We are excited to announce the launch of the California Freedom Council of The Red Nation. While we have had members in California for some time, we are officially forming a Freedom Council that will seek to organize and build revolutionary struggle with California’s Indigenous communities and all colonized peoples. The fires burning all around us and the pandemic that has swept through the nation are both an omen of settler colonial domination as well as a call to action to restore Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship of these lands. With almost 500 years of colonial occupation and mismanagement of the western coast of Turtle Island by European settlers, the forests burn with the help of fossil fuel induced climate change. Now more than ever the choice described in The Red Deal is clear: decolonization or extinction.
The struggle for Indigenous liberation in California is impacted by the multiple layers of colonization by Spanish, Russian, and American settlers and the wide-scale genocidal violence and erasure against Indigenous peoples. Though it was one of the most diverse Indigenous regions of North America, California’s tribes have faced dispossession through war, starvation, relocation, and broken treaties. Many do not have federal recognition or a land base yet California has the largest Indigneous population in the country, with half living in urban cities mostly due to relocation programs during the Termination Era.
Here in California we live in cities, on streets, and in counties named after Spanish missionaries who enslaved Indigenous people and for notorious Indian-killers from the ranks of the US Army, white ranchers, miners, and private militias. Fourth graders across the state are tasked with building replicas of missions where thousands of Indigenous people died of starvation, abuse, and overwork. Still, Native communities continue to exist and resist on or off their traditional territories. In the Bay Area there has been a longtime effort to protect the remaining shellmounds in which Ohlone people’s ancestors are buried, and they have built a land trust that seeks to return land to the tribe. In the North, many tribal communities are actively fighting mining, oil and gas, and for dam removal that harms salmon runs that feed their communities. And in the South, where the federal government is trying to build a racist wall to restrict our Southern relatives, the Kumeyaay people are putting their bodies on the line to stop the desecration of their territories. Across the vast agricultural fields in the urban centers of the state, Indigenous Mexican and Central American farmworkers and laborers are facing threats of deportation, discrimination, and environmental injustice through pesticide exposure and disproportionate exposure to COVID-19 and smoke alike.
It is with all of these ongoing and interrelated struggles that The Red Nation California Freedom Council hopes to be involved. We are beginning our organizing with a fundraising campaign to support Red Fawn Fallis, who has just been released from a 4 year political imprisonment for her efforts to protect her people’s water in Standing Rock. We are also beginning remote study groups to learn and develop political analysis together until we are able to gather in person. Stay tuned for ways to get involved with our study groups and how to join The Red Nation! In the meantime please follow us on our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages.
All Relatives Forever.
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