Towards a Theory of Red Natural History

All Society & Space Events

The world is in flames. From California and Oregon to Australia and the Amazon rainforest, the largest fires on record are spreading across the planet, bathing their surrounds in an unsettling red light for days at a time. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, deadly heat waves, and other climate-fueled disasters are tearing across the landscape. The Gulf Stream is on the brink of collapse. The predictive models of modern science no longer point to stable patterns, but to the volatile force of the unknown.

Not An Alternative, *Red Specter*, still from 3D animation in progress, 2020-21. Image: Not An Alternative.

The combined history of colonialism and capitalism has been marked by the unceasing effort to control the human and nonhuman forces that threaten to bring about its end. Climate change is only the latest threat, but it is unrivaled in its power to transform the world. The incapacity of science, states, and corporations to manage the threat of climate change is forcing a crisis in the colonial regime of knowledge that underpins capitalism—the groundwork of the tradition of natural history that emerged from the social institution of modern science and the political project of imperialism over the last three centuries.

This text introduces a perspective that interprets natural history neither simply as the study of “nature,” ecosystems, or premodern cultural traditions, nor as an intrinsically colonial enterprise, but as a history of struggle between two incommensurate relations to the world: one governed by a logic of extraction and enclosure and another that relates to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This struggle is not waged on the terrain of the natural, but over its interpretation, not over what is “intrinsically in nature” (Gould, 1988), but over the relation to the world that ought to be naturalized.

Naturalizing the Capitalist World

From Europe, to China, to the Indo-Islamic world, long traditions of natural history have emerged, and sometimes converged, over the course of human history. But by most accounts (Raj, 2007; Basalla, 1967), natural history is understood as the sole dominion of the West—as a project that emanated outward from the colonial metropoles to survey the entire world with the empiricist tools of modern science. The first large-scale natural history museums and botanical gardens were established in Europe and Great Britain to put this project on display. There, biological and geological specimens, premodern cultural artifacts, human and nonhuman remains, and other “curiosities” bought and stolen by explorers and colonists were submitted as material evidence for scientific investigation.

In its institutionalized form, the imperial project of natural history constructed a picture of the world through the spoils of imperialist expansion. Its collections demonstrated the military power of the metropole, and its methodologies for interpreting these collections asserted the supremacy of Western empiricism and modern science. This tradition of natural history rested on the assumption that experts could understand the world by extracting and studying its constitutive parts. It claimed its object as an individuated, knowable thing, part of the wealth of natural resources available for possession, profit, and scientific probing.

This basic premise came to prominence through Charles Darwin’s theses on evolutionary biology, which grafted a Malthusian logic of individual competition onto the world as a whole. According to this logic, organisms and their environments are not seen to be mutually dependent; rather, as Richard Lewontin (1991) explains, in the Darwinist evolutionary struggle “organisms find the world as it is, and they must either adapt or die.” Generations of conservative economists appropriated Darwin’s theory of natural selection to explain the dynamics of competitive advantage under capitalism, rationalizing capitalist domination as an evolutionary fact. The “survival of the fittest” thesis, proposed not by Darwin but by the social Darwinist philosopher Herbert Spencer, galvanized the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, unsurprisingly, found vigorous support from the world’s most influential natural history museums. The dominant ideology of natural history, which embedded both the logic of competition and the violence of extraction into the project of scientific inquiry, served to reinforce social Darwinism’s capitalist and white-supremacist conclusions.

Illustration of cranial types from Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon’s *Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History* (1854). (c) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.‍

All in the name of science, lands were torn up, bodies were exhumed, and skulls were examined, compared, and classified according to racist typologies. The living subjects of ethnographic study, too, were cast as primitive and prehistoric, banished from the historical time of the ethnographer (Fabian, 1983). “Objects for observation,” Vine Deloria, Jr. (1969: 81) argued, were always implicitly “considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, and for eventual extinction.” Prioritizing the physical materialism of the world and its ecosystems, natural historians submitted everything sacred to the profane logic of equivalence—the law of capitalist exchange. In this and other ways, natural history was part of a broader plot to remap the world as a capitalist world, to turn what John Locke (1689) called the “wild Common of Nature” into a source of profit.

