In April 2020, an arbitration panel upholds Payne’s termination but reinstates McClarty, along with Strudl and Mead. They receive back pay but are required to take a “refresher” course in policing.

“I Can’t Breathe”

A month later, in May 2020, after three of these four cops—now Indian killers—are reinstated as officers, four Minneapolis cops murder George Floyd. There is no flurry of punches, as with Bearheels. Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the back of George Floyd’s neck. One cop tells Chauvin, “I’m worried about excited delirium or whatever.” He asks if they should turn Floyd on his side. “That’s why we have him on his stomach,” Chauvin responds. “I can’t breathe,” gasps Floyd. Like with Bearheels, all of this is captured on video, and millions of people eventually watch as police slowly choke the life from Floyd while he cries out for his mother.

As in Bearheels’s case, the initial medical examiner’s report says nothing about police violence. “No physical findings support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation,” the first report read. It is “underlying health conditions” not the racial animus and white supremacy at the heart of American policing that killed Floyd. Is this the definition of excited delirium? The slow grinding down of the bodies, hearts, and minds of Native, Black, Brown, and poor people by police?

It is not enough to say that police killed Bearheels or Floyd, nor is it enough to focus on the particular sadism of Payne, McClarty, and Chauvin. Rather, our task is to ask how we might account for their deaths, understood as a product of a murderous system built on Native extermination and anti-Blackness, a system designed to lead directly to premature Native and Black deaths. This is the quotidian nature of white supremacy—the everydayness of genocide—and it reaches deep into Native and Black lives, breaking hearts, shattering minds, and destroying bodies. These are the preexisting conditions for millions.

The murder of George Floyd sparked ferocious, organized, and principled movements for Black lives in a historical force unseen in generations. Countless many have tirelessly organized for years against police and the murderous system of white supremacy police uphold and defend. They were ready for this moment, because this moment is every moment. Millions took to the streets to direct righteous anger at the institution of policing itself. The aftershocks of these seismic ruptures toppled monuments of Confederate generals, Spanish conquistadors, and racist sports mascots. Decolonization and abolition are not mutually exclusive.

Elites and nearly all elected officials, as expected, have scoffed at or patronized these Black and Native-led uprisings, condemning and vilifying those taking to the streets. “Why do people burn down their own neighborhoods?” they ask. Because these have never been their neighborhoods. US cities have never belonged to Black people. The end of chattel slavery offered no end to white supremacy. The plantation system continued on in the form of Jim Crow and in a ruthlessly policed racial apartheid organized around the theft of Black wealth. Black people were no longer the property of white overlords, but race relations—between Black and white—have always been—and remain—a property relation. Police are the enforcers of this relation, patrolling Black people as the plantation overseers once did, making, upholding, and defending racialized property relations. The geography of the United States is a geography of white supremacy—the Jim Crow sundown towns and the property redlining that reinforced it—a geography of unfreedom that excludes Black people from owning homes and land and of possessing collective social wealth.

It is this history that kindled the fires that erupted in cities throughout the United States following the murder of George Floyd. You can’t burn down your “own neighborhood” if it never belonged to you. It belonged to police, so we set it on fire. What burned was not Black property, but white property, the property of the owning classes: their chain stores, payday loan centers, fast-food chains, slumlord buildings, and banks. By burning down the police stations that patrol the plantation, people burned down the plantation. The fires burned brick and mortar, but the target was a different form of property, what the legal scholar Cheryl Harris called “whiteness as property.” Whiteness is not a thing but a property relation based on an exclusion ruthlessly enforced by the state. How could it be anything other in the United States than the social and spatial expression of a homicidal settler worldview constructed through cultural, legal, and political norms of extermination and genocide? The masses in the streets broke the spell of inviolability surrounding the plantation to teach us that whiteness burns too.

From the Plantation to the Bordertown

The plantation is where capital was first amassed from the forced labor of enslaved African people on the stolen lands of Native people. Expropriating wealth based on forced labor and stolen land requires an astonishing commitment to collective colonial violence. This commitment fueled US westward expansion. The settlers dragged the relations of the plantation along with them as they raped and murdered their way through Native lands. It took more than temporary settler outposts to sustain this commitment to violence, and so these outputs developed into towns and cities. This is what settlers meant when they talked of bringing “civilization,” as they liked to say, to their “western frontier.”

We call all of this the bordertown. Settler colonialism has so transformed the world we live in that few settlers see their cities as spatial expressions of settler violence. The word instead took on other meanings. The bordertown most commonly describes the cities and towns along recognized international borders, such as the US-Mexico border. These are considered the borders that matter in the everyday life of a settler. We draw on Native vernacular, an everyday language of resistance, to recognize the borders that settlers ignore. These borders exist everywhere settler order confronts Native order. And since we find this confrontation everywhere in settler society, everything in a settler world is a border, and every settler is haunted by this border—a Native presence that should not exist, that blurs the edges of settler ontology. This fundamental contradiction compels settlers to act like settlers; they sense the threat but cannot name it; they are always on the defensive.

The bordertown typically refers to white-dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations and give spatial form to the violence and exploitation that defines everyday Native life, past and present. The bordertown is a cruel invention that imposes on Native people a million daily indignities. The bordertown, however, is not just a place. It is a relation where the contradictions of settler colonialism emerge and show themselves to all. The constant crossing of borders is everywhere. The spatial transitions of off-and on-reservation, the moving across international boundaries, the skipping into and out of jurisdictions, and the knowledge that every Native step constitutes a transgression of a settler border and a settler rule.

“Off the reservation” is a political and military expression designating someone who is uncontrollable and, therefore, a threat to power. “Originally the term [off the reservation] meant a particular kind of ‘outlaw’ a Native person who crossed the territorial border, called a reserve or reservation, set by the United States or state government,” writes the Laguna Pueblo feminist Paula Gunn Allen. The reservation, more prison than homeland, offers no refuge from this settler geography. According to Gunn Allen, the boundaries also include imposed political and heteronormative norms, the strictly enforced divisions of territory, race, gender, and nation. A transgression of these cruel fictions—“going off the reservation”—made one a renegade, an outlaw, who could be hunted down and, usually, executed. Many reservations began as prisoner of war or concentration camps—and some remain so. Settler law allows Native peoples to call these homelands, but only until settler law says they can’t.

Like all property, the bordertown is many things at once. It is a thing and a relation, a place and a project. As a project, it is cunning in its capacity to make Native peoples appear foreign in their own lands. The Native is always out of place in the bordertown. The aim of this book is not to offer a cultural, or even geographical, analysis of the bordertown. Rather, we seek an analytical precision for the category, a category that we believe is crucial in the struggle for Native liberation. This term is our term, because it is the term that Native people themselves use. Its multiple meanings describe not only a place but also an experience. Red Nation Rising, therefore, makes no contribution to scholarly studies of colonialism. Ours is an elaboration of a collective Native experience of struggle against colonialism. The bordertown only exists to eliminate the Native, and to steal and secure Native land.

Language, of course, does matter, as the common practice among coroners of renaming police murder “excited delirium” makes clear. Everything found on Turtle Island, for example, has a Native name. Many are known by several names, a result of overlapping, negotiated relations among Native peoples to specific places. These names persist despite the violence of settlers who destroy these places and, by virtue of their “discovery,” rename them, often after an Indian killer or slaver. We note the increasingly common gesture among some non-Native people to refer to places by their Native names. We encourage the proliferation of Native languages and the restoration of Native place names. But renaming places by their Native names does not restore land to Native people, just as rejecting the language of excited delirium does not bring Zachary Bearheels back to life. The bordertown serves the settler no matter what we call it.

We use the term bordertown to keep the focus on its origins and purposes and the relations that it sustains. This is the analytical precision we seek. The word bordertown also captures a very specific accusation. The name itself—a noun, town, adjectively modified by border—reveals and clarifies the settler project. Every town is a bordertown, because every town serves as a border that settlers must defend. But the name bordertown anticipates its own failure and predicts its own demise. This is why we render it as one word. It is a bordertown, not a border town. Why? There is no objectively innocent spatial form in a settler world that we might call just a “town.” Rather there is only the spatial expression of the settler project—borders, violence, and police. Every settler town is a bordertown, because every Native person on land that the settler desires, whether in a city or on the reservation, represents and embodies the active ongoing failure of the settler project. Bordertown is the word that describes the murderous colonial condition that has come to structure Native life and, thus, Native resistance to overturn that order. The only way to resolve this fundamental contradiction is through Native liberation.

The Upside-Down Places

Bordertowns, as with all imperial borders, are spatial expressions of an intent to murder. This is why, from Saskatoon to Santa Fe, bordertowns are always bloody killing fields. Omaha and Minneapolis, two bordertowns whose settler names are taken from the languages of the Native nations from whom they were stolen, are united by a settler violence so deeply embedded in everyday life as to achieve a kind of banality in its regularity. It is so common, this violence, that it seems to disappear into the air that the settler breathes.

Omaha and Minneapolis, like all bordertowns, were carved from what settlers called “the frontier.” You find the frontier, according to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, at “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Consider the phrase. In the speech Turner gave during the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” his “meeting point” served as a metaphor to describe a United States finally and fully emerged. In other words, this place the settler calls the United States cannot exist outside the settler domination of Native lands. Another word for meeting point is bordertown, where the settler confronted and sought to destroy a Native world in order to become the United States, in order to individually become “American.”

Police use the exact same language. Police call the “meeting point” the thin blue line between two antagonistic social worlds. Like Turner, police understand the meeting point as the line between civilization and savagery. The thin blue line updates Turner’s frontier thesis. For Turner, the meeting point served as a metaphor to describe an event—the conquest of Native lands. The thin blue line makes clear that this was no event. It is an ongoing practice. Thus, the United States requires genocidal violence as long as a Native world persists. Police use the thin blue line to remind us that this imperial project is a police project. Without police, or without the settler, there would be no United States. So settlers and their police occupy these “meeting places,” the Omahas and Minneapolises, the wellsprings of the United States and progress, these upside-down places. They are upside-down for the way the bordertown makes police violence look like self-defense and a defense of civilization necessary to protect settlers from the savage threat of Native retribution.

Settlers Need Indian Killers

The settler is always white. The bordertown is always under attack. The Native must always be destroyed. This is the recipe for an always present settler fear and anxiety stoked by the terror of a coming “great replacement” fantasy, a “white genocide” in which Native and Black people are in constant rebellion, always threatening to do to the settler what the settler did first. To the settler, the only reasonable response to this is violence. Destroy the Native before the Native destroys you.

Police are settler society’s Indian killers. McClarty, Payne, and those Omaha cops killed Zachary Bearheels for embodying this existential threat, as did Derek Chauvin. George Floyd is not the only man he killed. In 2006, Chauvin and other police shot Wayne Reyes, a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, twenty-three times, killing him. Police awarded Chauvin a medal of valor for his Indian killing, as they always do.

Trace the work of the cop back in time. The first frontier police in the United States were the scalp hunters recruited into Indian Country to murder Apaches in the 1840s and 1850s. Chauvin and McClarty are their descendants, a product of a long line of scalp hunters, mutilators, and body part collectors. Churches in Santa Fe once ran the scalps of Apaches up their flag poles. In Minnesota, settlers collected scalp bounties on Dakota men, women, and children. Frontier newspapers advertised land for sale alongside rewards for bloody “red skins.” The violence of the settler has always been understood as productive, progressive, and, thus, lawful. Police create order out of this imagined chaos.

These scalp hunters never left, never fully gave way to police. Instead, they exist alongside them as de facto police. In April of 1974, three white high school students from Farmington, New Mexico, murdered three Navajo men, Benjamin Benally, John Harvey, and David Ignacio. The teenagers bludgeoned their faces and caved in their chests with basketballsized rocks. They exploded firecrackers in their noses and on their genitalia. They burned and beat their victims beyond recognition.

The Chokecherry Massacre, as it came to be known, is standard police and vigilante practice. There is nothing unusual about this brutality, particularly in Farmington where white high school students have been known to sever the fingers of Navajo people living on the streets and display them proudly in their lockers at school. Murdering and torturing Navajo people in the bordertowns that surround the reservation has its own name: Indian rolling. These are the scalp hunters of their generation.

