All Candidates, Once Elected

Become our opponents

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. Yesterday I came home after an uninterrupted three week perambulation¹ that culminated in a triumphant experience at the Portland Book Festival. I might write about that in a few days, who knows. But Portland and the literary community there treated me wonderfully and I am very grateful. I hope I have an opportunity to return there sometime!

As I write in the darkness of late evening we are under our first winter weather advisory. I can hear a steady downpour of rain outside and if the temperature doesn’t drop another ten degrees or so that’s all we’re going to get: rain. I don’t mind, though. It’s nice to know the cold season is looming, hopefully, particularly given the early evening darkness has arrived. I’m not too upset by that either. My molecules are so jerked around by time zones at the moment that this past Sunday morning, when daylight saving time ended, I didn’t even feel it. It was just Sunday and I had a couple meetings to make before I got to fly home for an unimaginable four days. I’m still on board with what seems the general consensus that the entire DST practice is well beyond its expiration date, though. This garbage country excels at sticking to ideas from generations ago that were generally dumb then and are even dumber now.

I’ll say this again, though, my friends, before I get on with it: I sure love the sound of all that rain outside.

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Northbound on I-15 out of Great Falls: It seemed like a request worth saying yes to at the time but now I kind of regret it. I’m more uncertain than ever that our vote represents our voice. Mostly I think voting is just a way to play us for suckers but it’s still marginally less useless than not voting at all.

I flipped the page yesterday on the calendar I have hanging on the wall just right of my computer monitor. The calendar was given to me months ago by the folks at Western Native Voice. I’ve enjoyed the illustrations – each by the same Native artist – that accompany every month very much. They are always of Native folks, with some recurring characters, a little cartoonish, engaged in this and that. They make me smile … but not this time. I actually dropped the calendar when I took it down off the wall and turned the page, as I find the November image incredibly offensive. It is of three Native people, all smiling, standing at little tables set up like voting booths, with a screen around each that says “VOTE” beneath an American flag. Behind the voters are dim ghostly figures, presumably of their ancestors, also smiling, dressed as you might expect them to look in the 1800s, when flags bearing that image were carried by men hell bent on slaughtering them. I don’t think too many of those ancestors smiled then when they saw the flag. The image provided one of those spiky jolts I feel deep in my body when confronted by the degree to which Native people have been colonized and then flex it without even realizing it. Voting is still an exercise in playing up to the power-over being inflicted on us by our occupier and I am deeply opposed to that.

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Friends, I wrote several hundred words of angry, spitty bluster over the last couple hours about this hellscape we’re in and I’ve just deleted ALL OF IT because who wants to read that and I didn’t want to take the time to make it coherent and I’m not sure if this headache is an aneurism about to burst or the aching shoulder is an indicator that my heart is going to explode. So I’m going to go on from here instead. It’s fortunate – or not, depending on how you look at it – that I sent my ballot in a couple weeks ago, because if I still needed to make it happen I might pass entirely. I’m actually ashamed that I voted how I did, even if my reason is that I’m not willing to entirely hand the keys of this country I live in over to people like Trump and his loathesome ilk. But I’m never going to make the same mistake of selling myself out again because I feel awful about it. There were a couple important ballot initiatives that I’m happy to have voted for accordingly, but the candidates? Arguably the worst field of options I’ve ever been faced with. I’m going to make my point why simply, and I am going to use the trailer to this important documentary that just recently went live on Netflix, the culminating events of which I remember watch play out in real time just a couple years ago.

YINTAH - meaning “land” - is a feature-length documentary on the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty.

Spanning more than a decade, the film follows Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham as their nation reoccupies and protects their ancestral lands from several of the largest fossil fuel companies on earth.

YINTAH is about an anti-colonial resurgence—a fierce and ongoing fight for Indigenous and human rights in the face of a colonial government committed to seizing lands at gunpoint.