The microscope is only one of many tools deployed in the ongoing project of naturalizing the capitalist world. By means of violent dispossession, deceitful and broken treaties, and the declaration of terra nullius, territories collectively held for generations by peasants, Indigenous peoples, and maroon communities were, and continue to be, stolen, enclosed, and submitted to the abstract logics of private property. Through the legal abstraction of land titling, territories were commoditized and made fungible—leveraged as credit, exchanged, and subjected to financial speculation in a world market (Bhandar, 2018: 97). It is not that the transition to capitalism catapulted idyllic premodern cultures into history, undoing some illusory primordial innocence as traditional anthropology and historiography would have it, but that in recoding land as property, collective systems of land tenure based on kinship, intergenerational stewardship, spiritual value, or communal labor have been rendered both illegitimate and illegible—from the capitalist point of view. Displaced and dispossessed, people around the world have been put to work, forced to toil not for the land and each other, but for capital.

Haunting Natural History

This ongoing process of enclosure and expropriation, which Marxists call “primitive accumulation,” has not only been a means of asserting sovereign rule over Indigenous land and establishing capitalist economic relations in new territories, but also a means of repressing preexisting modes of life, knowledge systems, and land-based practices that cannot be reconciled with the demands of colonialism or capitalism. Agrarian commons, subsistence farms, systems of mutual aid, and Indigenous practices of land and water stewardship share one thing in common: an insistence that the world is not a resource to be extracted, but, as Glen Sean Coulthard (2013: 60) puts it, part of a system of reciprocal relations and obligations between humans and nonhumans that demands mutual respect, non-domination, and nonexploitation. Writing about the land-based practices that structure the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism in North America, Coulthard (2013: 13) names this perspective “grounded normativity,” underscoring how Indigenous struggles for land are also deeply informed by the land. The ethics of reciprocity, which is differently expressed in Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions of resistance, is not a straightforward inversion of the colonial logic of extraction and enclosure. It does not simply subordinate human life to the lives of animals, plants, water, and land. Rather, it underscores how their interests are bound together in the production and reproduction of life.

During and after the transition to capitalism, collectivist societies across the world, even within Europe itself, have struggled within and against their conditions of survival to build alternative knowledge systems from their own embodied experiences, clarifying and sharpening place-based traditions and ways of knowing in and through their collective struggles for liberation. In the paranoid minds of the capitalists, these constructed traditions, knowledge systems, and world-building practices are not only incompatible with the colonial logic of extraction; they also represent its combative antithesis, expressing what nineteenth-century crowd psychologist Gustav Le Bon (1897: xvi) characterizes as an emotional, unreasoning, and barbaric “primitive communism” that needs to be destroyed.

There have not always been direct material connections between “communistic” peasants, heretics, maroons, women, workers, colonial subjects, and Indigenous peoples, whose appearances have spanned continents and historical periods. These groups have also related to the land they have traversed in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. Nevertheless, oppressed communities across the world have been perceived by the capitalists as instantiations of one collective body, whose inborn fidelity to the common will, left to itself, bring about capitalism’s end (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000). Faced with the endurance of this capitalist conspiracy, it is no surprise that colonial and capitalist forces continue to brutally attack collectivist societies and the cultures that ground them, specifically targeting the reciprocal relation between peoples, the animals they rely on for their survival, the lands they steward, and the traditions that connect them to their ancestors.

The cover of the Economic League’s *Red Octopus* (1950), depicting an octopus spreading its tentacles across a map of the world. The illustration deploys a visual motif commonly used in anti-communist literature since the 1870s, which equates the deepwater sea creature with the insurgent threat of the “reds.” ‍

So that it could stand as an objective and ideologically neutral authority on the nonhuman world, the imperialist tradition of natural history has served the function of eradicating knowledge systems that it has understood to be in competition. Natural historians have long participated in this project by treating societies they could not understand as barbaric, premodern, and extinct, even as these same societies held their ground and maintained their languages, cultural traditions, and ways of knowing. The modern concept of natural history was thus not only formed on a bedrock of colonialism; it has also required the constitutive exclusion of its other: a natural history built on reciprocity, not extraction. This other natural history was not annihilated, only obscured—symbolically imprisoned in museum vaults and display cases, where it remains as a specter that haunts natural history from within.

