Rev Left Radio - Toward Indigenous Self-Determination: Fourth World Theory and Indigenous Marxism

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

In this episode, Breht speaks with his guests Pavin and Jennifer Marley from Total Sovereignty Working Group about George Manuel's Fourth World theory and the Indigenous Marxist traditions of Howard Adams and Lee Maracle. Together, they examine the conflict between land as capitalist property and land as a living relationship; the formation of colonial-racial capitalism; and the limitations of state-recognized self-government, "Red capitalism," and settler socialism. They also explore the tension between Indigenous self-determination as a transitional stage toward universal socialism and as the permanent reconstruction of Indigenous nationhood, territorial authority, and collective responsibility, as well as Maracle's insistence that decolonization must include feminism, rematriation, and the restoration of Indigenous women's governing power. Ultimately, the conversation asks what it would mean to abolish capitalism and settler colonialism together—and to create forms of collective life grounded in reciprocity, land, care, and genuine self-determination. Total Sovereignty Working Group is a Native focus group dedicated to building a strategy for winning back our land and caring for our nations. Check out their work HERE   ------------- Learn more and support the show at https://revleftradio.com/ Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Jen and Pavin from Total Sovereignty Working Group on to discuss basically indigenous self-determination through the prism of two particular texts. George Manuel's The Fourth World in Indian Reality and David Meyer Tiemann's indigenous Marxisms. And we are kind of putting those two texts in conversation, elaborating and extending on them to have a wide-ranging conversation about. about indigenous self-determination, its relationship with Marxism, its relationship with socialist transition, you know, the critique of compradore elites within indigenous communities, the concept of rematriation, and so much more. This is a really wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. Many people won't even have heard, I think, of fourth world theory. So it's a really interesting concept to kind of use as a

launching point to have these broader discussions about indigenity, especially in the modern world in the context of colonialist capitalism and in the context of a deepening crisis in the biosphere. So this is a timely and really important conversation and I couldn't ask for a better guest to join me to work through it. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, you can find everything we do at RevLeftRadio.com. You can find our Patreon, our Instagram, YouTube account, ways to donate. and we have a really cool design from our comrade at Coffee Stain Comics that we turned into some summer merch as well, which you can find on the website, RevLeftRadio.com. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Jen and Paven from the Total Sovereignty Working Group on Indigenous self-determination, this relationship to socialism, and so much more.

Enjoy. Hi, thank you for having me, Brett. My name is Jen Marley. I did get the opportunity to join you a few years ago, so thank you for having me back. You might know me as being associated with the Red Nation podcast. I am also a graduate of the UNM American Studies Department. I'm a citizen of the Pueblo Sano de Fonzo or Pogo Geo Winge. And right now, I am very happy to be back home and organizing with the Total Sovereignty Working Group.

Thank you again. Yeah, hello. My name is Pavin. I'm citizen of the Kuwapaw Nation of Oklahoma. I'm also a member of the Total Sovereignty Working Group. And, yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us to talk about these subjects. Absolutely.

It's an honor and a pleasure to have both of you on for today's episode. And as I said in the introduction, we'll be talking about two texts, but we're using them as kind of jumping off grounds to have probably a broader discussion of the issues at play. This is George Manuel's, the fourth world. Indian reality and David Meyer Tehmann's indigenous Marxism. So the questions themselves will kind of go back and forth between these two pieces and just kind of asking questions that together, I think, are very generative. And hopefully a lot of people will walk away with like a deeper knowledge of some of the theoretical terrain surrounding indigenous self-determination and liberation

more broadly. So let's go ahead and get into it and perhaps starting with Manuel's work and the concept of the fourth world. So for listeners encountering the concept for the first time, which I assume is probably the majority of listeners, what does George Manuel mean by the fourth world and why should we understand it as both a description of colonized indigenous peoples and a sort of ongoing political project in its own rate? Yeah. So Manuel developed a fourth world as a way of describing the distinct situation of indigenous peoples who are fighting to develop their societies into the future. according to their own principles, beliefs, values, and in particular relationships to land

and to each other in their societies. Pretty much as an ongoing political project, the fourth liberation is understood as struggling against the ways in which capitalism, like global capitalism, its way of commodifying the land in human relations, struggling against those and the damage it's done to our peoples and our ways of life

by working on consciously rebuilding our traditional political economies and ways of life, life and in doing so move beyond what capitalism has done and reforge our distinct paths to the future. Yeah, I do want to offer a little bit of background on George Manuel. So he, something really interesting about him that you'll read early in the book is he didn't see an Indian agent until he was like eight years old. So he literally did grow up in a time before capitalism, before his land and his people had been. touched and reshaped by this. And so he is drawing from his experiences getting to actually live that. And, you know, he said he didn't know, he didn't go hungry until after the Indian agents came.

And in the intro of the book, Glenn Coltard describes the fourth world as both a verb and a noun. And so he describes it as the process of decolonization itself. And then also cites Manuel saying it's the, It's the ability to travel our own path in our own vehicles. And so with that, you know, self-determination is very, very central to this concept. And I know that sometimes we see the terminology of self-determination in maybe strictly legal context or we see it as maybe something kind of jargony or something that can become devoid of value as it's thrown around. but here he's talking very concretely and very he's very materialist about how he defines self-determination and how he is grounding it in relationships to land. And yeah, I'm, I also, I think, like, what I want people to get out of this podcast is I think

that manual is sometimes taken up. This work specifically is, I think, a little bit mischaracterized or misrepresented mostly by academics. I think I heard Fourth World Theory written off as just back to the landism or even primitivism. And I kind of want to

push back on that a little bit. But that's all I have to add to that first question. Yeah. And, you know, an interesting, I mean, when you hear Fourth World, it harkens back obviously to the old conception of like first world, you know, the, what we would now call perhaps the Imperial Corps, second world at that time is like these developing up-and-coming,

nation states in the third world are sort of these, you know, what they would call sometimes or the West would call underdeveloped, but, you know, we would, we would understand as over-exploited third world countries or impoverished countries, many countries that perhaps we would talk about, not identically, but, you know, approximately as like the global South in some ways today. But fourth world is interesting because I think, you know, the indigenous experience is to be in so many places confined within broader nations. states that, you know, are oppressive, that that in many ways prevents self-determination, that exploit and impoverish native communities. But, you know, unlike first, second, and

third world, the classical, you know, sort of articulation of that, many native and indigenous cultures and peoples, if not all of them, are actually confined within nation states that they do not have autonomy or control over. And so I think it's a really interesting term on that level. Does that sound really? right to you in the way that it's it's being used and that that that wrinkle of of not having in most instances if at all a nation state that is actually yours but actually being trapped within various other nation states or in in some instances in the borders between nation states does that sound right well let's say precisely uh like the reason what manual was responding to when he wrote

the fourth world was kind of like a desire to figure out how to include native people in the global decolonial like wave that was happening at this time with it because, you know, we are internal colonies, you know, is a distinct situation for Native people, particularly like living underneath, like, settler states in the first world, you know, in the West. And so that was the intention, was to try not to say that we are more or less radical than any other given group, but just to situate us in our unique situation, the trajectory historically that we came from when we were forced into capitalist development, you know, and global, you know, empires, it was developed. thing. But yeah, what I think is like kind of maybe overlooked is Emmanuel is really putting forth

