Decolonizing Anarchism: Dismantling Settler Logics

Introduction

Decolonizing anarchism is not a branding exercise. It is a reckoning. If you organize on stolen land, and you do, then the question is not whether you oppose the state, but whether your opposition quietly rehearses the very logics that built it. Too often anarchist movements imagine themselves as naturally anti colonial simply because they reject hierarchy and capitalism. Yet settler colonialism is not only a hierarchy. It is a structure of feeling, a habit of inhabiting land as if it were empty, transferable, and destined for our projects.

The danger is subtle. You romanticize land as wilderness without acknowledging its caretakers. You borrow Indigenous symbols to thicken your aesthetic. You launch direct actions on territories without consent, telling yourself urgency justifies trespass. You center your own narrative of rebellion and call it solidarity. In each case, the movement that claims to dismantle domination rehearses dispossession.

The stakes are strategic as much as ethical. A movement that cannot confront its own embedded settler logics will fracture, lose legitimacy, and fail to build the kind of sovereignty that outlasts spectacle. The path forward requires more than land acknowledgments. It demands a structural transformation of narrative, resource flows, decision making, and time itself. To decolonize anarchism is to reorganize it around Indigenous sovereignty and land based epistemologies, turning solidarity into material accountability and protest into co created self rule.

The Logics of Settlement Inside Radical Movements

Anarchism prides itself on being rootless in the best sense. No masters. No borders. No gods. Yet on stolen land, rootlessness can morph into something darker. It can mirror the settler fantasy of arrival without responsibility.

Settler colonialism operates through what scholars call the logic of elimination. It seeks to erase Indigenous presence in order to secure land for settlement. This elimination can be violent or bureaucratic, overt or cultural. Movements that fail to notice how this logic saturates everyday life risk reproducing it in miniature.

Romanticization as Erasure

One common error is romanticization. Activists speak of land as sacred, wild, or free. They frame a forest defense as a return to nature, a break from civilization. But whose land is being defended, and whose governance traditions are invoked or ignored?

Romanticization flattens specificity. It treats land as backdrop rather than relation. It replaces living nations with abstract indigeneity. In doing so, it enacts a softer elimination. Indigenous peoples become symbols rather than sovereign political actors.

Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa offers a counter example. The campaign began with a statue but quickly widened into a critique of colonial knowledge systems embedded in universities. It forced institutions to confront not only a symbol but the deeper curriculum of settlement. That is the difference between aesthetic protest and epistemic challenge.

Anarchist Exceptionalism

Another settler reflex is the assumption that anarchism is already decolonial. Because anarchists critique the state, they presume alignment with Indigenous struggles. But the state is only one layer of colonial power. Property regimes, extractive economies, and the normalization of settler presence exceed the state.

When anarchists search for traces of anarchism in Indigenous societies, they often engage in projection. They mine other cultures for confirmation of their own theory. This move recenters the anarchist gaze. It treats Indigenous epistemologies as raw material for radical thought rather than as sovereign frameworks that might unsettle anarchism itself.

The corrective is humility. Instead of asking where anarchism appears in Indigenous traditions, ask how Indigenous resurgence challenges anarchist assumptions about autonomy, territory, and obligation. That shift from extraction to listening marks the first crack in settlement.

The Meeting Room as Micro Colony

Settler logics are not abstract. They inhabit meeting spaces, funding models, and campaign rhythms. Who sets the agenda? Who controls the budget? Who defines urgency? If your collective meets on Indigenous land without protocol, raises funds without redistributing to local nations, and launches actions without consent, you have built a micro colony inside your movement.

A settlement audit exposes these habits. Map your material footprint. Trace where your money flows. Examine whose voices shape strategy. Publish the findings. Visibility is a solvent. It forces a confrontation between intention and impact.

To dismantle settler logics, you must first name them inside your own house. Only then can you redesign the foundation.

From Land Acknowledgment to Material Sovereignty

Land acknowledgments have become ritualized across activist spaces. Spoken at the beginning of meetings, they gesture toward history. But without material consequence, they risk becoming liturgy without sacrament.

The question is not whether to acknowledge land, but how to convert acknowledgment into sovereignty.

