Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
K. Malulani Castro On Organizing and Indigeneity
In this lively conversation with Malu Castro, we embark on an intriguing exploration of land organization and sustainability, with a primary focus on Hawaii. Castro's fascinating transformation from an orchestrator of professional revolutionaries to an investigator of land and indigenous rights offers a fresh perspective on the unique challenges and paradoxical situations that have arisen as a result of historical policies. We delve into the complexity of Native Hawaiian identity, the impact of the Dawes Act of 1887, and the profound implications of colonial power on economic and land relations.
As we broaden our discussion, we confront Marx's contradictions and the intersection of politics, identity, and land. We grapple with the historical effects of colonialism on land relations, and how these have facilitated the displacement and elimination of indigenous populations. The conversation further extends to the significant need to incorporate local and indigenous politics into our overall political comprehension, thereby bridging the divide between settler and indigenous conceptions.
In the final part of our discussion, we reflect on the enlightening journey we've taken with Castro. We probe into the intricate connection between politics, land, and identity, and the harsh realities of colonial policies that indigenous populations face. In conclusion, we ponder on the far-reaching impacts of industrial production on environments and the potential of subsistence as a more sustainable method of supporting people. Join us for a deep dive into an enlightening discussion that is bound to challenge your perspectives and enhance your understanding.
K. Malulani "Malu" Castro is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability. He is also a former union organizer. We talk about how we may need to change our ideas about organizing to allow for different land relationships with socialism. We also talk about the work of Dr. Glen Coulthard, particularly "Red Skins, White Masks."
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Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. And today we're with Mauro Castro, doctoral candidate at University of Michigan in environmental studies and sustainability. Former organizer Salter Salty Salting, I guess. The professional organizer, I guess, would be the polite nomenclature word to use.
K. Malulani Castro:Volunteer, volunteer. We were not volunteers.
C Derick Varn:Volunteer organizer yes, professional revolutionaries didn't necessarily get paid either, that's true. But so you work in both sustainability stuff now you've worked with unions, you're looking at going back to your native Hawaii and doing stuff on land organization, land reform, et cetera.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like the kind of short version of the story. Yeah, I like that bring out and organizing when I was like I don't think it makes sense to start when you're 18. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
C Derick Varn:They're like 18 year olds, because they don't pay them a lot.
K. Malulani Castro:Well the thing is, I was paid by the hotel. That was the grift of it. Yeah, I was not paid by the union. That was an ethical choice not to be paid by the union. But I got to the end of the rope with that and all the people above me were telling me not to go to school. But they all had gone to Amherst and Yale and stuff like that and I was like no one in my family had gone to college. So I was just like maybe I shouldn't listen to you.
K. Malulani Castro:But then I found my way back into school, kind of found my way back into organizing with graduate union organizing, and I think along the way I was just also dealing with the kind of questions that what I found was like union organizing was not really able to resolve for me, which were like a lot of the issues I saw on the islands that my family comes from so my dad's from Puerto Rico and my mom's from Hawaii, the island of Molokai, which is pretty rural and to some extent these kind of discussions in Puerto Rico is a little bit different, but some of the islands in Hawaii are a little bit different, but indigenous issues and kind of like land issues were not really present in any of the politics of the late 2010s, like early 2010s, like mid to, you know, 2015 or whatever.
K. Malulani Castro:That really wasn't on my radar, at least. So as I went back to school, I just like tried figuring out like how can I go back and do good work? And then that kind of found me into the world of doing like land rights work, indigenous rights work, environmental sustainability work, after going through like a short stint in psychology which was very, very bad, and I yeah, that's a whole other conversation.
C Derick Varn:So, yes, I always find psychology is one of those fields that I'm like very useful if you don't actually study it. Yeah, but this is one of the emissions of this show. I mean, you and I were, you have been and you've been a listener for a while you, you, would write me very long and interesting and informed comments and, just so people know if you bug me enough and you're not stupid are very aggressive. If I look into what you're doing and it actually interests me, I might be interested in talking to you. Now, that's the reason why that is Is that I think one of the things that's like holding down socialist, and I am increasingly frustrated with the idea of of like the broad left, because I just not because I want to be post left or beyond left and right that's always almost always bad, but because it's just I don't know what it means.
C Derick Varn:I can't even like, I don't even know broad orientations anymore. People try to like say there's one, and then I'm like yeah, but we don't all agree with that either. Like whatever someone's like. Well, the left believes in equality, and and I'm like, do we, though, like what does that mean?
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, what point, like what point in history are you talking about? You know can definitely, like you know, least here in this country. I mean some specifics here.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, equality for whom and how and for what, like um, and you happen to hit on the fact that I am a fan of Coltard, who wrote Redskins right Mass, often playing off of the French phenomenon book, blackskins white math. So this is a very different book in a lot of ways. I was actually coming out with one of my DNA friends. Oh, four years ago when I first came to America and we were arguing about Marx. This guy was a big mouth and I was a. And he's like don't you dare talk about primitive accumulation? And I'm like, well, I mean, I still think primitive accumulation never is primitive, I think it's always ongoing. And he's like oh, and I'm like yeah, but then he handed me Coltard. I'd also handed me Vine DeLoria I've read that before and DeLoria is a harder sell for me for a couple of reasons most of the work in the end of his life.
C Derick Varn:But I wanted to talk to someone who actually used Coltard like practically actually influence what they were doing.
C Derick Varn:Because that's sort of the way we are oriented here and one of the things that got me interested in your work was you would talk about you, talk about me talking to the organizing principles and then people asking you to give them things and I'm like, yeah, but as an organizer I actually can't do that for you.
C Derick Varn:Like I know you want me to and if I did I would be selling you a false bill of goods, like because there is no way in which I know all conditions which you exist and there's no rule I can give you. It's going to give you a way to act and everything that's going to come up. And if anyone who's ever done actual organizing knows that, and people who try to pretend like they have like the way, often they do have lessons Kim Moody, jim Jim McIvory have great lessons, but but they also tend to over emphasize certain things to the point where Perverse incentives are ignored yeah and whatnot. So I wanted to ask you, like one, actually, before even getting to that, let's get to the. Let's get to something. A lot of people don't think about Hawaiian Pacific Islanders as part of the American indigenous.
K. Malulani Castro:So let's just jump into that real quick. Ok, I mean, yeah, so just again I give some context. Yeah, so like I'm a doctoral student I do kind of dissertation work. My dissertation is focused on a big land back project, like an Ina back project there going on with my community or in my with my home island and kind of navigating kind of all the kind of insanity that kind of comes with that.
K. Malulani Castro:I can kind of get into the specifics, but I don't think that that's necessary. So, like I do have some extent beyond my own personal identity, I have some kind of kind of expertise or knowledge about Hawaii and I think when I get brought this up right, so like you know, I personally have had people kind of tell me that like Native Wines aren't an indigenous people or just did not know that we existed as a people prior to statehood. I've, all you know, I can kind of list off all the kind of funny like micro aggressive things that have happened to me over the years. But I think part of why Native wines aren't necessarily kind of wrapped up into the kind of indigenous category, the kind of American, you know, alaska, native American, indian or Native American categories, is because of some like very specific conditions of how, you know, us occupation of Hawaii occurred internal issues within how kind of indigenous is like utilized as like a kind of a political strategy or you know, both from indigenous peoples but also by nation states to kind of control and kind of domesticate people. Right, that what we've kind of landed on in the kind of like 21st century is like a very kind of like paradoxical situation, that's, I don't want to say completely different than like anything else you know across like indigenous context here in the US, but it's pretty unique, right, and maybe something you see more commonly across the Pacific or in other parts of the world.
K. Malulani Castro:And you know, you'll find you know very strong, staunch monarchists and when I say monarchists I mean native Hawaiian monarchists who want to kind of reinstate the native Hawaiian monarchy because their argument is that Hawaii is an occupied kingdom and that we kind of fall underneath the kind of charter of like non self governing entities. So there's been some interesting kind of international kind of attempts at appealing to like international courts around that. But you have like kind of diehard monarchists who are also like incredibly Christian conservatives and you also have kind of state agency and kind of more kind of maybe just to grab it as like liberal or kind of indigenous approaches where there's like a focus on having native Hawaiians reorganized as like a federally recognized tribe. And then obviously there's people who kind of like none of that is going to be good for us, so like we have to figure something else out and then to add on top of that. You know, we I think we just got out of like what Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month or like.
K. Malulani Castro:We just kind of crossed through that period of time which I always find like super interesting and kind of complicated, but like Asian American identity, specifically with like Hawaiian identity, is like kind of written into like our blood quantum in a very real way. So just to give some other kind of context and we don't have to talk about this too much longer, like native Hawaiians are one of the few peoples who kind of were had a blood quantum established by Congress in 1920. And that actually predates the kind of reorganization act in the 1930s that affected the other tribes of the lower 48. And where you saw the kind of more mass distribution of blood quantas across indigenous communities and peoples, so about 10 years before that. And one of the major arguments in that establishment of blood quantum was the large presence of Asian kind of plantation labor and the kind of strong history of solidarity between and kind of just intermarriage and interrelationships between Japanese, korean, filipino, you name it.
C Derick Varn:Well if you don't get along in actual Asia. Do you get along in Hawaii?
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, yeah yeah, well, it didn't always go that way, but you know you treat them badly enough through plantation systems and they kind of realized, like you know, maybe you do actually need to have some kind of cross ethnic solidarity across national solidarity.
K. Malulani Castro:But by 1920, you still had, like you know, acts and laws that were excluding Asian populations and kind of Asian citizenship, but you had a large population of native Hawaiian Asians. So the, you know, congress was kind of facing this dilemma of like how do we incorporate, you know, and establish or extend citizenship to this population and extend, I guess you know, which you can maybe understand as like benefits or privileges to a population that we want to kind of like wholly exclude? So that's like something that you know, I think, and you see other kind of instances of that in the US, you know, particularly around like freemen and other indigenous communities where you have some debates and kind of complexities there, where they're into marriage and interrelationships make things complicated. But I do find ironic now that we have the kind of collapsing of Asian American and Pacific Islander, while those identities were seen as like incredibly different, you know what, maybe 100 years ago.
