In 2023, shortly before his death, Klee Benally published No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred, a book of emancipatory thought that speaks to some challenging questions about land decolonization and anarchist politics. Benally’s work—writing, singing, talking, agitating, and antagonizing—comes out of the “crucible of the asymmetric slow burning war of resource colonialism” (16). There are many ways we could describe him: writer, artist, activist, agitator, liberation fighter, organizer, anti-colonialist, teacher, provocateur, punk, anarchist, Indigenous thinker. But what is important is to recognize that Benally has a unique ability to provoke our attention and, above all, our engagement with land struggles and resistance to ongoing patterns of settler colonialism. (One good way to engage with him is to listen to his many podcast interviews, such as “We Belong to the Earth: Against Settler Belonging,” from the Grounded Futures podcast.)
In No Spiritual Surrender (hereafter NSS), Benally offers an account of human liberation. His thought is deeply rooted in his experience with Indigenous resistance, but it speaks to all of us, including us settler-scholars. “When I speak of liberation, it is not to foment yet another social justice project, it is an inclusive and fervent agitation against domination and exploitation of existence, for the liberation of Mother Earth is liberation of all existence” (9). The concept of “punk” gets close to describing Benally’s work. He writes of “The aggression of punk and its political agitations,” and his musical projects, including Blackfire, are important elements of his political vision (9). “Storyteller” is another good description of Benally. His thought is rooted in a particular human situation—his own experiences of struggle as well as community and ceremony—which implies a particular geography, history, and grammar. Describing himself as “a mixed-Diné” with an “Upbringing through ceremony,” many of Benally’s thoughts on anarchist politics are expressed through stories of his “practical experience in frontline land struggles” (7–8). He opens NSS by introducing himself in the Diné language and noting that “What I have learned about life I have learned from ceremony” (8).
Benally’s work is situated within protest movements against resource colonialism, especially in his homeland of Arizona or “occupied-Kinlani” (78). One important land struggle that he was part of was the multi-year direct action campaign to defend the San Francisco peaks against desecration and exploitation, including challenging the Forest Service and private corporations from developing a ski area that used reclaimed sewage water to blow artificial snow (38). The subtitle of Benally’s book is “Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred,” and we learn that he became a land defender at an early age and continued throughout his short life to defend sacred sites against Capitalist interventions such as mining. The opposition movement to the SnowBowl ski area included a diverse group of activists from different types of backgrounds, including “environmentalists, liberals, anarchists, elders, healers, young people and more” (71). To assist with the “Save the Peaks” movement, Benally created Indigenous Action Media, which is still going strong today. In 2011, after long legal battles, Snowbowl clear-cut 74 acres of sacred forest land and created a fifteen-mile pipeline to carry treated sewage for snowblowing. Land defenders took various strategies to stop the desecration of the Peaks, including chaining themselves to machines, battling in court, organizing, and developing media platforms. In telling the story of these land defenders Benally expresses how anarchist anti-colonial struggles implicitly and explicitly contain an “indictment of the State and total rejection of it” (344).
Benally diagnoses the degradation of humanity and Nature we are experiencing in the West as the result of a particular kind of state: the settler colonial state. Most political philosophers trained in U.S. American academies (and elsewhere) are educated to think about “the State” simpliciter without weighing the specific dynamics of settler colonial statehood. Fundamentally, the settler colonial state is based on military conquest, land and resource theft, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the replacement of Indigenous peoples with non-Indigenous settlers. Far from being a neutral instrument aimed at reconciling competing rights of individuals, the truth of the U.S. settler state is that it was formed through stolen land and forced labor (primarily the labor of people from the African diaspora, but others as well, including Indigenous people and the indenture of the Irish and other impoverished Europeans). The American social contract continues to this day to be based on coercive treaties made with Indigenous peoples, as David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima have detailed excellently.
One reason NSS is important reading is that it offers a dose of honesty and humility to settler scholars like myself. (By “settler scholar,” I mean scholars who, by virtue of their race, nationality, class-being, ancestral descent, thinking, and/or values, find or insert themselves in positions of institutional power and privilege within U.S. American or other settler colonial societies.) Benally insists that Indigenous struggles against colonialism involve ways of thinking, being, and acting that cannot be reduced to “theory” or “philosophy” in the European sense. Some attempts to do radical philosophy are stuck in Euro-centric patterns, including what he calls “settler pity” (27). Anarchist politics challenge the settler colonial State through mutual aid (community organizing and taking care of each other) and direct action (violent and non-violent protest against the State, including government and local officials and the police). According to Benally, the State can be defined as “a privileged group that makes the decisions for everyone else and upholds those decisions with military and political forces” (318). To this general definition of statehood, we can add a layer of analysis that captures the unique violence of settler colonial statehood: “When a State has consumed its available resources it is compelled to look elsewhere and to others… This is the etymology of colonialism; it is the language of domination, coercion, control, exploitation, assimilation, and annihilation” (318). In one word, the goal of the settler state is land. Hence, one demand of anarchist Land Back politics is the rematriation of stolen land and resources, as well as a renewed relationship with the sacred. In a section titled “Land Back or Cash Back,” Benally gives an account of the slogan “Land Back,” writing that “the assertion of Land Back requires no elaboration: End colonial occupation, restore ancestral relationships with the land” (146). Benally is quick to point out, however, that Land Back demands can bend towards liberal and corporatist strategies, as well as anarchist strategies (146–147).