like he's using dialectical materialism. He's using historical materialism. He is the articulation of the fourth world is simply to indicate our unique historical trajectory. And again, that's not to exceptionalize us. I feel like sometimes this book is critiqued for implying that, but I don't really think that was the intention. It's simply to demarcate us as having these really specific historical and material conditions. And you talked about, before we move on to the next question, just one quick follow-up, you talked about historical and dialectical materialism. I'm wondering to what extent, or perhaps the listener would benefit from knowing to what extent Manuel consciously saw himself as perhaps within or adjacent to or outside of

the Marxist framework. Obviously, there's concepts being employed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, one has to, you know, be a Marxist in their overall approach. How do you understand George Manuel's relationship to Marxism more broadly? I think this is an interesting question, forgive me if it takes a little bit to answer it. But I think he certainly saw some utility, historically speaking, I think he certainly saw some utility to applying Marxist analysis and you can see it in the way that his analysis works, particularly in his way of understanding how native concepts of labor and labor relations and early pre-colonial society were transformed through like the way capitalism developed and pulled us into it and deprived us of our means to have sovereign economies. David Tenman, I'm sorry of pronouncing that wrong, but he explicitly states actually in the book remapping Sovereignty's particularly included Marx's notion of the base in superstructure in his understanding of like what happens to native people, like how colonization actually mechanically worked, and referred to that when he was writing the fourth world, although you don't see it cited in the fourth world. these types, the deployment of these types of Marxist concepts are kind of obvious in the sense that like the way in which Manuel describes colonization as he describes it as a process of the recontextualization of what labor means for native people, right? Because native societies and I'll cut it shortly, but native societies, you know, are ultimately founded on reciprocity, right? You know, like he talks about the earth being his mother. And what he means by that is like, you know, the earth gives us things, resources, land, you know, food.

stuff like that, but in turn, we need to, you know, show reciprocity. We need to take care of the resources that we have. And that mentality applied to the way society worked. It was a very communalistic society where people took care of one another because, you know, you need to rely on one another. And so in that society, you know, what are all those things? What is that activity on the land? What is that activity in the village? That's labor, you know, and like that daily labor of maintaining the land, harvesting from the land, working in the village, working with others, produce the consciousness of a people that saw a mutual relationships as normal as basic. And labor is something that was dignified and meaningful.

And then, of course, you know, when capitalism comes, you know, when they begin imposing like hunting restrictions and fencing off the land and blocking his people from access to their resources and then trying to break up their collective economy and then they have to go and work and wage jobs, you know. And all these kinds of things begin to deprive them and their ability to provide for the means to provide for themselves. It recontextualizes what labor means to punishment, you know, and to things dependent on a wage and not something that you just do for others

because colonialism was suppressing that. That's what I see, you know, his relationship with Marxism and his husband. And the only thing I'll add is, I think it's a part to note that he was exposed to these things. Via his internationalism, China, he very,

visited Tanzania. And he was very moved by the Udrama villages he saw there. So he was exposed to, you know, these processes in the context of seeing other tribal people building sovereignty for themselves, building self-reliance. And I think the big thing we also want to emphasize in this is his concept of self-reliance. Yeah, do you want to talk about that right here? Do you think we'll get into it going forward? the idea of self-reliance if you want to build on that at all.

Yeah, I mean, I think on that subject, just to kind of quickly summarize that, and it's related to like the fourth world as a verb, right, as an ongoing political project. Like, Manuel's vision of kind of what fourth world liberation looks like is he under, you know, he says this and we can get into kind of details of his specific political vision. But Manuel is kind of a visionary in that, like, he straight up understands that we have a transitional process of decolonization that we need to work through, both in terms of like relations of force, you know, with a colonial state, like how can we, how can we protect and manage ourselves, take our land back and, like, assert ourselves, you know, as distinct sovereign nations,

but also to, you know, how are we going to carry out the process of essentially, like, learning how to live as we were, but, you know, with all the trappings of, like, life today, like technology and various other ways that, you know, our consciousness has been altered or tools that we now have in our hands that we didn't have. And so, you know, his basic plan is essentially that, you know, we can take the first steps towards moving towards a world where we can rebuild this community between the non-human world and our world and between each other once again. You know, the first steps when you take in that direction are getting back to work for ourselves, rebuilding collective economies. You know, he envisioned the building of cooperative mixed economies. And by that, I mean, not including capitalism, but mixing certain types of industry that were necessary.

you know, to be able to sustain ourselves, you know, and mixing that with certain types of, like, what people would call, I guess, like, Bush activities or modes of production, but like traditional hunting or farming or various practices that have both practical and cultural significance, you know, with the work. And all of this was part of an idea that we would be laying a foundation both to provide for ourselves, so we're less dependent and less vulnerable to the violence of, you know, the capitalist state. You don't have to work three jobs. you know, to survive if your community has a job for you that you only have to work for five hours at, you know, and you can spend time with your family and vice versa. And then also to in the process of doing that work,

of working together, learning to be cooperative again, breaking that, you know, that grip of capitalism has on us. We would make that long march back to where we should be. Yeah. And I like that there's something, perhaps there's something deeply dialectical about this refusal of the misinterpretation of trying to, go back and reclaim some lost age and try to have to not navigate the complexities of modernity in that process, just like rejecting it and going back, which is just a historical impossibility. You know, I often say the only way out is through, and the dialectical move is not necessarily to go back to some reclaimed past, but to kind of re-engage with that past at a higher level through the prism and through the transition state of modernity. and overcoming the modern problems of, in many instances, capitalism, imperialism, you know,

the collapse of the biosphere, et cetera. There is really no going back. So this idea of self-reliance and self-determination and fourth world as a verb in this long march is a forward march, which I really appreciate about the argument overall. Does that sound right to you, is my interpretation of that, more or less correct? Yeah. And that's why, like, I'm often confused when people try to imply that manual is implying a kind of back to the landism or primitivist view because he articulates several times throughout the book, the necessity of incorporating technology, the necessity of incorporating the technology and the goods that we've been exposed to already via capitalism. And he says, what is that quote? He says, we may not, we don't need to dress like in the threads of our ancestors to like carry on our ways basically. And in fact, he says we can't.

And so this is, yeah, this is a very forward thinking model. It is something that that's why, again, I believe he's being very dialectical. Like when he's articulating this, he really is. I really appreciate, too, how he's looking at governance as something that cannot be static. And in fact, he calls the governance, you know, wrought upon us by capitalism, the settler projects, as he calls those static and those unmoving, right? And so he really turns it in, he really turns that question in on itself. Yeah, absolutely.

I really, really appreciate that about the text. So let's go ahead and move on because Manuel describes settler colonialism as a struggle between kind of two ideas of land. And we touched on this a little bit, but maybe we can go deeper. Land as property and commodity, right? Land as understood through the colonial and capitalist lens. And land as a living and reciprocal relationship, as you mentioned. Can you talk a little bit more about what different ideas of humanity, freedom, and just society emerge from these two, fundamentally different relationships and ways of relating to, you know, the planet and the earth?

Sure. So he primarily defines the divide as being about the fundamentally different relationship to the land. So, you know, people will kind of, again, try to, you know, be like Manuel's buying into a clash of culture's myth. Again, I think that's a misreading of him because he is explicitly saying this is about, this is about the difference in how the settler society views and relates to land and how we view and relate to land. And so he's saying that, you know, the settler state is fundamentally incapable of relating to the land in a reciprocal way at all because it is about pure exploitation and extraction, right? The land is something to be conquered. It's something to be owned. It's something to be privatized, something to be cut up and redistributed.

and he has this really awesome line in there too where he says on this idea that nature is something to be conquered he says the land is no or nature is no less mean to endings and so why is it that we don't see it as something to conquer as well and then that's when he goes into his idea of community and he's like we are able to face this together because we are unified as a people and that basis of unification and reciprocity amongst ourselves is also how we interact with the natural world.

