From left and right, those of us wishing to build solidarity face challenges of claims of knowledge. On the left, people routinely use standpoint epistemology and punching-down discourse to suggest that no person who is not a member of a specific identity group can have true knowledge. No non-indigenous person can know indigenous history. No man can have insights about feminism. The only people who can know about gender are those with minority gender identities. Knowledge of race flows in the blood and is embedded in genes, not in a critical understanding of race. And so it goes.
From right-wing troll culture, we learn the refrain “you don’t know me,” whereby people who have been spouting racism announce that if we truly knew them, we would understand that they were not bigots. Disbelieve what Donald Trump does and says; ignore the actions you witness him taking; if you truly knew him, you would know he cares about the environment/women/LatinX people more than anyone else.
“You cannot know things about me without being me” is a master discourse of our present age. And it runs completely contrary to the idea of solidarity. That’s why the privatization of reputation is not a curiosity; it is an existential threat. While it is true that no person can know another’s experience, oppressive or otherwise, completely, it is also true that no solidarity can be built solely from pity. It must be built from mutual recognition and imaginative empathy.
As we face the extinction event our plight converges with more and more kinds of people, not just with people in uncontacted societies in New Guinea, Brazil or India, whose fate is now one with ours as planetary life support systems go into crisis, but with thousands of plant and animal species whose fate converges with ours as our planet burns.
This piece is the first in a series of four that makes its argument using material from my formal education as a doctoral and postdoctoral student, drawing from the early modern Spanish Empire under the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties. This is the empire whose decline and fall directly preceded and gave rise to capitalist modernity. It is my view that, at the end of the Age of Reason, it is useful to look back on the Age of Beauty for hints about how to navigate our present times.
In 1598, the Spanish Empire conquered New Mexico, that arid part of the Great Basin north of the fertile and densely populated region that has been dominated by the Aztec Alliance. This was among the first territories the Spanish tried to rule on the American mainland that had not already been consolidated into a territorial unit by the empires that preceded the Spanish, the Mexica and Inca.
Almost immediately upon conquering the region, the Spanish began to repent of their conquest. There was no pre-existing network of easy-to-traverse canals and roads linking the region to itself or anywhere else. Not only was there precious little irrigation in most of the region, this absence arose from there being little surplus water to irrigate with. The Seven Cities of Cibola and their gold had turned out to be a series of what the Spanish called “pueblos,” villages in which the dwellings, temples, common areas, etc. were integrated into a single large adobe brick structure, adjacent to irrigated fields of maize.
The only wealth in New Mexico came from the pueblos and their inhabitants’ ability to produce a surplus of maize through careful and sophisticated agricultural practices. These surpluses attracted Apache raiders, who both competed with the Spanish in extracting maize from the pueblos, and raided the Spanish themselves. The small and beleaguered population of Santa Fé made its living by heavily taxing the pueblos and using the surplus maize both for food and to supplement the diets of the sheep, goats, horses and beef cattle they raised. Illegal indigenous slaves and salted beef were all the region exported, at a cost in military spending greater than the paltry resources New Mexico delivered.
New Mexico was a backwater, but the Spanish held onto it out of pride. If they left, they would be seen as having been defeated by either the people of the pueblos, the Zuni, the Hopi, etc. or by the Apache raiders. Over time, the Spanish and Apache, the raiders of the pueblos, came to resemble one another increasingly. Raiding and slave capture became the centre of these cultures and the Spanish had to innovate as royal decrees prohibiting indigenous slavery destabilized slave markets to the South.
So, an increasing number of the slaves became genízaros, a Spanish transliteration of a specialized kind of slave taken by the Ottoman Empire. Unlike Ottoman janissaries, genízaros were child slaves who were raised not as soldiers but as herders, a cross between a domestic slave and a field slave, who bunked with the family but spent the day out on the plains herding the domestic animals, the bread and butter of New Mexico.
With an increasing number of their children being stolen, their temples being vandalized, crippling maize tribute and European disease epidemics, the people of the pueblos faced intolerable pressure. When all this combined with a drought in the 1670s, Popé appeared.