The practice of Indian rolling is bound up in a state-sanctioned death culture practiced mostly by white male settlers. Winslow, Arizona, police officer Austin Shipley worshipped killing. He once posted a selfie wearing a III% skull t-shirt in his squad car. These men are hunters, and policing has always followed the logic of the hunt. The cop hunts when on patrol. On March 27, 2016, Shipley received a call about a woman shoplifting at a Circle K gas station and convenience store. The clerk claimed a woman stole two cases of beer and a gas station hotdog. Shipley hunted her, and the point of the settler hunt is the kill.

He pulls up behind Loreal Tsingine, a twenty-seven-year-old Navajo woman, a young mother, walking down the sidewalk. Shipley fumbles with his lapel camera, tries to turn it off, in fact, but all this does is deactivate the audio recording function. So, from his own lapel camera we watch his hunt without sound. He leaps from his cruiser, grabs Tsingine from behind, shoving the hundred-pound woman so forcefully to the ground that the sidewalk tears flesh from her arm as she falls. She shows no fear as she recovers from the blow and turns to face her attacker, raising a pair of blunt-ended forceps in defense. Shipley fires at her four times at close range. She falls and Shipley stands over her calmly watching her die, gasping for air.

Among the items Shipley carried with him on his hunts was a Punisher skull patch, the common insignia of police, military, and settler militias. The patch represents the masculine heart of the settler’s commitment to the hunt. The settler forges his masculinity in violence against Native women. The cop and the vigilante are represented by the Punisher logo, both versions of the same “anti-hero engaged in a war against evil, seemingly without end.” These are the words the creator of the comic book uses to explain the Punisher. “God will judge our enemies, we’ll arrange the meeting.” This phrase adorned the range bag Shipley placed alongside him when he took his police cruiser out for his hunts. The settler understands the hunt as a divine mission to kill.

Off the Reservation

Settler citizenship entails a lethal obligation to kill Indians. And the history of settler colonialism is a history of the professionalization of this obligation. The settler hired the Indian killer to cleanse the land and make way for white settlement. The settler got the world, the Indian got the reservation. It is from this history that the common American English idiom “off the reservation” comes to us, with all its genocidal meaning. For the settler, the obligation to “cleanse” territory of any Native presence and claim it is the first premise of collective violence. From this premise comes perpetual violence, extermination, and the drive to erase all that is Native. More dead Indians, more settler land. The Indian killer had counterparts in the east who were slave patrollers hunting, capturing, and returning enslaved Africans to plantation overseers.

But Native people and Black people are not hapless victims. There is a reason the thousands of protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd were described in mainstream media as an “uprising.” There is nothing that terrifies a settler more than the words Indian uprising or slave uprising. In fact, the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, mentions Native and Black people in the same paragraph, citing “domestic [slave] rebellions” and “the merciless Indian Savages” as two major threats facing the nascent settler nation.

These are our histories of resistance. Consider the Dakota Uprising of 1862, when the Dakotas, enraged by constant abuse at the hands of white settlers and broken treaties, burned down trade forts and attacked colonial settlements. Draw a straight line between the Dakota uprising and the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. Connecting these two reminds us of our shared struggle, but it also reminds us to prepare for the backlash, because settler backlash always follows an uprising. Settlers imprisoned and hanged the Dakota patriots in 1862 for their crime of wanting freedom. In 1863, a white settler captured and scalped the Dakota leader of the uprising, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow). A mob dragged his body through the bordertown of Hutchinson, while white children exploded firecrackers in his nose and mouth. This was how they celebrated their Fourth of July.

Native activists founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis in 1968, inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Like the Panthers, they came together to protect their relatives from police who constantly beat Natives for being “off the reservation.” All law is settler law, so self-defense is always a crime when practiced by Native or Black people. Police and vigilantes killed AIM and Red Power activists as retribution. The FBI waged a terror campaign through its notorious COINTELPRO program.

We keep drawing this line and it passes through Gallup, New Mexico, where two young Navajo men, Larry Casuse and Robert Nakaidinae, kidnapped Mayor Emmet Garcia in 1973. Garcia embodied the anti-Indianism at the heart of Gallup. In addition to being mayor, he was a co-owner of the Navajo Inn, the most profitable liquor establishment in the state of New Mexico at the time, perched along a lonely highway between Gallup and the Navajo Nation. Like all bordertowns, Gallup was, and remains, a machine that settlers built to kill Native people. It was, in Casuse’s and Nakaidinae’s time (and very much still in ours), an economy organized around the exploitation of Native people: check cashing, payday lending, pawning, high interest auto lending, liquor sales, and bars. All of these existed—and still exist—to target Navajo people, who had, and continue to have, few alternatives on the reservation.

If you wanted to see bordertown violence, you went a few miles off the Navajo reservation to the Navajo Inn, where vigilantes killed Navajo men and women, and then dumped them in ditches alongside the road. The most common cause, according to the coroner, was “death from hypothermia,” but, like excited delirium, this was a euphemism. Most died violent deaths at the hands of vigilantes or police. In a two-year period in the late 1960s, vigilantes and police killed twenty people and injured ninety-one more along a sixteen-mile stretch of road that connects the Navajo Inn to the Navajo Nation. Many of those were within a mile of the Navajo Inn. Thirty-six people died of alcohol-related “accidents” in one three-year period in the 1970s.

Without police, the bordertown as we know it would not exist. Gallup police made, on average, eight hundred public drunkenness arrests each month in the early 1970s. Police waited in the parking lots of liquor stores and along the alleys behind local bars, hauling people to jail night after night, hunting. Nearly every person they arrested was Navajo. They held these men and women in what at the time was the largest county jail in the United States, an overcrowded and decrepit “drunk tank.” They hunted; Native people hid.

But Casuse and Nakaidinae did not hide. They resisted. These were the material conditions in Gallup that led Casuse and Nakaidinae to kidnap the mayor at gunpoint, parading him down Gallup streets. They barricaded themselves in a sporting goods store on Route 66. State police sharpshooters took up positions on rooftops along the street.

Robert put down his weapon to build barricades against police, and Garcia, his hands cuffed behind his back, kicked him away and dashed for the front door. Garcia came crashing through the front window, glass flying. Police sharpshooters opened fire; the barrage of bullets and chemical munitions sent onlookers scrambling for cover. Robert burst out of the store and through the gas, his hands high in the air, his voice pleading for help for Larry, who was lying face down in the back of the store, covered in blood. Police dragged Larry’s body onto the street where cops, one-by-one and in groups, took turns posing in front of his body, smiling, holding rifles. Like any proud hunter, they took pictures of themselves with their kill.

Larry Casuse committed the ultimate crime against settler law. He refused it. He rejected colonial arguments that blamed Native people and instead understood the problem as one inherent to the political economy and policing of the bordertown. The problem was not that Navajo men and women were drinking in Garcia’s bar; it was that they were dying. He saw it in the liquor stores and bars and on the streets of Gallup. Despite the doctors and public health officials of the time who blamed “Indian drinking” on genetic or cultural deficiencies among Native people, Casuse asked who and what killed them. When he answered the question—settlers—he acted, entering into a long tradition of radical Native resistance. In the death of Larry Casuse, just as in the deaths of Zachary Bearheels, Loreal Tsinignine, and also George Floyd, the logic of the bordertown reveals its lethal obligation: kill the Indian, save the land. And build a fort to defend settler society.

The settler is right to be afraid, because the Native is, in fact, coming for his fort. The Native will kidnap his mayor. The Native does have plans to burn his police stations to the ground. A Native world will grow from the ashes of his settler world. A Native world is under constant erasure but always on the verge of return. The settler is right to be afraid. Natives oppose the law precisely because they uphold a different kind of order, one that opposes the settler’s commitment and obligation to collective violence. This is the settler past, present, and future: perpetual fear.

In September 2016, The Red Nation, a Native-led revolutionary organization, organized a Larry Casuse Spirit Ride from Albuquerque to Standing Rock to bring supplies to Water Protectors camped on Dakota and Lakota land and fighting to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. By then, Water Protectors had been standing their ground for more than four months against National Guard units and nearly a hundred different law enforcement jurisdictions. The Minneapolis Police Department was one of many jurisdictions on the ground. Police attacked, maimed, and arrested Water Protectors, deeming them “insurgents” on the Great Plains. Like Zachary Bearheels, their crime was being on their own land and, as with Larry Casuse, settler police attacked them for their refusal to accept a settler world.

From Larry Casuse to The Red Nation

In the early morning hours of July 19, 2014, three teenagers entered a dirt lot on Albuquerque’s Westside. The teens had spent the night wandering back alleys looking for homeless men to beat. For months, in gangs of three and sometimes more, they hunted mostly Native homeless men in a blood sport of violent beatings. On this morning, they found three Navajo men in a vacant lot sleeping on mattresses. Not cops armed with truncheons and Tasers, the teens gathered broken cinder blocks and caved in the heads of two of the men, Allison Gorman and Kee Thompson. After the cinderblocks, they hit them with metal poles. Leaving the scene long enough to retrieve knives from their homes, the teens returned and stabbed Gorman and Thompson in the heart.

Gorman, from Shiprock, New Mexico, and Thompson, from Church Rock, New Mexico, were Diné. Jerome Eskeets, also Diné, miraculously survived the attack. The boys had done this before, he would later explain. He told the New York Times that these same teens had threatened him with an attack earlier in the month, but he did not report the threats, “because no one cares.” After their arrest, the teens, the oldest eighteen and the youngest fifteen, admitted to beating Native men living on the streets frequently, estimating as many as fifty prior attacks within a year.

These attacks brought the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission to Albuquerque in December 2014. The commission held a public hearing at the Albuquerque Indian Center, a place where unsheltered Native people get a free lunch, connect with social services, and pick up their mail. The mayor of Albuquerque refused to attend the hearing, perhaps fearful he might be kidnapped. The director of the commission opened the hearing by explaining that the investigation would focus on vigilantism but also on police. “The role of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve,” he explained, “but our people tell us that we need to protect ourselves from the police.”

One after another, Native people testified about the constant violence of police. “I was the Indian, so I was the bad guy, I guess,” one explained. “The police aren’t going to help us. They don’t care.” Another explained that police harassment of unsheltered Native people “happens whether we’re homeless or not. The danger is everywhere. But the homeless are just easier targets. Someone was shot to death on the streets recently, and no one even heard about it. It wasn’t reported.”

To be Indian in public, to walk the streets of bordertowns, is a transgression of the anti-Indian common sense that permeates settler society. As those who testified all knew, like Casuse and Nakaidinaie before them, to be Indian in the bordertown is to be a problem that needs solving. To be Indian in the bordertown is to remind settlers and their Indian killers that you are not extinct, that you claim the humanity and the rightful relations with the lands they arrogantly claim as their own. It’s also to be poor and often without a house. Of the estimated twenty-five thousand Native people living in Albuquerque, 13 percent are chronically houseless like Gorman and Thompson. Many live in a part of Albuquerque that police call the “War Zone.” According to the unsheltered Native people who live in that part of town, the war being waged is by police against Native people.

After listening to the testimony at the Albuquerque Indian Center, we walked through the War Zone to hear the stories of Native relatives on the streets. We met a man a few blocks from the Albuquerque Indian Center who told us he’s constantly harassed by police, “You know, I’m an alcoholic, and I drink on the streets, and [the police] picked me up, and they brought me all the way down to the [zoo], and they beat me up while I was in handcuffs, and then they unhandcuffed me and let me go.” The practice of apprehending Native people on the streets and dropping them off miles away from their encampments is a common tactic of settler police. Like Zachary Bearheels, this man walked through a city hostile to his presence, past its hospitals and schools and wealthy homes, only to be terrorized by Albuquerque police who hunt Native people as part of their mandate.

A few blocks away, we met another man who told us, “I was walking on the street, and [a cop] was following me. I’d go down the alley, and he’d follow me. ‘Why don’t you go back to the rez. You’re not welcome here in Albuquerque,’ he told us.” We met a Jicarilla Apache man named Natani at a tent camp who had had the same experience. “This is ours, our land,” he said. “And the cops, they’ll say things like ‘Why do you want to bring the reservation our way?’” We asked him how often police harassment includes physical violence. He gave us an impatient look. “It’s usually,” he said. He showed us his wrists, covered in scabbed-over wounds. These were from handcuffs, he said. He pulled off his sunglasses to show a red and swollen eye. “They maced me in this eye. They walked up to me from behind and maced me like this,” he said, as he put his hand inches from his eyes to show us how it was done. “How common is this? Does this happen to everyone?” we asked. “Yes,” he said. “They handcuff you, and then they beat you, and then they take you to the hospital and say something like ‘We found him this way.’”