And so he is talking about the importance of, and this isn't like, you know, again, this is something I've kind of misread as like a strictly metaphysical woo-woo thing, but he is literally just talking about the scientific knowledge required to be in relationship with the land. So this can be something as simple as, you know, knowing what plants not to harvest in certain places to keep an animal population healthy, knowing how to limit what you harvest on from where and at what times, right? So he is grounding this knowledge in a practice of, you know, deep scientific knowledge. And also in terms of how do I say this, I guess, like, project. management, for lack of a better term, right? But like, you know, how is agriculture being organized? How is labor being organized on the land in service to the land and each other? And so he basically, you know, sums it up as being like, you know, because capitalism is solely about extraction, greed, a

conception, it will inevitably consume itself. And so he is articulating this concept that Marx articulated through this indigenous lens. And I just think that's really powerful. Yeah, I mean, I think it would also, too, I guess, what we're sort of talking about, like, indigenous ways versus, like, capitalism and sort of, like, the political economies and the types of, you know, values and things that they engender, I guess, like, I would say they, like, you know, I'd refer to, like, Mariatagi, you know, too and his, like, critique of, like, Spanish colonialism and the fact that he made the point.

But like, even though like the Incan Empire, for example, may not have had like even wheels, you know, or things like that, because they were so highly organized and collectivistic, you know, in a society, it was based on the reciprocity of labor primarily. They had far higher, like, levels of, like, you know, surplus and crops and they managed the land and they just built like a highly productive society. And then when the Spanish came with their idea of, like, early private property, you know, like he points out how like each conquistador could just claim. whatever area that they saw, you know, and it had like no relation to like rational planning. Like, you know, one could like claim an area with no river and the other could claim the river. And then they wouldn't be able to irrigate the other conk use the door's land, you know, because they're just stupid conquerors. And I think the same thing is something, that same argument of like actually, you know, our systems are highly productive, adaptable, produce, thing, produce large amounts of stuff, but also do it in a way that is congruent with the land. and in concert with it is not woo-woo at all, you know,

and was something that I think an argument, Emmanuel was making about his people. And by no means is like, you know, the early America is like a utopia. And by no means are we like not suffering from, you know, different droughts or famines or other issues and stuff. But the point is like we were able to overcome and live productive, you know, enriched lives in a way that Europeans couldn't because of that collective reality

and because of that relationship with the land. And capitalism simply cannot do those things, particularly because of the commodity form and the way that human beings are treated. Everything is a commodity. The land, human beings, what have you. It's unable to do that kind of rational work, you know. And arguably, you know, you can't have functioning, you know, socialism or communism or a higher form of society. If you don't kind of look to the deeper layers of alienation, you know, not just from our own labor, but from the things that we're working. into stuff that we need, you know, like the land itself, you know, forgetting that there's a whole living world out there.

Absolutely. Yeah, I really, I appreciate, you know, the rejection of a sort of overly romanticized nature. And sometimes people of all types that have been alienated from the natural world, like many of us are, you know, in the modern world, we, there's a tendency to over-romanticize nature. but this this also this this this sort of again dialectical recognition that yes of course nature is you know our our mother it's it's completely we bubble up out of it we literally are it we're where nature become conscious and we depend on it in so many ways but also yeah like living in a state of nature um is incredibly difficult and the way humans were able to survive evolutionarily was precisely through their communality through their through their social structures of of solidarity and cooperation and camaraderie and shared resources. And there's an alienation from that

in the form of colonialism and eventually capitalism that, you know, just sees nature as something to be suppressed, dominated, and then exploited and plundered for profit or to maximize comfort, et cetera. And there's an interesting little thing you said about the conquistadors kind of just pointing to a patch of land and saying, this is mine now, you know, this hyper individualism. Eventually, that mentality evolves to become the anarchy of the market, right? Of a bunch of different capitalists jostling for profit maximization and, you know, creating a situation in which there's a surplus of shit we don't want or need. And then the things that we actually do deeply need are not accounted for because they're not in various ways profitable.

And so the conceded door pointing to a point part of land and saying, that's mine. And then the other one saying, okay, the patch next to mine is, land as mine and the the the lack of um thinking about how those two pieces pieces of land relate to one another i think is a fascinating early insight to the anarchism of individualism that would eventually manifest under capitalism as the anarchy of the market and all of its sort of attendant issues that we're seeing you know spread and explode across the planet today so yeah that's that's incredibly interesting anything else you want to say about that before we move forward and shift to the to the other text. Yeah, I agree with their interpretation of like how that that

mentality, that private property does evolve into like, you know, the anarchy of the market and whatnot. I mean, like I always think a lot about like, you know, my folks live in Oklahoma. It's crossed by fences, you know. I'm a fence hater in a lot of ways. It blocks a lot of the way for animals to move around. It just kind of destroys a lot. You know, it's, it's antithetical to rational planning. And that's kind of, I think, what was interesting about Mariatici and then like a little bit of like what Manuel sort of gets into and his critique of capitalism.

But two, I would say that like kind of just to finish up with this question on like alienation, I guess, like, you know, you really, if you're, because these like ways of life come from thousands of years of trial and error, right? You know, people have all kinds of stories about when humanity screws up, you know, in a distant past, you know, and like, people have learned that you've got to consider where you're getting your resources from and you have to treat it with respect. You know, you have to understand that we're bound to this relationship because you need water. You need food. You need, you know, you need these things.

And so you really cannot like survive something like climate change, you know, for example, particularly a lot of native communities are suffering right now or on the front lines of like climate change. like people are having their reservations flooded, you know, it's too damn hot, you know, a lot of crops are suffering. People are really having to move around like with the flooding of those events in Alaska and whatnot. Like, you know, particularly for us and in our situation where we are, you know, we ourselves cannot have a solution that doesn't factor in like this work of considering not just how we're organizing our labor, but also our labor in relation to the things that we work with and fortunately we have the lead on that so much of this is in the culture it just needs to be put into power yeah absolutely well said so let's let's shift to the other text indigenous

marxisms and um you know howard adams argues that canadian elites constructed whiteness and this resonates with with the u.s as well constructed whiteness as a cross-class identity that bound ordinary settlers to colonial expansion how should this history kind of change the marxist understanding perhaps of class formation, the revolutionary subject, and importantly and fascinatingly for me, the possibilities of white working class solidarity. Yeah. So this is, I feel like this is a really common subject. Again, like in the humanities, I've seen it a lot, come up in my academic life.

