“A reverberating despair echoes through dry canyons and off distant concrete walls filled with ancestral subversions, it is the far crying conspiracy of anti-colonial dissonance. It is the conflict of Settler cognition in discord with itself, resonating against its contours and contradictions. It is the overbearing sound of desperation and failure weaponized into a pedagogy of negation. Our defiances, our subterfuges, our anti-colonial antagonisms all have a natural resonant frequency. This is the indelicate strategy of breaking glass with sound. This is part of how we make sense of this world, again. I offer that it is the responsibility of those who wage anti-colonial struggle to break the static infrastructures of settler colonialism.”
Regardless of political affiliation or your feelings about “anarchy”, I urge you to read this antagonistic and passionate manifesto by the recently passed Diné agitator Klee Benally, an autonomous land defender, hardcore punk musician, artist and co-founder of Indigenous Action Media, Táala Hooghan Infoshop and other organizations for mutual aid and direct action. Despite the title, “No Spiritual Surrender” is not here to define “Indigenous Anarchy” or Diné spirituality, instead declaring the power of remaining unknowable and ungovernable. The following pages are rich with history, personal experience, theory, direct action strategy and security culture advice, all poetically woven into an anti-colonial ceremony that challenges “colonial fictions” and aims to unravel/uproot the colonized ways of being that suffocate existence itself in the stolen lands of the so-called “United States”, whose “history is a mass grave too small to conceal genocide and ecocide and not deep enough to contain ancestral rage”.
Growing up in their ancestral lands on the Navajo Reservation (until their family and thousands of other Diné were forcibly removed due to land disputes), Klee recalls a childhood performing traditional dances to entertain tourists in Kin?ani (so-called “Flagstaff, AZ”), where they would eventually relocate and spend most of their life. After being inspired by the raging “cassette tape riots” of anarcho-punk and starting the band Blackfire with their siblings as a teenager, Klee became increasingly involved in local struggles to protect their land and culture, as well as organizing mutual aid to support the unsheltered Diné relatives living on the outskirts of settler society. The land that is so sacred to the Diné people has a history of desecration and extraction, from fracking and nuclear testing to abandoned uranium mines. Despite the amount of resources (including millions of gallons of water used to exploit the land), the majority of the tribal residents are actually deprived of running water and power. The Diné have an especially vital and sacred connection and cultural identification with Dook’o’oos?ííd (so-called “San Francisco Peaks”), the holy mountains that multiple indigenous nations look to for ceremony and harvesting herbs and natural medicine. After a ski resort was built on the mountain and began pumping treated sewer water from “Flagstaff” for their unnatural snow, these peaks became an ongoing battleground for Klee and many other Diné land defenders, culminating in the Save the Peaks Coalition.
In the following decades, Klee continued to directly participate in over two dozen land struggles around Turtle Island, from Dook’o’oos?ííd to Standing Rock to “Washington, DC”, gaining vital experience and knowledge that will benefit future generations of colonial resistance. Despite fighting fiercely for indigenous people and Nahasdzáán (Mother Earth), Klee saw these struggles as a series of failures that reveal the flaws and weaknesses of different methodologies, both “legitimate” and otherwise. Legal battles, electoral politics, international appeals, and economic boycotts all expose the seeming impossibility of beating colonization in its own frameworks and the necessity of unrelenting direct action and sabotage of the colonial machine. As a devoted antagonist, Klee thrives on negation, arguing that “progressive” or positive movements for healing or restoration will always be incomplete as long as colonial and capitalist structures still stand to co-opt or subsume them. They challenge the “settler literacy” of academia, politics and the non-profit industrial complex that aim to domesticate and de-fang anti-colonial movements. They criticize anyone from themself to tribal governments to settler leftists to the project of “civilization” itself, which they declare has always been an apocalyptic war on the Earth aiming to erase and homogenize the multi-plurality of indigenous cultures around the globe. Klee often confronts the reader, making you examine your own assumptions and beliefs. This includes challenging the sedative effects of hope and Western understandings of linear time (even encouraging you to read the book out of order). Some readers may be provoked an essay like “Voting is Not Harm Reduction”, where Klee argues that participating in electoral politics serves to reify and legitimize the colonial system that has been violently imposed upon people. This thinking is far removed from their old punk band’s time playing “Rock the Vote” concerts on the reservation. Klee also became disillusioned with international law when, years after being invited to speak to the UN in support of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they discovered that these UN declarations are more symbolic than materially enforceable. If Klee were still with us today, their understandings would undoubtedly continue to sharpen and transform as they wage their battle against colonialism, but unfortunately they passed away at the end of 2023, barely a month after this powerful, provocative book began to ripple through anti-colonial and abolitionist thought.
Free PDF (Klee was anti-copyright)
Further Research:
“No Spiritual Surrender” by Klee Benally
Resisters interview with Nadia Chan and Klee Benally: “Anticolonialism vs. Decolonization”
Tribute Klee Benally: Final interview and First Documentary
In Defense of the Sacred: A Conversation with Klee Benally – Uncivilized Podcast 39