Ritual With Teeth

A strategic approach treats every acknowledgment as a transaction. Pair words with resource transfer. Establish an automatic contribution to a land back fund directed by Indigenous leadership. Make the transfer visible to your membership. The ritual then becomes a mechanism for reparative flow, not a performance of virtue.

The Québec casseroles during the 2012 student strikes illustrate how ritual can mobilize dispersed publics. Nightly pot and pan banging transformed households into participants. Imagine similar repetition applied to reparative giving. Regular, rhythmic transfers normalize redistribution. They build muscle memory around sovereignty.

Micro Treaties and Shared Governance

Before launching a campaign, draft a micro treaty with the nations whose territory you occupy. Co write objectives. Define dispute processes. Include a sunset clause that forces renewal. Treat this document not as symbolism but as binding guidance.

This approach reframes activism as negotiation between sovereignties rather than agitation against a monolith. It acknowledges that Indigenous nations are not stakeholders but governments with whom you must coordinate.

Such practice requires patience. Structural crises may tempt you to act unilaterally. Yet urgency without consent replicates settlement. If a pipeline threatens water, ask how your intervention can align with Indigenous protocols rather than bypass them. Consent is not a delay. It is the legal and spiritual force that undermines colonial legitimacy.

Counting Sovereignty, Not Heads

Movements often measure success by turnout or media impressions. A decolonial strategy asks a different question. How much sovereignty was gained?

Did land return to Indigenous stewardship? Did decision making authority shift? Did revenue streams change hands? These metrics discipline your imagination. They force you to see beyond spectacle.

Occupy Wall Street galvanized global attention around inequality but struggled to translate encampment energy into enduring institutions. Its lesson is not failure but incompletion. Without mechanisms to capture and hold sovereignty, even electrifying moments dissipate. Decolonizing anarchism means designing containers that can hold power long enough to transfer it.

Material sovereignty is the bridge between solidarity and transformation. Cross it deliberately.

Embedding Land Based Epistemologies in Movement Strategy

Decolonization is not only about resource redistribution. It is about epistemology. How do you know what you know? Whose cosmology structures your sense of time, urgency, and victory?

Land based epistemologies begin from relation. Land is not property but ancestor, teacher, and law. This orientation disrupts linear progress narratives that dominate activist culture.

Rewriting Movement Time

Many movements operate in bursts. Mobilize. Escalate. Win or fade. This tempo mirrors electoral cycles and media attention spans. Indigenous resurgence often follows a different rhythm. It is cyclical, seasonal, treaty bound.

Adopting a land centered tempo may feel like slowing down. In reality, it is recalibration. Fast protests need slow storylines. Heat the reaction, then cool it into durable institutions. Fuse moments of disruption with long term stewardship.

Consider the Oka Crisis in 1990. A land defense blockade by the Mohawk community at Kanehsatà:ke escalated into a national confrontation. While the standoff was dramatic, its roots lay in generations of territorial defense. The visible crisis sat atop deep continuity. Movements that lack this depth struggle to endure repression.

Centering Indigenous Women’s Leadership

Indigenous women’s literatures and organizing traditions offer more than inspiration. They provide governance models grounded in care, accountability, and relational ethics.

Gendered dimensions of settlement often go unexamined in anarchist spaces. Colonial dispossession targeted women’s authority in many Indigenous societies, replacing it with patriarchal structures aligned with European norms. To decolonize anarchism, you must confront not only race and land but gendered power.

Centering Indigenous women in decision making shifts the architecture of meetings. It alters who speaks first, whose stories frame strategy, whose labor is recognized. This is not token inclusion. It is structural redesign.

Story Architecture: From Hero to Council Fire

Western activism loves the hero narrative. A charismatic leader rises, confronts power, and wins or falls. This script mirrors the frontier myth of lone conquest.

A land based narrative resembles a council fire. Stories circle rather than climb. Protagonists multiply. Land itself becomes a character.

When you tell victories as co created sovereignties rather than anarchist triumphs, you decentralize your movement’s ego. You make it harder for settlement to hide behind radical branding. Narrative is not decoration. It is infrastructure for imagination.