It reminds me of this book called Wages of Whiteness, which basically talks about the racializing process for white workers as being like co-constituted with a proletarianization process. So it's like, you know, how did indentured, you know, Irish servants become white, for example. And to what ends was this serving capital? And I guess in that instance, you know, they were used to break up black unions. They were used to create hierarchy within the workplace among the workers, right? And in the Canadian context, I'm not as familiar with their labor history, but what Adams does talk about is essentially the same phenomenon happening where when workers are allowed to move into whiteness, the white working class has an affinity with the bourgeoisie, or he's, you know, implying that the bourgeoisie assigns them, I guess, a place of superiority amongst the non- non-white workers. And so it is important to remember this history. It is important to remember

that working class solidarity isn't always as clean and simple as, you know, we as Marxists may like it to be. However, I do think that people don't always take up this question in good faith either. I do think that, you know, very unfortunately, sometimes it can truly go to an identitarian place today. And I think we kind of lose sight of the importance of asking a question like this and looking at this, you know, not always so smooth history. I do think it's important to remember that, you know, the way racialization works and the way whiteness is kind of wielded is, you know, racialization is a process that serves capital in different ways at different times. And so like Peyton was kind of mentioning in our pre-conversation, you know, it's not always uniform that white workers were weaponized against native people. There's moments where white workers are working in solidarity with native people against the boss or against a particularly exploitative project. In this chapter, Adams is talking about the enormous solidarity that was being built up in the

northern Saskatchewan region between farmers, white workers, METI workers, Indian workers. And so I think it is important to look at that too and to look at the very fluid way that racialization serves capital in different moments in different times and places. And so if this is a matter of merely saying like, oh, well, we need to be careful when we're talking about, you know, building solidarity with white workers,

I'm like, well, this is actually a bigger conversation about how we understand class solidarity and I do think that overall Native people must take class solidarity more seriously. This is something that I think a lot about in my context here in New Mexico as a Pueblo person where we also have a really, really badass history of poor and working class solidarity with the surrounding non-Indian communities, the surrounding Nuevo Mexicano, Heniziro, the Hispanic communities, and how up until the late, 1800s, we were still fighting the Americans. We were fighting American expansion. And so I think

when there is a consciousness that the white worker really doesn't benefit from inclusion, you know, or being assigned a particular status by the bourgeoisie, I think it's, there's just unlimited possibilities. And I do think that's something that is necessarily going be a part of what any kind of self-determination or sovereignty looks like here. And I will say I'm talking about here. It's different from place to place, for example, Pavin's area, that dynamic looks very different. I don't know if you want to add. I guess, yeah, for a minute.

I mean, I agree with everything Jen is saying, you know, like Oklahoma is like an illegal state. It was founded illegally, you know, on land that, you know, not only the original peoples who live there are entitled to, but, you know, also too, like even by American law, it's supposed to be ours. You know, it was just taken by people, you know, settlers called the Sooners, you know, but after all that incredible violence and then, of course, just the ongoing hell of, you know, allotment and whatnot, like the green corn rebellion still happened, you know, mainly because of like banks trying to drive out small farmers, native black and white, you know, and I'm not trying to idealize this as like some utopic everybody got together and we love one another,

but, you know, at times the common. enemy shines through the things that are ways we are pitted against one another by that enemy. And, you know, I think it's interesting in that, like, right now we are kind of seeing a resurgence in the deployment of anti-Indian hatred, particularly in my state, Governor Stitt, who's a fake turkey, for a variety of historical reasons with it, is like trying to advocate, essentially, like, new termination, you know, of Oklahoma tribes. And he's trying to use anti-Indian stereotypes and tropes and, you know, a variety of things to stow hatred between white workers and native people there. And we'll see to what extent that turns into resistance,

oppression, and or solidarity with that. But I can say that it is encouraging to see lots of people come together against data centers in my state in particular with all kinds of backgrounds. So, you know, I pray that folks can understand that we have more unity than we have this unity. but at the end of the day, my policy with these things personally is always that I'll take what I can, but I will defend myself. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And I think, you know, it goes without saying that from the other end of that relationship, from the white working classes perspective, anybody interested at all in liberation in a better future has to, you know, take not only solidarity and internationalism and all those things incredibly seriously,

but in the context of a settler state, it's, you know, non-negotiable. to have full solidarity with indigenous peoples and their fight for self-determination. And if we have any pretense of wanting to confront and dismantle the structures of capitalism and imperialism, that absolutely requires and is inextricably linked to dismantling and overcoming all structures of colonial and settler colonial and neo-colonial domination. And that should go without saying sometimes obviously it doesn't. And there's lots of perhaps confusion on that point. unfortunately, but for us on the Marxist left, that has to be central, especially the Marxist left in a settler state like the United States or Canada from this example. I just actually,

as just a personal side note, I just visited for the first time ever northern New Mexico. And it was absolutely gorgeous. And I went out of my way to try to educate myself on the indigenous history in particular of the land and the, you know, the indigenous spiritual meanings and cultural meanings assigned to, you know, what is now called the Sangra de Christo Mountains, but the Taos Mountain in particular. And the history there is absolutely fascinating and incredibly deep. And I encourage people in that area, but even just people more broadly to learn from that and study that history because it is quite fascinating. But let's go ahead and move forward, switch back to the other text, as we're going to do throughout this conversation.

George Manuel argues that a pipeline, a mine, a dam, or an employment program is not genuine development if it reduces a people's control over their lives. So what would fourth world development actually look like? And how does it challenge capitalist ideas of modernization, growth, and progress? I mean, I think, like, Manuel gets to the heart of it when it comes to, like, control with it because a lot of his critique of, like, what capitalism has done to us is it's, made us very dependent because capitalist society. People, native people work. We work a lot. We work very hard. You know, we just don't work for ourselves. We're working for Taco Bell, McDonald's, the mines, the academy, whatever may be, you know, like everything is externalized, you know, in the capitalist world primarily. And even like within tribes, often, you know, capitalist relations

and nonprofit relations prevail. But, like, that's a degrading type of work. That's a disempowering type of work. It's wage labor. You're working for somebody else. You're not a participant in your job, you're making things you have no say in for somebody else who controls you, you know, and your reward is not some type of community meaning or some type of place or honor or love instead. It's like a wage, which is an abstract representation of exploited labor. You know, it's not real. It's not something you can eat, you know, it allows you to eat at their, you know, discretion. And so, like, his main thing is that this, this way of life that we've been forced into this capitalist system deprives us of control and it degrades us.

and makes us a very like dependent people that only work, you know, for like survival, for wages, for these types of things. And we need to get out of that mentality, you know. And the only way to do that is to put in, rebuild the economic, rebuild our own economic systems in a way that is self-directed. That is something that people participate in. He gives an example of what he means by that when he says that. I don't like the couch and reservation, excuse, if I pronounce that wrong, but on the couch and reservation when he was a community development worker, he talks about a housing project that he was engaged in organizing for, both against the government to provide aid, but also, too, against, like, local elites and trying to

like, yeah, with the, and trying to, like, get the people to come together and demand better housing in their situation. And it brings up that while the housing getting built was a great thing, and it addressed the needs of the community, the main victory of that work was that, For him, you know, if people are getting educated and how to do construction, how the process of building these things work, how the buildings work, like the proliferation of knowledge about how to do things for yourself and as a community and also being empowered in carrying that work out, not just of fighting for the thing to be built, but doing it yourself with their own hands, doing it together, is critical to what he conceives of his fourth world development because that unalienated labor, labor for the sake of the community, you know, labor is part of something great. or meaningful labor is what's so key to making indigenous society, indigenous society. It's what nourishes the culture. It's where the culture comes from, you know, and what the culture reinforces. And so to him, you know, welfareism, the state, just building things for you, or capitalism, alienated labor being expanded into our lives, those are not true development