C Derick Varn:Basically, at this point, sorry, no, and in practice I live, weirdly, one of the things about Salt Lake City which I don't think people get we have a huge Pacific Island topic, but it's not Hawaiian, it's Tongan and Samoan, yeah, and they do not identify with the Asian American.
K. Malulani Castro:No, yeah, no yeah. I mean I can kind of speak about funny stories about that and like I think you maybe picked up, I was raised Mormon.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, I got it. I was like I smell LDS on you.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, yeah, I know, yeah, so we can. I don't want to get down that track too much, but I'm happy to talk about that because that's also a wild trip when it comes to all of this stuff as well.
C Derick Varn:It surprises people who don't know the LDS church for Mormon history when I'm like, yeah, there's a huge Polynesian community here and it is specifically tied to the LDS church, even though you can't assume that a Polynesian person who lives in Salt Lake is LDS, so for sure.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, I mean, I can have a really interesting history in Hawaii too, not just beyond, like you know, because obviously at BYU Hawaii and the Polynesian Cultural Center, which is run by BYU Hawaii, but like a very famous, like cabinet member who was like trying to resist the overthrow, was like this kind of like missionary at large, member of the church, who was kind of established, is kind of how do I say like scam ward or scam stake in Hawaii, to kind of get underneath like breaking young's nose.
C Derick Varn:That's a whole other conversation.
K. Malulani Castro:But yeah, no, there are. I mean, there's a lot of Hawaiians and there's a lot of Hawaiian Mormons as well, Obviously also I know you spent time in Korea there's a lot of Mormons in Korea.
C Derick Varn:But, yeah, there's actually the more Jehovah's Witnesses in Korea, which was, yeah, for sure. But and then there's all the what are the fun things about Korea, is it? It's kind of a religious creation factory. I don't know why I like I'm like I'm not going to be irresponsible and vaguely positive reason, I'm just going to note that it is. Yeah, but the one of the things I wanted to get to talk to you about them, because there's some interesting things that you talk about the Hawaiian case and the kingdom case and I'm like, ok, but let's be honest about American indigenous peoples.
C Derick Varn:The category of nations being applied to them is, in and of itself, kind of an imposition, a necessary one, one that, like I always talk about the African case in Chinua and she beats like ambivalence about this whole thing. But all the deciding like it's probably better to be a nation than not, it's, it's still really confusing because you know every, you know all indigenous people now are US citizens, but they're also Quasi nations and so when we talk about national sovereignty and indigenous people, it's both a big deal and, in, a very real thing to tackle, but it's also like Trout diggers concept of nationality. Yeah, yeah.
C Derick Varn:And the hope in the native Hawaiians are a little bit different, in that they have something closer probably because they're in Ireland to a, to a nation state prior to being colonized and incorporated.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, I mean. So I mean not to say that this like never occurred, but like generally you know, and I don't know if the entire history of treaties, but like you know, you had the kind of process, practice of treaty making with indigenous communities for and European colonizers and even with the US for like basically the entirety of that history, right, and generally those treaties were understood, you know, by indigenous communities as kind of kind of operating in the same facsimile or like the kind of same structure that they would occur within the European or other like international realms, right, that there's that there were nation to nation in that regard, even if they didn't necessarily see themselves as nations, right, as like modern kind of like post Westphalian nation states, they did imagine themselves or kind of understand themselves as having the same level of like kind of political self determination and kind of autonomy, right. Obviously that didn't kind of pan out for like a lot of different reasons, especially when you get into the 19th century. And we can kind of get into the Marshall trilogy if you would like to talk about that stuff, because that stuff is really useful. But the Hawaii case is interesting because by the time the monarchy occurs it's 1840, right, so the first Europeans to get there, obviously Captain Cook the famous guy gets in 1779. And mostly the interactions there are like between, like British sailors and French sailors, some other kind of European nations.
K. Malulani Castro:But then you really have, like the influx of American presence. Is presence in 1820 with actually the arrival of the ABC FM, the kind of Calvinist missionaries Well, not, it wasn't ABC FM at that point, but the Calvinist missionaries and by that point the native Hawaiian kind of like monarchy or like the elite, the chiefly class had been pretty like well versed and kind of pretty astute in kind of hearing what was happening to other communities across the communities, across the kind of colonial world. And then by the time you get to like 1840. There is like a pretty concerted effort to actually kind of rehabilitate, even within the kind of chiefly class, not even necessarily rehabilitate but kind of save the community, save the peoples, because by the time the Constitution is signed Almost 95% of the population is gone. So already by that point, like the huge population you know decline, huge ecological, you know disruptions, huge cultural disruptions, while at the same time having a very kind of how do I say kind of like worldly leadership that kind of saw the revolution.
K. Malulani Castro:So their establishment of a constitutional monarchy was kind of an attempt to be like hey, like don't do bad things to us, right. But then that kind of shot them in the foot because one of the major things I was kind of forced on to them was privatization, or the privatization of land in 1848, which kind of led to the whole kind of overthrow process. Yeah, but like that case is very different than what you see in other parts of the US where you didn't necessarily have a, you know, modern nation states, you know to some extent or like a constitutional nation state kind of engaging in treaty making at the same degree, right, but that's not to say that in other contexts, like you know, indigenous nations were not kind of afforded the same rights or perceived as having the same rights.
C Derick Varn:Hmm, I guess it's just kind of.
C Derick Varn:You know, this is actually kind of important when we talk about like cases of indigenous peoples and North America in general, because the Hawaiian case is very specific and it is different than the case of the other indigenous peoples in North America, but it still ends up kind of in the same Trudegger's nation concept.
C Derick Varn:And there's a couple of things that I started thinking about, particularly when I read Glenn Cotard with when my friend Marona Ben Ali had me read him many, many years ago now, because I started really thinking about the way in which state formation in the settler context in the Americas is actually really precarious, because one hand on one hand, you have a naturalization of a nation state in areas where they're in the European and African-American state, and the African-American model has actually never really been a nation state, even in the colonial government sense, because we've never been, even as settlers, to unify people or unify ethnic, we haven't shared a language, etc. And I have to also combat the naive form of lambakness, because I was listening to some white liberal anarchists here in Salt Lake and they're like we want everyone to get lambak, everyone to go back to their indigenous lands and I'm like where are my indigenous lands, motherfucker?
C Derick Varn:And I'm like, oh, I think I'm a product of this weird ass hybrid place and you know I'm not. I'm not going to claim like indignity because a white people do it too much anyway. And we also like, even in the case where I do have some some kind of like genetic markers for indignity, I kind of think blood quanta is bullshit and I've never been raised in a tribe, so like, and also like it's such a small part of my background, so it's like it's to be basically non existent. So in this sense, I'm like, okay. So on one hand, I want to push back on this like naive, frankly liberal, anarchist conception, like we can all go back to our indigenous, our indigenous lands and run it in context with nature. And I'm like how, like, how does this work?
K. Malulani Castro:Do you really want to go back to the UK?
C Derick Varn:And I'm like, do I like, do I split myself up between, like probably Bulgaria, like the Palestinian mandate, somewhere probably in Jordan, the Midlands and Scotland and part of Peru, like just make any sense, make like at the same time, one of the things I was talking to my goal, talk about this a while back and I'm like we need to get that. When, when, when indigenous and people are talking about land back, they're talking about distributions of power or not, but they're not usually talking about it in the same way as as like colonial sovereignty over the land, and that's what the Kultar book really got me to understand. Because if you, if you treat this as the same thing as like okay, we want you to, we want land back, we want recognition for the government, you're actually making their claims of sovereignty valid by doing so and it also limits you and a national framework in the case of, like the DNA there's brought over three you know three different nations today like countries, not nations. Countries like they're in Mexico, in the United States and in Canada.
K. Malulani Castro:Like and that's just like your graphic separations.
C Derick Varn:That's not even like you know like the draft for whatever yeah well, that was that, and like they're also, like you know, plan differences, travel differences that you know are still meaningful, right, like you know, kultars, yellow knives and stuff like that, yeah, oh yeah, I was actually getting briefed by my friend about like different groups and politics within the DNA nation and the thing about the DNA is there are relatively intact people for indigenous people in America so they can advocate for themselves a lot more easily and they still have some of their, their their reservations are on some of their traditional lands, etc. As opposed to like everybody else who just got dumped in Oklahoma.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, my wife is Osage. So just to kind of give you some context.
C Derick Varn:So, so that argument by Kultar really made me start to like process. Okay, like as a socialist, as a Marxist, how do I handle this? And also deal with white clans, majoritarianism and also not being comfortable with the idea of an info, of actually imposing European style, nation states and that framework of development.
C Derick Varn:And a lot of people think when I talk about development that I assume that that I like take on this, like well, there's this stages theory and I, and I do think actually for like socialism to work in certain ways you do have to have a certain amount of technology. But I'm not, I'm no longer. If I ever was a true stages. I'm not anymore, let me just put it that way. So once you question that you kind of have to deal with, like, okay, how do we deal with you know as close our business the subjective and objective parts of colonial power. And why would anybody who's a Marxist care about this? Because when you start talking about subjective states they get all uncomfortable.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, okay, so this was a few questions there, so, or a few kind of.
C Derick Varn:It's true at all. I appreciate it. And I'll just clarify I'm like completely self taught on all this stuff because there's surprisingly no classes on like indigenous political economy or this very rare so yeah again, my friend Maron I banale is constantly like no one teaches this, they don't treat it as a valid subject and I'm like, yeah, I know, I'm sorry.
K. Malulani Castro:I'm like you have to, like you know, you know kind of sift through everything and like kind of find it yourself.
