The Red Nation. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Common Notions, 2021.
Indigenous, racialized, and queer people have experienced the menace of extermination and have been able to resist it, and as a result, these groups share a knowledge that is increasingly important if humanity expects to survive in the face of climate disaster. As The Red Nation says in the introduction to the book The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions 2021), “[t]he path forward is simple: it’s decolonization or extinction.” Under this disjunctive, The Red Nation proposes a series of actions to resume with one primary objective: to restore our relationship to land, which begins with giving it back to the people who have known how to live in a balanced way.
The Red Deal is a manifesto. It is not only a theoretical reflection on the planet, but a recognition of a pressing exigency for acting if we want to secure a space to live. The book is organized into different sections and focuses on three main parts: “Divest: End the Occupation,” “Heal Our Bodies: Reinvest in Our Common Humanity,” and “Heal Our Planet: Reinvest in Our Common Future.” First, for The Red Nation, it is essential to remember that colonization is not a “thing of the past. It is what shapes our present.” As long as colonization is the system in which states relate to land, it will be impossible to stop the track to human extinction; that is why it is necessary to return the land to indigenous peoples because they can help us to restore the balance that capitalism disturbed.
Besides having access to land, bodies must be healed through the acknowledgment of the importance of learning from the natural world. Humans have been on Earth less time than all the other species, so we must learn how to live as a community from how animals, plants, and the natural world keep alive. Restoring the bond with our natural relatives would leads to the possibility of living well. To achieve that goal, we need to learn how to take care of our planet, and the knowledge for doing that is in the natural world itself, where it is possible to find the infrastructures that guarantee the subsistence of people, animals, plants, and land.
The Red Deal aims to motivate people to act if they want to stop extinction of life (mainly human life). It is not enough to change consumption habits; people must take actions that change the system that has created the current crisis.
Review by Mario Henao
