We went to Big Island for our honeymoon last year and as an organizer I was just blown away by the visibility and strength indigenous sovereignty movement there.

It took me so by surprise, it's so completely elided from tellings of contemporary United States liberatory movement.

We'd be driving by, like, a bunch of fisherman on a pier, and they'd be sitting around in t-shirts protesting the TMT project on Mauna Kea.

We'd be in the Walmart parking lot, people would be like, yeah, this weekend I'm driving some blankets up to the Mauna blockade.

There was one flag we saw just everywhere the first few days, and it turned out to be the independence flag.

We had a tour book that was supposed to show us the "hidden" locations, rented a Jeep to go see some of them.

A lot we missed because they'd just been marked "kapu" (=taboo, forbidden) with handmade signs, even though our guidebook said they were technically public.

Our guidebook was also like, "yeah, ignore the kapu signs for the public stuff, it's a constant struggle between Hawaiians and tourists."

That's some militant shit.

That was also when we started looking for a new guidebook.

Even the corporate and colonial tourist sites were spaces marked by very visible pushback, places hotels had been forced to engage in petroglyph preservation, National Parks that basically admitted "okay these are the rules, natives ignore some of them, you may not"

We were in a B&B with an evangelical Christian family one night, and it turned out the mother in the family was a Hawaiian hula dancer (later, we found out, a famous one).

She'd grown up on the mainland and come back; she was the one who told us to visit the blockade.

She also talked to me a lot about how she didn't see her faith and her observance of Native traditions as contradictory, talked about the tension between the colonialness of Christianity and how she found balance.

It's not that any one of these things isn't a kind of resistance we see in other forms on the mainland, but it's hard to convey just how omnipresent and overtly political and linked to explicit sovereignty this stuff was.

I wrote here at one point about a story one of the TMT organizers told me about how indigenous cops just started boycotting orders to arrest protesters, because their aunties were given them such grief at home.

Someone was like "that would never happen [on the mainland]," and no, almost certainly not.

What's remarkable isn't so much the strategy itself as what its efficacy on Big Island demonstrated.

What cops boycotting protester arrests showed was, the community was so successfully organized around political indigenous identity that cops felt more accountable to indigenous movement than they did to the institution of policing.

One of the biggest failures of mainland left liberatory movement is our tendency to focus on analysis and campaign to the neglect and often the complete rejection of the cultural.

That's an unfortunate legacy of a lot of forms of Marxist-Leninist thinking within the left, this idea that the richness of cultural identity is an obstruction and barrier to the realization and primacy of a revolutionary worker consciousness.

It's always struck me as punishingly colonialist-- all these highly educated white cadre dudes spending the better half of the last century fantasizing about stripping peasant and indigenous culture of the practices they used to maintain identity and dignity and community.

The more I end up exposed to tankies, the more I understand that my association of "Communist" Soviet bloc government with ugliness and grayness isn't just US propaganda, it's about a reptessive intellectual colonialism present in Soviet attitudes towards culture of the people.

I was a sociology/anthro major and a religion minor in college.

My politics have always been as grounded if not more grounded in my understanding of social theory, and of the power of people's culture and memory when it comes to creating liberatory movement.

I wrote my thesis on white appropriation of Afro-Atlantic diasporic religion (for example, Vodou, Santeria, rootwork).

It's been a long time, and I was brushing up recently when an article jogged my memory about how Castro tried to eliminate Santeria from the Cuban peasantry.

The thing about Santeria (and many other Afro-Atlantic syncretic New World religions) is, it's this remarkable site of resistance against brutal white colonial repression and attempts to eliminate African beliefs from an enslaved populace.

Slaves encoded their African ancestral religion into the Catholic Saint structure, creating correspondences between individual spirit semi-deities and the canonized.

They'd worship the saint, they'd also be worshipping the corresponding semi-deity.

It drove (drives!) priests batshit.

As the practice gained a foothold in Afto-Cuban community, its practitioners began to view themselves as faithful to both Santeria and Catholicism, even integrating Catholic mass into Santeria initiation ritual.

Priests would say, "please stop, this is unCatholic," and practitioners would say, "we don't know what you're talking about, this literally IS Catholicism."

Catholic orthodoxy couldn't kill Santeria, and neither could Castro.

After the fall of the USSR, he tried to essentially commodify it as a tourist spectacle.

By the end of his life, Santerian priests were claiming to basically function as medical consultants for him & his army.

Talking to the evangelical Christian hula dancer about how many indigenous Hawaiians both practiced a Christian faith and native religious practices side by side reminded me a lot of how Santeria became and remains an expression of political identity and cultural resistance.

I'm thinking about trauma a lot these days, and I've been reading up on how different cultures understand and encode survival into their belief systems and sense of identity.

In Western psychology, we encode it as the baseline for growth, the first stage of the Erikson developmental stages, as the very base of the Maslow hierarchy.

In some forms of Indian spiritual tradition, it's encoded in the root chakra, the vestigial tail of our coccyx, where ancestral memory is imagined to be stored.

It's envisioned as dwelling at the crossroads of the spiritual and physical planes.

In ancient and revivalist Celtic, Saxon, and Briton religions, it's encoded in tbe wheel of time as the beginming of the year, Samhain/Halloween, a time concerned with both protection from/survival of death and evil, and with communication and reverence of the ancestral.

Again and again in my reading, there's this sense of a crossroads between survival and a development of higher self and community, an initiation point to find protection, process ancestral wisdom, and ask for help in the clearance of obstruction.

Thread continues here: https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1278006801729028096