 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we're joined by Melanie Kiyazi of the Red Nation, a project which is dedicated to the liberation of the native peoples from colonialism and capitalism. She's going to talk to us about the problems relating to the COVID-19 issue in the Navajo Nation, as well as the structural issues that have been facing the people of that community for a long time. So we already had an interview yesterday where we looked at the situation on the ground and today we'll be looking a bit at the context as well. Thank you, Melanie, so much for joining us. So first of all, I wanted to start out by doing a bit of a larger context. So like I said, we've already examined what's happening on the ground right now, but we also understand that the number of cases and the Navajo Nation is the third highest number of cases in the U.S. after New York in New Jersey is also a result of a lot of structural issues which include the kind of lack of access to healthcare that people are facing, the lack of access to clean water. So could you talk about the policy framework as a whole which is led to the situation? Sure. Thank you so much again for having me on People's Dispatch to talk about this. Yeah, I've done some other interviews about kind of the larger context of the Navajo Nation and why the infection rates and the contraction rates are so high during the pandemic. And as you know, it has a lot to do with the chronic lack of infrastructure. So when we talk about infrastructure, I think people often think about kind of standard policy, whether it's like the amount of appropriations from the federal government in the United States that might go towards building roads, for example, or putting in pipes for the delivery of clean water to households. But the real issue when it comes to Native people in the United States is that we live under a consistent condition of colonialism, right? And so in the United States, it's called settler colonialism. So basically, you know, the invaders came and they never went away. And even though they still desire land, they still desire the disappearance of Indigenous life in order to gain access to land and wealth, we are still here. We've actually grown numbers demographically. And so there's a sort of constant crisis of Indigenous presence that the United States is constantly having to manage. So when we think about policies related to infrastructure, we always need to be thinking about the colonial relationship that Native people as nations and also as individuals have with the United States. And so if we're thinking about policy that's framed by an ongoing context of colonialism, then that helps us to understand the massive disparities that exist in healthcare, education, infrastructure, water delivery, electricity, right? So 30 to 40% of households in the Navajo Nation don't have running water or electricity. This is a statistic that's kind of circulating in the U.S. media because of the pandemic numbers in the Navajo Nation. But the reason why this is the case is because of colonialism, right? It's not because of a lack of investment and something I think that also, and you might ask me a question about this later and I might be jumping the gun. But what often, what has happened historically in the Navajo Nation is that we serve as a resource colony in terms of water, coal, uranium, different kinds of resources that are extracted. Value is extracted from the Navajo Nation. And then that value was applied elsewhere. Settler cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas or Los Angeles, it's literally siphoned out of the Navajo Nation and it goes elsewhere. And so if you think about that type of colonial relationship where we're literally just a colony to be exploited for the profit and the benefit of the settler economy that surrounds us and occupies our land. And when you think about the kind of livelihood and the wealth that that produces outside of the Navajo Nation and then you compare that to the poverty, really, and the chronic lack of things like water and electricity in the Navajo Nation, then you can see that the condition of colonialism is, the gap actually is much bigger, I think, than some people realize. And so even though value is extracted from us, we don't actually get any of that value in return in terms of the actual building of the Navajo Nation. So I think that, I'm trying to give a bigger picture when we think about the term policy in a larger level. Right. So I just wanted to ask you something a bit more about the question of colonialism, because it's actually a term that people sometimes don't really understand that is still applicable today because people treat it as history, people treat it as, okay, maybe an unfortunate history, but not something that is a living reality for people, for people today, native people today, especially. So could you talk a bit more about how, say, in day-to-day life this actually works? You mentioned the extraction of resources, of course, but how does it have an impact on the native people in the country? So movement, for example, so let's say, let's think about, we call it Turtle Island, which kind of describes North America before the imperial borders of the United States or Canada or Mexico were imposed upon that land. All that land was just indigenous nations living, engaging in treaty relationships with one another to traverse territory to have free movement, right? There weren't borders in the sense that we understand today. So if you're thinking about the Navajo Nation, which is the largest, it's the indigenous nation that has the largest contiguous land base of any indigenous nation in the United States today. But if you think about the Navajo Nation, even though it's quite large, it's larger than some states, imagine if you took all of those borders away and you thought about Navajo people being able to move fluidly with the seasons, the migration patterns of animals that we depended upon for subsistence, then when you think just about movement of my own people, Navajo people, not to mention the other sort of 600 nations that exist in what is today the United States, then you can start to think on an everyday level of how our ability to cross fences, right, to cross state lines, to go into different jurisdictions is inhibited by the imposition of colonial borders and boundaries. And so today we have something called border towns, they're non-reservation settlements. They're mostly white majority settlements. Commonly, I think just thought of as like American towns or American cities, Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I live would be considered a border town. You have to cross the border from the reservation jurisdiction into kind of like the United States, the rest of the United States. But the crossing of that border, it creates all kinds of carceral regimes where native people are policed when they're off reservation by vigilantes, but then also by police, but then also exploited in border town economies. And so just thinking about the way in which native people are forced to move through space and to cross colonial borders that did not exist before the United States came into existence, I think helps us to think about kind of the everyday impact because we all move, right, we all take public transportation, we drive, we take public transportation. So imagine if you moved through that space, but you were marked as a colonized subject every time you moved into different spaces and you had to be hyper aware of that fact in a different space. That's one, I think, one of the ways that I can describe how colonial feels in the everyday life of native people. Right. And if you look, for instance, at the question of administration itself, so what is the kind of administrative structures that work through which the US regime, for instance, also imposes some of these restrictions? The list is endless. I