Redistribution of Wealth is a settlers move to occupy the land of natives.

The Occupy movement for many economically marginalized people has been a welcome expression of resistance to the massive disparities in the distribution of wealth; for many Indigenous people, Occupy is another settler re-occupation on stolen land. The rhetoric of the movement relies upon problematic assumptions about social justice and is a prime example of the incommensurability between “re/occupy” and “decolonize” as political agendas. The pursuit of worker rights (and rights to work) and minoritized people’s rights in a settler colonial context can appear to be anti-capitalist, but this pursuit is nonetheless largely pro-colonial. That is, the ideal of “redistribution of wealth” camouflages how much of that wealth is land, Native land. In Occupy, the “99%” is invoked as a deserving supermajority, in contrast to the unearned wealth of the “1%”. It renders Indigenous peoples (a 0.9% ‘super-minority’) completely invisible and absorbed, just an asterisk group to be subsumed into the legion of occupiers. For example, “If U.S. land were divided like U.S. wealth” (figure 1.1) is a popular graphic that was electronically circulated on the Internet in late 2011 in connection with the Occupy movement. The image reveals inherent assumptions about land, including: land is property; land is/belongs to the United States; land should be distributed democratically. The beliefs that land can be owned by people, and that occupation is a right, reflect a profoundly settling, anthropocentric, colonial view of the world. In figure 1.1, the irony of mapping of wealth onto land seems to escape most of those who re-posted the images on their social networking sites and blogs: Land is already wealth; it is already divided; and its distribution is the greatest indicator of racial inequality17. Indeed the current wealth crisis facing the 99% spiraled with the crash in home/land ownership. Land (not money) is actually the basis for U.S. wealth. If we took away land, there would be little wealth left to redistribute. Settler colonization can be visually understood as the unbroken pace of invasion, and settler occupation, into Native lands: the white space in figure 1.2. Decolonization, as a process, would repatriate land to Indigenous peoples, reversing the timeline of these images. As detailed by public intellectuals/bloggers such as Tequila Sovereign (Lenape scholar Joanne Barker), some Occupy sites, including Boston, Denver, Austin, and Albuquerque tried to engage in discussions about the problematic and colonial overtones of occupation (Barker, October 9, 2011). Barker blogs about a firsthand experience in bringing a proposal for a Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples,18 to the General Assembly in Occupy Oakland. The memorandum, signed by Corrina Gould, (Chochenyo Ohlone - the first peoples of Oakland/Ohlone), Barker, and numerous other Indigenous and non-Indigenous activist-scholars, called for the acknowledgement of Oakland as already occupied and on stolen land; of the ongoing defiance by Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and around the globe against imperialism, colonialism, and oppression; the need for genuine and respectful involvement of Indigenous peoples in the Occupy Oakland movement; and the aspiration to “Decolonize Oakland,” rather than re-occupy it. From Barker’s account of the responses from settler individuals to the memorandum, Ultimately, what they [settler participants in Occupy Oakland] were asking is whether or not we were asking them, as non-indigenous people, the impossible? Would their solidarity with us require them to give up their lands, their resources, their ways of life, so that we – who numbered so few, after all – could have more? Could have it all? (Barker, October 30, 2011) These responses, resistances by settler participants to the aspiration of decolonization in Occupy Oakland, illustrate the reluctance of some settlers to engage the prospect of decolonization beyond the metaphorical or figurative level. Further, they reveal the limitations to “solidarity,” without the willingness to acknowledge stolen land and how stolen land benefits settlers. “Genuine solidarity with indigenous peoples,” Barker continues, “assumes a basic understanding of how histories of colonization and imperialism have produced and still produce the legal and economic possibility for Oakland” (ibid., emphasis original). For social justice movements, like Occupy, to truly aspire to decolonization nonmetaphorically, they would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of United States. Decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people. There are important parallels between Occupy/Decolonize and the French/Haitian Revolutions of 1789-1799 and 1791-1804, respectively. Haiti has the dubious distinction of being “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” (Central Intelligence Agency, 2012); yet, it was the richest of France’s colonies until the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolution to ever found a state. This paradox can be explained by what/who counts as whose property. Under French colonialism, Haiti was a worth a fortune in enslaved human beings. From the French slave owners’ perspectives, Haitian independence abolished not slavery, but their property and a source of common-wealth. Unfortunately, history provides us with the exact figures on what their property was worth; in 1825, “France recognized Haitian independence by a treaty requiring Haiti to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs payable in 5 years to compensate absentee slaveowners for their losses” (Schuller, 2007, p.149). The magnitude of these reparations not for slavery, but to former slave owners, plunged Haiti into eternal debt. Occupy draws almost directly from the values of the French Revolution: the Commons, the General Assembly, the natural right to property, and the resistance to the decolonization of Indigenous life/land. In 1789, the French Communes (Commons) declared themselves a National Assembly directly “of the People” (the 99%) against the representative assembly of “the Estates” (the 1%) set up by the ruling elite, and adopted the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. Not unlike the heated discussions at the December 4, 2011 General Assembly of Occupy Oakland that ultimately rejected the proposal to change the name to “Decolonize Oakland”, the 1789 National Assembly debated at great length over the language of emancipation in the Declaration. Ultimately, the Declaration abolished slavery but not property, and effectively stipulated that property trumped emancipation. While rhetorically declaring men as forever free and equal (and thus unenslavable), it assured the (revolutionary) colonial proprietors in the assembly that their chattel would be untouched, stating unequivocally: “The right to property being inviolable and sacred, no one ought to be deprived of it...” (Blackburn, 2006, p. 650). Decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless. It is incommensurable with the redistribution of Native land/life as common-wealth. Our critique of Occupation is not just a critique of rhetoric. The call to “occupy everything” has legitimized a set of practices with problematic relationships to land and to Indigenous sovereignty. Urban homesteading, for example, is the practice of re-settling urban land in the fashion of self-styled pioneers in a mythical frontier. Not surprisingly, urban homesteading can also become a form of playing Indian, invoking Indigeneity as ‘tradition’ and claiming Indian-like spirituality while evading Indigenous sovereignty and the modern presence of actual urban Native peoples. More significant examples are Occupiers’ claims to land and their imposition of Western forms of governance within their tent cities/colonies. Claiming land for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government. Occupation is a move towards innocence that hides behind the numerical superiority of the settler nation, the elision of democracy with justice, and the logic that what became property under the 1% rightfully belongs to the other 99%. In contrast to the settler labor of occupying the commons, homesteading, and possession, some scholars have begun to consider the labor of de-occupation in the undercommons, permanent fugitivity, and dispossession as possibilities for a radical black praxis. Such “a labor that is dedicated to the reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension” (Moten & Harney, 2004, p.110), includes both the refusal of acquiring property and of being Property.