“Canada has found a way to criminalize every aspect of who we are; Our identity has been criminalized, our cultural

“Canada has found a way to criminalize every aspect of who we are; Our identity has been criminalized, our cultural practices and songs and dances were criminalized; the way we provided for ourselves, our traditional practices, whether it’s hunting, fishing, tobacco, gaming, all of these things … have been criminalized…; our governing systems have been criminalized. I mean literally, they portray any system outside of the Indian Act as rogue, as terrorists, as some kind of ‘splinter group causing trouble without any legitimacy’….

All they care is that you’re indigenous, and being indigenous means you’re inherently criminal.

But here’s the twist!

In order for us survive genocide, in order for us to assert, live and defend all of our rights, we have to be criminally indigenous!”

–Pam Palmater via 1492 Land Back Lane Teach-in, 2020

—

“Anarcho-Blackness’s conceptualization of Black anarchism specifically, demands
the impossible. [..]
The impossible is the name for the world outside of, or after, or differently
within, an anarchic destruction of the racial and sexual capitalist State.

This world-outside is Black, or lawless; this world-outside is anarchic, or
stateless, radically liberated.
I take my cue in this from an etymological source. One of the first
recorded uses of ‘anarchy’ comes in 1539 from Richard Taverner, who
writes, 'This unleful lyberty or lycence of the multytude is called an
Anarchie.’ Anarchy becomes more than what classical anarchists note: the
negation of a head or chief; without a ruler or leader; stateless. Though
Taverner surely connoted his usage of anarchy negatively, one can read
this iteration in a way that precisely captures how the anarchism of Black
anarchism seeks to operate. That is, an 'unleful lyberty’ is a freedom or
liberation that arises not as a product of a bestowal by the State. [..] We grant our own 'lycence’ to be free, and it is
multitudinous, a mass, a heady swarm, that takes this liberty and license.
A promotion of disorder inasmuch as it is an anarchy that refuses to cater to order as instantiated by regimes of governance.

The prefix anarcho-, an
index of all of this, embraces a political disorder begotten by an encounter
with Blackness’s troubling ethos, its radicalization of radicality. The history of Blackness, in short, is a history of disruption toward freedom.

How anarchic.

[..] On one register, Black communities themselves are, one might say, anarchist communities: they don’t ‘involve the state, the police, or the politicians. We look out for each other, we care for each
other’s kids, we go to the store for each other, we find ways to protect our communities.’”

–Marquis Bey, “Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism” (2020)