Work · Indigenous Philosophies
Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom
Named after a Kanienʼkehá:ka war dance, the book calls for a non-violent but uncompromising “warrior ethic” and a spiritual revolution starting in individuals and communities, and rejects “Aboriginalism”, the integration of Indigenous peoples into the state, for an “anarcho-indigenist” politics.
Introduction
“Wasáse” appeared with Broadview Press in 2005. The title names the Thunder Dance or war dance of the Kanienʼkehá:ka, which Alfred takes as the image of a struggle that is non-violent yet uncompromising. The book calls for an Indigenous “warrior ethic” and a spiritual revolution that begins with the regeneration of individuals and communities. Against “Aboriginalism”, which Alfred describes as a legalistic ideology that integrates Indigenous peoples into the state, it proposes an “anarcho-indigenist” politics: rooted in Indigenous cultures and spirituality, anti-institutional and radically democratic, non-capitalist and non-statist. Glen Coulthard later took from the book its analysis of a colonialism that rules less by open force than through a “fluid confluence of politics, economics, psychology and culture”.
Connections
Builds on
- Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto1999 · Taiaiake Alfred
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