A social investigation report from GATT readers in the Southwest

Our social investigation crew formed to take on the call laid down in Going Against the Tide‘s 2024 post-election editorial to “[broaden] our understanding of the different classes and sections of the proletariat who are, or can become, the social base for revolution in the US.” We wanted to learn about what conditions are like for Indigenous people living on reservations, Pueblos, and in cities. We were equally as curious about how everyday Indigenous people are thinking about the issues their nations face. Our crew went out five times, attending three pow wows and making two trips to different Pueblos in New Mexico. The thirty people we interviewed were mostly from the Southwest, including from different Pueblos and the Navajo Nation, but we were also able to speak to people from around the country at the pow wows.

“Where is the resistance?”

“Culture is everything,” a guy named Johnny told us. “Without culture, we are nothing.” He looked at us and asked playfully, “What culture do you guys have?” Johnny is a middle-aged man who grew up in Los Angeles, and his mom is from San Ildefonso Pueblo and currently lives there. We sat with Johnny and his wife, Brenda, outside of their home in San Ildefonso Pueblo for a while, drinking Jarritos, while they were waiting for family and friends to arrive for their daughter’s birthday party. Originally when we knocked on their door, they thought we were party guests who came early. While the people we talked to had vastly different connections with their own culture, languages, spirituality, and dances, an overwhelming sentiment from people was that practicing and engaging in their culture is a significant part of understanding their own identity as Native people. For Johnny, culture is spiritual connection. It’s the connection to language, connection to traditions, to the land, and to others.

Most Native people we talked to saw an incredible value in their culture and a desire to carry it on, even if they weren’t sure how. Much of the culture that comes out of the American “melting pot” lacks fulfillment or meaning. Johnny, and many other people we spoke to, feel passionate about protecting a culture that wasn’t just gnawing on something hollow, but has deep roots and a clear purpose connecting his people; culture is about social relations, land, language, and history. We talked to a middle-aged dad and his seven-year-old son from a different Pueblo. He told us that for him, participating in cultural practices felt more significant and meaningful than engaging in tribal or local politics (which he had tried for a while).

Throughout our social investigation project, our crew was curious to see how different Native people think about their culture, what culture means to them, and where the future of their culture is headed. We were able to go to three pow wows, which provided a great backdrop to talk through some of these questions. Most people told us they felt it was important for many nations to get together from all different places and celebrate their cultures together. Some people told us about the social importance of pow wows. To Arnie, who is from Isleta Pueblo and now lives in Albuquerque, it’s difficult to be connected to the day-to-day life of his people and culture, so pow wows provide a way to “see old friends, watch their kids grow up.”

It was a widespread sentiment that practices, such as dance, can have a positive effect on young people, and gatherings where people can watch others dance are meaningful for many people throughout their lives. Several people expressed fears that there were forces at work threatening these practices that have been such a positive influence on their lives. Pamela, also from Isleta Pueblo, was standing by herself in front of artisan booths when we stopped to ask to talk with her. She was a friendly middle-aged woman who tries to attend all the pow wows she can. She told us in sadness that, these days, she feels it is harder to get kids to participate in traditional dances, and lots of families use external factors (like money or prizes) to motivate kids to take part in them. She let us into how she feels when she hears the drums, that they echo loudly and speak to her directly. While we were talking to her, she asked us to close our eyes for a minute and just listen to the echo of the drums, which we did (and it was beautiful). She wants kids growing up now to feel connected to the drums and the dances the way she does, and the way kids once were. To her, it feels like when kids don’t want to be involved in the dances, it is a larger culture that they are opting out of participating in. She told us, “you don’t dance for the money, you dance for your well-being.”

As Pamela noted, cultural practices are not frozen relics immune from forces both in US society and in Native nations. A young Apache man named Richard we spoke to at the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow had insightful criticisms of the current landscape of Native art and the way “culture” is practiced. As we spoke, an Apache dance group started dancing near us, which set the scene for his critique. He told us this particular dance that we were watching meant something. It was performed at certain times for certain reasons, and it was defined by and helped define a broader context, the particularities of which he didn’t get into. But here, at the pow wow, it was nothing more then “entertainment.” The distinction is that in the ceremony from which it originates, the dance signifies something to a particular set of people in a particular context, an example being a girl coming of age. But at events such as the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow, dances are performances of “culture,” performed for a viewer who might not know what they are watching, so the meaning of the dance is different.

