Indigenous intellectuals like Kim Tallbear see the current Anthropocene crisis (climate change, etc.) as a continuation and intensification of the kind of thing Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans (among others) have experienced for centuries. Her thoughts for Indigenous People’s Day, shared on Tallbear’s Substack account, are well worth reading.
Describing a “radical hope” that might be available to us today, Tallbear writes:
In this moment, I see an opportunity for a sharpening of moral clarity across the land. The apocalypses that Indigenous and Black peoples have suffered for half a millennium are blossoming into settler state reckonings. That the violence and unsustainability of colonialism is now confronted by an ever wider number of people feels productive and ethically clarifying. We are more able to deny the genocide deniers, those who have denied our apocalypses while building their homes and farms, factories, institutions, and wealth upon stolen lands using stolen bodies and labour.
It is this “sharpening of moral clarity” that I believe we should all be pursuing today. How do we, each and together, support and contribute to the intensification of colonial, imperial relations that have captured the Earth in an unsustainable grip? How and from what positions can we resist doing that and work toward an alternative set of relations?
Colonialism and imperialism are historical forces aimed at control, exploitation, extraction, dispossession, and expansion of power across land, air, water, and space. The effects of these forces have been with the colonized and the imperialized for centuries; they and their traumas are deeply imprinted on colonized bodies, and remain deeply embedded within colonial and “postcolonial” societies.
But those results are today reaching all of us. They remain unequally distributed (as Tallbear points out), but their distribution will spread, as escape routes fall away for one population after another, as the unfolding storm of climate trauma continues to grow.
This is what Tallbear refers to (citing Junot Díaz) as a “sharpening of the already present” — “a moment in which the violent policies and strategies of US empire first enacted upon Indigenous peoples on this continent, and African peoples, and Black people, then enacted on other peoples abroad, are now returning home to a wider array of populations within lands that the US occupies and calls its own.”
This is the case of course for and within the United States. But here is where the U.S.-centrism of American intellectuals needs to expand to encompass a more global lens. The forms colonialism and imperialism have taken, leading up to the present moment of Anthropocene crisis and reckoning, certainly include the settler colonialism found across the Americas (and in Australia, et al), but also the plantation colonialism, exploitation colonialism, surrogate colonialism, internal colonialism, economic neocolonialism, ecological imperialism, and other forms found around the world.
Reckoning with those forms and with their responsibility for today’s crises is not helped by seeking one source to blame (the U.S., the West, Europe, et al.). It is done, rather, by tracing the commonalities between all of them — in historical imperialisms around the world including Europe’s, but also Japan’s up until the end of the second world war, China’s historically and in crucial ways today, Russia’s — which clearly continues in its militarized violence in Ukraine today — and many others (to which the Americas and Africa were certainly not immune). The multi-polar world order sought by Chinese, Russian, Indian, Iranian, and other state actors is not necessarily a solution to today’s crisis. It could also be a simple dispersion of its responsibility, a responsibility that isn’t at all being taken up by self-maximizing states.
The question is less an intellectual one than a pragmatic one: how to best understand colonialism and imperialism so as to be able to weaken these forces today, and how to build relational, affective, and political alliances that would reconstitute non-imperial and non-fascist relations across a widening world of socio-ecological possibility.
This is the project, as I see it, for all of us to take up.
