Demystifying New Age Spiritualism Around Indigenous Practices

A Critique of the Settler Colonial Hijacking of Organizational Spaces

Introduction

“Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.” — Assata Shakur

We write this post as a fact-checking response, not provocation, to statements made by AF3IRM to shield its leadership from valid criticisms by laying false claims that members of our organization are anti-Indigenous.

Let it be known that our organization has members who are Indigenous, including Native Hawaiian, as well as Third World born-and-raised. We also point out that all of the transgender people in or onboarding into AF3IRM and nearly all of the Black or sex trade survivor-members left AF3IRM to join our organization. Unlike AF3IRM, we acknowledge the pitfalls of identity politics. All have signed our initial grievance letter which outlined organizational and ideological criticisms of AF3IRM that led to our split, including our concerns that AF3IRM is mixing business with spirituality and community organizing.

Indigenous and cultural practices are sacred, selling them is not. This was our original message. Any other interpretation is a manipulation.

To label or dismiss us all as “white-passing”, white, or non-Indigenous is wholly inaccurate and anti-Indigenous itself. We defend our observation that the commodification, commercialization, and debasement of the sacred is an emerging phenomenon with the rise of alienation under capitalist systems.

There is power in Indigenous protocol, ceremony, and values. To commercialize and commodify these for capitalist consumption and personal profit is not only unprincipled, it is also how one sells the sacred. It primes AF3IRM members to be consumers of for-profit spirituality and grooms members to become hurt and hostile when criticism of commercialized spirituality is voiced, as we have seen play out. It is here that consumerist self-help ideology is exploited by New Age spiritualism. Furthermore, there is power in respecting each members’ unique relationship with spirituality and setting boundaries with one another as to how we engage in said spiritualities. It is anti-colonial to raise concerns about the sale of the sacred, not “anti-Native” or cultural policing as AF3IRM leadership claims.

As dialectical materialists, we understand that there are never singular or isolated events and our critique was an organizational critique, not a personal. We did not seek to hurt or defame any particular NEC leader and, unlike AF3IRM, we decided to intentionally remove names of individual leaders and refrained from weaponizing our identities against them. Instead, we sought to highlight an organizational failure in adherence to putting principle and member safety first. The publication of our letter on a blog site was a desperate escalation tactic to pressure the management to take its members seriously — it was the only leverage we had after years of harm that AF3IRM leadership let come to a boil. It is ironic and malicious that AF3IRM leadership, which includes professional union organizers, have attempted to portray the public release of our grievance letter as an unethical, unconscionable attack when it merely reflects a common tactic of workers who feel unheard, hopeless and powerless within a top-down and abusive organization.

By grounding our organizational structure in democratic centralism and true transparency, we will also practice self-critique. We recognize that our movement toward shared liberation should be grounded in scientific and material analyses that hold that nothing is above critique. Our members are encouraged to present new ideas and actions that are rooted in Indigenous protocol, holding that we must be able to all have a dialogue about what that could mean for our organization and the masses.

Simultaneously, we maintain that as an organization and in general we have chosen to keep our religions and spiritualities separate from our organizing efforts except for specific place-based struggles necessarily grounded in cultural protocol. Cultural preservation is a core value of our organization that we strive to balance with deep respect for each others’ spiritual practices while refraining from exploiting and appropriating anyone’s culture. We are focused on revolution and liberation first and foremost.

The following sections serve as declarations on our stances as well as further insight into our critiques of AF3IRM’s policies and leadership decisions.

Bourgeois Spiritualism and New Age Spirituality

We must condemn the capitalist and petit-bourgeois commercialization of spiritual practices. In the same way that we aim to de-commodify the lands of Indigenous nations and bodies of exploited women, we aim to fight for the de-commodification of cultural and spiritual practices belonging to the oppressed people around the world. We are materialist, revolutionary communist women and gender oppressed people who derive from nationally oppressed and colonized backgrounds. We all deeply understand the importance of spiritualism in our respective communities and how ancestral practices have been suppressed and weaponized by colonial, imperialist powers.

Defining the Commodification of Indigeneity

There is no central societal structure that can be applied to all Indigenous people. From a historical perspective specific to the United States of America, the treaties the U.S. government imposed on Native people revoked their sovereignty whether they signed and submitted to it or not and thus Native people became one ethnic group in the eyes of the settler colonial state. In the case of those Indigenous Peoples who have had their sovereignty taken without the signing of a treaty (such is the case for the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and the Seminole tribe, for example), the same is true and they are still treated as one ethnic group by the settler state.