Embedding land based epistemologies requires surrender. You must relinquish the comfort of familiar frames and let other cosmologies reorganize your practice.

Accountability as Strategy, Not Guilt

Many activists fear that centering decolonization will paralyze action. They worry about saying the wrong thing, about being called out, about endless self critique. This anxiety reveals a misunderstanding.

Accountability is not confession. It is strategy.

Public Scoreboards and Transparent Metrics

Publish monthly metrics of resources redirected, meetings held under Indigenous protocol, decisions co authored. Transparency transforms accountability into contagion. Other groups will emulate what they can see and measure.

This approach counters entryism and co optation. When procedures are visible, charismatic gatekeeping weakens. Transparent decision hacks outperform personality cults. Settlement thrives in opacity. Shine light.

Designing for Creative Tension

Disagreement between anarchists and Indigenous nations will arise. Land defense tactics may clash with broader movement goals. Rather than smoothing over tension, design structures to metabolize it.

Include dispute resolution processes in your micro treaties. Schedule periodic reviews. Build in the possibility of withdrawal without stigma. This prevents resentment from festering into rupture.

Repression can act as catalyst if critical mass exists. But internal fragmentation kills momentum faster than police batons. Accountability processes create resilience. They allow you to absorb shock without shattering.

Relinquishing Control as Power

Power recalculates when movements demonstrate the capacity to relinquish control. Hand over agenda setting for certain campaigns. Allow Indigenous partners to veto actions on their territory. Redirect media inquiries to sovereign spokespeople.

Each relinquishment chips away at the settler reflex of ownership. It also builds trust. Trust is not sentimental. It is strategic capital.

The Women’s March in 2017 mobilized massive numbers yet struggled with internal conflicts over leadership and representation. Scale without deep accountability fractures quickly. If you want durability, design for shared authority from the outset.

Accountability is not a brake on radicalism. It is the steering mechanism that keeps you from crashing into the very structures you oppose.

Putting Theory Into Practice

You can begin transforming your movement today. The following steps convert decolonial commitments into operational shifts:

• Conduct a Settlement Audit: Map your meeting spaces, funding sources, imagery, and decision structures. Identify where Indigenous consent, protocol, or redistribution are absent. Publish findings and set timelines for change.

• Create Automatic Redistribution Mechanisms: Pair every land acknowledgment or major fundraiser with a fixed percentage directed to Indigenous led land back or stewardship initiatives. Make transfers transparent and recurring.

• Draft Micro Treaties Before Campaigns: Co author one page agreements with relevant Indigenous nations outlining objectives, consent processes, dispute resolution, and review dates. Treat these as binding documents.

• Shift Narrative Frames: Replace hero centric storytelling with collective, land centered narratives. Highlight sovereignty gained rather than attention captured. Train spokespeople to foreground Indigenous leadership.

• Institute Rotating Agenda Authority: Regularly cede agenda setting and facilitation roles to Indigenous partners or representatives. Embed this rotation in bylaws to prevent drift back to settler default.

Each of these actions is small. Together they alter the chemistry of your movement. They mix voluntarist energy with structural awareness and subjective transformation. They design a chain reaction in which material flows, narrative shifts, and governance reforms reinforce each other.

Conclusion

Decolonizing anarchism is not about moral purification. It is about survival and effectiveness. A movement that ignores the settler logics embedded in its practices will eventually reproduce the very world it seeks to dismantle.

By confronting romanticization, rejecting anarchist exceptionalism, and auditing the micro colonies inside your organizing, you expose the hidden scaffolding of settlement. By converting land acknowledgments into material sovereignty, drafting micro treaties, and counting sovereignty rather than crowds, you redirect energy toward durable transformation. By embedding land based epistemologies and centering Indigenous women’s leadership, you allow other worlds to reorganize your imagination.

The future of protest is not bigger marches. It is deeper sovereignties. It is the courage to relinquish control so that justice can root itself in place. If you truly believe in a world without masters, you must ask whether you are willing to unsettle your own habits of mastery.

What would it mean for your next campaign to leave behind not just a headline, but a tangible increase in Indigenous self rule on the land beneath your feet?