Days later, we met two women walking near the Albuquerque Indian Center. One woman told the story of a cop who had recently slammed her head to the pavement. “Then he just got back in his car and drove away.” The other woman described constant harassment. “They pull up and tell us to leave or they’ll arrest us for loitering,” she said. “Where does this happen?” we asked. “Everywhere,” she said.

We write this book as part of The Red Nation. The Red Nation began in the summer of 2014, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the heels of Gorman’s and Thompson’s murders. Like Casuse and countless others before us, we could no longer stay silent about the gruesome Indian rolling happening every day around us. The anti–police violence uprising of spring 2014, which ignited after Albuquerque police gunned down a man named James Boyd in the foothills east of the city, was winding down, and the United States was on the precipice of experiencing a Native intifada the very next year, with uprisings in Oak Flat, Mauna Kea, and Standing Rock in quick succession. The conditions were ripe for Native liberation.

The Red Nation belongs to the traditions of Native resistance like AIM and Red Power that were born in bordertowns. Like these earlier generations, we seek to destroy the place and the relation of the bordertown. Our name comes from a Lakota term—Oyate Luta—which describes “the Red Nation”; humble people from the red earth, the Native of the Western hemisphere. From Rapid City to New York City, all will be again The Red Nation when we liberate the bordertown and replace settler colonialism with freedom.

This book, Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, offers a guide to the world that settler colonialism has made through bordertowns. Our goal is not to understand the bordertown but, rather, like Casuse, to map its weaknesses so we can burn it to the ground. We refuse its logic. Reject the history it tells. But how does a book refuse its subject? We are reminded of an apocryphal story of the Bedonkohe Apache warrior Goyathlay, also known as Geronimo. It is said that Goyathlay had magical powers. He could summon rainstorms and slow the passing of time. He could occupy two places at once and could fight two enemies simultaneously. The settlers and their armies would give his name—Geronimo—to all of their subsequent fears. Everything that had to die for settler colonialism to live, they named Geronimo. The act of merely being alive, of refusing to surrender or submit, of refusing even to fear those who hunted him, terrified settlers. They murdered his mother, his wife, and his children. They sent nearly half the US Army after him. They captured him, and he escaped. Captured again, he escaped again.

Of all the supernatural powers credited to Goyathlay, perhaps the most astonishing—the one from which all settler fears are derived—was his refusal to accept the settler world. What other than some supernatural power could explain Goyathlay’s refusal in the face of a murderous settler world spreading like a plague over Apache lands?

Through this refusal, Goyathlay conjured a different world than the one the settlers had made. He lived as one who belonged to a different world. The burning of a police station in Minneapolis or Portland and the toppling of an Oñate conquistador statue in Albuquerque is such a refusal. Should we live in a world organized around Native and Black death, or should we refuse this world, burn it to the ground, and conjure another in its place? We contend that the Native world of Goyathlay may be forgotten by some, but it never left, just as we have never left.

We have organized this book as a map of the bordertown rendered in textual form, organized by the concepts that animate the settler world, and those that conjure its opposite. We offer short essays, including “Anti-Indian Common Sense,” “Church,” “Tourism,” “Savage,” Poverty,” “Bordertown Political Economy,” “Vigilantism,” and “Police Violence,” among others. These are all simultaneously places and concepts, things and practices. They give the bordertown its form and function. We have mapped them so you will know where to find them—and where to set the fires of Native liberation. Among these concepts we also offer essays that define the world that will replace the world of the settler—“Abolition,” “Decolonization,” “Kinship,” “Solidarity,” “Liberation,” “Sovereignty,” and more. These constitute hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) geographies of Native resistance that will grow from the ashes of the settler world.

We write as ancestors from the future, enacting just relations that cannot be found in the nightmarish present of the bordertown. In this sense, the settler fears the future. He is an alien in both space and time. This book offers no measured gestures toward liberation, nor mercy for settler feelings. The word for that is reform. But the bordertown cannot be reformed and settler society cannot be redeemed. We study it not to change it but to destroy it. To read this book is to move back and forth between the settler world and the Native world, to enter into relations of liberation that can replace the bordertown. The Native liberation we write about is not some distant dream from some future world.

Our history is the future.

Chapter Two — Anti-Indianism

Anti-Indian Common Sense

Anti-Indian common sense combines what Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn calls “anti-Indianism” with what Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci calls “common sense.” North American settler societies are organized around the elimination of the Native. Therefore, anti-Indian common sense is the ideology that organizes Native elimination, encompassing everyday racist depictions of Natives in popular culture (like mascots) and more spectacular forms of genocidal violence (like massacres).

In Anti-Indianism in Modern America, Cook-Lynn defines anti-Indianism as the broad array of views that result in or carry out the death, elimination, and genocide of Natives. This includes the writing of history and literature that deliberately ignores Native existence, nationhood, and sovereignty, that denigrates or insults being Native, or that blames Natives for an unsatisfactory history. Anti-Indianism is how settler society expresses itself through both law and culture. The settler state and its institutions—police, courts, prisons, schools, hospitals, nonprofits, the military—create the law, but everyday settler citizens carry it out. “All of these traits,” Cook-Lynn writes, “have conspired to isolate, to expunge or expel, to menace, to defame” Native people of North America. Anti-Indianism is foundational to North American settler colonialism.

For settler societies, to ignore anti-Indianism is to participate in it. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci uses common sense to understand how spontaneous consent is achieved in Western capitalist societies. For Gramsci, common sense refers to “the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man [sic] is developed.” While common sense encompasses individually held beliefs, it is a structured belief system that governs society and partitions the planet along racial and class lines.

Gramsci understood common sense as upholding the capitalist exploitation of workers. Workers have to internalize or consent to ruling-class ideology to keep the system going. Settler colonialism, however, does not require consent from Natives nor does it necessarily have to be internalized by Native people themselves. If consent is required, it is often achieved through coercion or force: assimilation, starvation, neglect, imprisonment, or the cooptation of Native leadership. While working-class consent to capitalism is sometimes achieved through force, it is not in capitalists’ best interests to kill off the entire working class, whose labor they need to exploit to make profit. While the settler ruling class does not require consent from Native people, it does require consent from the settler working class to uphold the larger structure of settler capitalism that serves ruling-class interests. This is where anti-Indian common sense comes in. Settler citizens and vigilantes are conscripted into anti-Indian common sense to carry out the sacred duty of land dispossession and capitalist accumulation. And they are typically not coerced or forced but see their everyday obligation to carry out the project of Native elimination as a part of their identity as settler citizens. Settler citizenship and vigilantism, conditioned on many obligations, are also consummated through Indian killing. Together, anti-Indianism and common sense describe the structure of violence at work in settler capitalist societies like the United States and Canada.

Off the Reservation

Off the reservation is a common American English idiom. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, off the reservation means “to deviate from what is expected or customary; to behave unexpectedly or independently.” The expression is also common in US military and political circles. Someone who goes off the reservation has gone rogue or vigilante, disobeying orders: a soldier “crosses the wire” of a military base (called a reservation in military lingo) without leave or enters into hostile territory (called Indian Country in military lingo) without orders.

For Native people, to go off the reservation refers to those who refuse reservation life. The usage of the phrase off the reservation derives from the nineteenth-century Indian wars of extermination, reservation imprisonment, and the genocidal violence waged against those refusing to respect imperial borders. Like the military bases that share the same name, Indian reservations are militarized spaces of containment, meant to control Native movement and behavior. Indian reservations were designed as concentration camps to facilitate Native elimination by removing them from desired lands. Reservations were never meant to be “homelands,” though, for some, they have become that today. In the past, Natives who willfully crossed reservation borders were renegades, outlaws, or hostiles, who were hunted down, shot, lynched, executed, scalped, or imprisoned.

Bordertown spaces are designated as off the reservation, where Native life is heavily policed and controlled. Since a majority of Native people in North America today do not live “on the reservation,” their reality is defined as living life off the reservation. In this way, to live life off the reservation is a historical question of territory and a political practice—a direct challenge to where and how Native life and sovereignty ought to exist—or not. Cops and everyday settler citizens frequently tell Native people, “Go back to the reservation!” as a way to assert settler claims to land and Native unbelonging, when the reality is the reverse. According to Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, the trespass of the Native into what is considered “settled” territory and a “settled” history calls into question the finality of Native elimination and dispossession. The continued existence of Natives on desired lands, especially in bordertowns, calls into question the entire settler colonial project.

Territory, whether on or off reservation, is, Patrick Wolfe argues, “settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.” The erasure and elimination of the Native, therefore, is not based on race, blood quantum, culture, religion, worldview, or spirituality—it is simply to gain access to land. Once Native territory is acquired, it does not become an inactive element. It requires continual doing—an anti-Indian common sense that performs ownership and belonging at the expense of Natives. The continued presence of Natives in “settled” territory presents a special problem for that doing—a problem that has throughout history been called the “Indian Problem.”

Defining space as on or off reservation concedes that Native territory and land is permanently settled and that territory will be forever defined according to imperial borders.

Indian Country

It is no coincidence the US military refers to all enemy territory as “Indian Country,” sometimes shortened to just “In Country.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Indian Country in American English designates “a land or territory controlled or inhabited by American Indians” and “a place with hostile inhabitants, a dangerous area.” These two definitions of territory might appear different but are better understood as synonymous.

Indian Country is a military term that designates enemy territory and identifies the Indian as the original enemy of US empire. It was in Indian Country at the Battle of Wabash, in 1791, that Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees annihilated the regular Army under the command of “Revolutionary War” hero Arthur St. Clair. Next to the destruction of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors—a battle that came just weeks before the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—the Battle of Wabash, also known as the Battle of a Thousand Slain, was the most devastating defeat of the US military in American history.

Native nations, along with freed Black forces, allied with the British against the American colonists during the revolutionary war to oppose US independence, which depended on colonial expansion into the Ohio River Valley and the expansion of slavery. In other words, for Black and Native people, the US war for independence was little more than a counterrevolutionary war of settler territorial expansion. After the Battle of Wabash, with the entire US standing army crushed, Native nations reclaimed the Ohio River Valley. This was the historical context of the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms has never been about some abstract notion of “freedom.” Rather, it has always been about settler colonial anxiety and insecurity. With its standing army destroyed, white male settlers were organized and armed into “well-regulated” militias to prevent the return of the British and their allies, Native nations and freed Black forces. Thus, the reversion of “settled” land to its original free state—Indian Country—is the ultimate fear.

For this reason, US empire finds itself in Indian Country wherever it finds a threat to imperial authority. As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd argues, “the United States propagates empire not through frontiers but through the production of a paradigmatic Indianness” that it finds everywhere. Indians are the original Red Scare, and enemies of empire are always made Indian, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else the US has boots on the ground, in any of the eight hundred US military bases across the globe.

Every US war is an imperialist war, and all are an extension of the Indian Wars. And each of these wars includes its own Geronimo. Geronimo, known as Goyathlay, led the longest insurgency against the United States (1850–1886), evading capture and refusing confinement, forever “off the reservation.” This is why Geronimo has become a ubiquitous feature of US military authority terrorizing the world. Paratroopers jump from airplanes into enemy territory, or Indian Country, shouting “Geronimo!” Osama bin Laden, a CIA-funded jihadist, was given the code name Geronimo. To be in Indian Country is to be forever in enemy territory.

Drunk Indian

A Facebook post appears on my feed: “Drunk Indigenous people are still sacred and deserving of community.” This seemingly innocuous post delves into a history of Native peoples and their introduction to alcohol, first by settlers, and then by their government representatives, who facilitated the theft of Native lands with alcohol. Europeans, and then Americans, brought alcohol as a trade item and plied Native leaders with drink to facilitate treaties to acquire land, natural resources, and material items, such as pelts and clothing, as well as to exploit human labor. Incoming settlers and army soldiers were notorious for their drunken bouts, encouraging Native peoples to model their behavior and relationship with alcohol. Because alcohol use has been the source of dysfunction and violence in Native nations and communities, Indians, already cast as inferior and savage, are further demonized simply because they drink alcohol.