We raised concerns about AF3IRM’s gross oversight of a national leader, who is a settler on land that she is not indigenous to, selling “pan-Indigenous” practices to members of the organization, including people outside of her culture. This practice debases the sacred by selling settler spirituality as an Indigenous cultural practice. A leader of an organization whose line is “Land, Bodies, and Culture Not for Sale” cannot ethically engage in the commercialization and appropriation of multiple spiritualities traditionally practiced by people of color.

We also raised concerns about the same leader being allowed to use AF3IRM and its membership as a platform and customer base to advertise and sell these services. Bourgeois new age spirituality has no place in a revolutionary feminist organization.

“Pan-Indigeneity” is a product of liberal identity politics. There is no such thing as “pan-Indigenous” spirituality or an all encompassing “pan-Indigenous” culture. Different Indigenous peoples and Indigenous individuals have different cultural and spiritual practices.  Indigeneity itself should not be weaponized and used as a means of covering up abuse, exploitation, and opportunism. There is often an implication that Indigenous protocols are untouchable and therefore do not have room for self-criticism. It is untrue and racist to posit that Indigenous cultures are perfect and that Indigenous people do not and cannot self-criticize.

For a person to profit off of spiritual practices — especially closed practices — that are not necessarily their own, is inappropriate. Moreover, it is dishonest to conflate the commercialization of settler spirituality with Indigenous protocol and practice. This conflation has been the primary strategy of AF3IRM leadership to try to turn its members against each other and the public against critics. People who are not Indigenous to the land they live upon offering psychic readings with tarot cards marketed specifically to “children of the diaspora and Indigenous folks in occupied homelands” is not analogous to, for example, the important struggles of land justice and Indigenous Sovereignty, like the fight to protect Mauna Kea.

The image below was posted by Af3irm Hawai’i on February 17, 2023, we assume this was in response to our published letter:

Identity Politics As a Determinant of Righteousness, and Selective Application

AF3IRM's reliance on liberal identity politics ultimately upholds anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, transphobia, colorism, and featurism. AF3IRM has no scientific analysis of race, nationality, ethnicity, colorism, nor featurism. This has created inconsistent and even harmful practices across AF3IRM chapters where identity politics can be turned off and on to defend the status quo, relationships amongst leadership, and sorority as needed. As said by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Identity doesn’t transform one into a teacher or one’s opinion into a valuable lesson, just as one’s identity doesn’t negate the capacity to teach or discount an opinion. The idea that someone must shut up and listen to someone else solely based on the body they’re in is absurd.”

Despite AF3IRM's precious rhetoric of centering “women of color,” in practice when trans women or Black women in the organization raised concerns about transphobia and anti-Black iterations and leanings within the organization, concerned members were effectively dismissed or allowed to see themselves out the door. That is a systemic act of violence conducted by the organization’s failure to implement critical racial discussions in favor of a liberal application of race theory and trans affirmative discussions in favor of trans exclusionary theory.

Furthermore, they support and uphold white supremacist ideals, such as implying that everyone in Latin America is Native and Indigenous. As such, anyone who has just one Latino parent (regardless of race) is considered a person of color. Anyone with white parents from other ethnicities, not of Latin origin, would otherwise not be permitted to join AF3IRM.

Because of their poor (or nonexistent) or inconsistent analysis of racialization, this would not only exclude white Jewish women, but women from communities such as the Sámi, who despite being racialized as white, are oppressed and persecuted Indigenous peoples in their homelands. AF3IRM also posits that white women — who are not of Latino origin — cannot join AF3IRM due to "past issues" and the implication that they are inherently antagonistic to women of color. This thinking is not applied universally across chapters. It also ignores the history of how white supremacy functions in Latin America. It is evident that due to many core members with decision-making power over membership themselves being white Latinas, have held onto white Latino supremacist myths about indigeneity similar to how white Americans employ the “my great grandmother was a Native American princess” trope.

It has proven deeply problematic that AF3IRM considers an entire group of women as inherent trouble-makers while ignoring the contradictions between cis women and those who are trans or non-binary. In AF3IRM, trans women and non-binary members are asked to work alongside cis women, who as a social class, pose threats similar to those that white women would pose to women of color. This is especially heinous for AF3IRM given that the organization has members who have been openly transphobic and worked with known transphobes/TERFs.

Moving Forward

In conclusion, our organization's response to AF3IRM's claims of being anti-Indigenous are rooted in our critique of weaponized identity politics, and the commercialization and appropriation of spiritual practices from racialized and colonized people. We recognize the importance of self-criticism and constructive criticism for revolutionary organizations, grounded in scientific and material analyses that hold nothing above critique. We will continue fighting against the commodification of Indigenous practices, rejecting the notion of pan-Indigenous spirituality and condemning the commercialization of settler spirituality as an Indigenous cultural practice. Finally, we will continue to be critical of movements that operate as an advancement of revisionism and liberalism while upholding anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and transphobic practices.

Originally published May 12, 2023