Reflections on The Red Deal

I began reading The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth this weekend. It was a fitting way to commemorate International Workers Day. I am still pondering this quote

Each movement rises against colonial and corporate extractive projects. But what’s often downplayed is the revolutionary potency of what Indigenous resistance stands for: caretaking and creating just relations between human and other-than-human worlds on a planet thoroughly devastated by capitalism.

From The Red Deal

They introduce and center caretaking:

If prisons, police, and the military are the caretakers of violence and agents of death, then educators, healthcare workers, counselors, water protectors, and land defenders are caretakers of peace and agents of life.

and

Caretaking is often unrecognized work that is heavily gendered, severely criminalized, and never fairly compensated. The pay gaps between carceral and military workers (mostly men), and care workers (mostly women) makes this crystal clear. The climate justice movement needs to center the labor struggle of caretakers if it is to be successful.

and introduce a notion of land and “here” that removes ownership and domination:

Land back would become mandatory, ushering in a different type of development oand reconstruction of our fundamental relationship to land not premised on ownership but on collective well-being. Transforming out relationship with the land would create conditions for caretakers (who aren’t exclusively Indigenous) to inherit the Earth; to work with, take care of, restore, and heal the land as diverse workers whose labor is bound, quite literally, with the land itself.

I leave you to sit with that, and with a photo from yesterday of the what this looks like, brought to you by East African women in my community who decided to take care and hold the sacredness of a forgotten corner lot along my running path.