Grounding in land, ceremony, and ancestry, Klee narrates a poetically powerful and honest story, one that brings us to the root of this conversation about belonging. In Klee’s words: “for Mother Earth to flourish, settler failure is necessary.” Moving beautifully  between genres, Klee’s words are medicine — an offering to move us towards deepening mutuality and collective liberation.

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Klee Benally passed peacefully on Dec. 30, 2023.

As we collectively grieve, please keep Klee’s powerful messages traveling. keep them radical. and celebrate Klee’s ferocity for destroying colonialism & his love for mutuality.

Donate to Klee's kin and projects

Rest in Fierce Love, Klee.

SPEAKERS

Klee, Jamie-Leigh, and carla.

Welcome to On Belonging, an audio series to connect us. On Belonging explores why so many of us are feeling called to find a deeper sense of belonging, whether with our ancestors or to land where we live. And beyond.

These powerful stories and conversations are an invitation into the lives and landscapes of the guests' worlds, offering pathways towards remembering and finding more belonging.

The following narration features Klee Benally.

We Belong to the Earth, Against Settler Belonging

Diné existence is part of a spiritual narrative that carries forward from our emergence into this world. The whole creation account and complex of ceremonies that accompany and flow from it are not necessary to share here. What is most useful perhaps, is that our existence in this world, our relationship to the land and other beings, what we can name is our cosmology has been established as an ongoing cycle that precedes the creation of time. Within six sacred mountains, we maintain our home, if you observe a Dinétah mapping of our universe, you will see the structure of a Hogan.

It is a practice that when Dinétah are born, we bury the umbilical cord at the place of our home in this earth. This is so we always are connected, and we always return.

It is no mistake that nahasdzáán is our name for Earth. It literally means Mother Earth, from the collective to the individual. Our ceremonies which flow from this belonging establish our way of seeking harmony in this world towards old age, what we call solenoid; this path is well documented and somewhat romanticized. So I won't and I don't feel the need to share too much on this here. If we were to discuss this much further and share we would talk about K’é, matrilineality, and relationality. But this would take much longer and there's not much need for that, considering what I'm going to see next.

This is where the sharing of belonging must start for me as an introduction of sorts. I was raised in ceremony, identify my clans upon meeting, that is how I belong. Hello, I’m called Klee, I’m born for Bitter Water and Wandering People are my paternal grandparents. My mom is Russian- Polish and so are my maternal grandparents. I am originally from Black Mesa and currently reside in the “Place of many houses” (so-called Flagstaff).”

For the purposes of this project, I certainly don't speak for all Diné. I'm a fragment of imperfect and mangled teachings. My path has taken me over shards of glass, sharp rock, sand and ash, like a lightning struck tree. I speak as a person split into many parts.

Lose yourself in the unsettled wilderness. Find yourself nowhere. Embrace the dispossession, the displacement, the emptiness, the alienation and shape it

The cartography of civilization, which also encodes itself in a temporal hierarchy of pronounces as modernity has been shown threaded through an expansive violent project of domination and exploitation named colonialism. This mapping has been propelled by the economic system of capitalism and molded into matrices of laws that can only be maintained through a complex of socially institutionalized violence, aka the state cis- hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and so forth. It is mapped and marked in blood, genocide, enslavement, ecocide. this secession of moments that have passed, what is also called history is an accumulation of moments that compound into the pervasive violence that enables all of settler existence today.

To rethink history, is to contemplate war in our place, our role in that war. You have arrived in the shadow of this geopolitical monstrosity -- cast through a lineage of invasion and occupation, either asserting as a force of resistance that we are still here, or as a settler, implying with the promise of pervasive violence, and we are here. Let's dig into this notion of "settler belonging."

You first killed your relationship to nature. So where do you belong except where you impose and construct myth to support that imposition.

If we understand Indigenous to simply mean: of and with the earth, then we must understand the settler as against the earth.

If the terms of your existence on occupied lands is not unsettling, then you are flowing with the force of ongoing anti Indigenous violence. Your belonging is an ongoing narrative. It is a condition that is only possible with the unbelonging and dispossession of those that are of and with the earth.

This is the architectural composition of settler power. The ongoing story of settler existence is a fiction passed through generations to justify itself, and inheritance of brutality that has shifted quietly into your hands. You may look at your palms and say, but there is no blood. This is an intriguing yet obvious way that settler fiction and power works. It bleaches and scrubs and tears away at the stains. It obscures hemorrhaging with legalese and nationalism. Like a parasite or vampire the blood is sucked from prey to feed the insatiable predator. There was no visible bleeding, of course, because like a pipeline carrying unrefined crude, it's obscured consumption is also part of what sustains settler existence. It's what makes it permissible. It's what keeps the lights on, it's what pumps the water, it's what heats the buildings, and even makes sustainable homesteads. When we see the blood from the bleeding, it all becomes much less palatable.

