Melanie Yazzie: Building indigenous solidarity and power (ep334)
What does it mean for those working within academia to become scholar-activists—going beyond working to rise within the ranks of educational institutions to engage with and help enact change within their communities? And why is maintaining an internationalist lens critical for those wanting to support Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and liberation?
In this episode, we welcome Melanie Yazzie Ph.D., a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history, political ecology, Indigenous feminist and queer studies, and theories of policing and the state.
She organizes with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization committed to Indigenous liberation, and she is the author of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation.
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“If we’re going to have any type of change, it’s going to come from movements and people power, not politicians. The politicians will respond because we built power, and that’s just the way that you fuel the engine of history—through movement building. ”
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Melanie Yazzie: I didn't know it at the time when I was a child or even when I was a teenager, I actually didn't come to Native politics or Indigenous politics and choose that as something I was going to specialize in for my life's work as a professor, as an activist, and as a revolutionary. I didn't know that even when I was in high school all the way up until college, I would say.
What I did understand, though, was injustice, and inequality, and suffering. I didn't always know exactly why those things existed. But I knew that certain people experience them more than others.
I knew that my Native relatives experienced it more than other people, particularly compared to the white folks around me. My mother is actually not Native. She's white. She's originally from Pennsylvania. My mom is an interesting person. She was very political. My mom actually participated in the antiwar movement. She lived in the Bay Area in the 60s. In the early 70s, she organized with the United Farm Workers and also the American Indian Movement. I remember, even as a child in our little tiny house in Kingman, Arizona (where I grew up until I was in first grade before we moved to Colorado), she would always watch the news and she was glued to the news all the time. She would always be reading the newspaper. She had subscriptions to political magazines like The Nation or Harper's.
I was nine years old in 1991 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I just remember watching the bombs over Baghdad, and I remember just thinking about the people who were on the ground and what they must be experiencing because of that. I didn't know anything about the U.S. war machine or U.S. imperialism or the history of U.S. imperialism in relation to the conquering of Indigenous nations in the 18th and the 19th century in the United States. How the United States was born out of imperial warfare and bloodshed against Indigenous people and Indigenous Nations. I didn't know any of that stuff at that time. All I knew was that it was wrong.
So when I became a teenager and went to college and started to really learn more about things like racism, colonialism, and capitalism. It wasn't until I was in graduate school in my late twenties that I really learned what feminism was. I've had a long journey into this work.
I started to connect the dots and realized that the gut feeling I had that war was wrong, or that the suffering and discrimination against my Navajo relatives was wrong, had a name, and that it came from structures of power.
Once I realized that, I became much more politicized and radicalized starting in my late twenties into my early thirties. I turn 40 next month. Around the time that this comes out, I will be turning 40 the week of no-thanks, no-giving. So I kind of think of my trajectory into this life through the decades, from my childhood into my adulthood. I did not decide to do Native American studies or become a historian of my own people, the Navajo people, or become a historian of social and political movements, or myself become an activist or somebody who is a social and political actor within those movements until I would say my early thirties.
Kamea Chayne: Something that stood out for me from a past panel that you spoke on is how you show up as an intellectual, juxtaposing a difference between being a revolutionary and intellectual versus, as you've named, a bourgeois intellectual employed in the academy. And it sounds like a lot of your critical learnings didn't come through formal educational institutions. Can you elaborate more on this, and how it's informed or instructed the ways that you work within and outside of academia?
Melanie Yazzie: There's so much to unpack. I have a bourgeois education. I have an elite education. I went to a private liberal arts college called Grinnell College, which at the time had the largest private endowment of any college in the nation. I got a full-ride package to that particular college. I received my master's degree from Yale University, and Yale owns the world like Harvard and Princeton, right? Those are Ivy League institutions.
UNM, the University of New Mexico, is not really a bourgeois institution. It's kind of like a rickety public research institution in one of the poorest states in the entire country. I made that choice for a reason — to come to this place. I currently still live in Albuquerque to receive my Ph.D., to bring me closer to my people, to be able to work with Indigenous folks on the ground. It really was right. It was about four years after I started my Ph.D. that Nick Estes and I and a few other folks in Albuquerque co-founded The Red Nation, which is a revolutionary, action-based grassroots organization that was founded in Albuquerque. That happened when I was a graduate student, a Ph.D. student here at UNM. So even though I come from that kind of background, I didn't really become a real thinker, somebody who had strong analysis, somebody who had conviction until I was at UNM and, honestly, until we started to do organizing on the ground with The Red Nation.
