This week many in the US celebrate the “Thanksgiving” holiday, even amidst the growing isolation of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical Resistance sees this holiday as an opportunity to center the experiences of Indigenous communities and honor centuries-long struggles of Indigenous people here at home and around the world against the violence of colonialism and for cultural regeneration and self-determination. 
 

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately devastated Black and Indigenous communities, with Indigenous peoples experiencing COVID-infection rates at 3.5 times higher than white people in the US, impacting Native youth at higher rates than white youth according to the Center for Disease Control. This is certainly the result of US settler-colonial project, deploying generations of genocidal policies stripping Indigenous communities of living conditions for healthy, sustainable lives. From forced relocation, to confinement, imprisonment, monitoring, criminalization, policing, political repression, dispossession, disenfranchisement, torture, forced sterilization, disappearance, and death--the prison industrial complex (PIC) has been instrumental in maintaining colonial control over Indigenous peoples and land in the US and around the world. Today, Indigenous people in the US continue to make up the largest group per capita imprisoned in jails and prisons. Leonard Peltier, from the Lakota & Dakota peoples and a former member of the American Indian Movement, remains the longest-imprisoned political prisoner. Free Leonard Peltier!

In July, Sioux leaders engaged in another instance of ongoing resistance for land reclamation at the Black Hills site in Keystone, South Dakota that was targeted by state repression. Northern California’s Yurok and Hoopa Valley Tribes made advances in their fight for self determination, winning a landmark deal to remove several dams that have ruined salmon runs integral to the tribes’ survival and practices. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Muskogee Creek and other Indigenous peoples in Oklahoma, bolstering their capacity for self determination and resisting the PIC. O’odom water and land defenders recently led a protest against militarization of the borderlands in Tucson, Arizona. Throughout the summer, there was powerful political solidarity and commitment to fighting policing demonstrated by Indigenous people in Minneapolis, Minnesota during the George Floyd protests. Lastly, the Indigenous peoples of Nigeria waged a powerful fight against poverty and the violence of policing, protesting SARS, the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad. 

These battles not only push forward significant advances in the struggle for decolonization, but also in the struggle for PIC abolition, as abolition is a strategy for the ultimate goal of community self-determination and liberation. In the words of Pit River Tribe organizer and long-time cherished friend of Critical Resistance, Morning Star Gali: “Abolition is more than an idea. Abolition is decolonization. Abolition on stolen land, as this is for Indigenous communities, is a radical dismantling of the carceral state.”

Toward liberation, 
Critical Resistance