If you are concerned with liberation, where do you belong except implicated in the undoing of your belonging? This is where some might call for accomplices, but that is only slightly beside the point here. If belonging is set without consent, what does that make it? No land acknowledgement, no guilt motivated. donation or settler charity penance. No petition will revoke this-- it is an unjustifiable and irreconcilable condition. To be a settler is to never belong unless Indigenous existence is extinguished or at least contained.

We are entangled in this contradiction. If existence is arranged and organized without calculating it through and with consent, it is domination and we do not desire to dominate or be dominated.

Even this idea of thriving is filled with so much baggage like a hoarder who can't stop collecting social political philosophy books and positivity memes, and refuses to throw away plastic containers from takeout because at some point they will be useful. In this question of belonging moves beyond the ontological. When settlers thrive, they spit lithium and cobalt, they shit plastic and nickel and tar, while whole bio regions die. Species are extinguished. They procreate more laws and recraft and reform the existent social order, they mitigate progress, while waving its banner and the death march towards the dead end of existence. The skeleton of capitalism dressed in the costume of a green economy, dancing the death of existence. I state this elsewhere and often, but it must be clear, global warming is a consequence of war against Mother Earth.

For Mother Earth to flourish, settler failure is necessary. Fuck thriving with ego homesteading and sustainable housing projects. Stop imagining and reproducing settler futures on stolen lands.

Let this statement haunt and comfort you: you have never belonged. Disentangle yourself from belonging to settler progress, put that banner down, Let the dust settle and let ruins of empires past wash over and collide and speak through with and over you. Bite your tongue and move against modernity with an unsettling force, embody settler destruction.

T his is where belonging is shaped into a magnificent weapon of obsidian, or glass. This is the path where harmony finds us, destruction towards renewal, of renewal of mutuality. Through the degradation of the dominant social order, a way forward. Belonging to settler destruction is an act of liberation.

To my relatives, we belong to the Earth is a principle of wretched humility. How does the land know us if we do not know ourselves? We unrecognizable dance and beg for scraps of recognition. Liberal settlers tease progress and extend invitations to seats at some grand table. But what a trick to be sold a stolen dream is to be imprisoned within someone else's dream nightmare. Those locked away become the ghost memories that only accompany the bearer of such dreams. We are trained to be such polite guests to those who are burning our homes. Yet we internalize settler dissonance and idealize the promise of progress.

Progress is a notion of civilization, which cannot exist without Dominion or domination. The claiming of land and existence as property to be owned, to be an owner to be longed to end of Dominion, domination. And so we are placed and belong to a classification. This progress is a quiet violence that definitely severs and slivers, the cycles and lays them out alongside railroad tracks. A beginning, a middle and an end, a one way ticket to someone else's utopic promised land. We do not belong to progress. Nor do we belong to tradition. These notions of modernity are artificial classifications to separate existence from the natural cosmological cycles that shape our meaning in this world. Modernity is a crime that beats our being into pulverized historicity -- we belong to no time. When we locate the medicine and ceremony to heal this temporal wounding, we become free. Where and as we belong, we do not belong to and with existence without agreement. without consent, there is no belonging.

Here I offer two fictions. One might be considered a prayer. The other perhaps, though I contend this, a curse. I'll let you decide.

Part One.

One night we slipped out the view of eyes filled with ones and zeros and processing inputs of code and energy drinks. We had done our work. Two of us had already conducted recon on the selected target, we scrutinized the security patterns and knew when it was optimal to strike. We randomized the operation, so as not to raise any suspicion. The recon team established the escape routes, with contingency plans and a rally point. We also checked all possible surveillance along the route -- stores and restaurants with cameras etc. We randomized our patterns and planted all roots accordingly. The remainder of our tight-knit affinity group prepared the devices to be used. A cleanroom was established sometime prior to the action. This basic operation wasn't terribly complex, though great attention to detail was ensured. Of course, we never had cell phones on us through any of this operation. And we rented a hotel room with cash, we set up a liberated tent inside, we cleaned ourselves thoroughly and donned tyvek suits, double nitrile gloves were taped at the wrists, booties on, hair completely bungled the way meticulously covered. masks on, and we got to work. Only two of us fit inside, though one could have handled the job. We assembled timers, incendiaries and other devices inside, we wiped them down with rubbing alcohol to ensure no traces of DNA would remain and triple package them with plastic sealable bags. Then, within a cardboard box. Everything on the outside was to be disposed of. So that can be handled without too much risk. In one night's work, we prepared for multiple events, certain other elements needed could be prepared in slightly less restrictive manners. But these components had to be completely clean, particularly if any had failed to operate as intended, which would of course make the job of the investigators that much more easy. The action team consisted of a driver and, well, we'll call them artists. This small team connected via a basic cheaps comm system. No names only signals, this team ensured their shoes were covered so it's not to leave an identifiable prints that some shoes varied sizes were to throw off investigators, tripled gloves, everyone had read headlamps and hair completely bound. Since recon had already identified the target and suggested deployment areas, the deployment was really quick. There was no need for spray paint or other materials to be left and possibly traced. They traveled lightly and swiftly from the drop area and nearly a mile away. And once the operation was in effect, the timer set off. The artists moved to the pre identified pickup zone. Before the timer even went off, the action team had already disposed of and destroyed their attire and any tools that could possibly rouse suspicion. Everything was cleaned within a reasonable timeframe, including the vehicle, mud dirt, anything from the local area was removed. The news the following day reported a power station providing critical energy for a pipeline and nearby municipality was destroyed. Suspected arson. No manifestos were issued. The law enforcement investigation was stunted as it started grading the next day. A tip line was established yet yielded no leads.

