The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth Spiral-Bound | April 20, 2021
The Red Nation
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
When the Red Nation released their call for a Red Deal, it generated coverage in places from Teen Vogue to Jacobin to the New Republic, was endorsed by the DSA, and has galvanized organizing and action.
Now, in response to popular demand, the Red Nation expands their original statement filling in the histories and ideas that formed it and forwarding an even more powerful case for the actions it demands.
One-part visionary platform, one-part practical toolkit, the Red Deal is a platform that encompasses everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. We—Indigenous, Black and people of color, women and trans folks, migrants, and working people—did not create this disaster, but we have inherited it. We have barely a decade to turn back the tide of climate disaster. It is time to reclaim the life and destiny that has been stolen from us and rise up together to confront this challenge and build a world where all life can thrive. Only mass movements can do what the moment demands. Politicians may or may not follow--it is up to them--but we will design, build, and lead this movement with or without them.
The Red Deal is a call for action beyond the scope of the US colonial state. It’s a program for Indigenous liberation, life, and land—an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives. The Red Deal is not a response to the Green New Deal, or a “bargain” with the elite and powerful. It’s a deal with the humble people of the earth; a pact that we shall strive for peace and justice and a declaration that movements for justice must come from below and to the left.
“The Red Deal asserts that the fight for climate justice must center Native people when it comes to the issues that disproportionately impact Native communities, but it also communicates what the Green New Deal does not — namely, that public lands are stolen lands and climate change is significantly caused by just a few industries, which the government has at worst neglected to hold accountable and at best assisted in their efforts to mine the earth for resources in a move that put profits over people.”—Teen Vogue
“The Red Nation has given us The Red Deal, an Indigenous Peoples’ world view and practice that leads to profound changes in existing human relations. Five hundred years of European colonialism, which produced capitalist economic and social relations, has nearly destroyed life itself. Technology can be marshaled to reverse this death march, but it will require a vision for the future and a path to follow to arrive there, and that is what The Red Deal provides.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
"The Red Deal is an incendiary and necessary compilation. With momentum for a Green New Deal mounting, the humble and powerful organizers of The Red Nation remind us that a Green New Deal must also be Red—socialist, committed to class struggle, internationalist in orientation, and opposed to the settler colonial theft of Indigenous lands and resources. Redistribution also requires reparations and land back. The Red Deal is a profound call to action for us all."—Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
“We really need The Red Deal because it forces open a critical conversation on how Land Back can be a platform for mass mobilization and collective struggle. The Red Deal poignantly argues that if we do not foreground decolonization and Indigenous liberation in climate justice strategies such as the Green New Deal, we will reproduce the violence of the original New Deal that dammed life-giving rivers and further dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands. Strategically, The Red Deal shows how, if we understand green infrastructure and economic restructuring as anticolonial struggle, as well as an anticapitalist, we can move from reforms that deny Indigenous jurisdiction towards just coalitions for repossession that radically rethink environmental policy and land protection without sacrificing Indigenous life and relations.”—Shiri Pasternak, author of Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State
“The world system, born in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, is mired in a crisis at once ecological, epidemiological, political, and economic. What is to be done? As this urgent book states, the choice is decolonization or extinction. The Red Deal presents a rousing vision of a shared future of socio-ecological care, rooted in revolutionary Indigenous praxis. A must read.”—Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal
“The Red Deal offers a revolutionary program for global environmental justice informed by the liberation struggles and epistemologies of Indigenous, Black, migrant and working people everywhere. The vision of this manifesto calls for nothing less than a radical transformation of our relationships with each other and the land itself. It is truly inspiring work that we have come to expect from our comrades in The Red Nation.”—Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
“The GND has the potential to connect every social justice struggle — free housing, free health care, free education, green jobs — to climate change. Likewise, The Red Deal places anti-capitalism and decolonization as central to each social justice struggle as well as climate change. The necessity of such a program is grounded in both the history and future of this land, and it entails the radical transformation of all social relations between humans and the earth.”—Jacobin
“The Red Nation also names Black abolitionists as an inspiration for the Red Deal, citing the links between mass incarceration and detentionand climate change. They further note that police departments, prisons, and the U.S. military receive billions of taxpayer dollars annually while doing irreparable harm to Native Americans, Black people, and the Earth."—Essence
"The Democratic Socialists of America is proud to endorse The Red Deal, an indigenous centered set of policy recommendations that was written by The Red Nation.We are also proud to endorse the work of The Red Nation and commit to a long-term partnership with them in the furtherance of decolonizing our society. The Red Nation is a group of radical indigenous people that are fighting back against the US imperialist settler colonialist state. They are not just fighting for land and sovereignty, but for survival….We also look forward to a fruitful and mutually beneficial partnership with The Red Nation in all areas of activism moving forward.”—Democratic Socialists of America
“For the Red Nation, living and being interdependent with Mother Nature is explicitly anti-capitalist. An ethos merely hinted at in the Green New Deal, the Red Deal understands that capitalism fundamentally protects wealth, not life.”—The Politic
"[The Red Nation] make clear that they believe the campaign to halt climate change and repair ecological destruction is bound up with the fate of the world’s Indigenous peoples...Those willing to listen today will gain a lot of insight and inspiration from the radical Indigenous activists showing leadership in this fight to save the Earth."—Climate and Capitalism