At the conclusion of his 1932 cross-country travelogue, American Jitters, the critic Edmund Wilson reaches the end of the continental United States to gaze upon the sugar magnate John Speckles's iconic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Wilson describes the hotel as “white as a wedding cake” and, in a nod to the imperial “Great White Fleet” of San Diego, notes also that it is “polished and trim as a ship” and that its presence is a monument intended to “dominate” the coast before the “shoreline gives way to Mexico” (254). This image of whiteness and imperial domination stretching off into the infinity of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean is then coupled with a dialectical image of Wilson reaching back in time, to the history that brought the hotel into existence: “it was the same year the first vestibule train was put on the tracks by George Pullman and the revolt of the Apaches under Geronimo . . . to assert their independence . . . had been put down by the government and the Apaches penned up in a reservation.” Wilson's construction, in which he simultaneously looks forward, over the ocean to the “sugar plantations of Honolulu,” and backward, into the connection between settler colonialism and capitalist industry, topped by an absurdly white hotel, marks a troubling convergence of settler-colonial time and capitalist space in left-wing thought in the United States (254).
Despite the commonplace assumption that radical-left authors and activists of the 1930s were narrowly focused on class, Wilson's travelogue was in no way exceptional. Or perhaps one could say that it was exceptional insofar as it came from someone like Wilson: a WASP from a patrician background, Wilson spoke for and summarized the elite literary consensus on what had constituted good taste a decade earlier. Thus, for Wilson to pen these lines suggests how increasingly common it became for left-wing writers during the Great Depression to openly question Frederick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis”: the idea that the uniqueness of American democracy lay in the individualistic conquest of the frontier, the privatization of land, and the mythic journey West. Instead, there seemed already to be a growing awareness that the breakdown of capitalism, suddenly visible to the naked eye in the environmental catastrophe of dust storms, droughts, and bankrupt farms, had something to do with the ideology and practice of settler colonialism. For the first time in United States history, a wide swath of the left articulated a relation between ongoing thefts of land, resources, and livelihoods from independent producers, what Marxists refer to as the “primary accumulation” of capital, and the ongoing displacement and genocide of Native Americans. The “failure of the West” became a trope in the 1930s, a way to articulate the “metabolic rift” between capitalism, settler colonialism, and the latter's ability to reproduce itself through nature (Foster 156).
As the environmental critic David Pellow reminds us, the modality through which nature is dominated is inextricable from the modality through which human beings dominate each other (46). It makes sense, then, that an anticapitalist mode of ecological thinking emerged at the same time as an understanding of the relation between settler colonialism and class formation in the United States. Anticapitalist writers who were part of what Michael Denning calls the “long Popular Front” (9), such as Wilson, Meridel Le Sueur, James Rorty, and Carey McWilliams, associated the collapse of capitalism's ability to meet basic human need with the violence of the pioneer and the mythologizing of colonial conquest. While we don't know how closely Indigenous authors and intellectuals of the period, such as John Joseph Mathews and Archie Phinney, were in communication with non-Indigenous authors such as Le Sueur and McWilliams, it is clear that these mid-twentieth-century Native intellectuals saw capitalism much the same way their non-Native contemporaries did: as constructed through the theft of Native Americans’ land, and as depending on the continued exploitation of the people who labored on it. During the Great Depression, Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives existed, as they still do, not in isolation but rather as coconstituted within broader fields of meaning, especially at moments when political coalitions, such as the New Deal, constructed a framework in which land, race, capitalism, class, and colonialism were being rearticulated through social movements and the state. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, the routes of capital are never culturally pure (32–33). Given that the Green New Deal recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey evokes the environmental legacy of the original New Deal, it seems apposite to ask how Indigenous absence and presence became a discursive framework nearly a century ago, as the state proposed a new relation between capitalism and its ecological matrix—and how we may avoid such a framework now.
From the New Deal to a Left Critique of Settler Colonialism
The concept of nature and its relation to the state changed radically during the Great Depression, from progressive conservation to a nascent environmentalism. As Neil M. Maher writes in his history of New Deal environmental programs, never before had the state mobilized millions of people, mostly young, to engage in conservation work, attempting often to restore ecologies ravaged through capitalist exploitation of land and resources—changing the state's relation to the land from managed exploitation to restoration and sustainability (6). Among the actions the government took that changed the landscape during the heyday of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Farm Security Administration were the following: planting millions of trees to restore soil, cutting firebreaks to control wildfires, reforesting, creating national parks and trails, cleaning rivers, and curbing soil erosion through switchbacks, terracing, and drainage. Even more important, perhaps, than the individual projects the CCC undertook, Maher argues, was the corps's rearticulation of the welfare state's relation to the management of nature: jobs, prosperity, and productive work, it seemed, could restore the soil and, by implication, the health of the nation (165).