One of the most racist images of Native peoples is that of the “drunk Indian.” It is used to excuse society’s behavior toward Native people who live on the streets of bordertowns. It is presumed that these individuals are the dregs of society who deserve hatred, discrimination, murder, and rape, because they are already not human. Racist stereotypes about “drunk Indians” have resonance in bordertowns, where liquor sold to Native peoples is profit-making. Bordertowns are death spaces for Native peoples cast endlessly as “drunk Indians.” Deemed as less than animals, Native people like Raymond Yellow Thunder, Allison Gorman, and Kee Thompson, among countless others, are viciously mutilated, tortured, and murdered. However, as the script that begins this entry indicates, Native peoples have always demanded that Native forms of kinship extend to those who face some of the deepest structural forms of disparity and injustices, of which widespread alcoholism is but a symptom. Recognizing that the trope of “drunk Indian” is deployed in a host of ways to excuse violence by settler nations is an important step toward Native liberation.

Over generations, self-proclaimed Indian experts have ventured to bordertowns to find the reason for what seems to be rampant drunkenness among Native people. These experts use all the tools of universities, nonprofits, and policy think tanks to argue that the Indian is morally deficient, because he can’t hold his drink. An oft-cited study by the Indian Health Service in the mid-1980s determined that, on average, Indians die more frequently of alcohol-related causes than non-Indians. They conclude that Indians are “tragic,” because they have not been able to adjust to a modern world. The trope of the Indian stuck between two worlds emerged from these studies. As expertise in Indian victimization grew into an entire industry of trauma-informed research, researchers “discovered” that Native alcoholism is the result of genetic predisposition to addiction. Native people cannot overcome alcoholism, these experts explain, because violence is so pervasive in Native life that it now predetermines their genes. While researchers continue to acknowledge the disproportionately high rates of alcohol-related deaths among Native people, it would be inaccurate to say that alcoholism is entirely the result of genetic trauma. Alcohol abuse is a condition created by colonial systems of oppression that forces Native peoples to leave their homes and communities and seek survival in hostile bordertowns. Alcoholism is a colonial technology that can only be dismantled by decolonization.

Urban Indian

The term urban Indian automatically invokes layers of meaning that reify stagnant notions of the “Indian” in which a binary of “traditional”/“urban” and “rez”/“city” becomes the truth about what it means to be a Native person in the current moment. This binary becomes a barometer for who is “more authentic” or “more traditional,” with those who reside on designated “reservations” or Native nations seen as somehow more rooted in cultures and traditions associated with ancestors and those who reside in “urban” environments or the “city” seen as more assimilated and, therefore, less rooted in the cultures and traditions of their nations. Reservation spaces are simultaneously cast as places of poverty/stagnation and cultural/traditional resurgence, whereas the city is cast as a place of opportunity/progress and as assimilated/modern. Such labeling reinforces settler colonial notions of who is Native, with the caveat that Native peoples uncritically deploy these categories in their own judgements of one another.

These binaries are ahistorical and stagnant, because their meanings are rooted in late nineteenth-century salvage ethnography, the same era in which famed anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who we discuss in our entry on kinship, birthed modern ethnography by studying the supposed backwardness and savagery of Haudenosaunee society. Anthropologists like Morgan often worked with the US government to create studies and academic frameworks that would facilitate military campaigns and colonial policies. Historically, once Native peoples were militarily defeated by the United States and forcibly relocated to spaces designated as reservations, which in many cases were lands undesired by white settlers, they became the places were [sic] Native people were supposed to exist and die. Like the tourists of present-day bordertowns, anthropologists would accompany Indian agents to newly formed reservations to administer government policy. Salvage ethnography became a mechanism to, on the one hand, record dying Indian cultures and, on the other, help Native people adjust to their new reality and assimilate into colonial and capitalist ideologies about labor, sex, gender, and family.

In 1953, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, which set the stage to terminate Indian tribes in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. The Klamath of Oregon and the Menominee of Wisconsin were terminated along with many smaller tribes along the West Coast. Public Law 280 allowed state governments to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian reservations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In 1955, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relocation offices were established to facilitate the relocation of Native families from Native homelands into cities, where they would supposedly disappear into the multicultural milieu, thereby absolving the US government of its treaty obligations to Native nations and peoples. Hundreds of Native families were relocated to cities and towns, where they received short-term benefits, such as housing, education, and employment. They were relocated into areas where poverty and its accompanying social ills were the norm and where they were treated as second-class citizens. In 2010, the US Census reported that 78 percent of American Indians live off-reservation. Of approximately 5.2 million that self-identify as American Indian, roughly four million live off-reservation and federal trust land.

Today, many of those who reside in cities and towns are the descendants of the families relocated in the 1950s. Although often invisible in urban spaces, Native people contribute to urban and bordertown economies, while their respective nations’ natural resources are exploited to benefit and create thriving urban hubs in the American West at the expense of Native land and people. In Albuquerque and places like Rapid City, South Dakota, one of the common police refrains when enacting violence on Native people is: “Go back to the reservation.” Native people are seen as not belonging in bordertowns, even though these settlements are on Native land. Disturbingly, Native people today use this same logic on each other to argue that so-called urban and city Indians are inauthentic, the source of cultural death for their people.

When you subjugate a people, you not only take their land and their language, their identity, and their sense of self—you also take away any notion of a future. Native peoples’ free movement across the imaginary borders of the bordertown defies binaries of rez/urban and traditional/assimilated, as do their vibrant histories of anti-colonial resistance in these spaces. Native mobility, resistance, and resilience in bordertowns pushes back against the dominant narrative that Native people are a dying, diminishing race desperately holding on to the last vestiges of their culture or their land base. If that were the case, then Standing Rock, Line 3, Bayou Bridge, the immense amount of mobilization around murdered and missing Native women, and, indeed, this book would not exist. To understand who Native people really are and not rely on government and academic jargon that seeks our disappearance, we must look at the bordertown.

Relocation

Relocation was a twentieth-century Indian removal policy. Relocation was a continuation of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which ordered armed soldiers to forcibly march Cherokees at bayonet point from their homelands in what is currently North Carolina, west of the Mississippi River, to Indian Territory in what is currently Oklahoma. Some four thousand Cherokees died on what became known as the “Trail of Tears.” Removal first removed Natives to reservations, and then it proceeded to remove them from reservations. The first removals from reservations began when Indian agents and priests kidnapped Native children to send them to boarding schools, which aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man” through military discipline, flag worship, Christianity, and US patriotism. An untold number of Native children were murdered and generations traumatized, tortured, raped, and beaten as a result of this removal program. Removal and relocation, whether formalized in official policy or not, are always tactics of Native elimination to open the land for white settlement.

As part of the federal program of Indian termination, relocation policy set into motion the mass removal of reservation-based Natives to urban centers, such as New York, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The goal was to eliminate Native people by removing them from the land and assimilating them into settler society. Mormon Utah senator Arthur V. Watkins adopted the language of civil rights by equating termination—in his words “the freeing of the Indian from wardship status”—to the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves during the Civil War. Lakota scholar Edward Valandra, however, contends that termination and relocation were little more than an attempt to overthrow Native governments, an attempt that many Native nations successfully resisted, but not unscathed.

In 1953, US Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 immediately terminating the federal status of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes. That same year, Public Law 280 authorized states to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native lands. Three years later, Congress passed the Indian Relocation Act to further remove Natives from the reservation. The consequences were devastating. From 1953 to 1964, more than one hundred Native nations were terminated, and 1.3 million acres of Native land was removed from trust status to be converted into private ownership. Termination ended federal and treaty responsibilities, including access to education and health care. From the 1950s to the 1980s, as many as 750,000 Natives were relocated to cities.

Termination and relocation policy also coincided and worked in tandem with large public works projects that removed Natives from their homelands. For Missouri River Native communities, for example, the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to build five earthen-rolled dams that deliberately flooded reservation lands. As a result, 30 percent of Lakota and Dakota people living along the river were removed from their homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Because it coincided with termination and relocation, the Pick-Sloan Plan, Vine Deloria Jr. argues, “was without a doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.”

As a result of removal, most Natives today do not live on reservation lands, but this does not mean they do not live on Native land. In fact, bordertowns and colonial settlements called cities have been and will always be Native land. Nevertheless, many Native people, facing dire poverty and in search of work, willfully relocate to bordertowns, where they face increased state surveillance and policing.

Savage/Savagery

The use of the word savage, and the claim by European settlers of Native “savagery,” is more than merely a common slur used to describe Native people or a rationale for settler violence—though it surely was and remains both of these things. Use of the adjective savage dates to the thirteenth century and was usually a reference to something or some place that was wild, fierce, and ferocious. Its use as a noun came later and was meant to embody the condition of being “untamed,” usually as a reference to any and all who would stand against establishment order.

Savage always implies movement. In Europe, the “savage” was the central problem in the collapse of feudalism. With the birth of capitalism came an unpredictable and uncontrollable mobility among a peasantry that refused capture and resisted the relations of capitalist wage labor. What came to be called the “vagabond savage” threatened the conditions necessary for capitalist accumulation. His—and it was nearly always a man—“savage” mobility refused a social order that required a constantly available laboring poor to be exploited. In the grammar of capitalism, the savage is the antonym of the obedient worker. In the grammar of nationalism, the savage is the opposite of the dutiful citizen or settler.

Henry Mayhew, the nineteenth-century English journalist, compiled an extensive study of London’s poor, and like most “reformers” of his time (and ours), he saw poverty as a function of biology or a pathology of the poor. Thus, there existed in the city “two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilized tribes.” And this distinction was important, because, “despite the privations, its dangers, and its hardships, those who have once adopted the savage and wandering mode of life, rarely abandon it.”

The mobility of the “savage” is, thus, what defines the savage. Vagrancy, which is defined as the condition of one standing outside or refusing the wage relation, threatens civilization. Civilization, which is defined as the condition of class order, is, thus, the primary goal of the capitalist state. The inauguration of class order was and remains the duty and primary object of the state, usually accomplished by police. Civilization in its contemporary usage always refers to a violent police practice that describes a class order defined by compulsory citizenship, forced settlement, and wage labor.

The term savage today retains the reference to unacceptable mobility and the condition of one standing outside of establishment order but is used most frequently now as a slur to describe Native people—either collectively or individually. When used to describe a Native collective, it relies on a common settler typology of indigeneity—the noble savage.

Consider the phrase noble savage. The noun savage in noble savage places Native people forever outside civilization. It does this to offer a historical rationale for settler inevitability. In other words, if “civilization” (recall the definition above) is the telos of human social organization, then the settler is necessary as the social formation. And the adjective noble imagines an innate desire for civilization among those who are savage. This desire is unknowable to the “savage,” who, according to the settler, stands forever outside history. And, even more, it is up to the settler to bring this innate desire for civilization to the surface. The job of the settler is to eradicate the worldview of the “savage” and replace it with the worldview of the settler.

Savage is, therefore, a word that names a subject who refuses but cannot be allowed to exist outside of relations and conditions of capitalist and colonial conquest. Therefore, the continued usage of the word demonstrates the abject failure of settler colonialism’s primary goal—the elimination of the Native.

Church

There is a joke in Indian Country. When the Europeans came, they had the Bible and the Indians had the land. Now the Indians have the Bible and the Europeans have the land. This is the story of the New World.

In 1511, on the island that later became Cuba, the Taíno leader Hatuey orchestrated a successful resistance movement against European invaders. At the heart of the struggle was his strident opposition to the Christian church for its violent conversion of Indian souls and lands into the possessions of the Spanish Crown. “They tell us, these tyrants,” he said of the Christian missionaries, “that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters.” After his capture and torture in 1512, the invaders tied Hatuey to a stake to be publicly executed, a punishment befitting only the pagans of the Promised Land. Being a generous Christian, a priest offered Hatuey eternal salvation as an alternative to eternal damnation—accept Jesus Christ as his lord and savior and his soul would enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The resistance leader contemplated his situation and asked if there were Christians in heaven. The priest answered yes. Hatuey said he’d rather go to hell where there are no cruel people like the Christians. Being faithful servants, the Christians granted his request by burning him alive.

Once the church—its clergy and armies of men—became the authority of the Crown (also known as “the sovereign”), the sovereign pushed for the colonization of new lands in search of gold and souls. The Indian’s body and the Indian’s land, the pope and his legions argued in the Doctrine of Discovery, had to be converted into church property.

