In honour of the late trailblazing Diné anarchist and land defender Klee Benally who joined the ancestors last month, we will be reading and discussing his groundbreaking zine Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory.
Klee builds upon existing work by Aragorn! on Locating an Indigenous Anarchism, identifying natural affinities and alliances between Indigenous cosmologies and Anarchism. He also touches on the anti-Indigenous racism in the American left-anarchist scene, both in history and the contemporary.
Klee explains “Indigenous autonomy needs no theoretical foundation to justify itself” and renounces the fixture of “anarcho-Indigenous” as a revolutionary appendage to settler anarchism. Klee suggested doing so runs the risk of having an Indigenous Anarchism as something eventually locked in old theory belonging to settler linear time “in the past,” no longer able to stay relevant like other cemented settler anarchisms. He asserts that if an Indigenous Anarchism is to exist, it should not adhere to settler politics or conceptions of time. It should be adaptable, dynamic, fluid, unmappable, unknowable.
The zine is available to read or download on Indigenous Action’s website: https://www.indigenousaction.
Both versions available on the website are here as well: zine format for printing and readable format for screen reading.
As always, we meet at Camas Books and Infoshop, 2620 Quadra Street, on unceded Lekwungen Territory at 6:30pm on Sunday February 4th.
Next circle, we are reading Chapter Six, titled, “Homeland: Anarchy and Joint Struggle in Palestine/Israel” by Uri Gordon. This is the final chapter in Anarchy Alive! (2008) and it offers insights on the issues, challenges, and movements involved in solidarity and direct action struggles within occupied and contested State forms. This will be a good reading to do in preparation for the talk on the 28th.