Underwhelming

tgestabrook

Aug 30, 2024

I guess I'm sympathetic to its goals but found most of it frustrating:

What does indigenous sovereignty look like when police and prisons and borders (the usual tools of sovereignty) are abolished? The authors allude to a specifically indigenous borderless non-coercive form of sovereignty but don't bother describing how it should be adapted to modernity.
In a country where 2.9% of the population is indigenous, what exactly does 'indigenous leadership' look like? It's unclear whether the authors are calling for full-on rule by a tiny minority or some softer form of leadership where non-indigenous leaders take policy cues from indigenous people. There's also little clarity about how much of the program is directed at the US vs. the entire world.
The authors portray indigenous societies as uniformly non-patriarchal, non-homophobic, sustainable, etc. (i.e. in line with every value professed by a 2022 leftist). I'm on board with the idea that they were/are broadly better in many of these areas than colonizer societies, but failing to acknowledge any diversity or internal contradictions raises my Marxist alarm bells. This also kind of exists in tension with their call for a 'world in which many worlds are possible'.
Sometimes it seems like a moral equivalence between different forms of oppression is conflated with strategic equivalence. (C.f. Matthew Huber's for a good discussion of this tendency).

I wish they devoted more of the book to describing specific indigenous ecological practices. Obviously it's a massive topic and too much to really tackle in a slim volume like this, but even a few more examples would have been great -- like throw in something about oak-hickory food forests, or how controlled burns created a 1000-year stable low-severity fire regime in the mountain west, something to make concrete the claims about indigenous sustainability.

As far as positive aspects go, the early chapters are a good enough introduction to indigenous liberation and lay out many of the ways that colonialism continues to decimate indigenous societies. It was also interesting to learn about indigenous climate struggles elsewhere in the world, e.g. People's Climate Agreement of Cochabamba. And despite my critiques I agree with many the specific policies laid out toward the end.

Cynically, I'd say the blustery manifesto-style writing optimizes it for circulation among leftists wanting to ~~score good-boy points~~ learn about indigenous liberation but is very poorly suited for moving the needle of mainstream discourse. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

Y J+2

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normiekillaz691 year ago

The idea that in 2024 and with 7 billion people on the planet we're supposed to be able to transition to a "borderless non-coercive form of indigenous sovereignty" with minimal hierarchy is hilarious and shows how cognitively dissonant the resist libs or soc dems are. The only way they see us overcoming our problems is through pure fantasy.