Dear readers and listeners, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. It was a fall semester of teaching students at the University of Alberta who understandably struggle with this world, have fascinating insights, and 50% can’t get their schoolwork done because of the distractions of a world in crisis. I also had multiple talks and consultations to help battle rampant self-indigenization (more colloquially known as pretendianism) across Canada and the USA. Intellectual battle against those with delusions that they are us has turned in the past four years into my main body of academic research. I co-edited a special issue of the journal Genealogy this past fall, (Un)Settling Genealogies: Self-Indigenization in Media, Arts, Politics, and Academia. There are two more articles to come, including a substantive introduction to the topic by me and my co-editor, Northeastern University Distinguished Visiting Professor and citizen of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota, Dr. Gordon Henry.
Post-US presidential election, a deeper form of self-indigenization that we’ve been subject to since at least the Revolutionary War era—that is, white supremacist settlers believing they have “homeland” claims to stolen lands—proceeds apace with great zeal. Even more humans now fear they’ll end up like the Indians, Africans, and disparaged non-European immigrants of the 17th through 19th centuries. USA history is present and it is the future: forced relocations, massacres, enslavement, and/or torture to continue building a land- and resource-ravenous, white supremacist settler-colonial nation state.
I write from Santa Cruz, California, where I am spending some time with my daughter. She was born here just a year after her father and I arrived in this university beachside town on September 10, 2001 with a U-Haul truck. I had been accepted to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program at UC Santa Cruz. My then spouse and I woke up September 11th in a cheap hotel down by the beach boardwalk to a call from my mother. She was frantic, worried that we were anywhere in the world in an airport. We had just returned home from living overseas and several years of global travel. We sat in bed all day and watched a 24-hour news channel and scene after scene of the World Trade Center towers on fire, disintegrating into massive clouds of toxic dust and debris.
My first week of graduate school was filled with numb and shocked reactions by most everyone to the events of 9/11. As much as I can remember, I stayed quiet in seminar rooms much of that week as we talked and processed around tables arranged in rectangles. I did not feel the apocalyptic shock that many others around the table felt. As a Dakota person, my People’s apocalypse happened in 1862 at the hands of settlers who starved, incarcerated in prison camps, mass executed, and expelled my ancestors from their homelands. Those settlers founded the State of Minnesota. I was raised by my grandmothers and mother in an extended Dakota family that regularly recounted the story of the US Dakota War of 1862 and the role of my four greats grandfather, Taoyateduta (aka Chief Little Crow), in that war. My ancestors were probably thought of as “terrorists” for defending their lands and ways of life. In September 2001, I had also recently returned to the US from living 2-plus years in Indonesia. I’d learned some Indonesian history. I knew a bit about the US role in the anti-communist massacres there and the ensuing Suharto dictatorship. I was living on Java when President Suharto fell in 1998. “Shock” at 9/11 did not quite capture my feelings.
During the second week of September 2001, I certainly felt surprised by the enormity of what had just happened in New York. And I was fascinated with how others around the tables at UC Santa Cruz tried to navigate from their critical anti-imperial positions the bloody reality of a strike back at US and “Western” global bullying, a strike within the borders of what the US within a year consecrated in federal law as its “homeland.” This event with its decades or centuries of historical, political, and cultural context, was never far from our classroom conversations in the following several years. There were many global and historical thinkers in our classrooms at UCSC.
Twenty-three years later and a few months, Santa Cruz, the world, and the cybersphere is buzzing and raging with lamentations of the Trumpster Fire’s impending reign of terror. Like many of you, I’m getting intel by text and social media from persons in D.C. of fears of widespread professional carnage in federal agencies and loss of funding for biomedical and other science research. There is fear of even greater medical chaos than even exists now with our cruel capitalist health insurance system. I’m searching for reliable news on the ongoing anti-immigration moves of the white supremacist settler state, this time under Trump. I’m getting messages and texts from other Natives across the US about tribal governments responding urgently with advice to carry state and tribal IDs after their citizens are being stopped along with other visibly non-white people under suspicion of being “illegal.” I’m trying to be careful about the news stories I share on social media so as not to spread bad information, fear, and anxiety that Trump and his loyalists want spread.
In anticipation of what promises to be a painful decline of US empire, I’ve been reading and listening to the late Johan Galtung for the past decade. Understanding history and geopolitics helps me. Knowledge won’t assuage all pains, but as an intellectual, knowledge keeps me morally grounded. In the rest of this post, I’ll share with you some of what has kept me grounded since 2015, ideas I’ll keep turning to as I and we make our way through the coming years of a hard fall.