Richard extended this criticism to the recording of dances, other rituals, and even language. He insisted that what made these things significant is that they signify particular things in a particular context to people who understand that context, i.e., a particular Native nation. If, in hopes of preserving these customs, you record them and make them widely available on the internet, are you actually preserving the culture, or are you preserving a practice stripped from its culture? Even more importantly for him, who are you giving ownership of these customs to? If they are uploaded to social media, tech companies that own the social media site will likely retain the rights to the video. With the acceleration of AI, he had deep fears about tech capital’s ability to profit from the likeness and practices of Indigenous people with little recourse available tribal governments, much less individuals, to stop this.

Part of the reason he brought these concerns up was his feeling that these developments were not being taken seriously or discussed broadly among Native nations or in Native country, and that this technology was being adopted without much thought of the possible drawbacks or how they would affect the trajectory of Native nations and their culture. Richard was underscoring that culture, and society more broadly, is in a constant state of flux, and that cultural practices are being remolded every time they are performed. Furthermore, they are being impacted by larger forces such as technological development. The only way to have a conscious impact on their development, so they can be pushed in a direction you want them to go, is having an accurate understanding of how forces in society are moving.

Another realm he dove into that demonstrates how the forces of capital impact Native culture was his criticism of how the desires of white art consumers manipulate the Native art scene. He said many people continue to paint and draw similar scenes of historic Native people because white people eat it up. Wealthy white people who want to have “exotic” Native paintings or pottery in their homes want the art to be trapped in time, to look how Native people might have looked like centuries ago. Artists who are skilled at creating art to appeal to white audiences are the artists going to be shown in galleries, especially Santa Fe galleries. They are able to sell more of their work and thus are able to sustain themselves as artists easier than those creating in new and unique styles. Pushing the boundaries of artistic expression might be cool in Berlin or New York, but it’s not what rich white people going to Native country are looking for (they conceive of “Native art” as paintings of women carrying baskets or men dancing). In this way, the broader capitalist art industry shapes how Native people produce art and how they are able to make a living through their own art. Though Richard has lots of respect for many of the well-known Native artists creating in this style, and is impressed by their skills, he also feels the trend shrinks the horizon. Even before young Native artists learn what sells and what doesn’t, they come up admiring prominent artists in their nation or from others who are more likely to be producing to appeal to the white art market.

Richard went further to extend his criticism to how Native revolutionaries and heroes of war are portrayed. He was baffled by tourist shops that sold t-shirts and other items with the faces of Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and others. He wasn’t at all against venerating these people, but questioned if people really understood what these leaders did and what they stood for. They took up arms against the United States government in defense of their people, land, and way of life. If the people buying and selling these commodities took those actions and ideas seriously, would they be buying or selling those t-shirts? What would they be doing with their lives? Richard asked of the art scene: “Where is the resistance? Is this history of resistance something to be studied, and taken seriously and improved upon? Or is it just another commodity, to be taken on and off, or made into a quirky t-shirt?”

Death of a language, death of a culture

The United States made an explicit and earnest attempt to exterminate Native languages. A generation of Native children were kidnapped and taken to boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their language. Until 1975, the federal government ran schools on reservations where no Indigenous languages were spoken and, like in the boarding schools, children faced physical and psychological punishment for daring to speak their language. Outside the reservations, employers discriminated against Native people, especially those who spoke their own language.

If you take the government at their word, a practice we don’t recommend, they would seem to have reversed course. They now fund programs across Native nations to promote the study of Native languages. Despite this, the second most common concern aired by people we spoke to was the loss of their language.

