"Hope is not a tactic, it's a marketing scheme for the biomachinery of civilization. It is spoon-fed little by little to keep us going (progress), to keep enduring (resilience), to keep producing, to keep consuming. Hope preserves institutions of domination and exploitation from those who aren't distracted by its religions.

Hope maintains the imaginary confines of our servitude like an electric fence; we don't even know if it's on all the time. We become preoccupied by the fabulous sales pitch, "You too can become the master." Hope is progressive reform handed down from above, one link at a time it is the loosening of chains to make those enslaved believe that freedom is comfort in slavery."

- Klee Benally, "No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred", page 369

Respectability politics and "generative" (which is code for progressive) conflict are both part of the same machine that seeks settler inclusion through appropriate channels. Progressive activist projects attempt to render positive or legitimate action towards a favorable resolution. Both liberal and radical conflict resolvers are enticed to recuperate and mediate with settler society. They refuse to shed the skin of the civil, of the respectable. They articulate their intelligibility as 'generative' in order to make agreeable their brand of social management. They are the administrators and marketers of The Struggle™. Their liberalism encodes domination. It is the politics of idealizing your captor and putting their clothes on. If this is the 'new world' envisioned. It is utopic violence dressed in a sweatshop free organic cotton t-shirt emblazoned with the words Democracy Now!"

- Klee Benally, "No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred", page 364

#NavajoNation Dishonors Legacy of #KleeBenally: Agrees to #Uranium Transport Through #Navajo Communities

By #BrendaNorrell, #CensoredNews, February 3, 2025

"The Navajo Nation dishonored the memory and legacy of Klee Benally by agreeing to allow radioactive uranium trucks to travel through the Navajo Nation. It was what Klee spent the last years of his life fighting against.

"The deadly trucks from the #EnergyFuels #PinyonPlain uranium mine in the #GrandCanyon will pass through the #Havasupai's homeland, and then past the homes of #Paiute, #Dine' and #Hopi in Arizona before reaching the dumping ground: The Energy Fuels #UraniumMill in the #WhiteMesaUte Community in Southern #Utah.

"Klee is being honored with a #NuclearFreeFutures Award in New York in March.

"Nuclear Free Futures said, in announcing the award, 'Klee Benally was a Navajo activist and musician and member of the Navajo #Tódichiinii Clan and the #Nakai #Diné Clan. In addition to a
musical career with his siblings in the band #Blackfire,

"'Klee was a passionate campaigner and filmmaker exposing the #colonialist legacy of uranium mines and working for the cleanup of the more than 500 abandoned uranium mines that continue to contaminate the Navajo Nation. A month before his death on December 30, 2023, Klee published his book, '#NoSpiritualSurrender: #IndigenousAnarchy in Defense of the Sacred.'

"The award will be accepted by his mother Berta Benally.

"Klee, co-founder of #HaulNo!, warned of the danger to the water and rivers from the uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, and the planned deadly transport of radioactive ore, before he passed in
December 2023: 'There is possible radioactive contamination to land, water, and air from the #CanyonMine, White
Mesa Mill, and transport of uranium would impact northern Arizona, southeast Utah, the #ColoradoRiver, #MoenkopiWash, the #SanJuanRiver, and the lands and cultural resources of the #Havasupai, Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Paiute peoples.'"

Read more:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/02/navajo-nation-dishonors-legacy-of-klee.html
#WhiteMesaUte #EnergyFuels #HaulNo #BuuNygren #IndigenousAction #IndigenousResistance #NuclearColonialism #ReaderSupportedNews #Dine #RestInPowerKleeBenally #NoUraniumTransport #DefendTheSacred #ProtectTheSacred #UraniumMine #NoNukes #NuclearFreeWorld #NoNuclear #NoWar #NuclearWaste #NoMoreTransportationOfUranium
#NoNuclearWeapons #NoNuclearPowerPlants #NoUraniumMining #UteNation #NoUraniumMining #Navajo #Havasupai #GrandCanyon #NuclearWeapons #InformedConsent
#EnvironmentalRacism #WaterIsLife

And last, but not least, not a music video, but a plug for #KleeBenally's book, #NoSpiritualSurrender

"No Spiritual Surrender: #IndigenousAnarchy in Defense of the Sacred is a searing #AntiColonial analysis rooted in frontline experience. Klee Benally (#Diné) unrelentingly agitates against #colonial politics towards #IndigenousAutonomy and total liberation of #Nahasdzáán (#MotherEarth)."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6wWXP7_KmY&pp=ygUSa2xlZSBiZW5hbGx5IGNvdmVy

Available now from Detritus Books
detritusbooks.com

406 pages | $20
Nonfiction | Paperback
Available in select bookshops.