K. Malulani Castro:But like I mean, I think your first point right here is kind of like naive interpretation of land back. I think something that I and I don't think Glenn or you know called our gets to this in the book but I think you know could be got through like an other kind of context, but I think actually does kind of get to this. When they kind of see how the denig declaration is talked about when it comes to non natives is like settlement was never the issue. I'm just going to say that really kind of clearly and plainly like settlement was not the issue. Right, treaties, treaty making, diplomacy, kind of agreements, kind of cohabitation, co management, coexistence, not to say that this was like always nice and even and always pleasant or like done pleasantly. So like this imagination, and I think again, like people kind of portray the kind of aftermath of like mostly the 19th century on, to like basically look the 500 years of colonialism or 400 years of colonialism, and even like the 19th century, is like pretty uneven.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, there are significant, I think really powerful examples of people just kind of making kind of good treaties and operating in good faith or like believing that they're going to operate in good faith and having the expectation that the kind of ecologies that we're operating in kind of sustain everyone. Right, you have a famous example of the dish with one spoon. You also have the kaslinta, which are all kind of you know hodnishoni, anishinaabe traditions, both kind of interacting with like your other different, various, different kind of indigenous or not indigenous European traditions of colonialism between, like French and British. But anyways, I think like that, why I bring that up is like I think when people bring up this like kind of naive interpretation of land back as like also like forced dispossession again or displacement again of people who are like living here is like this misinterpretation of what I think actually is like at the heart of, I think, glenn's or, you know, clothard's book that you get kind of in the later chapters, which is like just like uneven land relations or just like particular land relations that have been like put onto people.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, and it's not, like you know, and I don't necessarily think like the German, maybe they were, but like you know, the German homesteaders were really like the masters driving colonial slavery. Or you know, colonial settlements, right, but the, the ecologies and the land relations that were being kind of forced on to indigenous peoples and onto these landscapes and also onto, you know, workers, right and onto, like European immigrants, right Onto working class people on. You know, mexican immigrants, mexican, you know, people were like leftover after the Mexican war, american war, like that's the real issue and that that's kind of what we're all trying to like negotiate together. Right, that's actually, I think, what land back is like trying to negotiate is like how do we all negotiate? The fact that like we're all kind of operating in kind of unconcentral land relations that aren't beneficial to any of us, yeah, absolutely.
C Derick Varn:I mean, it's one of, it's one of the ironies of the successful center colonial states, because the empire was able to dump it surplus population somewhere and then use it to dispossess another surplus population surplus from their perspective, like, like, like, well, you know, there are these people and it is of historical interest to kind of see the difference between the, the North American and the Central South American.
C Derick Varn:But at this point that's just a historical curiosity. Yeah, you know, it does explain why, like, there's not a whole mestizo North American group outside of the Metis. But yeah, I mean, it's, it is its own thing and I think it's important for people to understand, because the naive form of land back rightly sounds absurd. It's just like where are we even got to go? When you think about, however, that it literally takes an act of fucking Congress to fix piping on most on, like, on reservation lands or indigenous, or formal indigenous lands, it's like you're like oh, oh, oh, yeah, it's, yeah, it's like come on, we have to think about this in a real sense. It does lead me sometimes to schemes where I'm being a constitutional reformist, where I'm like well, every tribe can have a senator.
K. Malulani Castro:Well, you know, the church here is still trying to do that, right? Yeah, I know You're still trying to do that and I have a lot of churchy friends who are still like we're going to get it this time though. Okay, I don't want to like you know.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean, I think you look at kind of situations where you've had like constitutional reform, at like massive scales, right, like you know, I believe it was like a bad example, because it's not really a comparable example, but like even there it hasn't really kind of fulfilled its own aspirations of being kind of a plurinary national states, particularly for, like you know, especially rural indigenous communities, especially for, like rural indigenous women right, like that hasn't rested necessarily like panned out for them. I'm not going to say that that is like a bad example or that wasn't like a positive thing, but just to kind of put that there.
C Derick Varn:But to kind of go back to your kind of final oh, can you talk about where there's been plural national states, constitutional reforms? Because I know that was a big issue that went down like a Led Zeppelin in Chile just now. But what does that mean and where has that actually been practiced?
K. Malulani Castro:I mean and again this is like my own kind of like lack of experience, so I apologize, but I mean, I think honestly like the only kind of successful forum that I've seen its reach at the constitutional level has been Bolivia, from my interpretation right, and again like part of that was like you know, I think that there's like some kind of again subjective components.
C Derick Varn:Maybe you're gray, yeah, but yeah. Yeah maybe it'll be like maybe, but like you know, even if we just look at the Bolivian oh sorry, son, I have a two year old, it's okay.
K. Malulani Castro:Okay, I have to go. I'm on a conversation, okay.
C Derick Varn:Sorry, um, anyways, good night Good night. Sorry, I have a two year old Totally okay.
K. Malulani Castro:Anyway, so, like you know, in the Bolivian situation, what's the kind of plural national constitution established was one the kind of ensurrement of different indigenous worldviews or philosophies in the kind of in the Constitution.
K. Malulani Castro:To make sure that and there's like, I think, very good debates on like whether or not you wanted to have like expressly enumerated rights or if you just want to have, like you know, catch one like worldviews established in Bolivia, like the Bolivian Constitution, because that allows for a level of like flexibility, because you're not necessarily sure what kind of different policies that need to emerge, and that has allowed for different tribal entities to have, um sorry, it's the kid, uh, you know one political representation, the kind of same level of, uh, kind of political kind of ownership and like oversight at the kind of level of, like you know, legislative development.
K. Malulani Castro:Again, not, I'm not a Bolivian expert, so I can't speak to the entirety of like, how that like works out. I think, when we're thinking about why it's struggling, um, partly is like due to its focus on resource sovereignty, um, and the nationalization of its resources, which has been beneficial for the Bolivian people at times, but also has like brought it into kind of contentious relationships with its own indigenous populations. Um, the only difference here being that, like now, those indigenous populations have a more, I would say, like direct kind of lever within their constitution to affect change when it has these issues.
C Derick Varn:Um, but that's kind of change over the last, like I'll say, like five or six years, but like the different kind of political upheavals there, um, yeah, actually reading about this, Ecuador is also technically a plural national state, but it has had, like it's so limited, in excess we don't even think about it.
K. Malulani Castro:So yeah, so I yeah, so I'm not an expert on that, so I, you know I don't want to speak too much on that, but, um, I don't think people are like. So I think when you have, like it was kind of constitutionalist, reformist ideas, right, like you also see that in Australia right now, like they're kind of going through their own kind of process of and this is kind of even being floated about in New Zealand um of these kind of different changes at the constitutional level. But I think you know the Coulthard book, kind of going back to that kind of helps bring to question like the kind of validity of those solutions, um to addressing, you know, issues of settler, clone, domination, um dispossession, um alienation, you name it right. Um, sorry, kind of didn't necessarily answer that particularly well.
C Derick Varn:No, it's okay. I think you gave enough of an answer that people can understand what you're talking about. Um, the you know, I mean the pro-national thing thing is also an interesting concept. Um, uh, as a constitutional reform. And yet I could also see it being harder to do in the North American context for a variety of reasons, one of which is like, well, how are you going to treat races as peoples? Um, that's going to be the immediate question. Um, and then that opens up a bunch of different, uh, conflicting frameworks. And the other thing that becomes pretty clear and this, this comes from my admittedly white, uh perspective, so I just want to put that out there. Um, but I've always puzzled in the 19th century why, like, colonial powers could be good on black people, are good on indigenous people, but you couldn't be good on both. Um, like, like, if you found someone who was like pretty progressive for their time period in 1870 for uh on race, uh, on black people in specific, they're usually terrible on indigenous issues.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, super bad yeah.
C Derick Varn:Um and, conversely, the Confederacy was better about indigenous rights than the union was.
K. Malulani Castro:And that's like that's one of those things that's like, yeah, we don't want to talk about that, but it's true Um yeah, I can kind of give a nice kind of kind of example of that kind of speaks to that issue and maybe that kind of helps with like the discussion and to your point about like in these pro-national contexts and like how they navigate races, so like.
K. Malulani Castro:One thing I do know for certain is like in the Bolivian constitution, right kind of Africa, diasporic peoples receive to some extent the same level of rights as indigenous populations, right, so they actually, even though they're not seen as indigenous, receive the same kind of level like kind of autonomy and kind of recognition and upliftment in their constitution, which, like you said, would pose a question here in the US of like treating races like peoples. Um, but, and something I like to bring up a lot because I think it's like a really important part of like US history that people don't necessarily know a lot about, is the Dawes Act um the 1818, from 1887, the several two laws that basically like ended the reservation system, um, and opened the West kind of in its final moment, um, to not just you know, not just like privatization and kind of land grabbing, but also to the kind of complete dissolution of kind of any kind of competing political economies, right, or any kind of political ecologies happening there. Um, and again, I think I've brought this up in comments before right, and there's a great scholar, rose Stremlau. She's Cherokee, she's written a great book about this, um, sustaining the Cherokee family, written some good articles about it. Um, but one of the major kind of campaigners for the Dawes Act were the friends of the Indians.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, there's kind of reformer, reformist group that were largely a protestants, largely like white, kind of this kind of burgeoning middle class community, um, largely like, also like women, um, who you know had in their vision, this idea of meeting to completely disrupt the kind of land relations and the economic relations and internal gender relations that were being kind of experienced out in the kind of Western kind of communities and Western indigenous communities, and, at the same time, right, these are people who were you know about you know, abolitionists you know who to some extent were supporting or had or supported reconstruction Um, but they were also, like heavily invested, you know, at this time, in establishing the boarding school process.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, this um, you know, when we think of compulsory education now, like it's, its roots are in the boarding school system in this country and you know, to some extent in across the colonial world, um, and there's some really great you know kind of firsthand accounts and kind of you know kind of um, kind of how these people talk about their experience but like, yeah, in that like 19th century moment, you have these like reformers in this like particular case, who were like, yeah, like women shouldn't be able to like own their ability to kind of like harvest and like maintain wild rice, because that means that they're not maintaining a household, like a domestic space and their kids are like running wild.