Part two

it was after ceremony that a dream spoke -- the voice of a lost relative cried abandon. You couldn't make out the figure but follow the path. It was leading you down. You arrived at a small spring. A deer was bleeding and ate a plant. The deer spoke and you woke up. Why couldn't you remember the words? It aches to connect to your tongue and flow from your lips. Then you threw up? There was blood in a small piece of bone. You cried. You knew what it meant. It wasn't ceremony that the words came back. You asked what they meant, but the answer was a bit of a riddle. Like an abstract, confused painting. Somehow the meaning began to take shape the farther you got from it. A week later, you rode the bike that you liberated from a college dormitory to your friend's house, and listened to music and shared food. You left the dream wrapped in tobacco and ash. Your friend asked how your silk screening project was going-- something about placing local herbs and screens and exposing them to the suns that can be printed in a zine. You almost collapsed in a momentary spin of tofu tomb core music, wild harvested rice for green candles, barbecue smoke, and sage tea. Someone had a patch that red land back, it got lost in the shiny blur of spikes and thrift store denim. In the moment, your eyes closed, a word came to you. It stopped spinning. "Medicine" spoke the ancestor. You went back into the space against time, the words became a ceremony. And it was the other way around. The land called you back. It was after a dream that ceremony spoke the voice of a lost relative was found. The knowledge that was passed was made whole in this moment. It was unforgotten, it was made unknown then made itself known again. This is healing belonging and being. This is the cycle that ends worlds and also renews them. It belongs to no time. We belong to no time. We belong to the earth.

This is an invitation to dismantle hope. Settler and invader and Indigenous Hope are entangled with each other in the way that someone falling into a dark cavernous hole reaches out to pull on someone extending an arm to help, only for them to be pulled down into the abyss. Both perish in this heroic act of Mutually Assured Destruction. Just look to the ways Indigenous people are tokenized by the climate justice movement to lead the way out of this mess that colonizers civilizer, dominators exploiters have made... we are not much more than props and nonprofit PR maneuvers to evoke settlers sympathy and influence political decisions. A hand reaching out.

We're begging the colonizers to end our suffering. Liberals pronounced hope to keep the lights on, knowing very well that this is also why the world is burning: shorter showers, going vegan, recycling, personal lifestyle choices compounded will not overwhelm the system content on mass scale ecocide. It's a basic calculation, smashing the factory farm and or the industrial polluter etcetera, will have far more impact on the health of existence than merely shifting consumption patterns. Greenwashing is a potent drug, lifestyle changes is a potent drug. Just look at the sales pitches for nuclear energy, anything to keep the profits flowing. And so we are pulled or rather, we also throw ourselves into the abyss.

For liberation, hope must be abolished.

Hope is an institution of faith that a present state of suffering or injustice etc., will eventually change. That idea that things will get better in and out of itself is not the core issue though. It is the way that this faith of Hope obscures direct means of ending that which is at the root cause of suffering. Hope is not the opposite of despair. Action is. To be clear, this action, as the opposite of hope, is not a positive proposition. It is to dig deeper into the conflict that is the permanent war of domination, control and exploitation and uproot to end it. As we dig. We unearth bones dirt , blood, rot. and stench. This is an ugly, despicable degenerative process.

I bring up the emaciated specter of hope because it coats the roof of our mouths when we discuss such ideas of belonging and thriving. We are forced to drink from the polluted waters of its promises only because all of the wells and springs have been poisoned already by its fallacies. We drink until we die of thirst.

We would not be asking about belonging if we were not severed from existence. If belonging does not restore mutuality with existence, it is just suffering disguised and prolonged.

These words do not belong to you. Wrap them in cloth and bury them deep in the broken heart of an ancestor who passed on with a knife in their hands. Let them grow. Be with intention.

Affinity is belonging.

attack is belonging.

mutuality is belonging

belonging is ceremony.

Thanks for listening to On Belonging! This episode featured Klee Jones Benally, with music by Klee.

On Belonging is curated by carla joy bergman and Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, with tech support by Chris Bergman. The show's awesome theme music is by AwareNess. On Belonging is a Joyful Threads and Grounded Futures creation. Please visit www.groundedfutures.com for show notes, transcripts, and to read more about On Belonging.

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Till next time, keep walking. Keep listening.

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These transcripts were generated in Otter, and lightly edited by our team.