Our crew kicked off the social investigation project by traveling to Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo. It is one of the largest Pueblos by population, with over 1,000 residents and over 3,000 tribal citizens. Ohkay Owingeh is similar to many towns and Pueblos in northern New Mexico, where government jobs or working at a hospital are some of the only stable employment opportunities. Many scratch out a living working a mix of odd jobs or for retail corporations, like the Walmart in the neighboring Española, a town of slightly over 10,000.

We knocked on doors of a relatively new public housing complex built by the nation to ask people if they were interested in being interviewed for this project. Most of the people who answered were young families or young couples, including Anna and Carlos, who we ended up talking to for about an hour about life on the Pueblo. They were deeply invested in the overall well-being of their people and the conversation touched on many topics. They spent much of the time talking about how they don’t know their language, and would like to learn, but making that happen is challenging. There is a weekly class not far from their home, but their hectic work and life schedules frequently prevent them from attending or practicing what they learned at home.

People from across nations expressed concern about how knowledge of their language diminishing was directly tied with knowledge of their culture diminishing. Johnny from San Ildefonso expressed heartbreak that his mom never taught him the language, and he sees the death of his language as primary to the death of his culture. The disappearance of the language was his answer when we asked what he saw as the biggest problem facing his community, ranking it higher than the horrid desecration of his Pueblo by Los Alamos National Labs (more on that later).

We spoke with a retired nurse named Susan, a woman in her seventies, who invited us into her family’s home on the San Ildefonso Pueblo. We spent over an hour and a half talking about her life and the lessons she’s learned. She spoke of growing up on the Pueblo, but then going to Catholic school where being Indigenous was never spoken about, going to nursing school with other Native people where it finally wasn’t clandestine to talk about being Native, and what it was like being a nurse at Indian Health Service. She told us that participation in language classes has dwindled for young people, which she sees as directly correlated to her culture diminishing. She told us that people don’t speak the language from the heart anymore, because they just don’t know it.

Susan’s house was filled with family photos of her parents, siblings, and nieces and nephews throughout the years. She is the last surviving sibling from her family, and she wants to keep the house’s spirit alive and well. During cultural events and ceremonies, the house is where her whole extended family gathers. She now has her own home about a mile down the road, but she still spends a lot of time at this house to preserve the spirit of the home for her family.

On many Pueblos and reservations, there are language classes, often for kids and sometimes for adults. Many adults in their twenties and thirties expressed that they weren’t motivated to learn their language when they were kids, or that it was taught for only a couple of years at school—not enough time to really become competent in the language. At the Gathering of Nations, we met Calvin, a man in his late twenties from the Miccosukee Nation in Florida. We spoke at length about how he saw his nation changing. He spoke about how the language was fundamental to his culture and how it influenced how he saw and understood the world. He spoke on how the language was taught as a barrier to it being more widely adopted. He felt that so long as it was taught in school like just another class, such as social studies or math, it would not be adopted by young people. Teaching the language as just another subject in school, he remarked, keeps the language stale and cordoned off, something you learn to please your teacher or parents, rather than innovating with, thinking in, and using the language in your day-to-day life as a way to understand the world.

Calvin’s insights demonstrated the shortcomings of more or better programs alone successfully combating the eradication of Native languages, though they’re certainly needed. The about-face the federal government has done to promote Native language use, after hundreds of years of attempts at eradication, will always be insufficient for these languages to be adopted widely. This change in attitude did not come from the US government having genuine concern that they have deprived a people of their languages, and that it’s a crime against humanity. Instead, they’re now funding these programs to stave off pressure from Native people who have demanded and fought for the right to learn their languages. Despite funding many of these programs, the barriers to learning, both contemporary and historical, have not been resolved in any way. When you need two jobs to get by, and those two jobs are far away because there are limited job options on your Pueblo or reservation, spending time to learn a language is barely feasible. Despite many teachers and students making the most they can out of them, these programs are in place not to actually solve the problem, but to make it seem as if the government is doing something about the problem they created.

Entire generations ravaged by addiction

We typically started out our interviews asking people what they saw as the biggest problem where they lived. More than twenty of the thirty people we interviewed listed drug and alcohol addiction as the greatest problem in their community. Pamela told us that addiction is the biggest issue on her Pueblo, and that kids start as young as twelve. She emphasized that drugs and alcohol have completely disintegrated familial structures, and many kids are raised by their grandparents due to their parents’ struggles with addiction.

