Immanent Emergence: A Partisan of Color Perspective from Wii’i Gdwisa (Red Butte)
This article offers a partisan of color perspective on the summit that took place on May 15-18, 2026 on the south side of Red Butte in the Kaibab National Forest in Coconino County, Arizona (about fifteen miles south of the Grand Canyon). The summit was organized to oppose the nearby Pinyon Plain uranium mine in the face of renewed focus on nuclear power and the extraction and hauling it requires.
By Haraami
We responded to a call to action. Empire seeks to reawaken the nuclear beast, to carve out the poison earth and extract fuel for AI generated nightmares and war machines of civilizational annihilation. For decades, Havasupai, Diné, and others had fought the beast, keeping it pacified in a half-slumber. The beast bided its time, with companies like Energy Fuels extending their claims over greater swathes of territory and the breccia pipes running beneath them. The beast sat on these potential mining sites, waiting til the moment its colonial masters called on it again, waiting for our present moment of turmoil and transition. The American players in the global game of Empire seek a new beast of burden and war with which to remake the geopolitical and economic order. Existing avenues and resources have been exhausted—courts and legislatures offer no recourse in the face of the imperatives of “national security,” the colonially imposed Navajo Nation government has welcomed the tendrils of the beast into its territories, and those on the frontlines cannot continue to fight a beast of this scale alone.
To break this impasse, a call emanates: transmitted through dreams, translated into words. A call that connects to a lost lineage of worldwide “guardian-warriors bound together by our common love for our people and land and common hatred for the enemies of our people and land.” A call to everyone that comes from no one. There is no organization or identified group of people from whom to seek authority, permission, or deference; but a call still rooted in and in relation to the struggles of Havasupai and Diné. Elders insist that this fight is everyone’s, is global, and ask when will the people rise up to stop them? This question becomes the call, a call for direct intervention: To come to Wii’i Gdwiisa, become part of her body and spirit, gather in the lap of the Grandmother Canyon, and slay the nuclear beast. To use any and all means to Stop THEM: Transportation, Hauling, Extraction, and Milling.
So we arrive at the summit, guardian-warriors from across the continent. From the get-go, the summit invites all of us into ceremony and relation. Our first task upon arriving, before setting up our tents, is to introduce ourselves and make offerings to Wii’i Gdwiisa: who we are, our lineages, our intentions. We are gathered in a ceremonial site of the Havasupai, with their blessing; a site whose desecration and endangerment by the mine only a few miles North has led the Havasupai to impose a ban on visiting the site, in order to preserve their own survival. Our gathering at the site is possible because of Wii’i Gdwiisa herself, whose backside faces the mine and shields the site from the worst effects of irradiation or spread of radioactive dust.
At the start of the four day summit, two sacred fires are lit: one for Wii’i Gdwiisa and another for Dookʼoʼoosłííd (the San Francisco Peaks), both visible from camp. The struggle to defend Dookʼoʼoosłííd from desecration by the Arizona Snow-bowl, though temporarily defeated, set the stage for this renewed struggle for Wii’i Gdwiisa; this struggle, in turn, fights to liberate Dookʼoʼoosłííd as well. Every sunrise, we are invited to gather around the fires to join in a sunrise ceremony, to greet the sun and the day. Throughout the camp, we are invited to take turns as keepers of the sacred fire—ensuring they are lit through the entire summit, offering medicines and prayers. Each morning, a part of the sacred fires is used to light the hearth of the collective kitchen, which each day provides three full and filling meals. Fire-keeping and wood-gathering becomes part of the core rhythms for the collective reproduction of the summit.
The schedule is immanent and emergent. The first day, programming is cleared in order to make more time for connection with the land, a purpose at the heart of the summit: the day is filled with crews making visits to the summit of Wii’i Gdwiisa, from where you can see the mine in which the nuclear beast resides, and to Grandmother Canyon, a testament to the depth of time and power that renders human civilizational powers miniscule. Diné elders demonstrate and guide the collective butchering of two sheep, with many hands working over the next few days to transform their bodies into the feast on day three of the camp. On that first day, a twister runs through the heart of camp, threatening tents and scattering zines. Its counterclockwise rotation, a sign of malice, leads to a call that gathers the entire camp around the sacred fires. We offer prayer and medicine in clockwise rotation, a collective re-grounding in our relations with each other, the land, and the struggle.