#RestInPowerKleeBenally #HaulNo # #IndigenousAnarchy
#NoUraniumMining #DefendTheSacred #NoMiningWithoutConsent #DefendMotherEarth #SaveOakFlat

"While Indigenous scholars and activists like Vine Deloria Jr. and members of the American Indian Movement have focused on the goal of Indigenous sovereignty "without political and social assimilation," this objective has been limited and ultimately reinforced the Euro-colonial, or more precisely the Westphalian, system, of nation-state sovereignty. "Tribal sovereignty" is not possible while colonial authority exists, and perhaps a more pressing concern is that it is fundamentally a colonial political concept.

While calls to "honor the treaties" on one hand could be viewed as assertions of Indigenous political authority, on the other, they are a myopic urge to revisit forced negotiations made under duress to benefit the colonial order. The strategy of colonial expansion was not designed to sustain treaties with Peoples that invaders planned to assimilate into their order. The US government had absolutely no problem breaking every treaty it marked its name on. From the colonizer's perspective treaties were always temporary; they were a concession to captivity, an agreement to civilization. They were merely a symbolic and political formality of capitulation. Treaties are dead words o dead pieces of paper that were negotiations of the surrender of our ancestors."

1/2

"Indigenous Mutual Aid organizing challenges "charity" models of organizing and relief support that historically have treated our communities as "victims" and only furthered dependency and stripped our autonomy from us. We organize counter to non-profit capitalists who maintain neo-colonial institutions and we reject the NGO-ization and non-profit commodification of mutual aid.

While solidarity means actively and meaningfully supporting each other, it also doesn't mean blind illusions of "unity" or that we must flatten out the diverse cultural and political ways and views that each of us maintains. There are some necessary tensions and factions in our communities and in radical Indigenous politics.

Some Indigenous non-profits such as the NDN "Collective" and Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-10 Relief Fund (NHFCRF) have made millions of dollars from relief efforts in response to this pandemic. Relief has become big business while root causes are reinforced and further entrenched. To illustrate the disconnect of analysis, the NHFCRF started distributing coal for Diné and Hopi families to burn to stay warm in the cold depths of winter. Others are proposing a "revolutionary Indigenous socialist" agenda in an academic vanguard charge to proletarianize Indigenous ways through redwashed Marxism.

This re-contextualizing of Marx and Engels' political reactions to European capitalism does nothing to forward Indigenous autonomy. The process inherently alienates diverse and complex Indigenous social compositions by compelling them to act as subjects of an authoritarian revolutionary framework based on class and industrial production. Indigenous collectivities and mutuality exists in ways that leftist political ideologues can't and refuse to imagine. As to do so would conflict with the primary architecture their world is built on, and no matter how it's re-visioned, the science of dialectical materialism isn't a science produced by Indigenous thinking. Colonial politics from both the left and the right are still colonial politics...

Indigenous Mutual Aid is not just about redistributing resources, it's about radical redistribution of power, to restore our lifeways, heal our communities, and the land."

- Klee Benally, "No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred", pages 309-311

"Put this into perspective that folks rushed to support #nodapl resistance yet perpetuated erasure of sacred lands and water struggles right where they live. This isn't to say Lake Oahe (the sacred confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri River) didn't warrant critical support, but to contextualize the larger struggles to defend the sacred and protect water.

Anti-colonial struggle necessitates an understanding that the frontline is everywhere. It measures and calculates how colonial power operates. If we don't build these understandings into our struggles, we risk the momentum ebbing right where Idle No More left its watermark.