because they disempower our people while true development must be something that we do ourselves for ourselves and the struggle is ultimately about the means to be able to do that the land resources you know the help necessary do the work i mean i think a lot about thomas sancara saying that like don't give us grain or don't give us you know food give us tractors you know at the end of the day i would like to build my own tractors you know and and we'll see what that looks like but um it's my best answer for a lot i think like especially now as we are you know, as Pavin mentioned, we're facing the disproportionate impact of climate change pretty drastically. We're already having to find ways to respond to these things with sometimes just

the labor of whoever is available. Like a few years ago, we had a pretty terrible mudslide that came in and affected the neighboring Pueblo. And it was just a matter of people getting out there to put up sandbags and build Dan's, like, within the day. And so these things are becoming more central to how people are kind of making sense of a future. But not only that, you know, in the political realm, we are facing down neotermination. I'm not sure if you're following, like, the moves Trump is making to just squash and remove protections for huge swaths of, you know, sacred sites or national parks, such as, bears ears, Chaco Canyon. And while these are places that, you know, people may see as, you know, symbolic or not inhabited, you know, one, I, you know, obviously believe in the protection of sacred sites and, you know, the spiritual significance of them, but also these landscapes, in many ways, right, harkening back to the point that paper was making about Marieti, they're not, they're not attached to our,

ongoing, you know, our landscapes that we depend on now, right? Our river systems, our groundwater systems, you know, our hunting grounds. And not only that, to roll back protections for these sites does set a legal precedent to attack more of our trust lands and to continue to violate a lot of these places that we quite literally do depend on. And I'm not saying, again, tribes evenly. are land-based or, you know, have their hunting agricultural practices, but many of us do, actually. And this is having very immediate impacts on us. And so I think this dissemination of skills and the reframing of labor and, quite frankly, reclamation of communal labor is something that's really heavy on people's minds across all political tendencies, including, you know, our leaders

who we might be quick to criticize, are now having to think. very seriously about these things. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the fascist Trump administration's assault on on sacred sites, on indigenous communities, on public land is inextricable from the Trump administration's assaults on Palestine and Iran, which is inextricable from allowing corporations to poison our food, to increase their profits. It really is this sort of accelerationist and feverish sort of crescendo of the colonial mentality that is, that is, that is, that is. present, of course, in every single United States administration, but has a particularly fascist and

overt and just death embracing sort of inflection in the Trump administration. So I have been following that, and it's absolutely, it's beyond egregious. It's terrorism. It's an assault on life itself. And I did want to say earlier you mentioned just really quickly the idea of self-reliance. And it just occurred to me how fascinating it is that from the indigenous perspective, the term self-reliance is a communal self. It's an us. Self is not just an individual and how that contrasts sharply with the settler notion of self-reliance, which is like one guy in a gun, you know, taking his stand. And I think that just speaks so, so well to this psychosis of colonialism and where that mentality has gotten, you know, our species when it comes to our relationship to nature

in the crisis of the biosphere more broadly. So I just wanted to kind of quickly mention that. But let's go, you know, moving forward a little bit here. I'm sticking with Manuel because he proposes kind of as a solution, you know, home rule, responsible government, treaty relationships, and confederation among free communities, which I think is really interesting. Can you kind of talk about this and, you know, whether or not this should be understood as reforming the settler state, constructing a,

form of dual power or beginning an entirely different political order altogether. Sure. I can take a swing at this one. So I want to begin by first giving a lot of grace to Manuel on this one. I again want to remind people of the context he was coming from, right? I think throughout this book and when I read authors from this era, something that's pretty heartbreaking is they do have a lot of faith in the possibility of, you know, alignment with, you know, non-native people, not necessarily always on the basis of class, but really on this basis of us, belonging to a global community of us recognizing our mutual humanity. And the things that he saw, you know, when he was young, the desecration of Islam, the coming of the Indian agents,

they were unfathomable to him, right? These are things that were not even imaginable to native people in many cases. And so when he is proposing, when he's making these propositions, home rule, treaty relationships, I think in his mind, he was sincerely, I think he saw this as a form of constructing dual power. I think he really saw this as a way to overcome the position that's, you know, Canadian settler law had put them in where if they wanted to, if they wanted the full rights of a Canadian citizen, they had to assimilate and denounce being Indian. If they wanted to remain Indian, they had to accept being second-class citizens with no rights. And so I think

he really saw this as a way to reckon with that dynamic, which is a losing dynamic. And it's, mirrors the dynamic that, you know, federal end in the United States created for us, too. And So seeing the elders of this time, or I mean, they weren't elders, that are the elders to us now, but seeing, seeing, you know, the leaders of this time really deal with this, they're in an impossible situation. And a lot of what manual work towards, right, with the reforming of the Indian Act and so on has been, there's a whole lot of criticism of that and what became of that. And there's a lot of, you know, arguments saying that this is what led to and reinforce the politics of recognition that are so common in Canada now where, yeah, we're getting recognized. But there's actually still no possibility for sovereignty. They're actually still on paper, don't have the right to self-determination. Oh, but they get to practice their culture.

Their culture is so celebrated in the mainstream. my traduce famous tattoo and what have you but today I think that what he was proposing unfortunately

we know that it didn't exactly work to construct dual power and what he was proposing I don't think would be taken up today in the same way and I don't think it would achieve the ends that I think he was hoping for, unfortunately. And it is really interesting to look back on this.

And we're not even terribly far into the future. But, you know, reading something like this really makes me see how rapidly our political landscape shifted. And just how insidious, right, the inclusion and recognition is, which, again, there's tons of work about that. But I do think it is just important to give the leaders of this time grace. I will say the confederation of free communities is still very relevant and still, I believe, very possible and something we should really consider as a tactic. I think that's the goal, right? I think the consolidation of political and economic power for tribes today is going to be one of the only ways we're able to really stand on. our own in a world where, you know, we're dealing with a dying, we're living inside of a dying

empire. And so what does it mean to not get stuck down with the ship? We really have to consolidate what we have now. And I think this is so important because, you know, so often I hear non-natives, even non-native leftists who, you know, really believe they're good friends of ours will bring up this point that, oh, there's just so few of you. They're just so few of you. And I'm like, okay, be that as in May, we have way more, you know, capital, right? We have way more money. We have economies, you know, some of us have economies as big as African countries, right? It's no joke if we were to consolidate that. It's really not. And I think that we need to take ourselves more seriously, um, politically and economically and, um, really, really start to think about what it means to

delink and really the consequences of failing to de link as the empires in crisis right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I think that's all very well said and I think, you know, you handle that issue and that tension with nuance and complexity and, you know, I think a genuine amount of kindness and charity to, you know, the elders of the community working through some of these serious issues at perhaps a different time. Certainly the construction of dual power, I think,

is not just necessary in all of our sort of understandings and political analysis, but it's going to increasingly become inevitable as, you know, the capitalist state, that North American states, particularly Canada and the United States, continue to deepen the natural crises of the biosphere of climate collapse, that they're not at all interested, the ruling classes of especially the United States in particular, they're not at all interested. And I'm sure this applies to Canada as well, although I'm less familiar,

with helping people, with assisting people, with creating a better life for the mini, you know, they're just going to extract and extract and extract until there's nothing left to take. And as you said, that's just a structural logic

of colonialism and capitalism itself. So the construction of dual power to meet our needs and to deal with our, you know, our problems locally and as communities, I think is only going to increase. And hopefully there's a basis there

for genuine solidarity. in that way. And you know, you mentioned this idea that some, you know, well-meaning perhaps white leftists or have that, you know, there's so few of you. And I think perhaps that comes from just in ignorance. Maybe if you are confined to like super huge cities on the coast or something, you might be able to have that delusion. But I mean, you know, living in the Great Plains, having been to New Mexico, having been to Oklahoma, lived a lot of my time in Montana, off the Crow Reservation, have family that are, you know, you know, in that in that community, there's a, there's a powerful presence of, of indigenous communities throughout North America.