Sessions on radiation and decontamination protocols teach the newly initiated of the risks of contamination and how to protect oneself from the alpha particles that may carry in the wind. While these risks always exist, they are lessened at our location thanks to our distance from the mine and Wii’i Gdwiisa’s protection; while the strong winds pose greater risks for picking up contaminants, most winds during the weekend come from the south, flowing from the camp towards the mine. Exposure remains a cause for concern, and that concern spurs a range of protective responses, but we are reminded that we will likely be exposed to negligible amounts relative to the many people who live in these territories and navigate these risks daily—a reality familiar to those of us who make home in extraction and sacrifice zones.
That first night grounds us in the lineages of resistance we are stepping into. The struggle of the Havasupai, including the National Monument designation at Wii’i Gdwiisa that enables us to camp there legally and permanently prohibits new uranium mining around the Grandmother Canyon; Haul No’s decade of work monitoring the mine and hauling routes; the formation of a frontline science composed of decades of deep knowledge of uranium’s effects and mitigation procedures; research on the infrastructure and technical operations of the industry and its role in the reconfiguration of the present Imperial order; the recovered histories of the Indigenous Uranium Network, which in the 80s connected struggles against nuclear colonialism across continents.
A Diné and Apache comrade visits camp to share with us a song, and invites us into participating in an Apache war dance. We encircle the sacred fires with arms interlinked and move together in dance, approaching and retreating rhythmically from our comrades on the other side of the circle, each of us glowing bright and warm in the fire’s light. The movements are sometimes stuttered and awkward, perhaps due to the limitations of space and numbers that constraint our movements, perhaps due to the lack of rhythm of some people. Whatever the cause, the awkwardness does not detract—in fact, it is an inevitable part of the process, when many peoples from many different peoples attempt to enter into ceremony and relation together. We lean into the awkwardness and discomfort.
The second day picks up speed. We map out the the beast, gaining a fuller picture of its weaknesses and intervention points. Currently, the Pinyon Plain Mine is the only high grade uranium mine in the country. The Energy Fuels uranium mill in Utah is the only such facility in the continental US. The hauling is all handled by Hammond Trucking, a small “mom & pop” trucking company based in Utah. In the four corners, this bundle of sites and the hauling routes that connect them constitute the soft underbelly of the nuclear beast, a site ripe for direct intervention to halt it domestically before it can grow any stronger.
That night, we gather together around the fires in story and song. We share in the ritual of a morale, a collective sharing of stories, songs, and performances spread by internationalists connected to the Kurdish freedom struggle. Ranging from silly and playful, to somber and melancholic, to rousing and fierce, these performances reaffirm our bonds as guardian-warriors in shared struggle. We go to bed with fire in our hearts and the ringing melodies of the songs in our ears. Through the night, armed with information and imagination, crews spend the night dreaming.
The third day is the big day. The Havasupai have asked for us to have a public rally to keep attention on the struggle. The rally is scheduled for the early afternoon on the main road leading to the Grandmother Canyon. It’s a Sunday, and our location is a fair distance from the typical hauling routes and times, so we mostly anticipate making a public presence with signs, banners, and noise for the many tourists on their way to visit the Canyon. Police, alerted by the public rally post, gather some forces; but it’s a small county with few resources, so they do little to the camp or to the rally in its first hour.
We gather and chant, stretched up and down the road. Many passersby honk and wave in support, tourists and locals alike. To keep things lively, we move back and forth across the street, a slow trickle that forces traffic to slow down. This turns out to be crucial when, more than halfway into the rally, a suspicious looking truck begins to pass by. Bodies block the truck in the street, and a few eyes inspect it and recognize it as a hauling truck belonging to Hammond Trucking.
Once that call is made, the crews who dreamed the night before spring into action. The street is blockaded, the underbelly of the truck littered with obstacles, its carapace redecorated with slogans of doom to the mine. The police mobilize and threaten, but are too few to effectively respond. While they wait for reinforcements and try to re-establish control, others on our side take on the responsibility of redirecting traffic. Cars and trucks backed up behind the blockaded truck on this two lane highway are redirected around the haul truck. This pushes them in the direction of the police line, forcing the sheriffs to also focus on redirecting the flow of cars past them, adding chaos and physical barriers which hinder the police’s attempts to establish control or initiative in the situation.
After nearly an hour of confrontation, the police threaten chemical weapons. Not aiming for an indefinite standoff, the rally regroups and begins to move out from the zone. This reorientation is slow at first, as our forces remain split between lines continuing to heckle the police and those regrouping to exit together. Communication and coordination is difficult. That is, until a familiar call from the morale rings out:
Comrade, take me by the hand,
Strong in solidarity we stand,
Fight for revolution, fight for revolution!
