Download pamphlet: Print – Tabloid [For a Risograph]
Download action poster: Print – Tabloid [For a Risograph]
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, “Everything in U.S. history is about the land.” All nation-states rely on maintaining control over a particular territory, while capitalism has forced people across the world into dependency by taking away their access to land. But the United States is also a settler colonial state, built on anti-indigeneity alongside anti-blackness. Colonial regimes like the U.S. “create their legitimacy by occupying indigenous land and trying to delegitimize indigenous sovereignty. […] That’s the fundamental core of the colonial project” (Amrah Salomon, O’odham Anti-Border Collective). Understanding the deep significance of “land back” as an objective is of critical importance, especially as the Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign and other place-based struggles gain momentum across this territory. Prioritizing indigenous sovereignty can be difficult for settlers in the U.S. to navigate, but it is critical to the success of liberatory struggle. [1]
So are practices of autonomous and offensive direct action, which this column aims to bring together. Struggles to defend land, especially when intertwined with reassertions of indigenous self-determination, pose an existential threat to the United States as a settler colonial project. This means that such struggles are met with brutal repression. We can help avoid the containment that repression seeks by spreading the active defense of land to new places, while evading state control by taking action in unexpected and decentralized ways.
Continue reading Night Owls #2: Summer of Sabotage (USA)
