Author(s): The Red Nation

Politics | Ethnicity, Race and Identity | North America | Climate Change and Enviromental Politics

A powerful guide to indigenous liberation and the fight to save the planet. The Red Deal is a political program for the liberation that emerges from the oldest class struggle in the Americas-the fight by Native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. As the Red Nation proclaims, it is time to reclaim the life and future that has been stolen, come together to confront climate disaster, and build a world where all life can thrive. One-part visionary platform, one-part practical toolkit, The Red Deal is a call to action for everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. Offering a profound vision for a decolonized society, The Red Deal is not simply a response to the Green New Deal, or a "bargain" with the elite and powerful. It is a deal with the humble people of the Earth; an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives; and a pact with movements for liberation, life, and land for a new world of peace and justice that must come from below and to the left.

The Red Nation is dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism and centers Native political agendas and struggles through direct action, advocacy, and education. 

Review:

"The Red Deal asserts that the fight for climate justice must center Native people when it comes to the issues that disproportionately impact Native communities, but it also communicates what the Green New Deal does not - namely, that public lands are stolen lands and climate change is significantly caused by just a few industries, which the government has at worst neglected to hold accountable and at best assisted in their efforts to mine the earth for resources in a move that put profits over people."-Teen Vogue

"The Red Nation has given us The Red Deal, an Indigenous Peoples' world view and practice that leads to profound changes in existing human relations. Five hundred years of European colonialism, which produced capitalist economic and social relations, has nearly destroyed life itself. Technology can be marshaled to reverse this death march, but it will require a vision for the future and a path to follow to arrive there, and that is what The Red Deal provides."-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

"The Red Deal is an incendiary and necessary compilation. With momentum for a Green New Deal mounting, the humble and powerful organizers of The Red Nation remind us that a Green New Deal must also be Red-socialist, committed to class struggle, internationalist in orientation, and opposed to the settler colonial theft of Indigenous lands and resources. Redistribution also requires reparations and land back. The Red Deal is a profound call to action for us all."-Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

"We really need The Red Deal because it forces open a critical conversation on how Land Back can be a platform for mass mobilization and collective struggle. The Red Deal poignantly argues that if we do not foreground decolonization and Indigenous liberation in climate justice strategies such as the Green New Deal, we will reproduce the violence of the original New Deal that dammed life-giving rivers and further dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands. Strategically, The Red Deal shows how, if we understand green infrastructure and economic restructuring as anticolonial struggle, as well as an anticapitalist, we can move from reforms that deny Indigenous jurisdiction towards just coalitions for repossession that radically rethink environmental policy and land protection without sacrificing Indigenous life and relations."-Shiri Pasternak, author of Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State

"The world system, born in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, is mired in a crisis at once ecological, epidemiological, political, and economic. What is to be done? As this urgent book states, the choice is decolonization or extinction. The Red Deal presents a rousing vision of a shared future of socio-ecological care, rooted in revolutionary Indigenous praxis. A must read."-Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

"The Red Deal offers a revolutionary program for global environmental justice informed by the liberation struggles and epistemologies of Indigenous, Black, migrant and working people everywhere. The vision of this manifesto calls for nothing less than a radical transformation of our relationships with each other and the land itself. It is truly inspiring work that we have come to expect from our comrades in The Red Nation."-Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition