No Spiritual Surrender

Description

No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred is a searing anti-colonial analysis rooted in frontline experience. Klee Benally (Diné) unrelentingly agitates against colonial politics towards Indigenous autonomy and total liberation of Nahasdzáán (Mother Earth).
406 pages

Excerpt:
“A reverberating despair echoes through dry canyons and off distant concrete walls filled with ancestral subversions, it is the far crying conspiracy of anti-colonial dissonance.
It is the conflict of Settler cognition in discord with itself, resonating against its contours and contradictions. It is the overbearing sound of desperation and failure weaponized into a pedagogy of negation.
Our defiances, our subterfuges, our anti-colonial antagonisms all have a natural resonant frequency. This is the indelicate strategy of breaking glass with sound. This is part of how we make sense of this world, again.

Indigenous academics are fond of quoting Patrick Wolfe in his assessment that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event.” Here I offer fragments of glass, bone, and thought that are ground together to make an illegible poultice. I offer that it is the responsibility of those who wage anti-colonial struggle to break the static infrastructures of settler colonialism and make it become an event.
Liberation is painted in red ochre on steep canyon walls. It is both radical reconnection and settler destruction made legible through its own cognitive distortions. This is to say that it should be made into a moment that we can place within the pictograph constellations of ancestral memory.”

About the author: Klee Benally was a Diné (Navajo) anarchist and undisciplined agitational propagandist. Originally from Black Mesa. He passed away in December 2023 at the age of only 48.
Indigenousaction.org
Crimethinc interview from 2009