K. Malulani Castro:Um, so let's like put them into a house with like a man and also make them, force them to send their kids to school. Basically, um, that was like their logic at that time, right, and imagining kind of and how they talked about kind of indigenous you know economies at that time, or kind of land relations as almost like slavery. So just to kind of give some context for that.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, that's, that's important because it actually is married in Mexico and it said. The irony about it to Mexico has been, you know, war is literally the only indigenous president of Mexico ever is the person who institutes similar policies, and so it's very much seen as a pro indigenous reform act. And yet we all know that it ends up, like you know, basically finishing the King William's war. But, um, uh, it is what it is, but it's something to understand and I think that's there doesn't totally get to the paradox of like why you could be, why it seems like you can only be good on one issue or the other, but I do think that it gets to. When we think about this in the current like BIPOC framework, um, there is actually a pretty hard separation between that being that I Um, so like legally right.
K. Malulani Castro:Just legally right, Like let's just be honest. Right Like legally they're separated, Right, we can get to the, the, the, the POC part, which is its own can of worms that I don't really want to open up here.
C Derick Varn:But like there's, there's a legal distinction, there's a historical distinction, there's a historical tension there, um, and I, I I think one of the interesting things about these reconcessions, I mean these re the land, back movement, this, this attempt to just completely reject colonial politics altogether, is actually really important, for I think it also gets you in ways to reconceive things where this tension that we can't even quite articulate ourselves about, like why can you only be good about one of these two things in the 19th century, can be removed, um, and I think that's, I think that's a really important thing, um, but I think the renegotiation of of the land, and I think there's something that socialists are actually quite bad on, we are not particularly good about conceiving, uh, land rights in a non-capitalist, non-national way, um, which is not like.
C Derick Varn:I actually hate to give credit to Georgia's for anything but, um, I think the Georgia's actually are a little bit more advanced on us in understanding these things, um, because that was the only thing they focused on. But, like, when we talk about production and your role in production, all that's vitally important, but when you talk to, like, indigenous peoples and you're like, yeah, yeah, you'd like that's actually the problem's more primal than that, um, and so I think this leads to a kind of and this is, this is to me in cult art. Is you have to deal with this tension where, like you know, a social socialist and indigenous rights activists are going to come at this with some, you know, anti-imperial sympathies to some degree, uh, at least an ambivalence, if not an endorsement of, um, decolonial politics, etc. But we don't approach these issues in the same way at all and often we don't understand each other. Or really, let's be honest, the socialists don't understand the indigenous framework, the, the indigenous have probably heard the socialist framework and get it Um, but we don't like when, when you hear, when I hear, like my, my DNA friends, like pushed back on the Mars's conception.
C Derick Varn:I'm like, okay, how do we do this? How do I listen? But also not completely be like well, yeah, but like no one's going back to nomadic relationship and no one wants to either. So like what do we mean? What? Where are we at here? And I bring that up because this actually also it wins to some practical considerations how do you organize around this? Because you're you're dealing with um, almost you're dealing with completely different frameworks of like land and wall.
K. Malulani Castro:Yes, yeah, so I mean just like a few things there. Um, yeah, and I you know, I think when what I think Colthard lands on and I actually think it could have been done better or I think that there's like some good expansions that could happen and I'm like excited to like see what he's going to write in the future. And I think your discussions with Jordan on Saito actually kind of adds a lot to this discussion as well Is when he talks about the kind of separation between like the subjective and the objective, or like kind of cultural versus like productive or whatever you want to, or like kind of objective, kind of components, right, or material components of silicone, or reality and capitalist reality. I think he's just trying to highlight you know, I think that you've been kind of landing on kind of consistently, but it is like no one really knows how to talk about it which is like social reproduction, right, the kind of domestic versus productive spaces. How do we actually like deal with that gender Right? How do we deal with the fact that it's like constructed in these ways and kind of placed in these ways?
K. Malulani Castro:And then obviously race right, like you know, I think, why? And going back to like the Dawes Act right. Like, the Dawes Act is a kind of a perfect and the kind of discussions around is kind of a perfect example of like why it's hard to talk about race, because the process of eliminating, the process of eliminating collective title and indigenous ecologies and economies was about eliminating one and like an actual, like valid alternative to the growing capitalist production modes. Right.
C Derick Varn:One that was definitely sometimes preferred by former settlers who just go and join up Right All the time, All the time, In fact, a lot of our great stuff on kinship. Another thing I'm obsessed with is actually because we have all these records of, like you know, these people just ran off and started living with the indigenous tribes and we don't understand why we got to stop that from happening.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, exactly. So part of that was like you have people that they had to deal with as nations, right, and then who you had to basically, you know, break their kind of alternative power system or their kind of their alternative political economy, whereas for you know, their relationship to emancipated, you know, african Americans at that point was the kind of fulfilling, their kind of placement into, like the labor pool, right, you know, they're kind of fulfillment, you know, and they're kind of assimilation into the like the labor pool, now that they've been kind of established as citizens at that time.
C Derick Varn:But they don't actually function in the broader spectrum of the way peoples are incorporated in the federal, colonial, capitalist matrix. They are not really positing an alternative lifestyle that they have been cut off from that totally, whereas, like indigenous peoples are not. Their lifestyles, at least in the early point, still exist in there, out there and they are fairly productive and in some cases, let's be honest, even though we didn't always recognize it, some pretty technologically advanced. Even so, like I really hate the notion when you, when people still push, like oh, it was the gun that caused the Spanish contingent or, as I'm like Spanish guns sucked, like it was the fact that a whole lot of other indigenous groups wanted to get rid of the.
K. Malulani Castro:Mexica.
C Derick Varn:Like that's how that happened. It wasn't because of guns. If you're going to talk about a weapon, actually Spanish steals the advantage, but even that like right.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, and like you can talk about like diseases maybe.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean, I think to some extent you know there's also like a mis discussion around the disruption you know, especially at like you know the 16th, beginning of the 16th or through the 16th century right, like these really elaborate ecological systems and agricultural systems just losing a huge amount of population and like you just can't maintain those agricultural systems.
K. Malulani Castro:But like what I love about Like if you ever like spend time in I'm sure you've done this like with your dinner friends, or maybe if you ever come on to the Great Lakes you ever go and spend times like in the on a show about people and you maybe hear from an elder like the seven fires, like prophecy or narratives. Almost all indigenous peoples I've interacted with at least, and again it's like kind of contained within the US context. Their origin stories are one like often ones that are like mobile, full of disease and destruction, like war, like they're not like peaceable and they're like mostly focused on like how to adapt Towards those conditions in a way that like reduces the most amount of harm and like maximizes kind of collective and individual freedoms and kind of benefits.
K. Malulani Castro:Right, that's not to say I don't want to pick two rows of a picture but like that is a kind of common trope that you see across, especially like after the 16th century right and after the kind of mass die-off.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, that's important, I think the mass die-off also. I always pranked the other people like, oh, it's the English and like, the Honestly, the English wouldn't have been able to do it if it wasn't for smallpox and, like we now know, just genetically, like it's just they weren't actually lying about the cities being abandoned. Smallpox had already done a lot of the genocide for them. But I Think it's, I think that's really important to kind of grasp in the sense that, like, this is a, this is a viable alternative system. And this is why, when I don't communicate this, I have people who are, you know, indigenous activists.
C Derick Varn:When I talk about this in terms of, say, europe, and they think I'm implying it to people's in the United States and I'm like I don't know that I am, because I don't think it applies in the same way. There is a sense in which, like, like Marxism and its European context is not just like culturally Eurocentric, it's necessarily Eurocentric like and and we should just admit that, and that's that. It's kind of a criticism, but it's also just kind of an, an addressment of reality. Capitalism as we know it developed there like, so I think this is this is a Key problem, though, for socialists, because they have to kind of like how am I gonna navigate this when I, when I do, have what is effectively a Eurocentric framework, in so much that I'm responding to capitalism, a political, economic condition that was developed in Europe and exported like?
K. Malulani Castro:Well, I mean, I think one of the things that I so when I think of like a practical solution right, or like I don't have a practical kind of component when it comes to like organizing or like you know, thinking about, you know, when we think about like unions right now I have some experience at the unions right like To some extent, like why did union power like kind of dissipates in this country? Partly it was because, like the you know and there's like a lot of different kind of pressures that kind of produce this but like the kind of separation from like worker ownership of the most you know, the means production towards worker democracy. Those are not the same thing, right, and they kind of imply kind of different land relations right and.
C Derick Varn:That's a big point of actually never really thought about that.
K. Malulani Castro:Go ahead. No, yeah, I mean it's like, and when you are Not dealing with the fact that, like with the one of the major financial and kind of speculative assets that you're dealing with, is literally the thing that like holds your feet to the ground, or like Like the thing that you're like working at a factory at right, that that that you have no actual control over, even if you're a private property owner, like fee, simple title, is not a real, I want to say it's not a real land relationship, right, or it's a very kind of like precarious one.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, they could be taken from me with somebody who can, like, steal your land title and kill you.
K. Malulani Castro:Like that eminent domain I mean yeah, and just just being taxed out of it, right, you know, depending on, like property tax, real estate tax, whatever you want to call it right.
K. Malulani Castro:So you know, I think, as an organizing tactic and this is something I've maybe kind of I've been reflecting on more recently is like the labor mark, like the, like the labor movement or like whatever, like labor politics are still here, but also like because I do a lot of environmental justice stuff One like they don't have like a good definition of labor or like actually like what labor is, as like an ecological relationship, but they also don't understand, like how land is Operated, and I think we don't reflect on the fact that there hasn't been any real land reform in the US, basically, since I don't know like the, like 1920s, like mineral, like leasing acts which kind of opened up you know the kind of natural resource regimes that we understand now that kind of dominate, a lot of Kind of like large-scale like research, like resource extraction, and I don't necessarily know where to go with that for people.
K. Malulani Castro:But I do think it's like an interesting question where it's like why is it, even in the most basic sense, that unions aren't dealing with, you know, housing issues, like at you know the most basic sense of like the fact that if you want to imagine the process of socially reproducing the kind of relationships that you want to imagine, you want to like hold on to power if you the land can be taken from you, right, and this kind of goes to your discussion about accumulation, right? Or like primitive accumulation, that's like always ongoing, if that can always happen.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's in the name. One of these things where I point out to people like, yeah, capitalists don't really truly believe in the inviability of private property Well, particularly of small Individual holders versus firms like, because it's plenty common for people to imminent domain People's private property and then for the state to sell it to another private property at a premium, at the disadvantage of the person who they eminent domain, are forced out and that's that's done under developmental considerations, but it's like in our law. It's one of the few times I've cited libertarians and anything but it's. It's that more, but it's what these are connected.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, they are directly.
