The gravest sin of all the currently existing social movements in the United States is their short memory, and the wages of that sin is the failure of each generation to pass its insights along to the next. Thus we are doomed forever to run in place, to learn again and again nothing but the lessons of the past.
This is true to an even greater extent here than it is in other regions of the world, I’ve gathered. Our Lefts are characterized by radical discontinuities: between the Old Left of the 1930s, the New Left of the 1960s, and the Millennial Left of the 2010s there exist certain fragile threads, but for the most part they are each separated by abysses of silence and oblivion.
In each generation people must learn to ride the bicycle through a community of peers equally inexperienced in pedaling, for we never teach our children and so they’re left to teach one another as they’re learning. Red-diaper babies are by far the exception and not the rule; and anyway, they’re much more likely to inherit their parents’ stupid party dogmas than they are their practical know-how of how to facilitate an assembly, organize a direct action, collectively manage money, or win a faction fight.
The erosion of tradition is our tradition, it seems. Thus Maurice Isserman, one of the DSA ‘olds’ and a veteran of the New Left, writes in his famous history If I Had a Hammer:
I knew that the Old Left had existed an immeasurably long time before, back in the 1930s; terrible things had been done to it, and it had done (or at least believed in) some terrible things itself, then had disappeared. Utterly. Without a trace. The only survivors I knew of were a few relatives in my parents’ generation, wonderful and well-loved people who kept the most recent copy of Political Affairs on a shelf in the bathroom for convenient reading, but who were getting on and were, besides—I thought a little guiltily—irrelevant…[T]he valuable political lessons Communists had learned from their own experiences in the years between the 1930s and the 1950s “came too late to be of use to the generation that had learned them, and too early to be of use to the generation that followed.”
I got it even more bluntly from my comrade Mike Hirsch, a council communist of the same vintage, over coffee near Stuytown some eight years ago. His elderly eyes suddenly lit up with rage as he sputtered, “They abandoned us! Because we weren’t anti-communist, even though we were anti-Stalinists, they didn’t care – Harrington and the old SPA people – they rejected us, instead of teaching us lessons, and so we made all their same stupid fucking mistakes!” Which, I suppose, is why he befriended me: to break the cycle. But not many other DSAers were interested in those old stories. When Hirsch himself passed away in 2021, during COVID, so did all that history – besides the precious fragments that were his gift to those of us among the young lucky enough to count him as a friend.
Yet I would argue that the greater part of the deep lore of what it really means to be engaged in social struggle is contained precisely not in books but in the brains of our movement elders – people we are all too likely to treat with dismissal and contempt instead of the curiosity and enthusiasm they deserve. In fact I would go further: the true Marxism, the true anarchism, the true understanding of Black and Indigenous liberation is never to be found in any book, no matter how sophisticated. It can only be found, I think, in the conversations one has with certain individuals who have lived certain lives and seen or done certain things, individuals who can only be found in places like delis on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or shabby bookstores in Oakland, California or humble schoolhouses in rural Latin America and Southeast Asia. Those people alone – not even so much through what they think or what they say, which may or may not be correct, but through their experiences and their example – are the ones who can teach you how to live the life that will lead you to discover what is to be done in your time to push forward towards radical democracy. For a book is only a snapshot of a moment in time, whereas a revolutionary way of life is always constantly evolving and can only be perceived accurately in motion.
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The Native struggle for liberation in North America is one of the most important social movements on our continent, and has been for hundreds of years. Today, it manifests itself in such magnificent revolts against the powers that be as the Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en anti-pipeline struggles, cultural events such as the production in collaboration with the Osage Nation of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and the rise of the autonomous territories in Mexico under the control of the Zapatistas and other Indigenous groups. But it can be said to have begun centuries ago, from the first resistance to European colonization; and over time it has produced heroic figures as diverse as Tupac Amaru II, the Haudenosaunee Confederation, Sitting Bull, and the armies of Miguel Hidalgo and Emiliano Zapata.
The immediate context for today’s US Native movements, however, is the enormous flowering of Indigenous resistance and cultural production that took place after the Second World War. A Native American Renaissance in literature and art was accompanied by the rise of radical movements, more or less affiliated with the other New Left formations, across almost all the Indigenous nations of North America. The most important political organization that emerged from this conjuncture was the American Indian Movement, whose programme tackled an enormous range of issues from treaty rights long betrayed by the expansionist US empire to the horrifying economic conditions on many reservations to police brutality against Native peoples and more. In many ways things came to a head with the 1973 massacre of AIM-affiliated occupiers at the Pine Ridge Reservation in Wounded Knee, South Dakota – the very same site of a famous massacre of Native people in 1890. The combination of brutal COINTELPRO tactics of state repression and internal errors borne of the Marxist-Leninist ideology of many of the group’s participants led to the fading away of a movement that in many ways opened the door to today’s most advanced struggles for Indigenous liberation.
But what lessons can we learn from people who actually lived that history? I was very lucky, two years ago, to be able to talk to Roberto Mendoza and find out.
I first met Mendoza at the Symbiosis Congress of 2019, the somewhat ill-fated attempt to found the Federation of the same name. I say somewhat, because the Federation – made up of local groups of dual power organizers already building working-class institutions and movements on the local level – did establish itself, after a fashion, as a loose network; but the road was very bumpy due to some clumsy organizing on the part of the organizers, of which I was one. The Congress was saved by the collaboration between the event’s formal organizing team and a number of very generous attendees whose experience and wisdom were key to reconfiguring the schedule and transforming the space into a more open-ended exploration and trust-building exercise between the various highly diverse groups it was trying to herd like cats. Mendoza was one of those amazing people. I distinctly recall the calm conviction with which he first proposed and then facilitated a breakaway meeting for attendees of color – which we called the Global Majority group, owing to its international character and to the fact people of color are in fact a majority and not a minority of the world population. Yet unlike the usual struggle session of mutual recriminations and denunciations that such an identity caucus can sometimes turn into under the influence of recent toxic movement ideas, Mendoza’s meeting was run in an expert and sensitive fashion, allowing everyone to express their grievances in a non-accusatory manner, receiving these in a judgment-free way, and directing the group’s energies towards positive steps we and the Congress as a whole could take to move in a better direction. (I can vividly remember one detail in particular: at Mendoza’s suggestion, we used what he called “an old Native trick” of passing around a talking stick to dictate speaking order, rather than the stack procedure that’s more common nowadays – it worked so well I’ve used it several times since for brainstorming type in-person meetings.) Out of that session would come the Symbiosis Summer program, one of the main Symbiosis-wide collaborations to this day.