Even the name “Indian” interpellated their role in this system of organized theft and plunder. Russell Means, the late Oglala leader of the American Indian Movement, argued that, contrary to popular belief, the name “Indian” didn’t come from a confused Christopher Columbus who mistakenly believed that he had landed in what was then Hindustan and what is today India. According to Means, the word Indian derived from Columbus’s original Spanish description of the people of the Americas. Columbus called them una gente en dio, or simply en dio or indio: “people in god.” These “peace-loving and generous” people, Columbus concluded, “would make excellent slaves.” Thus, out of benevolence for these savage lands and savage people, Europeans could enslave, rape, torture, and kill them as Indians, as people in god. Means concluded that it must be as Indians that Indians fight for freedom. And once the chains of colonialism are broken: “We can call ourselves any damn thing we please!”

Nature

“The idea of nature,” according to Raymond Williams, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extra-ordinary amount of human history.” It is through ideas of nature, according to Williams, that boundaries are erected and defended in ways that delineate human history from nonhuman history. “One touch of nature may make the whole world kin, but usually,” he asks, “when we say nature, do we mean to include ourselves?” Ideas of nature, in other words, are always ways to invite belonging at the same time as they are a means to enforce exclusion. In the settler colonial imagination, ideas of nature provide the central rationale and legal basis for claims to land. Indians, settlers have long argued—in a discursive construction central to all settler colonial societies—live in a state of nature, while the settlers’ relationship to nature is one of domination.

The settler claims a right to dominate Native life and land. This is the sine qua non of settler colonialism. This claimed right underwrites settler violence. It is a violence posed as righteous by the settler by depicting settler domination as inherently progressive, in that it creates and defends the conditions and relations necessary for the permanent settler occupation of Native land. Some of these forms and modes of domination, based as they are on ideas of nature, appear precisely as they are: the violent expansion of white settlements on Native land through the transformation of social and natural relations. This is a version of “progress” celebrated as the taming of a “wild frontier” necessary to build a “civilization.” The “frontier” in the settler imaginary is depicted as a geographical location freely available for the inevitable expansion of settler society. But “the frontier” in the settler imaginary is a people not a place. The frontier is defined as an uninhabited wilderness only through a very specific kind of settler alchemy in which Native people, living in a “state of nature,” require the settler. And this is true whether we are talking about the violent dispossession of Native land by armed settlers or the romanticized notions of Native spirituality celebrated and practiced by New Age wealthy white people sweating in lodges in Sedona, Arizona.

This version of nature that the settler finds in “the frontier” poses an existential threat to the settler. Frederick Jackson Turner, the American apostle of settler domination, locates this jeopardy in the way that the frontier “masters the colonist.” The settler domination of nature requires coming into contact with nature. The frontier “strips off the garments of civilization.” The frontier “takes [the colonist] from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him.” It is in “the frontier” that we find the first settlers playing Indian. “Before long,” according to Turner, “[the colonist] has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.” Nature, in other words, threatens to trap the settler in a world defined by the Native. And, so, the settler must overcome this, must first and fully understand Native life, in order to destroy it. “[The colonist],” Turner explains, “must accept the conditions which [Native life] furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.” And through this domination, the settler doesn’t just replace the Native, the settler becomes the Native. In the process, something new emerges—Turner calls it “America.”

Poverty

Poverty is an inevitability in liberal capitalist society, not an accident or an aberration. The only shared characteristic of those who “suffer” from “poverty” is the wage relation. The “poor” are trapped in, or excluded from, low-wage jobs in insecure industries. They are trapped, because they have only their labor to sell. Ignore those who seek after the causes of poverty—and all the many afflictions that economic insecurity produce—in the imaginary pathologies of the poor. If you’re looking for the roots of poverty, start with the wage relation.

Poverty, in other words, is a relation, not a condition. It does not exist independent of the socioeconomic system that produces it. There is an impoverished class trapped in the prison of poverty. The labor of this impoverished class sustains an affluent class, for whom the labor of those who work for a living is nothing more than a “resource” for the production of more wealth. But this is more than an antagonistic relation, it is a power relation. The wage relation serves “at the same time as a means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker.” If we seek the roots of the domination at the heart of the wage relation, we must start with colonial conquest.

Poverty is, therefore, a weapon, not a description. The United States federal government and various state agencies administer a variety of carefully underfunded “anti-poverty” programs. These programs—often coming in the form of welfare payments conditioned on the performance of various indignities to which the poor must submit—reinforce the relations that sustain poverty.

Poverty is indeed a settler concept, and it is deployed specifically to interrupt radical relations of solidarity. “Poverty” is a carefully calibrated counterinsurgent logic that settlers rely on to “pacify currents of rebellion,” as Radmilla Cody and Brandon Benallie describe in the foreword to this volume.

Poverty is the logic underpinning anti-Indian common sense. Various federal and state programs administer anti-poverty programs, such as grants for education in white institutions, job training programs for low-wage work in white-dominated industries, or vouchers for food or other goods redeemable only in settler-owned businesses. These programs function specifically as colonial bounties. Consider the 1980 US Supreme Court decision in the United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The court found that the United States violated its own treaty when it seized and occupied He Sapa in the Black Hills, known among settlers as Mount Rushmore. The Oceti Sakowin, however, refused the $106,000,000 “award.” Given that life expectancy among the Pine Ridge Lakota, for example, is nearly half that of settler society and infant mortality more than twice (statistics that settlers use to define Indian “poverty”), why would the Great Sioux Nation refuse such a windfall? Since 1980, the payout remains in a settler bank, accruing interest, now valued at nearly $1,000,000,000. But, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explains, “The Sioux believe that accepting the money would validate the US theft of their most sacred land.” The money cannot resolve what settlers call “poverty,” because what settlers call poverty is not an Indian pathology but a colonial occupation.

And you will find all of this—the conquest and the exploitation and the cultural appropriation—in “Burn Your Village to the Ground,” a track released in the United States on Thanksgiving Day 2014 by the First Nations DJ collective A Tribe Called Red. The track mocks settler explanations of Indian poverty, as it blends hip-hop and electronic Pow Wow over a sampled movie scene:

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours

Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations

Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs

We will sell our bracelets by the roadsides

You will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres

My people will have pain and degradation

Your people will have stick-shifts

The gods of my tribe have spoken

They have said, “Do not trust the Pilgrims”

And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground

Public Education

In 2019, New Mexico ranked last out of fifty states for quality of education. Seventy-two percent of students in New Mexico public schools are low-income and over one-quarter are food-insecure. Many receive their only meal of the day through school lunch programs. New Mexico offers one of the lowest wages for public school teachers in the country and consistently posts among the lowest graduation rates in the country. Native students in New Mexico receive among the worst public educations in the United States. They graduate high school at rates between 45 percent to 65 percent, significantly lower than the already dismal statewide average. At least 60 percent of Native students who do graduate from New Mexico public schools require remediation in college, which means that two-thirds of Native students aren’t prepared for postsecondary education.

The landmark 2018 Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico court decision found that New Mexico violated its own constitutional mandate to provide adequate education to at risk students. This decision also found New Mexico in violation of the New Mexico Indian Education Act, which requires the state to provide adequate and culturally relevant education to Native students in consultation with Native nations. A few short months after the Yazzie/Martinez decision by the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, a white Albuquerque high school teacher committed what then Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye called “cultural assault” against two Native students by forcibly cutting one student’s hair after asking the student if she “liked her braids” and calling another a “bloody Indian” for donning fake blood on her face as part of her Halloween costume. The incident made national news and fanned the flames of growing Native outrage at the anti-Indianism at the heart of state’s public education program.

Add to this the fact that New Mexico depends on revenues from resource extraction on tribal lands to fund postsecondary education, a practice that pollutes Native land and violates the consent of many Native communities, and you get a clear picture of “public education”: a state institution that is anti-Indian through and through. While exceptionally incompetent and negligent, the State of New Mexico isn’t unique. Its spectacular anti-Indianism illustrates the rule of bordertown violence: where Native people and nations abound in numbers that defy the colonial designs of elimination, anti-Indian discrimination and violence proliferate to keep Native presence in check.

Quality education is tied to all other forms of social and economic well-being. If Native people escape the violence of police and vigilantes, they still need to contend with racist policy makers and educators. This leaves Native people in a position of permanent disadvantage when it comes to jobs, health, housing, and other socioeconomic indicators. It is because of this track record in education that Red Power activists fought for Native American Studies departments in American universities in the 1960s, as well as survival schools to replace K–12 education, as a means to rectify the extreme anti-Indianism that Native children confront in mainstream public education.

Chapter Three — Indian Killers

Indian Rolling

Scholars, lawyers, and journalists have framed Indian rolling as a type of extreme hate crime against Native people. Indian rolling is extreme because of the exceptionally brutal methods of torture that its perpetrators use to harm and murder Native people, including beating, bludgeoning (rocks and cinder blocks are common), burning, and mutilating (especially genitalia). Indian rollers typically target unsheltered Native people, elders, and those compromised by intoxication.

The term Indian rolling first appeared in 1974 during protests in the wake of the Chokecherry Massacre in Farmington, New Mexico. One of the protest organizers, John Redhouse, explained Indian rolling as a kind of blood sport:

We didn’t see the murders as the act of three crazy kids. We saw it as a part of a whole racist picture. For years it has been almost a sport, a sort of sick, perverted tradition among Anglo youth of Farmington High School, to go into the Indian section of town and physically assault and rob elderly and sometimes intoxicated Navajo men and women of whatever possession they had, for no apparent reason, other than that they were Indians.

Redhouse notes that, like any hate crime, Indian rolling is driven by racism against Native—in the case of Farmington, Navajo—people. However, framing Indian rolling as a hate crime limits our understanding of how Indian rolling as a type of settler violence is part of the larger structure of settler colonialism. Reducing Indian rolling to a hate crime obscures the fact that Indian killing serves a structural purpose in a settler society premised on the elimination of Native peoples. Indian rolling is simply the enforcement of the settler order of things by settlers who are carrying out this larger project of Native elimination. Indian rolling is often gendered, with Hispano and white settler boys and men carrying out the majority of Indian killings in bordertowns. But the blood sport of Indian rolling isn’t carried out by vigilantes and settler citizens alone. It is also carried out every time a cop bludgeons, beats, maims, or tortures a Native person in the name of settler law and order.

Indian rolling is a type of lynching; the settler order literally carved and burned into the bodies of Native people. Although it enforces and reinforces the elimination of Native people, Indian rolling also serves a pedagogical and social regulation function in off-reservation spaces; it conveys the message that Native people don’t belong “off the reservation” and are not welcome in settler towns and cities where they are expected to have been cleared and disappeared by previous colonial campaigns. Because there are high numbers of Native people in bordertowns, their presence upsets settler expectations for Native erasure and subjugation. Therefore, settler vigilantes and cops work to terrorize Native people; to remind them that they are forever “out of place” in a settler world. The terrorism of Indian rolling is not extreme or unusual; it is engrained in the social fabric of settler identity and kinship in the United States, particularly among men in bordertowns, home of the Indian killers.

Vigilante

A vigilante is commonly defined as a private citizen who takes the law into their own hands to avenge what they perceive as a crime or to defend against what is perceived as a threat. A vigilante makes or upholds the law in the perceived absence of it. On the frontier, vigilantism flourishes as an essential practice of settler colonialism, by upholding civilization and claiming its own nonexistence in Indian Country. From what and from whom must civilization be defended?

The German philosopher Georg Hegel once credited European liberal democracies with inventing “civil society” or “bourgeois society.” Invoking civil society or “civility” also invokes an antagonistic, although often unacknowledged, opposite: “savage society” or “savagery”—in other words, the darker nations and territories Europeans intend to “civilize” and bring order to. When Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated US imperial expansion in his “frontier thesis,” he defined “the outer edge of the wave” of invasion as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” The latter would replace the former. At this meeting point, known as the frontier, Indian Country was seen as a lawless landscape, and the Indian was made into a lawless criminal, a “merciless Indian savage” who threatened US empire. But the frontier has not closed, nor is it confined to a specific time or place. Instead, the frontier is a practice of policing space and people, created and recreated wherever the Indian persists.

