#81
bb bourgeoisie
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icecrystal posted:

so i'm sure a lot of us are white. did any of you have a hard time reading this?



i'm feeling okay but my family history is exculpatory

#82
bb bourgeoisie
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also i am incapable of feeling guilt, or feeling
#83
UNUSUALY COOL
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L2SENoOsX70
#84
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kersplebedeb.com/posts/gender_sakai/

Fresh J Sakai on gender and oppressed nationalism
#85
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The_Boourns_Identity posted:

i'm curious about this settlers thing, why should I, your humble local doofus, read "Settlers"?



because based on the recent thread you made, you are lacking an understanding of settler history and historical materialist analysis of the white settler nations. I, too, did not understand my own white pig settler history until I read "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat: By J. Sakai" . After reading it you will be enlightened.

#86
[account deactivated]
#87
Post rating: +++++
i have some problems with the traditional left "genocide of the tribes" narrative that is in part endorsed by sakai. the first is one that sakai, to his great credit, avoids right off the bat by putting a picture of peltier right in the first couple pages and by repeatedly referencing contemporary native interests... but your typical liberal (especially out east for obvious reasons) finds it very easy to move from "there was a native genocide" to "and that's why there aren't indians anymore frowny face" which is not really appreciated by the 3 million actually-existing contemporary native people (this is also an underrecognized aspect of the mascot conflict--indians as contemporary living people vs. indians as defunct historical entities akin to vikings and spartans).

two it moves the spotlight away from the very explicit and well-documented genocide of the period between the end of the indian wars and the new deal (& also lingering in a less explicit but still very real form at least until ICWA's passage in 1978). that genocide wasn't the kind where everyone gets murdered, but it was a systematic and couldn't-be-more-overt effort to extinguish native cultures, and its echoes can be seen every day (not fifteen miles from where I sit now there was a community of native religious refugees from ~1900-25, who fled a reservation system that actively suppressed non-christian religions; i've met more adults raised in white foster homes than I can count, and that's without even getting into the boarding schools).

sakai, oddly, seems to ignore this period (haven't read the whole thing yet but I did some searches) to instead condemn the indian new deal as colonialist... which it was, for sure, no doubt, the spectacle of BIA-written-and-approved constitutions as "self-determination" was a disgusting farce, but it was still better than the genocide that preceded it and the self-described Termination era that came after wherein many tribes were coercively converted into land-holding corporations. it appears that sakai's sources here were AIM-types who were at odds with tribal gov'ts ("These are governments led by the Dick Wilsons and Peter MacDonalds, of elements whose capitalistic ideology and income was tied to collaboration with the larger capitalist world."--the "Dick Wilsons and Peter MacDonalds line here is speaking to the ugly can of worms that is intratribal racial politics, where late-19th century race science in the form of "blood quantum" is weaponized against natives with more white ancestry, and while it's not really my place to speak on this i can say it's highly possible that the Supreme Court will one day use it to strike down the whole tribal system under the 14th and that arguments over blood quantum are just as ugly as you'd guess). and while many if not most of those folks' complaints are well founded, it doesn't mean that allotment->termination or ANCSA Corporations were better alternatives (the line "Instead of the old practice of individual sale of small plots of land - which could be blocked by an Indian's refusal to sell - the new, capitalistic "tribal governments" signed wholesale mineral rights leases with major corporations"" is, in addition to being uncharacteristically liberal, really, really backwards--under the "old practice," i.e., an allotment system that was barely 50 years old at the time, the landholder would get bought out at best, and more typically would lose the land to tax forfeiture or foreclosure with the gov't/bank happily selling the land to white interests at pennies on the dollar)

(of course sakai's sources would expect a white indian-law lawyer like me to defend the indian new deal, given that he references vine freakin deloria as some kind of compromised house Indian, ... all i can say to that is that i've advocated true legal independence and moves away from the western template throughout my career and have always followed the lead of tribal members. plus i'm going to get my white ass outa this entire shitty profession as soon as i feel like i've paid off the debt i owe to the native folks who taught me what i know)

so, uh ~catches breath~ my third problem with the "settlers killed all the indians in a big genocide" narrative is that it's wrong and less interesting than the truth. ironically, sakai here does the exact same thing here that anti-communist historians do, takes a before shot and an after shot and say "look at how many fewer people there are in this second picture! looks like murrrrder." and i don't want to say that there wasn't plenty of murder, because there certainly was--but we have a decent idea of the numbers of natives killed by violence. 200 brutally murdered at sand creek, 150 at wounded knee, 150 at gnadenhutten. even some of the earliest wars are in that same <1000 range--pontiac war, king phillips war, etc, were all conflicts in which even the biggest battles would have participants measured in the hundreds. even if you make the (very safe) assumption that there was a shitload of undocumented massacres on the downlow in the 17th and 18th centuries and include the thousands of deaths that occurred during the various removals, the numbers are off by an order of magnitude. the truth is that the vast majority of that killing was done by first contact plagues, the initial wave of which destroyed densely populated, primarily agricultural statelets and converted them (James C. Scott-style) into hunter-gatherer groups--but hunter-gatherer groups with undeniably solid claims to those same lands--before almost any settlers had even shown up. the methods by which the settlers dealt with those claims include basically every option under the sun, but the ways in which they did so while trying to uphold the basic principles of capitalism are a source of endless fascination to me, and i'd love to read dive into the details from a marxist perspective. it is disappointing that sakai didn't do more there (although it's hard to fault him too much for privileging the narrative of the radicals he was probably talking to... but it makes me once again wish that those radicals had kept learning and developing their thought instead of largely getting murdered/imprisoned by the FBI)