Mendoza is a lifelong activist and political organizer with deep roots in the 1960s-70s Native liberation milieu – not only AIM, but many of what were then called the Red Power movements, most notably the daring 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Prison. But this is not the whole scope but merely the beginning of Mendoza’s fascinating experiences. He seems to have met everyone there was to know on the New Left, from Native heroes like Richard Oakes and John Mohawk to libertarian Marxist luminaries like James and Grace Lee Boggs to the social ecologists around Murray Bookchin. His remarkable experiences are difficult to sum up, but overall they form the story of a certain political evolution: Mendoza, realizing from the direct experience of the people around him that Soviet-style dictatorial developmentalism and Maoist guerrilla insurrection simply could not deliver the kind of society that would produce Native liberation, turned on the one hand to an anti-state autonomist politics inspired by various forms of libertarian socialism and on the other hand to a philosophical and cultural mission to transvaluate the values of settler culture, nudging us away from capitalist values and towards values like those of Indigenous cultures. For Mendoza, cultural questions of this sort aren’t just “superstructural” fluff on top of the “real issues” of economics and geopolitics – because, he argues, the kinds of political and economic institutions we make, or are even capable of making, depend upon our adopting certain ways of life, and those ways of life are ultimately governed not only by economic necessity but by the adoption of certain values over others. Hence, there is no getting around the need for a vast cultural transformation alongside the socioeconomic one.
Mendoza speaks in a quiet but surefooted voice, often pausing to make a deeper recollection. He is an enormous repository of stories and insights, as well as a great raconteur – his eyes often sparkle with a hint of mischief. We spoke deep into the night in a beautiful stretch of national park in the Indiana Dunes.
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INTERVIEWER
So I’m here at the Dual Power Gathering with Roberto Mendoza, who is a longtime activist. I know him as part of Symbiosis. And he is, I believe – correct me if I’m wrong – the brains behind the initial idea of the hugely successful Symbiosis Summer program, right Roberto?
MENDOZA
Yeah, it was my idea.
INTERVIEWER
And obviously, it was a team effort. I think I was there in the room when you first suggested it – and it was super cool!
Roberto has a long history with a number of social movements going back to the 60’s and 70s – and he really generously wanted to share it with all of you. So thank you, Roberto, for talking to me.
Just to start, what was your family’s tribal background?
MENDOZA
Well, my mother was Muskogee. My father’s family were from Mexico. My mother had gone to Chilocco Indian boarding school. And then she moved to Tulsa during World War II, to work at the Douglas Aircraft company – because they’re hiring all these ‘Rosie the Riveters’. I think she met him at Cain’s Ballroom, which is a famous dance hall in Tulsa. And then he got her pregnant. Then he went to work up in the beet fields in Minnesota, So she went up there and talked to his mother, who told him, “You have to marry her.” So he did. He was only 19. She was like 20.
Then he got this young white girl pregnant. I think she was like 15 or 16 years old. The girl’s mother told him that If he didn’t marry her, he was going to be charged with statutory rape. So he had to divorce my mother and marry that girl. And they had two children. But they eventually divorced. Eventually he got married four times.
Anyway, I didn’t live with him then. That wasn’t until I was in the Haskell Indian Institute high school, which was like 30 miles from where he lived, in Kansas City, Missouri. I looked him up, and he said I could live with him and his family. He was an alcoholic – not a heavy alcoholic, but enough to cause problems.
INTERVIEWER
What would you say has been the overall arc of your career? How do you get started in activism? And where did it take you?
MENDOZA
Well, I guess I started out being radicalized in San Francisco in 1969.
My girlfriend and I had been living in New York City as filmmakers, and we went to San Francisco to work with the San Francisco Newsreel people – because they were radical filmmakers.1The Newsreel groups were a loosely federated group of filmmaking collectives that emerged in the late 1960s and 70s as part of the New Left. Essentially radical documentarians or journalists, they could be found at most of the major protests of the era (the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the occupation of Columbia University, major conferences of the Students for a Democratic Society and Black Panthers, the guerrilla theater disruption of the Ms. America pageant by feminists, etc) and produced films that explained and supported many direct actions. While many of the individual collectives folded, the network produced two institutions that have lasted to this day: California Newsreel and Third World Newsreel, both of which make and screen radical documentaries. You can see an example of their classic 60s work on YouTube under the titles “Black Panther a.k.a. Off the Pig (Newsreel #19) – Trailer – TWN” (11 August 2017) and “Revolution ’67” (14 July 2008). For a contemporaneous account of Newsreel’s early history (albeit from a dogmatic Maoist perspective), see the UCLA Master’s thesis by William James Nichols, Newsreel: Film and Revolution (1972). –Eds. I remember going to their office in the Mission District, where they were all dressed in green army fatigues.
We were from New York City, so this was new to us. My girlfriend had seen the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party, and when she showed it to me she said, “You know, I really like this program.” And that was the first time I heard about the Black Panthers.
So when we went to the office there, they said: “Well, if you want to join our group, you have to believe in armed struggle.” We knew a little bit about the Panthers and we liked their struggle. So we asked ourselves, do we believe in armed struggle? We saw that the Panthers were armed, as they were trying to protect themselves. So we told them yes! The next day, we went down to the army surplus store, and we got our green army jackets—so we could fit in.
INTERVIEWER
Wow! That’s really intense. So one day you convinced yourself and the next day you’re at the army surplus store.
MENDOZA
Yeah. And then a little later, my girlfriend bought an M1 carbine.
INTERVIEWER
That’s pretty cool.
MENDOZA
Because the Newsreel group, and some of the other people that we knew, would go up to northern Marin County, to a place where we could shoot and do target practice. I remember being there, and there was one guy who had an automatic rifle. And I was a little envious of him, because all we had was an M1 carbine. Then we started interviewing members of the Black Panther Party. We went to the San Francisco State strike that was happening back then. Then we started going to the Black Panther Party’s political education classes.
When we got there, they passed around the Little Red Book, selected writings of Chairman Mao Zedong. They bought them, and then they would sell them to the leftists in the area. We liked what Mao had said about how the Chinese Revolution started. And I learned about them going through the Long March. I really admired Mao Zedong back then. I think they got them directly from China, because they had some people that were in China. Well, not the Black Panthers, but some leftists who brought them over from China.
So yeah, we would talk about revolution. And we had this idea – which was totally unrealistic, looking back on it – that we would have a revolution in five years. Of course we didn’t. Instead, we had Ronald Reagan. We were living in a bubble. And we didn’t quite realize it, you know, as San Francisco was the center of a lot of radical activity back in those days.
And then one of the first things that I got involved in, that was even more radicalizing, was the occupation of Alcatraz Island. I was working at the American Indian Center, just as a janitor. And the people from San Francisco State, who were organizing the occupation, would come to the center and plan what they were going to do. My girlfriend and I had a 16mm camera. I took the camera with me when I joined the group when they first got on a boat and went to occupy the island.
INTERVIEWER
Wow! And can you tell folks who might not be familiar with the history, what the occupation was all about?
MENDOZA
Yeah, it was based on a treaty with a Native tribe – the Lakota, I think – that said any surplus government lands or buildings could be obtained by Native people.2The document Mendoza mentions is the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which was between the US government and several Native groups: three bands of the Lakota, the Yanktonai Dakota, and the Arapaho. These peoples are all considered part of the greater Sioux nation. –Eds. So when they closed down the prison on Alcatraz Island, we thought – well, we could take it over. And we could have a university there. So that’s the idea, was to build a university there.
INTERVIEWER
Of course. I mean, that’s what the treaty says, after all. Why not?