For Benally, the verb “decolonize” should be applied first and foremost to resources and land, and only secondarily, if at all, to decolonizing epistemology and the normative structure of the settler world. On this matter, Benally’s work makes an important contribution to recent discussions about the difference between “colonialism” and “coloniality.” Benally asks us to think about the difference between decolonization and anti-colonialism, where anti-colonial struggle refers to militant protest, property violence, street-level organizing, and mutual aid within communities. The object of anti-colonial struggle is to disrupt Empire by putting a wrench into the ownership of private property, to dispute resource extraction and to challenge the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land. And as the subtitle of his book reminds us, anti-colonialism is also about “defending the sacred.”
To place Benally in dialogue with philosophical discussions of anti-colonial thinking and being, I would recommend three recent books that deal extensively with coloniality and its relationship to colonialism: Jina Fast’s Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology; Brian Burkhart’s Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land; and Lewis R. Gordon’s Freedom, Justice and Decolonization. (I would add, as well, an excellent recent piece by Kris Sealey on the APA Blog). Decolonial philosophy draws on the concept of the “coloniality of power,” a term that comes out of the work of, among others, Walter D. Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano. Drawing on Lewis R. Gordon, Fast writes: “Philosophy as a discipline supports, generally, a set of norms that uphold colonialism and thus function in service to colonial orders of knowledge” (xiii). Burkhart makes clear that resistance to normative and epistemological coloniality is part of the resistance to settler colonialism’s war on land, resources, and the sacred: “The power of Western coloniality, highlighted by the genocidal removal of Indigenous people from their lands as the foundational act of creating the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is centered in land” (4). Reading these three books alongside NSS affords us a good opportunity to think through the relationship between normative and epistemological coloniality and the violent political structure that is the settler colonial state.
Another reason to read Benally is because his conceptual framework lies outside and against the social contract tradition as well as the Marxist tradition, which are two common lenses through which Western academics think about statehood. (I thank chris time steele, host of the excellent Time Talks podcast, and carla joy bergman for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay regarding Marxism’s blind spots about settler colonialism.) Academic political philosophy in the U.S. is dominated by the liberal social contract framework, which originated in 17th and 18th century Europe by the over-represented thinkers we all know: Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, etc. Social contract philosophy finds its contemporary expression in John Rawls, as well as communitarians like Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Joseph Raz, and even anarchists such as Robert Nozick. A primary limitation of these thinkers is that for them, “the State” is not differentiated at different points of historical development (such as settler colonial, resource colonial, or 19th-century romantic nationalist) or geographic specificity (such as the difference between British imperialist statehood, Black Nationalist appeals to statehood, or Zionist forms of state-building). Philosophers from the European social contract tradition typically do not see themselves as inheritors of a Western imperialist continuum or a White and European way of thinking. A. Shahid Stover has a wonderful expression for this continuum: the “normative gaze of Empire” (33). The normative gaze of modernity endorses an instrumental conception of Nature and posits a sharp separation between human existence and the rest of creation. It is no surprise that Western imperialists justify land theft with an ontology that proposes that rivers, trees, and soil are inert “things” rather than living beings.
In Benally’s thought, anarchism is bound by Nature; it is not a way to control, conquer, or improve it. His way of thinking about human existence contrasts with the normative gaze of settler colonialism which makes a sharp distinction between humanity and Nature. As Burkhart argues, one glance at Locke’s Second Treatise reminds us that most European political theory differentiates human “civilization” from Nature to explain the supposed legitimacy of the State. The settler imagines that Indigenous people are in a permanent condition of Nature, while Europeans are imagined to have emerged from Nature in order to become rational and civilized. “Most of this understanding of American Indians generally or severally is utterly ridiculous and wholly manufactured by Locke within the already existing settler colonial imagination… Since the target is Indian land, the construction of Indian-ness also centers on land” (40). For the settler thinker, attributing naturalness to Indigenous peoples and rationality to European peoples becomes a justification for appropriating land; land which the settler describes as “wasted” and “vacant.” Locke writes that the “Indian[s]…in the woods of America…[are] perfectly in a state of nature” (§14). For Locke, land in North America is empty, untouched by civilization, and thus value-less. “Nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials, as in themselves” (§43). He famously claims that land becomes valuable only when Europeans add their labor. Locke dismisses the labor that Indigenous people put into land; such land is “not worth a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it were to be valued, and sold here” (§14). Western anarchists and Western Marxists sometimes adopt the same perspective towards land, even as they reject the legitimacy of the State.