Joe, a man in his thirties from Laguna Pueblo, told us he believes depression and isolation are key factors to why alcoholism is so rampant where he’s from; people believe that they don’t have family or people who care about them, so they turn to alcohol. Joe lets his cousins and family know that he’s always there for them, even when he has his own problems to deal with. He wants people in his life to know that they have people who care about them. He told us that there are people living homeless in Albuquerque who have family and homes in Laguna, but their isolation and loneliness pushes people to addiction and homelessness. An older man from Iselta Pueblo similarly said that homelessness is the biggest problem facing his people, but back home on the Pueblo, job prospects are slim, keeping many trapped in the city, homeless.

Susan told us that a primary problem in San Ildefonso is young people leaving the Pueblo and not coming back because they are searching for better opportunities. This estranges young people from their culture and family, and it contributes to population decline. Towards the end of our conversation, though, she said she also gets worried when young people stay on the Pueblo because “they’ll probably get into drugs or alcohol.” In her opinion, even though population decline is a problem, young people do need to get out of the Pueblo and then come back. If they stay, oftentimes they’ll just get caught up in drugs and alcohol, and it is a very real slippery slope to a premature death.

Numerous people we interviewed were more than just affected by the epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction—they had seen entire generations and families ravaged by it.

Young people can look forward to “working at Burger King”

A lot of the people we spoke to at the Gathering of Nations and Nizhoni Days Pow Wow were Diné (Navajo) and lived on their reservation. Dinétah (the Navajo Nation) is home to largest reservation in the country, and it is the second-most populous Indigenous nation in the United States. Unlike most Native nations, much, though not all, of their ancestral homeland is on their reservation. Despite living on the land their people have had a material and spiritual relationship with for centuries, it goes without saying that the process of colonization completely transformed life in Dinétah. The United States government—through razing towns, internment, forced marches, allotment, ecological degradation, boarding schools, and many other barbaric tools of genocide—eviscerated the economic and many of the social relationships that Diné society was built upon. Today, there are little economic prospects on the reservation. In the middle of a conversation with a young Diné man, we asked what kids can look forward to living in his small rural town on the reservation. He laughed and said “working at Burger King.”

Steven, a middle-aged Diné man, was one of the first people we approached at the Nizhoni Days Pow Wow. He was extremely suspicious of us at first, clocking us as right-wing YouTubers looking to mine the pow wow to make clickbait content. He quickly warmed up to us when we described our project. Steven described the towns and enclaves like the one he lived in as having very little money and few ways to get money. He said the lack of grocery stores, no running water, and pollution from uranium mining wreck the health of people in his community. According to Navajo Water Project, 30% of households on the Navajo Nation lack running water, and thousands live without electricity.

Steven said people were divided on whether the nation should mine uranium and coal in order to bring money onto the reservation. He sympathized with those who saw resource extraction as a necessary evil but had personally lost too many family members to cancer directly tied to uranium mining to support resource extraction. We asked him if he felt the Diné government could do a better job allocating the resources they had to alleviate the destitution he described. He was extremely reluctant to criticize the tribal government and placed the blame squarely on the US government for failing to uphold their treaty obligations.

There was a near-universal hatred of the US government among the people we spoke to, but some felt tribal governments didn’t help the destitution many experienced on the reservation. Eric and Micky, teenage friends who lived in and outside of Window Rock (the capital of Dinétah), were pissed at Buu Nygren, the Navajo Nation president, for endorsing the Trump administration’s proposal to mine coal on the reservation, and to look into reopening uranium mines on Mt. Taylor, which is controlled by the Forest Service but is sacred to Diné people. Nygren also allowed mining companies to transport radioactive waste across the nation. Joseph, a young Diné man who moved from Gallup to Oklahoma City, and his friend Sam, who is from the Chickasaw Nation and also lives in Oklahoma City, spoke to us about their tribal governments. They felt the governments were riddled with nepotism and corruption. They said the family and friends of those in government were prioritized when it came time to make infrastructure investments or when government jobs became available.