MENDOZA
So we took a boat over there. And then other Native people came in more boats. And then the news people came. And we raised our flag. There wasn’t an American Indian Movement (AIM) back then. But we called ourselves Indians of All Tribes. And I realized later that this was the first Native occupation or political action that attracted international attention. (Before that there were fishing rights struggles, but those are regional, up in the Pacific Northwest.)
I remember there was a Native woman from Paris, France. She was living there and came all the way from Paris to be there. And we went over there with a boat. The leader at the time was a young Mohawk man, called Richard Oakes,3Richard Oaks (1942-1972) was a Mohawk activist whose actions during and after the Alcatraz occupation have made him generally regarded as one of the early major figures of modern Indigenous resistance movements in North America. He helped create one of the first Native American Studies programs and dreamed of creating a “mobile university” for Native students. About a year after the occupation, he was gunned down under suspicious circumstances by a YMCA camp manager. –Eds. who was a very big, kind of a macho guy. And there were other leaders too – but when they got in front of the cameras he would elbow them aside, making sure that his voice was heard.
INTERVIEWER
Not atypical of New Leftists back then.
MENDOZA
Yeah, back then political consciousness wasn’t all that great.
An example was when I was on the island and my half sister came from Oklahoma to stay there. Her father was Native, my father was Chicano. I wasn’t living on that island myself, but I went to visit her. And then when I left, she told me that this Inuit guy from Alaska came to her and said, “How come you’re talking to that Mexican”? She said, “That Mexican happens to be my brother. We have the same mother. And who are you to talk? You’re not even Indian, you’re Eskimo.” Political consciousness was developing slowly back then.
And I had a white girlfriend. I couldn’t bring her over there either. I felt, oh my god, I couldn’t do that. I remember one Native guy who said, “You know, Indian people shouldn’t be going out with white people and shouldn’t be marrying white people, because you know it’s like the birds: the crows don’t date blue jays and have babies with them.” As if somehow we were like different species. Well, that was the level of consciousness that existed back then.
INTERVIEWER
Despite its flaws, do you see a moment like that Alcatraz occupation as being like the germ of later Indigenous rights movements in North America, like the American Indian Movement?
MENDOZA
Yeah. At the time, the American Indian Movement or AIM was being formed in Minneapolis/St. Paul. And they were, like, watching the police. They were inspired of course by the Black Panther Party, which had patrols that would carry their guns and their law books and would confront the police when they were hassling Black people. AIM came later.
But anyway, Richard [Oaks] got kicked out as a leader because of some fight with another (woman) leader. He was asked by the Pit River Indian tribe, which is up in Northern California, to come and help them. Their land had been taken over by Pacific Gas and Electric. And they asked him to come up and help them organize. So a group of us went up there from San Francisco, including my girlfriend, as we had a camera and we were going to do a documentary.
We occupied one of the PG&E camps, which was originally on Pit River tribal land. And the police rousted us all out of bed at four in the morning, I remember shivering because it was cold. And there was another guy who was a white filmmaker. But he had a card that said PRESS. So they left him alone as he was filming it. But me and my girlfriend, we didn’t have that card. So we got arrested, and then we were all taken to jail – but they let us out after a few hours. And we eventually weren’t charged with anything. And then we finished a documentary about that struggle.
Back in San Francisco, I got involved with another Latino group, Los Sieta de la Raza, who were defending some young Salvadorians charged with killing a policeman. They were all going to be charged with murder. It turned out later that one cop had been killed by another cop, when they tried to arrest them. Then they tried to frame them.4For more on this grisly incident, see the anonymous pamphlet Who are Los Siete de la Raza? (1970). It became a major cause on the New Left, attracting the support of the Black Panthers and others. –Eds.
INTERVIEWER
And you think they knew that at the time, and were just framing these guys?
MENDOZA
They probably knew it, and they didn’t want to take responsibility for killing each other.
I remember the Nicaraguan guy who was leading the group, Roger Alvarado.5There isn’t much written information about Roger Alvarado, who seems to have emerged out of the student movement and was a senior in Latin American Studies at San Francisco State in 1968. One amusing anecdote survives: while joining some protests over the price hikes of some vending machines on campus, Alvarado was quoted by an underground newspaper as saying, “I’m totally against it. Food should be for nothing. We should destroy the price rise by any means necessary.” See “Students organizing forces to battle Servomotion soon,” The Daily Gator (3 October 1968). –Eds. He was a very brilliant thinker, and he was always carrying around a notebook taking notes. And I started doing that too, taking notes. I thought that was the thing that leaders did. Later, I found out that he actually was using speed. That’s why he was so energetic. Eventually, his girlfriend got him to stop using speed. And he was a changed person. He was quiet, you know, he was calm, and he wasn’t constantly on the move and doing things and talking and everything. And that kind of taught me a lesson: don’t get your energy or whatever from drugs.
Anyway, one of the things that they did was help organize a plan to get one of the young men to Cuba. They decided to hijack an airliner. I remember them talking about it. They said, “Well, we gotta go talk about getting this guy to Cuba”. And then Roger asked if anybody had some speed. (That’s the first time I heard about him using it. I found out later that he was using it most of the time.) They were doing some good work. They also started a health clinic, and they had some medical students that were with them, to treat people basically. And they somehow got a restaurant in the Mission District, where they were doing a Breakfast for Children program like the Panthers. I remember having to get up at like 5:30. It was hard for me to get up that early, but I did. And I met some really great people. I’ve met one young woman who turned out to be a muralist. And I still know her, you know, since way back.
INTERVIEWER
Old movement people kind of situation.
MENDOZA
But then we were young – and anyway, I really liked her. She was a very attractive young woman.
INTERVIEWER
Actually, where were you and your girlfriend in this picture – like, organizationally? So you moved to SF, you were involved in the occupation, you’re some of these breakfast program type things – but were you guys part of any orgs? Or was it more of like a general Bohemia thing where you’d just go to events, after hearing your friends talk about it? How did that work on a day-to-day kind of basis? Also how’d you pay rent, what were you up to?
MENDOZA
It was easy to pay rent, because the rent was low, for one thing. We all lived in a big three-story house, and my girlfriend and I bought a truck. One of the guys that was in our group, he knew how to steal credit cards somehow. So we went and bought brand new tires for that truck we went up to Pit River in! We used that truck to start a little hauling business, and that’s how we got money. Then we got food stamps. It was relatively easy to survive there, on part-time jobs and food stamps. And some people were on welfare.
One of the women that was in our house there ended up joining the Black Liberation Army. She was white, but she was helping the Black Liberation Army when they robbed a Brinks truck and people got killed.6This robbery has a lot of obscure connections to today’s Left. It’s the robbery that sent Kuwasi Balagoon to jail, for example, where he converted from Leninism to anarchism and wrote the major Black anarchist work A Soldier’s Story (1986). Kathy Boudin, a white woman who also participated in the robbery, was released on parole in 2008 and became a professor of social work at Columbia. Her better-known son, Chesa Boudin, was the ill-fated socialist attorney general in San Francisco whose anti-carceral, anti-Drug War reforms were reversed when he lost a recall vote due to the COVID crime wave. –Eds. So yeah, she spent like 30 years in prison.