C Derick Varn:But it's something to think about. And when you talk about, yeah, workers, ownership of the means of production versus workers, democracy versus the entire Spectrum of relationships of social reproduction, there is I think I Don't want to use the label schizophrenia anymore, it's my natural metaphor for this, but I'm trying to get away from that. There is a fundamental Contradiction and incoherence around it, even, I think, even a Marx himself, because on one hand, you have all this developmental forces stuff, on the other hand, you have the natural metabolism stuff. I think they're both there. I don't I, when, as I'm reading, say to I'm not sure that I can actually square that circle the way he's trying to, but I do see that they're both really there, because Marx insist against other socialist, that nature is the source Of wealth and thus land is important. You cannot ignore it.
C Derick Varn:But so we can't just focus on labor, as in most of the classical socialist movement, however, that's ends up being what we do anyway. So it's it's. It's very important to realize that, and I think it also leads this sort of like. Another fundamental incoherence remarks this like yeah, we all know that political Economy only appear separate in in capitalism, and that's Of a mixed character, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then then we act like, oh, the economic is dominant, but I'm like, yeah, but we just said that they're not actually separate.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah well, you know, like, um, like, because social reproduction is tied to things like culture. You can't get around that, which is also why I think, when culture's right, that like, uh, you know, canadian multiculturalism, even in its like, is actually Fundamentally impossible, and that's why it's proffered like, because, like no, we can't actually let you have a truly alternative political, economic lifestyle. Like Like, that's not going to be tolerated and I'm like, yeah, so culture is. Culture is defined in liberal society as that which doesn't affect the most parts of your life. Yeah, yeah.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, um, this is something I, you know, kind of bang my head a lot against um and what's funny, you know, and I think this is like a lesson to be learned from, like indigenous, you know peoples now, and like also not just indigenous peoples, but you know a lot other varieties of groups, right. So, like um, you know, when I think about why is it important to Talk about land, why is it important to to understand culture and land as these kind of vessels that kind of contain, you know, politics and the economy, right, that actually may.
K. Malulani Castro:I don't want to say like that precluded, but kind of maybe actually be useful vessels to kind of hold the kind of complexity of these things. Um, I Really, you know, again, I have to kind of go back to my home, you know, home, community, home, island, and see how the fact that, like there's no viable way to develop an island that has 8,000 residents, that is almost exclusively private property, right in a way that Reflects, you know, it's like how do I say this? Like there's no way to like develop that space in a way that reflects I don't want to say like kind of industrial production, because that has consistently failed.
K. Malulani Castro:It has actually consistently degraded those environments, when the environment and the cultures that are related to those environments and those, those land relations, have been basically the only thing that kept kept people fed right. So, like at any one point on that island, right, 28 percent of the people are below the poverty line. Maybe more they might have, or they might you know. Are you receiving food assistance? You're receiving food assistance. They're getting about 38 percent of their food stuffs from subsistence, right, that's not an indication that they need to be modernized or developed. That's actually an indication that they've kind of have the capacity to sustain themselves and what they need is like people to like let them do that to some extent, right, um, and then that's kind of the history of my, of my people, and the memory is actually the kind of constant imposition of.
K. Malulani Castro:Maybe I'm kind of that, you know, kind of muddling this a bit, but you know there's a reason why they attacked Language. There's a reason why they attacked hula. There's a reason why they attacked cultural practices because if you have the time to in your life for leisure, like dancing hula, and part of that process is going, and like harvesting particular kind of environmental, like materials or like natural materials for your garb. That means that you believe and you're like operating in a in economy or a, you know, a social reproductive process. That is basically like anti-capitalists.
K. Malulani Castro:Right does that make sense?
C Derick Varn:Absolutely. I mean, um, because you don't, you, you don't need to engage in that kind of production. Um, you couldn't. The land itself is productive enough that you can actually have a fairly controlled lifestyle. Yes, you might want things like modern medicine, but you can probably trade for that if you really need to do Um, and I think that's actually important. But I got fascinated with this question actually by looking at what happened in mexico, the united states and then, and then rodigia. I know that sounds weird, but it was like. I was like okay, we always assume that these developments are linear and progressive or whatever, but why the hell did they have to force people on to land private land plots in rodigia and south africa, if it was automatically more, you know, appealing, like they had to force people into agriculture, basically, and not, and not permaculture and I admit, not every place can do permaculture I mean, yeah, let's talk about europe.
C Derick Varn:Let's talk about europe as part of their whole thing. But, um, when you, when you're looking at, like the eurasian landmass, and particularly its little dangly bits in the places where it connects to africa, as your only model for for how the world develops, you you basically hear be dragons most of the planet. Um, and one of the things that I think, as socialists, we have to just kind of admit um, marx did get interested in this in the end of his life, so if you have to have something that ties it to marx, then there you go. But, um, in general, that is not something that socialists historically looked at, and while his socialists historically were less racist than everybody else, that does not mean they were not racist.
K. Malulani Castro:So, um, yeah, I mean, I mean there's quite a bit there, right, and I think, yeah, when we're thinking about like why, I mean I do really I don't want to say like love, but I think the Dawes Act, as like a particular moment in like kind of global colonial history, was like really important. Because if it's like huh, like, why don't we just like force them at mass, at scale, onto private property lots, right, and it didn't work out.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, it's the save the person, kill the Indian movement, and like which? Which I? I have to admit that at times, you know, when I didn't think this through I'm like, well, why was that so inhumane? And like, well, they killed the Indian anyway. And I like, literally. And I'm like, yeah, okay, so it doesn't work, it's horrible.
C Derick Varn:And you, you remove their ability to live their lives. But also, like you, you render them a Minority and then pit them against other groups. I mean, this is one of the things Coltard's really good at. He's like, yeah, when you do this, you make indigenous rights, and like it's opposed to, like Canadian workers and other minority peoples, and like, oh Well, you can't really recognize that because that'll screw over the Canadian worker, which, which does have a certain majoritarian appeal, but also the reason why one group's the majority has been a policy enacted that, even if it wasn't intended to be genocidal which it was Even if it wasn't, though it wouldn't matter it still it still. It still did what it did. And, in the case of the does actually quite right, like there are people who really thought they were trying to like save these people.
K. Malulani Castro:And and, just like you said with the Rhodesia right, it wasn't also desirable right. I love the like, reading the kind of accounts of this, because people are like we need to like, instill the like desire for private property right, the desire for greed to some extent right, the technology, the inter psychic technology agreed into these people, not to say that people didn't actually have a concept.
K. Malulani Castro:Concept it's agreed, actually probably did. They actually just knew how to deal with it differently. But again, like I don't, I like I don't know, it's just like it didn't it failed. A lot of lots were not taken up. Actually, tons of the land was grabbed by settlers, right, and then often the people that were on these lots actually defaulted on their leases because they Couldn't do the agriculture component and the market was against them, right, and the agriculture wasn't efficient when these private subsistence plots organized this way either.
C Derick Varn:You know we're not. So much of this was based on assuming that, like Inguing, conditions would be universalizable, which is almost like which, frankly, and the first 150 years of Of North American settlement led to a whole lot dead white people to. Yeah, yeah.
K. Malulani Castro:And like probably like a global ice age, just gonna. But Just I mean, yeah and I think this kind of Kind of picks up a point, I think kind of going back, if we want to like tie this back to like socialists or like Marxist organizing or thinking like you know something that you kind of talk about allies, like literacy education, kind of like literacy education, kind of alienation right and I think I brought this up a few times in comments is like this was a conversation you had when you're talking about Eldridge Cleaver and the Lumpinization, and like the canary in the coal mine.
C Derick Varn:Like to some extent.
K. Malulani Castro:When I see the kind of like decline in literacy right, or the increase in alienation right amongst like the kind of majority population right To me, I'm like, oh, this is just like we were the canary in the coal mine and this is just happening right?
C Derick Varn:Yeah, it's. Basically it happens indigenous people first, then black people, Then other minority groups and poor white people, then middle-class white people. Probably will never happen. The rich white people, let's be honest. Yeah but, but, like, that's the way it goes through. The population like and and indigenous people are often rendered completely invisible in this process. Like you know, that's one thing that I Did. I just, you know, really internalized. Even when you talk about stuff like, well, the Mayans don't exist anymore, I'm like motherfucker, have you been to southern Mexico, guatemala? Like the Maya?
K. Malulani Castro:there.
C Derick Varn:Quite a few Maya. They just quit living in those.
C Derick Varn:They moved around a lot yeah those, those, those giant, obvious, evadeable pyramids, like which they never really lived in anyway, those religious structures. There is some kind of social revolution that we actually don't really have a direct history for, but they're still around, I promise you so it's, and that's the case in the United States. However, colter's quite right that, like Colonial policies have rendered then such a minority did, it's just easy to Not see them. I mean, like you know, in the United States, you're talking about, if you want everybody together, you're talking about 2% of the population, and that's that the most generous Interpretation, which is why like, for I had this. I even way back when I was in college. I remember arguing with a professor by a conservative professor, and I was conservative, but he was like well, what we did in America was not like what happened to the Jews, and I was like there's a more Jews still left and there are some indigenous peoples. They just want to point that out to you.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, where do you think I got his ideas from?
C Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean, you know it's. It's like they he studied our land set of an axi. He wanted to do that to the Jews in the slabs. So you know I like, yeah, um, the camps also. You know that wasn't invented by him. He got me real.
K. Malulani Castro:Really may have nasty air, but but yeah, yeah no, I mean, I appreciate you bringing this up Right, because I think that there is a lot of difficulty right Because a lot of our politics and like we want to conceive of as politics or like about scale and like majority and kind of appeals and stuff like that.