Wet’suwet’en land is unceded: There is no treaty, no bill of sale, or no surrender placing the land under Canadian authority. In 1997, the Dinï ze’ and Tsakë ze’ (Hereditary Chiefs) of the Wet’suwet’en people proved in Canada’s top court that they had never given up ownership to 22,000km2 of land.

Yet, despite this court ruling, Canada has authorized fossil fuel giants to build pipelines across Wet’suwet’en land. The result: a decade long clash between Wet’suwet’en land defenders and Canadian police seeking to seize Wet’suwet’en land at gunpoint.

YINTAH is the story of the Indigenous right to sovereignty over Indigenous territories. Freda, Molly, and the Dinï ze’ and Tsakë ze’ are part of a centuries-long fight to protect their children, culture, and land from colonial violence. For the Wet’suwet’en, their very future is at stake.

What does this documentary have to do with candidates on my Montana ballot? Watch the film and understand that not a single one of my possible choices, for all their courting (and efforts to exploit) Native folks for their vote, would stand with the Wet’suwet’en people. Not one. To a person I am certain they would stand instead with the oil company and the RCMP and all the other loathesome characters. These Montana Dems would all come off like that whiny prick Justin Trudeau, a guy who at least owns a striking personality. Which is to say every time he opens his mouth I want to put a fist in it.

Which also explains why I’m 100% certain they – these ignoble candidates – are all in 100% support of the genocide of Gaza and Lebanon and all the other places around the world where the USA is engaged in actively inflicting on other people the very things we are so freaked out about suffering ourselves. Which is shameful. Election after election, year after year, the United States expands as the largest terrorist organization in the world right under our noses.

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We are Building on Centuries of Resistance

I do dig this, though. Vote Like a Radical. It’s an essay from my mighty relatives at NDN Collective and I needed to see it. Maybe you do too.

I’m not afraid of tomorrow. I’ve known for the entire election but particularly in the last year, when so many people decided to overlook livestreamed genocide financed and unrelentingly supported by the administration their current favorite candidate is² part of and committed to, that there is no “winning” this election. The work starts Wednesday. All I’m waiting to see is what kind of work is going to need to be done, and who is going to recognize that and roll up their sleeves or just relax back into business as usual.

In the last year, where I’ve spent hours upon hours talking to probably thousands of people, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and draw connections to our shared humanity, particularly as it relates to where we stand on the spectrum of settler-to-Indigenous people. That is a global relationship. I’ve never wanted to make people feel guilty and now I’m not so sure about all that and this is largely what troubles me deeply. This last year and the willingness of so many people to overlook genocide has lit a different kind of fire in me. I’m trying to figure out what it is going to look like. I will say this, though: I will no longer seek solidarity or community with comfortable people living comfortable lives in comfortably unthreatened homes on stolen land who are unwilling to risk that comfort and convenience in service to the liberation of people forced to give up everything in service to all that comfort. It’s that simple.

“As for who you should vote for, why turn to me for the answer? You already know what you need to know, and now it is up to you to face yourself in the privacy of the ballot box, just as the faithful are, in the end, alone with their own conscience. But the problem is that the metaphor of one’s vote as a matter of the lesser or greater evil is, for too many Americans, simply a metaphor. How many Americans will choose the lesser evil and recognize that it is not a metaphor but is, in fact, evil? And will then choose to fight not only the greater evil but the lesser evil as well? Fighting a greater evil provides reassuring moral and political clarity. Fighting the lesser evil would mean recognizing the ultimate unity of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, archetypes of this country from its very origins, when settlers arrived in the Garden of Eden and imagined themselves as Adam and Eve, when they were, in fact, the serpent.”

– from “Lesser of Two Evils? Our Fight Is Against Both, No Matter How We Vote”, an essential read, by Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen

All best wishes to everyone. Please look after one another. It might be a tumultuous few days.

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1. There was one day at home before I headed to Portland, which allowed me time to do laundry and unload my car and cook some food for myself myself and that was about it.

2. Full disclosure: I wrote in Brother Cornel West for president. Which doesn’t matter because Trump is going to win Montana in a landslide.