For Benally, it is important to keep in mind how “The settler colonial State has always meant war against Indigenous Peoples in so-called North America” (319). Thinking about anti-Indigenous violence as the origin of the U.S. State has been outside most mainstream American political thinking. Some academic political philosophers go their entire careers without grappling with the origin and continued existence of our State in genocide and ecological destruction. For an understanding of the U.S. State that grapples with its genocidal origin, we can turn to thinkers like Benally or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, whose An Indigenous People’s History of the United States traces our current settler colonial state back to England’s invention of the plantation system in Ulster Ireland, in 1609 under King James VI (51–54). Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the underlying motive of English colonialism, first in Ireland and later in the American “New World,” was the destruction of patterns of communal land use (what the Indigenous pre-Christian Irish called the “Tüath” system), in favor of a system of private land ownership. The English destruction of the Irish Tüath system foreshadowed the Dawes Act of 1887 by almost three hundred years. The Dawes Act (also known as the General Allotment Act) attempted to destroy Indigenous ways of being on the land by replacing communal land use with the doctrine of private property, as inherited from Locke’s and Jefferson’s philosophies.
Benally rejects the doctrine of private property as well as the logic of the social contract tradition, which have been animating features of European Modernity and colonialism. While some activists have called for a return to treaties such as William Penn’s famous pact with the Lenape under the treaty Elm at Shackamaxon, Benally warns against this. He sees treaties as instruments for “violent dispossession, appropriation and imposition” (320). From Benally’s work, one could extract a philosophical critique of social contract theory, consent, the Lockean theory of the state and of private property, and Marxism; this critique might go deeper even than the pathbreaking work of Charles Mills and Carole Pateman. However, Benally isn’t interested in this critique—he believes that it would concede too much to academic philosophy and to settler colonial forms of domination. His skepticism of statism extends to the model of tribal sovereignty embraced by the 574 federally recognized Indian tribes in the U.S. (319).
Benally’s anarchist skepticism towards authority includes a distrust of the academy. As carla joy bergman pointed out to me, his work is about “unearthing” traditions of resistance that are much older than the academy and which often take place outside of mainstream educational institutions. Benally’s music, for example, is an important expression of his extra-institutional anarchist politics. On his album “Appropriation,” in the song “Speaking as a Counter-Revolutionary,” Benally offers the following lyrical provocation: “Academic armchair nation building statists/You’re not our saviors/We’re not your proletariats/We reject the imposition of your assumed authority/Stop trying to revive dead words from someone else’s dead history.” The punk politics of this song help us academics see the distance between our day jobs and the DIY street movements that challenge the U.S. settler State through protest, property destruction, squatting, and overt counter-violence against the police and other arms of the State.
Many of us academics, myself included, receive our paychecks from tax-payer-sponsored, federal and state governments. Many other academics are employees of private universities, which are controlled by directors who have a capitalist interest in maintaining their “brand” and protecting donations from wealthy sponsors. Put simply, there is a basic tension (one which mediates our efforts and must be constantly revisited) in being a State-sponsored academic who professes the anarchist principle of anti-statist autonomy. And to restate the obvious, most U.S. Universities are located on stolen land. Benally’s lyrics in “Speaking as a Counter-Revolutionary” also raise the issue of the audience for anti-colonial academic publications; if we use “a shit ton of overly academic terms” (to quote the lyrics to “Going in Circles” from the “Appropriation” album), who are we writing for? Settler-scholars can address the tension above with the question: In the professorate, how does our writing, teaching, agitating, and antagonism towards the ongoing settler colonial State acknowledge and contribute to on-the-ground, extra-academic activist struggles for communal autonomy, mutual aid, and the re-matriation of stolen land and resources?
Benally’s skepticism of academics is based on a skepticism of any form of epistemic authority that comes from placing a person into a powerful institution, “Those who aspire to be scholars, by design of their institutional careers, most often are placed in the position of ideological authority” (324). This skepticism of institutions is not a skepticism about the importance of thinking and writing; it is a skepticism of institutions. He reminds us how much thinking goes on outside of the institutions of education (primary and secondary), and the diverse methods in which thinking is expressed (ceremony, dance, storytelling, elder care, child care, mutual aid, discussions, protest movements). As Benally remarks, “Indigenous autonomy needs no theoretical foundation to justify itself” (324).