The poverty Steven and others described forces many off the reservation and into cities. Though there are jobs in the city, urban life poses a different set of challenges to survive. In the gentrifying cities around Dinétah, soaring rents and hurdles implemented by property managers and landlords to intentionally exclude the poor force many onto the streets. We met a Diné man in his mid-thirties who had hitchhiked his way off the reservation when he was seventeen and hasn’t looked back. He didn’t think there is anything left for him on the reservation, but he was jealous that people on the reservation had time, because surviving in the city meant he was constantly working and had no time for himself.

Many people we spoke to who live in cities said racism against Native people was severe in every aspect of society. Joseph spoke fondly of returning to Dinétah and even the border towns around the reservation. He said he couldn’t hack it on the reservation because of how brutal the living conditions are, but “at least you are surrounded by other Natives.” Joseph contrasted that camaraderie with his experience in Oklahoma, where he described deranged white people looking for an excuse to kill Native people around every bend. He said this white supremacist terror extends into rural areas on the reservation as well, because white people owned lots of land that was technically on reservations.

Tourists from around the country go to the Southwest to visit Native nations and pretend they are in a foreign country, or to play out their twisted Wild West fantasies. An older man from the Taos Pueblo, Ed, told us that he has a love/hate relationship with tourists, because they bring in a lot of cash to the Pueblo, but oftentimes they don’t act with respect or realize that the Pueblo is a living, breathing place with real people living there. He told us that despite not being allowed to, some tourists climb on buildings and take pictures. Native reservations and Pueblos are sovereign nations, but because they are dependent on capital investment from the US, and the forces wielding this capital designate Native country as only ripe for tourism, tribal governments invest in tourism. Despite many tourists being rightfully loathed by tribal citizens, and despite goods and services produced for these tourists being of little use to the nations, tribal governments use tourism to bring cash into the nation. This dependence on US capital, caused by the US destroying Indigenous peoples’ previous economic structures and geographically isolating them, severely limits how tribal governments can invest their economic resources.

The gambling industry is another one of the few ways money trickles into Native country. But like tourism, it comes with serious drawbacks. Calvin, the man from the Miccosukee Nation we spoke to at length at the Gathering of Nations, detailed how the gaming industry was affecting his people. He told us that some people in his tribe have been able to accumulate money primarily through the gambling industry, which he is grateful for. But he also said that this changed the way people relate to one anther. He talked about how many of his friends and neighbors are building single-family homes on larger plots of land and are focused on getting their piece of the American pie. This is in contrast to how people saw themselves when he was a kid, when they made decisions not in the interest of themselves or even their family unit, but for the entirety of their people. He tied this change in priorities with the ability for (some) individuals to accumulate wealth. He fears that the younger generation will not look out for the interests of others or see the importance of the tribe operating as a collective.

“We want our land back from LANL”

We got the chance, one afternoon in late spring, to talk with people at their homes on San Ildefonso Pueblo, which is a twenty-minute drive downhill of Los Alamos National Laboratory (also known as “LANL” or “the Labs”). LANL was the secret location of the design and production of the first atomic bombs in the world under the Manhattan Project during World War II. Today, LANL continues to build essential components for nuclear weapons as well as conduct nuclear research and research in national security, space exploration, and supercomputing. The LANL property is under some of the tightest security in the United States, and many employees will tell you that they don’t know the whole picture of what their research is serving (though it is, without a doubt, super sketchy).

LANL, located in a town also named Los Alamos in a county also called Los Alamos, is an island of wealth. Los Alamos County is the wealthiest county in New Mexico, with a median household income of $143,000, compared to New Mexico’s median household income of $43,000, one of the lowest in the US. About one in five people living in Los Alamos has a PhD, and the town physically looks more like an out-of-place California suburb than a mountain town in northern New Mexico. An older man from San Ildefonso Pueblo, Eugene, told us, in an eerie way, that “the Labs are really powerful and VERY strong.” Our crew had questions about how LANL taking control of the San Ildefonso Pueblo’s land had affected their people and way of life.