A settler’s hypervigilance against the Indian’s persistence makes him a vigilante, authorized to carry out the law, with genocidal violence if necessary. Put another way, settler vigilantism is law outside of law, and, thus, makes the law. Law is not a civilizing force or an objective standard, it is a means to shore up the legitimacy of those who use violence to fabricate and defend order. The vigilante exists for this purpose, because, as every settler knows, settler society must be defended! Indian persistence is a constant reminder of the settler’s own tenuous belonging. The settler as vigilante is, thus, the bearer of a murderous civilizational order. Throughout history the vigilante came as conquistador, explorer, frontiersman, trapper, poacher, slave catcher, trader, cowboy, militiaman, cop, oilman, pipeline worker, and armed citizen.

The cowboy, portrayed as a heroic gunslinger in popular culture, idealizes the settler vigilante. In western films, such as John Ford’s 1956 classic The Searchers, for example, settler vigilantism is depicted as a form of self-defense. In this version, it is the settler not the Indian who is surrounded. John Wayne, the archetypical cowboy, plays an ex-Confederate soldier killing his way through Comanche territory. On the post–Civil War frontier, North and South united in Indian killing. Native genocide in The Searchers is shown as an act of revenge for killing a white squatter and taking his daughter. The crime, in this case, is not invasion but Native self-defense. The “cowboy as Indian killer” also upholds the myth of rugged individualism, a fetishized settler identity forged and constantly remade through violence. But invaders never come as individuals, otherwise they easily would have been dispatched. Indian killers come armed with the support of the colonial state and are mobilized by the collective will of settler society, raping, murdering, beating, torturing, and plundering their way to civilization.

Ending vigilante violence against Native people was a primary cause the Red Power Movement took as its own. On a cold winter night in February 1972, in Gordon, Nebraska, a bordertown to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, four white men—Melvin and Leslie Hare, Bernard Ludder, and Robert Bayless—kidnapped fifty-one-year-old Oglala elder Raymond Yellow Thunder. The men stripped Yellow Thunder naked, beat him, forced him to dance as a “drunk Indian” for the entertainment of whites in a dance hall, before leaving him to die from his wounds. Outraged, Yellow Thunder’s family called on the American Indian Movement, who quickly mobilized and took Gordon by storm. Without pressure from AIM, Leslie and Marvin Hare would have walked. To memorialize Yellow Thunder and all those Native people ruthlessly abused and murdered by settler vigilantes, the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song” became the “AIM Song.” Vigilantism is an organizing principle of settler colonialism.

Police Violence

Police violence rarely comes into focus. Something close to it comes into view when we use the phrase police brutality, but that phrase implies that the police use of force (a euphemism for police violence) is something other than violence. Police violence is often understood as having a dual character—it can either be unjustified, which often gets called “police brutality,” or it can be justified, which gets called “the police use of force.” When police violence is misunderstood as having this dual nature, activists’ calls to end “police brutality” function as calls to expand police violence—give us less police brutality and more justified police use of force.

To bring police violence into focus, we should start by recognizing that police are violence specialists. The job of policing is to fabricate social order and to rely on violence or the threat of violence to make this order. What exactly is the order that police fabricate? This is an important question. When we engage in an analysis of police that does not begin with this question, we leave it up to police to provide an explanation for their violence. And when this happens, police are only too happy to explain away their violence as something other than violence. It is force, and it is necessary to “serve and protect,” cops tell us. But policing in settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel has always been the work of fabricating a settler social order. All settler colonial policing begins with the idea that Native peoples have no claim to Native land and, equally important, stand in the way of settler claims to Native land. The order that police create is a settler order that requires the elimination of the Native conditioned by a settler claim over Native land and Native life and a settler obligation to bring about Native death. While the obligation to manage Native life and death is distributed broadly among settler citizens, it is the very job of police. Police are Indian killers.

To speak of bordertown violence is to speak of the vigilante who beats up a Native man in a bordertown or the cop who kills a Native woman on the street or the payday lender who traps a Native family in a ruthless cycle of debt. To speak of police violence, however, is to speak very specifically of what Mark Neocleous calls the “permissive structure of law.” Law accommodates police. Police are always “beyond the law,” yet their behavior is also always “lawful.” And since law is about order not justice, what might seem trivial on its surface, such as the mere presence of a Native person in a bordertown, is seen to police as among the gravest of threats to good order. The Indian killer, therefore, is law itself.

Don’t look to law to rescue us from police violence. Law explicitly endorses violence against Native peoples. And don’t call for an end to police brutality, which is nothing more than a call for more and better police trained to inflict more humane and efficient violence and, thus, more “good order” in the bordertown. Instead, call for an end to police violence, which is a call for the end of police and, thus, the end of settler social order.

Indian Expert

“Indians have been cursed above all other people,” wrote Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. “They have anthropologists.” And pawnbrokers. And Christian missionaries. And traders. And Indian agents. And bureaucrats. And other parasites who infest Indian Country. In the early nineteenth century, Indian experts murdered men, women, and children for scalp contracts. In the late nineteenth century, Indian experts claimed to have been kidnapped by Indians and wrote breathless memoirs of captivity and escape. In the early twentieth century, Indian experts worked at Bureau of Indian Affairs hospitals sterilizing women and girls. In the late twentieth century, Indian experts became “scholars” of “public health” and epidemiology and wrote books about “drunk Indians.” The Indian Expert always “tells it like it is,” as Deloria puts it, which is to say that the job of the Indian Expert has always been to keep attention on various Indian pathologies and away from the organizing violence of the settler society. The job of the Indian Expert is to depict the vanishing Indian, the corrupted Indian, the Indian as a shadow of what the Indian once was.

Dark humor and dramatic irony percolate through Deloria’s often hilarious satire of anthropology, but make no mistake, he is deadly serious. “The fundamental thesis of the anthropologist is that people are objects for observation, people are then considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, and for eventual extinction.” There is no more important job among settlers in a settler society than the job of the Indian Expert. The role of the Indian Expert, and the various modes it takes, can be summarized by its four essential colonial tasks.

The first task of the Indian Expert is to represent Indians as responsible for the genocidal violence of settler colonialism. These “experts,” who once issued scalp bounties and wrote travelogues and captivity narratives, now cash checks from prestigious Ivy League institutions for their “field research.”

The second task of the Indian Expert is to provide the legal, biological, economic, and cultural rationale for genocidal policies that include child abduction (also known as boarding school), sterilization, Indian removal, treaty violations, and too many others to mention. They design “studies” of Indian pathology and publish articles in “scientific” journals about Indian biology and genetics, in which they claim Indians are unfit for modern life. They give interviews to fawning reporters in offices decorated by looted headdresses and tomahawks incoherently displayed.

The third task of the Indian Expert is to place Indians forever in the past. Indians have vanished these “experts” explain, but at least we have all their stuff. This is how the Indian Expert as a class transforms Indians into a settler economy. The Indian Expert takes a life and transforms it into an artifact and the artifact into a commodity and the commodity into an economy.

The last task of the Indian Expert, a task only recently added, is to modernize the role of the Indian Expert in settler society. To survive, settler colonialism must appear as what it is not. So Indian experts hold degrees in “Indian” law and draft administrative law regulations for BIA bureaucracies to “help” Native people, which is another way to take children from their homes. They hold elected office and pass payday loan legislation for bordertown “economic development,” which is another way to loot Indian art and artists. They own and control hospitals that continue to offer reproductive health services, which is another way to sterilize women and girls. They “play Indian” in cities like Sedona or Flagstaff or Rapid City or Santa Fe, where they claim to have tapped into some profound Native spirituality, which is another way to depict “The Indian” as a product of settler society.

The Indian Expert works to resolve the fundamental contradiction of settler colonialism, which is that its future is conditioned on settler society’s capacity to sustain genocide. While the job of the Indian Expert has always been to manage this insecurity, the contemporary Indian Expert operates differently. The Indian Expert today pretends to be a real ally with Native peoples by claiming “cultural competency.” These Indian experts demonstrate their “cultural competency” when they place Indians as one among many deserving “identities” that inhabit the settler’s liberal multicultural society. The point here is to stifle Indigenous solidarity, to thwart the possibility of international solidarity among Native peoples, and to undermine solidarity among Native peoples, Black and Chicanx folks, immigrants, the poor, and the working class.

The Indian Expert does not wear a target on its back. We must place it there.

Drunk Tank

Four decades ago, Gallup, New Mexico, was so notorious for its public display of drunkenness that the city became known as “Drunk Town, USA.” The ABC television program 20/20 [sic] solidified Gallup’s reputation as “Drunk Town, USA” with a 1987 segment about Gallup that included photographs of bodies piled into what was known colloquially as the city’s “drunk tank.” These were the bodies of Navajo men who had been picked up by police and then taken into “protective custody.” Protective custody meant that police arrested anyone they claimed was inebriated in public spaces. They held hundreds of people in a 4,800-square-foot drunk tank cell with a cement floor, a drain, and nothing more. Police routinely filled the jail so beyond capacity that people slept on the floor in shifts, taking turns standing for hours awaiting their turn to lie on the hard concrete.

As a 1950s survey of Navajos and Hopis in Gallup reported, the police viewed public drunkenness as the largest problem they confronted, which was largely attributed to Navajos coming off the Navajo reservation to buy and consume liquor. In the 1970s, Gallup ranked nationally as first in alcohol-related deaths, with Gallup’s McKinley County the worst county in the United States for alcohol-related mortality. Residents there were 225 percent more likely to die from alcohol-related causes than were New Mexico residents overall. In 1973, New Mexico decriminalized public drunkenness and created a category it called “protective custody.” Under the law, individuals deemed inebriated could be held for twelve hours. By the 1980s, police claimed that they spent most of their time picking up inebriated people and depositing them in the drunk tank. Today, the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates that the area surrounding McKinley County has the worst alcoholism problem in the nation, though it doesn’t provide a precise definition of “alcoholism.” On average, twenty-six thousand people are taken into protective custody each year in Gallup for alcohol-related incidents, and the area’s rate of alcohol-related traffic accidents is twice the state average.

In response to protests and ongoing negative media attention, Gallup implemented a number of measures, including closing nearly a half-dozen Gallup bars and banning Sunday liquor sales and walk-up windows at liquor stores. McKinley County approved a liquor excise tax, which generated nearly $600,000 annually for abuse prevention and education. Further, Gallup’s Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) ordinance (a 0.08 blood alcohol level or greater leading to seventy-two hours of mandatory jail time for first-time offenders) is the strictest in the state. Longtime New Mexico Republican senator Pete Domenici also supported Gallup’s efforts by advocating for the federal government to allocate $900,000 through Indian Health Service to operate a new protective custody center, which became Na’Nizhoozhi Center (NCI). Using city and federal funds, NCI opened its doors in 1992, thereby closing the doors of the notorious city drunk tank profiled five years earlier by 20/20 [sic]. Between 1992 and 2012, NCI served as a detox center, a short-term shelter, a provider of treatment for DWI offenders, and a counseling unit. NCI also initiated a fourteen-day program utilizing traditional Native healing methods to help chronic alcoholics. In the 1980s, Gallup averaged a little more than 34,000 protective-custody admissions to the drunk tank each year. By 1996, admissions to NCI had dropped to 17,723.

While NCI’s methods saw some success, its existence was short-lived, and Gallup continues to criminalize Native people for drinking. In the years following its opening, NCI was criticized by those who experienced its services. The Gallup Police Department created a new subdivision of policing called Community Service Aides to patrol and sweep Gallup’s streets for intoxicated individuals who were then transported to NCI. Data gathered by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission indicates that these transports are often involuntary, and that patrol surveillance leads Native people to hide or elude service aides to avoid detention at NCI. Many claimed it was no different than the city’s drunk tank of earlier years. Stories about walking down Gallup streets (inebriated or not) only to be targeted and detained by Community Service officers were common. Many told stories of being forced to take a breath analyzer test, only to find themselves thrown into the NCI “drunk tank.”

