Woody Guthrie and Left Settler-Colonialism
Woody Guthrie died in late-1967, a few months after I was born. Many people understand him to be one of the great “American” (yes, the quotes are deliberate) folk singers and song-writers, and many of those people are also aware that Guthrie was an avowed socialist and anti-fascist. His guitar famously displayed the regular message, threat, or promise: “This machine kills fascists.” Believe it or not, there was a time when this was not an unusual sentiment, way back in the mid-20th century United States. Let’s not forget that in both the Marvel and DC Comic Book universes, Captain America and Wonder Woman made their respective debuts during World War II as consciously anti-fascist super heroes. But regardless of his clear leftist and anti-fascist politics, Guthrie influenced a lot of artists. Yes, a lot of them were also leftists and anti-fascists: from Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs to Johnny Cash, from Lou Reed to Steve Earle, and from the Clash’s Joe Strummer to Billy Bragg. In Canada, Guthrie influenced Gordon Lightfoot, whose song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” remains a national treasure. But it was Billy Bragg’s collaborative work with Wilco (1998-2000) –– which produced two volumes of tribute (and re-imaginings) to Woody Guthrie’s songs (called Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Volume 2) –– that got me to listen to and appreciate Guthrie’s songs in a way that I likely would not have experienced otherwise. I am, after all, a Gen-X’er, and punk rock and proto-punk/metal crossovers (like Alice Cooper) –– not folk music –– were my teenage lifeblood in the 1980s.
But Guthrie, as great a songwriter, musician, and activist as he was, is also a great example of what is wrong with settler-colonialism. And let’s be clear: not just what’s wrong with Manifest Destiny as a particularly or exclusively American-style of colonialism … but what’s wrong with settler-colonialism as a universal phenomenon. As an aspiration. As a solution to real-world social ills. And indeed, as a concept.
Perhaps more importantly, as someone who considers themself to be firmly within the leftist domain, Woody Guthrie is also an illustrative example of why liberal, social-dem, progressive, leftist, and even avowedly-revolutionary forms of colonialism are just as problematic, if not more dangerous, than what we might call “hawkish” and more overt forms of imperial and colonial hubris and violence.
Let’s take Guthrie’s most well-known song as a case in point. In 1940 he first wrote a draft of the lyrics to “This Land Was Made for You and Me.” Almost everyone of a certain age growing up in both Canada and the United States knows a version of this song, and especially its chorus and refrain: “This land was made for you and me.” The first verse, in particular, ought to be recited in whole:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
Now, of course, if you read or hear this sentiment as text or song, and the sentiment sounds unequivocally wonderful and true to you, or sounds like an unfulfilled aspiration that any good or sane person ought to hold –– then you may indeed share an affinity with Guthrie –– and you may find it difficult to understand those who see this as a problematic expression of settler-colonial ignorance and entitlement, perhaps masquerading as fair-minded egalitarianism.
Who or what is left out of Guthrie’s song? Indigenous peoples, of course, in their diverse and decidedly-plural forms … are left out. Not a homogenous, singular “Indian” colonial fabrication, but a diverse, heterogeneous multitude of nations: Beothuk, Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Mik’maw, Haudenosaunee, Cree, Anishinaabe, Lakota, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Salish, Innu, Inuit, and literally hundreds of others, each worthy of their own history and self-representation, many of whom have been systematically dispossessed, expelled, and/or murdered in the post-Columbus era. When Guthrie sings about “this land” being “made for you and me” is he referring to diverse Indigenous cultures and peoples? Is he justifying their dispossession and (in some very concrete local cases) their ethnic cleansing and genocide?
This is not a problem unique to Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is, by most accounts, a wonderful human –– who aspired to a world of equality and social justice. But there is no one immune or transcendent to their own socialization. Twenty or fifty years from now, if anyone remembers my name, it will no doubt be clear to a new generation that I was a flawed (i.e., normal) human, and probably oblivious to, or at least didn’t take as seriously as I ought to have, a great many domains of social, political, and economic life. The point is not to judge or condemn Guthrie for bad politics. He was, like all of us, a product of his time, and his ideology. The point is to illustrate something significant about colonialism itself. Those who benefit from the institutional, material, and ideological products of colonialism have an extremely difficult time disentangling themselves from the mythological narratives about their own settler-colonial history. I encounter this every single time I teach Canadian colonial and Indigenous histories, and every single time I encounter someone deeply-entrenched in the colonial mythologies of another nation-state.