And yes, as a, as a, as a bloc, as a, as a people, as a confederation of free communities, there's absolutely a genuine potentiality for, for enormous political power. So I completely reject the idea that there's a weakness there or there's a lack there, It's just not. But I want to kind of move forward and shift over to the indigenous Marxism piece because I think this next question kind of continues the dialogue of that former question. Because Adams and Markel warn that state-funded self-government can create what they call a red bourgeoisie and red capitalism in which indigenous elites manage extraction without ending colonial dependency. How can we distinguish genuine self-determination from neo-colonial administration dressed in the language of sovereignty and culture, et cetera? Oh, yeah. I'm so glad that we asked this question, Britt, because this is something we really got to get real about amongst ourselves as Native people.

I hope that the Native people listening really do take this point seriously and don't take it as something antagonistic because it. I think our failure to understand that we do have our own red bourgeoisie, we do have our own compador class. The failure to acknowledge that has had just profound consequences for us, right? I think that literally prevents us from making sense of how we understand the development of class and class stratification in our societies. And so I say this is just like this is just my, you know, thing that I say, but I'm like, there is no, what I say is sovereignty without socialism is just Indian capitalism straight up because much of the time, you know, there's so many instances where the, whether it's an endeavor to continue massive resource extraction, not even in a way,

you know, not even in a sense that like our minerals are nationalized, right? where we're really, really getting the shit end of the stick, that's called an assertion of sovereignty, right? You know, having a Raytheon factory is called an assertion of sovereignty. Taking jobs at Los Alamos National Labs is an assertion of sovereignty. And so we, if that sovereignty, right, anything can be called sovereignty, even if it's quite literally to our detriment, even if we see the impacts of that detrimental impacts of that in real time and within a lifetime. And so I think if we want to talk seriously about sovereignty, we do need to understand and take seriously our economic life

and what it means to sustain a nation, right? Not just to sustain a small group of people for a limited amount of time. And so I think how can we distinguish, you know, this from neo-colonial administration, it literally requires us to have a materialist analysis. It literally requires us to be invested in a nation-building project and not just simply seeing ourselves as wards of the state who are inevitably going to be beholden to the limitations of receiving federal monies and what have you. And so I really hope that there is a shift. And I do see this shift happening. I really do. I do see this shift among tribal leaders really rethinking what sovereignty means and, you know, what asserting it

is going to take. I do think there's a lot of fear right now amongst leaders, too, because of the moves the Trump administration has pulled. I know it was really profound when my own governor said the Trump administration can do anything right now. So they are taking seriously the attacks on us. And it is really foreseeing a shifting in how we're thinking about development and sovereignty overall. And so how can we distinguish genuine self-determination from neocolonial administration? I think it's, you know, are these shifts coming from the people? Are they coming from the masses? Are they being, you know, imposed on us from, you know, outside consultants and, you know, think tanks?

Are they, or are they direct responses to our immediate material needs? Are they something that are coming about to respond to what impacts us the most directly on the ground? And yeah, it is unfortunate the state of, you know, our kind of confidore class, because in some cases, you know, they're competent, you know, capitalist. In many cases, they're not, even if they believe they are. And even that can be arguably more messy sometimes. But I don't know if you want to add to this. Yeah, I would also say that like the four-fold project, as Manuel, like, articulates it, you know, is not a project.

It's a project that's fundamentally antithetical to there being class stratification within the native community. You know, it's a society where everybody works. It's a society where everybody works together. and gives and provides and reciprocates with one another. It's a society based on relationship building between equals with it, and that equality is guaranteed everybody contributing what they can from each according to their ability to each according to their need. And that's a society it's antithetical to parasitism.

You know, it's a society, it's antithetical to hoarding wealth. It's a society, it's antithetical to domination of one person over another. So by virtue of the goal, by virtue even of just comparing where we are now to what we used to be and where we would like to go, you know, in this book, there is no place for, you know, capitalism. There is no place for a Petty Borswell class. There is no place for classes. And ultimately, that requires a class struggle because the types of solutions and things, the types of the establishment rhetoric of, you know, people attempting to characterize development as red capitalism, you know, of business development of sovereignty, of accumulating capitalist sovereignty.

You know, while some, to some extent, forced on us by circumstance, for example, casinos were some of the only ways to, like, raise independent capital to provide social services so people weren't so poor. You know, that time, those things ultimately are at a point now where they're beginning to be stretched to their limits. Native business, right? The two kind of major things is I see it, right? Native business and kind of like government subsidies and support, right? If you really think about it, the entire native economy is entirely at the mercy of the state. in American capital with it.

There is no possible way that native businesses are ever going to compete with Walmart with it. There is no way that a native capitalist class can develop even if people wanted it to develop with it. It is dependent on all the concessions that the state provides us to allow space

for some degree of economic development as a concession for the militancy of the 60s and 70s and the hard work of all the people who came before us, you know, right now. And that concession is going to end and not too long. You know, we are ultimately like if we are ultimately something that is taking from funds of the government would like to use for foreign wars and violence, you know, elsewhere right now is it descends into fascism. And so these types of like special benefits, these types of federal funding that we receive, all these things are entirely at the mercy of those folks. And we have to do what I believe Manning will, you know, really captures succinctly when he says we need to basically move beyond the politics of appealing to morality, you know.

as like the main trap of indigenous politics, we need to move beyond defending and attempting to articulate different versions of victimhood to the state, right-wing victimhood and left-wing victimhood, you know, for these types of concessions. And we need to begin seriously considering how we can provide for ourselves what we have and what we've accumulated, like what Joan was talking about, the capital, through all the hard work, you know, efforts, suffering, and decisions that people made before us. And that project is a class project that requires class. struggle within the community to put this vision in power as opposed to the people that want to go out with the system because they can't imagine anything else so they benefit too much from it.

Powerfully, powerfully said, completely agree with every single word you said there. And kind of building on this continuing line of discussion here, Adams treats indigenous self-determination. I think this was mentioned earlier, largely as a transitional stage within a broader socialist revolution, whereas Maracle understands it as the permanent reconstruction of indigenous peoplehood, territorial authority, and collective responsibility. Does universal socialist emancipation require enduring indigenous political difference, or does it ultimately expect that difference to dissolve? How do you navigate that question? So I think this has a couple things going on here. I think the first has to do with like the real obviously like answering the

question as you just said like, you know, will we like always be independent or are we going to have to like, you know, are we going to ultimately merge into a larger socialist project? Do we benefit from that? Do we not benefit from that? And then also too, I think another major question brought up here is the relationship of like the question of class struggle and Marxism and it's a relationship with indigenous movements, indigenous societies in the 20th and 21st century. So I guess I'll just like straight up start this question off by saying I'm way more inclined to what Markle has to say. I believe that you know the message of the fourth world is that there is no

antagonistic contradiction between us developing along our own lines and a little broader emancipatory movement in the rest of non-native society occurring with there shouldn't be a contradiction there shouldn't be a disagreement you know like we are simply asserting our right to self-determination to grow and develop a according to our own principles, which are, you know, antithetical to oppression, class society, exploitation. And we have the right to be able to do that. I think Manuel makes a very profound point when he says that one of the main reasons why he emphasizes self-reliance,

and I really appreciate how you put that as communal self-reliance and not just like uncles on the land. You know, the reason why he emphasizes that self-reliance is because to him, ultimately, any form of like union with like the non-native you know world or states or whatever kind of forms you know on this continent any union with that must be a voluntary union that we are in a position of equality and decide for ourselves whether we want to join or not join and it is both the principally is both the principal and material take of people who are not native to respect our right to be able to develop according to our means and choose whether we'd like to be something or not be something with them.