Eugene and a few older people at San Ildefonso were displaced earlier in their lives by the US government in order to build the Labs. Eugene was chopping weeds in the San Ildefonso Plaza parking lot when we approached him. He told us that when he was a kid, the government pushed him and his family downhill and built the walls of the Labs enclosing his childhood home. Now, you can’t access anything behind the walls of the Labs without a LANL employee with a badge. Eugene spent a few years working at the Labs, and he said with hesitation that it was a good place to work. These mixed feelings about working at the Labs were a sentiment shared by others.

Johnny and Brenda shrugged their shoulders when we asked if they would recommend for young people to work at LANL. “That’s where the good jobs are,” they told us, but not without also admitting how much it sucks that some of the only jobs with a substantial wage and benefits are at the Labs, because the damage that LANL has done to their community is so clear. Anna and Carlos, from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, which is about a forty-minute drive from LANL, said that despite struggling to pay the bills and a lack of nearby job prospects, they would never work at the Labs even though they are always hiring with good pay and benefits. They cited the toxic pollution and the poisoning of their people as reasons that they would never work there. They said that though some people from their nation do work there, most of the people they know feel the same way they do, that the health of their land and people takes precedence over their own financial advancement. A massive billboard encouraging passersby to apply for jobs at LANL in order to “serve your nation” was visible from where we talked to Carlos and Anna.

Many of San Ildefonso’s sacred sites and homeland are on what is now the property of the Labs, behind walls and layers of government security. Tribal members are not allowed to be there unless they are on a specific LANL tour, led by a LANL employee. Even when escorted into their own land with a LANL employee, they are not allowed to take pictures (only LANL employees can take pictures for them). One woman described having to “bite her tongue” when the LANL employee giving her the tour described the Labs as being on Department of Energy land; she wanted to let the employee know that it’s actually her people’s land. Another woman said when she took a tour with her brother and other tribal citizens, they were in shock to learn how much of their culture is locked away.

Tribal members can’t participate in their own cultural practices in private because their traditional land is locked up and poisoned every day by one of the most secret national labs in the country, which operates for the purpose of producing nuclear bombs that the US government uses to threaten the world with nuclear holocaust. There are times and places that tribal members are allowed to use some sites to hunt deer and use some natural resources for their ceremonies. One older woman we talked with said she was concerned about the safety of these plants and animals because of the chemicals seeping from LANL.

The Labs actively poison the water, land, and animals every day. No one knows the full effects of LANL’s poisoning, because no one knows exactly what they are doing, nor what chemicals are being used and leaked. Multiple people on the San Ildefonso Pueblo told us that cancer is very prevalent; Johnny and Brenda insisted that “We didn’t have cancer in our community before LANL and the stuff they started doing.” Another woman we talked to, Lori, said that people are much more likely to get cancer if they work up at LANL, but those who don’t work there aren’t immune from it. She is a survivor of colon cancer. Thyroid cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, and other types of cancer have ravaged almost every one of her family members and friends. Johnny and Brenda said that recently LANL gave them an opportunity to test their water, which was nice because they know their water is probably no good, but they said if LANL hadn’t fucked up in the first place there would be no need to test.

Residents of San Ildefonso Pueblo are used to waste getting dumped onto their community. All of the waste that LANL produces goes directly through their Pueblo. There is only one road that goes from LANL to Santa Fe (which is where the Labs dump their waste), so radioactive trucks pass through the San Ildefonso Pueblo every day. Moreover, LANL used to dump waste directly over the canyon walls into the Pueblo. One elder woman, Denise, said that sometimes you can feel blasts coming from the Labs, and she spoke about the mystery of having no idea what they are doing. We visited San Ildefonso days before LANL was set to vent four radioactive tritium containers into the air, which were in storage for nearly two decades. Due to the weather, it ended up happening in September instead of June, but people across northern New Mexico were concerned about the environmental and health effects of the tritium release. We asked people what their thoughts were on it. Johnny and Brenda shrugged their shoulders and said “what’s new.”

