Who I am
Siyo Nigad! I’m Virgo.(Hello everyone!)
I’m Cherokee and I’m a communist, and I’m proud of both. I’m a Marxist-Leninist and a thirdworldist. I don’t believe revolution is coming out of the imperial core. It’s coming from the Global South and from oppressed nations, including the ones colonized inside this country’s own borders. That’s who I write for and who I stand with.
I don’t have a journalism degree or a newsroom behind me. I work construction. I hunt, and most of the meat I eat in a year is something I took myself. I keep a garden, and I come home to two cats and a pet squirrel. Writing is what I do with everything I have left over, and Punk On The Frontline is where I’m learning to do it right.
No writer has shaped how I organize more than J. Sakai. Settlers changed the way I understand this country, its working class, and who actually has something to gain from tearing the settler system down. His interview When Race Burns Class is one of the most useful things I’ve ever read on race and class. I don’t agree with Sakai on everything, China especially, but his work sits at the center of how I think and what I do.
My other teachers came out of the American Indian Movement. Dennis Banks, who helped found it. Russell Means, who stood at Wounded Knee in 1973. John Trudell, who kept speaking through a grief most people couldn’t survive. Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly fifty years in prison and never stopped being who he was. Plenty of Marxists know the Panthers and the Young Lords and have never learned a thing about AIM. I’m trying to change that, because Native history and Native struggle matter for every communist in this country.
On YouTube I break down theory and history: Sakai and Settlers, the so-called Lenin Testament, fascism, a full series on racism, and proto-communism, including why Indigenous societies were never “primitive.” More on China and AIM is on the way. I also serve as Deputy Secretary of the Young Socialists of America and organize locally where I live.
None of this happens without Hailey. She’s my partner and my right hand. She plans protests, talks through every topic with me, and edits before anything goes out.