And so that's kind of my answer to that question. I think real quick on the question of like the relevancy of like Marxism and class struggle, I think that I, you know, I disagree with like my, from my reading, my interpretation of like what Adam sees the relevancy of Marxism and the people as is something that has to be imported from the larger struggle into the community because of the way elites use cultural nationalism and sort of paper over contradictions among our own people. I disagree with that. I think that the native working people, you know, regular humble native working people

are more than capable of grasping class struggle, and they already do. If you see how people get mad on Facebook, get corrupt tribal chairman, you know, you will see the native class struggle occurring. It simply needs to be organized. This is not something that has to be imported from the outside

and should not, honestly, in my opinion, with it, because that would be, you know, reinforcing a different kind of dependency. And I think on the other hand, too, you know, Maracle had terrible experiences with the non-Native left in her time, you know, and the way that they treated Native people and the way that they're the personal conduct of their members, you know, like the Communist Party of Canada and their actions towards Native women and other things like that. And so I understand, you know, her hesitancy to want to leave, you know, the relevancy of Marxism.

out of the community and at least how I see it, like develop her own kind of interpretation of what's going on. And I think that that leaves out the fact that Marxism is a tool, you know, it is something that's irrespective of certain projects we may disagree with or certain groups we may disagree with taking it up.

It's not a personalized thing. It is a tool as a weapon. And, you know, guns and tools and machinery and things may be foreign to this continent, but we have taken it up to defend ourselves and build our lives nonetheless. So I believe that, ultimately, you know, our own people can grasp these tools of Marxism in the same way that we have

grasped other alien things and utilize it to understand the ways in which an alien system, such as capitalism, has affected us and made us oppress our own people on top of being oppressed, you know, by the state. And so I would say that would be kind of my response to the miracle take. But her basic conclusions that she comes up with here are ones that I agree with, though, in this question. But yeah, Jan, what I'm doing? Yeah, at this point might be like run into the ground and I even kind of like snicker when people make this point. But, you know, Marxism is really not as alien to us as, you know, people make it out to be. I remind people that Marx and Eagles were looking at my people, specifically Pueblo people along with the Haud Nishoni, Kanaka Maui, as examples of what they called primitive communism. And, you know, we could debate the semantics of that term. But nonetheless, you know, they were looking to us to essentially validate their theories, right? And I will say a little more, I think, when it comes to the difference between how Adams

and Miracle take up their understanding of this, it has a lot to do with their backgrounds, you know? I didn't realize that Adams was like a Berkeley student, right? He said he wasn't political until he went there. he is like a self-admitted late bloomer he said he felt some shame about participating in things because he's like white passing and um i can really see how his specific uh background really informed his differing uh opinions about you know the use of these politics and i think and and with maricol again like yeah she had some you know she comes from a different context right in terms of you know connect And she also, as Pavin mentioned, had these really awful experiences with other left organizations in Canada. And I don't know if you're aware, but the way some of these, you know, socialist organizations in Canada think about, talk about Native people today is just horrendous. Like, so I, you know, even just seeing that, I'm like, wow, I can only imagine what these conversations were like back in her time.

But what happens is I think they both kind of end up throwing out the baby with the. bathwater in that Miracle is kind of looking to lean into like, I guess, a culture-centric way of making sense of these things and kind of abandons the tools of Marxism. And again, I think maybe that has to do with being exposed to Marxism is like a movement or a clique or a social group, right, which sadly, that's how many people are exposed to it today too. So again, reminding people that, well, it's not a click. It's not a trend. It's not, you know, these. A subculture. Yeah, subculture. It's, it's a frame of analysis. It's tools. It's science that anyone can use, that we can use to our own ends for our own projects. And then I think with Adams,

he ends up becoming really disdainful or he ends up becoming really resentful of how culture is used to justify things like extraction and participation in capitalism and the further subjugation of their people, which is, again, something that is still happening today, very unfortunately. But I think he also kind of veers a little bit, he veers off a little too much in that, you know, culture does still matter if we're seeing it as something not just symbolic or not just in the realm of the politics of recognition, but as being attached to it. labor as being attached to our mode of production inherently. And I think, you know, perhaps he didn't get to witness that in his life under his particular circumstances, but that doesn't necessarily

reflect everyone. And so, yeah, I feel like it's really sad to kind of look back on where this divide developed historically through both of these figures and consider that, you know, these are actually debates that are still alive and well, even though there is no inherent contradiction. And I really hope that Native people continue to reckon with this divide because I would argue there's no divide at all here. Yeah, I think both of you really navigate that tension with a lot of thoughtfulness, which I really appreciate. And, you know, broadly, and we won't have time to get into this, but I just leave it to the listener to contemplate is this, you know, within Marxism more broadly, there is this tension and this interesting, dialectic between the universality of human liberation, right, and the dignity of difference, the dignity and the integrity of self-determination for different peoples and different cultures,

and how to reconcile, you know, a universal vision of emancipation from all forms of exploitation of exploitation and oppression with the very real need for different communities and different peoples to be able to genuinely and freely express their own uniqueness and the only uniqueness of their cultures and their histories. And so that tension is, I think, philosophically at play, perhaps underneath this particular debate, which I think is worth thinking about deeply. But you mentioned Markel having these bad relationships or these terrible experiences with settler socialist organizations. And this kind of feeds a little bit into this next question because I'm interested in what Mark Markle means by gendering decolonization and, you know, her deployment of the term

rematriation, which I found really fascinating. How did the patriarchal settler state attack indigenous women's authority over land, kinship, social reproduction and governance? And why can neither male dominated nationalism nor liberal inclusion adequately repair that particular damage? Yeah. I mean, I always, when I'm asked a question like this, I always start by reminding people that, you know, the sexism and misogyny like the racializing process is something that's deployed in service to capital, and it's deployed unevenly and in different ways at different times. And so it's important to remember that, you know, the seller state didn't attack indigenous women just because they were, you know, visually sexist, although that is how

it manifested, right? It's about destroying governance structures, right? It's about destroying how we organize labor. It's about destroying how we organized authority and really destroying just how our societies are organized overall. Because when we are looking at, you know, the status of Native women, I think we really in general, you know, even the self-proclaimed feminist, overlook what labor means, right? And you hear tons of conversations about, like, oh, like domestic labor is erased and not acknowledged. But we rarely talk about or think about what labor could look like outside of that and how changing, how we think of women as labor actually does play a huge role in facilitating the status of women in society overall. And so I think what she's getting at here, though, is something that, you know, self-proclaimed indigenous feminists have articulated a lot over. over time where we're looking at how the settler state facilitate these attacks on indigenous women by endowing the native men with some kind of authority over them and that as the native working man is being belittled in all aspects of society, you know, he can go home and be assured that he'll still have power over his wife and kids, the women and his family.

and that authority is enough, right, to make them submissive essentially to the settler government. And Native women all across North America, all across the world will describe some articulation of this dynamic in their communities for sure. I think that, and this is, you know, this is also talking about how this destroys the very nature of kinship, how this, how the destruction of, women's place, a woman's place in a kinship structure is the destruction of the kinship structure itself. And then in terms of governance, you know, I'm sure you've heard the way this is most commonly taken up is like in terms of like blood quantum, right? So it's ultimately on the woman, the native woman to reproduce the native nation. And if she deviates from that, well, she then becomes antagonistic to her nation. So whether that's having a mixed kid,

marrying a non-Indian, which we know the predatory targeting of Native women and Native women's bodies for land a key feature of how colonization has taken place and continues to, right, is access to the land through the bodies and Native women. That is a real dynamic. That is very sadly and scarily ongoing.