INTERVIEWER
Was that the famous chase that ended up leading Assata Shakur to leave the country, if I recall correctly? Or was that another one?
MENDOZA
They might have been involved with that? I don’t remember exactly. But some of my friends also joined the Weather Underground, and I thought about it myself – but I didn’t.
INTERVIEWER
Why didn’t you?
MENDOZA
Well, I was kind of instinctively not wanting to go into armed struggle.
INTERVIEWER
So you convinced yourself of going to war, but you ended up not?
MENDOZA
Yeah, because when before we said we believed in armed struggle, it was kind of abstract. It wasn’t that real.
And I didn’t want to go underground. I remember some of my friends were in the Weather Underground. And I didn’t know until years later that they were in there. They never said they were, before. I was involved with a group that was planning to hijack a plane. My friend ended up being in the Brinks robbery and spent years in prison. I was arrested for occupying a camp in the Pit River struggles. So the military-police complex was always in the background. There was a kind of paranoia in some ways.
INTERVIEWER
Can you explain more about the underground? Because I think that this is going to be something that’s very difficult, certainly for Zoomer/Millennial listeners, but even for a Gen Xer or really anyone who had their formative years after the 80s. You mentioned the underground, and I think that’s something that’s kind of unusual to people when they read it in the literature. Can you say more? Not just about the Weatherpeople, but like the general idea of the underground and not wanting to go down into it, in the context of the 60s and 70s.
MENDOZA
Well, it was the desperation of so many people at that time. They felt that the only way they could overthrow the government was to take up armed struggle, through urban guerrilla warfare. I remember we were reading one of the books by a Brazilian, Carlos Marighella, The Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. We wanted to learn about how to do that. And I remember riding in a car with some friends in San Francisco. They were driving around really fast, tires squealing around the corners. And the driver said, “Oh, well, we’re practicing for urban guerrilla warfare.”
INTERVIEWER
You think they really were – or were they just getting their rocks off drifting?
MENDOZA
Both? Yeah, kind of a show-off – but also, they were thinking they would have to actually try to get away from the cops at some point.
INTERVIEWER
How would one go about going underground?
MENDOZA
Well, you’d have to have a set of people that would help you. In the Weather Underground they had lots of people to help them. I don’t think they ever got caught. They took disguises. They changed their names and everything. And they kind of lived anonymously, not completely underground. I mean, it was possible back then. The police intelligence thing was not as well developed then. Eventually, they turned themselves in.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t have this digital identity that stuck to you, at every checkpoint.
MENDOZA
Yes. They managed to bomb the Pentagon and some other places. They didn’t kill anybody because they weren’t into killing people. They weren’t terrorists in that sense. But, of course, they’re called terrorists.
INTERVIEWER
That’s an interesting point. So how I’ve always wondered: as it escalated, that changed somewhat – with the BLA and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The Weatherpeople seem like they tried to maintain the non-violence thing in a weird way.
MENDOZA
Well, they weren’t so much into non-violence as they weren’t interested in hurting innocent civilians. Just the military and police. And they bombed structures, not people. So that was a difference.
INTERVIEWER
So changing tracks a little bit, I’m curious about you and your girlfriend’s origins as filmmakers. Because it seems like, based on your story, this was the first way that you interacted with radical elements. You got into it and saw the Panther program and stuff like that; there was the other documentary that you mentioned in San Francisco that y’all wanted to make.
Back then, what was the relationship between the literary and artistic scenes, on the one hand, and the radical politics scene on the other? Did you think of yourself as artists, while also thinking about the abstract possibility of armed struggle?
MENDOZA
Well, I learned filmmaking in New York City. That’s where I met my girlfriend, because she was a student also. This guy was teaching filmmaking and I was his assistant. I was homeless, and I needed a job. And he said, “I can pay you $20 a week and feed you, and you can live and sleep in the studio until nine in the morning”. Because that’s when he started his classes. I thought that was a pretty good deal. And it was! I learned how to make films.
Then I teamed up with [my girlfriend] and this young Palestinian guy. He was really smart. And we said, “You know, we can do the same thing this guy is doing, maybe even better.” Because he wasn’t much of a filmmaker. Technically he was good, but he didn’t have any great ideas.
INTERVIEWER
Who were great filmmakers for you back then?
MENDOZA
Oh, well, coming to New York City from Kansas City, Missouri — It was just an amazing place. We could go and see films by Antonioni, Godard, and Truffaut. All of these European filmmakers back in those days. We were just blown away by what they could do. Satyajit Ray, I really liked his first film Pather Panchali.
But anyway, that’s how we learned from them. And we actually worked with physical 16mm film; you actually physically cut and pasted it, you didn’t cut it with a computer like now. I remember, the only thing that seemed political back then was watching the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The cops were beating up people like crazy. And we felt, “Oh, my God, those cops are awful.” But we weren’t really political that much.
When I was in college, I remember meeting some New York Marxist Jewish people for the first time, and they were reading Marx and Lenin. I took a class and the guy who was teaching Marxism was kind of strange, because he had a thick southern accent. But he was talking about the class struggle and all that stuff. I was more interested in Jean Paul Sartre, trying to combine existentialism and Marxism. And I wrote an article about it.
But back in San Francisco, I was with this Latino group. There was a white Cuban guy, but he was racist. He started saying stupid things about Native people. And I told that to my friend, and she said, “I didn’t know he was ever like that.” But he was, at least to me.
And then I fell in love with a young Native woman from Maine and went to live there on her reservation. Then we came back in 1975.
And I met Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. And she was a Marxist. She and I, we started going to AIM meetings. But the chapter was in San Jose. And they were real traditionalists. They were Lakota and they wanted to do ceremonies and stuff like that. We were more into Marxism, and we understood imperialism and capitalism; they didn’t. They were just kind of like rebels, and we were revolutionaries.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of tensions existed between the traditionalists, as you call them, and people who were more Marxist-Leninist in orientation?
MENDOZA
They liked to do some ceremonies. I remember they did some ceremony where I was trying to light the fire or something like that. I couldn’t get it to go! And I heard back that the reason that I couldn’t get the fire going – was because I was a Marxist! [Laughs.] That I wasn’t traditional, and I didn’t believe in the traditional ways.
And it was true to a certain extent. Because where I lived in Oklahoma, all my family were Christians. My grandfather was a Baptist minister. And while the stomp dance was our traditional dance, I didn’t go to stomp dance till I was in my 20s.7Stomp dances are a family of rituals practiced by many of the Native tribes of the southeastern US, including Mendoza’s own Muskogee. They take place seasonally at specified ritual times and on special ceremonial grounds. They tend to involve men and women, older and younger people dancing and singing together in a careful circular choreography. Such rituals remain important to the Native tribes that practice them, as a source of artistic pride and a way of transmitting their language and culture to younger generations. –Eds. Because I asked my mother at the time about the dances. She told me, “The people there, they go there to drink and practice witchcraft.” They must’ve heard that from the white missionaries.
But anyway, Roxanne and I got to know each other. And we said, “Well, why don’t we start our own AIM chapter in San Francisco, instead of just going to San Jose”. And so we did. We were Co-Chairs of San Francisco AIM.