‍Red Natural History

This other natural history, in distinct opposition to and in struggle with colonial, capitalist historicization and expropriation, is not simply alternative, peripheral, or marginal to the disciplines, methodologies, institutions, and practices that are usually associated with natural history. Rather, like a repressed trauma, it constitutes the disavowal at the center of natural history and its related disciplines. It is reflected in the life-affirming processes that have been deemed out of control because they refuse to stay within the bounds of privately held allotments: the weeds that settlers try to keep from returning to their manicured lawns; the cyclically returning forest fires that threaten the value of the mansions that get in their way; the surging waters that dams try to hold back; the climate refugees shaking down border walls. Not An Alternative is working with a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to give a name to this other natural history, which we propose to call Red Natural History.

Red Natural History names a commonality shared between the peoples, worldviews, traditions, and practices that have been the objectified subjects of natural history, taking as axiomatic that the world is not a wealth of natural resources but a world in common. The world in common is not identical to “the commons.” The commons is a territorialized site that can be enclosed, whereas the world in common exceeds every attempt to consume it, make it knowable, or enclose it in the property form. It defines a comradely and reciprocal relation between humans and nonhumans, a relation of mutual obligation that is not naturally occurring, but that is made to exist through the sustained, collective effort to produce it.

For Not An Alternative, the “Red” in Red Natural History designates the divide in natural history, signaling an alignment with those forces that have always been illegible to the colonial regime of knowledge, which represent the dangerous idea that something might exist beyond capitalist management and control. It signals our fidelity with the long history of struggle to make the world a world in common—with the intergenerational movements against enclosure, colonization, exploitation, and extraction that have assembled under the red flag, the red star, the red fist, the red square, and the red line.

On the cover of Lothrop Stoddard’s *The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy* (1920), a trio of gigantic, silhouetted figures charge across a globe, set against the backdrop of a red sunset. The image supplies a clear illustration of the anxiety and terror felt by the colonizing nation-states during a period of intense anti-colonial struggle.

For centuries, the purveyors of colonialism and capitalism have targeted groups that relate to the world as a world in common, waging brutal campaigns of extermination, enclosure, and forced assimilation. These campaigns have been devastating but left incomplete. The world in common, as a relation to the land and the horizon for our politics, comes into view when we hold in our minds the memory of the ancestors who came before us. It is awakened when we recognize how our traditions of resistance (Estes, 2019) open ways of understanding the world that enable us to see differently, when we build on the life-affirming knowledge of past generations, and when we pick up the struggle to protect the world for our descendants.

As a conscious project of “selecting and re-selecting our ancestors” (Gilmore, 2017), Red Natural History asks us to ground contemporary struggles for the land and all its inhabitants in the struggles of those who came before us, to draw a line from the past into a future that capitalism has barred from view. It asks us to build on the revolutionary work of the True Levellers (better known as the Diggers), who in the midst of the English Civil War of 1642–51, dug up the hedges at St. George’s Hill to plant crops for the poor—an act of negation meant to affirm and reveal the world in common beneath the enclosures imposed upon it (Winstanley, 1649). It asks us to learn from the maroons of Dominica, who, having fled from the plantations to the mountains throughout the eighteenth century, held their ground for decades not simply by fortifying their camps, but also by learning from and living with a wild terrain that the French and British armed forces were unable to tame (Malm, 2018: 13-15). It asks us to remember the Guinnean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral (1972), who, leading the guerrilla movement against the Portuguese occupation from 1963 to 1973, declared that on the flat terrain of Guinnea-Bissau, “Our people are our mountains.” It asks us to stand behind the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the world—to bear witness not only to the blockades they build, but also, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, to “the rich sites of Indigenous life” existing behind them, where “you will witness a radically different political existence and ethical orientation, in spite of the dominance of colonialism.” Red Natural History’s task is not simply to show how people have “made kin” with nonhuman others (Haraway, 2016), but to build from the long and ongoing history of reciprocity in struggle. The point is not to chronicle a linear history, to get the facts right, but to see past and present struggles as part of one movement to decisively shift the direction of natural history, from progressive degradation to abundance and collective flourishing.