And so there's this critique of the male-dominated like Indian nationalism or like masculists you know, nature of these things. And I do want to say, although this dynamic of male domination is very real in most of our communities, I don't always think this, I don't always think with the way people throw around like calling Native Nationals and masculinist is always done in good faith. And I do want to be really honest about the fact that, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these, you know, Native women at the time were being heavily influenced by, you know, white feminism, by the, you know, popular feminist movements developing at that time. And what really,

really breaks my heart is looking at this history and realizing a lot of these women were embracing that because they were not embraced by their own people. They were seen as troublemakers. They were seen as getting in the way of the men kind of setting out to set things right and advocate for self-determination. And what's really sad is I think what ended up happening is it really pushed these women into kind of these new age spaces where they now are focusing on things that sadly ultimately do become identitarian. And it's really what's so heartbreaking because that's the accusation that's wielded at Native women very unfairly a lot of the time. But the truth is this very obvious where the broader general feminist movement was influencing a lot of these native women

and really encouraging them to pull away from participating in their own nation-building projects and really creating that divide between Native men and women within our communities. And so when I used to identify as an indigenous feminist, I don't anymore because to be quite frank, it's really hard to identify it as something other than a theoretical project that exists solely in the academy. And I think Merkel was in the midst of dealing with this too. I think this question also kind of shows us how stagnant this conversation has been. And how to close up this question, I think that Native, I think that Native, I think that women today, I think that anyone who calls themselves an indigenous feminist feminist

should take seriously proletarian feminism, especially if we are committed to looking at to the third world. We're committed to looking at the global South and the struggles of women there. We need to take seriously that tradition of proletarian feminism that comes from tribal women in the global South. And to understand that there is a reason that we do need to keep sovereignty nation building and class central to these conversations, not in a way that is antagonistic to women's movements, but in a way that really makes it clear that we necessarily must have an understanding of these things are linked if we are looking at the land as corresponding to the bodies of Native women especially, right? If we're out here saying things like violence

on the land is violence on the body, we need to take seriously. the attempts to proletarianize us. We need to take seriously the attacks on the land as attacks on our motor production and therefore on the status and welfare of women. And I'm still always thinking

through these things. This is like probably the main thing I try to study in my time and I was very moved by the philosophical trends in the feminist movement, which is a text that was actually written for women in the West. And I would just love to see this conversation kind of developed to interact more sincerely with women in the global South other than just in a symbolic way.

And so, yeah, and I think to interact with proletarian feminism really shows us that we need to rely on the movement of the people. we need to rely on, we can't rely on liberal inclusion and we can't rely on a male-dominated nationalism either. And then ironically, I do want to say, like, today, there's a lot more Native women leaders than we think, you know, even if it is a patriarchal tendency that kind of dominates how we think about things, you know, Native women are more likely to be college-educated than Native men. and we are really beginning to take these positions of leadership. And so I think there's already genuine material shifts we've got to look at now. And yeah, I do think we just, we need to have a more material understanding of the scope of Native women's oppression rather than reducing it to like, oh, we're just hated for like our reproductive abilities or what have you. And I just think it's it just had that we're kind of still on these very basic or like, you know, bioessentialist. notions of the source of Native women's oppression, but all in there.

Yeah. Pavin, you have anything to add to that? Yeah, just something brief. I was going to say, I think that, like, also, too, as far as, like, when it comes to, like, you know, definitely the male role in the suppression and the way that, you know, men are interacted with and whatnot. Like, you know, Manuel really emphasizes that, like, fourth where liberation is, like, a process of development and kind of the remolding of, like, people, you know, away from, like, the types of things that, you know, behaviors, norms, beliefs, you know, American ideology and whatnot that we've been inculcated with, including, like, misogyny, patriarchy, violence, you know, the types of things that people do, you know, men do with it. And I think that, you know, particularly in the

movement, this speaks to the need to have a strong commitment to the remolding of people. I speak kind of of like Gracely Boggs' organization means commitment document and kind of the way in which Vicky Legion 2 also provides answers. I think that this doesn't have to be dealt with, you know, this can be dealt with in a very practical, very direct, in a very serious way, and is integral to the project of fourth world liberation, building a successful movement that fights and combats these things, and transmen differently. And I do believe that, you know, while we're in the process of doing that, you know, I appreciate comrades like Markle and Jen and how far we've come. like beginning to really like figure out what this would look like. Yeah. Yeah.

To just to say one last thing, I think I always say a lot of what are framed as women's issues are actually men's issues, right? And so looking at the source, you know, men have a lot of healing to do amongst themselves. And I don't mean healing in an abstract wishy-washy way. They do need to confront their participation in these things and take it upon themselves to correct their behavior and to really find a way to feel human as themselves. And I think the attempt to proletarianize native people is about the destruction of our concepts of masculinity and instead of replacing them with, you know, the hyper-patriarchal way of relating to themselves that they have today.

And so I'll end it there. Yeah. No, that's a deep note. And I think just for time's sake and everything, let's just go ahead and wrap it up there. I mean, Jen and Paven, it's been an absolute honor and a pleasure to have both of you on, to help articulate these particular arguments as well as elaborate and expand on them with your incredibly thoughtful and principled analysis. It's really fascinating to hear. And I know I learned a lot in this conversation. I guarantee my audience has and I would love to have both of you back on in the future to continue some of these other threads that we were. able to only to touch on briefly or in some instance had to pass up altogether because I think there's even more on this outline, let alone the many conversations we could have that would take a lot of this analysis even deeper and on a wider range. So before I let you go, though, I want to give you both an opportunity to let people know where they can find you and your work or your organizations online and anything else that you would like to put in front of people's attention. Awesome. Thank you so much, Brett. I really enjoyed this conversation too. Thank you for

for this opportunity. If you want to keep up with us, like I said, we are part of a working group. It's closed at the moment. It is exclusive to native people. But we do not, we have a limited internet presence. You can follow our Instagram, Total Sovereignty Working Group. And then we also have a substack and a medium account. Like I said, it's minimal. And it's the substack and medium also under the same name, Total Sovereignty Working Group. And then if you're so inclined to follow my personal Instagram, it's Jen Marley's 1680. Yeah, I don't think parasycial internet relationships are always helpful. But if you have more questions for me, I'd love to engage.

Yeah, absolutely. We're doing our best. We're humble. We're mainly just working on getting these questions answered and figuring out the plan. but please follow us. Thank you very much for this opportunity, and we look forward to talking more and doing more work. Absolutely, yeah, I'll link to all of that in the show notes.

Thank you both so much. Keep up the amazing work, and let's definitely keep in touch and do a round two. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Yes.