Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots

Across the United States, activists are responding to the pandemic crisis with anarchist strategies, like mutual aid. In Window Rock, Arizona -- the seat of the Navajo Nation -- the K'é Infoshop is one such group, and has been providing food and medical supplies to elders, families, and those infected with the virus. In a recent article in "The Nation," the Infoshop's members said their style of autonomous organizing has distinctly Navajo roots.
 

Just a few minutes from the Navajo Nation government offices, the K'é Infoshop opened its doors in April 2017 in a vacant coffee shop. Inside, early collective members painted each wall to correspond with the sacred Navajo colors -- black, white, turquoise, and yellow -- and began stocking the space with Native American books and magazines. Near the entrance, they hung a painting of a women's turquoise-ring-clad hands wrapped around jail bars -- a piece by a member who the group says was unjustly arrested in a police raid of the nearby flea market while she shared her lunch with a group of homeless people. Across the back wall, they put up red stenciled letters that spelled out, "K'é does not discriminate."
 

Anthropologists frequently describe k'é as the Navajo kinship system, but Infoshop members say it's much more than that. "It's our theory of everything," K'é co-founder Brandon Benallie declared. "It's our string theory. It's how we're connected to everything -- but specifically how that kinship is reciprocated and maintained. K'é is this huge overlapping philosophy that the whole universe is interconnected. But it's also these relationships that we have with one another and with the elements that exist in the world, whether that be the weather or the water or the animals."
 

Although there is a markedly European jargon to describing contemporary anarchism, the movement has long been influenced by Indigenous ideas. Being Navajo could be considered anarchist because they never had chiefs; they didn't have a hierarchy. It was always horizontal. Socialism and anarchism derived ideology from Franciscan missionaries who came to the Navajo Nation in the 1500s and 1600s and studied Indigenous societies. And later you have notable activists like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin reading the journals of these religious figures and how they describe Indigenous societies at that time.
 

As soon as the pandemic hit the Navajo Nation, K'é's members decided they had to help. K'é utilized the food pantry it had stocked for weekly solidarity meals with homeless community members. They gave away a years supply of food in just two weeks. At first the Infoshop was alone in its relief efforts in Navajo Nation, but by April and May, other mutual aid projects began to emerge. The youth-led Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief project raised funds to place large orders and organized teams to distribute upwards of 10,000 pounds of food each week across the 27,000 square miles of the reservation.
 

As the Navajo government struggled to control the spread of the outbreak, it established curfews and stay-at-home orders that no doubt saved lives, but made it more difficult for families to travel to any of the reservation's 13 grocery stores. Mutual aid groups obtained essential worker passes to distribute food after curfew, but organizers still faced resistance from the government. They were harassed on many occasions by Navajo police pulling them over and telling them that their authorization letters were not valid.
 

Commenting on the impacts of the pandemic and rapid growth of mutual aid groups across the country, Benallie noted, "Every time capitalism fails, we land on socialism, we land on anarchism, to take care of us. I hope it makes people question who is there for them. Was it the $1,200 stimulus check or six months of unemployment? Or was it the good people of the earth who were organizing resources and material needs to make sure that you don't go to sleep hungry or that your children don't go to sleep hungry?" he said. "Capitalism fosters this unhealthy, highly individualist view of oneself. People began to forget their responsibilities to each other, to the land, and began to only worry about how much they can benefit from the imbalance from broken kinship."
 

As organizers contemplate strategies to take care of their communities in the absence of government support, Benallie urges them to remember their relationships to one another and to the planet. "We can't do this alone. We need all of the good people of the earth to come together."

Appropriate Destruction

From a shamanic perspective, all creation is based on some form of destruction. In order to create something new, something old first must be destroyed. The old form is taken apart and from its energetic source, something new arises. Nature offers the best examples of this constant destruction in the form of seasonal changes. As each season gives way to the next, something is destroyed in the process. Fall kills off the green leaves and lays the landscape bare. Winter kills off the insects and weakest animals. Spring destroys the snowpack and brings floods. Summer bakes the land, drying up the streams and plants. Everywhere in nature are examples of great destruction that reform the land, creating a new canvas for change. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, erupting volcanoes, and withering droughts destroy the landscape as it was, clearing the way for new life, new forms, new possibilities.
 

Shamans acknowledge the awesome power of transformation that comes with destruction and seek to harness that power. One powerful universal shamanic motif of appropriate destruction is the dismemberment of the apprentice during the initiation as a shaman. The individual dies a symbolic death and is then restored and brought back to life. Completing this restorative rite is precisely the task of the shaman. As anthropologist Joan Halifax explains in her book Shamanic Voices, "The shaman is a healed healer who has retrieved the broken pieces of his or her body and psyche and, through a personal rite of transformation, has integrated many planes of life experience: the body and the spirit, the ordinary and non-ordinary, the individual and the community, nature and supernature, the mythic and the historical, the past, the present and the future."
 