Our collective’s understanding of Red Natural History is inspired by a long history of anticolonial struggle, but, to be clear, it is not based on a neo-primitivist imaginary. It does not look to the past to discover an authentic, precolonial ideal, but to build on the power of those who, throughout history, have struggled to maintain reciprocal relations in the world. It sees tradition as something that is invented, worked on, put to use, and transformed in the intergenerational movement to secure just relations with the land and each other. While the future is not behind us, the accumulated history of struggle empowers and guides us in our collective work.

The work of Red Natural History is to force the dialectics of natural history into the open. To see dialectically is to see the split in the totality, the dynamic contradictions through which historical change is made. The operative division in natural history is not between the human and nonhuman, as the New Materialists argue, nor is it between nature and society, as in the writing of Jason W. Moore (2015). Rather, it is between two fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives on the world: one that sees the world as a wealth of natural resources and the other that sees the presence of the world in common within and beyond every enclosure. These perspectives enforce distinct relations between humans and nonhumans—reciprocal or extractive—and, as a consequence, different obligations—to the reproduction of life, or the reproduction of capital. To see natural history through this schema is to register the divisions through which the world itself transforms, not in the interest of healing the divide, but of taking a side: oppressor or oppressed, extraction or reciprocity, individual or collective, enclosure or common. When we take the side of the common, we open a path for new alliances, not through the intersection of identities, but through a shared relation to the world. As a mode of seeing historical change, Red Natural History mobilizes its adherents as a divisive force—within, against, and towards an emancipatory future.

How, then, do we relate to the signs telling us that the world we live in is coming to an end? Do we stand by in horror, interpreting the storms touching down with increasing fury as evidence that there is no alternative to mass extinction? Do we rest assured that big tech will save the capitalist world from ruin? Or do we interpret the arrival of the storm as a sign that the red specter has awakened to support the oppressed people of the world in their efforts to plot the only path forward?

The ongoing and accelerating effects of climate change have launched the planet into a perpetual state of emergency, but the meaning of this emergency is not locked in. As a perspective and a praxis, Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all.

References

Basalla G (1967) The Spread of Western Science. Science 156 (3775): 611–22.

Bhandar B (2018). Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership.Durham: Duke University Press.

Cabral A (1972). Our People are Our Mountains: Amilcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution. London: Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola & Guine.

Coulthard GS (2013) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deloria V Jr (1969) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: MacMillan.

Estes N (2019). Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Brooklyn: Verso.

Fabian J (1983) Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gilmore RW (2017). Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence. In Johnson GT and Lubin A (eds) Futures of Black Radicalism. Brooklyn: Verso.

Gould SJ (1988) Kropotkin Was No Crackpot. Natural History 97(7): 12–21.

Haraway D (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke University Press.

Kapil R (2007) Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Le Bon G (1897) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. 2nd Edition. New York: MacMillan.

Lewontin RC (1991) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. Concord: Canada Broadcasting Corporation and House of Anasi Press.

Linebaugh P and Redkier M (2000). The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.

Locke J (1689) Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Malm A (2018). In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature. Historical Materialism 26(3): 3-37.

Moore JW (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Brooklyn: Verso.

Simpson, LB (2021). A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

Winstanley G (1649). The True Levellers Standard Advance: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.

Not An Alternative (est. 2004) is a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and theory. The collective’s latest, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (2014–), a traveling museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The Natural History Museum collaborates with Indigenous communities, environmental justice organizations, scientists, and museum workers to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.

“Towards a Theory of Red Natural History” was originally published in Society & Space (May 11, 2022).

Across the United States and around the world, monuments to racists and genocidal colonists are being toppled, thrown into rivers, vandalized, and quietly removed. Responses to these actions vary widely. Some on the left celebrate them as meaningful acts of refusal. Others disregard them as merely symbolic gestures, acts of erasure that obscure the terrain of struggle, making people feel like they’re changing something without changing anything at all. On the other side of the political divide, right-wing conspiracists interpret monument removals, the integration of “critical race theory” into educational curricula, open borders for refugees, and Indigenous land claims over privately-owned and federal lands as part of one coordinated movement to eliminate the white race—a conspiracy that some call “the Great Replacement.”

If the narrative of a Great Replacement has been a rallying cry for the far right—a highly effective means of driving a division between ethnonationalist patriots and the forces, tendencies, and movements that undermine their “sovereign claim to the land,” the left has thus far not directly answered to the charge. While it may be tempting to disregard the right’s conspiracy as a paranoid fantasy, there is another option. The left can take advantage of it—by defining what it is fighting to replace, and what with.

This text is the first in a two-part essay series, which enters this ideological struggle from the left. As members of Not An Alternative (NAA), a collective that has spent the past eight years intervening within the sector for science and natural history museums in the United States under the generic name The Natural History Museum, our focus is on the disciplines and institutions broadly associated with natural history. What would it mean to replace the dominant tradition of natural history, which emerged from colonialism and enforces a capitalist relation to the world, and what might such a replacement open up for the left?

Not An Alternative, Mining the HMNS: An Investigation by The Natural History Museum, 2016. The eponymous exhibition, held at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, interrogated the symbiotic relationship between the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and its corporate sponsors. The exhibition analyzed key narratives and displays in the Houston museum, highlighting the voices and stories that were excluded – those of the low-income Latinx fence-line communities along the Houston Ship Channel. Photo: Not An Alternative / The Natural History Museum.

As part of this investigation, NAA is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.

The Museum Divide

Established in 2004, NAA is a collective of artists, activists, and theorists with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. We have worked shoulder to shoulder with homelessness and anti-eviction activists, Occupy Wall Street organizers, environmental justice advocates, climate scientists, and Indigenous organizers, engaging their struggles not through a typical head-on (or head-butt) approach, but through the occupation and redeployment of popular vernacular, symbols, and institutional forms. Our persistent goal, as much as aiming to challenge the right’s grip on power, has been to challenge the left to step into its own power. We have argued that without a strong organizational infrastructureand a language in common, left counterpower is very difficult to build and sustain. Without these resources, the left finds itself continuously starting from scratch, seemingly building from nothing other than the experience of co-optation and defeat.

As the right has spent billions of dollars seizing institutions for its ideological agenda—taking over the leadership of everything from public school boards to major museums—much of the radical left has abandoned such spaces, arguing that left counterpower should be built in the streets. For this camp, institutionality is assumed to be inherently conservative. In our collective’s analysis, this position has contributed to a strengthened and emboldened right, which has embedded itself within the concrete structures and infrastructures through which people learn to relate to the world, and a demoralized left, which tends to see its failures at the expense of what it has achieved.

After a decade pushing for the development of a coherent visual language for the left—which NAA saw begin to coalesce, and then saw disappear, in our involvement with the eruption and disintegration of the Occupy movement—we founded The Natural History Museum (NHM), an experiment that aimed to model a left answer to the right’s institutional takeovers. The NHM was founded both as an intervention on the US sector for science and natural history museums and an institution in and of itself, an experiment in enlisting the museum as part of a communicative infrastructure for the climate and environmental justice movements. NAA’s hypothesis was that for museums to help pave the way towards a more just and sustainable future, they would need to not simply represent environmental injustice, but be rebuilt around the movements that are struggling against it.

Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum, Will the Story of the 6th Mass Extinction Ever Include the Role of its Sponsors? (2015). Diorama installed at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention in Atlanta, depicting the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History in New York several hundred years into a dystopian future. Photo: Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

We started with a series of campaigns that aimed to split some of the country’s largest natural history museums from the industry interests they served. In the first of these campaigns, we enlisted dozens of the world’s top scientists and Nobel laureates to stand behind an open letter to the museum sector calling on all museums to cut ties with fossil fuel interests. We made a target of fossil fuel oligarch and climate science obfuscator David H. Koch, who for 23 years had held a position on the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, one of the country’s largest natural history museums. Following dozens of news stories and more than 550,000 petition signatures, Koch quietly stepped down from his position at the AMNH—a monument toppled. Koch, in our calculus, was low hanging fruit, a symbolic target that could be leveraged to draw out comrades inside the museum sector with whom we could advance shared aims. In the Koch campaign, as well as other campaigns against corporate sponsors, fossil fuel investments, and right-wing funders of science denial, our aim was not to make museums like the AMNH better, but to activate an internal split—to reveal, in their internal contradictions, a kernel from which to build a left alternative.

