Injurious forms of dependency: toward a decolonizing resurgence of indigenous peoples?*

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Irmgard Emmelhainz[1]

 

 

 

 

 

“We are no longer postcolonial creatures.”

Hamid Dabashi

 

One of the consequences of the implementation of neoliberal policies worldwide has been the predominance of capitalist absolutism, which we must think of as inextricable from the geological era in which we are currently living: the Anthropocene, or the era in which man is facing the extinction of the world as well as his own, as a result of human intervention and irreversible modification of the earth’s ecological systems. This is linked to the fact that our current global order is grounded on a romance with fossil fuel led modernity. Aside from the environmental devastation that characterizes the Anthropocene, the main outcome of this global order has been the creation of redundant or surplus populations, also known as the underclass, governed by a neoliberal logic. This logic could be described as the differentiation of privileges and access of populations to varying qualities of commodities, jobs, education healthcare, etc. and by forms of State control that translate to different degrees of exclusion, dispossession, coercion, violence and repression. This means that neoliberal States are making themselves strategically present by protecting and providing certain territories and populations connecting them to global processes through infrastructure, merchandises and opportunities –of varying qualities–, while dispossessing, neglecting, repressing or putting other populations under threat – appropriating, privatizing and exploiting their commons – according to the interests of global capital[2].

The Israeli occupation, which translates to various forms of control over the Palestinian population, could be said to be the forerunner or blueprint of the way in which redundant populations are being controlled, dispossessed and displaced all over the world[3]. Following Adam Hanieh, Israeli control is “designed to facilitate the transfer of wealth and resources from the Palestinian population, while ensuring the ongoing settlement of a section of the Israeli population in the West Bank and the permanent subjugation of Palestinians.”[4] Therefore, the Israeli dispossession of Palestinians materializes in the way in which Israel co-governs Palestinians as non-citizens, or as citizens with different kinds of rights than Israelis[5]. Israel’s differentiated form of government expresses the essence of settler colonialism, and is operating worldwide. One of the paradoxes of the present is that while the global imposition of neoliberal policies and governance has brought about homogeneity in the ways in which populations are being governed, dispossessed and repressed all over the world –with Israeli technologies of control and repression at the forefront –, no sustained or cohesive global struggle has emerged against these new forms of power. Rather, we have seen emerge sporadic and localized struggles, but disconnected from one another proposing short-term solutions, with medium and long-term results remaining uncertain. This uncertainty is inextricably linked to the precarious living and working conditions of the peoples in struggle and on the permanent threat under which they live.

Israel’s differential form of government geared at the transfer of wealth and resources from Palestinians to Israelis, moreover, reflects the current division of the world between privileged populations governed as citizens with a set of rights –mostly concentrated in urban areas, although exceptions abound –[6] and what Naomi Klein has denominated zones of sacrifice[7] in which populations are governed under a different set of rights, as non-citizens (like Palestinians). Once the project of development imposed worldwide through the narrative of Modernity and progress failed to modernize so-called “primitive” societies (or they stagnated halfway toward modernization), territories began to be more valuable to capitalism as zones of pure extraction. These sacrificial zones are not only communities surviving with the toxic load of our systemic need to consume fossil fuels (undergoing, as Robert Nixon calls it, a form of slow violence)[8], but communities whose commons and forms of autonomous sustainability are not only being destroyed in the name of modernization, but are de facto sustaining the privileges of people living in wealthier, “developed” areas –like the creation of dams to provide water to cities which destroys the communities around them who are promised jobs, money or relocation. The destruction in zones of sacrifice is justified or denied under the logic of development.