You're taught in the academy, especially places like Grinnell or Yale, to be hyper-individualist, to be very careerist, to think about getting tenure, to think about how you can rise through the ranks of the institution.
And that's fine. I know a lot of people who do that. A lot of people I respect deeply do that.
But you end up spending your life playing the game within the institution. What also ends up happening is if you're a political person, if you're somebody who wants to enact or inspire change, you often get hamstrung by the institution in the sense that you think that you're always battling the institution and you're trying to change the institution itself.
I learned from organizing and doing political and intellectual work completely outside of the academy that the academy is a bourgeois institution. The field of education is a battleground is where the war of ideas plays out. It's why right now the United States is really trying to crack down on public education on university campuses, right? In Florida, trying to surveil teachers who might be teaching ethnic studies the quote-unquote liberal content that they're so afraid of. So education and universities are important places where politics do matter. When you're in the classroom and sometimes when you're engaging and fighting to save a department like Native American studies, for example, that is important political work.
But the political work that happens outside of the institution, for me, is so much more rewarding. And it's intellectually rich when you're engaged in action-based organizing with other people, especially with other colonized or oppressed people. There's nothing like that feeling.
It's like you have true self-determination and freedom when you're doing that kind of work. And to make history through doing that work, that's what you're actually doing. You're not just reflecting on history, you're not a commentator, which is often what scholars are, a commentator on history. You're actually a social actor within that history-making. You're not doing an ethnography, you're not conducting interviews with people. Your whole heart and soul is in the work, and there's nothing better in terms of understanding what that history actually is and what those aspirations actually look like than to be immersed in it and to be a part of it.
And so for me, it's a very dialectical relationship between the action-based organizing and then the reflection. The reflection, i.e. the writing, the teaching, the stuff that I do as a professor who's employed by the academy, I now see that that labor must directly feed and always be feeding and nourishing the movements themselves. Movements for decolonization, right? Movements against imperialism, movements for climate justice. I'm always encouraging my students to think that way as well. That you're not just creating think pieces or thought experiments, but that your work is deeply grounded in the material conditions of the struggle for liberation itself. The activists working outside of the academy taught me how to do that.
It's less about being a public intellectual. I think sometimes people like the term scholar-activist. For me, when you produce knowledge as a revolutionary, the way you do it, the audience, and the reason you do it is much different than if you're simply a scholar who's trying to get tenure in an institution. I want tenure. I want some job security. I want health insurance like everybody else. I love working with Native students. I have deep respect for the scholars that have mentored me and who I am in conversation with.
The thing is that almost all of them, especially the Native ones, also do a great deal of community work outside of the institution and are constantly trying to create more space within the institution for the types of things I'm describing, right? The types of experiences, the types of knowledge, and the types of movements. That's just a little bit of what the organizing has taught me. I've said this publicly many times, and people are like, wow, you left Yale to go to the University of New Mexico, why did you do that? Because I got into the Ph.D. program at Yale and really considered staying. Every time someone asked me that I'm like, it was the best decision I ever made. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my entire life because it has led me to this place where I just understand things.
I have a completely different sense of who I am as an intellectual and as an educator than I could ever have had if I had stayed in those institutions and risen through the ranks of power in that way. That's just the truth. That's a little bit about my journey and why I do what I do, and I'm not the only person who does it. I've learned a great deal from other people who've paved the way for me.
Kamea Chayne: And just what does all of this tell us about how we conceptualize credibility, and how we value different educational degrees or different forms of education? It's interesting that there's often this presumption that education is neutral, or it should be neutral and unbiased. But I don't even know if any form of neutrality, in human storytelling and education, is even possible.
Melanie Yazzie: That is such a B.S. narrative from American historians.