Beyond the Museum

It was during the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock that our scope began to expand. When the Dakota Access Pipeline company bulldozed sites sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, with the suspected aim of obliterating evidence of Traditional Cultural Properties before they could be officially designated by the federal government, it became evident that archeology, oral history, and other building blocks of “natural history” as it was conventionally understood could become crucial components of a pipeline struggle. Asked for support by Native Organizers Alliance, an Indigenous-led community organizing network, we leveraged relationships built over the previous two years to issue a public letter condemning the desecration, which was ultimately signed by more than 1400 archeologists, anthropologists, historians, and museum workers.

If our initial aim was to enter the struggle for environmental justice from the side, through the mediating apparatus of the museum, the conflict over archaeological and cultural resources at Standing Rock made it clear that some of the most consequential struggles over natural history were taking place not in museums, but on the land. Natural history was not just in the museum; it was also in the ground, standing as a bulwark against extraction.

Out of our collective’s long-term intervention within and beyond the natural history museum, we have come to the analysis that it is not the museum, but natural history itself, that needs to be split—a conceptual shift that allows for a radical reimagination of what institutional forms can best support collective emancipatory struggles. The museum is one apparatus that can be used to teach people to see the world in common that exists beyond and beneath the capitalist world, but there are others: Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, environmental justice think-tanks, progressive science associations, citizen science labs, journals like Society & Space, and so on.

Drawing a Red Line

Since 2017, NAA has been working primarily in solidarity and in collaboration with Indigenous communities in North America, most deeply with the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation. For more than a decade, the House of Tears Carvers has been carving totem poles, putting them on flatbed trailers, and bringing them to communities across North America to build alliances in the struggle to protect the land and water for the generations to come. The totem pole journeys visit Indigenous communities, farmers and ranchers, scientists, and faith-based communities, engaging groups in ceremonies led by Lummi elders. At each ceremony, participants are invited to touch the totem pole—to give it their prayers and power, and to receive its power in turn. The goal of the totem pole journeys is to connect communities on the frontlines of environmental struggle, and to build, through ceremony, a collective that did not previously exist—invoking generations past, present, and future. Lummi councilman Freddie Lane likened the totem poles to batteries: they are charged with the energy of those who touch them, and as they travel, they give the people energy in turn.

Our first projects with our Lummi comrades sought to leverage mainstream museums as communications infrastructures for their campaigns, which we experimented with in special exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Our latest collaboration, the Red Road to DC, was a sort of exhibit that traveled across the land—a cross-country totem pole journey that aimed to support local communities’ efforts to protect sacred places threatened by dams, mining, and oil and gas extraction. The journey highlighted the critical importance of Tribal Nations in decisions on land, water and infrastructure projects, and demanded that the U.S. government respects the international legal standard of free, prior, and informed consent in its negotiations with Tribal Nations.

The Red Road to DC began at the Lummi Nation, where the tribe is fighting to protect the Salish Sea, orcas, and salmon from tanker traffic and pollution. From there, the pole traveled to Nez Perce territory in Idaho, where tribal leaders are fighting for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River, which have had devastating effects on the salmon, as well as the people who rely on fishing for their survival and sustenance. It then went to Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, which was opened to oil and gas extraction by the Trump Administration; and to the Greater Chaco region in New Mexico, where oil companies have been given permits to drill despite the area’s historic cultural importance to the Hopi, Navajo and Pueblo Nations. It then headed north to the sacred Black Hills in South Dakota, where Lakota activists are leading the #Landback campaign with a call to return Mount Rushmore to its original custodians; to the Missouri River and Standing Rock, where the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline remains very much alive; to the rice fields of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where water protectors are fighting to block the construction of the Line 3 Pipeline, which promises to transport nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta to Wisconsin; and to Mackinaw City, Michigan, where the Bay Mills Indian Community has been fighting the existing Line 5 pipeline, as well as a plan to build a new pipeline tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac. At the end of the journey, the pole was received by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in Washington D.C. It was ultimately installed at the National Conservation Training Center where it stands as a symbol of Indigenous movements for life against extraction.

