Decolonize North America

A Modest Proposal

On October 7, the Palestinian resistance showed that decolonization is not just a metaphor. As Hamas freedom fighters were busy raping their way to justice, North America’s leading intellectual voices were quick to unpack the significance of the day’s mass killings for us. Ameil Joseph, McMaster University: “Post-colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI [equity, diversity and inclusion] workshop.” Jairo Fúnez-Florez, Texas Tech: “Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories.” Najma Sharif, Teen Vogue: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

Inspired by the October 7 example, I propose a practical plan for North American decolonization that goes beyond mere land acknowledgments. As the stirring prose of Tuck & Yang makes clear, “The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence’, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” No more problematic attempts to rescue settler futurity! Let’s follow the lead of great progressive documents like the Communist Manifesto and the Hamas Charter and get to praxis:

1. Halt all immigration to North America. Settler occupation of Indigenous lands only ends when Indigenous peoples reclaim their pre-colonial demographic majority. Any consistent supporter of Indigenous rights must be against non-Indigenous immigration (ie, immigration), whether legal or illegal. As a first step in the decolonization process, the importation of new settlers must stop.

2. Death squads to “encourage” remaining settlers to self-deport. Recent immigrants will be sent back to their home countries. Descendants of earlier immigrants will go to England or Spain or wherever their DNA tests say they belong. Descendants of African slaves will be shipped to Liberia, a country already created for that very purpose. Jews can’t go to Israel, of course, since that would be colonialism. Hamas, the great progressive vanguard movement, will decide their fate.

3. Declare Turtle Island free from the river to the sea. The buffalo will once again roam. Colonial boundaries will disappear. Najma Sharif of Teen Vogue will continue to cheer on Indigenous resistance after self-deporting to her ancestral homeland of Somalia.

Admittedly, the plan lacks the revolutionary simplicity of the Hamas roadmap for a free Palestine (day 1: murder, rape, kidnap; day 2: hope for the best). But it contributes, I hope, to the progressive, post-colonial dream: a world where history is unwritten through blood.