Melanie Yazzie traffics in radical certainty & fights against the fallout of political atomization

Melanie Yazzie is a political organizer, a vocally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinker, and an Indigenous revolutionary. She currently works as an assistant professor in the Departments of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico (https://nas.unm.edu/people/faculty/me...) and also organizes with The Red Nation, an indigenous-led leftist organization committed to immediate and material decolonization (https://therednation.org/). She is the lead editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society and has co-written two incredibly important books, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation. We talk about those texts here, and about some of Dr. Yazzie’s forthcoming book projects. Yazzie’s work decrypts and diagnoses the individualism that characterizes liberal politics. And she is, as she explains here, understandably frustrated about the lack of progress that has been made on dealing with the liberal takeover of radical politics, in part via the reassuring language of “reconciliation.” In relation to this problem, Yazzie talks about the palpable “confusion” and “alienation” that exists among white settlers who participate in solidarity protests alongside Indigenous peoples. What she says we tend to overlook, though, is that this alienation is a defining feature of capitalism, and that the desire to be close to and internalize the type of connection and feeling of interdependency that Indigenous peoples feel toward the land, even it comes from a sincere place, is a deeply messy, difficult and unsettling tendency. The rise in “settler extremism” is, in her words, a “direct response to the existential threat that” even a change in the “symbolic order” represents. And so, for this reason, she reflects on how, as an educator, she has seen a “full scale assault on education” and why it might make sense that "the realm of ideas and the realm of intellectual production is” a “battleground… right now politically.”