While the communities brought together through the totem pole journey are held in common by a shared history of settler-colonial dispossession, forced assimilation, and exploitation, the Red Road to DC foregrounded not the violent conditions they endure, but the sacred world they live to protect. Instead of drawing a black line between oil pipelines, colonial monuments, dams, and other monuments to extraction, the journey traced a red line between sacred sites, insisting on a relationship between people and place that cannot be seen from the capitalist point of view.

Our collective co-produced the Red Road to DC because we imagined it could model a response to the struggles over colonial monuments that have been erupting over the past several years, specifically by building power around a different kind of monument—one that reveals a way of seeing and relating to the world that is fundamentally irreconcilable with capitalism. Situated within a wider landscape of activist mobilization that includes struggles to change place names, to remove colonial monuments, to integrate anti-racist narratives into school curricula, to decolonize museums and repatriate stolen objects, and to return land to Tribal Nations, the Red Road to DC could be seen to be part of the Great Replacement that the right-wing conspiracists fear: a movement to destroy the myth of settler indigeneity that the United States was built on—of the “natural” right of the property-owning class of white settlers to the land and everything that can be extracted from it—and with it, the capitalist system that this myth enshrines.

For NAA, the Red Road to DC modeled a non-capitalist and anti-colonial practice of natural history, a natural history that gets its energy from the movements to support collective life and gives these movements energy in turn; a natural history that points to the world beyond capitalism and takes the side of the common. As a first step toward building out and organizing around this alternative, our collective has given it a name: Red Natural History.

Defining Red Natural History

After spending eight years organizing within and against the institutions of natural history, we are convinced of the need for a name that defines a partisan project of natural history—a name in common that can hold together the insurgent work of scientists, social scientists, conservationists, communities, and others who are struggling to transform the fields and disciplines broadly associated with natural history.

As we will elaborate in the next essay in this series, our collective defines “natural history” as the ever-unfolding history of life and land. While the dominant, institutionalized tradition of natural history is informed by a colonial logic of extraction, enclosure, and exploitation, we argue that there is another tradition of natural history, built not on colonial or capitalist relations, but on a comradely and reciprocal relation to land, life, and labor.

For us, the “Red” of Red Natural History does not only suggest a relationship to the history of Indigenous struggle, but also to the “red threat” that terrifies the right, the red flags that have been waived by revolutionaries around the world for centuries, and the red alerts issued by climate scientists to warn of the storms to come. In our interpretation, Red Natural History is not just a proposal for charting alternate histories of natural history, but also for embracing the right’s fantasy of left power. It is also a call for the left to search for the ancestors, irrespective of their identities, whose emancipatory struggles live on in the contemporary movements to remake the world as a world in common.

Our collective’s perspective on Red Natural History is one of many that will be shared over the next year, as we have been working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists, scholars, and practitioners to publish a dossier of speculative essays that give meaning to the term. The point of this collaborative investigation is not to reach consensus, but to create energy around the term Red Natural History, to signal a gravitational pull from the critique of the imperialist tradition of natural history to the positive articulation of another—a tradition of natural history that can rise to the challenges of today’s overlapping and intensifying social, climate, and extinction emergencies.

Our hope is that Red Natural History does not remain an abstract concept, but that it has an effect on practice—that it provides a framework that insurgents from fields associated with natural history (including archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, ecology, and so on) can use to articulate what they share in common as they struggle to leverage their institutions’ resources to support the communities that are leading efforts to protect natural and cultural heritage, block extractivist projects, and point the way to a just and livable future for all.

“Coming Out the Other Side: Notes on an Eight-Year Expedition into Natural History” was originally published in Society & Space (May 9, 2022).