Then when I came back in 1975, she wanted to drop out of AIM and just have a Marxist study group. But I wasn’t too keen on that. I studied Marxism in college, and I had read the key parts of Marx’s Capital. I didn’t get a lot much from it, other than understanding about the class system, surplus value, and how capitalism works. I was more inspired by the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist conception of a People’s War. And I wrote articles against the Vietnam War. I remember I did an art piece comparing Native peoples’ struggles against colonialism and Vietnamese struggles against colonialism.
So I understood imperialism and capitalism. And a lot of the Native people who were in AIM, they came from reservations, where the educational level was pretty bad. So most of them didn’t know anything about capitalism or imperialism and had never read Marx. There was this Native guy who was Lakota, and he didn’t like what we were talking about. So he talked to a bunch of alcoholic Native people who lived on the streets and tried to get him to come there and bully me. But I stood my ground and was very calm, and they realized that, you know what, this guy ain’t bad. I remember once I was attacked by a couple of Native guys, who were jealous of me because I was friendly with one of the women that they liked. But like I said, their political consciousness was fairly low – not only in Native communities, but including the white community too for that matter.
Roxanne’s and my thinking was mainly based on Marxism-Leninism and anti-colonialism. Because all [the movements] we knew that seemed to be successful against fighting capitalism were Marxist-Leninists and socialists around the world, like in Cuba.
INTERVIEWER
This actually makes a really great transition into the next thing that I want to talk about.
You’d mentioned to me before the interview that you wanted to talk about your intellectual journey as a political thinker, alongside the history of your activism. So just to get us started: what was it like, for a person of color of Indigenous background in America in the 1970s? What was Marxism-Leninism to you? What was this high level political consciousness about imperialism that you were talking about, in a nutshell?
MENDOZA
Well I remember writing, reading about neocolonialism. And I think I might have read Open Veins of Latin America –
INTERVIEWER
Galeano8Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) was an Uruguayan poet, journalist, essayist, novelist, and polymath who’s generally considered one of the most important Latin American men of letters and Left intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Open Veins of Latin America, his most famous book, is a major work of history and political economy that refutes most of the then-major US talking points about Latin American development (including the notion, absurd in retrospect, that underdevelopment in the region was primarily due to a lack of sufficient population control) and popularizes the dependency theories of the Latin American Structuralist school of economics, marrying these to a vividly written historical account of US imperialist exploitation and atrocities. A funny story about Galeano and Strange Matters is that Colón, the interviewer, was once commissioned to write a brief obituary of the famous writer for n+1 when he died in 2015. Unfortunately, Colón didn’t feel he could write the obit unless he could assess Open Veins, and he couldn’t assess Open Veins without understanding how development actually worked and whether its arguments held up. Thus, Colón spent the next several years teaching himself developmental economics and economic history, and alas, the obituary was never written. Happily, though, some of the resulting background knowledge made its way into several of his and others’ essays published in the magazine. –Eds. is so good!
MENDOZA
Yeah! And some other leftist writers. And of course, I read some of Marx, and Lenin’s What is to be Done?, and Mao Zedong’s writings. That kind of stuff. And I thought that they were the only real people who could defeat capitalism.
Because I knew by that time that capitalism was no good. And I also understood that colonialism was what took all the land away from our people, my people. Because we originally were living in Georgia and Alabama, and we were ethnically cleansed by Andrew Jackson illegally, because John Marshall of the Supreme Court ruled against it. But Jackson said, “Well, let him enforce it.” And he went ahead and did it. So that just showed me that capitalism in the US government was just not our friend.
And I did a lot of reading, of course, when I had gone to college for a couple of years. But I was also a thinker, you know. And Roxanne was really brilliant, too. She’s really sharp. So we kind of got drawn together. And then we formed our group, but then she wanted to just have a study group of Marxism-Leninism – because she thought that was what we needed to do. And I went to one or two of them, and I told her, I really want to work with the movement anyway. I can’t just be part of a study group. Because it was too academic. It was too abstract. It didn’t seem that Native people were going to relate to it that quickly or easily, or even if they wanted to.
I had thought about joining some communist groups, there was a Chinese group in San Francisco that were communist, and they wanted me to join. And I thought about joining, but then I went to Maine instead, and I tried to start an AIM chapter in the reservation there and also another on the Penobscot reservation. So I was still active in the movement. And my son was born around then.
By that time, people there wanted to go to Wounded Knee. But I didn’t want to leave my wife there, she was just about to give birth! So I told them that I would stay back and organize on the rez, which I did. I did a lot of posters, and then we organized around blocking off the highway that ran through the reservation there. One of the older men, who was like in his 40s, jumped in front of a car and asked them to stop. And they just took off, and he was hanging on to the windshield wipers. And they drove him three or four miles away, and finally let him go. But he could have been killed. (These were Vietnam veterans that did that, and they were full of anger.)
Eventually, I developed an agreement with my wife that we would go back and forth between the reservation and San Francisco. So we went back to San Francisco, and that was one of the happiest periods of my life, because I got paid $1,000 to do a mural on the Native movement that was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And then I had a radio show. And I was an AIM leader in San Francisco. I went to some AIM conferences in New Mexico. So I was doing what I enjoyed most, which is organizing and artistic work. I was happy in that.
But my wife didn’t like it because she didn’t want to go to school. And she just wanted to go back to the rez and be with her family. And so we went back. We were supposed to come back and forth. But then when we got back to the rez, I built a house. And then she changed her mind and didn’t want to go back. That was kind of, like, starting the end of our relationship. We had two more kids. And then after a while I realized, you know, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on this little reservation. It’s so hard to get anything done, a lot of the young people were into drugs and alcohol, there’s infighting, and I was being threatened.
Even after I got divorced, I stayed in Maine because of my kids. I went back to University of Maine; I was offered to go on a Peace Walk in the Soviet Union. It cost $2,000. If I could raise $1000, they would give me the other $1000. I knew some people there. So I raised $1,000 in a week, which surprised me, but it was because I knew some wealthy movement people.
INTERVIEWER
Did you end up going? How was the USSR?
MENDOZA
Well, by that time, I had my doubts about it. We took a train from Moscow to Kiev, in Ukraine. And then we would take a bus to a town, get off, then walk to a town. Then the people in the town would welcome us and treat us like rockstars, because most had never seen Americans. They all wanted to take pictures of us, shake our hands, and practice their English. Then they would show us their schools and their factories. I was in my 40s, and at one factory there was a young, attractive Ukrainian woman who would start flirting with me. And I knew the reason they were friendly with me is because they wanted to be able to leave with me. Maybe I was attractive. I remember thinking, “I’ll probably never see them again.” Which was true, unfortunately.
INTERVIEWER
So I guess my question for you is: in this period, the 70s and 80s, what did you guys in the anti-imperialist Marxist-Leninist movements hope for?
MENDOZA
Revolution.
INTERVIEWER
Okay, but what did that mean, really?
MENDOZA
Taking state power. Like what happened in Cuba, for instance, things like that.