It's mostly white settler American historians who have really just taken up all of the space, all of the oxygen, in writings about the history of slavery, or of genocide against Native people, both within the academy and publicly too—that is, popular public histories or in museums, which also narrate history.
Elizabeth Cook Lynn, again, right? The Dakota scholar that I mentioned earlier is one of the founders of Native American or American Indian studies in the United States. She's famously written that there are no two sides to this story. She says there are no two sides to a story of conquest and a story of genocide and colonialism. That’s right. The historical move that the U.S. is always the U.S. and its handmaiden, its elite, trained historians who are handmaidens often to the colonial enterprise that is the United States. They like to say, well, we need to be objective, right? To be an intellectual, to be somebody who produces history and writes history means we need to tell both sides because there are always two sides to the story. But there are no two sides to a story of colonialism.
If you're trying to two-side a history of genocide and colonialism, then you're whitewashing that history.
That's just what's going to happen. Because in a colonial relationship, one of those entities, the colonizer has the monopoly on power. They have a monopoly on violence. Right? That's essentially what colonialism describes. The United States government is our colonial occupier as Indigenous people and as Indigenous nations. They are the colonizer and they go to great lengths to whitewash the history of colonialism.
It's not just history. It's an ongoing reality. It's an ongoing relationship. The only way that colonialism would end is that actual decolonization would happen. One thing that would have to happen is that Indigenous nations would actually have true independence. We don't have true independence. We're just subsumed under the weird kind of domestic law that frames federal Indian policy and our relationship with the United States. We're expected, at every turn—whether it's our membership determinations or how we want to allocate our resources —we constantly have to get permission from the United States government because there's a colonizer. So when you think about education, the very understanding of reality, the beating heart of the United States, what is America, really?
Last year, we found out that America is just deeply racist, white supremacist, and profoundly anti-Black. Right? The Black Lives Matter uprising after George Floyd was murdered was really like a revolution in how we think about and how we understand what the project of America is. There was the 1619 Project in the New York Times and there was this incredible backlash. When you challenge these narratives, these received truths about what America is, that it's the purveyor of democracy around the world and that it's the greatest democracy on Earth, we’re the beacon on the hill, this is the land of freedom and true equality. So it’s the ideas that really build the United States and create this narrative of what the United States is or what an American is. Then when you challenge that, when you really peel back those layers…
Not only is the United States founded on these pillars of genocide and slavery, but, in fact, inequality and the legacies and the ongoing practices of anti-Black racism, for example, or settler-colonialism, are still as strong as they were 200 years ago.
They've just morphed into different technologies and different ways of making sure that that power and that relationship of domination and subordination remains intact. That's partly we saw a rupture in the Make America Great Again narrative last year with the uprising. Every time you see Indigenous uprisings, whether it's at Standing Rock or what's going on at Line 3 or just two or three days ago at Indigenous Peoples Day, when you see those kinds of ruptures, the toppling of statues, these monuments to the glory of America, there's a rupture in that triumphalist narrative that the United States likes to tell itself.
Those ruptures are really important. They're beautiful and they're powerful, and they have the capacity to shift how we think. At the end of the day, education is about thinking. From a perspective of statecraft, education is about indoctrination. Indoctrinating people from a very early age into believing this narrative about who they are as Americans or about the history of the United States.
Every time there's a protest, it's pedagogical.
There's education happening at a protest—when you see a protest sign, when you see a confrontation with police, or with right-wing militia, or with fascists. That there is an educational moment—where there are narratives and there are entire social orders colliding with one another and that it is not in fact about indoctrination. We understand that knowledge is produced through conflict and through encounters.
I always encourage my students, even when my classroom is kind of a vanilla, chill environment where they're talking about books and ideas. I tell them I don't want you to just receive what I'm telling you. I want you to think for yourself. I want you to question the things that you're told are normal. The things that you're told are the received truths and then just live your life according to those rules. I'm like, I want you to challenge that and I want you to be able to think independently of that. That's what I value, critical thinking. I use a kind of Paulo Freire model. I have had my students read his work a lot because I think he did incredible work in this regard. But for me, that's what education is.