Popé was the first of many American Indigenous neo-traditionalist prophets. Just as Europeans borrowed Indigenous ideas and foods, so too did Indigenous peoples. One of the most useful European imports was the idea of an eschaton, a moment at the end of history, when things seem darkest, that God re-enters our cosmos and joins the side of the righteous, meting out justice and cleansing the world. This originally Judean idea fused with various Indigenous ideas of justice, purity and pollution to produce not just Popé’s movement but the cosmology of Wovoka, Paiute creator of the Ghost Dance, Neolin, the prophet who preached for Pontiac’s rebellion and Tenskwatawa, the brother of Tecumseh.
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But these subsequent movements did not just replicate the theological manoeuvre that Popé made to galvanize the people of the pueblos and the genízaros to rise up together and drive out the Spanish conquerors. Their rebellion gave those subsequent movements not their ideology (as far as we know, each time Indigenous neo-traditionalists adopt eschatology, it is based on the Christianity of their day, not the ideas of previous movements) but something far more important: the horse, the single-most powerful material tool Indigenous North Americans have used to challenge European invaders.
As far as we can tell, Popé, like many of his successors, taught that all things the Europeans had brought had polluted the world and that the maize-sustaining rains would only return when they had been utterly destroyed. This meant that the colonists who failed to flee were not captured but killed. European dwellings, clothes, even useful tools like swords were destroyed, buried, discarded.
And this seems to be the case with the invasive species, not just goats, beef cattle and sheep but wheat, grapes and barley. Except the horses. The horses were not killed. They were freed. The later interactions of the Apache and genízaros with those horses would cause one of the major events of ethnogenesis in the Western Hemisphere and produce a whole new people, the Comanche, for whom one’s full humanity could only be achieved on horseback, a people who could ride, train and shoot from a horse better than any European. And like their cousins the Métis, the Plains Cree, the Kickapoo and the Sioux, they would be the ones who would make the last courageous stand against the industrial might of the American and British Empires two centuries later.
In this sense, Popé was a prophet. He and his Puebloan armies released a force into the Americas that would be Indigenous peoples’ best hope of resistance for centuries. This was possible because of those things upon which solidarity rests: mutual recognition and imaginative empathy.
Puebloans had a distinctive social contract, not just unlike the Spanish but unlike the Apaches and genízaros. Except for the temple, all space inside a pueblo was women’s space. Each dwelling was the dwelling of a woman and her children. Men might pass through common space to reach the temple, but over 90% of a pueblo was women’s property; and 100% of private space in a pueblo was this kind of space. Marriage took place not in the temple, where men led rituals to contact the Rain Gods, but by a woman inviting a man into her dwelling, at which time he became her husband. Divorce took place when a man found his shoes had been moved by his wife from inside the dwelling to the common passage outside.
Women ruled the pueblos in the name of the Corn Mothers, and what took place inside was society. Men ruled in two places: priests ruled in the temple and chiefs could lead war parties and hunting parties. Unmarried men had an important role in society. While women and their children worked the fields and made food and clothing from what they raised, young men took on high-risk hunting expeditions to obtain meat, which provided the fat that the Puebloan diet was chronically short of. In this way, a tiny handful of old, powerful men presided in the Temple, but the other men in the pueblo were guests. Most men orbited around the pueblo, sometimes getting to come inside, but often ranging away from civilization for weeks or months on high-risk expeditions.
Just like horses. That’s not how seventeenth-century Spanish people lived, at all. But it was how their horses lived. When the Puebloans looked at the invaders, they, like the invaders, did not experience mutual recognition, but confusion. But when they began being taken as slaves by the invaders, they did experience a mutual recognition, made possible by imaginative empathy and an understanding of their shared plight: they recognized the horses, the invaders’ most valuable slaves, as people like themselves.
Because they were.
You see, equine society comprised mares, their foals and a stallion or two. Younger stallions range in a wide, irregular orbit around horse society as bachelor bands who, from time to time, return seeking mares or to challenge the primary stallion.
Ultimately, the Spanish returned and reconquered New Mexico as a matter of imperial pride. But it was too late. The horses were loose and they changed the world.
The descendants of those horses freed lots of people, some of whom were human, some of whom were not. Hunting down and recapturing or slaughtering those liberators became the job of the British, American, Spanish, French and Mexican armies for the next two hundred years.
Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society speaks of a moment in the 1970s as giving his life purpose: an undeniable sense of mutual recognition with a whale, of shared plight, shared purpose and, most importantly, shared personhood. I know many people experienced this feeling last year, when an orca mother carried her dead child for seventeen days in an act public mourning in the Salish Sea. That recognition is the beginning of the solidarity we must build together.