Development is about growth, about capital, about technology, about becoming modern. Colombian Anthropologist Arturo Escobar, however, compared the notion of “development” to Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism.” For Escobar, just in the same way that Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority of the Orient, development is a regime of order and truth deepened by economics and an apparatus for exercising power over the Third World. Under this regime of truth, rich countries are believed to have the financial and technological capacity to secure progress over the world. According to this discourse, the poor countries (and their indigenous populations) would become rich sooner or later, and the underdeveloped world would be developed. Development also encompasses the belief that industrialization, urbanization and material advancement can lead to social, cultural and political advancement. In this frame, the belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of destroying archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural and political cost, predominates. And yet, as Hanieh has made evident, in the case of the Israeli occupation, the neoliberal model of development is aligned with the very structures of dispossession of Palestinians. The model manifests itself as a form of technocracy based on the “aid industry,” conceived as a neutral, technocratic process considered to be lacking in power relations. This is because the discourse of development maintains that the “liberated market” is also apparently neutral, and that economic development as an allegedly objective and disinterested process above relations of power.

If “development” is the excuse to dispossess and control Palestinians in the West Bank, it is naked dispossession that we see operating in Gaza. A few years ago, Noam Chomsky noted that the Naval siege that are has been steadily tightening wince 2000, when the British Gas Group discovered quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza’s territorial waters. Industry journals reported that Israel started appropriating the Gazan resources for its own use as early as 2006[9]. Similar forms of dispossession and destruction are occurring across the world like El Zapotillo, Mexico, or Belo Monte in Brazil, where resistance against hydraulic megaprojects has been going on for years; there are also resource extraction (or dispossession of the commons) projects like mining bauxite in central India, lithium extraction in Afghanistan and Canadian Mining projects throughout Latin America and Africa[10]. We can also consider under this frame shale gas extraction across North America, which is affecting communities by polluting their waters and making their lands unlivable. Justified by the notions of modernization and “development,” entire populations are being left landless or their lands destroyed. This is because in the current world order, transnational companies are stealing public resources and exploiting them at the private level, while governments destroy indigenous and peasant populations, which in turn, are perceived as redundant as they remain disconnected from global processes[11].

Arguably, the root of the normalization of the neocolonial destruction of means and forms of making a living of some for the sake of the privilege of others, is premised on the modern relationship of domination of societies and nature. This relationship naturalized a conception of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted to “development professionals.” The rationalization or technocratization of life and resources are precisely the grounds for the siege of forms of life and of making a living; and because LIFE ITSELF is at stake, political struggles bifurcate and are disconnected, crystallyzing in localized environmental battles, transformed into identitarian, ethnic or cultural struggles. “Nationalistic,” “ethnic” or “cultural specific” struggles as the basis to protect the commons, oversee the fact that the territories encompassed by these discourses cannot be understood as self contained economies separate from the ways in which they are now intertwined with other spatial scales, that is, the regional and the global, integrally connected to the way in which capitalism has manifested itself under the aegis of Western domination.  This is why it becomes crucial to posit exploitation, dispossession and destruction of peoples and their lives and forms of making a living –the sacrificial zones– as intolerable forms of injurious dependency created by fossil fuel led modernity furthered by neocolonial practices.

We must take into account that destructive processes underwent by people living in zones of sacrifice lead to self-destruction of the social tissue through various forms of individual, social, transnational and State violence (Ciudad Juárez in México, Alberta in Canada, the communities surviving at the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania[12], the Gaza Strip) but also in epidemics of self-destruction as suicide and mass murders followed by suicide[13]. These processes also need to be urgently politicized within the context of the global threat to life and forms of life by the neoliberal siege on sustainability and reproduction. At the same time, the flow of resources that is transported to international markets: from oil and gas fields, refineries, lumber mills, mining operations, hydroelectric facilities located on the dispossessed lands of indigenous nations, needs to be defied and disrupted.