K. Malulani Castro:Um, well, at the same time, I think, like if you were to like ask anyone who's like on the ground, like organizing right now, like I think we kind of started the conversation around like kind of like left unity kind of question, it's like is there this thing that's happening? Um, like, is there this appeal? Is there this kind of the social relations necessary for that to occur? Um, and that's what to say that I'm like against kind of you know, a kind of mass popular politics. I'm arguing the fact that, like you know, if we want to actually occur those right, you actually have to deal with the fact that you are Um expecting kind of very discreet, kind of very alienated, actually incredibly different, and kind of kind of separate people's trying to agree to do something together On land that they don't know.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, and um, it's also interesting when we talk about lamb back, because I'm because I talk about this when it was uh with my goldhawk and I was like Like one of the things about it, that's like yeah, because when we talk about land back, we're also not talking about our conceptions of land, like Like uh, because only like I'm not saying that there were no indigenous tribes with with concepts of ownership of land. That's not true, but it wasn't consistent. I can tell you that, um, and so I think that's you know, you know, I mean, even I even sometimes feel weird talking about First Nations and indigeneity, because I'm like, well, you know, there's a lot of different people's we're like throwing in here, um, uh, but I do think we have to recognize that, deal with that, incorporate that and create relations. That would make that a lot more feasible. Because I'm like I want socialism, but I don't know that I want a socialism where I'm going to have to force, like, every indigeneity, every indigenous person to Go be socialists the same way I am.
K. Malulani Castro:I don't know if it's gonna work.
C Derick Varn:I don't think it's possible Like.
K. Malulani Castro:I just like I think you have enough history to show that that like didn't work out most of the time.
C Derick Varn:Um, and it's one of these. It's one of these things no one talks about in the soviet union was what happened to the Siberian indigenous people. Um, we just, we're just not gonna mention that Um, so, uh, it's. You know, I've had, I've had some, you know, very hardcore communists be like, yeah, that was a mistake. I'm like, but why did it happen? Like, okay, why, in particular, did the indigenous peoples of tzadbiri you could? Why couldn't you do the nation thing with them that you did with, like the, the Turkmen and the usbexed and, and you know, the soviet mongolians and stuff? Why did that not work? Well, we have to acknowledge and deal with that, don't we like? Um, and I mean okay, yeah, good.
K. Malulani Castro:No, I mean, like I think part of this, like you know one, I think it's like difficulty, you know, of any kind of communist project kind of, you know materializing in a kind of the way that imagines or desires in, without kind of a global upheaval, right, like that's a kind of fair case, right, because the kind of level of accumulation, level of demand you know engaging in, kind of if you're still going to be engaging in the kind of global capitalist market, will require, you know, a certain land relation, regardless of your kind of like Kind of time relation, right, if you're thinking about like labor and like work exploitation, right, um, and that's a, you know I don't want to come off as like a degrowth because like that's like definitely not the case, but it's like I do think that there is like a good, like earnest interrogation of like Well, if we're, we're happy to like kind of question, kind of like how our time is exploited by like labor, right, like, are you actually satisfied or kind of consenting to the kind of land relations You're kind of engaging in?
C Derick Varn:right, what relation are we going to have to the Natural world? Unquote, and I'm going to put ahead and play that. I admit that the concept of nature isn't self problematic, yeah, but that's the best I got. When I'm talking about, like Land and the resources of land that exist before human intervention are, you know, concurrent with it? Um, and yes, it's valorizable.
C Derick Varn:But I've really started thinking, like we have to think about this in a deeper way. It is implied in parts of marks, but it's not clear. Like sito wouldn't need to write these books where we have to go into like Sub notebooks to get this, if it was completely obvious. Like it it's not clear and it's not completely worked out either. And Like, okay, sure, we can make a march theological argument about it if that makes you feel better, but we should also just admit that we have not.
C Derick Varn:This is failed on this point and it also not hasn't just failed in a western context because of the various frameworks of nationalism and relations and say and In, say a Chinese context, have not been unfraught. Let me put it that way Um, um, and so we don't just have to talk about Europe or our Russia, we also have to talk about China and Um there are. Like, vietnam did a slightly better deal with this, but only slightly. It's Um, and so there's gonna have to be real interplay and you're gonna have to just admit like, yes, we have to, we have to give certain, we have to reconceive certain things and deal with certain things and talk about land rights in certain ways and uh, and usage rights and and development rights in this and the other and uh, unless you're a complete utopian um, that involves Reconceiving things, we can see anything through law. And it is a massive ask like I mean like yeah, sorry.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean like yes and no. I mean like I think I've actually had a lot of positive experiences talking to people about their alienation and, like you know, kind of like work, because I like to think about this as like a question of alienation right like, and like working them back from like hey, like, how are you like? What kind of like Like do you feel kind of close to like the people that you like are living with whatever? Like Um, do you have like friends, whatever? I had talked to my students about this a lot and then I always kind of like ended this conversation like do you know where you like bones are going to be buried?
C Derick Varn:Yeah, I got no idea.
K. Malulani Castro:And it may be like kind of like woo, woo or whatever, but I do think that there's like kind of something where it's like, you know, if you don't take seriously the kind of like the ways in which like land actually, you know and not just like bones but like ashes or whatever like holds you know what you are going to leave behind, right?
K. Malulani Castro:I think it's a really good metaphor for people to like figure out like oh yeah, I actually don't have any connection to this place that I spend like all my time in, right, and actually how like destructive that is to our psyche's, right, like, how destructive and shitty it is it to like be driving down like the 95 corridor, like towards Baltimore. Like that's a pleasant experience, right like. Or you know, um, you know, when we're thinking also kind of to questions of gender and how gender operates in like different spaces, right like you know, when we're thinking of questions of like creating food, like cooking and stuff like that, like those are actually kind of part Of these like land relations that you actually have to re interrogate if you want there to be any kind of change in gender relations.
C Derick Varn:Yeah.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean, if that makes sense, I mean no, absolutely.
C Derick Varn:Actually, this is one of the things I will get the Chinese communists about. Like they're, they're, they're collective food haul things were like kind of Not a bad idea, um, and I'm like, and you're like, oh you're, and I don't think people, like a lot of cultures, eat communally. Like it's, it's not like we hadn't figured this out before modern industrial processes and it is a division of labor and, frankly, like it's a shitty division of labor. A lot of the reason why a lot of us have shitty diets Is because we do this. We, we had, we had it based off of a kind of oppressive domestic situation that is now ending and what have we filled it up with a shittier commercial one.
C Derick Varn:Like you know, that's not. Like you know, that's not something I love. Like you know, I love an impossible burger as much as the next guy, but I don't like love this situation because it incentivizes all kinds of bad things, um, from health effects, etc. Having completely disconnected from your understanding of food, not understanding how any of this works, I mean like, uh, I can tell you, as a person who sometimes teaches gardening and foraging, that like people have no idea, uh, any more. Like I'm like, yeah, you can't eat that. That'll kill you, like, um, uh, and, and there is something you know I'm, I'm not, I don't, I'm not woo in this sense. Um, but there is something about like, yeah, indigenous food ways like kind of usually do have Like traditional, kind of I'm almost gonna sound like a conservative, but it's actually true.
C Derick Varn:Traditional stuff Often does make sense in its context, which is why it's around. It does not make me optimal all the time, but it works. Like when I was out in the desert and I was like oh, oh, this weird, when I considered weird better and dressed as, like it's way more practical than what I'm wearing, it protects my skin, like it's pretty cool. Um, you know I have one big pocket, that's, that's useful. Um.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, I mean, and like this isn't, like you know, I don't like make an appeal towards, like environmental determinism. I'm not saying like we have to like take every lesson from the land. It's more of like you know, I again like I think what you know call car is just getting it as like hey, like no one's talking about this, or like you should right, like why, why would you give up a discussion Around the thing that like keeps your feet on the ground Right? That just makes like such a strange and not say that everyone does, but it is like such a strange kind of absence, not just and I think what I mean this is like later in the book.
K. Malulani Castro:I actually do wish he actually applied his discussion on ground and normativity to settlers and to like, because I do think he actually kind of misses an opportunity to talk about how, like you know, for like indigenous peoples, like you know, like this kind of Desire to just like engage in the kind of reciprocal relationships and responsibilities that allow them to sustain themselves and to produce themselves and the lives that they want and relationships to the environment. Everyone does that, even if it's destructive. Yeah, right, like everyone's always engaging in a ground like that's like my one big concert, like frustration with this book is actually like Everyone's always engaged in engaging grounded normativity and some of it sediments us into really shitty kind of desires or worldviews.
C Derick Varn:I mean one of the things that I also try to get people to understand. This for us is, like, well, with the english, the first people that colonized were themselves like, like that's the whole fucking thing of like Protestant, breaking these other traditional wise ways up, getting rid of this policy trick system, getting rid of the commons, etc. I mean it is nominally done by the same people and that they speak the same language, are the same confessional religion, etc. Ish, although again, even that's synthetic, because, like All nation buildings based on like that's my thing about, like the Marxist answer nations, I'm like, are you gonna, are you gonna really try to convince me that like there was an organic Italian people we didn't like have to really fucking force a language on a bunch of people?
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, yeah, have you been to Italy like?
C Derick Varn:Like, I have you been to fucking England?
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah.
C Derick Varn:It's just like I don't know how anyone from north umbria understands anyone in the south. Uh, because I In the south of england, because I barely do, and I because I used to think, oh, america is like this until television, we couldn't, we could barely understand each other here. And then I'm like, no, that's like universal actually. Um, and you're right, we engage in these land normative. You think I was, actually it was. It was interesting, because I was having this back and forth with uh Marani, um, and we were talking about like and uh, uh, like indigenous philosophy and cultural practices and development disabilities, and I was like you know, I'm not trying to impose a European framework on this, but if you actually look at ancient greek stuff, um, it's not the same. And I'm not saying like this is a stage or you were in that stage. That's not what I'm doing here.