The viewpoint emerging from the shamanic community suggests the times we live in have a theme of planetary and cosmological initiation. Shamanic initiation is most often precipitated by physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual events that force the ego into submission. Who we believe ourselves to be is not who we truly are. No matter how many years one has been developing their consciousness, no one is exempt from this shamanic death-and-rebirth. This is a shamanic initiation on the grandest cosmological scale.
 

The times we find ourselves in are like a great river in flood. We can try to hold on to the shore to save ourselves from being swept along with the current. But this is a futile effort, for nothing can resist the great tide of change that is sweeping through and forever altering life as we have known it for millennia. Instead, we are being challenged to let go and go with the flow. We are being given the opportunity to surrender to the current of change so that new dreams and visions can emerge.
 

The cure for dismemberment is appropriate destruction. An appropriate destruction measure for anyone would be to get rid of anything that does not contribute to personal growth and learning. This would include the elimination of unnecessary possessions, ideas, habits and limiting beliefs that no longer serve you. Situations, careers or relationships that no longer resonate with you will eventually fall away from your life. When you clear out the old, you make way for the new.

Pre-Columbian Council Circle Discovered in Kansas

Archaeologists using new drone-sensing technology have found evidence of an enormous, horseshoe-shaped trench hidden beneath a Kansas ranch. The rounded earthwork, which may be part of the largest pre-Hispanic settlement north of Mexico, appears to be what's known as a council circle. To date, researchers have identified five such structures across 22 sites in the area. Ancestors of the modern Wichita and Affiliated Tribes lived in what is now southeastern Kansas between about 900 and 1650 A.D. They lived in grass-roofed pit houses; hunted bison; and farmed crops like squash, beans and corn.
 

Over time, erosion filled the newly discovered earthwork with topsoil, concealing it from view. But modern sensors can detect subtle differences in temperature and foliage between the filled trench and the earth around it. The researchers located the ditch through a combination of drone surveying and LiDAR, infrared and thermal imaging.
 

Relic hunters who looted the region in the 1800s gave council circles their name, but the earthworks' actual purpose remains unclear. Researchers have previously posited that the structures served as the site of ritual ceremonies, housed community elites or offered protection from invaders. Archaeologists now suggest that sites including the just-detailed trench were part of Etzanoa, a population center dubbed the "Great Settlement" by Spanish conquistadors.
 

Spanish colonizers first encountered Etzanoa in the 1590s, when an unauthorized group traveled north in search of Quivira, a mythical city of gold. Though the expedition ended violently, one survivor managed to return and inform the Spanish of what he'd seen. In 1601, conquistador Juan de Onate marched to the settlement, captured a resident and tortured him until he revealed the city's name.
 

Archaeologists first excavated the site of the newly discovered council circle more than 60 years ago. But by 1967, they felt that they had discovered all of the mounds and earthworks located along Walnut River. Thanks to new technology, contemporary researchers have proven these predecessors wrong. Led by Dartmouth anthropologist Jesse Casana, the study's authors used nighttime thermal imaging to measure how daytime heat dissipated from the soil. The ancient ditch, which measures roughly 165 feet in diameter and 6.5 feet thick, is filled with looser soil than the tightly packed prairie around it; as a result, it holds more moisture and radiates less heat at night.
 

Casana and his colleagues identified the ditch as a cooler, darker horseshoe shape in a warm landscape. They then followed up during the day with photography and infrared imaging. The team also reviewed previous aerial and satellite images, spotting the circular formation in photos taken in June 2015 and July 2017. Researchers plan to continue exploring the site with remote-sensing techniques, which will hopefully enable them to develop precise targets for future excavations.
 

This article first appeared in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian Magazine

Out of the Darkness, Light

From Hitler's Rischstag Fire to 9/11, history is beset with instances of governments using terrorist attacks to justify invasions or suspend civil liberties indefinitely. The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on February 27, 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's government stated that Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the culprit, and it attributed the fire to communist agitators. A German court decided later that year that Van der Lubbe had acted alone, as he had claimed. The day after the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, restrictions on civil liberties began to grow. The attack spawned wars to export democracy abroad, while degrading it at home. Our military actions, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria, have reflected increased investments in the military, accompanied by diminished attention to political change, economic development and institution-building -- the essential prerequisites for democratic freedoms. Fear of terrorism has justified excessive and persistent suspension of good governance, ultimately creating more fertile ground for terrorists. Our leaders have nurtured a crisis of "domestic terrorism" within U.S. borders, perpetrated not by foreigners, but by U.S. citizens.