There are only two roads that go in and out of Los Alamos. One goes through the Jemez National Forest, and the other—the one that the daily radioactive dump trucks take—goes through San Ildefonso Pueblo on the way to Santa Fe. One woman said that it would be nice if LANL gave the Pueblo some compensation in return for using their roads, but then she said that that actually wouldn’t matter because “LANL is using us, no matter what.” One person did tell us that LANL requires the cooperation of the Pueblo to run safely. She said if there’s ever a car accident or a fire at LANL, or on the one other road that goes through the forest, the Governor of San Ildefonso has to go open another road to let cars through. LANL is dependent on San Ildefonso’s cooperation, and it doesn’t give the Pueblo much in return. This woman told us that this power that the Pueblo has over the Labs shouldn’t be forgotten about.

“Where is the Native Left?”

After getting into the problems facing Native country, our conversations frequently turned towards what is being done or what should be done to solve them. Eric and Micky, the Diné teenagers from Window Rock we met at the Nizhoni Days Pow Wow, pointed out that their people gathering together was not the problem. They gestured to the thousands of people who had braved the blustering wind to spend time together on University of New Mexico’s Johnson Field, where they shared dances, sold their goods, promoted social service organizations, and caught up with loved ones. Many of these people had traveled from around the country to gather in Albuquerque that weekend to attend the Gathering of Nations the previous two days and capped off the weekend with Nizhoni Days. Despite their ability to come together, Eric and Micky felt there was still a lack of coming together to figure out how to address the ills that ravaged their people. They blamed their generation for thinking re-posting Instagram stories was enough to stand up to their oppressors, rather than organizing their community to confront those oppressors head-on. They mentioned the Black Panther Party as a model for organizing their own people and lamented the fact that they don’t see any organization today in Native country that resembles what the Panthers were up to in their day.

The previous day, we spoke to a group of four young men in their twenties at the Gathering of Nations. They had met in college at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. After graduating, they moved around the country. They attend the Gathering of Nations annually to catch up with each other and hang out. During the 2020 uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, they all were in the streets protesting in their respective cities. In the years since, they continue to attend protests against injustices, especially against the oppression of Native people, but none of them are impressed with the leadership of these protests.

Ray, one of the four, who is from Phoenix, recounted a recent march he attended against the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The stated aim of the protest was to pressure the state legislator to put resources into solving these murders and disappearances. When the protesters marched to the state legislature, the leaders of the march redirected people to march away from the building. Ray was confused by this—he felt that the only way politicians would listen to Native people was if Native people made it an issue for politicians by disrupting their day-to-day activities. He felt that bringing hundreds of angry people only to have them parade around in a circle would not accomplish anything, and he questioned if the groups putting on this event deserved to be leading these political struggles. This story came up when we asked what the group thought about “Land Back.” We wanted to hear about their thoughts about “Land Back” as a slogan or demand, but they interpreted “Land Back” as referring to the Native NGOs who put on protests like the one Ray attended.

When it comes to fighting the everyday oppression that Native people experience in the city, one man in his thirties who we spoke to at Nizhoni Days asked, “Where is the Native Left?” He asked, “Where is The Red Nation? Where is Pueblo Action Alliance?” He felt these groups might have been on the ground several years ago, but these days he doesn’t see them as a force building a political project in his community, counter to what their sizable online followings suggests.

We were curious if people felt that voting for Democrats or Republicans could help free Native people. Practically everyone we spoke to does not vote. Sam of the Chickasaw Nation called the different political parties “puppets on either hand of the rich,” which succinctly categorized many peoples’ feelings. That winter, Deb Haaland, citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, had announced her candidacy for governor of New Mexico. We wanted to know if people felt Indigenous representation in government could change the situation for Native people and was worth supporting.

Jess and Alex, a Diné couple in their late twenties, when initially asked if they voted, said that US elections were “none of their business,” as the results didn’t affect Native people because the government would always oppress Native people. We asked if they thought Deb Haaland being governor could change that. Alex wasn’t convinced. Jess was skeptical of Haaland because she didn’t feel like she did anything for Native people in Congress or in Biden’s cabinet. She said, however, that it was impossible to say if a Native person being elected governor could change things because it had never happened. Therefore, she was open to the idea of supporting Haaland for governor. Several other people expressed a willingness to support Haaland after saying elections did not matter for similar reasons, though we didn’t encounter anyone who was a gung-ho supporter.