This new relation among the state, nation, and nature was often mobilized under the trope of the Native. Whether it be the Boy Scout–like “Woodcraft Indians” that gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt some of the inspiration for the CCC (Maher 31), an early promotional photograph of Roosevelt as governor with a bow and arrow (35), the carving of totem poles in many of the camps (158), or camp workers’ writing home about how they've become “brown as Indians” (99), the idea that Americans could return to the wilderness and restore the vitality of an ailing nation goes back, as Richard Slotkin and Philip Deloria note, to the founding of the United States as a settler colony (Slotkin 4; Deloria 109–11, 126).
Because the CCC's work was imagined as an act of collective planning rather than individual conquest, the mobilization of Native tropes was intended to Americanize and thus contain a program that many New Deal planners worried seemed socialistic. Indeed, the image of the Native became a modality through which the United States sought to rediscover itself in other ways as well, including a series of Works Progress Administration (WPA) travel posters. Offering nostalgic and romanticized images of Native Americans in teepees, wearing headdresses, and on horseback, the posters suggested that, by driving across the country and seeing its natural beauty, white middle-class travelers were doing something similar to working-class CCC laborers: remaking themselves into Americans and at the same time revitalizing the economy (Pillen 61). The trope of going Native as an act of national recovery was made quite literal, as John Collier, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, made clear a decade before he spearheaded the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA): creating reservations to help restore a land base to the Indigenous tribes that originally inhabited it, he wrote, would be like recovering a “red Atlantis,” a way to restore the collective health of the United States (18). Collier believed that the United States could restore its connection to a premodern past by restoring Indigenous people's ability to lead communal lives. One part racist romanticism and one part pragmatic reform, Collier's policy ultimately articulated Indigenous futures less as autonomous and sovereign nations than as components of a multiethnic settler-state that were vital to that state's collective health.
The reemergence of Native iconography became synonymous with a patriotic recovery of American vitality and the restoration of the nation's natural beauty—or, rather, with the construction of nature itself as something to be experienced for its own sake, as a unique legacy of a settler-colonial nation-state. Such an idyllic construction of “native” iconography and natural harmony did not, however, sit well with a number of radical journalists and novelists of the Popular Front period. Left-wing writers such as McWilliams, Phinney, and Le Sueur critically engaged with the reconfiguration of colonialism, the state, and the latter's relation to nature in a moment of crisis. One of the most popular critiques was offered by McWilliams, who argued that the mobilization of Native imagery was pushed the furthest in California as a means of refashioning nature and human development. In his contribution to the book series American Folkways, McWilliams tells the history of “Southern California Country” as a land whose ecology has been made and remade through two waves of genocide—first of the Indigenous people by Europeans and then of the Mexicans by Anglo invaders. What is remarkable for McWilliams is the dialectical way in which the Indigenous Californians’ enslavement by the Spanish was central to the shape and economy of modern California and, at the same time, was remade into a nostalgic foundational myth to grant Anglo settlers a sense of place.
For McWilliams, the enslavement of the Indigenous Californians by the Spanish mission system secured permanently the plantation nature of the state's economy. Through giant estates organized by Spanish missions and their military guards, “the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps” (29). The violent colonial manner of Southern Californian settlement wrote itself into the very ecology of modern development. Writing that the problem with “water in Southern California is a cultural problem” (192), McWilliams discusses how the Californian settlers and waves of subsequent American migrants do not understand the “semi-arid” environment in which they live (193) and yet are haunted by a vague “fear of future disaster” (199). For McWilliams, the disconnection from the land and the impending droughts and fires that mark the Southern Californian landscape are part of the cultural erasure of its origins: Californians cannot grasp their landscape because they cannot grasp their history.
What disconnects Californians from their history is precisely the nostalgic image of “Mission Indians” produced to give white Americans a comforting myth about their recent past (76). Citing the rapid growth of the Ramona pageant, along with the “rediscovery of the Missions,” McWilliams offers that the “well-being of the natives under Mission rule” has been the foundational story of California origins (75, 77). This story is enacted through live plays performed throughout the Southern Californian countryside, telling tales of “elegant pre-Raphaelite characters,” of “Indians never seen on this earth,” loosely based on characters in Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona (75). Combined with the mission “fiestas,” in which “paunchy realtors . . . dashed about town in gaudy sashes,” these Mission festivals began in the late nineteenth century and helped fuel the state's first real-estate boom, a way of selling an elegant, premodern, aristocratic past in which Indigenous people, Franciscan clergy, and Spanish nobility lived in a state of harmony. “The region accepted the charming Ramona, as a folk figure, but completely rejected the Indians still living in the area,” McWilliams notes, adding that the visible remnants of the Chumash are begging in the skid rows of downtown Los Angeles and filling the ranks of the unemployed (76). McWilliams finishes his survey of the mission myth by sardonically adding that “the restored Mission is a much . . . less embarrassing symbol of the past than the Mexican field worker or the ragamuffin pachucos of Los Angeles” (83). The mobilization of a romantic Indigenous past is the language, in other words, by which land was rendered into a commodity and its original inhabitants turned into paupers.