C Derick Varn:But there are parallel concepts. We're not as foreign to each other as you think, as long as we admit that we are different and we come from these different things and like, look, even the fact that I think of myself as somehow coming from greek culture, it's kind of wild. But Because, like, that's not real but um it, it's still like these, these kind of collective constructions that we have and these Thought traditions that we have, and we have the ones that are recorded, but a lot of them do. They're not there, it's not unbridgeable, even if it's different. And that's one of the things I think. As socialists, we like we got to get better at like we need to talk about this, like how does this look? And you know the other things we as socialists should probably admit, and it does get down into this. Uh to to this um Thing is like we're never gonna invent a universal people, like that's not going to happen, like if that's what wants that?
C Derick Varn:right, if that's what socialism requires, then it's not happening like. Um well, I mean, you know, christians want that, so maybe habit religions have always. What is that? But you know, but they've never actually done it.
K. Malulani Castro:Um so, yeah, and they've had like varying kind of conceptions of like how to like like like manage that contradiction when it didn't actually work out right. Yeah, and I actually think, like socialists, socialisms and kind of different like Marxism's actually struggle to actually deal with like that kind of Down the line contradiction right Like uh, and try to deal with that right now. Um and One, I mean, I think like as long as like any kind of like left politics but just kind of global politics are kind of defined by like US politics, we're kind of going to deal with people who are just like really bad at being humans no offense, but like we're just going to be kind of like bad socially and kind of have bad relationships.
C Derick Varn:I used to think that was unfair, but having come back to the United States after being gone for eight years, I'm no longer. I'm like, yeah, there's, there's something about being the hegemon towards the end of your empire that just makes you crazy. Like, like I don't think it's just us, I don't think like this is where I'm different. I could like, oh, it's, it's inherent to Americans. I'm like I don't think it's inherent to Americans, I think it's inherent to to being this kind of hegemon and then losing the spot, because also, yeah, look at, like Rome or Imperial China with stuff break down. People get crazy.
C Derick Varn:But in another sense, like, yeah, we absolutely do have to get back to that and I just I think socialists need to be not just better on this, we have to learn from it. It's not just a matter of acknowledging it. That's not going to be good enough. Like we have to learn from it. I was thinking about this and we were, when I was talking to Joel Rainwright of climate, of I think he talks about climate accident like, yeah, you know what we should actually be looking at all kinds of prior traditional ways, not to replicate them or go back to them, but to figure out how they worked and how we can scale them and what we have now Like, because if we don't, we're screwed, and I think it's just like this kind of specter of like conservatism in like kind of developmental thought or like kind of modern thought.
K. Malulani Castro:It's like how do I say this?
K. Malulani Castro:Like like the level of fear that was like struck into the hearts of, like Joe Biden and the government when, like, the railroad workers are going to go on strike and basically shut down infrastructure, that basically is like a major like defining material character of our land relations, right, like the railroad system, right.
K. Malulani Castro:I also think a lot of I don't want to like kind of characterize it, but like, just like your average person is not like kind of ready to like let that go, like, let go of like that imagination of like that kind of like kind of large scale infrastructure and not to say that infrastructure is useful, but it's like, if you're also not willing to let that go, that's a very kind of conservative approach that is holding onto something that you don't necessarily even want to agree with and is also kind of like imposing Again like a land relations ecologies on to other peoples that are going to bring up contradictions where it's like now are you going to have to start being like, I don't know, I'm kind of like missing the point here, but I do think like an inability to kind of look at alternatives, look at alternative land relations and ecologies is like a weird kind of holdover or kind of kind of hidden conservatism about kind of how life is.
C Derick Varn:It's funny, it's a conservatism that's, oddly also driven by a fear of being seen as conservative because you're advocating for anything other than like, natural, wiggish development. And I'm just like. No, I think, I don't know, I've I flirt with the idea, with the idea of like, well, what, what is what? Would it be for us just to say, okay, there's multiple paths to develop development and multiple traditional ways that could have done it, like, like, and there's, we see this in technologies and not like indigenous people didn't have technologies come on. So so what if it was, if these things were, were to develop, even in concert with modern, like post capitalist technologies? But we're saying, but we said like, okay, how do we, how do we let you use this in a way that's more, more tied into your land, your land ways, etc. I think you get very different things like, and this is why like, I'm not a primitivist, but I do like at all, but I do think like we have to take this stuff seriously.
C Derick Varn:We have to look at these other things seriously. These other life ways have worked and, for fuck's sake, europeans are not completely far into. We're not like, a completely like, and so much that like I even feel weird saying I'm a European, but because I'm not, but but in so much that we identify with this, this thing, which a lot of us do and a lot of socialists really do. They have this like can't use a metaphor really messed up, broken view, like oh well, we're to Eurocentric but also we're only ever going to talk about the Russian Revolution and the way that we're going to create and I'm like, but like you know, there's traditions here, right like, yeah, like we, we have our own shit.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, and like in very practical ways, right, that I think you know, and again, like I think it's, it is difficult because of how indigenous people have been situated right discursively, right, this is actually like to that subjective component, right, so like we're not discursively situated when we're also thinking about the technologies of like land stewardship that, like you know, created many of the vistas that you know john mirror thought was like attractive, and then he was like I need to get rid of all these dirty natives. And then what happened after you get rid of them, all that land, like you know, yellowstone National Park, all that stuff just got flooded with trees and kind of got overgrown, right, quite literally with like California, right with like, and you know, just like they like the kind of traditional burnings right, the kind of cyclical burnings, right, that's a very obvious technology that isn't even one that wasn't known to Europeans or to like the US. Like you know, to the US kind of kind of traditional traditions are kind of forest conservation traditions. It just was like in opposition to their land relations.
K. Malulani Castro:That's, that was like actually the bigger issue, right. So, and I mean I get it, I get it is incredibly hard, right. I teach classes at the graduate level on indigenous kind of environmental justice, like organizing kind of philosophy worldview and my you know, I get so many students who spent 20 plus years they never actually understanding that, like I don't know that indigenous people are real kind of currently existing peoples to some extent, right Also how much the land is changed and utilized, like, even in ways you like.
C Derick Varn:Oh, I'm in wild nature. I remember realizing this in Georgia when I was, when I was quite young, and I was like none of these pine trees are from here.
K. Malulani Castro:Not one of them.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, like, which is why they follow my house all the time.
K. Malulani Castro:But yeah, I mean, if you go to like Lake Tahoe, like every tree around Lake Tahoe is like completely like it's like maybe like 40 or 50 years old and they're all kind of been brought in after the lumber industry kind of cut down.
C Derick Varn:I mean plantation land. This is the south, the plantation land relations was a disaster. Like was an objective disaster which we then tried to fix and also fucked up things worse and trying to fit because like, okay, we got to reclaim this land, got to reforest, we, this is all going to get desificated If we're not. Let's like now let's screw with these wetlands. Oh, no, that's a problem, let's bring in Japanese stuff to get to save the top soil. Oh God, it just took everything over.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean, I think and again, like I think you know, cthard does kind of make a good point right like how do I say this? Like the time necessary to observe the kind of reasonable relations, not just like the time necessary, but also the kind of absence of certain kind of economic pressures to engage those, like actually take care in sewered land, are directly threatened by capital in the state, right, and everyone gets that right. But like why? You know, why has conservation always failed? You know, to some extent or another is because of its kind of inability to imagine actual living human beings in the kind of conservation space, right?
K. Malulani Castro:some extent right.
C Derick Varn:It's always nature as other other and static right.
K. Malulani Castro:It is kind of held at a point.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, actually that's, that's. That's something that seito is actually really good at talking about. Like, yeah, there's no way for there to be an environmental sound capitalism. It's not possible. Why? Part of that is accumulation drive, but part of that's just like the way you abstract from the environment and a way that closes off any treatment of local conditions as local. You abstract away from that and that's. And that's a pretty primary realization, which is why, like, yeah, you know, you don't necessarily meet a lot of indigenous Marxist. They do exist, but you don't necessarily but I don't meet that many indigenous capitalists who aren't A heavily land owned way. Yeah, yeah.
K. Malulani Castro:No, I mean, I think you'll actually find more kind of self about indigenous capitalist, because I think when you meet someone who is like aligned with indigenous or like Marxism, they kind of don't describe their politics and those terms.
K. Malulani Castro:At that point there's just like not you know to some extent like what they're doing and that's, you know, I don't really care how people feel about that or not, but yeah, like you know, the there is a real kind of kind of assimilation and that did occur right, the establishment of like a bourgeois elites. You know, my wife is Osage, right, we definitely understand the kind of Osage oil situation. She, you know, had family who died in the kind of murders and the kind of kind of a massive accumulation that happened there and what's like. Interesting though, and I think you see this and why I think it's it's it is important to actually engage, and I think to your point where, like, people should just be engaged in the real kind of local, indigenous politics that are on them because they should treat them as seriously as they treat, you know, british politics or like global politics.
K. Malulani Castro:So some any politics is because they're really kind of complex and contested. Right, you said, like you know the dinner. Right, if you go to Navajo nation you don't have that much territory and don't have a bunch of political kind of conflict. Right, it's like the largest tribal reservation. You know a large history of uranium mining, also now a large history with kind of reforestation and kind of carbon capture. There's a lot of like really important politics are going on there and kind of like interesting, kind of valuable, kind of like important politics that I think if people engage with they'll be able to understand that the question of land back, the question of land is not one of like hokey, return to you know. You know, yeah, like primitivism, like hunter, gatherer traditions, but a real earnest engagement with the fact that, like no one really has rights. As long as we were like floating over, you know, either private or federal lands or state lands, right, you don't really have rights. That kind of can slide a lot.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, and it's, I think, your point about maybe both looking at, you know settler conceptions of this and tying it into indigenous conceptions. Maybe someone will do that. You know both to separate, like, okay, what's what's what's corrosive, but maybe what could you build on and build bridges on, because that is something I I have turned away from the idea of university. I just don't think that's possible. But I have increasingly been like how do you, how do you create a politics that is adaptive and flexible enough to incorporate people who will not always share interest, ideologies, epistemologies, ideas like, even if you assume a secular like, like that's just, you know, we have to kind of do that. If your politics is based on us all believing the same thing and having the same interest, it's dead.