The eruption of a song from the morale, one brought to us via the Kurdish freedom struggle, helps reorient the energy of the crowd towards its exit. As the crowd returns down the road towards Wii’i Gdwiisa, the police try to clear the road and get the truck moving—but something goes wrong. The truck breaks, grinds to a halt, and one can see a wheel lifted feet above the ground. A leg has been broken, and so the whole monster is left unable to move. We later receive confirmation that the truck has to be towed away.
We return to camp triumphant. The police, furious, set up checkpoints on the road out of camp, drive by collecting license plate information, and fly helicopters above. Anxieties rise about a police raid, as seen in the wake of courageous actions in struggles such as Weelaunee. But this is a different terrain—they are too few, too disorganized to strike back so quickly. Despite these intimidation techniques and attempts at interrogating those leaving camp, they are too weak to do anything. The intimidation does thin out the numbers at camp, but a substantial committed element remains overnight. Those who remain share in a feast of mutton from the sheep butchered days earlier and sit around the fire in discussions about “partisanship of color,” struggles against ICE, and more.
The next day, those who remain move to clean up camp and put the sacred fires to rest. We offered gratitude, prayers, and songs—to Wii’i G’dwiisa and Dookʼoʼoosłííd, to the fires, to Klee Bennally and the legacy of his work fighting the nuclear beast.
***
The summit was an impressive start to the movement to Stop THEM: opening with a gathering of over a hundred people from across the country and a smashed truck. Energy is generated for further research projects, campaign speaking tours, interventions in local nodes of the nuclear beast across regions, and for more coordinated action and convergence. The wager is this: that by striking at this weak-point, we can directly connect struggles against imperialist war, AI data centers, and the American economy itself, and that we might even win.
In order for this gamble to pay off, we should expect the struggle to face significant hurdles. The repression directed at the Defend the Atlanta Forest struggle illustrates the lengths our enemies will go to advance projects they see as essential to their designs. While Stop THEM has the layers of energy and experience developed through Stop Cop City, the Student Intifada, and the recent waves of conflict with ICE to build on, it will likely need to find ways to activate resistance and face down repression at scales and intensities beyond the Stop Cop City movement. In short, how can Stop THEM not become just another activist campaign competing for resources and attention in a political market over-saturated with issue campaigns, but a revolutionary catalyst that connects struggles against economies of extraction, tech capital, and colonial governance, expanding beyond the purview of radical activists to activate ever greater swathes of society?
Looking towards the longer horizons of revolutionary struggle and upheaval, the summit modeled practices that could form the foundation of the decolonial insurgencies to come. These practices, if taken seriously, could help break through some of the impasses1 and limits that have limited anti-colonial struggles in recent years: struggles over strategy, the question of "leadership," a guilt and shame based politics of identity-based deference, self-isolating and self-destructive tendencies, and the loss of a long-term vision.
The summit cultivated an invitation to initiative, strategic thinking, and autonomous action, with an ethics of responsiveness and responsibility to the contexts and relations we are entering. While firmly grounded in lineages of struggle and traditions, it offered an open invitation to common struggle, both through an insistence that this struggle is everyone’s and through invitations to shared ceremonies. From the level of ceremony to programming to action, it invited an experimental ethos that undercut impulses towards fear or control—whether driven by a desire for safety, anxieties around identity and composition, or the habits of ideological certainty and purity. Setting such a tone from the start, where participants are invited to shred shame and deference and stop waiting for permission, and instead step into agency and co-responsibility, establishes a powerful baseline for the struggle. Where previous struggles have been either held back or unraveled internally by conflicts over whose “leadership” to follow, or rigid racial divisions instilled in the relationships between participants in a struggle, the summit invited us into a collective transformation together in struggle, most significantly reflected in the sharing of ceremony.
From where will the anti/decolonial insurgencies to come arise? Their shape will not be determined by a rigid, pre-given ideological roadmap delivered via academic paper, conference panel, instagram slide deck, or anarchist polemic. These insurgencies will not arise from a search for the correct ideas, leadership, or perfect racial composition of a space. They will arise through an emergent, messy, experimental process of figuring it out in the midst of our confrontations with Empire, together, among those who show up. It is by taking sides and waging war against this colonial nightmare that we find our friends and enemies.