It doesn't just happen in a classroom, right? It's about education and knowledge is produced everywhere: on the streets, in the classroom, in our homes. I encourage my students to understand education in that way. You're told in the academy that you shouldn't be political because then you won't get tenure. You can't be too much of a rabble-rouser. And I completely reject that. And you know what?
I've been perfectly fine in the academy being an unapologetic, loud-mouth rabble-rouser.
Credibility. I think I have credibility because I just refuse to be silent. I think people respect me, and I'm sure a lot of people don't like me to think about it, but I don't really care. Like, what's the point? The planet is dying like now is not the time to be silent and to just be like holding our breath until we get tenure. That's absurd. Like, go get the work going, to get the work done, we have 30 years. Yeah. So I'm getting all riled up.
Kamea Chayne: No, I really resonate with your approach and presence and way of being because on this podcast, we're all about critical thinking and picking everything apart, deconstructing all the “solutions” that are being pushed, and really challenging presumptions and norms and what has been accepted as the way that things must be. So I feel really aligned here.
You mentioned that injustice or structures of injustice have really been pretty much the same in the past centuries and decades. They have just been reiterated in different forms. This reminds me of these different theories of change, which I recognize can be controversial. So I've interviewed both movement leaders who advocate for people to get involved in electoral politics, to vote for politicians with more aligned values, and also a lot of leaders who do not engage in electoral politics as a form of protest or at least don't really spend much effort on it because it's not possible to vote for a systemic overhaul to the degree they feel is necessary to address our eco-social crises.
From The Red Deal's statement, "Politicians can't do what mass movements can," I presume that your politics lean towards the latter. That can be viewed as doom and gloom for some people, although I think that the cynicism in improving the current system incrementally may be instructive because that hopelessness might be what opens our eyes to other ways to move forward that most people just aren't taught about in formal educational institutions.
I would love for you to speak more to your understanding of what reforms have actually meant, and their limitations in allowing for the collective transformations that many are yearning for.
Melanie Yazzie: When you become somebody who's like, I want to move out of the space that I'm in and I want to become more engaged in organizing or activism or I want to create change. What is available, what are the models? The theory of change are the models of change that are most readily available, especially in the United States.
Well, nonprofits, first of all, I tried my hardest in my twenties in a nonprofit, got super disgusted and alienated and disillusioned, and then I went to graduate school because I felt like I didn't entirely understand what I was seeing. But again, I had this feeling that it was wrong. So nonprofits are usually the first thing that many of us turn to.
And I think electoral politics, this thinking that change at the national, the federal, or the governmental level is what we should be focusing all of our effort on and putting our energies into. Getting elected to Congress, for example, or backing a candidate, I definitely wanted to do that. I participated in a lot of that kind of politicking when I was in my twenties and even into my early thirties because I think that those are the models generally that are available to you.
For Indigenous people, there's a third model for change or a theory of change that has really grown in prominence since red power kind of calmed down in the neoliberal era, and that's a return to culture. So traditional farming or engaging in cultural practices, finding your way back to your identity or your relationship with the land. So those are the three options, at least for Indigenous people who are searching for what model of change makes the most sense for them. Those are the three most prevalent, I would say, non-profits, electoral politics, and return to culture or return to tradition. I don't necessarily reject the third one because I think that's actually incredibly important to the work we do as The Red Nation.
But there is something, you use the word cynicism. There is something incredibly cynical about it. Thinking that those are your only options. It's very sad to me when I see folks choose something because they don't think that they can just do it themselves. For example, no one gave us permission to start The Red Nation. We just did it.
Something that I've learned from Indigenous feminists, particularly Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, my heroic mentor, is that you don't need to ask permission to do what's right.
And that just because something doesn't exist for you to participate in doesn't mean you can't create it. And that there might be a need for the thing that you're doing, for a different model for how to organize for change, revolution, and liberation.
The thing is, we did that with The Red Nation. It turns out it really resonated with a lot of people, and it continues to resonate with a lot of people as an alternative to the things that are on offer in the liberal framework that really dictates and dominates what we think of as the political horizon for social and economic change or for social and economic justice in this country. In The Red Deal, which I think is a really good example of where The Red Nation is at and our theory of organizing and change, as you stated earlier, one of the four principles is that politicians can't do it. Only mass movements can do it.