As far as I know, there was no official Communist Party theory of settler colonialism. And yet, in communist and early Soviet support for the right of self-determination among colonized people and in the placement of white supremacy at the center of the communist critique of capitalism (Adi 155), it is not a stretch to believe that many communist thinkers apprehended how capitalism and the working class in the United States were shaped by the theft of Indigenous lands (Balthaser 85; Estes, Our History 215). In her most prominent collection of short stories, Salute to Spring, Le Sueur depicts a primal scene of capitalism that locates alienation not in labor exploitation but rather in the commodification of the land. She opens the scene by positing that the “rigors of conquest” in her “pioneer town” on the Kansas prairie have “made us spiritually insulated against human values” (8). In a collection that moves from stories of a modernist wasteland of spiritual desolation to tales of revolutionary commitment and solidarity, the pioneer town is an emblem of the way settler capitalism ravages the personal psyche. In such a town, “[e]very man [is] going a lonely way in a kind of void,” Le Sueur explains (13–14), alone because he has no connection to the land or to the organic life of growing things.
As the Native American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, the commodification of land and its privatization mark the origins of the settler-colonial project, out of which relations to labor develop (140). In this tradition, Le Sueur connects the settlers’ alienation from the land to one's alienation from one's own body, noting the “acrid” and “thin” and “lonely” bodies of the settlers, concluding that we “used the body like the land as a commodity, and the land and the body resent it” (20). Twisting the notion of “virgin land,” “husbanded” and “domesticated” by the figure of the male pioneer, Le Sueur exposes a settler-colonial landscape that is “ruined” and “desolate,” like a “strong, raped virgin,” still vital but prostrate (24). James Rorty, one of the founding editors of the communist magazine New Masses, articulates a similar connection between settler colonialism and alienation in his 1936 travelogue describing his journey across the United States: the pioneer's “naive vulgarity” and “acquisitive social psychology” frustrate any sense of collective duty to other human beings, or to a rich ecology (168).
From Indigenous Critique to a Red Deal
For early-twentieth-century Indigenous writers, especially those who cautiously and critically aligned themselves with the reforms of the IRA, such as Mathews and Phinney, the mobilization of an Indigenous New Deal took on a complex literality. The federal government dramatically altered the terrain on which Indigenous nations negotiated with that government, capitalism, and their own land. While the IRA remains controversial and contradictory, perhaps the best way to summarize it would be to say that it was the federal government's adoption (and disavowal) of the demands of a decade of activism by the Society of American Indians, demands that were embodied in the recommendations of the 1928 Meriam Report (Bruyneel 99; Estes, Our History 219; Deloria and Lytle 144). One could read Mathews's seminal novel Sundown as a summary of the IRA's actions and the Meriam Report's findings, which focused a great deal on the calamity of the breakup and privatization of reservation land, especially the theft, embezzlement, and mismanagement of the Osage nation's oil wealth: in the novel, allotment and assimilation policies backed by Chal Windzer's father are clearly disastrous; in both the story and in reality, the Osage people's loss of their mineral rights was at least in part due to the tribe's hazy control over its collective property. And clearly this is how Collier intended it to be seen. Writing a decade earlier, in Survey Magazine, Collier imagined his “red Atlantis” as a reservoir of collective and spiritual value that needed to be protected by the state before it was lost to modernity and white encroachment. In some ways, one could say that Collier's vision of the reservation is the legislative version of the nostalgic Native American idyll to which McWilliams refers: by preserving its utopian past, America can project itself once again, renewed, into the future.
While Mathews ultimately supported the IRA as a practical reform of the allotment policy and of the limited sovereignty it granted, as did many other Indigenous intellectuals and activists, he understood that the IRA failed not only to grant true sovereignty but also to restore to the Osage “the one road,” their cultural and material way of life (271). The disconnect between a nostalgic past and a settler-colonial modernity is personally experienced by Chal, the son of a white proassimilation father and an Osage mother born on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, as an internally divided self. The destruction of the Osage nation's ecology and Chal's alienation are fused together in the text. The “black derricks” that are the source of the Osage oil wealth stand “like a sterile forest against the sky,” the prairie on which Chal rode small ponies as a boy now covered in oil slicks, where “oil and salt water kill . . . every blade of grass” (250). On this ecological wasteland he now drives his expensive roadster instead of a pony—drinking heavily and dating many of the Osage women he meets at parties and dances. Yet as much as Chal dreams of being like the “civilized” businessman who “pulled off deals” (281), he is simultaneously seized by what he describes as intense bouts of painful emotion in which he dances, often while drunk (297), and boasts to his mother about what he will accomplish in the future (311). These flashes of “racial instinct” dissipate quickly (136), and Chal drives the reservation back roads again, aimless and drifting. It's clear that he can master the machines of modernity—he was an accomplished wartime pilot—and he has attended university. Yet neither the past, which is unavailable to Chal, nor the seductive boons of the present seem to afford him a sense of belonging or a mastery over his life. Despite the trope of Indigenous harmony located in the fictive past deployed by the WPA and Collier's reform agenda, Chal is the fully modernist antihero, belonging neither to one world nor to another.