For a brief period, the Navajo Nation took over the operation of NCI, and, by 2012, Gallup expressed concerns that NCI faced closure. In 2017, NCI received funding to keep its doors open and to offer treatment services for substance use and provide shelter. The congressional appropriation will be made annually until 2022. After more than fifty years of attention to Gallup’s “problem,” not much has changed in its landscape of public intoxication and its accompanying social ills and atmosphere of racism and discrimination against its Native population. McKinley County is the poorest county in New Mexico, and its largest city, Gallup, has the highest concentration of predatory lending stores that target poor Navajos on-and off-reservation. The city is home to a multimillion-dollar-a-year liquor industry, with thirty-nine liquor licenses (more per capita than most major cities) that exploit already vulnerable Native people. Native, mostly Navajo, dollars keep the Gallup economy afloat, yet Natives have no political power in the city. Navajos and other Natives continue to meet unnatural and largely uninvestigated or under-investigated deaths in Gallup connected to the toxic environment of alcohol saturation. Drunk tanks, as a feature of bordertowns like Gallup, are but one signifier of how settler colonialism plays out in the present.

Forced Sterilization

In January 1973, Victor Cutnose, along with five other men, seized control of the Gallup Indian Medical Center. Armed with rifles and explosives, the men demanded the dismissal of hospital staff, including doctors, they deemed “disrespectful” to Native peoples. The Gallup Indian Medical Center was notorious for its treatment of Native men, women, and children. It was there and at the surrounding boarding schools that Indian Health Service (IHS) doctors conducted human trials on Navajo children and performed forced sterilizations of Native women as part of what doctors considered routine practice.

The armed occupation of the Gallup hospital occurred during the height of IHS policies to forcibly sterilize Native women. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies on the forced sterilization of Native people in the United States, and nearly all conclude that IHS sterilized between 25 and 50 percent of all Native American women between the years 1970 and 1976. IHS doctors continued to sterilize Native women even after a 1973 US District Court moratorium was placed on sterilization. A 1976 US Congressional investigation of four IHS service areas in the US Southwest, which included Gallup and Albuquerque, concluded that the IHS sterilized 3,406 Native women between 1973 and 1976.

Sterilization is not an official state practice imposed only on Native women. It has been a common eugenicist practice imposed via official state institutions on incarcerated, Black, Hispanic, and poor white women throughout the twentieth century. Eugenics is the racist idea that some people have no right or a limited right to reproduction, because members of these racial groups, according to eugenecists, are genetically less intelligent and, therefore, beyond the reach of social progress. The state, according to this logic, is obligated to manage the distribution of reproductive rights only to those deemed “fit,” which has historically meant the white (and settler) body politic. Eugenics is the pseudoscience of white supremacy, and it structures the work of establishment scientific institutions throughout the United States.

But the forced sterilization of Native women cannot be explained solely though the logic of eugenics. All settler states are sterilizing states. This is to say that all settler states employ eugenics as a tactic of genocide. The forced sterilization of Native women and, to a lesser degree, men is part of the genocidal logic of Native elimination. Sterilization, like the theft of children from Native households, is one way that settler states control the perceived threat that Native overpopulation presents to settler demographic supremacy. Settlers try to prevent the so-called Indian hordes from rising again to burn down their forts. They worry constantly that Native peoples will outnumber them and overthrow the settler logic of “kill to replace,” which must remain intact for settler order to maintain its dominance on stolen land. The forced sterilization of Native women, like settler colonialism, is, at the end of the day, about land. The only response is decolonization.

Gender Violence

Gender violence includes sexual violence, genital mutilation, child marriage, sex trafficking, domestic violence, abduction of girls, bride kidnappings, war brides, sexual harassment at the workplace, emotional or physical violence, femicide, coercive reproductive practices, and rape. Most normative understandings of gender violence rely on a binary of men/women and masculine/feminine in order to define violence as a product of social inequalities between men and women. When invoked this way, gender binaries serve as both an explanation and a basis for inequalities that place women at a lower social and economic status than men and do not speak to how settler colonialism structures gender.

Gender as a binary disguises the role of gender violence in constituting settler colonialism. According to Deborah Miranda, Native peoples practiced gender diversity prior to European, and then American, settler invasions. Such diversity incurred the wrath of Spanish priests in colonial Spanish California, where Jesuit priests systematically and ruthlessly tortured Native peoples. They focused their violence on those they believed to be joyas, “queer,” or a third gender, and they sought to exterminate the third genders they encountered in Native societies. Gender violence, therefore, is a foundational settler colonial practice. Settlers declare as abnormal anything that diverts from the binary man/woman. To be queer is to be criminal to the settler, and so the settler state seeks to exterminate and erase the presence of genders beyond the masculine/feminine binary.

As Native and queer feminists point out, the “queer” represents a political and social order threatening to the settler nation and its citizens. We value the presence of our nonbinary relatives. We know their importance in our survival as a people. We remember the stories our ancestors told us about our third-, fourth-, and fifth-gendered relatives within our kin networks—in Diné as nádleehí and in Lakota as winkte—and value these relatives as gifted persons. In solidarity movements that refuse settler values, including patriarchy, the nuclear family, and property ownership, we invoke our original teachings about kinship extended to all human beings and to all other than human beings. Confronting gender violence through queer-affirming networks liberates us from the pathology of heteronormative settler thinking. The world isn’t heteronormative, only the settler world is. There is no end to gender violence in a settler world. If we seek to build and nurture a community that extends relations to all beings, the Earth and Sky, and other than human relatives, we would do well to remember the stories our ancestors told us and look to the gifted persons to help us.

MMIWG2S: Missing and Murdered Native Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People

Anthonette Cayedito. Fred C. Martinez. Rose Osborne. Cecelia Finona. Raymond Yellow Thunder. Chris Yazzie. Betty Osbourne. Anna Mae Aquash. Brandy Wesaquate. Allison Gorman. Ella Johnson. Pamela George. Kee Thompson. Ashley Utley. Sherry Quintero-Davenport. Belinda Williams. Tanya Holyk. Laney Ewenin. Loreal Tsingine. Patricia Felinian Miranda. Irma Arce Garcete. Rose Osborne. Nee Oliver Yazzie. Ronnie Ross. Amy Hansen. Loretta Saunders. Hannah Harris.

These are the names of Native women, girls, transwomen, and Two-Spirits who have been murdered or gone missing. Some of the names may be familiar, but most are not. It has been through the dogged work of families, Native women’s groups, and community-based organizations that we know anything at all about the people listed here. And it is because of the persistence of families and relatives that some of the victims have seen some measure of justice through the settler colonial systems. This is no small feat since settler justice does not recognize that Native lives matter.

On April 6, 1986, nine-year-old Anthonette Cayedito answered a knock at the door of her family’s home in Gallup, New Mexico, and was never seen again.

No one has seen fifty-nine-year old Cecelia Finona since May 30, 2020, when her family last saw her in Farmington, New Mexico. No one knows who murdered Helen Betty in 1971 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her sister, Rose Osborne, devoted her life to stopping the violence against women. She created the Helen Betty Memorial Foundation and worked for justice for her sister until someone murdered Rose, a Native trans-woman, in 2008.

Thomas Mayes was convicted of the 1992 fatal shooting of his partner, Ella Johnson. Mayes, a Gallup cop, shot and killed Johnson in a parked car at a Gallup hotel while her twelve-year-old son watched from the back seat. He served eight years in jail. In 2005, the Santa Fe Boys and Girls Club hired him despite the conviction, because he was, “in general, a nice guy.”

Shaun Murphy killed Fred Martinez, a self-identified nádleehí and Two-Spirit, in 2008. A search party found her mutilated body in a remote area outside of Cortez, Colorado. Murphy bragged to friends that he beat up and killed a “fag.”

The movement to get justice for the murders of Native women, girls, transwomen, and Two-Spirits is often represented by the acronym MMIWG2S, but no acronym captures the astonishing scope and scale of the violence. Thousands and thousands of women and girls go missing, but few are ever reported. Native women are more likely to be murdered than the national average, but even this statistic undercounts the violence. The numbers often exclude violence against transwomen, and efforts to confront this problem that rely on statistical data or “crime” data often undercount the problem and render invisible all those who do not count as “female.”

LGBTQI2S people experience colonial violence and oppression in far greater numbers in relation to Native women and girls’ experiences. Further, gender violence is compounded for Native people in urban spaces and bordertowns, where at least 70 percent of the population live, as a result of losses of kinship connections beyond the normative nuclear family unit and to communities on designated Native lands. Further, the movement across imaginary boundaries of Native nations and urban spaces foments dislocations, whereby women and LGBTQI2S find themselves in settler spaces devoid of kinship-based resources. Vigilantes and police prey on these relatives. Many are forced by violence or circumstances into sex work.

This profound settler gender violence defines settler social relations, particularly those with the state and its institutions, such as police, jails, courts, welfare agencies, and schools. These are institutions organized around Native disposability and make no effort to confront the problem of Native gender violence. Settler state violence shapes the response of Native nations, nearly all of which have been transformed by settler state violence and, thus, like the settler state also fail to confront gender violence.

All settler nations, founded as they are on a genocidal violence that make and sustain claims to sovereignty over Native peoples and Native land, domesticate Native nations and their people. This is accomplished by law, police and vigilante violence, and more. And this drive for Native domestication fuels the epidemic of violence against Native women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. If the settler state recognizes MMIWG2S at all, it is not to end it but, rather, to reproduce and reinforce the relations that make all of it possible. MMIWG2S will never be resolved by the settler state, for to do so requires the dismantling of settler nations.

Militarization

Militarization is a particular mode of social organization marked by legal, material, and symbolic expressions of militarism that pervade every aspect of daily life. These expressions are broadly understood as compulsory in liberal capitalist states, where ubiquitous and obligatory displays of patriotism underwrite citizenship, and where martial values (authoritarianism, conformity, social conservatism, violence, and heteropatriarchy, among others) provide a shared, rarely contested political language and logic.

It is not enough to say that settler societies are militarized societies. While true, the claim implies that settler societies merely adopt militarization as a political technique or develop militarized modes of social organization to resolve the contradictions of settler colonial violence. Such a view is only partly true. While attuned to the malevolent influence of settler colonial militarization on the lives and futures of Native peoples, this developmentalist view of settler militarization fails to capture the reciprocal and etiological nature of the relationship between settler colonialism and militarization.

At the heart of all settler colonial societies we find an apparent and seemingly unresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, settler colonialism valorizes progress, individual liberty (through property), democracy, and the universal promise of safety, security, and prosperity generated by all of these. On the other hand, we find pervasive, sustained, and targeted violence organized and deployed by the settler state against Native peoples. This apparent contradiction—the realization of safety and security for settlers because of sustained, state violence against Native peoples—is not so much a contradiction, however, but, rather, should be understood as the wellspring of settler society itself.

As Audra Simpson explains, “Colonialism survives in a settler form. In this form, it fails at what it is supposed to do: eliminate Native people; take all their land; absorb them into a white, property-owning body politic.” Given its abject failure to eliminate Native peoples, we should ask what then sustains the settler form? When we ask this question, we find an answer in militarization. If settler safety and security exist at all, they exist as conditions of police, militia, and vigilante violence and the broad acceptance of this violence (usually rendered as lawful or justified or, if impossible to defend, ignored as aberrant or anomalous). These patterns are invisible to settlers and, as such, literally do not exist for settlers.

But we know there is no settler prosperity without settler law’s coercive political economies of resource extraction on Native land. We know there is no settler security without police, militia, and vigilante violence against Native peoples. We know there is no settler future without the destruction of Native claims to land. And we also know, despite all of this, that the thing that sustains settler society—militarization—will also destroy it.

White Supremacy

White supremacy refers to the imagined biological and social superiority of white people, which, to white supremacists, provides the basis for claims to the social, political, and economic domination of society by white people. The scale and scope of such a claim is often described through the language of disparity. In the United States, for example, a Native woman is paid fifty-seven cents for every dollar a white man makes. US judges and juries sentence Natives to prison at over four times the rate of white people. Native people comprise 4 percent of the population of Canada, but 36 percent of all women and 25 percent of all men in Canada’s jails are Native.

The language of “disparities”—whether in sentencing, educational attainment, or income—appears to merely describe the scope and scale of white supremacy. What’s most important here is the way it depicts white supremacy as an aberration—as a problem of institutional racism that disproportionately impacts Native peoples. To depict white supremacy as an aberration is to presuppose an imagined and possible alternative world of perfect equality and equity, where something called white supremacy can be overcome, and where Native women will make as much money as white men, and Native people will be incarcerated at rates no different than other groups. Beware: there is no such alternative in a world full of settlers.

