Transnational Resistance against Settler Colonialism —Indigenous Peoples’ Struggles for Solidarity with Palestine

Abstract

This paper examines the transnational struggles for solidarity among Indigenous peoples in the United States, African Americans, and people in Palestine, who have all lived through the violence and injustice of settler colonialism and racial capitalism over time. Given current increasing tensions in the Middle East, the paper focuses mainly on the grassroots activism initiated by an Indigenous non-profit organization, The Red Nation (TRN), and its participants’activities through various forms of media, including, for example, their podcasts and a teach-in event. I would argue that the national security policies established by the settler-colonial states represent ongoing political-economic projects to maintain colonialism and racism. Those projects have reproduced fundamental structures of violence and oppression, dehumanizing and criminalizing the Indigenous populations fighting to protect their homelands. As TRN’s activism clearly indicates, Indigenous peoples and their allies, in the present and the past, have developed solidarities in their daily lives, social and civil rights movements, and academic endeavors. By developing a diverse range of dialogues, they have been trying to learn from each other, while sharing the different contexts of stories of resistance. Ultimately, they challenge the historical and structural issues that are intertwined at and across different geographic scales. Their dialogues have represented and conveyed the “intersectionality of struggles,” an important concept articulated by radical feminist scholar Angela Davis.