But before I go on to give examples from other contexts, it might be useful to make clear that this assessment of colonial mythologizing applies to all ideological domains: liberal, conservative, social-dem, radical left, and anarchist. They all share a history of problematic thinking and practice in relation to settler-colonialism. Within anarchism alone, there are countless examples, going back to Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin, which I have written and spoken about before. (See, for example, my presentation at the Canadian Historical Association in Saskatoon in 2008 on precisely this topic.). Rudolf Rocker is another example. In his book Pioneers of American Freedom (1949), German anarchist Rudolf Rocker seemed oblivious to the impact of settler-colonialism upon Indigenous peoples, and stridently argued for open borders in North America regardless of the impact upon Indigenous nations. Rocker’s perspective was arguably indistinguishable from that of Guthrie, in Guthrie’s most famous song. Land was for everyone, obviously. Indigenous self-determination was an obstacle to that aspiration. Only a retrograde capitalist or robber-baron would oppose the idea of a “commons” accessible to all. The fact that this “left” or “progressive” version of politics resembled an imperialist “open door” policy (with its clear history of violence and state terror) was inconvenient … but let’s forget about that, for the moment. If you are not familiar with the term “open door” then look it up in relation to China and western imperialism.
Now, here’s the kicker. Everything I’ve said about colonialism and Manifest Destiny applies equally to Zionism, and the history of settler-colonialism in Palestine. Liberal, social-dem, left, and anarchist versions of Zionism are still thoroughly colonial in the way that Rudolf Rocker’s anarchist framework for understanding North American (and in particular U.S.) history is still thoroughly colonial. This has nothing to do with Jews nor with anti-Semitism. This is about colonialism. It is the nature of the beast to be this way. We do not oppose Zionism because it is framed as “Jewish” (even when it is not), but rather because it is colonial. Similarly, Manifest Destiny is not anathema because it tends to be Christian and European, but because it is colonial through and through. Only a liar or hypocrite would see it as exclusively the former, and remain oblivious to the latter.
But wait, you might be asking yourself, or wittily-declaring: “How can Zionism be colonial in the same way as Manifest Destiny, if Jews are themselves indigenous to Palestine?” Jews are absolutely indigenous to Palestine, but Zionism is not. Like Manifest Destiny, it is an ideology (with a movement or statist expression) not a people. Its origins, as anyone who has studied its 19th-century founders (such as Theodor Herzl, Israel Zangwill, Leon Pinsker, Max Nordau and many others) knows, were thoroughly colonial and European. But like German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, many (not all) of these Jewish Zionists were leftists and revolutionaries, seeking a way to liberate European Jews from European anti-Semitism, pogroms, and second-class citizenship. Settler-colonial visions were often motivated by very real persecution. Tsarist persecution of Doukhobors led Kropotkin to not just propose, but actively facilitate a colonial refuge for Doukhobors in Canada. As Roz Usisken has written about, Jewish immigration to Canada in the late-19th and early 20th centuries was also spurred by waves of Tsarist persecution. Fleeing discrimination, dispossession, and violence has so often been linked to colonizing projects that end up themselves displacing, dispossessing, and discriminating against Indigenous peoples elsewhere … that it should no longer surprise us. Persecution explains some of the motivations behind colonization projects and certainly informs a lot of colonial mythologizing. But it, of course, does not make any of them less colonial. Nor does it tell us what happens on the ground, the real history, the real impact upon Indigenous peoples in these ostensibly “empty lands” (as they are, almost invariably, falsely-represented). Should it surprise us that people fleeing persecution to Canada come to adopt the usual nationalist and colonial mythologies justifying their place on this land, and downplaying, ignoring, or denying the impact on First Nations? Should it surprise us that 150 years later many settler Canadians are still in denial about basic facts? Should it surprise us that Canadians still, periodically, engage in settler violence (both state and non-state actors) against Indigenous peoples?
Settler-colonialism is racist to its core, regardless of where it manifests, and regardless of whether or not many of the “settlers” who form the vanguard of historical or ongoing colonization projects are themselves fleeing persecution. This is what happens when you steal someone else’s land, and then form elaborate mythologies justifying that dispossession (usually, a mixture of mutually-exclusive claims such as the land was an “empty wilderness” or “desert” (terra nullius) awaiting and beseeching colonization, along with a host of claims about “lawful” and “fair” “purchases” of land from otherwise non-existent “natives”). Manifest Destiny and Zionism are replete with such examples and mythologizing, just as Canadian colonial myth-making shares in these fundamental tropes. It is precisely this kind of mythologizing that allows Woody Guthrie to sing “This land is your land, this land is my land,” as if California and the New York islands were indeed empty wilderness, or if not, then fairly acquired. Guthrie’s brand of left-colonialism was no less problematic for its insistence that land should be free and open to all.
The point in all this is not that Woody Guthrie is, or ought to be a write-off. But colonial myth-making comes in many forms, including a progressive, social justice, egalitarian mantle –– one that is often, in the real world, just as violent and vicious in its defence of colonial institutions and privileges as any other form of colonialism. Guthrie, for the most part, did try to defend the underdog. But he shared a fundamentally racist colonial paradigm precisely because of what it left out. Of course all of us, even when we aspire to a better world, are deeply-flawed. We should hope to be so flawed, when others assess our lives at the end of all things: it means nothing more and nothing less than we are human. But we should also strive to disentangle ourselves from settler-colonial and nationalist myth-making and allegiances, wherever those manifest. We are born into, and remain inside such formations at our peril. And the colonized, from Canada to Gaza, pay the lion’s share of the price.