We say this first from experience. At a smaller scale, like city and statewide, as The Red Nation, we don't ask for permission to be Indigenous to our own homelands. We don't ask for permission to organize in the ways that make sense to us to help our people and to unapologetically aspire for total liberation and decolonization for ourselves and for all life on this planet. When we just act in this way and when we have that power and we recognize our power to do this, we make a pretty remarkable change. And politicians actually respond to us, and this is what happens when you build really vibrant, successful movements. They are the power, you are building power.
It's okay to build power. There's this tendency in the United States, especially on the left, where having power, building power, is seen as counter-revolutionary, which is silly because then the colonizer has the monopoly on power.
The ruling class quite literally owns the planet. If ever there was a monopoly on power, they have the power. We have power too. Why not build the base from that foundation of power? Because when we have power, the ruling class actually has to respond to us because they recognize that we have power and they respond in multiple ways. They try to assuage us, they try to throw money at the situation. They try to apologize and think everything is OK. They try to co-opt, sometimes they beat us. Sometimes they put us in jail or prison. They respond in various ways to the power that we're building, but mostly they're just trying to diminish it and to destroy it because they know that the power that we're building in movements means their demise, really.
Because to have a monopoly on power in the particular way that it exists today requires incredible violence. It requires incredible inequality and remarkable suffering of most of the planet's human population, especially in the Global South. Pretty much all life on this planet has been harnessed for this larger hoarding of capital, power, wealth, and life, also called capitalism, but by a very small percentage of the world's population, most of whom are white men.
So when you can actually build a movement, it means you're building power and that that power really means something. When the state is responding to you or the ruling class is responding to you, I listed the different ways that we've experienced that response, it's a really good sign. Because it means they recognize your power and they feel threatened. Even though it's scary, it's also really good because you're like, yeah, we got power, you know?
I don't feel that same sense of empowerment when I vote for Joe Biden or even necessarily having Deb Haaland as the Secretary of Interior. I support her as an Indigenous woman in a colonial government. I'm sure it's an incredibly difficult job. She's inheriting an entire legacy of colonial administration that I'm sure keeps her up at night, just thinking about having to participate in that system. But yeah, we call it non-reformist reform in The Red Nation, where it's like, if we're going to have any type of change, it's going to come from movements, it is going to come from people. Power is not going to come from politicians. The politicians will respond because we've built power. That's just the way that you fuel the engine of history through movement building.
I mean, I voted for Deb Haaland. She represented me when she was in Congress. That's my district here in Bernalillo County in Albuquerque. So it's not like I don't vote as an act of protest. I just don't see it really at all as an engine for change. It's a thing I do in five minutes on one day every two or four years and then the rest of my life. I'm pretty much just out there organizing because I think that's where the real change lives.
Kamea Chayne: So in order to actually move the needle, things have to be done to shake up the existing powers, to force them to respond.
On this note, another thing that really stood out to me is that The Red Nation really holds an internationalist lens, so I wanted to ask you why it's been so critical for The Red Nation and its program for Indigenous liberation to center a global perspective and to tether the Indigenous struggles within the US with the movement's rising up against US imperialism in other parts of the globe, beyond the borders.
Melanie Yazzie:
Internationalism is a centerpiece, to how we understand how we get to decolonization, self-determination, and liberation.
For me, it started with Palestine, actually, the question of Palestine. This became something very important about a decade ago in North American-based Indigenous studies or American Indian or Native American studies. I went to Palestine. I went to the West Bank for about two weeks in the spring of 2011 through a program sponsored by the departments of American Studies and Anthropology at UNM. I learned a great deal about resistance and about settler-colonialism and decolonization in Palestine. From that point forward, I understood. Many of our comrades now in The Red Nation have gone to Palestine. I think there are maybe eight or nine of us that have gone on various delegations. What Palestine has taught me and what it's taught all of us in The Red Nation (this was the beginning of our international work, we’ve now expanded significantly) is that we cannot achieve self-determination as Indigenous nations under colonial occupation by the United States without international solidarity.
