I put together a book. It is not a book about me. It is about a dozen other people who are, in some way, the audience and content of the book. It was a real challenge putting it together as the interview subjects did not conform to the framing I eventually put on the book. Most of the conversations were about people, biographies, and local challenges. The book is about an epic fight for Turtle Island that is invisible to most people. It is about memory, family, and the future of a livable planet.
It is also about anarchism. The original thesis of this book went something like this: The difference between indigenous and anarchist perspectives only requires some sort of keystone or translation guide; the two perspectives have so much in common that the only work is mapping the geography. But as the saying goes the map is not the territory. Clearly many, if not most, anarchists are happily married to Enlightenment thought and believe that the problem is not the production of widgets but how the widgets are produced. Similarly many indigenous people are not exactly on board with the kind of total social and material transformation alluded to by an anti-civilization, green anarchist perspective. To put this another way, I was wrong in my initial thesis and in face of that wrongness I am questioning both my anarchism and my relationship to indigeneity.
Couple this to the general exhaustion I am feeling in my seemingly complete transition from trickster to bear and it has been difficult to talk about this book. To get the word out. To care about how anyone not in the book feels about it. But this is how projects fail. This one deserves a full airing and luckily my friend Obsidian (along with peanut gallery) was up to the task. This is an hour interview with me about the book I edited “The Fight for Turtle Island.” Enjoy and then pick it up at Little Black Cart.
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