There’s global momentum for ways of life outside colonial extractivism. Try-or-die flips neg because the greater the threat of the status quo, the more pressure there is to join movements for decolonial resistance.

Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite writes, “That moment of utter disaster, the very moment when it seems almost hopeless, too difficult to proceed, you begin to glimpse a kind of radiance on the other end of the maelstrom” (McSweeney n.d.). This capacity to see possibility through the depths of catastrophe and to do so from a place of investment is exquisite and humbling. Estes crafts a similar path through the crisis of settler colonial infrastructure. Estes (2019) writes that “new pipelines are creeping across the continent like a spiderweb, with frightening speed, but in the process, they are also connecting and inciting to action disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed.”

The catastrophe of current times is clear. Across these three entangled stories of expanded reproduction, I have lingered in the violence: the necropolitics of contemporary supply chains, the colonial afterlives of its infrastructures, and the destruction of planetary ecologies that have us hurtling toward apocalypse. But what marks this moment is not just crisis but the movements creating possibility for substantial and sustained transformation. At each of the many sites we have encountered, fierce struggle confronts efforts to expand imperial reproduction. From Amazon workers to the Amazon, from the streets of Montreal to the central plains, these “disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed” are saying no and investing instead in motion's fugitive forms. In their refusal of the status quo, these movements make possible other forms of motion.

Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2014) pursues the concept of refusal in the context of colonial dispossession, suggesting that it is distinct from “resistance” in that it rejects outright the entire paradigm of colonial thought, value, and action. Refusal is the rejection of settler state legitimacy and authority, she argues, and it opens up “a possibility for doing things differently” (7). Tina Campt (2019) also sees refusal as “a rejection of the status quo as livable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation.” For Campt, it is “a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible . . . using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.”

In her engagement with the spatial practice of refusal, Leanne Simpson (2021) tells stories of the beaver. She explores the work of this beautiful creature that blocks some flows, enabling whole new ecologies to flourish. The blockade is a “counter logistical” practice of refusal that exemplifies this perspective of having both disruptive and generative effects. Blockades have long been mobilized against colonial infrastructure to disrupt colonial circulation. At a recent forum with leaders in the “Land Back” movement, Kanahus Manuel, a member of the Secwepemc Women's Warrior Society, explained, “Blockades have been one of our go-tos as Indigenous people when we're talking about direct action” (Yellowhead Institute 2020). Manuel situates the power of the blockade in the context of extractive logistics: “I think about the resources extracted without our consent. It's always about getting these raw resources from Indigenous territories out to the global market.” Manuel further suggests that the blockade isn't only about blocking but about also building. She continues, “The blockade is a place where we as Indigenous people, our sovereignty, our jurisdiction and our territorial authority, confront the assumed colonial authority and jurisdiction. They think they own the land, but we know we own the land, and the blockade is where we meet.” At the same forum, Mollie Wickam, spokesperson for the Gitemd'en clan of the Wet'suwet'en people, spoke to the creative capacity of blockades. “It started as a blockade. We set up a blockade, the RCMP came in and raided, got an injunction against us. But we are still living out on the territory and it's a resurgence that spread from coast to coast.” She continues, “When we shut down the road . . . as soon as Wet'suwe'ten people had control over their territory . . . the waters run clear again, the animals return. And you can actually live as a free person. I don't know how many people have actually experienced what that feels like. We've felt it.”

Manuel contributed to this extraordinary discussion from the front lines of a blockade, in a kind of mobius strip of theory and action. This blockade is one installation of the Tiny House Warriors, a group that Manuel founded. They build very small homes, directly in the pathway of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, strategically placing them next to proposed “man camps” to challenge the rampant violence they concentrate on Indigenous women. The tiny houses are also being equipped with off-grid solar systems. Village sites “operate under the authority of Secwepemc law to reassert collective jurisdiction and title over the whole of our unceded territory” (Tiny House Warriors n.d.).

Dakota scholar Kim Tallbear (2016) has noted the leadership of women and gender nonconforming folx in Indigenous resurgence and theorizes the tight relations of care and courage that fuel its feminism. Winona Laduke and I (2020) have termed this kind of feminist assemblage of systems to sustain decolonial life “alimentary infrastructure.” Alimentary infrastructure is life-giving in its design, finance, and effects—it refuses expanded reproduction and supports the regeneration and becoming of ecologies. Metis scholar Jordan Kinder (2021) describes an enriched sense of “embodied infrastructure” in the work of the Tiny House Warriors. Kinder describes their practice as “a return to harnessing flows in ways that foreground Indigenous epistemologies and ways of being,” one that “disrupts resource logics and their operations.”

Refusal also animates the contemporary abolition movement. In fact, if movements for land back through blockade are about building as much as breaking, we might consider movements for abolition as plotting radical reproduction. Abolition is not simply a resistance to the violence of policing or an effort to reform carceral systems, it is a rejection of the infrastructures of coloniality—the “infrastructures of feeling,” on Gilmore's terms, of white supremacy and the physical infrastructures on which they are built that produce premature death. Dismantling violent infrastructures that terrorize some as a means of protecting the reproduction of others remains a key to abolition precisely because organizations like the RCMP were founded on the protection of primitive accumulation through infrastructure expansion, and this continues to this day. Black Lives Matter–Toronto cofounder Sandy Hudson (2020) provocatively questions, precisely when in the RCMP's history did they depart from their “literal original purpose of terrorizing Black & Indigenous communities?” Abolition demands that reckoning.

At the same time, movement leaders regularly repeat that abolition is about more than dismantling carceral infrastructure; it is about cultivating alternatives. “What if abolition is something that grows?” asks Gumbs (2008) in Critical Resistance's collection Abolition Now! Ruthie Gilmore (2018) insists that “abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. . . . Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” This positive vision of abolition as already here becomes clear in an example that BLM-TO cofounder Janaya Khan offers. In response to a community member's question about existing examples of transformative justice that do not rely on calling police, Khan suggested, “First and foremost, we need to look at models that already exist,” specifically citing the experience of elders (Khan and Newbold 2018). Khan then explains that there is much to learn from the survivance of Black trans sex workers, and their creative work in assembling alternative infrastructures of community safety. Khan explains, “When a client is violent or dangerous, they can't call the cops. Sex work is not decriminalized here. In fact, it's heavily criminalized. And so, Black trans sex workers have invented and implemented safety strategies in order to keep each other safe because it's not an option to call the police.”

Movements that are making and marking our moment are working to build a future from the “fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities” that survive the violence of imperial motions. They are diagnosing the crisis of expanded reproduction—and refusing to seek inclusion on a sinking ship. Instead, they are working—as Octavia Butler encouraged—to shape change. Leanne Simpson (2014: 13) writes that decolonization is something her ancestors “set in motion.” Only in that motion, and in the alimentary infrastructures that support and sustain it, may we move toward the radiance beyond the maelstrom.