The language of disparities depicts the logic of elimination at the heart of settler colonialism as a kind of historical or political accident or aberration that should be confronted not through decolonization struggles over land but, rather, through political reforms to existing systems and institutions. The “white supremacy as aberration” logic seeks to blunt Native resistance to the settler state. Liberalism, in other words, is offered as the solution to white supremacy. Among the solutions liberalism offers are assimilation and state recognition, which is to say that the solution to white supremacy is found in the expansion of the settler state, which is based on and can’t exist beyond white supremacy.

White supremacy, however, is better understood as an organizing logic of settler and slave society—a logic that gives meaning and momentum to settler colonial violence. White supremacy is not an aberration of the liberal capitalist state; it is its mirror image. After all, settler colonialism destroys to replace. The “disparities” that appear to describe white supremacy are not aberrations at all but, rather, reflect settler colonialism’s unfinished and ongoing goal of the total dissolution of Native society. The “solutions” the liberal capitalist state offers to white supremacy are the smallpox-infected blankets of ongoing settler colonialism.

Exposure

Exposure is a leading cause of death for Native people in bordertowns, particularly unsheltered relatives. Exposure deaths increase during the winter months when low temperatures cause hypothermia and many who live and sleep outdoors freeze to death. Exposure deaths refer to unnatural deaths, or deaths that occur as a result of external forces. Unnatural deaths are the opposite of natural deaths, or deaths that occur as a result of “natural causes.” While elements like heat, cold, snow, fire, and rain are common external causes of exposure deaths, exposure also refers to the increased risk that comes with being unsheltered. These risks include assault, murder, rape, theft, stalking, and arrest. Being unsheltered decreases your safety and increases the likelihood you will experience violence and harm. To be without shelter leaves you quite literally exposed and vulnerable. Therefore, we cannot address exposure without also addressing the links between the logic of homelessness and settler colonialism.

As discussed in some detail in chapter one, in July 2014, three teenagers brutally bludgeoned to death two Diné men, Allison Gorman and Kee Thompson, who were sleeping in a vacant lot on Albuquerque’s Westside at the time of the attack. Jerome Eskeets, a fellow traveler and relative of Gorman, whom he called “uncle,” was resting in the vacant lot when the teenagers approached. Eskeets witnessed the murders and narrowly escaped with his life. National media picked up the story immediately. During an interview with an AP journalist, Eskeets recalled the teenagers deriding the Navajo men for being “homeless” several times as they were beating them to death. As he recounted the murders, he told the reporter, “We’re not homeless. Our home is right here on this land.”

As we note in the next section on homelessness, Native people are treated as terrorists, the original threat to US “homeland security.” Settlers understand the Native act of claiming a home on the land as a threat to order. This is an existential threat to a settler society based on a claim to “virgin land,” already cleared of any Native presence through waves of genocidal campaigns of removal. To proclaim that Native people living and sleeping outside are homeless is to claim they don’t belong, that they constitute a foreign threat to America’s security, and that the job of settler colonialism is only finished when they are cleared finally from the land.

What does this have to do with exposure? Why does sleeping and living outside—something humans have done for millennia—place Native people at risk of dying from unnatural causes? Because the condition of being unsheltered in settler society is a condition that marks one as an enemy of settler society. Vigilantes murdered Gorman and Thompson, which is how exposure works in bordertowns. In their case and those of countless other Native people in bordertowns, the condition of being unsheltered is among the conditions necessary for settler violence. It increases Native exposure to settler violence; it increases Native exposure to the Indian killers who patrol the streets of bordertowns at night; it increases Native exposure to the vigilantes who kill Indians for blood sport.

Like all people, Native people deserve shelter, and there are many reasons, including social and family violence, domestic abuse, homophobia and transphobia, poor health care, mental health issues, and housing injustice, that explain why Native people live on the streets at such high rates. These exposure deaths are one and the same with the bordertown hunts, with the constant arrests, and with the missing and murdered Native peoples that structure the settler world.

Homelessness

What counts as home? What counts as a home? Who gets to claim the lands of the United States as a homeland?

Native peoples often invoke the concept of homelands to describe their relationship with ancestral territories and lands. Sometimes the political boundaries of present-day Native nations match the homelands Native people have in mind when we use this term. More often, though, our homelands cover vast expanses that far exceed current reservation boundaries. Reservations are not homelands, they are a product of settler violence, the extreme reduction of Native homelands. Our homelands have been stolen by settler governments like the United States and carved into private property for settler landowners. The United States claims these stolen lands for itself when it declares sovereignty over “homeland security.” Native homelands don’t belong to the United States because the United States pilfered what it calls its homeland from Native nations. But Native nations have neither disappeared nor relinquished their rightful relationship with their homelands.

Consider the colloquial phrase “home is where the heart is.” What are matters of the heart? Family. Shelter. Warmth. Love. Safety. To be homeless and Native means that one has no homeland, has no family, has no love, and has no safety or security. To be homeless and Native places one beyond care and concern, condemned to live a life without relatives, without belonging, with nothing and from nowhere. As Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, to be outside of Native bonds of kinship and severed from our homelands is to be alien and without a future. But Native people are only alienated from settler society. We are not homeless in our own homelands. Settler common sense requires we believe that we are homeless, and settler order is the enforcement of that exclusion. To believe this is to submit to settler authority, to participate in our own destruction. To believe this is to think and act like a settler. That world erases us from the land permanently and reduces us from nations to citizens in liberal, capitalist, multicultural America. That world claims dominion “from sea to shining sea” once and for all. We have no place in that world.

We fight back against this, because the stakes are life and death. The term homeless first emerged in the early colonial period in North America. It referred to European settlers in New England who fled their farms in the wake of King Philip’s War of 1675–1676, an uprising led by the famous Pokanoket leader Metacom. Settlers fled to coastal towns where they quickly became a new class: “vagrants.” These struggles occurred alongside transformative shifts in New World mercantile capitalism, which created new categories of human surplus, for example, slaves.

As neither slaves nor settlers, however, Native people did not fall into either of these categories. Instead, they were, from the get-go, cast as insurgents and enemies of the state—terrorists. This means Native people existed outside of the subject position of the “vagrant” and, therefore, were also not subject to the logic of homelessness.

Today, we watch as cops, journalists, churches, politicians, and activists refer to unsheltered Native people as homeless, transients, or vagrants. The term transient is commonly found in police reports when referring to unsheltered Native people or Native people that cops simply encounter on the street. These cops aren’t confused. These words aren’t beside the fact. They operate within the logic of settler colonialism that dictates Native people are enemies of the state who must be annihilated—literally cleared out of the way—for US expansion to succeed. This clearing can and has happened through multiple techniques: military and police deployment, boarding schools, starvation, the kidnapping of Native children, sterilization of Native women, etc. Categorizing Native people as homeless today is a form of counterinsurgency. If we are enemies of the state—terrorists—imagine the ends to which the United States will go to suppress us with the limitless power it grants itself by the settler logic of “homeland security.” It will target, detain, torture, and kill us. The settler does this with impunity, but, more importantly, the settler does it because it is compulsory. This is what “homelands” means to a settler nation like the United States. Indians won’t stand aside and let settlers steal their land and future, turn them into terrorists, and beat them back until the job is done! This is America. And America will turn anyone in the world who defies US supremacy into an Indian (Osama Bin Laden as “Geronimo”) and this will justify everything.

Pandemic

Tuberculosis, the great destroyer of Indian nations. Smallpox, measles, influenza, the shock troops of colonial conquest, each made a murderous march through Indian Country. Now comes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), another severe acute respiratory syndrome attacking Native peoples. It was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province, China. Like settlers, it lurked for years before emerging on its global campaign. By January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the virus an epidemic of worldwide concern. On July 20, the Centers for Disease Control reported 3,106,932 cases of COVID, with 59,260 new cases and a total of 132,855 deaths, 799 of those deaths on that day alone.

News reports from March 19, 2020, told the story of a church gathering in a Navajo community that led to an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which church members then spread in their communities when they returned home to the western side on the Navajo Nation after the service. Christianity has long been a vector distributing destruction in Indian Country. And outbreak emerged in the infamous “drunk tank,” or Detoxification Center, in the bordertown of Gallup, New Mexico. The hospital and the detox personnel released infected patients without a quarantine plan, and the outbreak spread through the town and into nearby native [sic] communities.

On April 10, COVID-19 cases on tribal lands were more than four times the rate in the United States. By May 18, rates of infection on the Navajo Nation surpassed all the states, including New York, which had been the pandemic’s epicenter. On June 26, in South Dakota, Native peoples made up half of confirmed cases of the coronavirus. There are a number of reasons for this. Native peoples are at a higher risk from infectious disease, because they are subjects of settler conquest, which produces geographical isolation, limited health care access, high poverty levels, and a prevalence of diabetes and other preexisting conditions. They also stole crucial resources like water to facilitate the growth of their cities and bordertowns. By July, the fifth month, a second wave of the disease surged. The virus, for which there was no effective treatment or cure, has become the source of political division during the first and second waves. In the US, death and disease disproportionately affect communities of color, which have suffered the highest infection and death rates.

Tribal nations followed the Centers for Disease Control’s guidelines and enacted some of the strictest measures of safety and protection, even as they battled with the federal government for funding to address the spread of the virus. In New Mexico and Arizona counties with significant Native and Navajo populations, Native leaders closed roads to their communities and enacted weekday curfews and weekend lockdowns in efforts to slow the spread of the virus. The public offered money, food, water, and personal protection supplies as part of the relief effort.

Cities, bordertowns, and state governments dominated by Christian whites bizarrely called for a faith-based approach to combating the virus. They confronted those who took protective measures, such as wearing a mask in public, with physical and verbal assaults, and these efforts stymied Native nations’ science-based efforts to halt the pandemic. Approximately 70 percent of Native people live off designated Native nations, and many find themselves in settler bordertowns hostile to public health. Settlers used the pandemic, as settlers use all pandemics, to whip up anti-Indian hatred.

Native peoples live in worlds remade by settler pandemics. In the 1918 pandemic, only 85 of the 140 people at San Ildefonso, in the Southwest, survived. In many places, deaths were not recorded, so the numbers are unknown. Upon their arrival into the “New World,” the carriers of the smallpox brought death to about 90 percent of the Native population, from which the Native peoples never recovered. If this is to be the last settler pandemic, it will be because Native and Black organizers and activists, the great destroyers of settler society, have joined in solidarity to confront the racial oppression at the heart of all settler relations.

Public Health

Native people:

• are 50 percent more likely than others to have a substance use disorder;
• are 60 percent more likely to commit suicide;
• are twice as likely to die during childbirth;
• are three times more likely to die from diabetes;
• are five times more likely to die from tuberculosis;
• die on average five years sooner than other Americans;
• have 50 percent less access to Indian Health Service (IHS) care if they are low-income and uninsured, which is the majority of Native people.

This is not public health. These statistics describe an ongoing war against Native people. War, as we know, is profitable. Health care in settler societies, particularly the United States, is not organized around public health or the well-being of humanity but, instead, around profit. And this leaves Native people without health care forced to rely on the IHS or rundown urgent care clinics in reservation bordertowns.

Even if health care is nominally available to Native people, many avoid it. They are tired of the racism and the discrimination; tired of being pathologized as addicts or state-supported freeloaders. For poor and unsheltered Native people, entry into an emergency room or clinic for treatment often results in arrest and incarceration because of petty violations or intoxication. In the bordertown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, you will find more cops than nurses pacing the hallways of hospitals. Native youth report being apprehended by child welfare or incarcerated in mental health facilities against their will, simply because they sought care at a medical facility. It’s common for Native people to be turned away or manipulated into receiving treatments like sterilization or tooth extraction, because IHS facilities are too understaffed or underfunded to provide a broad spectrum of adequate care. This is compounded by the long history of colonial food technologies, such as withholding food rations and the scorched earth campaigns, that have created a chronic lack of access to nutritious food.

The result of all this is that Native people have a profound and enduring mistrust of the health care system. And when we are unwell, we would often rather live with the pain (or die) than deal with a racist institution that violates our bodies and our sovereignty whenever we have to cross a threshold into an IHS clinic or a hospital. Health care should be free, competent, and respectful of everyone, not the least of all Native people whose homelands these private and state facilities occupy.

Chapter Four — Looting

Chapter Five — Counterinsurgency

Chapter Six — Settler Scams

Chapter Seven — Burn the Village

Notes