By Susan Stevens

I recently let go of (hopefully) my last prideful thought about the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture I came from: my fantasy that it was my culture that birthed the American Enlightenment and sustainable democratic ideals, that we were Vikings and pirates — aka murderers, rapists, slavers, and thieves — but hey, we just had to hit bottom before we could rise up and give the world real freedom and the cool technology they didn’t know they were waiting for!

Then, two remarkable people joined with the Debs Caucus of Social Democrats, USA: Jennina Rose Gorman, a Haudenosaunee woman of the Mohawk and Seneca Nations, and Steven J. Schwartzberg, author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal. I learned that what I’d long ago accepted as the biggest step towards equality that humankind was capable of back in the 18th century — a belief in equality between white landowning males — was a poor shadow of the respect and reverence assumed as the birthright of every being of every gender among peoples like the Blackfoot, Cherokee and Haudenosaunee. Jennina Rose shared how it was the Haudenosaunee women who selected the leaders: they observed the children, and the ones they approved for leadership were those who took care of others. The women knew that choosing leaders wisely was a matter of life and death, because bad leaders would starve and freeze. Leaders were too busy handling political matters, such as negotiating with other tribes, to hunt, fish, and gather firewood for their own families, so they and their families survived only through the support and love of their people. People gladly provided for good leaders but not bad ones. Wow! Voluntary provision in response to representation — what a concept!  While the white man was taking baby steps towards democracy, Native Americans were jumping up, catching the ball and running with it!

Another crucial revelation was an essay by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a Palestinian and Algerian Jew, titled “The Ruins Should Be Inhabited as Part of a Process of Repair.” This essay challenged my colonizer mindset that lamented “past” crimes against humanity and nature (while ignoring their ongoing implementation) and said it was too bad but “what’s done is done, so we just have to move on.” Azoulay writes, in versified form:

A “potential history” is needed

to counter the discipline of history 

which considers what has been accomplished through violence

as a fait accompli, with no return possible. …

‘… We must return to what was destroyed, to the ruins and to the possibilities 

that were doomed to appear as “past.”

We must rebuild and resurrect them with and for the sake of 

those who were colonized and expelled, with and for the sake of their descendants.’

Azoulay also explains how powerful Christian Zionists continued Hitler’s project of extermination by attempting to wipe out the diverse identities of the Jewish communities already inhabiting Palestine and the diaspora, and to stamp them with a new “Judeo-Christian” identity. She writes: 

‘It must be plainly stated: this identity was conceived 

to prevent the return of Palestinians and of Palestine,

and to oppose the rich and diverse histories of Jewish communities, 

many of which lived within Muslim communities.

In reclaiming and embodying these almost extinct identities:

Palestinian Jew and Algerian Jew, I refuse to recognize myself in the “Israeli” identity

that was invented with the purpose of rendering impossible the return of Palestine, 

and of Palestinians to their homeland, as well as our return, 

as Jews, to the world of our ancestors, 

where we belonged to diverse communities.

The Jews didn’t have lands that Europe could have colonized;

rather, they possessed a strong group identity,

— what Frantz Fanon calls “ontological resistance” —

which they preserved and transmitted to their children for centuries

through social and spiritual principles, practices, and formations. 

Europe sought to destroy and replace this group identity 

with its own forms, principles, beliefs, and technologies of organization,

or, to put it plainly, they sought to colonize it.

Colonization often targets lands.

Without lands to conquer, Europe proceeded to colonize the minds of Jews, 

destroying this identitarian ontological resistance 

to Europe’s devouring imperial secularism 

and dissolving their autonomy and internal organizational principles.’ 

When I first began communicating with Steven J. Schwartzberg, I was eager to know what we, the Debs Caucus, could do to help overturn the evil laws that were still hurting and oppressing Indigenous Americans today. Steve said we couldn’t just rush in and try to fix things; we needed a time of grieving, a time to learn a whole new way of being. I’m slowly realizing that for me, sitting with this grief means mindfully inhabiting the ruins of end-stage colonization and capitalism. At 60, I am facing unaffordable housing, healthcare, and food and unreliable public transportation; and all of us are facing increasing environmental crises, including preventable toxic industrial pollution and accidents due to a laissez faire approach being more profitable to a few in power than implementing proper safety and eco-sustainability standards. Grief can be cleansing if we’re willing to let it do its work in us, and release us from our identification with entrenched attitudes and practices that don’t serve humankind or the whole of creation and therefore don’t serve us.

I become more ready every day to meet the person I am and the culture I’m still part of underneath the illusion that someone, or some entity, has to dominate others and commandeer resources, or someone “even worse” will fill that vacuum. I understand that the number of people embracing what Steve calls this new way of being will have to reach critical mass before the world can finally let go of militarism, and even the early peoples here fought to defend their tribes’ resources from other tribes. Yet we must not abandon this journey to the beating heart of our shared humanity, and our shared life with all that is!

As social democrats, we owe it to ourselves and, as the Haudenosaunee say, to the seven generations that follow, to stay the course and become, as Gandhi said, the people who embody the change we want to see in the world.

Susan Stevens is Chair of Kansas City, Kansas SDUSA.