There is a long history of internationalism built into the American Indian Movement and into Red Power, into the First Nations version, through the George Manuel of that type of internationalism that then resulted in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. There's a long history and there's a long history of international cooperation between Indigenous Nations. What I'm talking about when I talk about international cooperation and solidarity is one that is lateral. We're interested in engaging in internationalism with other movements that have similar aspirations, as we do with governments that have tried to build states in a post-revolutionary kind of context. Places like Bolivia, for example, where we have some aligned political values because we know that building a strong anti-imperialist and anti-colonial bloc will be essential for everyone. We need a truly global movement to tackle the global beast that is U.S. imperialism, but also global capitalism, and we do this laterally with other colonized or formerly colonized nationalities and movements.
The thing is, we have so much to learn, too. This is the other aspect of internationalism. There's this weird kind of exceptionalism and conceit that I really hate the United States left, but somehow it's part of this narrative that I was talking about earlier that somehow we're the best at everything and we're not. We don't have a movement in the United States. We have uprisings. You know, we have relatively successful parties like the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, but we are not great at building movements, especially in the neoliberal period. People in the Global South are really good at building movements. If you have like one to two million people in a movement or a party, that's something that's really powerful. The Red Nation has like 25 people, we're small but mighty. What do we do? We're not a movement. So we have so much to learn from people who've had actual revolutions and who have really gone through difficulties filled with contradictions and complexities. The process of actually building a revolutionary government, for example, or having to build a people's movement.
So part of the reason why we engage in the international work, in addition to the lateral solidarity piece and the need for a global anti-imperialist bloc, is because we have so much to learn. We have a lot of humility to exhibit to the rest of the world. Frankly, as people who are citizens of the U.S. Empire, I'm a reluctant American citizen as an Indigenous person who is under colonial occupation by the United States. But we owe it to the rest of the world that is under the boot of U.S. imperialism, whether it's the war-making machine from the U.S. military, whether it's sanctions, all of the different ways in which the U.S. exerts its dominance and power across the world.
We owe it to our Indigenous relatives across the globe, who are under that boot of US imperialism, to do everything we can to organize here and abroad to lift that.
Just so they may breathe and they may live with some semblance of humanity when they're constantly denied it. We are, too, but we also understand our complex relationship to the rest of the world as people who are in the belly of the beast of the U.S. Empire. There are a lot more reasons why we do the international work, but it's been one of the most fulfilling and I would say groundbreaking things that The Red Nation has been involved in over the last five years or so. I really think it's going to continue to grow, the international solidarity, and we're building power.
What you're told as an Indigenous person or even as a tribal leader, let's say the president of the Navajo Nation in the United States, is that the only foreign relationship we're allowed to have is with our colonial occupier. So it's always Joe Biden, U.S. government, help us, we need to ask you for permission to do this thing or you're the only nation-state we're allowed to have a relationship with. I categorically reject that. No one needs to have a relationship with their colonial occupier. Go build lateral relationships and international relationships with other entities and build power that way. And just refuse. Just refuse the colonial relationship that we have just been ensnared in from the inception of the United States.
Kamea Chayne: To these points, I want to emphasize that The Red Deal, as you've helped to outline, is not like the Green New Deal, which is something created for US politicians to take on or vote for, and it's really a call and guidance for the people.
So perhaps to highlight some ways that people are thinking outside the box and mobilizing beyond their existing political institutions, as you've named a lot going on in South America, can you share more about some of these efforts that have really inspired you? Perhaps some of the Indigenous women-led movements for climate action and what they may have been able to accomplish?
Melanie Yazzie: The Red Deal is very inspired by the Cochabamba Agreement from 2011, which was a decade ago, as was a gathering of over 30,000 Indigenous people in Bolivia to draft this visionary, pretty comprehensive plan for an Indigenous-led, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist approach to climate justice. Notions of climate debt came out of that particular conference and gathering of people. I think it's called The People's Accord in the Cochabamba Agreement, they’re very related but are two separate documents. We were really in conversation with that when we were drafting The Red Deal.
I mean, yeah the Green New Deal was an inspiration, but if you read the Green New Deal, especially the AOC version that came out, I think it was in 2018. It's very sparse. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
The Red Deal isn't a riff on the Green New Deal. Indigenous people don't need to riff off of colonially-produced things. We're the original, and we have the original relationship with these lands that the United States claims as its own.