Phinney, a Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) anthropologist and one of the founders of the National Congress of American Indians, echoed Mathews's analyses of what afflicted the Osage. In perhaps his best-known essay, “Numipu among the White Settlers,” composed in his final year of doctoral study in the Soviet Union and published posthumously in 1937, Phinney argues that the present crisis is marked by forcible entry into capitalist modernity, and that it is only through modern solutions—not a return to a mythic past—that the Nimiipuu can survive as a people. Through the “two distinct processes . . . of colonial ruination and . . . misguided governmental paternalism,” the Nimiipuu were divested of their cultural and economic ways of life, first through war (26), and finally through the land theft and ecological devastation of capitalist agriculture that rendered their allotments economically unviable (40). Eking out a meager subsistence on government rations and the shreds of remaining allotments, the Osage people, Phinney argues, could further assimilate only by entering the wage-labor economy “on the lowest level of white proletarian existence.” The only remaining sources of Nimiipuu collective existence are the cultural rituals, “native dances and ceremonials,” by which the Nimiipuu “glorify . . . the ancient life”—yet these have become just “pageantry” and “romance” for white voyeurs, as “few of the conditions that once gave life and content to such performances” continue to exist (33). For Phinney, the Nimiipuu's only remaining option is to form a “cooperative (tribal) organization” and assert “corporate (common) ownership over the means of production,” a radical reclamation of their land (40). As a historical materialist, Phinney felt that there could be no cultural revival of the Nimiipuu unless they found new, collective, anticapitalist modalities of life.
Together, these authors articulate a critique of the mobilization of Native imagery in the service of reconfiguring a capitalist state's metabolic relationship with nature. As Ocasio-Cortez credits her attendance at the #NoDAPL protests with having inspired the Green New Deal (see, e.g., Solnit), and as the promotion of the environmental reforms she champions often deploys Indigenous imagery (see, e.g., Funes; “Green New Deal”), we should take a page from these past Indigenous and non-Indigenous critics of settler colonialism and its relation to land. It's not that any of these writers opposed the New Deal—and indeed McWilliams, Phinney, and Mathews served in one way or another as representatives of New Deal programs. Rather, all these authors point out that the state, in the service of capitalism, will attempt to mobilize the image of the Native to disavow the limitations of programs of reform and their absorption into a system of economic and ecological exploitation. The danger is that just as the New Deal both enacted popular reforms and shored up a capitalist system in crisis, the Green New Deal, should it ever come to pass, will trade on its Indigenous image to hide its shortcomings.
As the Red Nation, an Indigenous-led anticapitalist organization based in Albuquerque, states, “[W]e know we must go further” than the Green New Deal to fundamentally break with the history of settler-colonial capitalism, by recognizing that “capitalist states . . . protect capital and the wealthy class, not life” (Estes, “Four Principles”). As Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a founding member of the Red Nation, writes in Our History Is the Future, the ecological crisis of capitalism creates the conditions through which both poor settlers and colonized subjects have the material basis to form alliances against multinational corporations that threaten to destroy human existence on the land and, by extension, the planet (7, 199). This is to say not so much that we “are all Indigenous now” as that the ecological crisis of settler-colonial capitalism can no longer rely on the fictive imaginary of the Native to disavow its own literal investments in extractive industries. Indigeneity means, in this context, the realization that the Native-settler binary may not outlive the Anthropocene, which is the condition not of unitary sameness but of solidarity. The linear time of the colonizer, which imagines a discrete past and an increasingly progressive future, has come undone. Whether that undoing appears as a future that spirals into more and worse pandemics, forest fires, hurricanes, soil depletion, mass migrations, and acidifying oceans, or as a future in which global coalitions lead by Indigenous principles of solidarity in dialectical relation to the land and the people on it, remains to be seen. If the Green New Deal should save us, it has to realize that embedded in its structure must be an end to the idea that there is a possible life of endless accumulation and capitalist futuricity, one that trades under the sign of a romanticized Indigenous past. As we live in the unraveling space-time of the Anthropocene, guided by the new coordinates for solidarity and community in its widening sacrifice zones, we must navigate a collectivity on a shrinking planet, the past of which must be the future.