Bearing this in mind, the challenges that current environmental mutations are posing do not only compel us to make ourselves responsible for concrete ecological phenomena like deforestation, infrastructure megaprojects, mineral extraction, fossil fuel burning, shale gas extraction, etc., but we need to begin to underscore the Western bases of modernity and modernism: the logics of technological progress as emancipation inherent to Modern narratives, the promise of happiness behind consumption premised on the domination of nature and society through technical reason that has led to the apparatus of “development.” This latter as a paradigm needs to be rejected and understood as self-destructing, as it has become obvious that it continues to destroy people and nature. More than anti-capitalism, which embodies the dialectic of leftist common sense, condemning capitalism without imagining anything else, what are urgently needed are new forms of collective autonomous organization. Aware of the role culture plays in producing surplus value insofar as capitalism produces cultural worlds, appropriates the language of subcultures, of activism, of communities and community recuperation as it gets intermingled with the cultural industries, what is needed is to decolonize institutions –as Deleuze once said, we cannot exist as societies without them –[14] and to autonomously organize life in common against neoliberal forms of social engineering.

The long-term outcome of recent experiments in indigenous autonomy and resurgence (mostly disconnected from each other as well as struggles to protect the commons), and how “modernized” populations could begin to decolonize their lives and forms of living to counter the challenges posed by the Anthropocene remains uncertain. Some instances have been successful, others not, and others merely symbolic. An instance from an urban area is the express take over of the Santa Fe Mall in Mexico City on November 20, 2017 when a group of about 4000 precarious workers, representatives of displaced students, activists, cultural producers, as well as people from San Mateo Tlaltenango, Santa Rosa Xochiac, San Bartolo Ameyalco, San Bernabé, San Lorenzo Acopilco, La Magdalena, amongst other communities and towns, took over the Santa Fe Mall in the business district of the same name located in the Western part of Mexico City. With the complicity of personnel working for the security company sub-contracted by the mall’s administration, the invaders were able to break into the facility at around 1:00 AM. The action was inspired by the 2001 Mayday Parade takeover of the Metropoli di Novate Mall in Milano, and by the rolezinhos, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 2014. In the rolezinhos (or “little strolls”) teenagers from the urban periphery used social media to organize excursions in malls. In these non-politicized actions, the teenagers sought to have fun and meet people. Causing terror amongst the shop owners, mall administrators and upper-class frequenters of these spaces, the sudden appearance of hundreds of people of color in shopping malls in Brazil immediately brought to the table the issues of public space and entitlement, life in the periphery and privilege.

Along the same lines as the mall take over in Milano and the rolezinhos, the group that broke into the Santa Fe Mall did not only seek to bring visibility to the precarization of labor, economic crisis, massive dispossession and displacement of campesinos and inhabitants of urban peripheries. The action also shed light to asymmetrical access to goods, infrastructure and services, the devastation of forms of life and ways of making a living within neoliberal policies, and lack of working-class housing throughout Mexico City. At the same time, the group wanted to put alternatives to the current corporate-capitalist system on the table, while highlighting the fact that autonomy for the rich is supported by the state (the Santa Fe ZEDEC is a de facto self-governed legal territorial figure since 1994), while autonomy for the poor is systematically repressed. In an exercise of translation of Zapatista autonomy exercises to peripheral urban areas, they outlined their struggle as one for human rights, justice and dignity, communal economies, education for autonomy, food sovereignty, indigenous and community communication all based on horizontality, solidarity, self-management, voluntary work, and consensus. They also sought to represent localized struggles against the government and national and transnational corporations and their megaprojects by putting to the forefront the defense of the land in San Mateo Tlaltenango and of the water in San Bartolo Ameyalco.