On the other hand, Joe, a man in his thirties from Laguna Pueblo, had a lot to say about fellow tribal citizen Deb Haaland. “We rooted for her initially, and we always tell kids on the Pueblo to reach their full potential, but not if they’re going to betray our people,” he told us. He said she hasn’t fulfilled any of the promises she made to her people since her political career began. Joe doesn’t think she actually cares about her people, and when we asked if he would describe her as a sellout, he agreed. On Laguna Pueblo, he told us, kids are taught to care about people. If you’re not for the people, it will come back to bite you. He implied most people he knows on Laguna Pueblo would agree with his strong criticism and distrust for Haaland, except for Haaland’s family.

“We fought the US before, and will need to again, soon”

Our social investigation team spoke to numerous Native people who starkly saw the need for revolution in the US, and many others espoused a sense of responsibility to their nation, to humanity, and to the Earth that is drastically lacking in American society.

Sam, the young man we spoke to from the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, when asked about what needed to be done to combat the ills of our society, described “the working class” uniting to overthrow the American government. He didn’t think his people could prosper so long as the United Sates, at least as a capitalist state, still existed. He understood racism against Native people and other oppressed nations as powerful tools that fractured the working class. Richard, the Apache man we spoke to about the art industry, had fears that, because his people’s reservation was “given” to them in an executive order, there could be an executive order to take it back from them. When we asked what can be done to stop this, he said something to the effect of “our Nation has been at war with the US many times before, what makes people think we forgot how to fight?”

A Diné man who is homeless told us that “I see [revolution] coming, sooner or later the way things are going. People are getting pushed into a corner. Someone’s gonna say something, and the people will revolt… Give me a rifle when it happens.” He said later: “We were better when we were self-sufficient, when we had our own livestock, our own fields, growing our own food. That dependency [on the United States government] ruined everybody… There’s a lot of depression, there’s a lot of suicides.” He then told us that his granddaughter just got sexually molested by his brother-in-law, and how he’s seen sexual abuse and assault rampant among his people for his whole life, including among children. He blamed the dependency on the US government for building a culture where kids are getting sexually abused. He went on to explain that “I think the Navajo Nation and culture could outlive the US. I think the US is going to self-implode… A lot of young Natives see what the elders were talking about as far as what’s coming.”

After a long, fruitful conversation, we gave a homeless Native woman the Going Against the Tide pamphlet “Revolution in the Philippines: the people’s war that persists.” She was excited to read it after opening it and scanning the content. When we asked what was compelling her to want to know so much about revolutionary movements abroad, she said: “We fought the US before, and we will need to again, soon, so we need to learn from them.”

The majority of people we interviewed didn’t talk about revolutionary history or theory, but felt strongly that they had a responsibility to collectives greater than themselves. People were deeply concerned about the overall health of their people and their land. The bourgeoisie has done a very good job of cultivating a “me first” attitude in much of the population of this country. We didn’t find this way of thinking to be dominant among Native people, and in fact we’d argue that the opposite is true, that communal principles in many Native cultures insulate many Native people from this corrosive way of thinking. We heard from many people about the significance of culture, that culture is everything. It is part of the fabric that holds nations together.

The social ills that people told us about—economic underdevelopment, pervasive alcohol and drug addiction, the loss of language, and population decline—all illustrate that Native people have been and continue to be in danger of genocide. For centuries, the US has forced Indigenous people off their land, and even today, many young people need to move to the cities to find economic opportunity, or as Susan somberly said, to not get caught up in the dangers of addiction. The dispossession and displacement that Native people experience lays bare the stark reality of the necessity of revolution for Native people. The survival of precolonial mentalities, such as strong collective thinking, a connection to and care for the natural world, and a shared desire to preserve culture and identity, highlights the fact that Native people, from the Pueblos, to the reservations, to the hood, can become a sharp social force for revolution.