We don't need to riff off of anybody, we riff off of ourselves in this way. So I heard people criticize The Red Deal in that regard, and I just reject that categorically as an Indigenous person. We're very interested in drawing from what our Indigenous people in other places like Bolivia are doing to really challenge the fundamental role of capitalism. Capitalism is pillaging the Earth and pillaging its people and creating the need for empire and the need for imperial expansion to just literally eat the world in order to produce profits. This remarkable, disgusting accumulation of wealth for this very small percentage of the world's population, you do not see in the United States at all.
Whether it's the Green New Deal or even other more lefty-progressive approaches to climate justice, you do not see a lot of people talk about capitalism. Frankly, a lot of the climate justice stuff is just green capitalism. If you're going to be thinking about alternatives and models for change and theories for change and you can't make capitalism kinder, that's just not possible. Capitalism requires violence and mass inequality. That's literally the engine that makes it tick. So we must overturn that relationship with humanity and with the planet if we're going to have any hope of having a future.
So we in The Red Nation and just me as a person and also as an Indigenous woman are incredibly inspired by the leadership of Indigenous women in these movements. There's a reason why you have such a strong conviction about the protection and defense of water and land. The notion of how one treats relatives and all of one's relations. The enforcement of certain political and social orders that have traditionally been vested in the authority that Indigenous women hold in our communities and our nations. Those are the people who inspire us, the people we continue to look to for guidance, but also our partners in this larger project, this larger movement, frankly, that we're trying to build.
Kamea Chayne: In my past interview with Dr. Mark Rifkin, he shared that you were the person to speak to about restoring kinship relations, reimagining governance with our more than human world, and the existence of treaties between Native peoples and the living nations they live in connection with as one big family.
So as we look to the future and open ourselves up to more deprogramming, what are the ways that you've imagined political order and kinship in relation with the living world that goes beyond “governance” entailing this sort of institution outside of and above in the ways that nation-states may have conceptualized governance?
Melanie Yazzie: Yeah, I mean, it's a complete—to use a fancy word—ontological shift, right? It's a way of being that I think is being revolutionized in the movements themselves again. History isn't just made or written by historians sitting in offices at Yale University. History is being made and written by the actual actors who are making that history actively in a particular moment or a particular epic. The movements themselves—I'm speaking of Indigenous movements, especially the ones led by women and LGBTQ folks—they are writing the history and creating the different ways of relating. So when you're writing and making history, you’re not just shifting ideas, you're shifting the way in which you are in the world.
Something that I've learned actually from these Indigenous women is something like Water Is Life, this mantra. They became much more popularized during the DAPL uprising of 2016 and early 2017, but Standing Rock in South Dakota did that. Water Is Life is essentially a shift in telling us how we need to be good relatives, not just to each other, but to our other than human relatives. There's a larger shift politically that has been happening that relates to climate change which is actually our relationship with the Earth. Capitalism has its own relationship to the Earth. I forgot who said that capitalism isn't just a structure of power domination, it's a social relation, right? Capitalism is a way of relation, and that relation hinges upon violence. It hinges upon domination and subordination. It hinges upon remarkable mass inequality between different sectors of life, not just human life, but all life on this planet, a hierarchy.
So when you think about Indigenous kinship and relationality, that is coming from the front lines. That is especially being reinforced. We're being reminded of what this looks like by Indigenous women who are leading these movements that that social relation is premised on completely different values. It's premised upon care. It's premised upon reciprocity. It's premised upon respect. It's premised upon cooperation. It's premised upon compassion, actually. So the values that would drive how we relate to each other and the way we relate to the world are obviously fundamentally different than the values that currently drive the hegemonic ordering of the world, which is ordered through the capitalist social relation of violence, domination, and subordination.
So for me, obviously, that would be a shift in a type of governance, but it also helps you to create political orders that aren't necessarily attached to the nation-state form, which really only came into existence with the birth of liberalism, which is a whole other topic. I think a lot about it, but it's not liberal. There's nothing liberal. There's no liberalism in that way of understanding how we organize ourselves socially, politically, culturally, as a species, as collectives. But that those collectives would look very different. There are places around the world that are doing this at a much smaller scale and places that are doing it at a larger scale.