Johan Galtung, a Norwegian and founder of the field of peace and conflict studies, died last year at 93 years. Galtung predicted in 1980 that the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire would fall within ten years. He wrote in The Fall of the US Empire — and Then What?, “The Berlin wall fell on time, 9 November 1989. After the wall came the Soviet fall” (Galtung 2009: 31). In that same book, Professor Galtung also predicted the fall of US empire by 2020, revised from an earlier prediction of 2025. The book is out of print. I got a second copy (used) recently from an online bookseller, but it’s hard to come by and expensive. Fortunately, Galtung has many online interviews. You might especially like his Democracy Now interviews with Amy Goodman. I’ve watched her interviews with Galtung: Part 1, Johan Galtung on “The Fall of the US Empire” (June 7, 2010) and Part 2, “‘I Love the US Republic, and I Hate the US Empire”: Johan Galtung on the War in Afghanistan and How to Get Out (June 15, 2010). The 2016 Vice article, “US Power Will Decline Under Trump Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse,” is a good overview of Galtung’s position. Finally, a 2011 online interview of Professor Galtung by the Alternate Focus media group provides an in-depth analysis of the historical events and political circumstances that built over many decades toward the 9/11 attacks in New York City.
A 2017 interview with Johan Galtung on the Geopolitics Empire podcast is one I have viewed many times; it has fairly accurate subtitles (the sound is not great). In this video, Galtung didn’t have good things to say about Trump in his first presidency. He called him "clinically insane." I'll let others debate the (dis)ability politics of that. Importantly, Galtung said Trump is not the cause, but a symptom of falling US empire. The fall of empire does not mean, in Galtung's words, the end of the US republic. But it involves internal incohesion in the US and dictatorship before an eventual return to democracy. I am very interested in his predictions about how power centres will shift around the world, emergent global alliances, and the emergence of a multipolar world. Like Galtung, I am encouraged in the long view by the fall of US empire and what the US looks like after that.
Interestingly, he predicts in a second 2020 interview on the Geopolitics Empire podcast that the USA will eventually split culturally (and its political organization shift), not north to south as many would expect, but east to west along the Mississippi. He predicted that the east would cultivate its relationships with Western Europe and the west would cultivate its relationships with Eastern Asia. This conversation starts at 15:30. Galtung also pondered the possibility of Africa eventually becoming "the centre of the world." Fascinating possibilities to consider.
This leads me to another scholar I just started reading, someone cited in Johan Galtung’s first 2017 Geopolitics Empire podcast, University of Wisconsin Professor, historian Alfred W. McCoy. McCoy provides a quick history of the concept of “geopolitics” and analyzes Africa, along with Eurasia, as a “world island” with the Americas situated in the margins of that particular global map rendition (McCoy 2017: 30). Like Galtung, McCoy moves Africa to the centre of a global future and also considers a future multipolar world with the USA as no longer the global superpower. And both men predicted the rise of China.
Galtung says McCoy gets some key things wrong regarding his definition of empire and how it operates. Scholars will disagree on the details, and I am interested to learn more about their differing analyses. I’m early on in McCoy’s book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017). So far, McCoy seems to overlook Native peoples in lands occupied by the USA when he writes about adding “America into the comparative history of world empires.” McCoy seems to define USA colonialism in relation only to other nation states, beginning in the late 19th century. So far in my reading (and in my scan of the index), he doesn’t mention the colonial invasion by settlers of Native lands in the 15th-17th centuries, and the centuries of settler-colonial occupation we’ve suffered since. He does mention seeing the grave of “Geronimo, the Apache chief whose capture in the 1880s…ended the ‘Indian Wars’”, which as you see, McCoy refers to into quotation marks (McCoy 2017: 3). McCoy’s analysis so far starts with the Spanish American War in the late 19th century. Whereas, Galtung acknowledges that USA colonialism began with European contact:
When did the US Empire peak? Or, when did it start, for that matter? In the prologue, the arrivals of the settlers in Virginia in 1607 and in Massachusetts in 1620 are hinted at, with maybe ten million indigenous, and hundred[s] of indigenous cultures, killed. The land was conquered. It was not empty, it was emptied. By the legitimation of “manifest destiny”, the US Empire became bioceanic, covering much of North America, the Americas dominated through the Monroe doctrine, the dying Spanish empire taken over by walking into its emptied shoes. And then came participation in two world wars for major commando positions in world politics. The peak came right after the end of the Second World War in 1946, with the whole world at the US’s feet (Galtung 2009: 14).