INTERVIEWER
So an armed insurrection, you surround the cities from the countryside, disappear among the people like fishes, blah blah. Then eventually, when you take state power, voila – dictatorship of the proletariat.
MENDOZA
But of course it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Because for one thing, we did not really understand the nature of armed struggle – how taking state power is not the way to have a good society. Because it’s all top-down and hierarchical.
And as time went by, I could see that things were not going well [in the communist world]. I remember talking to some of these people who are in this so-called democratic group. And I remember saying to them, “I’m in the United States, I’m a Native American. And I’m working toward some day that the people in the United States will adopt Native values.” (Way back then, I started thinking about it.) But they were saying things like, well, we should take the best of communism and capitalism and combine them. That’s where they were coming from.
INTERVIEWER
These are the dissidents in the USSR, you mean?
MENDOZA
Yeah. In Russia, and also in the Ukraine.
INTERVIEWER
So even there, people had basically been losing their faith in their own system.
MENDOZA
Yeah, they’d come up to me and want to buy my jeans. So I sold my jeans. I needed the money, and I didn’t need the jeans that much.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned doubts – what kind of doubts have been sitting in your head about these societies that you had looked up to, that had stood up to the imperialist war machine?
MENDOZA
Well, part of it came from reading the largest Native American newspaper back then, called Akwesasne Notes. And they were analyzing not only what was happening in the United States, but also what was happening in countries like Nicaragua.
INTERVIEWER
I’m not familiar with them. Who put that out?
MENDOZA
It was originally a Catholic priest, a white guy, who was the editor. But eventually they got rid of him, and this young guy named John Mohawk took over, who was brilliant. I got to know him. And he was criticizing the Soviet Union, because they were into industrialization and that was destroying the environment there. And that got me to thinking. And then he started talking about how we, as Native people, need to go back to our way of living – but with what he called “appropriate technology.” Like solar power, or things like that. We shouldn’t give up science, but we need to give up industrialization.
INTERVIEWER
What was this person’s name?
MENDOZA
John Mohawk, you can find him on Google, where he has a lot of writings.9John Mohawk (1945-2006) was a polymath of the Seneca tribe in New York. Raised in the rich traditions of oratory and disputation of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, he translated these into a career within the settler world of public intellectualism. A journalist, historian, philosopher, activist, and economic thinker, he not only founded Awkwasasne Notes as Mendoza says – at one point the largest Native publication in the US – but also dedicated his writing and political activity to various lasting causes. For example, his writings on political economy are a unique and prescient mix of something like social-democratic planning and something like ecologically minded degrowth; he demands the retreat of federal and state government so Native tribes can exercise community control over their investment and production decisions, critiques the Marxist obsession with industrialism, and advocates instead for the development of “appropriate technologies” that meet human needs while maintaining a respectful relationship with Nature. Mohawk also helped found or promote institutions such as the Center for Indigenous Studies at SUNY Buffalo, the Indigenous People’s Network, and the Seventh Generation Fund. He even played a crucial role as a peace negotiator in tense standoffs between Indigenous people and governments, both in movement struggles in the US and as a mediator between the Nicaraguan socialist government and the Miskito nation. For an example of his economic thought, see John Mohawk, “Marxism from a Native Perspective” (1981) on the Mike Gouldhawke blog and “Indian Economic Development: An Evolving Concept of Sovereignty,” 39 Buff. L. Rev. 495 (1991).; for a general collection of his essays, see Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader (2010); and for a taste of his oratory, see “John Mohawk – Survive and Thrive | Bioneers” on YouTube (3 December 2013).
INTERVIEWER
Where did he end up?
MENDOZA
He died eventually. I got to know him. Because they asked me to live there with him and work with him – which really, in some ways, I wish I had done. But I had a wife and kid and it just didn’t seem a good place for them.
He’s written quite a bit. He helped lead the Native movement, which is because he really understood The Great Law of Peace and the Iroquois Confederation as a model.10The Haudenosaunee Confederation (known as the Iroquois League in settler literature) was a large polity on the East Coast, an alliance of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations that was arguably the most powerful political entity in North America before the European colonial empires. Remarkably, the Confederation was run as a series of nested direct democracies, not unlike the structures libertarian socialists aspire to create and much like the radically democratic city-states of the Ancient Mediterranean, such as Athens (although it compares significantly favorably to the famous Greek city, in terms of the comparatively greater power of women and smaller role of slavery in Haudenosaunee society). This was by no means a natural or effortless political form: it took a massive reform movement led by the Great Peacemaker Deganawida, his Onondaga-Mohawk follower Hiawatha, and the Mother of Nations Jigonhsasee to transform what had previously been a largely feudal and war-torn political environment into a powerful Confederation united by its constitution, The Great Law of Peace. An excellent introduction to Haudenosaunee political structures can be found in a YouTube video by Historia Civilis, “The Iroquois Confederacy” (20 June 2018). Readers interested in learning about the Confederation in the larger context of Indigenous history should consult the major surveys of the latter subject. Two top-notch examples are The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (2023), a very fine history by the Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk; and Indigenous Continent: The Epic Quest for North America (2022), by the Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen. –Eds. And that’s where I got some ideas about, you know, indigenous ways of living in culture and values.
INTERVIEWER
Could you elaborate a little on that, for those who might not be familiar with the Haudenosaunee people and their laws? What’s The Great Law of Peace, and how did it inspire you? And when you discussed it with Mohawk, how did it mix with your Leninist background – or contrast with it?
MENDOZA
I actually heard about them back in the 60s. And I remember talking to Richard Oakes, who was the leader of the Alcatraz occupation, about the Iroquois Confederacy – because he didn’t really know about it, even though that’s his people! And because I knew about it and talked to him about it, he sort of took me on as a mentor – as, you know, he learned from me but I also learned from him. He respected my intelligence.
I saw that they [the Haudenosaunee] were a very powerful confederacy, made of different tribes, Iroquois, Seneca, Mohawk… I can’t remember all the tribes that were in the Confederation. I also started reading about The Great Law of Peace. John Mohawk talked about that and how it was a step forward in Native thinking, because they got rid of all the intertribal fighting, which is [still] happening among many tribes around the world unfortunately – but it wasn’t mass slaughter, like modern-day warfare. It was more like a counting coup type of thing.
So I started understanding that then. When I met my wife, she came with a group led by a man named Mad Bear Anderson.11Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927-1985) was part of the Tuscarora and was active in the Native freedom movement throughout his life. Long before AIM, in the 1950s, he was already engaging in radical protests against the Haudenosaunee paying federal income tax, fighting annexations of reservation lands by New York state, and leading a secessionist movement by Six Nations Reserve in Canada. In later years, the ones Mendoza is talking about, he became an indispensable resource for Indigenous movements of the New Left period, dispensing historical wisdom of both past social movements and Native history. You can see a video of him speaking at British Pathé, “CANADA: INDIAN SPOKESMAN” (1959). –Eds. He was also from the Confederation, and he was going around all the different reservations, learning about what their dances and songs were and teaching them his dances and songs.