C Derick Varn:However, I do think you got out. You have to build bridges, you have to be as inclusive as possible. You have to be like how do you, how do you make other people interested in your own particular life ways and interest and in a way that also is beneficial to them? And one of the things that I think is interesting, the more learn about like indigenous history and whatever I was like. Well, clearly, at one time it was because, like, you have all these colonial administrators being like, why are all these people running off and living with these savages? Like, don't they know that our way of life is better? And I'm like, well, clearly it wasn't. Like.
K. Malulani Castro:And I think that's I mean you also. I mean I think you can like look at like examples of, like you know, the, the. I think there's like one way to like look at like diversity of languages right, like just like the numbers of languages in a region, as, like you know not completely like well, person, they're kind of like linguistics theory around this, but like there is something to be said of like if you actually have, you know, dozens of languages kind of being operated on around in a region and actually people are speaking like that actually indicates a kind of like a high level of kind of coalitional engagement, right, right, yes, that people are actually kind of engaging with like different worldviews and saying I don't need to destroy yours to operate here.
C Derick Varn:Right because, that's, we might develop a pigeon language or something. But yes, right, like a pigeon language.
K. Malulani Castro:Right and like again, like the DNA really good example right as at a at a basket, like they're like, of the at a basket language group. Right, there's a reason why indigenous people is kind of like operating kind of organized. Obviously there's a kind of an ethical history with this, but also internally around these kind of like language structures that are both different but also kind of that can kind of coalesce. So but I think it's like a question of like, how do we like kind of organize? You know people who, if you actually assume that people can't or like don't need to kind of come to agreement on things and but, but we say and but then they also don't need to kind of come to agreement on like worldviews, but that's actually kind of a necessary condition of kind of coalition or organizing. I mean I hate to do this, but like I mean this is like a question of like virtues, right.
C Derick Varn:I don't know why I'm a virtue ethicist, because I'm like I haven't I haven't actually got into this element of it, but I'm always like the ontology and utilitarianism, in addition to being full of shit and impossible or also colonial and like, just like, aren't good organizing strategies?
K. Malulani Castro:if you've ever like trying to do it on the ground, right like anyone like who's going to figure out a deontological wall?
C Derick Varn:principle are are, it's just, no one does it, and I'm going to be breaking up a lesson magnified because no one does it. What actually means this happens is we. It's just our, our motive responses and since we're also alienated from communities are motive responses are not particularly well trained towards anything, so it's just like gross. And then we add, hocke it and like try to figure out some utilitarian post, whatever for why we reacted that way. And I'm just like no, we have to have virtues, we have to cultivate this, you have to like, you have to do these things. And, as I pointed out, I keep on hitting this on people that has. I'm like there is no clear, universal, applicable, unambiguous answer to the national question and Marxism. That doesn't immediately get in the contradictions, and maybe we should start thinking about this in a completely different way. And by that different way I do not mean we make everybody us.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, yeah, I mean again like I don't have like a good answer for this, because I don't think that is one of my grand like. This is kind of goes to the question of like organizing right, and I know that again, like this might sound really hunky to people, but like If we are going to imagine that maybe the workplace is not the analytic frame in which organizing is actually best, from it's a really powerful one, unions really necessarily, it's really important to engage there. But I think, as you've been touching on social reproduction and how we reproduce the relationships we want to have, the lives we want to have, where does that occur and how does that shape organizing?
C Derick Varn:Again.
K. Malulani Castro:I know this might get a lot of low back, but you have to focus on having good relationships and building good relationships and that being an organizing tradition and I know that sounds really strange to people but there's a reason why gift giving and those ceremonial traditions are so important and actually survived colonial to conquest.
C Derick Varn:It's also a reason why it's kind of, when we talk about the whole Marxist tendency, like, oh, your motor production does this, and I'm like yeah, there's truth to that. But I just want to point out to you some traits of modes of production are damn near universal until you get into industrialization and gift trading, sharing meals, kinship bonding, symbolic kinship rights. They're different everywhere but we all got them and we do have to get better at acknowledging that. I just don't think we're going to be able to build a politics off of the abstract, universal person unless we just realize that we're different. We're products of our community and our own temperament and that informs who we are, that we are different.
C Derick Varn:We do have to in some ways sincerely respect that and this dream of the perfectly efficient, planned everything is not possible. That does not mean we shouldn't try to be socialists. That does not mean we shouldn't try to rationalize relations, whatever that means. I'm not quite sure, but we have to admit that there's going to be different ways people do this and there's going to be different Even from the structural standpoint. This is the thing I keep on pushing against Marxist on, because they inherently have a 19th century view of efficiency and I'm just like. That's stupid. You're creating massive cascade failures. There's a reason why that frame of organization is not the dominant one in human history, even if it is productively efficient and has unleashed a lot of positive things in the world. Even capitalists don't truly organize that way. We have to be honest about that and kind of move past that dream. It's not smart.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean again, I've never been one to really understand it, because it's just like and maybe this is my own naivete, but I'm not in this because of that dream, I just want to have a better life for my kid, or something like that.
C Derick Varn:Actually why I'm in this is because my city was decimated in all this capitalist stuff and I started really digging into the history of decimations and the history of community and I was just like you know what I make this point all the time because I'm a conservative by my 20s but I was like this is destroying my way of life. There's no way I can reconcile this and also there's no, I can't believe in some kind of pseudo-eristocratic myth and I don't want to impose my history on everybody, because my history is also non-standard from the like. I'm not a waft, and so when I realized that, I was like okay, we have to change this. And then, as I've gotten into socialism, you start to realize like no, there's a lot of equally pernicious false dreams here, and I actually do think it limits our ability to help organize and both respect but integrate with indigenous peoples, and by integrate it don't mean wipe out. So why?
K. Malulani Castro:Also just like other groups? Right, yeah, just like indigenous people. I mean, it's not even like indigenous people. It's, like you know, like Europeans brought their own conflicts right. Like, like, like, like.
C Derick Varn:No, why? This was basically a myth. So we quit killing each other, Exactly right.
K. Malulani Castro:I mean, colonialism was like therapy for like Europe. Right, it was just like okay, how do we not do 30 years more again? Like, how do we like not just go through that process like all of the time?
C Derick Varn:And they have the 14th century over and over again.
K. Malulani Castro:Right and and it's funny, I'll actually just admit to the fact that I was like a hyper-reactionary in high school. I was like really into kind of like like I think critical, like left politics of greeting, but I was also like I want to join West Point, like I had like I mean, I was also raised in the military, so like that's like a very common thing to like oh yeah, make that transition.
C Derick Varn:And you were, you know, maybe in Mormon.
K. Malulani Castro:But I own a proud.
C Derick Varn:Not that there aren't left Mormons I actually do have. I have a truly secular standpoint in this instance. I'm like don't try to wipe out people's religion. If you actually have faith in this process, it's going to get better anyway, and if it's not, then I don't know. Have you seen how it worked out for Russia? I just want to like point that out to you. They can go well now. It's not like people go to church, but now the church has a lot of power they didn't use to have, even though nobody goes to it.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, yeah. I mean yeah, and the Mormon tradition is like really interesting and yeah that and like the persecution there. But we can have that for like another conversation.
C Derick Varn:You want to talk about like both being other and also being quit essentially the like settler colonial paradigm, but also being screwed over by the settler colonial paradigm because you lost even though you tried to screw other people over in the same pair Like it. Lds church is like example for that. Now they're like the paradigm of religious capitalism. They're like, yeah, the second richest organization and all the other ones are like the grief for us church and the Catholic church because they've just had this stuff forever.
K. Malulani Castro:Oh, this is old. No, the LDS church has like, just like, like granite vaults in like Utah that are just like filled with tithing slips.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, I was actually just reading that they're the fifth largest landowner in the country. Like yeah, they are, I've been actually, I think. I just read about the same thing.
K. Malulani Castro:It is like not in Utah, it's like not church.
C Derick Varn:No, it's just like random property. They own more land in Florida than Disney.
K. Malulani Castro:What oh the Sanctis is going after the wrong person or something I don't know. But I mean like. I think that there is also like again, when we're trying to like understand, like why I think indigenous political traditions, philosophies, also kind of contemporary political traditions are really useful for people to engage with.
K. Malulani Castro:It helps you actually understand why you see things like universities basically, like moving away from like actually any honest, like good faith engagement with like education and just being landowners. Yep, like that, like I do, there's, like you know, there's like astros there, but like I think, when we're thinking about capitalism and like it's like kind of an element in the world, the there really wasn't another opportunity to kind of have at scale the land, to kind of capture. That happens here, particularly in the Americas, right, right, and how that really shaped the relationship between like land capture, land accumulation, land dispossession and culture, right, like. That is, like you know, the most unspoken thing here. To some extent, and I think I've even like joked about this on the discord Like I do think it's actually like if you were to even like imagine trying to like change like road systems or like like any kind of like land relation here, it'd be harder than like getting like socialized healthcare, absolutely.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, that's why. That's why the whole infrastructure thing is kind of interesting, because I'm like, well, we always use the fact that we can't build national infrastructures for why we can't build decent local ones, which is kind of kind of something If you think about it. But anyway, and there's there, there's also the fact that we have both centralized and decentralized power in a way that makes it almost impossible to pin down, yeah, and that's a land relation?
K. Malulani Castro:Yep, Absolutely. And I don't mean like as like an abstract, I mean like literally, like where is it Right? And when we think about like, even like you know, policing right, like actual, like policing powers, that is like a condition of like states land rights right and that's like the, that's like the rights of the states, as like the landowner is policing powers.
C Derick Varn:Right, that's I think. When we think about states, we should kind of we should take Max Weber actually's definition, which is an administrative cast that decides the legitimacy of violence in a particular territory, like which means it's also based in land, like you have to deal with it. Well, thank you so much.
K. Malulani Castro:It's been a good time.
C Derick Varn:Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation. Maybe we'll have another one again.
K. Malulani Castro:Yeah, sam, yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you, yeah, take care again, you too, bye-bye.