When reading Benally, the settler-intellectual might begin to feel pessimistic about their being-a-White-settler, which is a variation of the trap of settler pity. Benally is not a pessimist about settler-Indigenous solidarity; he is an activist. “Collective struggle against domination would seem to be a shared goal for Indigenous and non-Indigenous, but the terms of affinity or solidarity have almost always been skewed towards the pursuit of a settler colonial future” (327). Solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can take the form of protest, sharing resources and working class unity against Capitalism (199). A key feature of anarchist solidarity is the desire to create community and a better future through local efforts of ordinary people, rather than through seeking change by building institutions or depending upon State processes such as electoral politics. As mentioned above, one route that does not work well, by Benally’s lights, is political engagement motivated by “settler pity, charity, or even becoming an ‘ally’”; Benally writes convincingly of the need for settlers to become accomplices, not allies (200). The accomplice makes political interventions for the sake of a more humane shared world and social experience, as opposed to working on behalf of colonized peoples. The accomplice is willing to consistently acknowledge and challenge power, for example by transferring resources to those who need them more than us (e.g., Benally had a large number of Patreon sponsors who supported his work). The accomplice is also willing to risk academic censure and willing to confront State authorities, including the police.
The type of solidarity Benally advocates can be called Mutual Aid. He writes, “When we recognize that we’re all in this together, that no one is better than anyone else and we have to take care of each other to survive, this is what anarchists have come to call, ‘Mutual Aid’” (309). Anarchist Mutual Aid programs do not treat Indigenous people (or any colonized people) as victims or saviors (310). Benally gives examples of successful mutual aid programs like the Sinlani Mutual Aid project, which began as space for unsheltered people in his own Diné community, and then turned into a place of dialogue and “talking circles” among Diné folks (225–226). Benally, a Diné thinker, emphasizes the importance of Diné language and concepts to his understanding of anarchism. In the Diné (or Navajo) language “T’áá ni’ínít’éego t’éiyá” refers to collective “autonomy” (308). The spirit of such projects is the trust in the ability of ordinary people to come together and work on what ills us at the local level, whether that’s poverty, racism, polluted water and air, or a failing educational system. Benally reminds us, too, that the Diné understanding of Ké’ (“family relations”) extends to non-humans. “Indigenous anarchism is a commitment to the destruction of domination and authority, which includes colonialism, white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, capitalism and the State” (308).
While Benally invites settler-scholars and activists to engage with his work, he also cautions against some of the possible effects of being read by and listened to by settlers. One of the most powerful ideas in No Spiritual Surrender is that Indigenous Anarchism is “unknowable.” The thought-systems of the West often ask the wrong questions and fail to acknowledge the specific cultural implications of practices such as writing in the English language. Even the label “Indigenous Anarchism” can be a way of imposing settler frameworks upon Indigenous ways of being and knowing. In Chapter 15, “Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory,” (first published in Black Seed), Benally makes the case that “ …there is no Indigenous anarchist theory and perhaps there never should be” (323). The Western idea of “knowing that” is implicated in the history of settler violence. To “know” Indigenous thought can become a way of freezing culture in time and space, hence to assume that Indigenous ways of life and Indigenous peoples are part of the past and not the present and future. The supposed contrast of “traditional” and “modern” ways of life can be a continuation of the project of “civilizing” native folks. Indigenous ways of life may be called traditional, if what we mean is ancient, or preceding in time and space (as well as taking place simultaneously with) the Euro-modern Colombian era, of 1492 and after. What this distinction misses, though, is that traditional cultures are cultures and they have always been in flux, and in relationship to Nature, where the only constant is change. Benally asks us to “unmap Indigenous social relations from the colonial political geography [and] to become unknowable again” (322).
Benally’s voice is extraordinary. His music, activism, writing, and speaking improve the collective world we live in. Engaging with his thoughts is like reaching for a hot cup of coffee in the morning; we know that its contents will enrich us spiritually as well as physically, and yet, we may burn our tongues. If we are unwilling to be challenged, if we dilute Benally and filter him through the cheesecloth of Western thought and the normative gaze of Empire, then we might well fall into patterns of pity, pessimism, and narcissism. Indigenous anarchist thought has the potential to disrupt and antagonize the life-denying institutions and ways-of-being that some U.S. Americans have come to see as benign and inevitable.
Thunder Storm Heter
Thunder Storm Heter is the author ofThe Sonic Gaze: Jazz, Whiteness and Racialized Listening(Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). His writings center on the philosophy of existence, critical theories of whiteness, and the importance of sound. Originally from Kansas, he is a White, Irish-American, and Jewish settler-scholar who now lives, teaches and writes from Lenapehoking (so-called Pennsylvania). He also co-edits the “Living Existentialism” book series for Rowman and Littlefield and is an executive editor ofSartre Studies International.