Still, I’m learning a lot from the McCoy book and his narration of the development of the US surveillance state and its rise to a super power post-World War II. I’ll continue reading, and will add correctional footnotes to this post if I discern a more nuanced view on US settler colonialism from Professor McCoy as I continue reading his work.
The subtitle of Galtung’s book is Successors, Regionalization or Globalization? US Fascism or US Blossoming? While Johan Galtung’s analyses have nourished me for a decade, the idea of a “US” blossoming is one that I stand in opposition to. Professor Galtung wrote in 2009:
I love the US Republic where I have lived much of my life, as much as I hate the US Empire for its violence of all kinds in so many places around the world. The book is as pro-American as it is anti-US Empire. The first country to blossom when the US empire falls could actually be the US Republic itself (Galtung 2009: 8).
My disagreement with Professor Galtung on this point does not mean I do not support the “blossoming” of individual humans who live in these lands, and I also support the “blossoming” of these lands. I simply do not conflate the USA with the lands and waters it occupies, nor must it be conflated with the humans who live here. These lands preceded the USA. The land and both human and non-human inhabitants will hopefully be here long after this always-colonial nation state exists only in the annals of human history. As I wrote in my 2019 article, Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming, published in the ethnic studies journal Kalfou, “American and Canadian dreaming is Indigenous elimination.” In that article (like in my entire oeuvre of work), I am explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist, and pro- “tribal” ways of being, for lack of a better word. English is inadequate. And I also wrote that we must “strike blows whenever possible to the dominant narrative of a multicultural and supposedly progressive (always progressing toward greater good) settler state.” Therefore, I do not equate the relatively very short lives of nation states with the lands and humans that I am willing to care for. Patriotism to the colonial nation state in its reactionary right-wing or supposedly enlightened liberal form ultimately betrays humanity and the planet.
That said, I read many thinkers with whom I do not totally agree, whose national and cultural genealogies are very different from my own and also from each other. Take Galtung and McCoy who both study US power and decline. Johan Galtung, born in Oslo, was a child during World War II when Germany occupied Norway. His physician father was interred in a Nazi concentration camp, but was released unharmed at the end of the war. Galtung’s national, familial, and personal history, including the example of his father as not only a prisoner of the Germans, but also as a physician committed to saving lives, influenced his views on peace. Alfred W. McCoy, whose “birth coincided with the last months of World War II, just as the United States was ascending to unprecedented world power,” is also a product of his national, familial, and personal history (McCoy 2017: 3). He writes in In the Shadows of the American Century about his own family’s access to elite higher education and elite military service, not unlike Galtung’s family, but in very different national circumstances. Galtung’s father did not make the same career of elite military service and post-war involvement in the Cold War as did McCoy’s father. McCoy’s father returned from World War II and later from Korea to work as an electronics engineer for multiple defense contractors. McCoy writes about how his father and other fathers he knew “drank hard” while “their wives pretended that an entire generation of veterans being on liquid therapy was perfectly normal. Those men, in turn, inflicted the war’s trauma on their families” (McCoy 2017: 7). Both men come to this work with not only their intellectual interests in geopolitics, but also with their personal relationships to the (hi)stories they write. I come to their writing from my own national, familial, and personal standpoint. I engage their work because it adds to my grasp of US and global history. Different standpoints support rather than undermine my continued moral grounding as a Dakota person in relationship to Dakota people, lands, to our ancestors and to their knowledge about how we might live. As I wrote in the Kalfou article:
The emotional baseline with which I am misaligned is the incessant dreaming, in whatever political tone, of a successful settler state…This crisis or transition time in the United States and Canada [the two settler states I live between], and globally, offers an opportunity to cease cultivating a misplaced love for the state no matter the party in power. This moment offers an opportunity, if we choose to see it that way, to be misaligned with the emotional, intellectual, and (un)ethical baseline and narrative of those who hold power. Instead, we can have radical hope in a narrative that entails not redeeming the state but caring for one another…” (TallBear 2019: 34).
I don’t write from a place of utopianism. I don’t believe in saviours, mountain tops, political or heavenly transcendence beyond the beautiful and harsh conditions of this planet and the space it turns within. I am also not a strategic revolutionary; their skills are not mine. As I see it, my individual challenge as US Empire falters—and so many will feel varying degrees of that pain—will be to continue insisting on a different historical and guiding narrative. That unfolding story involves not only edification, but making human networks to morally support, share material sustenance and practical skills. While I stand against violent, deceitful power, I will try not to give it my energy in the form of rage and fear. I will keep trying to figure out my role. What will be your role? What can I learn with you?
Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.
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