forgot, I think it was Vine DeLoria, he's a standing rock, Lakota Sioux, one of the preeminent kind of figures in the field of Native American Studies, which is my department at the University of New Mexico. He said indigenous people are legal, we're lawyers by default. Every indigenous person is a lawyer because we have to be, because there are so many laws that exist to circumscribe and to negotiate how we move again through space, but how it relates to the larger colonial state that is the United States. So I'm just thinking about your certificate of Indian birth, which is often thought of as your citizenship card, you're a citizen of a tribal nation, but then you actually have to carry that number or that card whenever you go and try to get services. And so just trying to navigate the health care system in the United States, which is under intense scrutiny right now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's incredibly difficult to get registered just to have even like a routine health care checkup because you have to have your tribal identity, but then you have to prove that you're a citizen of an indigenous nation, which is its own registration and administrative process. But then you actually have to prove that you are a documented US citizen with I think three or four different types of identification. And so the native people, like the number of forms that we carry on our body daily basis, just to move through space, I think actually exceeds a lot of other folks who live in the so-called United States. And so literally every element of our lives is administered, whether it's through health, whether it's education, all of the federal appropriations that come into tribal governments go through a high level of scrutiny. And there's just a labyrinth of laws related to literally everything that we have to do on a regular basis. And it's very specific kind of law. And just because like all native people are ipso facto lawyers, just because of the legal system, doesn't mean that we're all actually lawyers and can understand those things. And so right, we're just like everyday people kind of like trying to live our lives and trying to be happy and happy and fulfilled. And so it creates all kinds of complexities that you come up against all the time. Right. So one of the key questions I wanted to ask you also is about the nature of resistance. So we have centuries of resistance basically against the settler colony regime that you mentioned. But in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically, how does this resistance sort of pan out? How does it kind of present itself? You work with Red Nation, which has been in the forefront of a lot of this resistance activities. So could you talk a bit about that? So I do a lot of work. A, I'm a social and a historical actor in kind of the history of indigenous resistance in Turtle Island, but also in Navajo, political and social movements, particularly grassroots movements. But I'm also a historian of those movements. And so I have this kind of dual role where I'm always paying attention to kind of what's unfolding on the ground. And then what that's, what that tells us about the larger kind of dialectics, right of resistance and oppression and what Native people are doing to advance the agenda for decolonization and liberation. And so right now what I'm seeing with the pandemic is a really incredible kind of form of caretaking. I'm going to call it like we've been talking a lot about this in the Red Nation, a caretaking kind of economy, an infrastructure of caretaking that's developing with the, I mean, there's been a proliferation of mutual aid relief all across the world in different contexts. But in the Navajo context, it's very interesting because the notion of caretaking, the notion of being a good relative to caretake one's relatives is actually part of kind of the central philosophical mandate of who we are culturally and ethnically as or Navajo people. It's called which is just the principle of kinship. And so what I've been seeing actually and what the Red Nation has been very centrally involved in sort of trying to develop on the ground and to normalize in the political culture of indigenous liberation here is to politicize kinship, to politicize kinship, in order to develop really strong political relationships, whether it's notions of solidarity, we use kinship to describe the internationalism that we engage in, let's say around Palestine, for example, or with our Venezuelan comrades and relatives. And so we deploy the term relative to in a political way to describe kind of an anti-colonial and an anti-capitalist relationship, like this is the infrastructure of caretaking that we're trying to develop in the shadow, but then also the failure of global capitalism. And so with kind of the Navajo Hopi family's relief fund, the NFO shop is doing incredible work. We have some of our own Navajo comrades feeding unsheltered or houseless people here in Albuquerque with the urban native population. What we've seen because of the pandemic is that this politicized kinship or the solidarity work has amped up even more. And I think it's creating like an interesting almost something possibly developing if we organize it into existence sort of a counter hegemon, I would say to the hegemony of capitalist social relations, which is about alienation and competition and scarcity, right? And so it's really the opposite of that that's coming into existence. And so I think most of the resistance efforts I'm seeing right now with the pandemic is really leaning towards solidarity and kinship. And towards taking a slightly larger picture view, you also mentioned imperialism specifically in the context of solidarity with the Palestinian comrades, Venezuela, for instance. So could you also talk a bit about how the movements actually look at imperialism in today's context? I mean, to be frank, in terms of indigenous resistance in let's say the United States and Canada, anti imperialism isn't as strong. I think it's not like an impulse, a natural impulse in the way in which these politics are formulated. I think it's mostly just because of U.S. and Canadian exceptionalism, you know, as native people, I mean, we're constantly pushing back against the United States. But I think sometimes, and what's definitely happening with Native nations right now, they're suing the Trump administration for this federal appropriations for this COVID-19 relief fund. What I'm trying to do, I'm doing some writings and talking to some leaders, is I'm saying instead of focusing so narrowly on the colonial relationship that we have with our occupier and the oppressor imperial nation, the United States or Canada, why don't you think about engaging in international relationships with all of these other nations that exist who do not have a colonial relationship with us, right? Exactly. And so something that the red nation has been doing actually now for a couple of years is being stridently anti-imperialist. We really try to de-center the United States and sometimes we don't even talk about it at all. It's not like it doesn't exist, but it's not at the center of how we understand our project for indigenous liberation, larger kind of notions of indigenous nationhood or sovereignty, and we understand that we develop these ideas and the praxis of nationhood in relationship to other anti-colonial nations, whether it's Palestine, or struggles that conceive of themselves as national liberation struggles, trying to fuck themselves from the shackles of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. And so I would say that the red nation is pretty much at the forefront, I would say, of the indigenous liberation formations here in Turtle Island when it comes to anti-imperialist work. But I think it's catching on, but we just need to keep encouraging people more. Thank you so much, Melanie, for talking to us. Thank you so much.