Edited by thirdplace ()

#88
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

karphead posted:

Did some digging for source material on the last chapter's footnotes because it was small and I wanted to see what it would take:

9. Could not locate this pamphlet online



This is from Duke Library

Edited by swampman ()

#89
Post rating: +
i'd add that the contemporary natives i know, who maintain a lot of justified pride in their martial traditions and history, definitely prefer the mostly-true of "land dispossession largely occurred as a death by a thousand swindles/tax-forfeitures/occasionally a genuinely arms-length treaty because tribes had sufficient military strength to force the US to the negotiating table" to the much-less-true "it was a wave of inexorable death where the americans were the wehrmach and the natives were the polish cavalry"
#90
Post rating: ~
thanks, that was informative. I'm going through Settlers agains, there's a consistent polemic against CPUSA's revisionism as well as a tendency for euro-settler radicals to forget their place in this history. and I believe Sakai is correcting based on the "mass line", dealing with land question that is often erased, and other Maoist interventions
#91
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yeah i think it is all too easy for someone in 2016 to take the revisionist history on this topic for granted and to fault him for not rebutting the ways liberal ideology has accommodated that. i read bury my heart at wounded knee when i was like 14, and it wasn't all that discordant with with what I learned in school, but i don't think you have to be much older than me to have been taught uncritical manifest destiny bullshit. i can't find out when settlers was first written (anyone know?) but it's entirely possible that his intended audience all watched john wayne westerns as kids (instead of dances with wolves-type shit, really remarkable how easy it is to replace triumphalism with romanticized guilt to achieve the same end)
#92
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been listening to the interview audio, dude seems pretty chill
#93
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thirdplace posted:

i can't find out when settlers was first written (anyone know?)



it was published in the early 80s but in an interview he mentions having started work on it in the mid 70s

#94
[account deactivated]
#95
[account deactivated]
#96
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swampman posted:

karphead posted:

Did some digging for source material on the last chapter's footnotes because it was small and I wanted to see what it would take:

9. Could not locate this pamphlet online


This is from Duke Library



nice, did you get it through random emails? also, my server is down but should be up in the next couple of days (hopefully). if not, i have the files on my PC and can just forward them as necessary.

#97
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Been rereading settlers and get the eerie feeling I always had reading it before that Sakai was the link between Marxism 'Theory' and West Coast Panther etc tradition that unfortunately never got followed up on by the American Left
#98
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I shouldn't say never got followed up on since it obv was but has not yet reached fruition because of the highly cracker character of usaian society.


What I should say is its a work that follows historical materialistic principles but also promotes a realistic maybe even pro-protracted struggle position while still not taking on the exact rhetoric of a hypothetically illegal insurrectionist document
#99
[account deactivated]
#100
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

karphead posted:

nice, did you get it through random emails? also, my server is down but should be up in the next couple of days (hopefully). if not, i have the files on my PC and can just forward them as necessary.

Sent one polite email to one polite library staffer. Btw it turns out academia is full of helpful people.

#101
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I'll coordinate this tonight I was too busy sry.
#102
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

Btw it turns out academia is full of helpful people.




#103
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ill update the op with assignments for chapters
#104
Dont Mess With Sucess
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I'm doing chapter 2 & 7 then. it's trivial for me to check the OCR, but I don't have such as jstor access to start rounding up sources, so if anyone do, consider hitting up the bibliography sections?

Also steg do you want us to include anything to denote bolding/italics or are you doing that your own self

Edited by swampman ()

#105
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the bolding honestly looks like a bad scan. i wouldnt bother with it.
#106
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or rather, some of it is clearly a bad scan. how about we do this. if you come across a good passage and its bolded then bold it. if it looks more random then dont. annotate bolding with <b> </b>
#107
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Its too much work
#108
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the newer version has bolding too sooo
#109
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stego do you actually want people to do the sourcing crap to put up on the site? y/n
#110
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Sure if you want.
#111
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i'll get started on 3 & 4 friday
#112
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this shit is making me think that we need to form a collective cell for mim prisons and do like, 99% of their typing.
#113
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To be clear mim means Moderate Islamist Militants, right?
#114
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i should email them again. im so embarrassed that i broke contact.
#115
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alright, i'm working backwards on the source material and claiming chapter XIII
#116
Occupied Aztlan
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Prison solidarity work is exhausting stego, dont kick yourself over it. its common for their orbit to just do brief transcription stints.
#117
Dont Mess With Sucess
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karphead posted:

alright, i'm working backwards on the source material and claiming chapter XIII

I just finished doing the OCR for chapter 13 so dont do that
e: should we post the cleaned up text in the thread? I've been PMing it to stegosaurus.
ee: For anyone reading, chapters 6 is the only one unclaimed at this point, as im gonna do 14 while watching MST3K episode 10x12 "Squirm".

Edited by swampman ()

#118
Post rating: ~

swampman posted:

karphead posted:

alright, i'm working backwards on the source material and claiming chapter XIII

I just finished doing the OCR for chapter 13 so dont do that"



i was talking about the source material for the footnotes

#119
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Word.. . thanks
#120
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Urbandale posted:

Prison solidarity work is exhausting stego, dont kick yourself over it. its common for their orbit to just do brief transcription stints.



Ya try a more productive activity like working for the Sanders campaign.. Er I mean the PSL