The question is not, "is it happening?" but, "why is it happening?" To fully comprehend the "why" of it, we must first understand the meaning of the Latin phrase "ordo ab chao" or "order out of chaos." The  expression "order out of chaos" or more accurately translated, "out of chaos, order" is the idea that the order of the world emerges out of chaos or the undifferentiated. The term is often used to capture a fundamental dimension of evolutionary change within nature. It has become popular in contemporary times to identify chaos as a precondition for transformation, rebirth and creativity.

However, to our political leaders and their inner circles, chaos is a way of getting power and keeping it. That is, if you can create just the right crisis or chaos, you will necessarily get a citizen outcry for the kind of solution or order that you wanted to have all along. It really is a "shock and awe" military strategy based on achieving rapid dominance over an adversary by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower. Politicians engage in shock and awe politics in order to stun their opponents into inaction.

The idea that the order of the world emerges out of chaos is actually not new at all. It was preceded by more ancient principles such as "lux in tenebris," or "light out of darkness." Light out of darkness is an expression of an ancient wisdom about the relationship of complementary opposites in nature. In the eastern tradition of Taoism, light and darkness are represented by yin and yang, each of which contains the seed of its opposite within it as expressed in the ancient Chinese symbol (T'ai Chi Tu) of the yin-yang. The two teardrop figures within the circle illustrate the balance between the dark yin and the light yang. The black vibration of yin is dark, passive, feminine, nurturing, intuitive, and corresponds to earth or matter. The white vibration of yang is light, active, masculine, creative, expansive, and corresponds to heaven or spirit. Yin and yang pulsate within all things and in unison, they are the moving force of nature and all its manifestations.

Various mystery traditions such as Hermeticism had similar concepts such as "As above, so below" and "As within, so without." In Hermeticism, the phrase "As above so below" can be taken to indicate that earthly matters reflect the operation of the Cosmos. In other words, the human experience is a microcosm of the macrocosm we call the universe. Each human being is a hologram of the Cosmos, a weaving together of universal information from a particular point of view. Essentially, we are the universe experiencing itself in human form.

The idea that "As within, so without" can be found in the world's indigenous shamanic traditions. In the shaman's world, all human experience is self-generated -- our inner thoughts actually create what we see and experience. Everything that we perceive began with a thought. The structure of our universe is thought, mind and consciousness. Consciousness determines the form of our experience. The shaman traverses the inner planes of consciousness in order to change and shape experience. It is an inward spiritual journey of rapture in which the shaman interacts with the inner world, thereby influencing the outer world.

Shamanic rites involve many technologies for inducing altered states of consciousness. These vary from drum and dance to ingesting sacred plants. Practitioners enter trance states in order to perceive and interact with the inner world of the self. The essence of shamanism is the experience of direct revelation from within. Shamanism is about remembering, exploring and developing the true self. Shamanism places emphasis on the individual, of breaking free and discovering one's own uniqueness in order to bring something new back to the community. The goal is inner transformation; not outer.

Those who presently call the shots and pull the strings on the world stage only use "order out of chaos" to create favorable circumstances for themselves; to gain and sustain the same authoritarian power relations. For the power elite, external order is the goal. To achieve their goals, they first create the conditions for chaos/disorder to bring about order. The controlled chaos we are witnessing in society today is the direct result of the coordinated efforts by some to turn people against each other. This is a classic "divide and conquer" strategy.

A highly centralized government relies mainly on lies, fear and economic prosperity to maintain equilibrium. Allegiance is achieved through various means of socialization and indoctrination. Political propaganda emphasizes material and technical development while suppressing access to personal revelation and spiritual experience. Citizens are discouraged from thinking for themselves and required to follow the laws of secular authorities regardless of the discrepancy between what is legal and what is considered to be moral, ethical and right. The individual is left morally and spiritually impaired; their soul abandoned in darkness and chaos while urged to acquiesce to the needs of the collective.

This imbalance is reaching such heights that the pendulum of change will soon begin swinging back in the opposite direction. The movement for external transformation will reach a psychological extinction -- meaning there just won't be a situation chaotic enough or carrot sweet enough to keep people hoping external transformation and order will bring salvation without a shift in the internal direction. People will begin to realize the limits of external order when their internal worlds are in chaos, thus discovering the seed of the one in the other… out of the darkness, light!