As we look at our communities across the U.S. we see deep problems and hopeful possibilities, especially among our youth. The scourge of poverty, drugs and crime have torn apart families, killed and incarcerated too many of our youth and raised the level of gang violence in our neighborhoods/barrios. A ruling class policy of massive criminalization, through the ‘Drug Wars’, of our young people has led to incarceration/warehousing unprecedented in scope. This policy has created a vicious cycle of recidivism and led to massive physical and sexual abuse in the prisons and jails. In addition, the criminal war in Iraq has also killed and wounded too many of our youth, who were caught up in the ‘poverty draft’. Thousands of our young people have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, injured, brutalized and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
A new twist in the governments war on youth of color is to treat gangs as real or potential ‘terrorist’ organizations. The viciousness of the U.S. and Salvadorian governments campaign against the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang has shown how the ruling elites and opinion makers try to create new internal enemies to justify their increasingly oppressive laws and new prisons. In El Salvador, the only alternative offered to imprisoned gang members is fundamentalist Christianity.
All of our movements have slipped back from the high points of the Civil Rights and Liberation movements of the previous decades. African-Americans, under fierce FBI/CIA COINTELPRO wars that destroyed Malcom X, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King, have had their youth recolonized by the internalized racism and sexism of gangsta rap (“nigga, bitch, ho”) and the materialist glitter of ‘bling’, ‘pimp my ride’. This gangsta subculture has also spread its colonizing effects to Latin, Asian and Native gangs.
A few years ago Native gang culture exploded. It is a new phenomenon, far from the committed AIM/Wounded Knee liberation struggles. It has even spread to rural reservations and communities, along with crystal meth and crack cocaine.
The whole gang culture of oppressed youth of color contains the seed of a positive future, if we do not give up on them. Through a process of restorative justice, we could begin a healing process in our communities that could lead them to decolonize their minds and spirits. In addition, we need to them offer a new form of community service, where they could become the Warriors of the Rainbow that Betita Martinez spoke of in the introduction to her book, De Colores Means All of Us.
The energy and enthusiasm of young people are still seeking more positive outlets. despite a campaign of cooptation to keep them seeking materialist solutions from the ruling elites capitalist advertising system, and to keep them divided by race and class in competition for diminishing jobs, careers and status, they are still looking for an uplifting vision.
We need to develop new spiritual healing ceremonies as a way to recapture our youth from the deadly oppressor culture. Where they could let go of the hurts that set up negative patterns of acting out. Where they could see that they could begin a new transformative journey along the Red Road. Then they could redeem and transform themselves through community service by joining a new Rainbow Warriors movement. Going beyond warrior societies to a new social, political and cultural movement that includes Chican@s mixed bloods and anyone committed to defend the Earth and Pachamama. Rainbows Warriors would accept leadership from the wise elders and would be accountable to the whole community and Nation. They would give leadership roles to women and be in service to the people, not their rulers.
In the coming decades of the breakdown of Empire, we will need access to alternative food supplies—community gardens, organic farms and food coops. We will need our own self-defense security services, project oriented popular educational centers, indigenous arts and cultural centers, etc. We will need to create these community based restorative/transformative justice projects in every community, barrio and reservation in this country.
Then we need to unite Native and Latino youth under a common struggle for Indigenous human rights from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. A strong Native Youth Movement has developed recently in Canada and the U.S., especially in Vancouver and the British Columbia, First Nations struggles. But it needs to acknowledge that our Chicano and Latino brothers and sisters are also indigenous and are equal partners in our liberation struggle in the Americas.
And we need to spread this model to our allies in the African-American, Asian-American and European-American communities.
The danger lies in forces that would use the rise of militant gang based organizations to create sectarian militias that would only protect their turf on a larger scale. This could grow out of, for example, the Bloods and Crips uniting in Los Angeles as a way to confront the much larger Latino gangs.
Amongst Muslim and Arab communities, their youth could be drawn into jihad gangs inspired by Al Queda, which would make the whole community a target for Homeland Security. Another possibility would be the formation of militias modeled on Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite community based movement.
Hopefully, they would take the best from them and leave the worst, from the internalized of sexism of fundamentalist Islam and the dependence on outside forces. But if we in the Indigenous community could successfully create workable models of restorative justice that reintegrates our youth into our communities, then the Muslims communities in North American might be convinced to follow suit, using the best of Islamic culture.
The collapse of ruling class consensus around the War in Iraq is leading to demoralization and a possible civil war in the U.S. This was alluded to in Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent commentary, “The Tiger at Bay: Scary Times Ahead”. http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/192en.htm
Carol Swain in her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America , writes:
White nationalism is “the next logical stage for identity politics in America,… making the United States “increasingly at risk of large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation’s history.” The most powerful stimulus to such white nativism will be the cultural and linguistic threats whites see from the expanding power of Hispanics in U.S. society.
Johann Galtung, in his January 28, 2004 essay — On the Coming Decline and Fall of the US Empire , also talked about the possibility of civil war arising out of the cancellation of the next Presidential election: But the other nations in the USA, the Inuits, Hawai’ians, First Nations, Chicanos, African Americans, could be pitted against the Anglo-Saxon, Southern Baptist, militarized Deep South, now in command. Hopefully they will not create an emergency to cancel elections they may not win.
If civil war does eventually break out, we need to have recaptured our youth, or they could easily end up in sectarian militias, with white youth joining racist, neo-Nazi militias’; Native youth joining ‘warrior societies’ and Chicano youth joining ‘Aztlan’ or ‘Mexica’ militias. Ethnic militias, each fighting to defend their ‘turf’, with a winner-take-all mindset is not what we need to achieve true liberation for all of our different nations and communities. We need to raise out struggle to a new level and create a new movement whose weapons are effective organizing, creative strategies and tactics, new forms of expression and communication, and a deep love for Mother Earth/Pachamama.
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas best expressed the organizing bias of the new movements: “The movement has no future if its future is military. If the EZLN [Zapatistas] perpetuates itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it apart from that, would be for it to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army.”
The scenario of warring ethnic militias or ‘revolutionary’ armies battling for supremacy and State power does not have to happen, but we need to seriously brainstorm on how to best welcome and honor our youth by giving them a positive role to play in the liberation of our communities and Nation. Their energy, creativity and courage are greatly needed as we face the chaos and violence of a crumbling U.S. Empire. Galtung predicted the fall of the Soviet empire, and predicts the fall of the U.S. empire in as little as 15 years from now. We need to recreate our new revolutionary Indigenous movement as soon as possible.
This is a call for Rainbow Warriors, united under the banner of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor. It is a call for warriors of all ages, races, genders and sexual orientation, to first defend our living places, our nations, and finally our Mother Earth. It is a call to defend our ancient heritages, starting from Turtle Island, Aztlan, Pacha Mama – to all the different races whose blood has intermingled with ours, our mestizaje/mixed bloods. It is a call to listen to the wisdom of our elders, to be inspired by the words of fire from our poets and writers/prophets and to take heart from the energy and hope of our youth/juventad. It is a call not only to defend, but to create –– from energy, ideas and dialog – the revolutionary process of transforming our civilization from a deadly corporate empire to a life affirming, democratic community of Indigenous and Bioregional Nations in the Western Hemisphere.
All my relations.
