Woody Guthrie and Left Settler-Colonialism<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Woody Guthrie died in late-1967, a few months after I was born. Many people understand him to be one of the great \u201cAmerican\u201d (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: \u201cThis machine kills fascists.\u201d Believe it or not, there was a time when this was not an unusual sentiment, way back in the mid-20th<\/sup> century United States. Let\u2019s 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\u2019s Joe Strummer to Billy Bragg. In Canada, Guthrie influenced Gordon Lightfoot, whose song \u201cThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald\u201d remains a national treasure. But it was Billy Bragg\u2019s collaborative work with Wilco (1998-2000) \u2013\u2013 which produced two volumes of tribute (and re-imaginings) to Woody Guthrie\u2019s songs (called Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Volume 2) \u2013\u2013 that got me to listen to and appreciate Guthrie\u2019s songs in a way that I likely would not have experienced otherwise. I am, after all, a Gen-X\u2019er, and punk rock and proto-punk\/metal crossovers (like Alice Cooper) \u2013\u2013 not folk music \u2013\u2013 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\u2019s be clear: not just what\u2019s wrong with Manifest Destiny as a particularly or exclusively American-style of colonialism \u2026 but what\u2019s wrong with settler-colonialism as a universal phenomenon. As an aspiration. As a solution to real-world social ills. And indeed, as a concept. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201chawkish\u201d and more overt forms of imperial and colonial hubris and violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s take Guthrie\u2019s most well-known song as a case in point. In 1940 he first wrote a draft of the lyrics to \u201cThis Land Was Made for You and Me.\u201d 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: \u201cThis land was made for you and me.\u201d The first verse, in particular, ought to be recited in whole: From California to the New York island<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013\u2013 then you may indeed share an affinity with Guthrie \u2013\u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who or what is left out of Guthrie\u2019s song? Indigenous peoples, of course, in their diverse and decidedly-plural forms \u2026 are left out. Not a homogenous, singular \u201cIndian\u201d colonial fabrication, but a diverse, heterogeneous multitude of nations: Beothuk, Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Mik\u2019maw, 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 \u201cthis land\u201d being \u201cmade for you and me\u201d 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? <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a problem unique to Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is, by most accounts, a wonderful human \u2013\u2013 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s perspective was arguably indistinguishable from that of Guthrie, in Guthrie\u2019s 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 \u201ccommons\u201d accessible to all. The fact that this \u201cleft\u201d or \u201cprogressive\u201d version of politics resembled an imperialist \u201copen door\u201d policy (with its clear history of violence and state terror) was inconvenient \u2026 but let\u2019s forget about that, for the moment. If you are not familiar with the term \u201copen door\u201d then look it up in relation to China and western imperialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, here\u2019s the kicker.\u00a0\u00a0Everything I\u2019ve said about colonialism and Manifest Destiny applies equally to Zionism, and the history of settler-colonialism in Palestine.\u00a0\u00a0Liberal, social-dem, left, and anarchist versions of Zionism are still thoroughly colonial in the way that Rudolf Rocker\u2019s anarchist framework for understanding North American (and in particular U.S.) history is still thoroughly colonial.\u00a0\u00a0This has nothing to do with Jews nor with anti-Semitism.\u00a0\u00a0This is about colonialism.\u00a0\u00a0It is the nature of the beast to be this way.\u00a0\u00a0We do not oppose Zionism because it is framed as \u201cJewish\u201d (even when it is not), but rather because it is colonial.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Similarly, Manifest Destiny is not anathema because it tends to be Christian and European, but because it is colonial through and through.\u00a0\u00a0Only a liar or hypocrite would see it as exclusively the former, and remain oblivious to the latter.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cAmerican\u201d (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: \u201cThis machine kills fascists.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Joe Strummer to Billy Bragg. In Canada, Guthrie influenced Gordon Lightfoot, whose song \u201cThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald\u201d remains a national treasure. But it was Billy Bragg\u2019s collaborative work with Wilco (1998-2000) \u2013\u2013 which produced two volumes of tribute (and re-imaginings) to Woody […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[33,48,24,23],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political-writings","category-short-rants","tag-canadian-history","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-settler-colonialism","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcatredriver.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This land is your land, this land is my land<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The point in all this is not that Woody Guthrie is, or ought to be a write-off.\u00a0\u00a0But colonial myth-making comes in many forms, including a progressive, social justice, egalitarian mantle \u2013\u2013\u00a0one 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.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"