I think a lot of, I'll just take Bolivia again as an example. I think what MAS is doing and the Indigenous movement there, they're just forced to conform to this nation-state form, right? Because that's the dominant form in which you exert power in the current landscape globally of political organization. And also because U.S. imperialism is so intense and the crackdown on populations that are deemed a threat or an enemy to the interests of the United States. It's hard not to constantly have to defend yourself against that.
But what if US imperialism wasn't a thing, and Indigenous people actually got to self-organize according to these values of kinship and relationality? What kind of political and social orders would arise from that?
I think that the experiments that are happening within the movements themselves, I think of the camp actually at Standing Rock, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who's this remarkable thinker in the history and politics of abolition and ending mass incarceration in the United States. She talked about Standing Rock as abolition geography. So how can we continue to create abolition geographies in the very way we constitute ourselves as we're building the movements? But also as the alternative that we're trying to build with those movements. Really the basis of that is just imagining. It's important to imagine otherwise, to imagine a different way in which we organize ourselves and how the future might look.
That's part of the reason why I find just limiting ourselves to nonprofits and electoral politics, just so cynical and a little boring because there's no imagination in it. There's no imagination. If anything, we need imagination right now. We need imagination combined with hard work to make those things happen.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I really think that the dominant culture and formal educational institution that a lot of people have been raised in really stunt our imaginations in terms of what is possible. It's really time to deprogram and unlearn a lot of those limitations and to think outside the box. All of what you just said reminds me of what we talked about earlier in that education and history is not objective because as the author of these histories or curriculums, what are their relations to the living world? D they see the land as relative? Do they view the land as property as yet by default? What are their values and worldviews? So all of these deeper personal biases for me at least show that history, any sort of media content or education, none of that can be objective and neutral and therefore factual because it's really dependent upon the ontology and the world views and deeper relations and values.
So there's a lot more to unpack there, but I would love to wrap up so to break everything we discussed down into more immediate actions because as we talked about, there are many limitations of working within the system based on existing structures. What are the few things that you might recommend people do in their communities and beyond to play their role in support of this collective composting of the behemoth of an exploitive system that we exist within today?
Melanie Yazzie: Well, people need to act first and foremost. Like I said, we have a very short timeline for climate change and I'm a very action-based person. I like to go where the action is. That's why I'm an organizer. So people need to act, join the DSA chapter in your area, join an organization that's doing stuff. Just building a community garden is really beautiful and it’s feeding people and it is revolutionary. Absolutely. That needs to be attached to building a larger movement into building power. That's what I would say. People need to act.
You keep using this word deprogramming, which I really love because actually education deprogrammed me. I think education programs, most people, especially as we're younger, and my trajectory through college and then higher education was about deprogramming. Then the education I received from the organizing was about deprogramming. So act and deprogram. Yes, I think podcasts are an incredible tool for deprogramming, but those are the two things that I would say.
And maybe be a dissenter yourself a little bit and think more about the collective and about the relationships, I think social media gets us really focused on ourselves and the pandemic has alienated us and made us feel incredibly isolated. Now is the time to engage in relationships again with people because you can't just act on your own. No one needs a celebrity to lead a movement.
We need people to lead a movement, and that's how you do it, through relationality, through kinship, and through action. That's how you deprogram the planet, frankly.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Melanie Yazzie: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead changed my life. It's really long, it's crazy, but everyone should read it. It's like a path towards Indigenous revolution.
Kamea Chayne: What are some personal mottos, mantras, or practices you engage with to stay grounded?
Melanie Yazzie: I act with other people in a collective manner, and that I think is the greatest source of inspiration for me. The action and the work itself.
Kamea Chayne: And if anything, what makes you most hopeful right now?
Melanie Yazzie: Most of the stuff I talked about in this interview. It's Indigenous, women-led, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, climate justice struggles that are happening everywhere across the world.
Kamea Chayne: Dr. Yazzie, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Melanie Yazzie: Believe that there is a different future than the hellish reality that we currently live in. Believe in it, and then act upon it, to make it a reality.