As soon as the Santa Fe group came inside the mall, they got busy assembling a life-size blueprint of the space inspired by the imperial map in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story On the Exactitude of Science. The model proposed a de-colonized version of the shopping center, reusing its architecture as the basis of a new autonomous, communal economy. In the plan, the children’s entertainment complex premised on transforming kids into entrepreneurs and consumers, “Kidzania,” is replaced by an assembly hall; “Palacio de Hierro” becomes a learning center and host for an archive of the memories of the displaced indigenous peoples’ who have lived in the city for four generations or more; “Liverpool” would be a health and education center of traditional and alternative medicine; “Sears,” an education and research complex for recuperating aboriginal forms of knowledge and knowledge transmission. Most of the retail spaces are to be re-converted to housing spaces and facilities for raising cattle and chicken and for other subsistence needs for about 600 families. A park replaces the parking lot along with a barter market and time bank. The roof is devoted to an enormous urban garden and grasshopper farm, the community’s main source of protein. A pirate radio station is envisioned, and a memory commission is assigned to write the history of indigenous peoples from their perspective. The same group of French-Algerian and German-Turkish anthropologists that is now working on the Acapulco-Diamante takeover project[15], was involved in the design of the plan for the Santa Fe mall, along with a team of experts in sustainability and alternative energies.

The Santa Fe take over occurred while the 500 delegates of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) in Mexico debate within their communities the possibility of entering the 2018 Mexican presidential race with an indigenous woman candidate. The proposal furthered to the CNI by the Zapatista movement seeks to takeover the current political system to dismantle it in the name of the defense of collective life and to overcome the current government’s systematic ignoring of indigenous demands for autonomy and recognition. For the past 18 years, the Zapatistas have been working to reconstruct their own autonomy by recovering traditional farming structures and community police to oust organized crime and narcotraffickers. They have done so by creating community radio stations, by recuperating territory that had been violently expropriated by the government and large landowners, by establishing bilingual indigenous schools and by reviving their traditional medicine in order to fight dependence on corporativized medicine. But the whole time they have faced repression, plunder and rights violations as well as seeing their lands turned into zones of sacrifice through “death projects” or mega projects of infrastructure and resource extraction operated by foreign corporations who fail to consult them before destroying their land and their peoples. With the Zapatista’s proposition to get involved in the elections, they see the urgency in seeking to overturn first, the government’s systematic ignoring of their needs and the ongoing privatization of the commons brought about by neoliberal policies, and second, to stop the ongoing destruction and death through the exercise of various forms of State and narco violence manifested in murder, disappearance, rape, kidnapping, imprisonment and psychological warfare.

But back to the efforts in the city to translate to the urban realm some of the Zapatistas’ autonomy structures, once the Santa Fe takeover group expediently set up the blueprint along with signs and banners explaining how their urban autonomous communal space and economy would function, at around 2.30 AM they climbed up on the roof to have a nocturnal picnic and dance. At around 2:45 AM police officers landed on the mall’s rooftop from helicopters and used tear gas and bullets to disperse the crowd; although no arrests occurred inside the shopping mall, some 20 people have been reported dead, about 150 wounded. Officials have declared that in the face of the threat posed by this attempted takeover, a government program will be instituted for the residual populations that remain trapped in the periphery of privilege and progress in the Santa Fe ZEDEC titled: “Periphery as Cultural Patrimony.” A team of social architects, experts in sustainable building, and a historical urban landscape manager will begin to work on specific projects to better these people’s lives with consensual site-specific interventions along with social programs in housing, health and education. The program will be generously funded by the SoroSlim and Televisa Foundations. And yet, it becomes clear that programs such this one are being mobilized by neoliberal sensibility and the promises of modernity which transpire in discourses of development and betterment, behind which are hidden agendas to manage and control marginalized populations. An example that comes to mind is the failed Favela Pacification Program by community police that took place in Rio de Janeiro before the Olympics and the World Cup established in 2009, which turned into yet a series of episodes of State-backed violence.