Then I read Black Elk Speaks, where he [Black Elk] talked to John Neihardt about his great vision. That impressed me quite a bit – his concept of what he saw, that our nation was part of a circle of many hoops.12Black Elk (1863-1950), a holy man of the Lakota, spent his life as a prophet on the basis of a vision he had during a severe illness when he was nine years old. Its key moment is described in Black Elk Speaks as follows:
I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. –Eds. So he had a visionary way of looking at not his own people, but how everybody around the world could actually live together in peace. And that impressed me.
I also read a book by John Fire Lame Deer.13John Fire Lame Deer (1903-1976) was a Lakota holy man who also participated in AIM’s activities in the 1960s. –Eds. And I liked what he said about spirituality. Because he said, “We don’t talk about Grandfather, we talk about the Great Mystery.” Because we don’t know how this Earth was created. It’s all a Great Mystery. The spirit is not so much Grandfather or the Great Spirit, the Lakota actually call it the Wakan Tanka or the Great Mystery. And I liked that concept, because it’s right in line with Albert Einstein, who said, we don’t know how this universe was formed. It’s a great mystery. He didn’t say the very word. But basically, he said the same thing. Because I was into learning about relativity and string theory and things like that.
In the 80s, I met James and Grace Lee Boggs from Detroit. Grace, she told me to come visit them and I did – and she asked me to come to their cadre school, and I did. Then I became a fellow traveler. I helped them get started with the idea of Detroit Summer. It wasn’t completely my idea, but I said to myself: why don’t we do something similar to Mississippi Summer? I said, why don’t we ask people from around the country, all around the universities and high schools, young people, to come to Detroit and help the people in Detroit who are struggling?
INTERVIEWER
So you were drawing on a history of the Black freedom movement, and trying to replicate it again.
MENDOZA
Yeah. So I thought of that, and I wrote an article about it, and I presented the idea to them, and they said – “Okay, yeah, let’s do it.”
It was great. The only thing that bothered me was that they gave me no credit. When she [Grace Lee Boggs] wrote her autobiography, she didn’t mention my name at all. I understood it in a way because it would seem…on a political level, it would seem kind of strange, that this Native guy came up with these ideas. He didn’t live in Detroit. He wasn’t black. And it was kind of like, they didn’t want to disturb that conception. So she said, Jimmy and I came up with the idea of Detroit Summer. And of course, we had been talking about what to do with young people. But they hadn’t developed it into a structure or concept yet. When I presented the idea about doing it, like Mississippi Summer, that congealed the conception. And then, since I was in the leadership of the Greens, I had to convince the Greens to fund the first year. And we could barely afford it, but we did, because I said this is really important. And that was not mentioned either: the Greens got no credit either. Because if they hadn’t given that money to pay for the first year, it probably wouldn’t have happened.
So that’s the way things were then.
INTERVIEWER
This is so fascinating, because it feels like you were moving through all these different movements spaces that are so iconic to us – I mean, as history, right? People in my generation, we read about things like AIM; or you know, the Boggses and their libertarian Marxism, before they broke with CLR James or whatever; or about the people visiting the USSR in its decline and had meetings with dissidents; and for us, this was all history.
But very often it was a history that didn’t exist in books – you had to get it from someone. And that became harder with the years. The USSR doesn’t exist anymore; a lot of these folks have passed.
So here you are: you’re doing libertarian Marxism with the Boggs, in a way, although they don’t give you credit for your idea; you’re reading all this very heady stuff from Indigenous sources, which I presume is kind of coming out of your work with AIM and stuff like that; but you also had this very deep immersion – you know, with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and all those other folks – in like, old school, classical Marxism-Leninism of the 60s.
My question for you is: how was all this stuff mixing together for you, in this period? Did it feel like there was a change happening within you? And if so, a change moving towards what?
MENDOZA
Yeah, there was. It’s slow and it would go forward, then backwards. But it got clear to me – also with the help of John Mohawk, and his ideas, and his writings. And then a spark came.
Because then I read this speech by Martin Luther King, called “Beyond Vietnam.” And in that speech he said, “We, as a nation, must undergo a radical revolution of values.” And I started considering values – because I had been talking about Native values even before that. I thought he didn’t get a chance to really write on that in more detail, because he was assassinated a year later. And I think one of the reasons he was killed was because he was turning away from capitalist values.
I’d been reading about Native values all along. And I decided, well, I need to make clear about what Native values are. And then I’ve got to make clear what capitalist values are. So I developed a side-by-side chart, comparing capitalist values vs Indigenous values.
For instance, capitalist values of individualism vs. native values of community; capitalist values of competition vs. native values of cooperation – and down the line.
I took that seminar to Oakland, Berkeley, Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Lincoln, Nebraska, Detroit, Michigan, and here [the Dual Power Conference]. Things became clear to me when I started thinking about values: that Marxist values, to a certain extent, were very similar to Capitalist values. They had three values that were very similar to capitalist values. One, is that they both like industrialization. Another, is they both like top-down, hierarchical governing systems. And they both were materialists, believing that all happiness came from material goods. I saw that the weakness of Marxism-Leninism is that they shared these values with capitalism. And that’s why they could never really succeed.
So the task I took onto myself was to create this seminar, so that people could see clearly what capitalist values are and what indigenous values are, which could present them with a clear choice. You know, people need a choice, and they need to know that they were caught – their minds have been colonized – by capitalist values. Including myself! I was raised under capitalist values, everybody was in this country.
I realized that we had to decolonize our thinking from capitalist values, and that values were like the foundation of a house. You know, they underlie everything we do. Everything we would do in our life is based on our values – not just our culture, as cultures are different everywhere. But values are more universal. And most Indigenous people around the world lived under Indigenous values, including white folks – because before the Roman Empire and Christians colonized Europeans, before that they were traditional, they were pagans, they were Earth-centered, and they shared similar values around living in harmony with the earth as we did. Same thing with traditional African tribal people: their values are very similar, because they’re basically Earth-based. That’s the key point – whereas Christianity is sky gods, and an afterlife that’s supposed to be better than current life. That’s why a lot of fundamentalist Christians, they don’t care that global warming is happening, because it all will end when they’re lifted up into the Rapture.
INTERVIEWER
[sighs] The Rapture.MENDOZA
Yeah – so they don’t have to worry about this, it’s all unreal.
INTERVIEWER
So as we approach the 21st century in our story, let’s change tack a bit.
It does seem, by my estimate anyway, like ecological consciousness only really begins to emerge in social movements – and feel free to tell me if I’m wrong, because you were there! – in, like, the 90s or so. Obviously there’s predecessors going back at least to the 70s, if not further – environmentalism, Earth Day, conservationism, whatever. But around the end of the century you get this big explosion of, like, “Oh my God, the ecological crisis is actually threatening civilization!” that starts kind of penetrating more people’s consciousness around then.
How did your ecological consciousness develop? I mean, you started talking about it through the lens of Indigenous values; but how did you tie that into the scientific discourses around things like climate change, environmental degradation, or things like that?
MENDOZA
Well, I started reading about that 10, 15, maybe even 20 years ago. I remember reading a book called The Great Turning, because I was at a conference and I met the guy who wrote that, David Korten.14Interestingly, Korten is also the founder of the Positive Futures Network, the nonprofit which puts out the magazine YES!. His idea of a Great Turning has also been taken up in the work of the poet and deep ecologist Joanna Macy. –Eds. He presented an extremely cogent and clear explanation of climate destruction and how that it’s going to destroy so-called civilization. He argued that we needed to have what he called the Great Turning.