Only by waging insurgent struggles against Empire, from wherever we find ourselves in its matrix of domination, and by forging links between struggles, will we begin to develop a framework for common decolonial relations between peoples, a framework for life after the settler nightmare. Such a framework does not foreclose conflict, tension, and divergence, but will establish a different paradigm for navigating them not defined by nation-state or capitalist logics of sovereign authority, property, or exchange. If we can recognize a “leadership,” it will emerge from those forces and relations built on the frontlines of struggle, from those that prove most decisive, powerful, and committed to the decolonial horizon. We will find decolonization not as a moral yardstick against which to measure existing movements, but an insurgent potential always immanent to the events unfolding before us, a potential that must be activated and advanced by partisan forces oriented towards decolonial horizons, beginning from an ethical and political attention to the terrain we inhabit, what is possible in it, and what strategic maneuvers push us forward. Instead of deference, permission, and authority, we begin from relations, responsiveness and responsibility, with a commitment to mutual struggle, critique, and transformation.
This, then, is the potency of the collective transformation and ceremony at the heart of the summit. If we take seriously the anarchic and communal relations we form in struggle—the intensity of affinity, kinship, and interdependence forged in gatherings, frontlines, blockades, and the social life of collective kitchens and homes—we could see them as not just the means of our struggle but the foundation for these new paradigms, as the very thing we are struggling for. The rituals we construct to dream and make meaning, to become stronger warriors, to heal and grow through hardship, can become the foundations of the kinds of ceremonies that we can take beyond these temporary spaces back to the many worlds we all inhabit. There, they can become ceremonies to renegotiate our narratives, organization, and social existence for the long term, and to induct new codes of mutual relations and alliances between peoples towards decolonial horizons.
Sharing in ceremony requires a great deal of vulnerability, especially when it runs the risk of consumption. The ceremonies, experiences, and struggles of others can become extracted from their context and web of relations, and instead become raw material and markers to construct the identity of being a “good radical.” This risk is always latent in encounters between peoples, and particularly in our age where social climbers abound and identity is increasingly experienced as an individual property mediated through performance and consumption, rather than a set of living relations. However, we do not turn away from the risks we must take—whether the risks of confronting this world or of sharing in ceremony. The antidote to consumption may very well be the forms of relation and partisanship/struggle that shared ceremony enables, where one is always implicated in and called upon by webs of relations and the concrete needs of a struggle.
All of this requires that these ceremonies, conversations, and struggles spill over beyond ideological scenes, so that more peoples see their struggles against domination as implicated in these decolonial horizons and the fight to Stop THEM. A partisan of color2 orientation seeks to build the bridges to connect the parallel revolutionary transformations of different communities and so enable the emergence of new peoples and new relations between peoples. This will be a difficult process full of mistakes, hurt, and obstacles as we struggle to overcome the divisions imposed between peoples, the ploys of power that bait and trap struggles into being pitted against each other for Empire’s benefit. It will require patience, humility, and a tolerance for discomfort, to speak to those who think and act imperfectly beyond the closed rooms of activists. This calls on all of us—not just those of us racialized outside whiteness—to spread the embers from Wii’i Gdwiisa to ignite fires in new places and struggles—in kitchens and molotovs, barricades and hearths, camps and ceremonies, firearms and festivals.
What ceremonies and pacts of relations from the summit, or from other struggles like it, could we take back to our neighbors? What songs, prayers, rituals, dances might we share to transform them and bring them closer to this struggle?
How could the growth of popular power and militancy through neighborhood assemblies, rapid response groups, and workplace solidarity networks become implicated in and by the struggle to Stop THEM, and vice versa? What would be possible if other struggles dedicated themselves to sending warriors to the next summit, convergence, or call to action, to learn, fight, and build together?
How could we begin to connect these struggles, not just rhetorically and ideologically, but through frameworks for synchronized defense, action, and mutual support—sending resources and fighters to the frontlines of each front in the struggle, escalating in lock step? How could a blockade of a hauling route synchronize with a riot against police violence, or a hunger strike in a detention center?
What skills and infrastructure will we need to both fight Empire and to live well without its government or economy? Who already has them that we can build relations with? What resources, capacities, and infrastructures can we build now that we can offer to this and future struggles? What complexities and contradictions will we need to navigate between our efforts to meet our collective needs and the maintenance of right relation with each other and the Earth?
Ultimately, the question is: what new narratives of ourselves do we want to write? What kinds of peoples do we want to become, and how do we want to be in relation together? What new ceremonies will we need to enable this? How would these gestures and pacts of relation live on and inform struggles ten years from now and the lives of people seven generations out?
1 See Haraami, “Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity” for a critique of the limits of BIPOC radicalism: https://livingandfighting.net/Follow-the-Fires and Athena “Addicted to Losing” for a critique of the politics of safety and sacrifice: https://illwill.com/addicted-to-losing
2 See Haraami, “Bring the Swords, Storm the Palaces: A Partisans of Color Position,” for a further articulation of “partisans of color” orientations: https://illwill.com/bring-the-swords