Another instance of pacific take over in progress is that of the Choquequirao Regional Conservation Area by Quechua inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes. In a communiqué, they have stated that they are fighting against the cultural death brought about by the tourism industry that has been pillaging their sacred sites transforming their traditions into entertainment for foreigners. In an attempt also to end the exploitation of their peoples and cultural heritage by criollo and transnational tourism agencies, they have adopted the strategy furthered in 2015 by the Wampis Nation from the Peruvian Amazon to create an autonomous indigenous government within the State of Peru. The Wampis’ autonomous territorial government seeks to self-govern and to protect the totality of their ancestral territory covering 1.3 million hectares of tropical forest. Their claim is backed by the publication of the Statue of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation, which establishes the legal framework to govern the territory. The Statute is supported by the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from 2007, in which the General Assembly of the UN recognized the rights of indigenous peoples and nations for free self-determination. The Wampis and the Andean Quechuas are seeking to be able to determine freely their political condition revindicating their identity and belonging to a people with its own language, culture and citizenship. They also proclaim the right to authorize foreign incursions in their territories and free consultation, autonomous education services and to see for their own food security. Following the model of integration of indigenous and Western medicine in the Argentinian intercultural hospital Ranguiñ Kien in Ruca Chorroi (Aluminé -Neuquén), the Quechuas are also planning to create a hospital in the Inca Valley to recuperate their traditional medicinal practices.

The Quechuas have adopted the Wampis’ statue and have declared as autonomous indigenous territory the Choquequirao Reserve, the Inca Sacred Valley, Cusco Region, Urubamba Province and the Machu Pichu District in Peru. In an initial phase, they have decided to administer the reserve in which the Inca Trail is located and to take over the tourist infrastructure as well as to create new tambos or traveller lodges. They have also abolished the porter system, disabled criollo or foreign tourism agencies from promoting and operating tours in their territory, and to restore the Inca road. After its restoration, the trail will be free to all Peruvians, and it will be administered through the traditional mink’a system of collective work with the goal of communal utility. In a second phase of their self-government efforts, they have planned the foundation of the Cusco Resurgence Institute at the Casa de la Concha in Cusco, partially funded by revenue from the park. Another measure that they will take is to uproot the holm oaks that were given to the Peruvian government by Australia in the 1950s and which have been killing the soil; in parallel, and engaging a team of international experts, they will launch a reforestation project of native plants and animals. In their Statute, the Andean Quechuas reject Monsanto and other transnational corporations seeking to commercialize with seeds, they oppose the Transpacific Agreement. Furthermore, the Archeological site of Moray –a terraced circular depression with a highly sophisticated irrigation system which has served as agricultural laboratory for the Quechuas for centuries –, has been declared bastion for the global fight for food security. Like the Wampis, in their Statute they are prioritizing their well-being and food security and a vision for a healthy and harmonious relationship with the natural world.

 

#experimentsinradicalimagination

What seems to be key here, as Jaime Martínez Luna suggests, is to plant the seeds for a new form of political organization not through political identification or democratic participation, but as a form of belonging: a concrete relationship that supposes commitment, obligation, agreement. Identity (or common interest, which give cohesion to a political cause) is an abstraction that mutates depending on the political action executed; in turn, belonging is what is concrete. Belonging as a site for identity, can help us explain belonging to an assembly, based on respect, work and reciprocity. In the context of the assembly the relationships of a social cell become concretized, and following Martínez Luna, an assembly “exists to create life: that is movement, action, realization, intervention”.[16] Key concepts that would be useful here would be “comunalidad,” a notion from Oaxaca, Mexico that emerged in the 1980s which describes communal being in traditional ways of organizing, opposing capitalism and colonialism toward an ethical reconstruction of peoples. Communality is a way of being in the world, which neither revolves around the commons (which would end up being administered by bureaucrats), nor is it community as posited after communism: transient, ephemeral and non-binding. Rather, it is a pact that considers the commons not as something that is owned in common but as a common way of life. Without forgetting that communality implies new forms of inhabiting territories from the other side of modernity. What remains absolutely uncertain is the meaning and outcome of the practice of inhabiting territories from the other side of modernity, from a decolonizing perspective.

