"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." – George Bernard Shaw
all creative work is also destructive, but bricolage is maybe a little more explicit about the destruction than most. pictures, furniture, some articles or a book, a pile of old shit in a forlorn corner of your house: no matter what it is, the point of bricolage is that you are going to break it down into parts and destroy it to create something completely new. what follows is a bricolage, constructed from materials found at hand and designed to serve two purposes:
1. to white folks it is a list of demands. if you consider yourself an ally to racial justice and want to become involved in Library Biskaabiiyaang, this is a starting point for the kind of politics the Library will expect of you and your work.
2. to BIPOC interested in helping shape the future of this writer's society, this is a first attempt at putting together some of the guiding principles and philosophy that will go into our founding documents.
the largest share of materials that went into this document comes from the Red Deal, and much of its structure is formed by the 20 areas of struggle that the Red Nation laid out there, split into 3 categories: END THE OCCUPATION, HEAL OUR BODIES, and HEAL OUR PLANET.
(also from the Red Deal)"We seek to not just challenge power, but to build power. We are not simply a negation of the nightmarish colonial present - colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy - we are the embodiment and affirmation of a coming Indigenous future, a future in which many worlds fit."
all this brings us back to the following "impossible" question:
what happens when one takes Indigenous thought seriously?
2. End Bordertown Violence"the function of a bordertown is to exploit the identity, labor, and death of Indigenous people"
when the anthropologist's goal ceases to be its explanation, interpretation, contextualization, or rationalization and shifts to using it, drawing out its consequences, and verifying the effects it can produce in our own thought?
3. Abolish Incarcerationneither a form of doxa nor a figure of logic (neither an opinion nor a proposition), Indigenous thought should be taken - if we truly want to take it seriously - as a practice of sense
4. End Occupation Everywhere (including the atmosphere)as a self-reflexive apparatus for the production of concepts, of "symbols that represent themselves"
5.Abolish Imperial Borders (US must pay reparations for war and climate debt)if there is something that de jure belongs to anthropology,it is not the task of explaining the world of the other but that of multiplying our world...for we cannot think *like* Indians; at most we can think *with* them
"every understanding of another culture is an experiment with one's own" - Roy Wagner
This is like the barest minimum possible of what's necessary for America to ever stop being synonymous with genocide, and yet there are no shortage of people who laugh at the very mention of Land Back because it's just "not reasonable" or "not possible". Those who are only willing to fight for what is possible within our current systems or for what is "reasonable" have no business leading anyone, nor representing anyone.
what the hell does a writer’s society do anyways? are we gonna end up hosting like professional development workshops? I already got the ick
Reinvest in our Common Humanity
we live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers.
2. Free & Sustainable Housingwe no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity.
3. Free & Accessible Educationwe no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date.
4. Free & Adequate Healthcarewe no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges.
5. Free reliable and accessible public transport and infrastructureyour ancestors murdered Indigenous peoples just to build a world where you have to pay for the privilege of remaining alive
6. Noncarceral Mental Health SupportThey've cut me apart at each of my joints
Then sewn me back together, but not the same
7. Healthy, sustainable, and abundant foodMy nerves, my ligaments and tendons, something is wrong
8. Clean Water, Land, and AirI try to get up, to move
But everything's rearranged
9. End Gender, Sexual, and Domestic ViolenceMy own body resists, fighting my every command
10. End Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit PeoplesI scream as loud as I can, but no one will hear my whimpers
Please let me wake up
reinvest in our common future
"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept" - Angela Davis2. Traditional and Sustainable Agriculture (land return, remediation)
the only thing worse than the fear that things will never get better
is to trap ourselves in knowing that it never will
3. Land, Water, Air, and Animal Restorationswhy bricolage? why couldn’t I just write a normal fucking essay or two that were more coherent?
if I want to encourage other people to fuck around and write something, I should probably do the same. also do you have any idea how hard it is to structure anything coherently with both autism and adhd?
4. Protection and Restoration of Sacred Sitesbricolage is revolutionary
it’s up to you what properties, what parts and structure you use to create your work
what you choose to break down
5. Enforcement of Treaty Rights and other agreementsyou can use the whole damn buffalo, or take only what you need
whether to maintain or destroy any sense of sanctity or continuity of what came before
the choice is yours
Who am I writing for?
To people who are already committed to building a more equitable world, who want to help, but know they need to keep being wiling to learn
To people who want access to healthcare, education, energy, internet, housing, employment, and social security FOR EVERYONE without every aspect of our lives being put up for sale
to people that have started their healing journey, and are willing to stay vulnerable enough to pull themselves out of that cancerous body we call white supremacy culture
to the people I love
to people who carry a weight, are aware of that weight, but don't know what to do with it, or how to get it out