And then I read some other people, too, like Richard Heinberg. I wrote some articles about them. By that time I’d been in the Bioregional movement, and then I was in the Greens, and then I was in the Left Greens – Murray Bookchin was the guru of the Left Greens. But back then, I hadn’t read a lot of his stuff. In person, he just seemed to be this crotchety old guy complaining about the Earth Firsters because he didn’t like the way they were doing things.
INTERVIEWER
What did you think of Murray?
MENDOZA
That was just my first impression, because I didn’t actually read a lot of his stuff back then. But once I started getting involved with Symbiosis people, then I started reading more of him. I really liked the fact that he got Abdullah Öcalan, who led the PKK in Kurdistan, to move away from Marxist-Leninist thinking. Bookchin’s writings convinced him to move away from Marxism, into what he called democratic confederalism, which was a variation of what Murray Bookchin was talking about.
And [Öcalan] wrote some great books about civilization. And I highly recommend those two Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization books that he wrote: Civilization: The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings and Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings. Because they come from a way of thinking that’s not Western European, but reflects the indigenous thinking of Kurdish people, who were indigenous to where they lived. And that’s what influenced him to accept Murray’s ideas, because he realized, like myself and a lot of other people, that Marxist-Leninism was wasn’t working. And it didn’t fit in with the values of his own people.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see some of yourself in a figure like Öcalan, like a ’70s ML who then kind of moves away from it because of all those flaws in that model, towards a more libertarian socialist position?
MENDOZA
Yeah. Even though I don’t really think it’s libertarian socialist. That’s kind of like a DSA label. I like the description that Bookchin came up with, which was communalism.
INTERVIEWER
Hmm, what attracts you to that label?
MENDOZA
He started out as a Marxist-Leninist when he was very young, and then he got into anarchism. But what he didn’t care for about anarchism was that it was too individualistic. Because the people were talking about freedom from the state and from society, but it was mainly talking about how individuals could be free. So you know, that kind of movement influenced the back-to-the-landers, for instance. They would go back to the land, and then work on a farm somewhere all by themselves, and when it got really hard, they quit. And they came back to the city.
He said, “We got to do more than just go off by ourselves, you know. And to change ourselves, we have to change society.” And that attracted me because I’ve always been in the movement. And I realized, too, that I wasn’t into just individual freedom. That was a carryover from capitalism, because capitalism loves individualism.
So he no longer talked about being an anarchist in that sense. He started developing the ideas around communalism. He respected and understood a lot about Indigenous people and their values. And basically, I was attracted to Symbiosis because I saw that their values were hardly different from Indigenous values.
INTERVIEWER
Symbiosis is a good note to to end on, I think, because I suppose that by the time that you joined up with them, you’d have seen, I mean, basically my generation pop up, after Occupy Wall Street, the 2008 Crash and then later, the Trump election, DAPL, and Black Lives Matter.
What was it like for you—with decades of organizing experience under your belt, this intellectual journey from Marxist-Leninism to Indigenous thought, communalism, radical democracy—what was it like for you seeing that new movement emerge and working in these kinds of intergenerational movement environments? How was it like watching us fumble around, you know, stupidly, after you had gone through all this stuff for decades?
MENDOZA
Well, you’re not stupid. That’s obvious. We may have been ignorant. I was ignorant of certain things. Your generation is ignorant of certain things, but that’s not stupidity. There’s a difference. There were some things that I thought were like a mistake, especially in the early parts of the Sunrise Movement. They started saying things like, “Oh, it’s those Boomers that caused all this, and we have to clean up after them.” And to me as a so-called Boomer, even though I was actually before the Boomers, that didn’t make sense. It was just as bad as in the 60s, when people were saying, “Don’t trust anybody over 30.”
So you gotta have the generations together in order to make a revolution. You can’t do it just by young people, or just by older folks. The power of the new movements is that, hopefully, it will be intergenerational. And that it will be listening, learning from the mistakes of the elders. And the elders will pass on what they’ve learned from those mistakes, too. Like, that’s what I’m trying to do.
INTERVIEWER
Yeah. And I guess, very last question. It’s actually kind of a mix of questions in the spirit of what you just said. What do you like about what you see among younger activists? What would you critique? Of all the things that you have to communicate, what would be the most important thing that you could communicate to us, based on your decades of experience?
MENDOZA
We have to answer Martin Luther King’s call for a radical revolution of values. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I like that the movement is becoming more intersectional and that it’s starting to respect the knowledge of Indigenous people, instead of just ignoring us like they mostly did in the 60s, or idolizing us as Noble Savages or putting us on a pedestal. That didn’t help either. I’m liking the idea that your generation is facing the reality that this country was based on extraordinarily bad things like colonialism, genocide and slavery. Some of the worst things that possibly can happen in the world were happening here, and they created this country and did those murderous genocidal things to black people and to my people.
But one thing I didn’t mention is that I’m also involved with a peer counseling group. And that helped me because I had been carrying around an enormous amount of anger, pain, rejection, shame, and humiliation from being a native person living in a capitalist society. And I was able to let go of a lot of that, which, if I hadn’t done that, I would never be able to work with white people. And that’s why a lot of native people and black people and other people of color find it difficult to work with white people, because they still carry around all that hurt and trauma from the racist society.
And also with the help of thinkers like Abdullah Öcalan, Black Elk, I can see that we’re all one people—we’re all part of one circle of humanity—and that our values as Indigenous peoples were shared by other people all over the world before colonialism, Christianity, and the Roman Empire. I realized that all people, at one point in their history, were not so much tribal, but indigenous, and had indigenous, earth-centered values.
A lot of young white folks see that we got to get rid of white supremacy, because it’s the source of so many awful things that have happened here and around the world. And I respect that they’re seeing that more. Some of the mistakes that I see are that some of them are still blaming older people, and I’m an older person. But ordinary elders don’t make those policy decisions.
And then there’s also the saying that all of humanity is responsible for climate change and for all environmental destruction. But that’s not true, either. It’s only the rich billionaires who make the laws and rules and policies and actions that create all this. And you can’t blame a poor person in Africa, even though they’ll say that he’s part of humanity, and therefore he shares the shame of what has happened to the earth. That’s just not true.
INTERVIEWER
In terms of the revolution in values, why is that so important to you to communicate to us?
MENDOZA
Because values are like the foundation of a house. If they’re not strong, the house will fall down. They are the basis of everything we do, and the way we think and the way we act. And we have to realize that we’ve been colonized by capitalist values, and we carry them around unconsciously. And if we don’t understand what they are and get rid of them, we’ll keep acting on them. And those values can distort and destroy our movements—especially individualism. Therefore we have to really decolonize our thinking, starting with our values. We have to go to the root. That’s what radicals are supposed to do. Radical means to go to the root.
INTERVIEWER
Well, I think that’s a brilliant note to end on. Thank you for talking to me. ~