In this context, decolonization means the resurgence of indigenous political thought as well as the revitalization of sustainable local indigenous economies. Resurgence does not mean a pastoral, ethnographic idyllic return to the pre-colonial past but to see indigenous people begin to reconnect with their lands and land-based practices of small-scale collective basis. The notion of “resurgence” furthermore implies a turn away from neoliberal recognition and defense of human rights, and to build liberation efforts based on the revitalization of “traditional” political values and practices, creating new realities for themselves and for their people[17]. Finally, the efficacy of decolonization hinges on its ability to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that give shape to the destruction of the life and means of making a living of some, for the sake of the privileges of others. That is to say, we must base our efforts to survive in the environmental conditions and challenges before which the Anthropocene era has placed us, precisely in the injurious forms of dependency both to the commons and to peoples considered by capitalist absolutism as exploitable resources and as redundant populations. The latters’ struggles across the world, albeit disconnected from each other, are the vanguard of the fight against capitalist absolutism and neocolonial rule; we should follow their lead although the dangers, the road and the outcomes will remain tentative for years to come.

 

Received: 14/11/2016

Accepted: 17/11/2016

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* Part of this essay was delivered as a Skype lecture at the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, Occupied Territories within the frame of the Qalandiya International, the Palestinian Biennale this year.

[1] Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Mexico City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema and geopolitics, Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente: estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total (BUAP). Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to German, Italian, Norwegian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Serbian. She has presented it at an array of international venues including the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2014) the March Meeting at Sharjah, the Walter Benjamin in Palestine Conference (2015) the New School and Americas Society (2016). She is member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, and her book in Spanish: The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion came out last March with a preface by Franco (Bifo) Berardi.

[2] Cf. ONG, A. Neoliberalism as exception: mutations in sovereignty and citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. And EMMELHAINZ, I. La tiranía del sentido común: la reconversión neoliberal de México. México D.F.: Paradiso Editores, 2016.

[3] Not by chance in Latin America many private security companies are either Israeli or sell Israeli technology and the IDF provides training for militias across the world.

[4] HANIEH, A. Development as Struggle: Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 32-47, 2016.

[5] Cf. AZOULAY, A. The civil contract of photography. New York: Zone Books, 2009.

[6] Such as the neocolonial land grab by corporations by the Benettons in the Patagonia in Southern Argentina, displacing hundreds of Mapuche Indians.

[7] Cf. KLEIN, N. This changes everything: capitalism against the climate. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2014.

[8] Cf. NIXON, B. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011.

[9] Cf. CHOMSKY, N. Eyeless in Gaza. Tom Dispatch, April 27, 2010. Available online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175239/

[10] Cf. BUTLER, P. Colonial extractions: race and Canadian mining in contemporary Africa. Toronto: The University Press, 2015.

[11] We must note that in the case of Palestinians, the theft of lands to appropriate the commons is not taking place in the name is covered by the ethnic-religious aspect of the conflict that posits Palestinians as a threat to Israeli “democracy.” Ethnic and religious differences serve the function of an ideological mission covering the Israeli process of primitive accumulation because what is at stake in the occupation is the long-term ability of Israelis to survive in the land. But also taking into account programs like the Palestinian Recovery and Development Program, which has served to introduce neoliberal policies and practices within the Occupied Territories geared at “liberating the markets”, “inviting foreign investment”, etc.

[12] As portrayed in Hubert Sauper’s documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare (2006).

[13] Cf. BERARDI, F. Heroes: mass murder and suicide. London and New York: Verso, 2015.

[14] DELEUZE, G. Instincts et institutions. In: Textes et documents philosophiques. Paris: Hachette, 1955. Available online: https://deterritorium.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/instincts-et-institutions-par-gilles-deleuze-1955/

[15] Cf. EMMELHAINZ, I.  Decolonization as the Current Horizon of Political Action.  e-flux journal #77, Nov. 2016. Available online: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76637/decolonization-as-the-horizon-of-political-action/

[16] MARTÍNEZ LUNA, J. Pertenencia Asamblearia.  edicionespatito.org, April, 2015. Available online: http://compartencia.edicionespatito.org/?p=66

[17] Cf. COULTHARD, G. Red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2015.