Without meaningfully engaging in sacred sites defense at once as struggle against capitalism and colonialism (add racism and cis-heteropatriarchy to boot), we risk a not so distant future where we'll have people driving hybrids through South Mountain on Loop 202 to ski on shit-snow at Arizona Snowbowl on the Sacred Peaks while wearing #nodapl or "Defend the Sacred" t-shirts they bought at an Indigenous Peoples' Day event weeks prior.

This particular brand of superficial activism and anti-colonial posturing has become more prevalent post-Standing Rock. Indigenous Peoples' Day, as a process of collusion with occupying state forces, risks becoming a colonial patriotic ritual more than anything that amounts to liberation."

- Klee Benally, "No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred, page 275

"I offer that the term interrelationality considers these dimensions whereas intersectionality is anthropocentric (concerned with human social power relations) and internationalism is too loaded with the political baggage from conflicts of old world ideas and new world ideologies and doctrines. This is not to diminish the Black feminist brilliance and genealogy of intersectionality, but to offer an extension of its considerations beyond gendered colonial (identity) politics.

Interrelationality is free from such dilemmas because it is predicated on building and tearing down direct spacial and temporal relationships.

Overall it doesn't matter what term that's used, and I'm not intending this to be another tool in the activist's toolbox for progressive social transformation. The interests I have for these terms regard not their promises, but their limitations. We're not just Nations and sects/sections, so why attach such limitations to the ways we can connect, share, and attack?"

1/3

"Colonizers must religiously convince themselves and others that the world is already dead to justify their ongoing violence against the Earth and existence. In the face of global ecological ruin, some attempt to further convince themselves that killing the Earth just a little bit less is an appropriate response.

This is exemplified with climate justice movement organizing, where grand proposals of a "green economy" or a less ecologically devastating form of capitalism is the means to achieve human survival with a habitable planet.

"Big Green" non-profit corporations and so-called non-governmental organizations (yes even the smaller Indigenous ones too) set the terms for dissent and triage this crisis to the point where we can see the future coming back at us, but what else can be expected from marching in circles? After all, in the recycling of capitalism into climate justice, we still end up scrubbing their palaces green, resting our heads in green prisons, and sustaining unsustainable lifestyles...

[Thread] The next installment from #KleeBenally 's book, #NoSpiritualSurrender.

“The proposition of unplugging from a ‘dirty’ power source and plugging into a ‘green’ one does nothing to address the underlying power relations. It reinforces them.

“‘#GreenEnergy’ sustaining a Green Economy still demands resource #colonialism. From sacred #OakFlat in so-called Arizona where #SanCarlosApache are resisting a massive mine that is estimated to contain enough #copper ore to produce 275 million electric vehicles [#EVs], to sacred #ThackerPass in so-called Nevada where #Shoshone are resisting #LithiumMining, which is necessary for electric vehicle and ‘green’ energy battery production. A single car #LithiumIon battery pack contains 18 pounds of lithium. To electrify every vehicle throughout the world, an estimated 10.4 billion tons of lithium is needed, that is approximately 13 times the existing lithium reserves. The Thacker Pass lithium one is mismated to produce 60,000 tons annually. The proposed project spans approximately 28 square miles that would hold an #OpenPit and a #sulfuricacid processing plant to extract lithium from mined ore.

"The operation is estimated to release 152,713 tons of #CarbonDioxide [#CO2] annually and 400,000 gallons of #water is required for each ton of lithium meaning it will use 1.7 billion gallons annual. The Thacker Pass sulfuric acid processing plant will convert sulfur to leech lithium from raw ore, turned in from sources such as the #AlbertaTarSands, which are 1,500 miles away. The tar sands, located in so-called Canada, are known as the world’s most destructive oil operation.”

Page 138-139

#IndigenousAnarchy
#Ecosystem #DefendTheSacred
#CorporateColonialism #NoDAPL #CriminalizingDissent #WaterIsLife #ClimateDefenders #NoCopperMiningWithoutConsent #NoLithiumMining #CorporateColonialism #NoMiningWithoutConsent #LithiumMining #CopperMining #Greenwashing